Cody's Army (13 page)

The 727’s massive jet-engine power whistled, hummed and vibrated away to nothing, leaving Flight 766 from Athens to Tell Aviv
sitting all by its lonesome on the tarmac fronting the north side of the Beirut airport terminal.

The 727’s flight deck crackled with tension and body odor, and the plane’s air conditioning did nothing for the sweat Ward
felt beading his forehead and upper lip. He restrained himself from making even the slightest move to wipe away the perspiration.

He did not want to make the woman holding the pistol to the nape of his neck anymore nervous than she already appeared to
be.

Larry Jenks, the copilot, flashed Ward another secretive sideways glance, awaiting some sort of indication of what to do,
but Ward ignored him, as he had from the beginning of this ordeal, a long sixty minutes ago when Flight 766 had been cruising
routinely, halfway to its destination, high above the troubled lands of the Middle East. The endless expanse of the blue Mediterranean
flowed by far beneath as if there were no such thing as terrorists and hijackings, something that was always on the mind of
pilots and crew in this part of the world these days. But for all the hijackings that had occurred in the past few years,
the total was but a minute fraction of the daily air traffic in and near the trouble spots, and a job was a job. Flying was
a profession Ward loved, and all you could do was hope and pray that your luck would hold.

Ward knew their luck had run out.

The flight navigator, Yamir, lay stretched out dead on the floor of the flight deck, where he had fallen when he reacted in
the first moments of the takeover.

It had been an A-B-C, by-the-numbers operation all the way: the first thing Ward had known of anything being wrong was the
frantic knocking on the cockpit door and a woman shrieking something frantic, unintelligible.

Ward had nodded for Yamir to open the door, thinking perhaps one of the passengers was panicking from some sort of air-flight
phobia and had come forward. This happened from time to time.

The door to the flight deck had slammed inward then, knocking Yamir off his feet, and then Ward had known instantly what was
happening when he saw the dusky, Arabic features and the guns the man and the woman both held.

Yamir had started to get up, to protest.

The man had kneed him brutally in the face and the kick had jammed his nasal cartilage up into his brain.

Then the woman had aimed her weapon at Ward’s head, where it had remained except for the brief time during the landing.

Ward had followed the man’s orders and landed the jet here on the rough, uncared-for runway of Beirut International.

Every pilot’s nightmare.

Passenger’s nightmare, too.

He had not gotten much of a look at the woman, but one glance at the man had been enough to make him do as he was told and
fly the plane and not cause trouble, which is also why he had not encouraged his copilot to take action, either. He had not
only his own but the lives of all his passengers dependent on how he reacted.

The man—the woman terrorist had referred to him as Abdel—had about him the look of a born killer. Ward had flown in Vietnam
and had seen some men like this before; men who had lost their souls to what they had been through and lost even their reason
for fighting on, and had begun to enjoy the killing.

Abdel strutted back into the cockpit, now that they were landed.

Ward did not twist around to look out into the passenger section, but he knew other terrorists would have that part of the
plane secured. He didn’t know how they could have gotten these weapons aboard the flight, but it didn’t really matter now,
anyway. Athens security was a joke. His gut region burned to
do something,
but the woman had not removed the gun snout from his neck.

Abdel stepped over the sprawled form of Yamir, leaned forward past the pilots and picked up the cockpit radio.

“Attention, tower. This is Flight 766, do you read me?”

“We read you,” the radio crackled back. “Go ahead.”

Ward looked out and down at the group of people standing in the early morning light in front of the terminal. He could see
cameras and some uniforms, but no one from there came forward.

“This plane is now in the control of the Palestinian Liberation Guerrilla Force,” intoned Abdel without inflection.

“We demand the release of seven-hundred revolutionary heroes now held by Israeli forces in the prison camp outside Tel Aviv
within the next forty-eight hours. What is to happen is intended to prove we mean what we say. If our demands are not met,
we will commence executing the passengers aboard this plane one per hour.
Allah wa-akbar!
God is great!” Abdel replaced the headphones and stepped back, turning to the woman. “Watch them closely,” he instructed,
then he glanced at Ward. “I would advise you and your crew not to attempt anything, Captain. We needed you to land this plane.
We don’t need you now. Understood?”

“I understand that,” Ward grunted. “What I don’t understand is why you people always bring God into it when you’re getting
ready to massacre innocent civilians.”

The terrorist hissed and delivered a short, swift chop with his Uzi to Ward’s forehead, making the world seem to spin around
with a burst of pain inside Ward’s head.

Ward righted himself to keep from falling, shaking his head to clear it, turning in time to see Abdel leave the cockpit.

The woman stepped away from Ward now so she could keep both him and copilot Jenks covered with her pistol and riveting, dark
eyes.

Ward looked back at the woman and thought about trying to say something, but he caught his tongue.

If Abdel had looked like a man who would enjoy killing, this one had about her the look of the haunted, the damned, like she
had a mad-on for the whole damn world; as though she had just lost her best friend and was only waiting for the right opportunity
to let the anger and hate inside of her boil over so she could start pulling the pistol’s trigger.

Something about her scared Ward even more than Abdel had, and the only thought Ward had at that moment was, God help us all….

Farouk Hassan had positioned himself and Hallah in the rear of the jet’s passenger section, while Abdel and Tahia had found
seating toward the front.

The prearranged passing through of customs with their weapons had been managed without a hitch, thanks to connections made
at the airport by the PLGF’s local cell.

