Cody's Army (22 page)

“What is this?” Majed asked.

“A small flower we found in the rubble, most worthy general. She has agreed that it is not possible to do otherwise, and is
now ready to do your bidding.”

“Let her speak for herself.” Majed stared at her.

“I am not afraid of you, of any of you,” the woman said with a firm, assured voice. “My husband spent many years in the West.
He treated me as an equal.”

“What is your name?” Majed asked.

“I am Oma Yafi, widow of the copper merchant Nabih Yafi. My daughter’s name is Jasimine.”

“Oma, I too have lived in the West, where the women wear no veils and they expose their bodies wantonly. But I have known
Western women who were intelligent, brilliant, fascinating. Later I will see if you can meet those standards. Right now I
have a small problem on my hands, and a war to win.”

He motioned to the guards. “Take her to a safe place, and let nothing happen to her or the child, or you will personally answer
to me.”

The guards showed much more respect for the woman now than they had before.

Another explosion shattered the stillness. This one came closer.

Majed scowled.

“And get out there and put an end to this, at once!” he shouted.

Cody and his team had bored another twenty yards toward the main headquarters.

They had holed up in a small room with a window that opened inward and had no bars on it. The window was less than thirty
yards from the rear entrance to the Majed GHQ.

Again, Cody’s long experience in battle and strategy took over, and he pointed to Hawkeye Hawkins, the shorter of the three
men.

“Hawk, you and I are going to get into that fortress over there. We’re going to walk in, not blast our way in. What we need
are some raunchy-smelling clothes and a pair of AK-47 rifles and a pair of those fatigue caps they wear, the ones that look
like they’ve been sat on for a week.”

“Got one right here,” Caine said, looking down at the dead militiaman on the floor. “You want his shirt and hat and long gun,
right?”

Cody grunted and Caine began stripping the shirt off the man.

Rufe went to the door. “Didn’t we leave another body or two across the hall?” Hawkeye nodded at him. “Then ’pears like I should
take a small walk and bring back the right wardrobe. Anybody give me some cover?”

Hawkeye moved to the door, edged it open a crack and looked out. He waved Rufe forward and the big man went across the hallway
and into the room opposite in 1.4 seconds flat, a new Beirut record. Hawkeye eased the door closed when two militiamen ran
down the hall, shouting something behind them.

Two minutes later Rufe shot back into the safe room with a shirt, soft hat, and an AK-47 with three extra magazines.

“Now, we need a small diversion, Richard,” Cody said. “I’d say about half a cube of C-5 out the window and thrown down away
from the GHQ over there. Make it go off on impact. That will give Hawkeye and me a chance to get out this window and work
our way toward the GHQ main doors. I hope my six words of Arabic are enough.”

SEVENTEEN

C
aine added some C-5 plastique spice to the hand grenade he threw thirty yards north out the window and into the inner courtyard
of Kaddoumi’s fortress. The small bomb rolled near the side of a building in the protective ring and blasted with a vengeance,
bringing screams and shouts from all quarters.

As soon as the sound came, Cody and Hawkeye rolled out the window, looked at the blast site and then ran toward the headquarters.
They wore the Amal camou militia shirts and hats, and each carried a Russian-made AK-47 rifle.

Cody walked at a fast pace the last ten yards to the side door of the headquarters building. Two guards there stared at him.

“Trouble,” he growled at them in Arabic. “Kaddoumi himself called us to come.”

“Pass?” the guard asked.

“No time, camel dung! Let us past!”

The guard shrugged, stepped aside, and Cody and Hawkeye slouched through the door and into a hallway. Men in parts of uniforms
scurried down the hall, into rooms. Several held rifles.

“Kaddoumi’s offices?” Cody asked the first man he could stop. The Shiite frowned, jabbered something Cody missed. The man
pointed down the hall and said ‘number seven.’ They hurried that way, found room seven and barged in, safeties off the Russian
automatic rifles.

