Free Thunderstrike in Syria by Nick Carter

convenient enough, since
al-Huriya
wanted you brought here, to his base."
    "Oh, now I feel honored," I said with a chuckle. Suddenly without a warning of any kind, one of the terrorists, a skinny man with a long blue-red scar on one cheek, slapped me hard across the face. Evidently the man hadn't liked my last remark.
    Pretending to ignore the stinging pain, I looked at Miriam, who acted as if nothing had happened. "Yeah, honored," I quipped, "even if Karameh didn't send me an engraved invitation."
    "Don't flatter yourself, Nick." She was no longer smiling. "We wanted any agent that AXE or Hamosad might send. I will say that we were hoping it would be an agent of AXE and we were hoping that the agent would be you. Naturally we could only wait and see."
    One of the men, a heavyset thug with a small beard and beady eyes, spoke to Miriam. From the respectful tone of his voice, I deduced that she was one of Karameh's top people.
    "What about our dead comrades?" the man asked her, glaring at me and then looking around him at the bodies on the ground. Of the others that I had wrecked, the man I had hit in the abdomen was sitting on a small rock holding his stomach; the man whose ribs I had broken could hardly stand.
    "We'll leave them here," Miriam told the beady-eyed man. "Men from camp can come back and pick them up later. The important thing now is to get this stupid AXE agent to
al-Huriya.
How far away are the jeeps?"
    "About a mile to the north," the man replied. "We didn't want to take any chances of his discovering us."
    "Yes, that was wise," Miriam agreed. "Very well, we'll go." She turned to another man. "Halif, you go back down to the wadi and drive the van."
    We began the walk to the jeeps, Miriam beside me, to my left. To my right, a Syrian kept me covered with a Stechkin machine pistol. Behind me were two more men who, every now and then, poked me in the back with the muzzles of assault rifles.
    "There is just one thing I don't understand, I said to Miriam. I knew there had to be a beeper; there wasn't any way. "How did your people know we'd be at this spot today. We could have had engine trouble and have been a day late. We'd have been here earlier if it hadn't been for the bandit attack."
    "I thought you would have guessed, Nick," laughed Miriam. "There's a hidden transmitter in the van that emits a steady pulsating signal for tracking purposes, in this case for thirteen miles. You're an expert with such devices. You figure out the rest."
    "Someone followed us from Damascus," I said. "Your people never lost track of us."
    "Give the man a cigar," she said. "It was easy for my comrades to deduce when we would reach the wadi." She laughed again, reached into her pocket, pulled out a cigarette lighter and held it up for me to see. "Before we began the climb, I activated this. It was easy for the men to keep track of us."
    I knew that part of the lighter was a «beeper» of short range.
    "You see, Nick, we Arabs aren't half as stupid as you Westerners think we are…"
    We continued in silence, and the thought came to me that the great charm of fanaticism is that, like love, it's a great simplifier. It combines the virtue of explaining nothing with the vice of interpreting everything.
    I didn't underestimate my position.
I was in the hands of the most dangerous fanatics in the world.

Chapter Eight
    As the jeeps roared into camp, I knew how the early Christians in ancient Rome must have felt when they were about to be tossed to the lions. Nonetheless, my apprehension didn't interfere with my noting the various features of the base. I saw that there was another road leading from the camp, other than the main route that led to the one Miriam told me had been blocked by a landslide. This new road was smaller in width and seemed to lead off into the hills.
    I didn't exactly get a cheering welcome! There was pure hatred in the eyes of everyone whose stares I met; some of the men even shook their weapons at me. I saw that most of