Tom Clancy's op-center_ acts of war - Tom Clancy [13]
After they passed through the village, the cars moved on toward the Turkish border. Ibrahim rolled down his window.
The border crossing consisted of two sentry posts, one behind the other. One was Syrian, the other Turkish. There was a gate arm beside each booth and thirty yards of roadway between them. The road was weed-strewn on the Syrian side, clean on the Turkish side.
Walid's car was in the front of the caravan, Ibrahim's in the rear. Walid presented the visas and passports for his car. After the clerk examined them, he signaled an armed guard beside him to raise the gate arm.
Ibrahim began to feel the weight of destiny on his shoulders. He had a specific goal, the one Walid had selected for them. But he also had a personal mission. He was a Kurd, one of the traditionally nomadic peoples of the plateau and mountain regions of eastern Turkey, northern Syria, northeastern Iraq, and northwestern Iran.
Since the middle 1980s, the many guerrilla factions of the Kurds living and operating in Turkey had fought repression by the Turks, who feared that Kurdish autonomy would lead to a new and hostile Kurdistan comprised of portions of Turkey, Iraq, and Iran. This was not a religious issue, but a cultural, linguistic, and political one.
The undeclared war had claimed twenty thousand lives by 1996. Ibrahim did not become involved until then, when water became even scarcer in the region due to Turkish operations and his cattle began to die of thirst. Although Ibrahim had served in the Syrian Air Force as a mechanic, he had never been a militant. He believed in the Koran's teachings of peace and harmony. But he also felt that Turkey was strangling his people, and the genocide could not go unavenged.
In the two years that Ibrahim had been part of the eleven-man band, the work had taken on an importance all its own. Acts of terrorism and sabotage in Turkey were no longer just a matter of vengeance to him. As Walid had said, Allah would decide whether there was ever to be a new Kurdistan. In the meantime, the rebel actions were a way of reminding the Turks that the Kurds were determined to be free with or without a homeland.
Typically, two, three, or four of the men would sneak into the country at night, elude the border patrols, and disable a power station or pipeline or snipe at soldiers. But today's objective was different. Two months before, Turkish troops had taken advantage of a spring thaw and a unilateral cease-fire with Turkish Kurds to begin a massive offensive against the rebels. Over one hundred Kurdish freedom fighters had been killed in three days of relentless combat. The attack had been designed to quiet the western regions before Turkey turned its attention to the east. There, territorial disputes with Greece as well as tension between Christian Athens and Islamic Ankara were becoming more and more intense.
Walid and Kenan Demirel, a leader of the Turkish Kurds, had decided that the latest aggression could not go unpunished. Nor would the strike be small, worked by a team that snuck over the border. They would enter the country boldly and show the enemy that acts of oppression and betrayal would not be tolerated.
The caravan passed a black wooden stake stuck in the side of the road. They were in Turkey now. When they reached the Turkish gate, an armed guard poked the barrel of an M1A1 submachine gun through a small opening cut in the glass. His companion emerged and walked over to Walid's car. He wore a 9mm Capinda Tabanca in a crisp new holster.
The agent bent and looked into the car. "Your passports, please."
"Certainly," Walid said. He slid the bundle of small