The banquet room.
Hawkins and Caine, flanked back to back to each other, pulled their weapons around on the double doors where Cody should have been, according to plan.
Hostages leapt to their feet, cries of alarm and mounting panic magnified by the high ceiling.
Caine moved toward Mrs. Parker, who remained kneeling, sobbing over her husband’s body, and he gestured with his free hand for the group to quiet themselves and listen to him.
“Everybody come with me! We’re moving out! Quickly now!”
While Caine restored some semblance of order Hawkins hurried toward the double doors.
“I’ll check on Sarge!”
Caine reached out to Sharon Parker, bent on one knee beside her, not taking his eyes from constantly scanning the room in search of danger from any of several other doorways. He touched the woman gently but firmly on the shoulder.
“Please, Mrs. Parker, we must get out of here.”
“I—I can’t leave him!” she cried out. “Dan…oh, Danny! Then she looked around with new dread. “My child! Laura!. Where’s Laura—”
Caine awkwardly put his left arm around the woman’s shoulder, and that human contact seemed to curb some of her hysteria. Mrs. Parker began sobbing into his shoulder. He kept eyeing the room, wondering what the hell had happened to Cody.
In the corridor Hawkeye came to an abrupt halt, frozen in place by the sight he found there: Abdul Kamal’s left forearm brutally gripping the blond-haired girl against him as a human shield, the snout of a submachine gun pressed to the scared kid’s temple, and he saw the bubbling corpse of Majid Baqir. And Hawkeye saw Cody standing a few feet away from Kamal and the girl, his Uzi on the floor near his feet, both of his arms upraised.
At Hawkeye’s appearance from the banquet room Kamal hissed like a cornered beast of prey and jammed the gun barrel harder against the girl’s head for emphasis, hard enough to make her cry out.
“Neither of you will come any further! I’m warning you!”
Cody said smoothly, “Hold it right there, Hawkeye.”
Hawkins lowered his Uzi.
“I hear you, Sarge.”
Cody said to Kamal, “Now what?”
“I want this building cleared of everyone except the three of us! You, me, the child. What is your name?”
Cody told him. “It might be smarter to put the girl and your gun down and give yourself up. You’re alone. Your men are all dead.”
“No, I’m not alone,” Kamal said, snickering. He jammed the gun, grinding it against Laura’s temple, bringing another whimper from the otherwise silent, terrified child. “I have this little one for company. And she will stay with me every second until I am on my way out of this country.”
“Oh, please, mister,” the child whimpered to the man who held her, hurting her, ““Please let me go—”
Cody said, in a reassuring voice, “You’re going to have to be very strong and brave, Laura. My name is John. You’re going to have to trust me. Will you do that? Will you be stronger than you’ve ever had to be in your life. For me?”
“I—I will, John.” She nodded weakly, trembling.
“Enough!” Kamal rasped. “I want this building cleared immediately. I want a helicopter to land directly in front of the embassy, not on the street, on the grounds, inside the wall. And I want a plane and pilot ready for takeoff, waiting for us at the airport.”
“Hawkeye,” Cody said, “you and Richard get the people in the banquet room outside. Use the main stairs at the center of the building.””
“Roger, Sarge. What about you?”
“I’m going to stay on here to keep Laura company.”
Laura brightened a tiny bit at that.
Kamal sneered. “You will stay with me, Cody, because you appear to be a reasonable man. I will want you to reason with any American or Italian authorities who might think it more expedient to open fire on me and risk this darling child’s life. You understand that with all of my men dead and my plans thwarted, I have nothing to lose. You will keep your distance. I don’t need you that badly, understood?”
“Understood,” Cody said. Then to Hawkins, “Radio up to Rufe when you get to the comm van. Tell him to set down right away.”
“Gotcha.” Hawkeye nodded.
The Texan turned and disappeared back into the banquet room.
A moment later Cody and the other two heard the shuffling of feet from beyond the open double doors, Hawkins and Caine herding the group of hostages out one of the other of the banquet room exits, the sounds of the group fading to nothing as they left.
