Dick Stivers - Cairo Countdown

Autofire from the opposite wall raked the deserted walkway of the east wall. The smoke and swirling soot concealing Able Team also hid the gunmen.

Lyons grabbed Gadgets and Mohammed. "The roof! Boost me up."

Lyons stood on his partners' shoulders to grab the edge of the wall. He scanned the rooftop for a moment, then swung his legs over. An AK flashed.

Shock slammed Lyons against the wall. Slugs searched for him, bits of clay and whitewash falling on him as he scrambled away. He tore his Colt from its holster to trigger a three-shot burst at the muzzle-flashes. He saw a rifle fall to one side. Sighting at a form sprawled on the rooftop, he fired again and saw a piece of a gunman's skull fly away.

Lyons unslung his Atchisson before searching for his wound.

He felt no pain. Feeling his shoulders and back, he thought perhaps his battle armor had stopped the slug. Then his hand touched a gouge in the plastic foregrip of the Atchisson. The slug had only scored the plastic.

Leveling the Atchisson, Lyons flicked off the safety and rose to a crouch. He checked a body, found it was a Palestinian girl. Her back was spotted with tiny wounds from his grenade's steel wire fragments. Lyons searched her bloodsoaked uniform and came up with Soviet grenades. Going to the edge, he helped pull Blancanales to the roof.

"Thought you were gone," Blancanales told him.

"Me, too." Lyons leaned over the edge and shouted to the others, "Watch that patio. Watch the north wall. Pol and I will put some fire down their throats."

Gadgets put a burst of Uzi fire into a terrorist rushing up the stairs. A grenade bounced across the ground. Mohammed kicked it as the others dropped flat. The Soviet frag tumbled down the stone steps and exploded in the courtyard.

Lyons sighted his Atchisson on yet another form silhouetted by flames. He killed the terrorist, then followed Blancanales to the north. Below them, auto-fire hammered.

Chancing a glance over the edge, Blancanales saw two soldiers behind a sandbagged searchlight position who were firing at Abdul. In front of the gunmen, only torn bodies and blood pools remained of the terrorists hit by the rocket. Taking a grenade from his thigh pocket, Blancanales jerked out the cotter pin and let the lever sail free. He counted to three, dropped the frag and pulled his head back to safety. The grenade exploded in the air three feet above the terrorists. High-velocity steel shards reduced their heads to pulp.

Another terrorist broke from cover, screaming, an arm hanging limp. He ran for the west wall. A terrorist stuck an RPG around the corner and fired. The rocket hit the wounded man in the chest. It vaporized his upper body.

Pulling out more grenades, Lyons and Blancanales ran to the west. They pulled the pins. Blancanales said, "Now…" The levers flipped away. "One, two, three — over they go!"

Simultaneous blasts cleared the corner. Lyons leaned over the roof's low wall and snapped semiauto 12-gauge shots into every terrorist he saw, emptying his magazine in less than two seconds. He ducked back as AKs popped. Slugs chipped the wall and whined into the sky.

Keying his hand radio, he shouted, "North wall's clear…"

An explosion knocked the two of them flat. Stone showered them. A section of the wall edging the roof had disappeared.

Lyons found the radio and shouted, "Hit the west wall! They're hitting us!" He jammed the radio back in a pocket and helped Blancanales to his feet. "How many grenades you got left?"

"Haven't been counting…"

A round grenade arced toward them. Lyons lunged forward and whacked the grenade with the plastic stock of his Atchisson, sending it down into the courtyard's inferno. A rocket shrieked over them and continued high into the sky, where it exploded. Lyons dropped the empty box mag out of his Atchisson and jammed in another. "This is getting serious."

Blancanales jerked the pin from a grenade and looked for a target. Kalashnikovs flashed. He dodged back, blindly tossing the grenade. Lyons counted to three and crouchwalked forward. When he heard the bang of the grenade, he stood up and sprayed three riflemen with high-velocity steel shot.

A terrorist with an RPG had leaned from cover and was sighting on Lyons. Lyons sighted on the terrorist's face. The Able Team hotshot squeezed off a burst. One hundred sixty double-ought and number two steel balls riddled the terrorist and his launcher. One of the steel pellets crushed the rocket's electronic fuse cap. The explosion left twenty feet of the walkway a smoking ruin.

Terrorists scrambled from cover. Blancanales sighted on a form, saw the rifleman disappear off the wall. Another terrorist jumped off the wall to the sand outside the fortress. A second later, a mine exploded, throwing a leg into the air.

Rifle fire came in bursts from isolated positions. A rocket flash swept the west wall. Lyons ran to the northwest corner and looked down at Abdul reloading his launcher. "The south wall! Clear it!"

"You got it, Yank! Cover me."

Dashing around the corner, Abdul sighted on the muzzle-flashes. The flash destroyed a sandbagged searchlight and silenced an AK.

The building heaved beneath Lyons's feet as a rocket came from a concealed terrorist. The charge blasted through the exterior wall. Abdul sighted on the rocket man's hiding place and hit it.

Lyons keyed his radio again. "Wizard. The enemy is retreating, holing up. We got to find that Agency man."

"There are still the squads outside. They'll come back."

"I doubt it. If they do, let them try the minefield."

Blancanales aimed single shots down at forms in the graying predawn. Slugs killed wounded, punched more wounds in the dead. No shots answered Blancanales' methodical fire. Finally, nothing moved on the walls.

"Now search the place," Lyons told his partner.

"After we find our man, we pull out," Blancanales said. "We're pushing our luck way too far."

"No argument from me…"

Going to the roof's edge, they signaled to Abdul below. Lyons lowered Blancanales to Abdul's shoulder, then Abdul and Blancanales helped Lyons down.

In the courtyard, fires still burned in the gutted hulks of the trucks and cars. Dead and dying terrorists were sprawled everywhere. Human debris littered the walkways, the tiles slick with blood. Above the desert, the first pink light of day streaked the sky.

Able Team moved through the wreckage and death, searching for the American prisoner of the National Liberation Front.

Hiding in a closet, Omar shook with fear. The darkness of the tiny space stank of the urine fouling his fatigues. Ashamed of his fear of martyrdom, yet fearing capture more than death, the commander thought of suicide, to die with his men rather than accept the shame of trial.

Or interrogation. Were the attackers Egyptian commandos? If his countrymen took him, there was no hope. He would be dismembered as a matter of course. Unless he had enough gold to buy his freedom.

Or were they American? By radio from Cairo, his leader had warned him. It had been the Americans who had attacked his command center in the city. Did they now search for the American he had captured? What treatment could he expect? He thought of suicide, his body shaking at the thought.

Should he rush from hiding? Throw himself at the attackers? Offer his life to Allah?

Despite his terror, he laughed at these possibilities. He talked like that to his soldiers. He talked of Allah and martyrdom and Paradise, but he knew only graves awaited dead soldiers — sometimes not only graves, only places by the side of the road, a feast for green-backed flies.

But what if Americans found him?

Forcing himself to face the chance of death, he realized he feared death less than capture by the Americans. And even if he fought, death might not come quickly. Fumbling in the thigh pocket of his tailored fatigues, he found a grenade. He looped a finger through the safety pin.