The Sum of All Fears.pdf - Delta Force

almost because one of his teachers had been kidnapped, and two others had used
that as an excuse to leave the country. That had denied Ghosn the last nine
credit hours needed for a degree in engineering. Not that he really needed it.
He'd been at the top of his class, and learned well enough from the textbooks
without having to listen to the explanations of instructors. He'd spent quite a
bit of time in labs of his own making. Ghosn had never been a frontline soldier
of the movement. Though he knew how to use small arms, his skills with
explosives and electronic devices were too valuable to be risked. He was also
youthful in appearance, handsome, and quite fair-skinned, as a result of which
he traveled a lot. An advance-man of sorts, he often surveyed sites for future
operations, using his engineer's eye and memory to sketch maps, determine
equipment needs, and provide technical support for the actual operations people,
who treated him with far more respect than an outsider might have expected. Of
his courage there was no doubt. He'd proven his bravery more than once, defusing
unexploded bombs and shells that the Israelis had left in Lebanon, then
reworking the explosives recovered into bombs of his own. Ibrahim Ghosn would
have been a welcome addition to any one of a dozen professional organizations
anywhere in the world. A gifted, if largely self-taught engineer, he was also a
Palestinian whose family had evacuated Israel at the time of the country's
founding, confidently expecting to return as soon as the Arab armies of the time
erased the invaders quickly and easily. But that happy circumstance had not come
about, and his childhood memories were of crowded, insanitary camps where
antipathy for Israel had been a creed as important as Islam. It could not have
been otherwise. Disregarded by the Israelis as people who had voluntarily left
their country, largely ignored by other Arab nations who might have made their
lot easier but had not, Ghosn and those like him were mere pawns in a great game
whose players had never agreed upon the rules. Hatred of Israel and its friends
came as naturally as breathing, and finding ways to end the lives of such people
was his task in life. It had never occurred to him to wonder why.
Ghosn got the keys for a Czech-built GAZ-66 truck. It wasn't as reliable as a
Mercedes, but a lot easier to obtain – in this case it had been funnelled to his
organization through the Syrians years before. On the back was a home-built
A-frame. Ghosn loaded the American in the cab with himself and the driver. Two
other men rode on the loadbed as the truck pulled out of the camp.
Marvin Russell examined the terrain with the interest of a hunter in a new
territory. The heat was oppressive, but really no worse than the Badlands during
a bad summer wind, and the vegetation – or lack of it – wasn't all that
different from the reservation of his youth. What appeared to others as bleak
was just another dusty place to an American raised in one. Except here they
didn't have the towering thunderstorms – and the tornados they spawned – of the
American Plains. The hills were also higher than the rolling Badlands. Russell
had never seen mountains before. Here he saw them, high and dry and hot enough
to make a climber gasp. Most climbers, Marvin Russell thought. He could hack it.
He was in shape, better shape than these Arabs.
The Arabs, on the other hand, seemed to be believers in guns. So many guns,
mostly Russian AK-47s at first, but soon he was seeing heavy anti-aircraft guns,
and the odd battery of surface-to-air missiles, tanks, and self-propelled field