Cody's Army (24 page)

“No, Mr. President, the hardest part is for those surviving hostages who are wondering if they will be the next to be tortured
and killed.”

NINETEEN

C
ody and Hawkeye, thinking alike, both pulled grenades from pockets and discarded the safety pin at about the same time. Cody
raised himself from behind the old Mercedes and threw the hand bomb as far as he could toward the red-beret-topped Shiites
who were peppering them with rifle rounds.

The karump of the exploding grenade kept the red hats down long enough for Hawkeye to come up right behind the sedan and get
a good throw. Cody’s bomb fell ten yards short, but with a good roll, Hawkeye’s Shiite killer spattered six of the red caps
all over the landscape.

Cody and his firing partner began picking off the out-in-the-open troops as some of them tried to move forward, then gave
up and raced toward the protection of slit trenches that had been dug around the perimeter of the open space.

Just when Cody thought the attackers were beaten back, a Jeep roared, gears clashed, and a jolting green rig sped from a shed
affair, and a machine gun mounted amidship began yammering. Cody took his AK and turned his sights on the Jeep. He got one
shot through the windscreen but the rig kept coming forward.

The rounds from the heavy MG laced through the old Mercedes, and Cody and Hawkeye shifted their position to the end. Hawk
concentrated on the red berets and Cody slammed round after round at the jolting Jeep. He kept his Russian rifle on single
shot to conserve his long-gun ammo.

Caine saw the problem. He had gained the chopper, put down a guard and another militiaman who had been hiding there. Then
he turned his silenced Uzi on the red berets and bedeviled them with 9mm parabellum rounds.

When the last of the beret-topped defenders rushed for the perimeter trenches, Caine turned and watched the Jeep. He had six
grenades left. He souped up one with half of a quarter-pound blob of C-5 plastic explosive and ran forward to the first cover
he could find. The protection turned out to be a dead Shiite militiaman.

The Jeep turned and struck a new angle. The driver seemed determined to get to the chopper, probably to protect it. The closer
the Jeep came, the quieter Caine lay. He wanted to look like another dead body. For a moment he thought the rig would run
over him, but it missed him by six feet.

Caine had pulled the pin; now he let the Jeep jolt past him, then he lifted up and flipped the C-5-laced grenade into the
front seat and saw it roll to the floor.

For a moment, nothing happened. Then a scream shattered the afternoon as both men in the Jeep’s front seat and the gunner
on the MG tried desperately to exit the vehicle.

They did, but only with the help of an ear-jangling blast as the grenade triggered the C-5 into a roaring, thundering explosion
that decorated half of the courtyard with stray bits of Shiite militiamen and Jeep metal. A secondary explosion detonated
the fumes left in the gasoline tank, and then a quiet settled over the parade grounds.

Rufe had silenced his immediate problem, a pair of Shiites who knew how to shoot. He caught one as he came out of a trench,
and the other before he made it into the next one. Both went down in sprays of hot, silenced Uzi lead. Then Rufe legged it
for the chopper. For just a moment he dreamed of being a defensive end with the Dallas Cowboys.

He had just blocked a pass, knocked it up in the air and then caught it, and he was wide open sixty-five yards to the enemy
end zone! Before he made it to the end zone, he saw Caine, who had fallen back to a defensive position at a trench nearer
to the chopper. Rufe dove into the chopper, checked out the controls a moment, then started it. The four-place ship had room
for five. He let the big rotor spin slowly as the engine caught and purred contentedly.

He ducked down behind the heavy metal protection and let the chopper warm up for two minutes. Then he gunned the engine as
a signal to his team that he was ready to fly. Caine got back to the bird first. He used a captured AK-47 and laid down covering
fire as Cody, the woman, her child, and Hawkeye made a series of classic retreats toward the spot at which they had wanted
to be all the time.

Cody pushed the woman on board and pointed to the far-back area. She squeezed in and crouched there with her baby. Caine jumped
in next, then Cody and Hawkeye provided the final covering fire out the off-pilot side as they lifted slowly off the deck.
A rifle round punctured the thin plastic bubble on the front, but Rufe punched her in the throttle and they jolted nearly
straight up and slanted quickly over the buildings and out of range.

“What kind of armament does it have?” Cody shouted over the roar of the big rotors.

“Six rockets in pods, and a fixed fifty-caliber machine gun,” Rufe shouted back.

“Let’s give them a taste.”

Rufe swung the bird around, hanging just behind the rim of two-story buildings. Then he lifted up, zeroed in on the small
headquarters fortress and blasted off two rockets.

The small missiles flew true, jolting through the facade before exploding inside. Half of the building collapsed. Cody grinned
and Rufe trained the fixed machine gun on the Shiites scampering around the parade ground.

Rufe blasted until he figured he was half out of ammo and stopped.

“Bus driver wants to know what your stop is,” Rufe shouted.

Cody looked at the woman. He asked her where she wanted off, East or West Beirut. She told him she had some family in the
western part of the city. Rufe picked a parklike area near Corniche Pierre Gemayel, a wide street, and let her off. She stood
on the grass for a moment, looking at the men.

“Thank you,” she said, her only English.

