“Ilsa, you know nothing of soldiers like me, but you soon will,” he
taunted her, as he casually tossed the Luger aside. With another quick
move, he grabbed her shoulders and threw her onto the floor, hard, as if
she were a stuffed doll. He jumped on top, digging a knee into her
stomach and knocking the wind out of her. Then he straddled her and
said, “In Russia, when we found a surly bitch like you, this usually did
the trick. It was strange how we always found them a bit more polite
afterwards … sometimes even appreciative.”
She tried to shove
him away, but he grabbed her sweater and ripped it open, laughing as he
looked down at her small, bare breasts. She reached up and scratched at
his cheeks with her fingernails, gouging them like an angry cat and
drawing blood. He growled and slapped her across the face again. She
screamed in pain, but he slapped her repeatedly, punishing her with each
blow until she had to cover her head with her arms. His assault came so
fast that everything spun around inside her head. She heard him
laughing, but she was helpless to stop him. His hands dropped to her
breasts. He grabbed them, rubbing hard and pinching both nipples. She
screamed again and shook her head.
“If you aren’t
nice to me,” he warned sarcastically, “I’ll hurt you a lot worse than
that before I’m finished; and believe me, I know how to hurt a woman.”
His powerful hand
grabbed the waistband of her slacks and she felt them rip. Desperately,
she turned her head and saw the Luger lying on the bare concrete floor
near the wall. She stretched her hand as far as it would reach and was
able to wrap her fingers around the barrel. She swung it at him,
clubbing him across the forehead with all her strength.
He toppled off to
one side, but she kept the rain of blows coming as he tried to block
them and right himself. “You little bitch,” he swore, finally grabbing
her arm and twisting her wrist backward until the sharp pain made her
drop the gun. It was hopeless. She watched his eyes as he ran his free
hand across his forehead, pausing to look at the blood, then holding his
fingers in front of her eyes so she could see. “You’ll pay dearly for
this,” he whispered angrily, as he ripped her slacks open and began to
unfasten his belt.
She screamed again
as she heard him say, “Oh, yes, you will pay dearly …” but before he
could finish the sentence or carry out his threat, his head suddenly
snapped to the left with a violent jerk.
Richard Thomson was already having a very bad day when someone left a corpse lying on the rear steps of his hotel. Its head had been lopped off like a ripe melon and had been posed so it could look back down at its own body. Thomson is a burned-out CIA Agent and the body belongs to Mahmoud Yussuf, a fat, petty thief who tried to sell him photographs of a long-abandoned RAF base in the Egyptian desert. What the photos have to do with a dead Israeli Mossad agent, Nazi rocket scientists, the fanatical Moslem Brotherhood, and two missing Egyptian tank regiments could start the next Arab-Israeli War or stop it.
Alone and on the run, no one believes Thomson’s answers -- not the CIA, the US Ambassador, Colonel Ali Rashid of Egyptian State Security, and most assuredly not Captain Hassan Saleh, Chief of the Homicide Bureau of the Cairo Police, who wants to hang Thomson, preferably around the CIA’s neck . Under pressure from within and without, the slums of Cairo are a tinder box of discontent and the first faint whiffs of a military coup against the shaky, new government of Abdel Gamal Nasser are in the air. Thompson and the young daughter of one of the German rocket scientists have five action-packed days and nights to figure it out. Tick Toc, Tick Tock! Something is about to blow up in Thomson’s face at Noon on Thursday.
Like Night of the Generals, this is a murder mystery wrapped inside an international crisis.
