I but Monsour and Aba Waddi fit the standard Palestinian terrorist profile the way a too tight glove fits a hand: neither of them out of their teens, yet neither possessed of the rosy-cheeked youth of the young soldiers of the same age Cody had spared during the probe and firelight in Bulgaria. These youths were young in age alone, their features and expressions wearing the death in their souls.
Cody understood.
These were the ones, and hundreds of others like them, recruited from the squalor of the refugee camps across the Mideast, who planted the explosives on airplanes, drove the suicide bomb cars into army barracks, machine-gunned civilians in airports, in buses, in hotels; products of their environment, these young men had witnessed, suffered, and inflicted more misery, more loss, more bloodshed, than the average American would see in ten lifetimes, waging their war of terrorism because they felt they had nothing to lose, that their options had all been ripped from them along with any hopes for a future resolution of their people’s very real problems.
Cody understood thai;, sure. He also understood that he had his work cut out for him, just as these young men felt their own sense of duty. Understanding your enemy and what made him tick did not cancel out what had to be done, and no way would he have wanted that.
The feeling of Laura Parker’s dead weight in his arms after her death at the hands of Abdul Kamal in Rome haunted him as it had since that atrocity had been committed.
Monsour and Waddi had been singing an Islamic religious song, one of the young men tooting a small flute off-key in between verses. They stopped and looked up when Caine and Cody stepped into the trailer, which had two bunk beds at either end with a small communal area in the middle, the walls at the end of the trailer occupied by the two Lebanese adorned with photograph shrines honoring martyrs who had sacrificed their lives during terrorist actions.
The reception of “O’Devlin” and “Wade,” especially of the American, was decidedly cool to say the least, but Caine always had had the gift of gab when he wanted to employ it, and within ten minutes he, Cody, and the two young men sat around the table in the communal area sipping tea from small tin cups, the practice of socializing over cups of tea a ubiquitous Arab custom in lieu of such non-Islamic pastimes as smoking or drinking.
Neither of the young men made any attempt to mask their contempt for the American, especially in light of the fact that “Wade” was the flunky, the “Irishman” the boss of the two.
Employing subtle question-and-answer techniques, cloaked beneath the guise of amenities and guarded chitchat, Caine attempted to ascertain where the camp’s munitions were stored in the compound.
“We will go in the morning to become acquainted with the different types of explosives,” Waddi informed them. “There are stone bunkers built beyond the perimeter nearby, and buildings, which we will explode.”
“Oh, yeah.” Caine nodded. “We saw the munitions trailer when we came in. That structure behind Mustafa’s trailer.”
“No, no,” Monsour said, correcting him. “It is the trailer at the end of this line of trailers, between the last one on the line and Trailer A.”
“Glad I asked,” the “Irishman” grunted with self-deprecation. “Trailer A, huh? That’s where they put up the big shots, isn’t it? Who the hell have they got here with us this time; you fellows have any idea?”
Waddi set his teacup down as if to answer.
Then he and Monsour leapt to their feet with sudden force, clawing for the knives each of them wore, the table rocking onto its side.
Cody and Caine reacted to this by pushing back from the table, away from each other, at the first sign of the move from the terrorists.
The Lebanese teenagers let loose harsh screams and charged at Cody and Caine together, knives raised above their heads for murderous downs wipes.
Cody met Waddi’s charge with a left hand that shot out straight to clamp the other’s knife hand, bringing his right out to push with his palm beneath Waddi’s chin, forcing the kid’s head back, trying to force the knife around in the young man’s grip so as to plunge it downward into the terrorist’s chest.
They struggled toe to toe, Waddi, the bigger of the two punks with plenty of lean muscle and youth on his side, making a deadly opponent in this hand-to-hand.
Caine met Monsour’s charge with a sideways twist at the last moment, which exhibited all the grace of a trained dancer, then he took Monsour out with a brutal chop to the back of the neck as the terrorist sailed past him of his own volition with too much momentum to stop himself in time to deal with Caine’s maneuver.
It ended for Monsour with the crunch of the back of his skull caving in under Caine’s flatted martial-arts blow audible in the close quarters of the trailer, Monsour continuing dead on his feet another handful of paces until the wall stopped him in the face; then he fell backward to the floor with a rictus of surprise staring up at eternity.
Cody brought his knee into Waddi’s wad with every ounce of force he could muster, the kick into the genitals eliciting a shriek from the Lebanese, loosening his grip on the upraised knife he and Cody fought over. Cody steadied himself on both feet after the low blow and plunged the knife to the hilt into the region of Aba Waddi’s heart.
The kid died without a sound, the same look of surprise on his friend’s face sending this one to his own heaven or hell right behind Monsour.
Cody stepped back as the dead kid with the knife in his heart curled up into a fetal ball, pumping his lifeblood across the trailer’s linoleum floor.
“Now I wonder what the hell that was all about,” Caine mused, looking at the corpses. “I know we English have a habit of getting on people’s nerves, but this is ridiculous.”
Cody crossed to the draped window in the steel door of the trailer, parting the curtain a quarter of an inch to peer out.