Cody told her in Arabic they were glad to help. He watched her for a moment. He knew nothing of her background, of her life
up to now, but she seemed to represent all of the tragedy that slams down on civilians in any war.

The very people the generals say they are fighting the war to benefit are the first ones to be victimized. He reached in his
pocket and took out a wad of Lebanon ten-pound notes, and gave them all to her. She looked at him in surprise, then he told
her in Arabic to go and find a place to live in peace. She let tears spill from her eyes as she stepped back.

As the big chopper lifted away from her, Oma Yafi wondered if she would ever see the kind men again. She decided they had
to be Americans. They had treated her so gently, with such compassion, had rescued her and saved the life of her daughter.

For just a moment she thought of her dead husband lying in the shop. She should go back and give him a Muslim burial. She
could not. If she went back she somehow would be caught up in the war again. She would walk west. She would find a small village
that needed a copper worker. She had learned to make pots and other items that were always in demand.

She hurried with her baby to the edge of the park, plunged into the railroad yards. She knew where she was. She would cross
the tracks and come out near the bridge that led across the Beirut River, and go to the Sinn El Fit area. From there she could
slowly work her way out of Beirut itself into the western hills.

There were many small villages there. She was remembering Mkalless, where some of her relatives lived. Yes, she would go there.
It was not until she had crossed the tracks and she was in the warehouse area that she thought of the wad of money the American
had given her. She found a hiding place under an old wrecked truck and took out the roll.

Slowly she counted the bills. There were forty ten pound notes. Four hundred pounds! It was more money than she had ever seen
before in her life! She hid it in several pockets in her clothes, and walked out to the bridge. She would stop at the first
store she came to so she could buy a proper veil. It was unseemly to be without a correct veil. Then she would find a cafe
and have something to eat. She was hungry and the little one would want to eat soon again.

For a moment, Oma Yafi blinked back tears. It had been such a terrible day in her life, but the strong American had made it
possible for her to go on living. She would make it now, yes; she could go on and raise her daughter.

Cody sat in the seat next to Rufe, pawing through maps until he found the one he wanted.

“Yeah, the hills west of Beirut. Any idea where we are, big guy.”

“Not far from where we started,” Rufe shouted. “I’ve got a traffic circle down here, there’s the park where we let the woman
off, and we’re still on the east side of the river.”

“Roger, let’s head due west. Be a hell of a lot easier to find this place before it gets dark. What time you got?”

“About a half hour to sunset, twenty minutes after that to sit-down time, somewhere.”

“Agreed. Let’s move south, try to find a secondary road going due south out of Beirut. Down around the airport somewhere a
smaller road, probably dirt or gravel, turns off and goes east into the mountains. Should be a piece of cake.”

Rufe laughed, then winced when he shook his arm. “Hell of a lot depends who baked the cake, and who is on the navigation plotting
board.”

“Give it a try, we’ll find it,” Cody said. He took his knife, slit Rufe’s left sleeve where he had caught the bullet and dumped
on some antibiotics and wrapped it up while they flew.

“We’re looking for a village called Quadi Chahrour, but we don’t get all the way there.”

“Sounds too easy,” Rufe grunted, and dropped down so they could read the street signs.

Somebody took a shot at them.

“Folks must have seen you fly before, Rufe,” Cody said.

“’Pears as how. What you think of that road over there? It’s no four-laner, and I can see the edge of the airport to our right
and down a-ways.”

“Give it a try. Everybody check your ammo and supplies. We’ll be up against forty to fifty men out here somewhere. And we
can’t stop by at the hardware store for some more boxes of rounds.”

TWENTY

J
ust before sunset they spotted the small village they were looking for and backtracked toward Beirut two miles to where they
saw the lane leading off along the top of a ridge toward a swatch of green a mile distant. They went to four-thousand feet
and flew over the estate below.

Cody used binoculars and confirmed that had to be the place. It had two walls, the outer one with barbed wire on top, and
he was sure he spotted machine guns on the inner wall. They flew out of sight, then snaked down a valley, circled around and
flew to within a mile of the mountain hardsite to a small clearing, where Rufe set the bird down as lightly as a bumblebee
invading a tulip.

By the time they were loaded for combat and were on the trail, darkness closed around them. They followed the graveled road
that led into the estate. There were no cars or trucks on it as they walked along cautiously twenty yards to one side.

Cody was in the lead. He held up his hand and in the soft moonlight the men saw the signal and stopped. He gave them a down
command and moved ahead quietly through the harsh land, being careful not to kick a rock or snap a dry stick.

He found what he had expected, a roadblock. It was a log about a foot in diameter, but it would take two men to move it if
a car or truck were to come. There was no way to drive around the log.

Two men sat in the dark shack next to the edge of the road. Cody went back to his team, detoured them fifty yards to the side,
and then back to the road.

Twice more they found two-man guard posts with logs across the road. There did not appear to be any depth protection on either
side of the blocks.

Two hundred yards from the last roadblock they came to a small house, which must have been a gatekeeper’s residence at one
time.

Lights blossomed inside, and the men could hear radios or TVs playing. They circled this spot as well and moved forward. Cody
had told them they would keep it a soft probe as long as they could. He had no thoughts of going hard so close to daylight.