Sword of Allah (23 page)

The technician fiddled with a box from which two small sticks projected. He tweaked them left and right, and the angle of the view changed – lowered. ‘Just repositioning one of the Dragon Warriors for a ringside seat,’ he explained. ‘You’ll have to excuse the crude controls. We’re working on an integrated computer control unit featuring touch control pads. But that’s for Generation Two. They’ll probably release that model and drop the price a year into the production run, screwing up the resale value,’ said the technician, snickering.

‘Shut the fuck up,’ snapped Baruch. Wilkes couldn’t have agreed more. On the screens, men were dying. Wilkes shook his head, trying to clear it of the unreality.

The airborne force hit the roof and ran for the stairs. At street level, soldiers jumped from the Humvees. Percussion grenades – two – were thrown in through the front door. They exploded seconds later, the heat flaring bright red, yellow and green on the monitors.

Wilkes heard a woman’s voice shouting instructions: Glukel. There were other voices. Wilkes assumed they were speaking Hebrew – he didn’t understand the words. The tone was urgent but controlled, cool. No panic.

The Israeli troop on the ground went through the front door after the grenades. Samuels’ people. Submachine-gun fire and other small arms fire. Shouts. A scream. Baruch said something into his boom mic. No response. He said it again. Nothing. A barrage of yelling. Two of the vital signs on the monitor were flat-lining. Christ. More screams. A
clatter of small arms. On the screen, Wilkes watched ten Israelis come back out the front door, retreating. Two soldiers were dragged and another was carried. Others dropped to their knees behind the Humvees, covering the retreat of their comrades, and emptied their magazines into the front door of the building. All three of the mounted light machine guns on the Humvees began pouring fire into the ground floor through the windows, the doors and even the brickwork. There was shouting, yelling through the ’phones. The sounds of chaos, fear.

Baruch shouted something into the boom mic. No answer. He repeated the question. Again, no answer. He rubbed his face with his hands.

‘Go!’ someone said in English through Wilkes’s headphones. That must have been Atticus, thought Wilkes. He checked the monitors. Glukel’s people were faring better. No flat-lines. The view was in infrared/x-ray mode. flash-bangs. The Israelis entered the target room. A brief gun battle. Red spheres swarmed in like angry blood cells. ‘Target secured,’ yelled Monroe with an accompanying whoop.

Lightning balled in the room. The flashes blinded Kadar Al-Jahani and punched the air from his lungs. He tried to stand, only to be thrown against a wall by a massive force, the power of which momentarily blotted out his consciousness.

He coughed and choked with the dust filling his lungs. Kadar felt himself lifted up, this time by men, and then thrown face-down on the floor. His arms were wrenched
behind his back dislocating a shoulder, and a ball of spinning white heat wrapped in the barbed wire of pure pain exploded inside his head. He screamed, but the sound scarcely reached his deafened ears. Vomit seared his throat and made him gag on the mouthfuls of dry grit skinning his insides like coarse sandpaper. Soldiers, Israeli soldiers, were around him. His hands were secured behind his back. Somewhere in Kadar Al-Jahani’s head the reality of the situation found a chink in his armour of disbelief. He was captured.

A massive explosion echoed through the narrow streets as a rocket-propelled grenade blew up the lead Humvee. ‘Jesus,’ said Wilkes, ‘where did that come from?’

Baruch snapped at the technician to reposition the Dragon Warrior. ‘Kakat!’ said Baruch, the veins in his neck pulsing like excited worms. The UAV revealed that the building opposite the target was garrisoned with yet another twenty or so enemy. ‘Fuck!’ Baruch shouted, slipping in and out of English. RPGs ripped through the air leaving smoke trails. The rear Humvee bounced as it exploded in a mushroom of fire, landing upside-down. Wilkes heard the sound of whimpering men coming through his ’phones. Others were yelling. He glanced at the monitor – nine flat-lines amongst the Israeli ground force, Samuels’ people.

The gunships hovered above the scene. They couldn’t get off a shot at the floors occupied by the enemy across the street from the target building. The streets were too narrow. The action was now out of the Israelis’ control,
despite all the technology.

Glukel’s people began to pull back. The Blackhawk settled on the rooftop. The Israelis had three flights of stairs to relative safety. Three enemy shooters popped up on the rooftop of the building across the street. The orbiting Zefas cut them down with miniguns, their tracers a river of molten metal. RPGs answered, roaring across the narrow street and
into
the target building this time.
BOOM!
Strangely, the enemy’s target appeared to be the vacant floor
above
Glukel’s and Monroe’s men.