The compound appeared as it had minutes ago when they had crossed to the trailer after leaving Mustafa’s office.
He made out the three sentries at the gate in the barbed-wire fence, but the sounds of this wrestling match had not carried over there, the sentries lounging in various relaxed attitudes, conversing among themselves. He saw no one else in any direction.
“These two were put here to take us out of the picture,” he said. He crossed to the back door of the trailer. “The conversation was just to lull us, to set us up for the kill.”
“That means Mustafa is on to us,” Caine grunted. “Kamal and Vronski know, too, then. So what do we do now?”
Cody grasped and turned the back door handle, inching the door open.
The back of this row of trailers was strewn with garbage, but there was no human presence.
“We follow through.”
Caine came up behind him.
“You going to signal Rufe and that F-82?”
“Not yet. The way it looks. Mustafa sent us in here and they’ll be waiting i’or word from these punks that the job is done.”
“They’ll get curious pretty damn soon, I should think.”
“They may be already.”
Cody pushed the door open and left the trailer at a run. Caine fell in behind him. They hoofed along the back of the line of identical trailers.
“Let’s hope that kid wasn’t handing us a line about where the explosives are stored,” Caine whispered.
They rounded the L and approached a trailer at the end of the line, between the last of the bunkhouse trailers and Trailer A.
“If they thought they were going to kill us, they probably didn’t see any harm in telling the truth,” Cody said.
They paused at the corner of the last of the trailers.
The trailer with the weapons and munitions squatted beneath the desert moon, wrapped in ink thanks to the poor illumination of the compound.
A solitary Libyan soldier shouldered an AK-47, standing guard at the one entrance to that trailer, the entrance not facing the line of vision from the window of Mustafa’s trailer.
“We make it into that trailer, arm ourselves with some automatic rifles and grenades, then go after the lads in Trailer A.” Caine nodded. “You figure that’s where they are?”
“That’s why I’m not signaling Rufe yet,” Cody whispered. “Katnal and Vronski could be in the VIP trailer or they could be with Mustafa. I don’t want that F-82 raising hell here until we’ve made sure that those two are dead. They’ve gotten away from us twice. It’s not going to happen again.”
Caine scanned the compound for any sign of a presence or activity other than the sentries and, finding none, commented, “Sure is quiet.”
“Too quiet,” Cody said with a nod.
“I don’t like it, John.”
“Neither do I,” Cody grunted. “What’s that got to do with anything?”
He broke away from their cover, Caine directly behind him, their footfalls soundless, the only sound in the night the slithering hiss of a warm wind breezing sand along the desert floor.
They wore camouflage fatigues like everyone else here, and the colors helped them blend into the night.
The sentry never heard the man who killed him.
Cody brought the butt of the Beretta in a sharp arc to the man’s left temple.
The soldier’s knees knocked, and he bumped backward against the wall before belly flopping forward.
Cody crouched there against the trailer and watched the night around them as Caine grabbed hold of both of the dead man’s ankles and his rifle and dragged him around from the side of this trailer to the back, completely out of sight of anyone in the compound.
The absolute silence except for wisping sand across the dunes somehow made Cody think again of how far he and his men had come in so short a time, a chase that had taken them from the bright nighttime lights of Rome to a river crossing from Greece into Bulgaria to the battle at Padomir, surrounded by pine-covered mountains, to this eerily soundless world of the desert after dark.
Caine returned, grasping his Beretta in one hand, a ring of keys in the other.
“This should be our ticket into the heavy stuff.”
He went to the door and started trying keys.
Cody kept an eye on the compound.
No sign of anyone, anything. Another of the bunk-house trailers went dark, as several others had in the time since their arrival, the terrorists attending this training session turning in one by one.
Good, thought Cody, but he still did not like the absolute absence of any sign of presence of Captain Mustafa, who surely must have been in on the attempt to kill them, not to mention his itch to know where they would find the primary human targets of all this risk, time, and energy.
A quiver at the base of his spine and rising hackles on his arms awakened a primal warning within him. He started to tell Caine to stop, but he was one second too late.
Caine unlocked the door and nudged it inward with a boot, then went through the door into the opaque blackness on the other side, his Beretta in both hands. Cody lost sight of him.
He bit back a curse, knowing he could do nothing now but follow Caine in. He went through, unable to see the Brit or anything else in the utter black that enveloped him once he entered the windowless trailer.
He sensed more than heard another’s presence near him and sensed also that it was not Caine. He started to whirl the Beretta into target acquisition.
The door behind him slammed shut with the sharpness of a drumbeat.
Lights went on, rows of the damn things up and down this trailer momentarily blinding him with their brilliance, but that lasted only a second; and then he saw the lines of racked rifles, the walls of mines and ammunition and explosives and grenade launchers, a seemingly infinite array of the tools of terror.
He paid those things scant attention. He lowered the Beretta.
A man he recognized as Colonel Yuri Vronski, and Abdul Kamal, stood benind a dozen Libyan soldiers who unwaveringly aimed as many AK.-47s on Cody and Caine.
Cody held his fire, reasoning that if they had intended to kill him and Caine here and now, then he and the Englishman would be dead already.
