Cody's Army (20 page)

For the first time she thought of her husband. Nabih was just ready to go out the door! Where was he? She kicked through the
pots toward the front door. At first she saw nothing, then from a large chunk of plaster she saw a hand extended. There was
blood on the palm.

“Noooooooooo!” She rushed to the spot, fell to her knees and with a strength she had never possessed before, lifted the plaster
block upward and tilted it until it crashed backward.

On the floor lay Nabih. His chest was a mass of blood. His neck had been riddled with shrapnel. Only his face escaped, and
on it was a worried expression that had been frozen in place, and now would remain there forever.

Oma let the tears come. She fell on her dead and wailed and cried for long minutes. Then she lifted up, made sure her daughter
was comfortable in the front carrying-sling around her neck and shoulder, and walked through the splintered wood, crashed
glass and plaster to the open front where the door had been.

Once through the rubble, she headed aimlessly down the street. She could hear weapons firing ahead. She paid no attention
to them. A machine gun chattered half a block down.

Bullets zipped through the air near her, but Oma Yafi did not hear them. She kept walking.

Halfway down the block, a Shiite soldier saw her and called to her. At last he ran out, grabbed her, saw the baby and led
her to the safety of a doorway.

“You can get killed out there,” he scolded. She looked up at him, not understanding. Oma wore no veil, her blouse still sagged
open where she had been nursing her baby and her left breast was in plain sight, large and bouncing with each step. The soldier
stared at her undraped breast for a minute, then urged her deeper into the doorway. His hand reached for the woman’s naked
nipple, but a rifle barrel cracked his wrist.

“No!” came the sharp order. The soldier’s sergeant loomed over him. “This one we save for the commander. He likes them young
like this and he can even taste her milk!”

The sergeant caught Oma’s hand and helped her up. “Come with us, little mother. We have a safe place for you until we kill
these pigs who attack us. Then I will take you to see the great Majed Kaddoumi himself.”

For the first time since she had seen her husband’s body on the floor of the shop, Oma Yafi took notice of where she was.
She slowly shook her head.

“No, loyal soldier of the Shiites, I can’t go with you. By all that is sacred to Allah, I must go bury my husband. The sons
of a camel blew up our store. They killed my husband! You have to let me go bury him properly.”

The sergeant reached down and fondled her breast. It was the first that she realized she was not covered. She slapped away
his hand and pushed her blouse together, quieting her baby’s faint cries.

“I am a good woman, loyal to the Shiites and to Allah. I must go and bury my husband.”

The sergeant, nodded. “Yes, that would be proper. Come down the alley a-ways until the fighting is over. Then we will take
you to your husband when it’s safe to walk the street again.”

He took her three houses down, led her into a building that had a sentry on the alley door. Then he put her in a small room
that had a bed, a chair, and a washbasin. When Oma looked around, the sergeant was gone. She tried the door and found that
it was locked.

She sat down on the bed and tried to cry, but no tears would come. She was at the mercy of this band of militia, from whichever
faction they were. Trapped in the middle of a war that she knew nothing about, she wished only that it would end.

She lay on the bed and began feeding her daughter.

FIFTEEN

A
mbassador Stewart Tabler peered over Cody’s shoulder and looked at the map and the circle Cody had drawn on it around the
Furn El Chebbak section of Beirut just across the Green Line and west of the Pine Forest Park.

“Damn it, Cody, you’re supposed to be trying to find and rescue those hostages. That does not mean you are to commit suicide
on a trip like this. Do you know anything at all about conditions on the other side of the Green Line?”

“Mr. Ambassador, no disrespect, but a couple of hours ago I carried Kelly McConnell’s body through a tunnel under the goddamned
Green Line. Damn right I know about the Green Line. But to find out where the hostages are, I need to talk to Majed Kaddoumi.
You going to invite him here for tea or midday prayers or something so I can talk to him?”

“Easy, Cody, take it easy,” the Ambassador said. “If you do go in there, you’ll need to wait until dark, at least, then get
a damn good guide.”

“Ambassador, we don’t have the time. It’s 15:20 already. It won’t be dark for five hours at least. We have to move now. Do
you have any Lebanese you can trust on your staff who could get us through the Green Line in the daylight?”

“No, I won’t allow that. If they got caught they would be killed.”

“Great, fix me up with a Gray Line tour of the Green Line then.” The other three members of his team sat around the table.
They were in fatigues, with their weapons and equipment in place and ready to move and to fight. Richard Caine kept checking
his favorite handgun, a Beretta 92 DA. He kept slipping the loaded ammo clip in and out until the Ambassador stared at him.

Hawkeye kept looking at the map and grumbling. He wanted to get moving. Rufe Murphy sat on the chair, waiting patiently. Now
and then his eyes closed and his breathing evened out in just under a snore.

“Kelly got me through, maybe some of the other news people have more contacts than you do, Ambassador. It’s worth a try. What
hotel do most of them use?”

“The Royal Garden, but I don’t like the idea.”

“Show me a better way, and I’ll grab it.”

Someone came to the door and the Ambassador waved him inside. The man, a Lebanese, whispered to the Ambassador, who shrugged.
The messenger left.

“Cody, there’s someone at the gate to see you. The guards won’t let him in but he says he must talk to you. He’s about ten
years old and his name is Dahr.”

Cody laughed and a smile cracked his too serious a face. “Yeah, we might just have found our meal ticket. Dahr helped us get
over the Green Line this morning. I bet he could do it again, even in broad daylight. Tell the guards to let Dahr in and bring
him up here.”

Five minutes later Cody finished a serious talk with Dahr. The boy had told Cody that Kelly was the first American ever to
be honest and fair with him, and that he helped her whenever he could. He was angry that she had died, and now he wanted to
help Kelly’s friend.

