Cody's Army (9 page)

Rallis and the three men in the car rocked backward under the forward momentum as the unmarked vehicle barreled forward.

“Police!”
snarled Apodaka, and he pawed for his shoulder holster beneath his jacket.

Tahia and Ali had reached into the back of Anton Christus’s van as Christus held one of the doors back for them. Tahia and
Ali’s eyes had connected once across the box as they reached to take opposite ends of it in order to slide out the weapons
and ammunition, but she had not been able to read what she saw in the brief look that passed between her and this man she
loved so much.

Then everything fell apart as Christus’s driver cried the alarm.

She and Ali spun away from the truck, the box of weapons and ammo temporarily forgotten, reaching for their weapons.

Christus, and Hallah and Najib, who had been holding open the back door of the other van, did the same.

A sedan screeched to a stop, its tires shrieking on the pavement, nosed in toward the scene of these “laborers” transferring
one box of “tools” from one of their trucks to another, the four doors of the sedan flapping open even before the car had
braked to a full halt, four men from inside spilling out with pistols in their hands.

The one who had to be in charge, an older man who hopped out from the front passenger seat, started to shout, “Stop where
you are, all of you! You’re under—”

Apodaka pulled off the first shot.

The policemen scattered for cover behind the open doors of their car.

Ali cleared his Beretta of its leather and fired a round that caught one of the men in the chest.

The policeman, who had jumped from one of the back doors of the car, flew into a wide-armed backward fall to the pavement.

Screams of hysteria and surprise erupted from the touristy crowd that began scrambling in every direction for the nearest
cover.

The policeman from the opposite rear side of the car, and the plainclothesman who had been driving, returned Apodaka’s fire
at the same time, and so Tahia could not tell whose bullets sent Christus’s driver slamming backward into the side of the
van, projectiles coring his body, splashing his guts across the lettering that read Christus Imports.

Christus dodged behind the van, undercover.

Tahia saw the policeman she had guessed to be in command raised his pistol on Ali. She started to bring her own weapon up
and shouted a warning to Ali at the same time.

The policeman fired a single shot that drilled Ali through the stomach, jackknifing Ali al-Hassan to the ground, where he
spasmed into a fetal ball.

“Oh!” Tahia shrieked. ‘Wo!”

She rushed over to Ali’s side while Hallah stepped forward, his Ingram MAC-10 tracking toward the police car.

“Get him in the van!” the youth screamed at her. “We’ve got to get out of here! Najib, help her!”

Hallah triggered a nonstop burst from the Ingram MAC-10, the automatic fire spewing wildly at the police care and beyond.

The police car’s windshield shattered under the fusillade that pockmarked the frame of the car and began toppling people across
the street among the wildly scattering crowd of pedestrians.

Tahia and Najib scrambled to each lift one of Ali’s arms around them, tugging the wounded man between them toward the back
of their van. Tahia caught one glimpse of the gruesome horror that was her lover’s abdominal area. She averted her eyes with
a small shriek, fighting off panic while one small part of her mind kept telling her no, no, this was not happening, though
the noisy chatter of Hallah’s MAC-10 spraying everything in sight was a fearsome reminder that yes, the world had gone crazy
around her.

She and Najib lowered Ali onto his back upon the floor of the van, then she turned to Hallah, yelling, “He’s in…let’s go!”

Najib jumped into the back of the van, slamming shut his side of the back doors, pressing himself to the floor of the van,
a look of naked fear across his face.

Tahia crouched and pulled her door most of the way shut with one hand. Steadying herself, she opened fire with her pistol
on the police car.

Hallah ran to the driver’s seat, hopped into the idling vehicle and upshifted so abruptly that Tahia was almost pitched out
of the van, but she kept on firing.

The police, who had not shown themselves from behind their cover during the twenty seconds or so that Hallah had them pinned
down, now realized that the incoming fire was from a weapon of less firepower, and the three surviving cops showed themselves
at the same moment that Tahia’s pistol clicked on empty.

Projectiles pierced the back-door windows, zinging high through the van.

She slammed shut her side of the van’s back door as the vehicle sailed away from there. She threw herself across Ali, who
lay on his back, tremoring with terrible shudders, holding his stomach wound. His blood smeared her.

With everything happening, she forced herself to keep in mind what was most important of all.

“Ali…dearest,” she whispered close to his ear. “Tell us where to go…where is Farouk?”

She placed her ear close to his red-specked mouth and listened as he told her. She realized tears were pouring from her eyes,
down her cheeks. She cried out the address to Hallah as the police gunfire from behind them died down.

She placed her arms around Ali as the van rocketed away and then hugged her lover to her, knowing he was dying; knowing that
the tears and the killing would not stop.

Pandemonium reigned, the air filled with the moaning of the dying and the civilian survivors, the street at the foot of the
Acropolis hill dotted with bodies, the sirens of squad cars arriving too late, noisy above everything else in the white heat
of midday.

Rallis went over behind the Christus Imports van to where the surviving detective from the backseat of the unmarked car had
Christus under cover on the side of the van where Christus had remained during the shooting.

Rallis saw the van with the terrorists picking up speed as it tore away down the street.

Christus saw the look in Rallis’s eyes.

“I’m not armed!” the importer screamed.

“Where are they going?” Rallis demanded.

“I don’t know, I swear I don’t know!”

Rallis had not time to believe or disbelieve that.

He charged to the police car where Giorgios stood from examining the fallen policeman.

“Dead, sir.”

“After them,” snarled Rallis, throwing himself into the passenger seat.

Giorgios jumped in behind the steering wheel, and tires screeched a burning rubber cloud behind the unmarked car as he piloted
them away from there in hot pursuit.