“Now you lead the way,” Kamal snapped at Cody. “Down these stairs.” He indicated the nearby stairwell with a nod,” And you will stay within my sight but well ahead of me at all times. If you do anything I do not like, I will blow away the back of your head. Do you doubt me, American?”
“No, I don’t doubt you,” Cody replied in a quiet, icy voice.
“If anyone, anyone, approaches us, you will warn them away. You will tell them I will kill you and the child. They will listen to you.”
“What makes you think that’ll be enough? The NOCS has sacrificed hostages in the past.”
“It will be enough,” Kamal said. “Now move, damn your eyes. Enough time has gone by.”
Cody sent a final look to the girl imprisoned in Kamal’s cruel grip.
“Stay strong, Laura. Remember.”
“I will, mister.” She said bravely, in a small, terrified voice, and hiccupped.
“Move!” Kamal snarled.
Cody strode past, to the door leading to the stairwell. He unlatched the door and stepped through. He would have made his move then and there if it had been just himself and the terrorist, going for broke when Kamal came through the doorway six paces behind him, but of course, the presence of Laura Parker changed all of that. All that mattered to Cody at this moment was saving this brave little girl’s life. He lowered his arms to his side and headed down the stairs.
Kamal remained a safe distance behind him, the only sounds in the stairwell being the echoing footfalls of the men and the scared sobs of the child.
Then, as the three of them reached the bottom of the cement steps, a new sound: the throaty, rumbling whompa-whompa-whompa of what would be Rufe Murphy landing the army chopper on the embassy grounds between the main building and the front wall, as instructed.
When Cody reached the bottom step, Kamal ordered, “Step outside and hold the door for us. Try nothing, or I warn you—”
“You don’t have to keep saying it,” Cody growled. “You’ve got your chopper.”
He opened the door, moved outside, and positioned himself well back from the door, holding it open, waiting for Kamal and the girl to move through from behind him.
The helicopter descended, its rotors and engine hammering, the windstorm caused by the rotor blades whipping Cody’s hair, sending loose pieces of paper and debris whisking through the cold night. The chopper touched down, the engine rumble subsiding somewhat, the blades whistling. Kamal emerged from the doorway, hugging the girl up in front of him. He passed Cody, keeping the barrel of the Uzi pressed against Laura Parker’s temple.
Cody followed them from several paces behind.
It was all he could do to hold himself back from leaping at Kamal from behind, taking the creep down with some martial arts, killing the bastard with his bare hands. He knew there was a better than so-so chance he could save the child and kill Kamal in such a manner. But he held himself in check.
The chances of surviving this ordeal were far better for the child if they played along with Kamal.
Saving Laura’s life had to be the bottom line.
Colonel Adams, Brazi. the rest of the team, the hostages, and countless other faces observed the scene from beyond the hole in the embassy wall, ghostly, luminous, white ovals peering from beyond the lights.
Kamal and his human shield reached the chopper. The side hatch opened and Rufe Murphy stood there. Kamal turned sideways so his back was to the embassy building, not toward the street, so he could watch both Cody and Murphy.
“Not this pilot,” he snarled to Cody above the keening whistle of the idling craft. “He is one of your commandos!”
“What do you want?” Cody snarled back.
“Another pilot. Quickly!”
Murphy watched for Cody’s nod. When it came, the big black guy jumped to the ground from the chopper.
“I’ll get the pilot.”
He moved out at a long-strided run toward the group beyond the wall.
Tense seconds dragged on forever.
Cody caught Laura’s frightened eyes.
“You’ll have to go with this man, Laura. You will have to be very, very strong.”
“I—I will, John,” she called back to him. “But I don’t understand. I’m scared!”
“I know you are, honey.” Cody nodded, his insides torn apart over not being able to do anything immediate to help her. “It’s all right to be scared. Everything will be all right. Trust me, Laura. Just do as this man says and it will all be over very soon.”
“I will…. John.”
The freckle-faced chopper pilot who had flown them in from the NATO base came over on the run, taking in with uncertain eyes the tableau of the terrorist pointing a gun at the child’s head. He looked to Cody.
“Fly this man where he wants to go,” Cody instructed.
“Rome airport,” Kamal snapped at the pilot. “And no tricks!”
