Cody's Army (21 page)

The convertible appeared next and made the same trip as before. The men were not talking among themselves this time. One actually
stared into the alley, but the contrasting brilliant sunlight and deep shadows made it impossible to see far.

When the Ford was exactly opposite them, Cody gave the signal and they both fired. Cody’s round slammed into the Shiite driver’s
head, jolting him sideways, spraying the ages-old rock with blood, bone fragments, and brain cells. The dying man kept his
grip on the steering wheel, and when his body was flung to the left, he turned the wheel that way as he fell.

The convertible turned sharply to the left and smashed into the stone building, skidding for a dozen feet before the engine
stalled.

The sudden movement of the Ford jolted the two remaining live passengers. Hawkeye’s first round had killed his target, but
the second shot of both men missed when the car swerved. The two live Shiites dove over the side of the convertible and got
between the vehicle and the stone wall.

Cody and Hawkeye unleashed a sheet of hot lead from the two silenced Uzi’s, emptied 32-round magazines, and replaced them.
In the quiet spell, one of the Shiites lifted up and blasted twelve rounds into the alley.

Cody looked at the convertible, figured out where the gasoline tank was, and put six carefully aimed rounds into the area
he had selected.

Before he could fire again a small blue flame licked out from under the rear bumper, then the convertible exploded, flipping
end over end twice down the street, spewing burning gasoline along the way. The two Shiites were charred beyond description
in the few seconds they had after the blast.

With all the noise and firing, Cody knew he had to move fast. Cody jumped to his feet, charged across the street to the first
doorway. It had a new heavy door on it and, he figured, a good lock.

By the time he got there Rufe and Caine joined them. Cody tried the door; locked. He fired six times at the doorknob, and
just around it. When he tried the door the next time it came open.

Cody kicked the door forward and charged on through, his Uzi down and ready for anything that lay on the other side.

Caine, Murphy, and Hawkeye followed him in.

“16:30 hours,” Caine noted.

“Let’s hope this dude Kaddoumi has the poop we want on where those hostages are held,” Rufe grumbled.

“And let’s hope we can stay alive to do something about it,” Hawkeye tacked on.

Amen to that, thought Cody

They pushed ahead, deeper into Hell.

SIXTEEN

A
s Cody came through the door into the outer ring of buildings that formed the defense around Majed Kaddoumi’s West Beirut
headquarters, he found only an empty room in front of him. It was an entranceway, with a long hall extending to the sides
and a short one to a door straight ahead.

Dahr had been left in the alley. He agreed to stay there as long as he could, and he would try to find them when they came
out of the fortress. They would get back to this spot if possible. If he had not found them in an hour, he should go back
to the east side.

Rufe took the door ahead, kicked it open, lumbered into the room and swept it with his Uzi chattering softly in its silenced
mode. There was no return fire. He came to the door and motioned and the three men darted into the room. It had been a dayroom
for off-duty troops. Three dead Shiites sprawled on the floor. Each had an AK-47 Russian-made rifle with the 30-round curved
magazine loaded with the 7.62mm NATO cartridges.

Cody ran to the small window that looked on a courtyard. The building next door extended deeply into the open space, so from
here Cody could see little. What he did see did not make him happy. A cadre of twenty men was being screamed at by an officer
twenty feet in front of the window.

Cody had heard that many of these ‘soldiers’ received two hours of political diatribe which made up their complete training.
Then they were given a rifle and expected to be expert fighting men.

“Put a charge near the window,” Cody snapped at Caine. “Thirty-second timer. We stay together. They’ve got too much firepower
for solo.”

By the time Cody was through talking, Caine had pulled a quarter-pound of C-5 from his backpack, sliced it in half and inserted
a timer. He pressed the plastic explosive at the side of the window and set the detonator/timer for thirty minutes. He pushed
the start button.

Cody led the way into the hall and almost stumbled into an Arab man backing out of another room. When the door closed and
the man looked up, he started to scream, but Hawkeye put two silent rounds into his mouth, removing a chunk of his skull four-inches-square
and most of his brains with it. Cody caught the body and lowered it soundlessly to the wooden floor.

The four men ran lightly down the hallway to where Cody figured the longer building was located. He found a hallway that led
away to the left. Somewhere a woman screamed. Cody shook his head and pointed down the hall.

They made it safely to the end room. Rufe kicked in the door and charged into the room. There was no one there. They were
now on the second floor, since the land had fallen away downhill.

Caine closed the door as far as it would go, while Cody looked out the window. Now he could see the open area. It was at least
forty yards wide, with no trees, a few shrubs, and no grass. A misshapen child’s swing set had been tipped over on one side.
A squad of six men made a pitiful attempt at close-order drill near the center of the cleared space.

On the far side of the courtyard the appearance of the inner buildings changed. They had bars on the windows. There were guards
outside some of the doors leading to the interior. Then, at the far side, but detached from the square of buildings on the
rim, Cody saw a structure that had to be Majed’s headquarters. It had windows, so it couldn’t be that tough.

He had to work his way around to that spot, then find a way to breach the more heavily defended GHQ, and he had less than
half an hour before the first blast went off.

Cody looked over the area again, more slowly this time. At the far side he saw something under a canvas camouflage.

“Rufe, take a look at this. Is that a bird over there under that camou?”

Rufe checked it out and nodded. “Yeah, Yugoslavian make, a copy of something. Looks a lot like a YZ-24. I can fly it if we
can get to it.”

“Just checking. Caine, set another present for them, here,” Cody instructed. “Give it twenty-eight minutes and let’s move.”

