Majid Baqir gave up trying to follow the progress of the helicopter that had lifted off from the street in front of the embassy. He had been watching it through the tall windows of the banquet room. Now he let the heavy brocade draperies sway back into place and turned, and a start spasmed through him when he realized that Kamal stood less than a foot away, observing him.
“I have ordered that no one look out through these windows, Majid. You would make a fine target for a sharpshooter across the street.”
“They will negotiate with us, Abdul. They would have staged an assault before this if they intended to stage a rescue.”
“Perhaps that is what they want us to think,” Kamal growled. “I’have grown tired of waiting.”
“But the deadline, Abdul. They have another hour—”
Kamal waved an angry hand.
“They will try to stall. I know these swine and how they operate. They need to be reminded that we mean business.”
Behind them, in the center of the banquet room, the nineteen hostages cowered in a clustered circle. Mahmud and one of the other gunmen held machine guns aimed at where the prisoners sat and knelt uncomfortably on the tile floor.
Kamal had positioned the remaining two gunmen at strategic points outside the banquet room.
There had been little difficulty in handling the hostages. The first statements out of Kamal’s mouth, once Baqir had overseen the hostages being herded in here, had been that anyone giving he or his men the slightest bit of trouble would be summarily executed. The whimpering cries of frightened women and the terrified, uncertain stares of the men had been ground into an air of muted hopelessness by the slow passage of the past thirteen hours.
“I should think that those killed during our takeover would be evidence enough of the seriousness of our intent,” said Baqir, and he regretted his words immediately.
He knew himself to be one of the select few who dared disagree with Abdul, the two of them having been friends together since the days of their childhood in the squalor of the refugee camps. Baqir had once saved Abdul’s life. And so Abdul listened at those times when he offered his counsel.
Kamal’s nostrils flared, his eyes angry, and Majid realized just how tightly wound up his friend and leader was.
“Do you balk at the spilling of more blood of our enemies? These people are Americans. Do you forget that the American imperalist pigs support and supply the Zionists against us?”
Baqir looked again at the hostages. He and Abdul spoke in Arabic.
“Have you selected who will be next?”
“The child, I think.”
The child.
Baqir had confiscated and looked over the little girl’s identification when he’d collected the passports from the hostages.
Laura Parker. Age: twelve. Blond-haired, freckle-faced, braces on her teeth. A lovely child who had huddled with her mother and father in fear against their captors, but yes, Baqir had noticed little Laura Parker, from Menlo Park, California, who had not cried, had not trembled in the way some of the adults did. The child was afraid, as all these hostages were, but he had found himself watching her during the day, observing a child’s reactions to this adult drama being played out around her. Baqir, who had always loved children, had found something to admire in her bravery and control.
Her father: Daniel Parker, aide to the counselor for economic affairs.
Parker’s wife, Sharon, and Laura had accompanied him into the city that day for a shopping trip, they had told Baqir. Mrs. Parker and the child had accompanied Mr. Parker into the embassy snack bar for breakfast before he was to report at his office for work. They were netted in the roundup that immediately followed the sealing off of the embassy building.
“The child,” Baqir repeated.
“Do you think that is absolutely necessary, Abdul? I mean—’’
“I know what you mean,” Kamal hissed. “I think you are going soft on us, Majid. That is not good.”
“It is also not true,” Baqir snapped. “It is just that… in Lebanon, before you sent for me to come here to join you for this… Abdul, I have seen so much suffering… and the children always suffer the most, it seems. Why is that? They are not in this fight. They cannot defend themselves.”
“You lose sight of our objective.”
“We are here to seek the release of political prisoners held by the Italians.”
“That is the primary objective, yes,” Kamal acknowledged, “but it is not our ultimate goal, as you should well know. Gaining the attention of the world media and thereby the attention of the world, itself, is our ultimate mission objective. Sooner or later Israel’s allies, especially America, must realize that they will only be safe from us when the Palestinian situation has been dealt with fairly.”
“I know all of this Abdul, but—”
“The more ghastly the deed,” Kamal continued, as if Baqir had not spoken, “the more attention it demands on the world stage.”
Baqir looked back across at Laura Parker.
“And so you will kill that child?”
“Yes.” Kamal started to move away. “And I mean to do it now.”
Baqir grabbed his arm.
“Abdul, please reconsider—”
Kamal tore his arm loose.
“We have gone too far already to turn back now. Come with me, my brother. It must be done.”
Baqir fell in behind him, knowing that he already had said too much of what moved him in his heart; of the repugnance and disgust he felt for what he was allowing himself to do in the service of his god.
The Parker family seemed to know instinctively that the two Uzi-toting leaders of this operation had singled them out. They stood as one.
The other hostages huddled on the floor, staring anxiously to see what would happen next.