Farouk’s only real concerns had been the depletion of his unit, the fact that they were not carrying the full armament and
ammunition required for an operation such as this, and the fact that Tahia seemed to be suffering from such a state of nerves
that he had feared she might draw suspicion to them before the hijack even began. But that had not happened.

He had signaled the others that the operation was to commence when he had stepped up to the magazine rack at the front of
the passenger section.

That was when Tahia had gone into her act up front and within minutes the crew and all one-hundred-and-fifty passengers had
come under their control.

He knew how Tahia felt. He felt the same way. It had been only hours since he had seen Ali bloodied and dying. A cold rage
filled him to deliver some kind of retribution, even if only upon this collection of tourists and businessmen and miscellaneous
travelers, but he knew he must control his grief until the time was right and he must trust his brother’s lover to show the
same strength, as she had up to now.

At this moment, Hallah stood at the rear of the plane after having collected the passports of all aboard and separating the
Israli and American passports from the others.

The passengers remained seated, frightened, immobile, under the weapons aimed at them.

Abdel emerged from the flight deck and nodded.

“We are ready. I have radioed the message. It is time to select the first one.”

Sharon Adamson had been in the galley with one of the other stewardesses, chatting about nothing, in the moments before they
were to begin walking down the aisles, collecting emptied drinking cups and the like, when the woman’s screams from up front
had brought them running—into the barrels of the automatic weapons held by Arabs, one at the front of the plane, one at midsection.

She stood now near the front entrance, where she and the three other flight attendants had been told to stand. She watched
the drama unfold before her with the numbing shock of realization at how quickly one’s life could be turned upside down.

The Athens-Tel Aviv flight was not a long one, but glancing out across the passengers, she felt the same sense of responsiblity
she always took to heart, only magnified.

Her eye caught the elderly American couple that had been so nice coming aboard—the Marcuses, their names had been; charming
folks who had been bubbling with enthusiasm for their travels, their “second honeymoon,” as Mr. Marcus had chuckled affectionately.

There was Mrs. Vereen, an overweight woman in middle-age whose shortness of breath and flushed complexion made Sharon think
the woman probably had a heart condition.

And the children, at least a dozen of them.

She was afraid, she readily admitted to herself, but not so afraid that she could look away from the anxiety etched across
the face of every passenger aboard.

The terrorist she had heard referred to as Abdel emerged from the cabin and spoke to the other man, who was obviously the
leader, who nodded and turned to Sharon while Abdel and the man at midsection kept the hostages covered.

“Miss,” the man said, with a nod to the stack of passports that had been gathered and placed in an empty seat nearby, “I want
you to reach into this pile of American passports and hand me one.”

She lost her voice for a moment. Cold fingers seemed to wrap themselves around the base of her spine. She knew the methods
of these madmen and she knew what was about to happen, and yet she was stunned that she was being asked to be a part of it.

This can’t be happening! her mind screamed.

“W-why?” she asked before she could stop the word from coming out. “You…you’re not going to hurt any of these people, are
you? They haven’t done anything to you!”

He glared at her straight on for a moment and she saw things she did not understand in his eyes.

“You will do as I say. Pick one of the passports. Hand it to me. That is an order.”

The passengers overheard this exchange, and nervous murmurings began rippling through the rows of seats.

She suddenly felt very strange, as if somehow detached from what was happening around her, as if this was all happening to
someone else, not to Sharon Adamson of Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, with a planeload of tourists on a hijacked jet in Beirut,
Lebanon.

She said, very quietly and in a voice she did not quite recognize as her own, “I will not help you. Do with me what you will.”

The man named Abdel started to turn in her direction, raising his weapon.

“The bitch. Farouk, let me—”

Farouk lifted a hand.

“No.” He stalked over close to her and she could smell him. She
smelled
his hate.

“It is too late to help anyone,” he told her.

Then he made a fist and hit stewardess Adamson on the jaw.

Sharon’s eyes rolled back in her head and everything went black for her.

NINE

T
en minutes after Cody received word that they had a mission, the four of them kicked out of the new style military “Jeep”
in front of their operations center on the sprawling Andrews Air Force Base.

All four were grimy, splotched with camou black on hands and face. They wore camou fatigues well dirtied after a grueling
four-hour exercise in the woodsy, marshy section at which they had been training for the past two weeks.

“About time they hand us something,” Hawkeye groused with a belch.

“It has been getting real tedious,” Murphy agreed. “Almost got me to longing for my choppers and that mayor’s wife.”

“Imagine this will shoot teatime all to Hell,” Caine snorted.

Cody knew what they meant. He’d been getting restless, too.

Cody’s Army, as Lund had dubbed it half kiddingly, was ready, and for the past two weeks it had been a case of all dressed
up with nowhere to go.

The training helped relieve the tedium but it had proved unnecessary. Caine, Hawkins, and Murphy had kept themselves hard
and in shape, every bit as battle-ready as they were back in Nam.

Most important, to Cody’s way of thinking, was that these good friends—Hawkeye Hawkins, Rufe Murphy, and Richard Caine—had
lost none of their enthusiasm for a good scrap if the cause was just.

He led the way into a squat cinder-block building that showed only one story above the ground but dropped three levels below.

“Lund said it was a big one. Let’s see what they have.”

Two minutes later, they walked into the third basement level of their quarters, an elaborate electronic war room with one
twenty-foot-long wall covered with a huge video map that was computer-programmed and adjusted. Now an out-of-sight hand changed
the screen to Europe, then to the Mideast, and at last zoomed in on Beirut, Lebanon.