Caine planted the bomb so it would blow out the wall of the room into the courtyard and cause a lot of excitement—and, he
hoped, confusion.

They came out of the second room on the run, charging down the hall to the outer rim, then to the left again to get closer
to the building that almost certainly was Majed’s headquarters.

Twenty feet after getting back to the rim corridor, they ran head-on into three militiamen. Hawkeye was on the point. He sprayed
them with half a dozen silent rounds before they could get a shot off, and Cody finished one of them, who had only been wounded.
They charged on past, sure now that the dead men would be noticed behind them at any time and an alarm sounded.

Before that happened they came to the last turn. Somewhere ahead would be an exit they could use to get to the headquarters.

Fifty feet down the hallway, a sandbagged position erupted with hot lead. Cody’s men dove into doorways and splintered one
door on their way inside.

“Casualties?” Cody shouted. All were intact except Rufe, who took a hot slug through half an inch of his upper left arm. It
would bother him about as much as a mosquito bite.

Hawkeye was closest to the enemy position, still about forty-five feet down the hallway. He pulled a grenade pin and heaved
the bomb, hoping on lots of roll. The grenade went off with a shattering roar, echoing and with the sound building as it raced
down the hallway.

A hole in the floor showed where the hand bomb had been short. Firing came again from the sandbagged position and now from
Shiite men at the other end of the hall.

“Give them a Caine special,” Cody snarled.

Caine had it almost ready. He used the half a cube of C-5 explosive and formed the plastic around a hand grenade, but left
room for the arming spoon to fly off. Then he pulled the pin, and exposed himself for two seconds as he threw the bomb with
all his power down the hill.

He ducked back inside the door and clamped his hands over his ears. After the 4.2 second delay, the grenade and C-5 went off
in one tumultuous sympathetic explosion.

Cody looked out his door and saw the sandbags leveled, the position behind it only splatters of human flesh and blood on the
walls, and one wall on the inside of the courtyard, blown into the room it had been forming.

“Let’s go do it!” Cody yelled. The four men came out of the rooms firing. Two gave covering fire to the rear, the other two
used assault fire to the front as they charged down the hallway to take the territory their bomb had just won for them.

They leaped over parts of bodies, blasted sandbags, and twisted remains of a tripod-mounted machine gun, and continued down
the hall.

Two militiamen in civilian clothes jumped into the hall firing automatic rifles, but the spraying Uzi’s jolted them out of
their socks and drove them into the floor and straight into Allah’s waiting arms.

For a moment there was no firing in front or behind them so Cody kicked in a door, motioning them inside the room. It had
been an office at one time. A desk remained, but mattresses had been scattered on the floor for some of the troops to sleep
on.

Cody looked out the window cautiously, saw the headquarters not more than thirty yards away. From there it looked more imposing
than it had before. It was two stories, made of stone and plaster, and had heavy bars on all the windows and guards on the
two doors he could see.

Just then, across the courtyard, the first of the C-5 timed bombs erupted.

Majed Kaddoumi sat at his desk, looking over plans he had to solidify his grasp on the southern half of West Beirut. If he
could win ironclad control here, it would boost him for a bigger job—trying to bring the more moderate factions of the militia
together. They must unify. They could not expect to win against the Christian Lebanese Forces of East Beirut unless they were
unified and strong.

The first explosion came as only a faint shock to him.

A man rushed in to report the bomb inside the complex. It had never happened before.

“You can handle it,” said Kaddoumi. “Send in Abbas, he always wants the toughest jobs.”

He leaned back in his swivel executive rocking chair after the man hurried away. He was not worried about these minor skirmishes,
not even here at his headquarters. There had been dissidents from time to time. He had crushed them all. Just as he would
eliminate this probe.

His main concern now was that cursed hothead, Farouk. Kaddoumi had done his best to sabotage the PLGF, placing Najib Yaqub
among them, instructing Yaqub to inform on what he learned to the Athens police. But that bit of subtlety had failed, and
now here sat supposedly the most powerful warlord in Lebanon at a time when the least attention would do the most good in
achieving his goal of putting the country’s warring factions behind him. Those radicals, Farouk and Khaled, had picked this
moment to slaughter helpless American tourists on worldwide TV, and Kaddoumi had no choice but to feign approval while in
truth he would have preferred watching Hassan and Khaled and their crew die screaming by slow inches.

He heard a second explosion, which shattered the wall across the complex.

Strange that anyone could have penetrated.

He picked up the telephone and discovered that it was working. Sometimes it did and sometimes it did not. He dialed Farouk
Hassan and the call went through.

“Farouk, how is the mission?”

“Well, old friend Majed. We wait for the jackals to meet our demands.”

“I did what I could for you at the airport and later with the reporters,” Kaddoumi worked to make his voice cordial, “but
one can never tell when dealing with these Western cold fish. They say one thing and do another. They are not reliable.”

“My undying gratitude, old friend.”

“I want more than your gratitude, Farouk. I want your men, your organization, to join mine. We are rapidly growing to be the
largest of the Shiite militia. Soon we will control all of Beirut.”

“When the time comes, Majed, I will side with you. For now we each have our priorities. Now I must take care of my charges,
one in particular, and I must watch Abdel.”

They said good-bye and hung up.

The guard at Majed’s door saw that the conversation was over and opened the door. A soldier pushed a young, most attractive
woman into the room. She did not wear a veil, so she was not a respectable Muslim woman.

Majed looked at her again and saw the infant held at her waist. She was pouting, and angry.