Dan Parker stood with his feet squarely planted, directly in their path, his body shielding his wife and daughter.
Mrs. Parker’s arm went around Laura, drawing the child to her protectively.
Parker ignored the Uzis aimed at him by Mahmud and the other gunman from several feet away.
“Stop right there.” he growled. “What do you want?”
Kamal stood directly before Parker, inches away.
“Your daughter, Mr. Parker. We wish to interrogate your daughter.”
“Oh,no!” wailed Sharon Parker in a piercing voice.
“Daddyl” shrieked the child.
Parker was not a big man—he was middle-aged and paunchy—but he stared straight back at Kamal.
“If you touch one hair on my daughter’s head, I’ll kill you, you slimy snake.”
One of the foreign service hostages rose to his feet behind the family, and a few other men did the same.
“Now hold on here just a minute—” one of them started to say indignantly.
Kamal glanced at Mahmud and nodded, indicating the hostage standing nearest to him. Mahmud raised his Uzi in both hands, slashing the weapon’s metal butt plate down sharply to the back of the man’s head once, twice, crumpling the man to his knees.
“Everyone remain seated on the floor!” Kamal shouted, “or you will be killed!”
Mahmud stepped back from the group, glaring at them with the other gunman, gesturing threateningly with their Uzis.
One by one those standing sat back down, their eyes on the man who had been beaten, who lay facedown, groaning, upon the floor.
“Oh, please, please don’t do anything!” Mrs. Parker pleaded, both of her arms around her daughter, hugging Laura to her.
“Baqir,” Kamal snapped in English. “Take the child. We will interrogate her in the hallway.”
Baqir came forward, easing his Uzi down on its strap so that it rode on his hip. He stepped past the father, toward the girl. He knew there would be no interrogation; knew he could not stop himself from what must be done.
Parker snarled. “Get away from her, you pig!”
He lunged at Baqir. Kamal stepped in and behind Parker before he could reach Baqir, then brought the metal butt of his Uzi down as hard as he could behind the American’s right ear while Parker reached out for Baqir’s throat with both hands, until the blow behind his head sent him stumbling forward, past Kamal, pitching to the floor.
Some of the women screamed.
Kamal closed in swiftly to where Parker propped himself up on an elbow, dazed, wincing in pain. Kamal stood directly above the embassy man. He pulled back a combat-booted foot and kicked Parker brutally several times to the head and heart regions until Parker sighed and collapsed, face to the floor, and did not move.
Mrs. Parker shrieked her husband’s name and raced to his side, but she did not release her grip on her daughter’s hand.
The child’s young face was white with shock.
As the mother and daughter darted toward Mr. Parker’s side, Baqir reached out and grabbed Laura Parker’s free wrist and yanked with enough strength to pull the girl from her mother’s grasp.
So much was happening to Sharon Parker—a day that began as a simple shopping trip with her daughter into the city had turned into such horror, so unexpectedly, so ferociously. Now she continued forward to pitch herself upon her husband’s unmoving body.
She began wailing blindly. “Oh, my God, he’s dead
The word dead rippled through the circle of hostages in terrified whispers.
“Take her out!” Kamal snarled, motioning Baqir and the child toward a doorway of the banquet room. “Do as I say!”
Baqir had trouble tearing his eyes from the pitiful sight of Mrs. Parker wailing over the corpse of her husband.
“No,” he said to Kamal in Arabic. “Mr. Parker is dead. That is our warning to the negotiators. Why harm the child now?”
Kamal lifted the Uzi so that it pointed at Baqir’s chest.
“Do as I say, Majid, or I will kill you.”
The child fought in his grip, struggling and twisting with all her small might to break free, screaming, “Mommy! Daddy!” over and over.
Cries of alarm and fear from the hostages echoed from the high ceiling of the banquet room.
An hysterical Mrs. Parker moaned crazily. “No … no … this isn’t happening … dear God, this isn’t happening!”
Baqir thought he heard, through all the other noise, the faint sounds of a helicopter, a low, throaty rotoring from somewhere up above, but he could not be sure; helicopters had been flying overhead all day.
He knew what he must do. He dragged the squealing, fighting little girl across the room, toward the doors to the hallway.
Behind them. Mahmud and the other gunmen kept covering the other hostages observing the painful tableau of Mrs. Parker sobbing over her husband’s corpse, some of the prisoners easing forward to offer her comfort.
Kamal turned from that and followed Baqir and the child out of the banquet room.
Laura rained pummeling hits with her diminutive free fist, but she could not break away from Baqir’s ironlike grip.
As he emerged with his charge into the lushly carpeted, white-walled main hallway of the embassy’s second level,Baqir steeled himself for what he knew he must be a part of. There was no other way, if he meant to serve Allah and his people’s cause.