Just coming out was a militiaman and an Arab woman without a veil, carrying a small baby. The guard leered at the woman, stroked
her breasts with one hand, then patted her bottom and moved her into the hall.

The look of anguish and desperation on the woman’s face almost made Cody turn from his main objective. But he realized he
had a higher calling for the moment. He saw a man sitting at a desk staring at him.

“General Kaddoumi called us,” Cody said in poor Arabic. The desk man snorted, said something softly, then louder he said:
“He’s busy. Some trouble.”

“Yes, that’s why he called us!”

The desk man stared at Cody a moment, then lifted his brows and pointed to the second door. Hawkeye had snapped a night lock
on the door leading into the office; now he paused beside the clerk and with one swift stroke sliced the soft neck from ear
to ear. The desk man fell forward without a sound and bled to death all over his reports.

Cody eased up to the door. It was a soft probe turned hard and anything could happen now. He thrust open the door, found one
man behind the desk and two others bending over papers.

“Majed Kaddoumi?” he asked with his best Arabic accent.

“Yes, yes!” snapped the smaller man behind the desk, who had graying hair and wore a full general’s uniform.

Cody shot one of the aids with his forty-five-caliber auto, and Hawkeye pumped two of the 7.62mm NATO rounds through the other
man’s face.

Kaddoumi held both hands tightly to the big desk on which they had been touching a map. He looked up slowly now, first at
Hawkeye, then at Cody.

“So, the Americans come at last. I have been waiting for you.” He spoke in British-tainted English.

“Tell us quickly where Farouk is holding the aircraft hostages and you’ll live,” Cody snarled.

“They are in the country, well protected. All will die if you try to rescue them. The whole place is mined with explosives.
1 had my men set up the place.”

“You have thirty seconds to tell us the exact location and how we get there,” Cody threatened quietly.

“You are inviting disaster, the deaths of all those innocent passengers. I am on your side. Didn’t I speak with the hijackers
at the airport? I was trying to get the hostages released. I’m the good guy here, as you would say. I spent time in the United
States, yes? I have a green card to work there. Why have you killed my aides?”

“Time’s up,” Cody intoned in an icy voice.

Sweat beaded the Shiite’s forehead. He slumped in his chair.

“Keep your hands on the desk or you’re dead meat!” Hawkeye roared at him.

Kaddoumi obeyed.

“It would be suicide for you, and death to all of the hostages,” he protested. “These Palestine Liberation Guerrilla Force
members are a splinter group. Small, unreliable, and unstable. They could kill everyone and vanish into the countryside.”

“We know who they are, and their leaders,” Cody countered. “Time’s up, so we do it the hard way. Hawkeye.”

Hawkeye had moved beside the smaller man. His scalpel-sharp blade drew a three-inch-long bloody line across Kaddoumi’s forehead.

A sharp scream by Kaddoumi came not so much from pain as from the surprise and fear.

“Now we talk about the hostages,” said Cody. “Are they outside of Beirut?”

“Yes…to the west.”

“Near what town?”

“Nearest to Quadi Chahrour, but not quite to it. Twenty miles from here, out toward Baabda, not as far as Aley.”

“Draw a map the best way to get there. And tell us about the place. Men, defenses, arms, buildings, best way to get in—everything.”

An occasional burst of gunfire came from the outside. Cody hoped that Rufe and Caine were keeping a low profile.

“The estate is large, five hundred acres. It is in the hills, mostly barren, but around the buildings, lots of cedars and
other trees. It has a good well and they water everything. There is a security wall, eight feet high with barbed wire on top.
Inside that is another wall of six feet, and machine guns have been positioned there.

“My guess is that they have about forty men, total. That is their whole force. They are a small group with big ideas.”

He finished the map, showing approximate direction, distances, and other small towns.