Cody told Dahr the street address, and he knew at once where it was. He touched the map in the Najmeh section, where they
had crossed the Green Line that morning.

“Safe to cross there again, if I with you. About…oh, three kilometers to the address you need go to in the Furn El Chebbak
section.”

The ambassador shook his head. “Maybe you can get the men across the Green Line, Dahr. But how can you lead them through the
heart of West Beirut for three miles?”

“Just can,” Dahr said. “How can you be big-shot ambassador?”

Rufe bellowed with laughter and they all joined in, even the ambassador.

“You’re hired,” Cody growled. “Fifty dollars a day. That’s about two hundred Lebanese pounds. Now let’s get out of here. We’re
wasting time.”

Dahr looked at the four men and shook his head. “Too damn clean,” he said. “Dirty clothes. Two shirttails out. Each different
hat. Look too much like real army.”

In their supply room downstairs, the men picked up their combat ammo, grenades, all the special tools they each had ordered
and got ready to move out. Caine wore a small Israeli combat pack filled with C-5 plastic explosive and his detonators, all
of the timed variety.

Dahr looked at the four men again and shook his head. “Most militia don’t have uniforms,” he said.

Cody waved at Caine and Hawkeye. “Get out of the camous and back in pants and shirts. Nothing too new. Let’s push it!”

They rode toward the Green Line in an older fiat. Cody drove. Before they arrived at the parking spot, Dahr told them they
would be using a tunnel and that once across the Green Line he was their guide. They must do exactly what he told them.

“If we get into a firefight, then I take over,” Cody warned him.

“We might. Several factions in this area. None of them like the other. Oh, I not ten, I am twelve years old. I did not get
all of my vitamins.”

Getting into the buildings and then the house and to the tunnel was no problem. At the far end, Dahr talked with them before
they left the building in West Beirut.

“Keep weapons pointing down, slung,” he said, touching an Uzi. “No marching; militia don’t march. They run, scramble, and
get lost. No English, point, motion. Keep quiet as possible. We stay in alleys most of time.”

They were a curious-looking contingent as they came out the doorway into an alley in West Beirut. The boy went first, swinging
a stick he found. The four men grouped loosely, about five yards apart, heads down, caps covering obvious American features.
Rufe wore a floppy white hat to help hide his big black face.

The first four blocks went without incident, then on the next one they saw a barbed-wire barrier on the main street and expected
security of some sort in the alley nearby. An Amal Shiite stepped into the alley as Dahr came midway in the slit between the
one-story buildings.

Dahr tossed a rock and tried to hit it with the stick he still carried. The militiaman guard jabbered in Arabic with Dahr,
then held up his hand as Cody came within a dozen feet of him. The Shiite had just begun to swing up his automatic rifle,
when Cody beat him to the punch and sent three silenced 9mm parabellums into his chest. The rounds slammed him backward and
killed him before he skidded off the wall and crumpled in the dirt.

Murphy, bringing up the rear, effortlessly picked up the dead soldier and dropped him in a nearly full trash bin. They double-timed
out of that alley behind Dahr and resumed their southerly route, crossing over a wide street called Mar Maroun, and two more
blocks south past Rue Huvelin.

Dahr ducked into a safe place beside a stone building and pointed ahead.

“From here it get little tougher. We run out of alleys. We be on small streets, but there more people. Be casual, don’t look
like from out of town.”

“Yeah, and if we get into a firefight, let’s do it with the silenced choppers,” suggested Hawkeye. “We have four of them.
Let’s not alert anyone we’re on the way until we have to.”

They moved at a good pace, but not with any kind of military precision. Usually Dahr was ahead with his stick. Often small
boys trailed or led militia groups wishing they could be a member. Most could not wait until they were fourteen so they could
have a real weapon and join the militia.

Down two more blocks they passed a park that had not been watered or cared for and had turned brown. They found an alley again
that led south and to the east. The Green Line slanted that way and so they had to move with it.

They came to an area with many more shops, wider streets, and hundreds of people. It was some kind of an open-air market.
They went two blocks around it, and continued south.

Ten minutes later, Dahr bellied down at the end of an alley and motioned Cody forward. His men vanished behind doorways, and
he hurried up to lie beside the young Arab boy.

“This is the place,” Dahr said. “Thought I knew address. It is fortress. On outside many buildings, no windows. Then inside
is real fort. Also courtyard. Once saw chopper fly from this courtyard. Big place, many Amal soldiers.”

“First we watch the fort, Dahr. See what forces they show.”

Five minutes later an old convertible came around the corner ahead. It moved slowly. There were three militiamen in the big
backseat. Two had the long rocket-propelled grenade, RPG, launchers. The third a submachine gun. The driver moved slowly,
cautiously along the narrow street, and down to the corner, where he turned to the left to circle the block.

“So, they have a mounted patrol. What else?” Almost as Cody said it a pair of militiamen without uniforms but with camou fatigue
shirts, came around the far corner, where they had first seen the convertible. The men were young and did not check the alley
mouth, and so did not see Cody and Dahr lying there.

Five minutes later a second pair of roving guards, with no camou fatigues at all, strolled by, chattering and then laughing
at some joke.

Cody did not have to lay it all out and determine a plan of attack. He knew instinctively. He sent Caine and Murphy up the
street to the first doorway that was deep enough to hide them. They were to take out the first foot patrol to show up.

Cody figured the mounted patrol in the old Ford convertible would come past next, and it was first on the list. He brought
up Hawkeye and they split up the targets.

“I’ll take the driver and the man with the rifle,” Cody said. “You get the other two. At this twenty-yard range it will be
like picking your teeth.”