The Sum of All Fears.pdf - Delta Force

help, man, any way I can.'
'There is always a place for a true warrior.' If his language skills improved,
he'd make a fine instructor, Ghosn thought. 'Well, I must be off.'
'Where are you going?'
'A place we have east of here.' It was to the north. 'Some special work I must
do.'
'That thing we dug up?' Russell asked casually. Almost too casually, Ghosn
thought, but that was not possible, was it? Caution was one thing. Paranoia was
another.
'Something else. Sorry, my friend, but we must take our security seriously.'
Marvin nodded. 'It's cool, man, That's what killed my brother, fucking up
security. See ya' when you get back.'
Ghosn left for his car and drove out of the camp. He took the Damascus road for
an hour. Foreigners so often failed to appreciate how small the Middle East was
– the important parts, at least. The drive from Jerusalem to Damascus, for
example, would have been a mere two hours on decent roads, though the two cities
were the proverbial worlds apart politically . . . or had been, Ghosn reminded
himself. He'd heard of some ominous rumblings from Syria of late. Was even that
government tiring of the struggle? It was easy to call that an impossibility,
but that word no longer had its prior meaning.
Five kilometers outside Damascus, he spotted the other car waiting at the
prescribed place. He drove past it for two thousand meters, scanning for
surveillance before he decided it was safe to turn around. A minute later, he
pulled over close to it. The two men got out as they'd been directed to do, and
their driver, a member of the Organization, simply drove away.
'Good morning, Günther.'
'And to you, Ibrahim. This is my friend, Manfred.'
Both men got into the back of the car, and the engineer drove off at once.
Ghosn eyed the newcomer in the mirror. Older than Bock, thinner, with deep-sunk
eyes. He was poorly dressed for the environment and sweating like a pig. Ibrahim
handed back a plastic water bottle. The newcomer wiped off the top with his
handkerchief before drinking. Arabs not sanitary enough for you? Ghosn wondered.
Well, that was not his concern, was it?
The drive to the new location took two hours. Ghosn deliberately took a
circuitous route despite the fact that the sun would keep a careful observer
informed of their direction. He didn't know what sort of training this Manfred
fellow had, and while it was prudent to assume he knew every skill there was, it
was also prudent to employ every trick in the book. By the time they arrived at
their destination, only a trained reconnaissance soldier would have been able to
duplicate the route.
Qati had chosen well. Until a few months earlier, it had been a command center
for Hezbollah. Dug into the side of a steep hillside, the corrugated-iron roof
was covered with earth and planted with the sparse local shrubbery. Only a
skilled man who knew exactly what he was looking for could ever have spotted it,
and that was unlikely. Hezbollah was particularly adept at routing out informers
in its midst. A dirt track ran right past it to an abandoned farm whose land was
too played-out even for opium and hashish production, which was the major cash