“No tricks,” the pilot agreed. He boarded the chopper.
Kamal clambered aboard without once releasing his grip on the child or moving the machine gun from her head. He stood just inside the chopper, and the last thing Cody registered of the two were Kamal’s eyes glaring with cruel triumph, and the girl, terrified, trembling. Then Kamal leaned forward to shut the side hatch, shouting something at the pilot.
The rotors revved up, and the army copter lifted off, banking up and over the embassy and its walls, leaving in its wake more turbulance and exhaust fumes. Its blinking flight lights receded beyond the city’s shimmering night sky.
A knot of men left the street and ran onto the embassy grounds to Cody, watching the chopper’s withdrawal.
“I want a chopper to the airport. Colonel,” Cody said to Adams in greeting.
Then he heard approaching copter sounds that seemed to pick up where the departing chopper left off.
An unmarked chopper rotored in toward the embassy from the opposite direction.
“Figured we weren’t about to cool our heels,” Caine said.
“Not with all the action going down at the airport,” Hawkins added.
“We asked the colonel to radio in backup air support,” explained Murphy.
“What about Kamal’s demand for a flight out of Rome?”
“He has been supplied with a private jet,” Brazi said. “There were those in the cabinet who wished to hard-line it. We in Italy pride ourselves in not capitulating to these monsters. However, I made clear the situation here. The plane is fueled and idling. An unidentified Arab has shown up at the airport and says he is the pilot.”
“Kamal had himself a contingency plan ready to go,” Cody said, nodding. “How are the rest of the hostages?”
“They killed one, the little girl’s father,” Adams informed him. “The girl’s mother is in a real bad way, of course. The others weren’t physically harmed.”
The newly arrived chopper settled down on the exact spot on which the other had.
Murphy shouted in Cody’s ear, “I’ve got to fly us out there, Sarge!”
“Wouldn’t have it any other way, Rufe.”
The chopper’s side hatch popped open. The pilot stepped down.
“We’ll take it from here.” Cody told him. “Thanks.”
The pilot looked at Colonel Adams, who nodded, then he stepped aside.
Cody and his men hopped aboard. Rufe headed directly to the cockpit. The other three grabbed wall straps. Cody stood in the doorway.
“Give it all you’ve got, Rufe!”
The lights of Rome whizzed by beneath the open side hatch.
Kamal stood gazing ahead to where the tower beacon and the lit runways and activity denoted Leonardo da Vinci International Airport. He had released the child. There was nowhere for her to go inside the copter.
The pilot had not once turned to make eye contact, but Kamal felt the hatred emanating from that freckle-faced young man in the cockpit.
He wondered if he should kill this pilot when they landed. And he thought of Baqir and Mahmud and the others who had lost their lives in the failed embassy strike. Good men lost, and the objective, the release of the political prisoners held by the Italians had not been achieved; the mission was a failure. But he did not dwell on that. The important thing was that terror had again struck at the hearts and minds of the Americans and their allies in their war against the Palestinian people, and Kamal would escape and live to fight again against his enemies. That was something, he told himself, and perhaps the time had been right for Majid to die; to die slaying the enemies of Allah was to gain eternal privilege in paradise where one day Kamal would rejoin his friends and family. Hopefully only after he had lived to slay many, many more. …
He grunted in surprise and pain, a jolt of agony stabbing up and down his left arm. He swung it away, in the process knocking down the little brat who had grabbed his left hand in both of her hands and sunk her teeth into his hand, leaning into him, actually trying to surprise him and push him out of the helicopter!
Rage flashed in him, making him forget the pain of her bite. He lashed out with the Uzi, the side of the machine gun catching Laura Parker in the mouth.
She cried out and flew to the deck of the aircraft, onto her side, weeping, holding her mouth with both hands. Blood trickled from between her fingers, down her chin. She stared in fear at the man towering over her.
Kamal started to bring his boot back to kick, then checked the action, steadying himself, glaring down at the cringing child.
“You will pay for that, little one. Not now but soon, very soon. You will pay.”
He spun around when he felt the eyes of the pilot staring at him. The pilot’s freckled face was ruddy with rage. Kamal came up on the pilot, ramming the barrel of his machine gun forcefully to the back of the pilot’s head.
