Assault into Libya by Jim Case

Author:Jim Case [CASE, JIM]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780446566254
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2009-09-26T00:00:00+00:00

Sofia, city of one million souls, was a sharp contrast to Rome, which had been bustling and noisy, bursting at the seams. Sofia slumbered with enough order, peace, and quiet to make any good Party member proud.

They approached the city from the south, leaving the highway and heading into the orderly grid of deserted streets that criss-crossed broad avenues linked with poplars and broad-crowned chestnut trees. The open-air cafes were closed and boarded up at this late hour.

They crossed the elektrichka tracks over which the commuter trains would soon be humming practically back-to-back in from suburbs of hundreds of identical, drab, modem apartment houses.

They passed an occasional delivery truck on early rounds, a street cleaner, some private vehicles, and twice Cody drove past police vehicles cruising the streets but not interested enough in a rust-bucket van like this one that carried four heavily armed commandos and a member of the NFO.

Narda directed them around Lenin Square, after which they followed Georgi Dimitrov Street, skirting the very old sections of town where the streets were narrow cobblestone, medieval, the stately Byzantine Sancta Sophia basilica poking its floodlit cuppola top toward the dark heavens.

And everywhere—sidewalks that within hours would be overcrowded with pedestrians, thoroughfares that would flood with taxicabs and trucks and bicycles—everything was deserted.

“Like a ghost town” was how Hotkeys put it.

Narda had gone back to sitting straight-backed, staring ahead as they proceeded deeper into the city. She had spoken only to give Cody directions.

“Welcome to the capital of Bulgaria,” she said after a while, and her words were not the cool monotone but tinged with bitterness. “I do not know if you men have ever…” She paused and started again in a different, reflective voice. “It is a terrible thing to hate one’s home.”

The old section of town gave way to what in America would have been called tenements, and then they were approaching the warehouse district, canyons of architectural behemoths; looming shadows above and beyond faint pools of yellow cast by street lamps at every other intersection.

The conversation tapered off to nothing.

Cody felt that icy calm of total awareness slip over him.

They were in the belly of the monster now. Behind enemy lines? Hell, they were on the enemy lines.

All it would take would be one nosy cop, one bored militia patrol looking for something to do, to discover them and blow the whole thing.

If that happened, Abdul Kamal truly would have escaped. Laura Parker and her father would go unavenged. Narda Rykov would go to Darvo Prison and follow the fate of her star-crossed lover.

And Cody and his team would be dead.

If they were lucky.

“Turn here,” Narda said.

Cody tapped the VW’s brakes and steered into a canyon like all the others for the past several blocks, this one swathed in shadow, steam clouds rising from beneath a manhole, giving the scene a hazy, other-worldly ambience.

There were no other vehicles in sight.

“That alley at mid-block,’ Narda said, pointing. “Charova owns both warehouses. He has an office in the one on the right.

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