Night of the Peacock opens with Camellion sneaking up on Rabadh Yahya Tabriz's desert camp. The goal is to assassinate Tabriz, the leader of the Dasni (or Yezidis), who is expected to offer military support to Shaabi. Shaabi needs the Dasni rebels on his side when he attacks North Yemen, and the Soviets need Shaabi and his Marxist goons in an ultimate move against Saudi Arabia. Author Joseph Rosenberger helpfully offers a ton of background information on Yemeni history, outlining the succession of governments, and various coups and actions.
Camellion (as a representative of the CIA) is working with members of Sons of the Falcon, an underground organization in South Yemen, and one that is virulent anti-Shaabi. However, although Camellion and his men kill a few Dasni guards, they are unable to get Tabriz. So they hot-foot it away from the village of Danikil and fly back to Riyadh to discuss their next moves.
Soon, Camellion and eight other men (and 29 camels) are walking across the desert, disguised as Bedouins. They are making their way, over the course of about 10 days, from Al-Lu-baylah (a small oasis on the edge of Rub' al Khali) to the city of Aden. Rosenberger devotes several chapters to the monotonous journey of crossing the "Empty Quarter". They meet other groups of travellers and for awhile you think some violence might break out, but nothing happens.
One thing Rosenberger does in all of these books is provide in-depth descriptions of the cities, the citizens and their customs. They often read like encyclopedia entries - he apparently relied heavily on back issues of National Geographic - and have little-to-nothing to do with the plot, but they do show his high level of research, something that was much harder to do in the early 1980s:
The Death Merchant and his small band, now mingling with a stream of traffic pouring into the city - people of the various Arab tribes riding camels, horses, donkeys; or leading packed camels, horses or donkeys - saw their first Yemeni houses on the northeast side of the city, fortresslike houses built of multicolored stone or brightly painted adobe mud brick, some three stories high. Some houses had tiny windows and crenelated roofs, others layered rows of stone slate jutting out to protect the walls against the seasonal rains.In Aden, they meet with Nuri Boustani and his group, Ibn'u Alib Saqr. After learning from Boustani that Shaabi will be departing from the Aden airport in two days, Camellion formulates a plan of attack at the airport. The men with him are not too keen on the idea: "Today we are fire. Tomorrow, we will be ashes."
This was the old spice route and this river of traffic would enter the Crater, the old commercial quarter of Aden. There were three other quarters - at-Tawāhī, the business section, Ma'alah, the native harbor area, and at-Wanani, a small residential section for the wealthy and the influential. ...
There were hundreds of travelers spread out along the stone-paved route, men and women from the various Middle East and African tribes - not all of them Semites as were the Arabs. There were the Hamitic Beja from the northern Sudan, with their copper-red to deep-brown skin; the tall Beraber with their colorful clothes and pretty unveiled women, the arms of the females loaded down with copper and brass bracelets; people of the Zeer, Yafelman, Zemmun and other tribes who spoke the Berber language. And many, many Arabs; the Djerba, the Filala, the kabyle, the Shammar, etc.
Nevertheless, the group approaches the airport at night, kills a couple of guards patrolling the perimeters, and steals their uniforms. While wearing the uniforms, Camellion and Colonel bin Maktum are able to commandeer an armoured car, crash a hole in the protective fence and let the rest of the group through. In a repeat of the action described in at least one previous DM book, they drive two armoured cars around the airport, blasting the holy hell out of everything and everyone. With the airport in ruins - Shaabi survives, hiding in one of the hangars - they head towards a Soviet transport plane, in which Camellion aims to have everyone escape.
The action of Camellion flying the plane from takeoff to an extremely bumpy landing in the mountains is pretty suspenseful, even though the reader knows there is absolutely no way that Camellion won't land it safely. (Because this is Rosenberger, Camellion also has random thoughts flitting through his head during the flight, most notably how crime rates have risen in California because of the abolition of the death penalty.) The men meet up with Yadollah I'Zoir, who leads them through the mountains to meet Ali Sa'galli, the head of the Sons of the Falcon. Camellion and Sa'galli have a multi-page conversation about Soviet expansionism, the stupidity of the U.S. government, and the insanity of gun control. The Death Merchant also rants about having to pay five-cent deposits on beer and soda bottles! ("Instead of cracking down on people who litter, they force nonlitterers to pay deposits on beverage bottles to ensure their return.")
Later, the Death Merchant lays out the particulars of Operation Camelback, which will include Sa'galli's fighters, as well as 200 professional mercenaries - Mad Mike Quinlan and his Thunderbolt Unit: Omega. They will be transported to Aden to attack the heart of the capital: the Government House. But Camellion soon receives a message that Shaabi knows their location (his planes have been flying overhead) and is meeting with Tabriz, formulating a plan to attack with a force of 600 men. The Aden attack is aborted and the Death Merchant and Quinlan's and Sa'galli's fighters will immediately attack Tabriz's main camp instead.
Fourteen helicopters transport the men to the site of the attack. First, five of the copters fire tens of thousands of rounds into the village of Danikil. The five copters can fire a total of 36,000 rounds per minute and they lay waste to nearly everyone in the village. All of the copters land and the armed men jump out, ready to finish the attack. Shaabi, his assistant, and the three Russians have taken cover in the Temple of Melek Taus. The fighters go house to house in their slaughter and, eventually, converge on the temple. Camellion blows open the wooden doors with several blocks of RDX explosives and they charge inside. A fierce shootout ensues, with plenty of martial arts fighting. Naturally, the evil doers are killed.
Rosenberger describes the action in exquisite detail, while also telling us the name of every fighter and exactly what type of firearm and ammunition he is using:
Surprise! The atsonished [sic] Dasni were promptly cut to pieces by Manfred "Scarface" Rohde who started raking the area with a Heckler & Koch GMBH G3A4 automatic rifle. With the battered-faced West German, leaning around the broken and jagged wall stones at the south end of the rip in the east wall, were Rashid al-Khaima, firing an Igram [sic] sub-gun, and Carlos Luis Ceron, an Omega merc from Argentina, who was firing short, deadly bursts of 9mm Parabellum slugs from a Belgian Mitraillette Vigneron M2 chatter box; and while the three men saturated the area with streams of high velocity death, other Omega kill experts poured through the ugly gap and stormed forward, running in a crooked pattern. With them came the Death Merchant, ducking and darting, dodging and weaving, an AMP Alaskan in each hand. A 5.45mm AKS projectile spub by his head, only three centimeters from his left temple. Half an eyeblink later, a 9mm Vitmorkin machine pistol slug, fired by Major Vasili Tarasov, almost struck his wrist as his right arm was raised. Instead of hitting flesh and bone and almost tearing off his hand, the flatnosed slug struck the edge of his Seiko, shattered the wristwatch and sent the blown-apart mechanism to the four hot winds.Etc.:
Camellion's .44 projectile bored into the left side of the Arab's chest and blew open a hole in his body large enough to permit the passage of ping-pong balls.
As happy as a drunken hillbilly with a credit card, Rashid al-Khaima began firing ...
"Well, kiss my transmission!" (this strange expression is actually used twice)
Death Merchant: "I don't want your brain to rush to your head!"
Cooked human flesh has the aroma of a good grade of pork.
Camellion prepared the explosives "all the while wishing he could hear Liszt's Les Preludes - perfect music to kill by".
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