Rallis hurriedly reloaded his pistol as Giorgios rounded the corner from Ermou Street onto Pireos, heading back into the downtown
district, the street ahead of them well cleared by the crowds that had scurried for cover. Rallis saw the van up ahead, at
about a block and a half lead, traveling fast.

At first, back there when they had screamed to a halt, surprising these terrorists in the obvious act of picking up weapons,
Rallis had thought he’d been lucky enough to catch Farouk Hassan right at the beginning, but the man who had killed one of
his detectives, who Rallis had plugged through the stomach, was a younger edition of the Most Wanted Terrorist in the World.
That would make him Ali al-Hassan.

If Rallis was right, the speeding van they were chasing could lead him and Giorgios straight to the heart of Farouk al-Hassan’s
headquarters.

SIX

“A
re we being followed?” Tahia demanded of Hallah from the rear of the van.

She cursed the quaver she heard in her own voice, the fear and rising sense of panic she also heard there. She looked down
at Ali, whose head she cradled in her lap, and her fear caused her to tremor and she realized she feared not so much for herself
but for this man she held, the one she loved, dying before her eyes.

Hallah steered the van smoothly through the narrow, winding backstreet toward the Athens waterfront district. The youth kept
the van well below the legal speed limit, as he had since racing them away from the Acropolis hill area, having taken a zigzag
course ever deeper into the city. He glanced in the rearview mirror, then chanced a look over his shoulder into the van’s
interior, where Tahia held Ali.

“I think we’ll make it. How is he, Tahia?”

Dark gore bubbled out of the bullet hole in Ali’s stomach. Tahia had peeled back Ali’s shirt and jacket and tried to stop
the flow of blood with a cloth, but to little avail.

Ali rasped out in pain.

“D-don’t concern yourself with me,” he gasped. “Just get us to Farouk.”

He winced, spasming in agony across the floor of the van, but he did not cry out.

Tahia pressed the wound harder with the cloth, but the flow of blood continued to puddle beneath them.

“Ali, you must be still. We will get you medical attention.”

He reached his arm over his head to touch her face, a trembling finger wiping away a tear from her cheek.

“It…is too late for me, Tahia. You and the others must continue the mission without me…”

“Don’t say that!” she cried out. “Please, Ali, you must live. We need you. The movement, the cause, needs you …I need you…”

Najib Yaqub turned from where he rode in the passenger seat. He had been watching his own outside rearview mirror for any
sign of pursuit. He gripped his pistol in his lap. “Continue the mission?” he echoed. “We cannot continue! Not after what
happened tonight. Not after”—he nodded to Ali —
“this.”

Hallah snickered derisively. He steered the van around another corner, slacking off their speed even more as he guided the
vehicle down a somewhat wider, secondary residential street on the edge of the waterfront warehouse district.

“You speak as a coward.” The youth’s countenance glistened with perspiration despite the night’s dry coolness, and his eyes
glinted with the excitement of all that had happened. “All is in readiness. Too much has gone into this. We can not turn back
now.”

“Hallah is right,” rasped Ali raggedly. “There can be no turning back from…the course we have set for ourselves. I…only wish
Allah had not ordained…this—”

Tahia looked up from him, speaking to all three of the men.

“What could have happened back there? What went wrong?”

Najib stared with anger at the teenager steering the van.

“You were a fool to open fire like you did, Hallah.”

“I got us out of there, didn’t I?” the youth retorted. “And I would not hurl accusations, Najib. I did not let others do my
fighting for me.”

The man in the passenger seat looked away uncomfortably.

“I wonder what Farouk will have to say to all this,” he mumbled, more to himself than to the others.

“We’re about to find out,” said Hallah.

He braked, guiding the van into a narrow alleyway between two two-level structures.

The building on the left appeared uninhibited except for a slight motion that came from a curtain, on the second level, being
parted slightly behind a window, and then the shade was dropped back into place.

Ali Hassan groaned aloud for the first time since receiving his wound, lurching his head fitfully in Tahia’s lap. He began
coughing. Hemorrhaging blood burbled from his nostrils and from the corners of his mouth.

Abdel Khaled turned from the window, dropping the shade back into place where he had parted it a fraction of an inch to peer
out and down into the alleyway.

“They have returned,” he told Farouk Hassan.

Hassan looked up from completing the reassembly of a Uzi SMG he had dismantled and cleaned upon the table at which he sat.

He knew his second-in-command to be fearless and committed to their shared cause, but he had never fully trusted Khaled. Abdel
had learned to enjoy the brutality, the killing, too much. He had become a sadist, and it showed in his eyes, even now. Farouk
wished again that he had his brother as his right-hand man, but Khaled would never give up his power and influence except
in death, and so he and Farouk worked together.

“You see, Abdel, you were wrong.”

“Perhaps.” Hassan glowered. “And yet I say again, we have more to fear than what the authorities may do to us.”

“You mean Kaddoumi? I told you, I will have no more of this talk. Our cause is splintered enough as it is by differences among
us.”

“I must speak what is in my heart,” Khaled insisted evenly. “Majed Kaddoumi has placed a traitor among us, and if it is the
authorities to whom the traitor, whoever he is, informs, can it make any difference?”

“Majed is a moderate in the Palestinian cause,” countered Farouk. “He is not our enemy. He would not plot our undoing.”

“I hope you are right,” Khaled conceded. “If you are wrong, Farouk, then everything—today, the operation,
everything
—is at risk.”

They heard a clatter and voices from the bottom of the stairway outside the closed door of this room, this room that had served
as their station during the three days since they had arrived in Athens to make final preparations for what was to happen
later this day—if all went according to plan.