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said Rothberg, "I felt as excited as a street sweeper who'd won a million-dollar lottery."
"Can you give us any thoughts on where you think Venator hid the artifacts?" asked Pitt.
Rothberg considered for a long moment. Finally he said quietly, "Junius Venator was not an ordinary man. He followed his own path. He had access to a mountain of knowledge. His route would have been scientifically planned, only the unknowns were left to chance. He certainly did an efficient job when you consider the relics have remained hidden for sixteen hundred years." Rothberg threw up his hands in defeat. "I can't offer a clue. Venator is too tough a customer to second-guess."
"You must have some idea," Pitt persisted.
Rothberg looked long and deeply into the flames wavering in the fireplace. "All I can say is, Venator's burial place must be where no man would think to look."
0758, read Ismail's watch. He flattened himself behind a small blue spruce and peered at the lodge. Wood smoke was curling from one of two chimneys while steam issued from the heater vents. Kamil, he knew, was an early riser and a good cook. He rightly reasoned that she was up and making breakfast for her guards.
He was a man of the desert and not used to the icy cold that gripped him. He wished he could stand, flail his arms and stamp his feet. His toes ached and his fingers were becoming numb inside the gloves. The agony of the cold was filling his mind and slowing his reaction time. A creeping fear fell over him, a fear that he might botch the job and die for no purpose.
Ismail's inexperience was showing through. At the initial stage of the mission he was coming unstrung. He suddenly wondered if the hated Americans somehow knew or suspected his presence. Nervous and afraid, his mind began to lose its ability to make hard-and-fast decisions.
0759. One quick glance at the van just above the entrance to the road.
Shifts were alternated every four hours between the guards in the warm lodge and those huddled inside the van. Two relief men were due to make the hundredmeter walk from the lodge at any time.
He turned his attention to the guard walking a well-beaten path through the snow around the grounds. He was slowly approaching Ismail's tree, his breath coming in clouds of vapor, his gaze alert for any sign out of the ordinary.
The monotony and the bitter cold had not slackened the Secret Service agent's vigilance. His eyes swept back and forth over the area like radar. Less than a minute remained before he would see Ismail's trail in the snow.
Ismail swore softly under his breath and pressed more deeply into the snow. He was, he knew, exposed. The pine needles shielding him from view would not stop bullets.
0800. Almost on the dot, the front door of the lodge opened and two men stepped out. They wore stocking caps and down-filled ski coats. They automatically scanned the snowy landscape as they moved down the road in quiet conversation.
Ismail's plan was to wait until the relief party reached the van and then take Out all four guards at the same time. But he had misjudged and moved into position too early. The two men had only walked fifty meters down the road when the guard circling the lodge spotted Ismail's footprints.
He stopped and raised the transmitter to his lips. His words were cut off by a loud series of cracks from ismail's Heckler & Koch MP5
submachine gun.
Ismail's amateurish plan had gotten off to a bad start. A pro would have snuffed the guard with a single shot between the eyes from a silenced semiautomatic. Ismail stitched the guard'S COat in the chest area with ten rounds; a good twenty others sprayed the woods beyond.
One of the Arabs frantically began lobbing grenades at the van while another pumped bullets through the sides. Sophisticated assault was beyond the scope of most terrorists. Finesse was as foreign to them as liquid soap. Their only salvation was luck. One of the grenades found its way through the windshield, bursting with a loud thud. The explosion bore no similarity to motion-picture special effects. The gas tank did not go up in a fiery ball. The body of the van bulged and split as if a cherry bomb had gone off inside a tin can.
Both occupants were killed instantly.
Excited with blood lust, the two assassins, neither older than twenty, kept up their attack on the mangled van until the magazines of their rifles were empty, instead of concentrating on the Secret Service agents on the road, who took cover
behind trees and unleashed an accurate fire from their Uzis that quickly cut them down.
Correctly figuring their fellow agents inside the van were beyond help, they began retreating toward the lodge, running in a sideways motion back to back, one of them exchanging fire with Ismail, who had found cover behind a large mossy rock.
Ismafl's strategy was blown away by the confusion.
The other ten men of the terrorist team were supposed to rush the rear door at the sound of Ismad's gunfire, but they lost valuable time wading through knee-deep snow. Their ass
ault came late and they were effectively pinned down by the agents inside.
One Arab managed to gain temporary safety under the north wall of the lodge. He pulled the pin on a grenade and flipped it at a large sliding window. He misjudged the thickness of the double panes, and the grenade bounced back. His face had only time for an expression of horror before the blast blew him apart.
The two agents scrambled up the steps and leapt through the front door.
The Arabs laid down a barrage of fire that caught one of the men in the back, dropping him with only his feet showing across the threshold. He was quickly dragged inside and the door slammed shut at the exact instant a dozen shots and a grenade blasted it into splinters.
The windows disintegrated in showers of glass but the heavy log walls easily withstood the onslaught. The agents dropped two more of Ismad's men, but the rest dodged in closer, using the pines and rocks for cover.