‘Shit, man, why they doin’ that?’ asked one of the techies, thinking aloud the question also on Wilkes’s mind. ‘How dumb is that? They’re firing at their own people.’

A barrage in the ’phones from Glukel followed that could only be swearing.

More enemy RPGs made the characteristic sound of tearing paper as they streamed across the narrow street, exploding against and inside the building. Someone was coughing, gagging. Wilkes realised that the air must be thick with concrete and clay pulverised to dust by the concussion, making it impossible to breathe.

‘The staircases!’ Wilkes heard Monroe yell.

‘Shit!’ said Wilkes, suddenly grasping the enemy’s move. That’s why the terrorists were firing
into
the building. Their targets were the staircases. With all of them demolished, Atticus and the others now had no way out. They were trapped. They couldn’t get up to the Blackhawk, nor could they leave out the front door.

Machine gun fire was now raining down on the Humvees from the heavily defended building across the street. It was a killing zone. Wilkes saw that there were
now twelve flat-lines, Major Samuels one of them.
The buggers never had a chance.
Glukel barked an order. Wilkes watched it carried out on screen – brightly coloured red spheres took up position at the windows. One of the spheres only made it halfway, then turned blue. He glanced at another monitor. One of Glukel’s people had flat-lined. Jesus, this was murder. Small arms fire illuminated by hundreds of tracer rounds was being exchanged across the narrow street.

Baruch roared into the ’phones. Glukel yelled back. Dragon Warrior picked out half a dozen enemy about to make the dash across the street into the building held by the Israelis. Now Glukel, encumbered by dead and wounded, outnumbered and under pressure, was going to have to defend her position against an enemy on the assault.

Wilkes had seen enough. He grabbed a helmet and a tac radio off the table, and ran for the stairs. He brushed past an NCO whose mouth was open, enthralled by the monitors. ‘Thanks, mate,’ he said as he lifted the man’s sidearm from its holster. He took the stairs in a series of jumps and burst onto the street. There was a Humvee, motor idling across the street. He sprinted to it, opened the door. An Israeli grunt with his mouth open sat behind the wheel. Wilkes pulled him out by the collar, climbed in and stood on the accelerator. The vehicle jerked forward. He wrenched the wheel and the Humvee oversteered down a narrow side street, the back end flicking out and slamming into a wall. Wilkes floored it, took a left and a right and hoped his sense of direction hadn’t failed him. The vehicle shot out of the narrow lane like a bullet from
a gun barrel. He threw the thing sideways then stamped on the brakes. The cloud of brown dust rolled forward obscuring his vision momentarily. And then he saw it not five metres directly in front, lit by the Humvee’s dirt-caked headlights: the Merkava main battle tank.

Wilkes kicked open the Humvee’s door and ran to the tank. The panic heard over the combat frequency was coming in waves. Baruch was shouting orders – Wilkes had no idea what was going on, but it was obvious that there was no contingency plan in case things went to shit. He also knew that what he was about to do was downright illegal and that he could be imprisoned for it, or even shot. But Atticus was a friend – even if he was occasionally a pain in the butt, and he liked Lieutenant Glukel. What am I going to do? he asked himself wryly. Ask the colonel to pass the popcorn while I watch them die on telly?

The Merkava MBT was dark, but its air-conditioning system hummed quietly. There was no doorbell to press. Wilkes slammed his helmet repeatedly against the back of the tank. It bounced off with a dull thud, as if the monster was a solid ingot of pig-iron. Nothing. He crashed the helmet again and again against the tank, a wave of frustration building within him. If there were someone inside, would the thick hull even transmit the noise he was making?

A crack of yellow light appeared at the back of the tank as its rear door swung down. A rock and roll track blared out. AC/DC, an Australian band, for Christ’s sake, screamed out at a hundred decibels. A blond, bleary-eyed soldier poked his head out to investigate, pistol in hand. Wilkes kicked the gun aside, pushed the man back inside
the tank and leapt in.

‘Speak English?’ asked Wilkes.

‘Y…yes,’ said the private. He stuttered with an unusual accent Wilkes couldn’t place. ‘Who –’

Wilkes cut him off. ‘Can you drive this thing?’

‘Yes, but who are –’

Wilkes found the tank’s comms suite, isolated the radio, and tuned it to the tactical frequency. ‘Kill the music.’

‘Er, okay, but…’ said the soldier. He punched a button on a communications panel and a guitar solo ended abruptly.

Wilkes dialled in the combat frequency and the tank was suddenly full of the battle raging three blocks away. Glukel was screaming at someone. Baruch came in over the top. The noise of a submachine gun firing nearby drowned everything out. It was suddenly cut short by a scream.

