Cody's Army (16 page)

Gorman paused a minute

“All right. Truce for now. We know damn little. This is a new splinter from the PLO. We have no location for them, no headquarters.
All we know is that Majed Kaddoumi is the current front man, the negotiator who is supposed to know where they are.

“Farouk Hassan is their leader, and he works with an ice-cold killer called Abdel Khaled. Our best contact is a real TV reporter
named Kelly McConnell. She’s trying to find Kaddoumi with the hopes she can locate the hostages.”

“Any idea where they took the passengers?”

“Not a prayer. They could be anywhere in the west sector, or they could be in a village or halfway to Tripoli or Damascus.”

“We need a starting point. You must have something.”

“The McConnell woman is your best lead. She stays at the International Hotel. You might try her there by phone. Outside of
that, you know as much about it as we do. Incidentally, our countdown clock has now been running for almost eighteen hours.
We have a little over thirty hours before the next hostage is scheduled to die. It’s now 11:36 hours. Now stay out of my way.”

Cody found his men back at the room.

“Our problem is intel. We don’t have any. I’m taking Caine with me to try to find our contact. We’ve got two cars to use,
with drivers who know the lingo. Just cool it here for a while.”

Minutes later they were in the car driving to the place where Kelly McConnell had told the switchboard she would be if anyone
tried to contact her. As the old Fiat pulled away from the American Embassy, a vintage Chevy slid away from the far side of
the grounds and followed the Fiat, holding well back in a professional tail-job.

Kelly McConnell sat in her Volkswagen bug parked near a one-story building that had been blasted into rubble by a bomb or
an artillery shell and waited. She was good at waiting. She poured a cup of coffee from a steel vacuum bottle and handed it
to Cal Vanloo, her cameraman.

“You sure this is the spot, Kell?”

“As sure as I am about anything in this crazy town.” She sipped the steaming coffee, light blue eyes squinting against the
perpetual sunshine. She was a tall, slender woman, just over five-nine, with a Figure she tried to tone down and a mind sharp
enough to have earned her the top spot in her graduating class at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism just three years
ago.

She wore her free-flowing blonde hair as a badge in this brunette world to advertise that she was an American. It had helped
her nail down more than one good news story.

“Is that our man?” asked Vanloo, pointing through the windshield at a figure walking across the street.

“No.” Kelly was positive. “Kaddoumi is a small, stout man, clean-shaven, with wire-rimmed glasses. He almost never comes on
the street in the daylight. The contact man we need is a fatso, about five-nine and two-hundred and fifty pounds.”

“Trouble,” Cal whispered.

She saw them coming around the corner, a ragtag group of teenagers with automatic rifles, one carrying an RPG, a rocket-propelled
grenade on its rifle-like launcher. Small raiding parties like this roamed both sides of the Green Line, often taking what
they wanted from whomever had fewer arms and less of a stomach for fighting.

There were eight of them, all in their teens. They moved up cautiously, then when they saw who was in the car and the TV camera,
they became bolder.

Kelly rolled down the window and spoke to them in her passable Arabic. The apparent leader of the group, a pimple-splotched
youth of no more than sixteen, laughed and replied in English.

“You crazy come out here. This is our street. You got to pay to sit here. Instead you pay to take my picture. Put us all on
the American TV, yes?”

“I’m waiting to see an important man. You probably now him. Majed Kaddoumi.”

The name cause a stir among those who did not know English. The young leader of the pack took a step backward.

“You lie. Nobody, no American, ever talk to Majed.” The youth glared at her, turned to listen to someone in his group and
laughed. “My expert on women says he wants to see you with your clothes off, see if you have blonde hair other places.”

“Your expert on women is a little boy who has never had a woman and wouldn’t know what to do with one,” Kelly shot back at
him in Arabic. It caused hoots and howls of laughter among the group. The only one not enjoying the joke surged up to the
car and slammed his rifle butt into the windshield, cracking it.

“Get out, American whore!” the enraged youth spat. He turned the rifle and fired a round into the side of the rear door.

Kelly never moved. “What’s the matter, big general? Can’t you even control your troops?” Again she spoke in Arabic.

The leader shrugged.

The youth with the rifle glanced at the leader, then swung the rifle so it pointed at Kelly. “Get out, you stinking American
whore! Get out and strip off your clothes… or you die right where you sit!”

ELEVEN

“H
old it right there, small boys,” John Cody barked in his top-sergeant’s voice. “One move and you join Allah.”

He stood fifteen feet away with his Uzi leveled at the group. They had taken the silencers off them for this first run, so
they could hide the weapons under loose-fitting shirts.

Caine braced to one side for a crossfire angle with his Uzi lined up perfectly.

The leader saw the situation and shouted a quick order to his team, freezing them.

“You with the rifle pointing at the woman, put it on the ground, carefully,” Cody commanded.

The street bandit looked at his leader. Sweat broke out on his forehead, and his whole body shook. He picked up the silent
command from his leader and slowly bent to put the weapon on the ground.

The others whispered and growled, but a sharp command from the teen boss quieted them.

“You a big hero or something?” the bandit leader asked him.

“Mostly something,” Cody growled. He walked up to the group and slapped the youth who had fired his rifle. The blow slammed
the teen sideways, but he caught his balance before he fell.

“You understand enough English, small boy,” Cody said to the one he had just slapped. “You like to see people naked, try it
yourself. Strip down, right now.”

“No way,” the youth said.

Cody hit him with a short right fist that slammed him backward so hard he lost his balance and found himself sitting in the
dust of the street. Before the kid could move, Cody darted forward and slid a four-inch honed straightedge razor against the
downed Lebanese’s throat.