“The hills are not high, maybe six-hundred feet at the most. The roads are two-lane, narrow, and a long drive leads into the
estate. There are road blocks all along the drive, so do not try to motor in. I’m not sure if the estate is mined or not.
Farouk is a little crazy. He would rather kill all the hostages than not get what he asks for. His brother was killed yesterday.
He is crazy…and bitter. A dangerous combination.”

Someone banged on the door to Kaddoumi’s office.

“Answer!” Cody hissed.

Kaddoumi spoke in Arabic. Cody didn’t catch all of it, but enough to know the leader told whomever it was to get out there
and defend the headquarters. He was safe.

Whoever it was evidently didn’t believe his leader. A big man kicked in the door and burst into the room. Hawkeye took him
from the side with a six-round burst through his back and his head. He skidded to a dead stop almost at his leader’s desk.

The sound of the automatic rifle fire in the closed space was like an alarm. Hawkeye rushed into the outer office and closed
the door to the hall. It had been forced open, so it would no longer lock.

* * *

“Praise Allah!” Kaddoumi snarled in English. He stood, and as he did his hand came out from behind his side where he had been
holding a small automatic. He got off one round, nicking Hawkeye’s shoulder before Cody’s forty-five caliber blasted twice,
sending death through the Shiite leader’s forehead, dumping his lifeless corpse behind the desk.

Cody had already folded the map Kaddoumi had drawn and put it in his pocket.

“Let’s get the other two and move toward that chopper.”

As they came to the outer office, a guard holding an Arab woman by the arm hurried in. Her face was flushed and furious. She
spat at the man, who only laughed. When he saw the big .44 Magnum Hawkeye pointed at him, he began to shake, and spoke rapidly
in Arabic.

“Adios, hairbag,” the Texan muttered.

The forty-four-caliber hand cannon roared, slamming a 240-grain bullet at 1,455 foot-pounds of muzzle energy into the Shiite’s
left eye. It powered upward and then slanted to the side, blasting half the left side of the man’s skull against the wall.

“Bring her!” Cody snapped, and they moved into the hallway. Two militiamen stood there listening to the echoing sound. Hawkeye
held the woman by one hand, and fired the AK-47 with the other, chopping both Shiites into Allah’s garden before they could
get their weapons up.

The two men and the Arab woman with her baby ran down the hall. She clung to Hawkeye’s hand in desperation, sure that these
men would help her.

Cody kicked in a door to a room that he knew should look out on the inner courtyard. The room was empty, only a desk and a
filing cabinet. He motioned the other two inside, closed the door, and ran to the window. The courtyard swarmed with a hundred
Amal troops, all looking for someone to shoot.

As he watched, a nearby window in the outer ring of buildings exploded with what could only be one of Cain’s small helpers.
Then, down the line, two more of the bombs went off, not ten seconds apart. Half of the militiamen in the courtyard pounded
into doors that led to that area.

Just as they vanished, two more blasts came from the far side of the court as two more rooms collapsed in a rumble and roar
as the C-5 detonated. These blasts drew most of the enemy troops near that side into the outer-rim buildings to find the bombers.

Cody and friends were on the first floor of the headquarters.

“Out the window,” Cody ordered. “We make a break for the chopper down there; and hope that our men see us and support, then
follow. They must be watching.”

Hawkeye picked up the Arab woman and motioned out the window, then eased her out so she could step to the ground. A militiaman
sprang away from the building.

Cody blasted him dead with two rounds from the AK-47, then he and Hawkeye were both out the window, walking across the courtyard
as if they owned it, the woman in tow as if a prisoner.

They got halfway across the open space before anyone challenged them. Then a squad of six men in full fatigue uniform and
bright red berets jabbered at them to halt, but rifle fire from a window stripped that fighting force of four of its six men
in an instant, and Cody cut down the other two.

Hawkeye and his group were running for the chopper. Rufe Murphy bailed out of a window and angled toward them, his silenced
Uzi cutting a swath through six more Shiites who had straggled up to the sound of fighting. They never even knew where the
fatal firing had come from.