Vronski’s face looked uncomfortable wearing what he must have considered a smile.
Kamal appeared more frustrated than happy.
Caine stood where the light had pinned him about six feet to Cody’s right.
Captain Mustafa scurried away from having snapped the door shut behind Cody, looking relieved to remove himself from Cody’s immediate vicinity. He stepped well out of the line of fire.
“You will lower your guns, gentlemen. Drop your pistols.”
Caine looked, rather than said, the question to Cody, who nodded. They dropped their Berettas to the floor.
“Endgame,” Caine grunted, echoing the same frustration hammering through Cody.
“Kismet would be far more accurate.” Vronski’s thin smile evaporated. “We have been waiting for you. It is a distinct pleasure to make your acquaintance, Mr. Cody. We have crossed paths before, I am sure you remember; only, that time Fate bestowed you with Her good graces.”
Cody could not break eye contact with Kamal, who returned his stare with smoldering animosity.
“I’ve crossed paths with this piece of shit too,” Cody growled. “Hello, baby killer.”
Kamal snarled at the Russian. “We must kill them. You must let me kill them. They are blasphemers of Allah’s chosen land!”
Kamal’s hand rested on his sidearm, but he did not unholster it when Vronski raised a hand.
“Patience, Abdul, I beg of you. I thought that to be one of your people’s virtues. Mr. Cody is an important man in his government’s intelligence apparatus. There is much he and this other man who claims to be O’Devlin will tell us before they are put out of their misery.”
“Their kind will never talk,” Kamal objected.
“Oh, I think they will,” Vronski said, disagreeing confidently. “And for the humiliation you brought upon me in Bonn, Mr. Cody, I intend to see to it personally that your death is a slow and particularly humiliating one. We will begin now, I think.”
* * *
Rufe Murphy gave up on trying to keep his eyes off the wall clock and looked to check the time for what must have been the one hundredth time during the past hour.
He and the pilot of the F-82 sat in one of the rooms of the top-secret landing strip established one year earlier by the CIA in northern Chad, less than two hundred miles from the southern border of Libya.
The shack, camouflaged from the sky (and Russian spy satellites) by a desert net stretched out on poles, had air conditioning that represented the “listening post’s” one nod to comfort.
The men stationed here rotated weekly. The hurriedly constructed one-level structure had one small room filled with sophisticated state-of-the-art shortwave radio equipment to transmit daily reports and to receive instructions, such as their order to pick Murphy up several hours earlier, as they had done, to bring him back here to wait.
At this moment one of the CIA guys sat at the shortwave set, waiting for a signal to be triggered from the camp at Edri that would send Murphy and the pilot running pell-mell from the shack to the jet, which the third CIA man at the moment worked on running last-minute checks on its armament.
The jet, up until this night, had served exclusively as a spy plane.
Tonight was different, though, and Murphy figured that accounted for the lack of conversation between himself and the pilot, who sat across the table from him sipping at a cup of coffee.
Tonight the F-82 and the two men would fly into combat, less than a ten-minute flight from this CIA station to Edri.
When Cody sent the come-get-me blip from the mini-transmitter he carried into that camp, Murphy and the pilot would be on their way with the jet’s full capability of missile and cannon firepower. They had expected to receive that summons by this time. He found himself drumming his fingers on the tabletop and stopped.
He knew now how Hawkeye had felt when the rest of the team had left him at that medical facility before continuing on to the briefing aboard Admiral Williams’s carrier. That was before Murphy had parted ways with the others, Murphy meeting his CIA pickup in Cairo while Cody and Caine had flown a commercial flight on to Tripoli. Hawkeye had been steamed like a Gulf clam, Murphy recalled with a small chuckle in spite of himself, because the Texan had to sit this one out with a busted leg.
Murphy had grown up down home not caring much what lay beyond the state line, but the Army and Nam had changed all that. But he could not help feeling somewhat in a daze from all the traveling Cody’s Army had put in since their first alert of the embassy takeover in Rome. It was difficult to comprehend that that had been little more than forty-eight hours ago.
And now here he sat, he told himself, as out of the action as Hawkeye, except that he. Murphy, had both his legs in working order and a gutful of hate to unload in the direction of slimebags who murdered twelve-year-old kids in cold blood.
He did not feel comfortable with the idea of the team being split up like this: Hawkeye in sick bay, Caine and the sarge at Edri, while he sat on his butt in Chad, of all places. He did not like that at all—no, sir.
He liked nothing better than being a part of Cody’s team, but he did not feel a part of it now.
It occurred to him again how much he had missed this life during those years when he had run his charter helicopter business in Mississippi after Nam. There had been nothing wrong living that way but nothing all that right about it, either. Then Cody came back for him to put the old team together, and during the team’s first mission together Murphy had determined that there could never again be any other life than this for him. He was doing something with his life again, not just passing time between pussy on his way from the cradle to the grave.
Except that he felt sidelined right now, and it ate at his guts with sharp little teeth, and before he knew it, he found himself glancing at the clock again, wondering why Cody had not signaled as planned.
He wondered if this was just a delay or if something had gone wrong.