‘Your people are dying,’ yelled Wilkes. ‘Get this fucker started.’

The soldier nervously looked about for someone to tell him something different. He was young, inexperienced. The crew had gone off to a brothel and left him to guard the tank with a stack of American hot rod magazines for company. It had been so quiet he’d even been considering jerking off over the blonde leaning on the bonnet of a ’57 Chevy when movement on a video screen had caught his attention. He’d adjusted the tank sight system, external video cameras embedded in the Merkava’s armour, and saw this man pounding on the back door. He should have told him to fuck off over the PA, but instead he’d made a mistake and decided to do it face to face. He cursed h
imself for that now – his commander would kill him. He’d get back from doing the business and find the tank gone. The soldier pictured the look on his commander’s face and the subsequent anger that would be directed at him. But the explosions and the screaming coming through the internal speakers overcame his fear of his immediate superior’s retribution – that and the fact that the man who’d invaded his private world waving a Glock in his face was a more immediate threat.

The soldier lowered himself into the driver’s seat and tapped his access code into the computer’s touch screen. The beast’s engine still held a little heat. He tapped the green, warm-start option and the massive diesel roared into life.

Wilkes put on the commander’s helmet, which included integrated ’phones and mic. The driver followed suit. ‘What’s your name?’ asked Wilkes over the intercom.

‘Benyamin,’ the driver answered nervously.

‘Where you from, Ben?’ asked Wilkes quickly, turning the volume down on the bad news coming over the radio so that he could get the answer.

‘Originally…South Africa, sir,’ said Benyamin, deciding that the man who’d commandeered (the word ‘hijacked’ had entered his head but he killed it instantly) his tank had to be an officer – Sayeret, or maybe even Shin Bet.

‘Well, Ben, we’re going downtown to pick up some friends. If we do it right, we’ll get a big pat on the back.’ Wilkes chose not to add that if things went to hell there’d be faeces on the fan.

‘Which direction, sir?’ Benyamin asked.

‘You got a map of this city?’

‘Better than that, sir.’ The young man touched his screen several times and a similar screen in front of Wilkes flashed into life. On it was a colour road map of Ramallah with the tank’s location on it illustrated by a small tank icon. Cute. Stuck to the armour plate by his shoulder with Blu-tack was a collection of pictures of naked women torn from various sources, positioned around a buxom brunette suggestively riding the Merkava’s gun. Wilkes shook his head – the interior of the tank was no different to any other male workplace he’d been in.

‘GPS,’ Benyamin said by way of explanation.

Wilkes hit the transmission button. ‘Lieutenant Colonel, this is Tom Wilkes. I have a tank. Put me up on the system.’

‘Tom, where…?’ Baruch was momentarily confused, but Wilkes had chosen his words well, and the colonel grasped the Australian’s intent. He yelled at the technicians who relayed the frequency.

‘You got that, Ben?’ asked Wilkes.

‘Yes, sir. Seatbelt.’

‘What?’

‘Your seatbelt, sir.’

‘Oh,’ said Wilkes, vaguely surprised. He shrugged and buckled in. ‘And the name’s Tom, okay?’

‘Yes, sir…Tom.’

Several frames suddenly appeared on the screen, one atop the other. Wilkes moved them around with a trackball beside the screen. Benyamin did the same. The target building was one right turn and two hundred metres away. Benyamin touched his screen and the road ahead
was captured by the TSS and projected onto separate monitors in the ubiquitous green of augmented light.

Wilkes heard Baruch ask him several questions but he ignored him. He was still working out in his own head exactly what he was going to do with the tank once he got it into position. The situation at the target building had stabilised somewhat, but only temporarily. The terrorists attempting to take the ground floor had been beaten back. But Dragon Warrior had picked up reinforcements in the vicinity, making their way to the battle with, doubtlessly, more RPGs. The Zefas were powerless, unless the terrorists had the bad sense to try again to take up positions on the rooftop giving the helicopter gunships a clear shot. Samuels’ men – the ground blocking force – had been slaughtered to a man. Glukel’s troop was gradually being whittled down. From the screen display he could see that four were wounded, two seriously. The soldiers were also running low on ammunition and resupply was not an option. Lieutenant Colonel Baruch had assembled an assault team from scratch, made up of nearby Israeli Defence Force soldiers on various security details, but they would be walking into a firestorm. Whoever these enemy soldiers were – Hezbollah or Hamas – they were not lying down without a fight. Samuels had been right.