Abdul was right.
The child must die.
It was already too late for anyone or anything to save Laura Parker from her fate.
The bubble-front Hughes chopper with Peter Lund aboard descended toward the eighteen acres of White House grounds basking on the south side of Pennsylvania Avenue in the warm D.C. sunshine. The helicopter touched down smoothly onto the grassy area behind the executive mansion.
Lund left the chopper at a low run beneath the spinning rotors. He carried with him a briefcase containing files that would update the president of the United States on the situation presently unfolding in Rome at this very minute.
The president had been receiving regular updates from other sources, but Lund wanted him to know exactly what was going down in Rome right now, and he knew he was the only man for that job.
He was White House liaison for Cody’s Army.
He walked up to the three Secret Service men with whom he had gone through this routine every time he was summoned here.
The agent in the middle carried a metal detector with which he “frisked” Lund, who had left his .38 Police Special back in the chopper.
They escorted him through an unmarked entrance into the building, into an oak-paneled hallway, proceeding along the route Lund knew by heart, toward the president’s Oval Office.
He glanced once again at his wristwatch, making the mental calculations to adjust to Rome time, to calculate the minutes remaining until the deadline Abdul Kamal had issued.
At least Cody and his men were on the scene over there. He knew that much, and that told him something else: Any minute now would bring word of a successful hostage rescue by Cody’s team, or word of failure and more slaughter.
If anyone could pull it off, Lund knew it would be Cody and his men.
He sincerely hoped everything would go all right. He had known Cody’s team since Vietnam where he had functioned as their field liaison with the CIA. He had been the man to hand them their missions: strikes aimed at neutralizing enemy targets when the sensitivity of a mission precluded the use of standard military action.
Cody and his team had seen plenty of action behind enemy lines, even into North Vietnam on several hard-punch hit-and-git strikes, pulling off every impossible mission Lund could throw their way, most often without receiving any mention whatsoever in any official files.
After the U.S. pullout from over there and the disbanding of the team, Lund had asked Cody to continue working for the Company. Cody accepted and began taking on difficult missions all over the world, his combat skills honed to a fine killing edge in Nam, tailor-made for jobs considered “impossible” or maybe just too damn dirty except for a man of Cody’s skill, audacity, courage, and commitment.
Cody was a complex man of deep conviction who fully believed that he was doing something to make this a better world.
In Lund’s opinion, right now a beleagured America needed all the men, like the four of Cody’s Army, that it could get.
Cody’s unit had been designed to strike quick and hard in crisis situations, fighting back against terrorism as dirtily, as ruthlessly, as they could, to pull off missions wherein delicacy forbade the use of units like the army’s Delta Force: operations like the hopeful rescue of the hostages being held by Islamic fanatics inside the U.S. embassy in Rome.
Two of the Secret Service agents fell back from flanking Lund as they approached the heavy oak door of the president’s inner sanctum. The third agent knocked discreetly on that door, then opened it to lean inside for a very brief exchange that Lund could not hear. Then the agent came out.
“Go right in. Mr. Lund. The president is expecting you.”
Lund stepped past. The agent closed the door behind him, leaving him alone with the chief executive.
The president stood from behind his huge desk and came forward, hand extended.
“Good to see you again, Peter.”
“Good to see you. sir. I only wish it was under more pleasant circumstances.”
The president’s handshake was as firm and authoritative as ever, but close up Lund could read the weary edginess in those famous clear blue eyes and that vote-getter smile.
“I’ve found that being president is not too different from being a dentist. The only time I see anyone is when there’s trouble.” Presidential eyes fell to the briefcase Lund toted. “What have you got for me?”
Lund set the briefcase on the corner of the desk and unsnapped it, withdrawing the most recent satellite-transmitted update from Rome and handing it to the president.
“Just decoded, sir.”
The president scanned the latest transmission, deep furrows etching themselves across his high forehead. He handed the onionskin back.
“We should be hearing any moment, then, shouldn’t we? This says they’re going in.”
“They may have gone in already.” Lund nodded. “It could be happening right now.”
“And here I am, supposed to be taking care of business as if nothing’s wrong, while four good men lay their lives on the line to pull off by what all accounts should be impossible.”
“Cody’s team eats the impossible for breakfast, sir.”
“I know they do, Pete, but their luck can’t hold out forever.” The president glanced at a desk clock. “Damn. I have a cabinet meeting in five minutes, and all I want to do is sit at this desk and wait for the phone to ring to tell me how it went over there.”
“I understand you wanted me here on duty at the White House until the crisis is resolved, sir. I’ll come and get you the instant we receive any word.”
“Then I guess all we can do for now,” said the president, “is hope and pray.”
“For those hostages?”—Lund nodded—“and for Cody and his team.”