“You will attend only to landing us and nothing else!”
The pilot’s knuckles shone white where he gripped the chopper’s controls, the line of his mouth trembling, but he did not respond. He commenced radioing in their approach to the tower.
“There they are, Sarge,” Murphy said, pointing.
Cody and the others looked out and down at the chopper touching down inside the chain-link-fence perimeter of a private landing area, well removed from the activity of the rest of the busy airport.
The wet tarmac gleamed, reflecting the landing lights of Kamal’s chopper near where the jet idled for a short taxi to the nearest runway.
Cody could see Italian and NATO vehicles at the far end of the blacktop approach to this landing area, but the authorities over there were following Brazi’s instructions, keeping their distance.
“How are we going to play this?” Caine asked.
“By ear, all the way,” Cody growled. “Take us down, Rufe. Nice and easy. I want Kamal to know he can just get on that plane and go if he’ll set that little girl free. The rest of you stay here on board. Keep me covered, but don’t show yourselves.” He handed his Uzi to Hawkins. “Here, Hawkeye. Bring it on the run if you think I need it.”
Hawkeye took the machine gun, frowning.
“You’re cutting the odds way down, Sarge.”
Cody patted the .45 automatic he wore in shoulder-holster leather.
“I’ve still got Betsy, and it’s a risk I’ve got to take.”
Murphy landed the chopper three rotor widths from the other two aircraft, just as Abdul Kamal and Laura Parker emerged from the side of the other chopper, Kamal running toward the jet, lugging the child up around his chest as a living shield just like he had inside the embassy, moving at a sideways run, facing Cody’s chopper.
There was no way Cody or his men could chance a shot.
Cody left his chopper when Kamal was already halfway to the jet.
Kamal’s eyes widened with something approaching fright.
Cody approached with a steady, even gait, his arms swinging loose at his side so the terrorist could see that he was not toting a weapon in either hand.
Kamal scuttled across the rest of the distance and went up the short stair ladder to the door of the Learjet. When he was aboard, he turned and kicked up the stair contraption just as Cody came to a stop, standing opposite Kamal and the girl he still held, a distance of thirty feet away.
Cody discerned the form of a hooded pilot in the lights of the jet’s cockpit.
The fright disappeared from Kamal’s eyes but not the hatred nor the madness.
“Stay where you are!” he squealed above the whistling sounds of the jet.
“I only want the girl!” Cody called back. “Hand her down!’’
He saw the blood smeared across Laura’s face and the purple bruise at the side of the child’s mouth, but she stood erect, not trembling in front of Kamal.
“I’m…glad you’re here, John,” she called to Cody in that small, steady voice. “I was brave, just like you told me to be.”
Then Cody saw something in Kamal’s face that told him what was about to happen, and his soul shriveled and contracted and ice closed over his heart. He leapt forward, raising his arms.
“Kamal, no!“
The Arab laughed.
“She’s all yours, American.”
Kamal triggered the Uzi pressed against Laura’s back. A three-round burst blew the kid’s body apart into an unthinkable, geysering red horror, the killing force of the slugs pitching Laura’s body out of the plane like a tossed-away rag doll.
Kamal screamed something at the pilot and triggered a burst at Cody, then reached to slam the hatch shut.
Cody pitched himself onto the tarmac, projectiles raking the air inches above him.
The whistling of the jet increased to a shrill whine that buried everything else, the jet pulling away, gaining more than its usual momentum, approaching the runway in extreme haste.
Cody jumped to his feet, the .45 Colt Commander in both fists, pumping round after round at the departing jet.
His men tumbled from their chopper, and the night crackled into parting bursts of automatic gunfire. The jet gained the runway and accelerated, already out of range. They saw it fire down the runway past them, too far away for them to do anything about it, the jet’s nose lifting, the aircraft winging into a climb away from there, into the night.
Murphy, Caine, and Hawkins lowered their somber expressions from the sky to Cody, already holding in both arms the limp, bloody remains of Laura Parker.
A single tear pearled down the combat grime of Cody’s left cheek.
He turned and started with the body back toward the chopper.