Dick Stivers - Cairo Countdown

Evening air cooled their faces as they all looked down. They saw teenagers scrambling over a truck. Some of the young men waved AK rifles at onlookers to warn them back, others struggled to cover the rack of rocket tubes on the back of the truck with a black tarp.

"Dig that," Mohammed laughed. "A Katyusha. That's what that mullah saw…"

The truck carried a rack of forty 122mm rocket-launching tubes. Though capable of raining a salvo of high explosives on a target, the rockets of a "Stalin's Organ" flew like artillery shells, without infrared or radar-homing warheads. A Katyusha presented no threat to high-flying aircraft.

"Wrong rockets, wrong goddamn place," Lyons cursed.

"As long as we're here anyway…" Gadgets pulled off the safety cap of an RPG, cocked the launcher's hammer. "Stand back for backblast!"

Leaning through the shattered bricks, Gadgets sighted on the rack of rocket tubes and pulled the trigger. The flash lighted the night. "Katyusha out of order!" Mangled terrorists flew from the flaming truck. Bystanders scattered, though Gadgets had known his aim was sure enough to avoid reckless endangerment.

A blast threw them back. Shock rocked the floor and walls. Sections of ceiling fell. As Blancanales hit the heaving floor, he saw the rear wall of the apartment building fall away. A wave of flame rushed upward. The night returned for an instant, then another sheet of flame roared up.

Gadgets lay on the floor, stunned. Blancanales grabbed him by the coat sleeve to drag him back.

"Secondaries! This is not the place to be!"

Mohammed took Gadgets's other arm. Lyons rose to his feet. He staggered with an Uzi in his right hand and another Uzi dangling by a strap from his left wrist.

"Come on! The building's falling!" Blancanales shoved Lyons over to Mohammed the taximan. "Move him out of here."

"Hey, it's been a blast. But we gotta go!"

Another explosion brought down more plaster and bricks. A slab of plaster broke over Lyons's shoulders. He shrugged off the white dust, staggered after the others, steadying himself with his left hand against the wall. Blood streamed from his hair, flowed down his face. Mohammed glanced back at him, grabbed his arm and helped him toward the stairs.

"You all right, man? You ready to go up those stairs?"

"The rockets are here," Lyons gasped, the Uzi clattering against the wall. "They're here someplace."

"We got their rockets! So forget about finding any more, okay? Please? We hit any more rockets in this place, we check in El Motel Allah."

"I mean, in Cairo. In Cairo. The rockets are in Cairo." He staggered, blew blood off his lip. "Somewhere."

Through the thick bullet-resistant glass of the limousine window, tinted gray to block out the desert glare and the gaze of the common people, the lights became abstract patterns of amber and pale blue. Katz watched the distorted images of the Cairo night float past as he listened to Sadek and Parks.

The young CIA officer, his face unshaven and lined, eyes red with fatigue, talked quietly with the bored, always-dapper Sadek. They reviewed notes, cross-checking names and addresses against a map of the greater Cairo area.

"I understand the restraints on your personnel, but we must have information on the government employees at the airport."

"It will take weeks," Sadek repeated. "We do not investigate individuals simply because they express sympathy for these groups or their ideals. We respect religious expression."

"Religious expression? Mobs screaming 'Death to the Great Satan'? Let's start with the workers from the international airport that my people recognized."

"Often what a foreigner might consider fanaticism is only the expression of a fervent devotion to Allah. However, we are aware of the activities of certain individuals. Next month, we will have a complete list of suspects…"

That petty, self-important bureaucrat , Katz thought as he observed the Egyptian officer, listened to his smooth excuses. The flashy English and American styles, the lcd watch, perfect tie — all of it offended the Israeli colonel.

Katz had no respect for this playboy. Despite the bureaucrat's record of service with the Egyptian Second Army, Sadek was unlikely to have been a veteran of the Sinai. Perhaps a veteran of office politics, corridor wars, but not of fighting in the dust and diesel-filth and horror of an armored assault.

Sadek: wealthy, pompous, useless. He had no doubt purchased a military commission, then bribed his way to a career. Such men crowded the government and armed forces. They had led the army to constant defeat.

Sadek once accepted the gold of the Soviets, now he took the dollars of the Americans. A loyal and trustworthy friend to whatever foreign power dominated Egypt: Turkish, English, Soviet, American.

And Parks thought of Sadek as a patriot. The Americans bought the mediocre government leaders, the vainglorious army officers of many nations — Egypt; El Salvador; years before, Vietnam — and called them patriots.

A purchased friend of the United States. Katz had no reason to trust Sadek. The fanatics of the Muslim Brotherhood had infiltrated every branch of the Egyptian armed forces and government. Why not also the corrupt?

The limousine's radio phone buzzed.

"Parks here…" He listened for a moment, then passed the phone to Sadek. After a moment, Sadek slammed down the phone.

"Terrorism. A major incident this time."

Parks and Katz had not waited to investigate the fanatics. Minutes after the SAM-7 missiles had destroyed the secret U-2, the surveillance of the airport personnel had become the focus of an ongoing program.

After the disaster of the Iranian Revolution, the CIA had assembled a group of researchers and investigators to monitor the activities of the Muslim extremists in Egypt and Libya. This secret group operated independent of the Egyptian intelligence services. Sadek knew nothing of it.

Eighteen months earlier, the American force of investigators had discovered the plot to murder President Sadat. But when the CIA had notified the Egyptians, the warning had never reached the officers responsible for President Sadat's security. The next day, as Sadat had saluted a military parade, Muslim fanatics had jumped from a truck and had assaulted the reviewing stand where their president stood, firing their Soviet-supplied Kalashnikov automatic rifles point-blank into the only Arab who had had the courage to make both war and peace with the Israelis.

Since that day, the CIA had maintained a careful distance from all Egyptian security officers.

Within minutes of learning of the missile-downed American spy plane, the task force had assembled files of names and photographs of known fanatics employed at the international airport by the government of Egypt and the hundreds of private companies. Parks and Katz had then organized the operation against the fanatics. Parks had wanted to include Sadek in the mission planning. Katz had forbidden Parks to reveal any detail of the operation to any Egyptian.

Now, as their limousine sped into one of the quarters of the ancient city, Sadek briefing Parks on the future Egyptian investigation, an unmarked United States Air Force F-16 taxied onto the runway of Cairo International Airport.

"Executive Underwriters' shuttle jet, requesting permission for takeoff…"

Almost a mile away, the late-night shift of flight controllers glanced at radar screens empty of tourist flights. Talking and joking as they chain-smoked, they followed the course of an air-freight flight crossing the Mediterranean coast. As he gulped coffee, one of the men watched a controller monitoring an outgoing flight at a console.

"Please wait for updated atmospheric data," Aziz Shawan murmured into his headset's microphone. The controller reached to the tiny pager at his belt, pressed the unit three times.