“Strip down right now, punk, or I slice your clothes off you! I won’t mind cutting you up a little in the process.”

The boy, who now looked his fourteen years, nodded and unbuttoned his shirt. A few seconds later he kicked out of his pants
and slouched there in his shorts and shoes.

“All the way, gutter rat! Next time you think twice about ordering a woman to take off
her
clothes.”

Hatred showed on the boy’s face. He turned around, away from Kelly, and pulled down his shorts. He kicked them off his feet,
then looked at Cody over his shoulder. Suddenly, he began crying, and Cody waved the whole band away.

“Get lost, punks. Come back when you grow up, in about ten years!” Richard Caine shouted at them as they ran.

Cody motioned to the woman. “Get in that rig and move it fast! Those hotheads will be shooting this way as soon as they get
behind cover. Move it!” Kelly jumped in the car, where her cameraman had stayed, and spun the wheels in a U-turn as she tore
back down the street.

Cody and Caine sprinted for the mouth of the alley, surged behind solid walls, and waited. Two shots blammed through the quiet
street from the direction in which the teenage bandits had vanished.

Cody shrugged, got back in the car they had arrived in minutes before, and raced down the street after Kelly. She had stopped
two blocks ahead to wait for them.

She stood beside her car and laughed with a trace of nervous tension when Cody stepped up beside her.

“Who the hell are you and where did you come from when I needed you?” she asked, a brassy but sweet California-girl grin on
her pretty face.

“I’m Cody, that’s Caine. We need to talk to you somewhere that’s relatively safe and where they serve beer.”

Kelly held out her hand and gripped his with a firm handshake. “I’m Kelly—”

—“McConnell. Famous TV correspondent,” Cody finished for her. “I know. We came hunting you. Where can we talk?”

Ten minutes later, all three settled down over beers in a small cafe.

12:25 hours.

“I can’t tell you how glad I was to see you back there, Cody. I’ve been here over a year now prowling the streets, and I’ve
never been threatened with guns like that before—certainly not by one of those teenage gangs.”

“I’m glad we were there,” Cody said. “Any luck finding Majed Kaddoumi?”

Her soft blue eyes darted up to watch him with concern, then a touch of alarm. She grinned. “Okay, that must be it. You know
Jack Gorman and he told you I was Kaddoumi-hunting. Which means you’re either State, which I doubt, or CIA. Right, CIA. You’re
on the hijack.”

“You always do your logic out loud?” Caine asked with a grin.

“When I’m with friends. I owe you guys.”

“Any luck on Kaddoumi?” Cody persisted.

“A short fat man was supposed to leave that house I was watching and go to Kaddoumi. We probably missed him. And with that
gunfire in the street outside his house, he won’t show his face for days.”

“You must have more than one lead.”

“Why should I tell you?” she asked. “You could be an advance team for another network.”

“How many network news hawks do you know travel with a pair of Uzi submachine guns?”

“Good point. Look, I got this job the hard way. I am not just a bimbo over here pretending to be a newsperson. I get more
than my share of stories with hard-nosed, digging-it-out work. I thanked you for showing up back there just in time. My virginity
was not at stake, but a gang-bang is not something that turns this lady on. And so, Mr. Cody and friends, when 1 say I owe
you, that’s all there is to it.”

“And we both have a job to do,” said Cody. “I’m on a tight schedule, Kelly. I’m sorry. Where’s your other contact?”

“Across the Green Line.”

“Shiite territory.”

“Exactly. I go over there as little as possible, but it looks like I’m out of options. I have a friend who is a double and
has great contacts on the other side. I can take one man with me. I’ll take you, Cody, and leave my cameraman here. Are you
game?”

Five minutes later they drove down Avenue Dugeneal Fouad Chehab, turned right onto Rue Bechara El Khoury.

The Green Line was established years ago to divide Beirut into Christian and Moslem sectors, but for many years now it had
been a bloody line, militia on one side firing at anything that moved on the other side.

Now it was a symbol, and a barrier, and a spot where few wanted to be, let alone cross over.

Kelly turned right onto a side street. They were in the Bachoura section of East Beirut; only two blocks over was Rue De Damas,
the Green Line. Just across the line was the old St. Joseph’s University in the Yessouieh section of Moslem West Beirut. She
parked a short way down the street behind a red Fiat. A man with a submachine gun slung on a cord around his neck leaned on
the back of the Fiat, smoking.

“If he was not smoking, we would not have stopped,” Kelly said. “It’s our all-clear signal.” She got out of the car.

Cody made sure the Uzi was out of sight under the loose sport shirt he wore as Kelly walked past the man and turned into the
alley, then he strode along beside her.

Halfway down the alley a door stood open. Kelly stepped in and motioned for him to follow her. Inside the dingy building the
light was faint, and what light there was came from a small skylight two floors up.

The building could have been there for a thousand years. It was made of stone and much plaster and many coats of paint. It
smelled of hundreds of years of living, and cooking, grease and unwashed bodies, and now the strong musk of recent lovemaking.

Kelly turned, noting the scent.

“People here must live for the moment,” she said quietly. “They never know how long they will survive.” She continued through
the room, past two people sleeping on mats on the floor and into another room that had a square table made of heavy, black
wood. A man sat there smoking a water pipe. He did not look up as they sat down in two chairs facing him.

The man was ancient, at least eighty years old. When the old man’s eyes opened, Cody could see the white growths that covered
all of the cornea and half the other.

“Small flower,” the man wheezed through a protesting throat. “I am pleased to see you again.”

“I must make a special trip to see Majed, ancient one,” she said in Arabic. “It is vital I move as quickly as possible.”

“Youth, always so impatient. How old are you, girl, child?”

“Twenty-five.”