by Jim Case
“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.
CHAPTER
SIX
“Are 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.
“Do not worry, Abdel,” Farouk assured the other. “Flight 766 from Athens will be hijacked this morning. Blood will flow. Allah’s will be done.”
At that moment the door burst inward as if flung by a battering ram, startling both men, who had not expected such an entrance.
They whirled toward the doorway, Farouk bringing up the reassembled Uzi, holding his fire.
Tahia and Hallah rushed in bearing Ali between them, one of Ali’s arms draped over each of them as they supported him into the room while Najib held the door open.
Farouk’s heart leaped into his throat and he could not speak for a moment as he realized with shock that his brother was badly wounded and bleeding.
“What’s this?” Abdel demanded. “What has gone wrong?”
Farouk rushed toward his brother.
Rallis told his driver to brake the unmarked police car to the curb across the street and three buildings away from where the van had disappeared into the alleyway at midblock.
They had followed the van without detection all the way from the Acropolis.
Or so it seemed.
Giorgios, seated beside him, seemed to read his mind.
Rallis nodded to the dash radio, not taking his eyes from the entrance of that alley.
“Call in backup. I don’t want them jumping our net this time. This time we’ve got them, the Hassan brothers and Khaled and all the rest. Call the others in, and hurry.”
Giorgios obeyed, breathily summoning assistance from the other unmarked cars that had more or less accompanied Rallis and Giorgios, assisting in tailing the van by picking up the track while Rallis and Giorgios had shifted over a few blocks parallel before resuming the track for his final distance.
When the van began its approach to this seedy waterfront area district, Rallis had felt certain he was tracking these rats directly to their hole.
He only wished he knew what it was that he was so hot on the trail of.
The world’s most wanted terrorist gang, yes. But what were they up to?
Whatever it was, he hoped it would end here, in the next few minutes when they closed in.
Something told him time was already running out.
Giorgios replaced the mike hookup to the dash radio.
“They’ll be here in two minutes.”
Rallis unholstered his pistol and unlatched his door.
“We can’t wait that long.”
Giorgios unleathered his pistol, but he looked uncertain.
“We don’t know how many are in there, Inspector.”
“And they’re dealing with a wounded man,” Rallis grunted. “They’ll be confused, upset. We’ve got surprise working for us. Come on. Something’s in the wind and it won’t wait.”
Giorgios left the car with him. Together, the two of them darted across the inky shadows of the street.
* * *
Tahia did not know which hurt the most, watching Ali die right before her eyes or seeing the agony in Farouk’s expression as he helped her and Hallah carry Ali to the couch.
Ali coughed again and more pink bubbles burst at the corners of his mouth.
“A…trap,” he gasped unevenly to Farouk. “The police…waiting for us—”
His voice tapered off and he doubled over into a fit of convulsive, death-rattle coughing.
Farouk, perched on the arm of the couch with an arm around his brother, looked at the others in frustration and anger.
“Trap?” he repeated. “Who would do such a thing?”
Abdel remained standing back somewhat, with an air of cool, removed detachment as if observing the scene with only mild interest. Tahia, though, could see that his eyes were marble cold, reptilian, and calculating as ever.
“Only the six of us knew of the rendevous with Christus,” he noted without inflection, gazing from face to face of those around the wounded man.
“My brother is above suspicion,” snapped Farouk. “As am I, as are you, Abdel; as should we all be.”
Ali forced himself to speak from the couch, a weakening gurgle. He gripped his brother’s arm.
“Tahia,” he rasped to his brother. “She is…of us.”
“And that is good enough for me,” nodded Farouk to Abdel.
Tahia felt she must say something, when she sensed Farouk and Abdel centering their speculative glare on Hallah and Najib.
“Halla fought valiantly,” she told them. “We would all be dead or in police custody if not for Hallah.”
Hallah remained standing on the far side of the couch from Abdel and Farouk. The youth stood with is back straight, returning their glare, his fingertips lingering near the front of his open jacket and the .38 pistol holstered there.
“Thanks, Tahia,” he said, “but I can take care of myself. I’m not your traitor, may Allah damn your eyes,” he snarled at Farouk and Abdel, “and I’ll kill the man who says I am.”
“Relax, my headstrong young one,” Abdel purred smoothly. “No, you are not the informer among us.”
His eyes turned to Najib, who pulled back from the couch as the eyes of everyone there, including the wounded man, fell upon him.
“No, it was not I!” Najib cried out, his voice rising with each word. “I could not have led the police anywhere! I have never been to this house before right now, you know this to be true!”
Farouk nodded slowly, picking up the chain of accusation.
“Which is why the police did not close in on us here,” he intoned grimly. “You did know the arms pickup. They intended to force Ali to tell where we were.”
“No, I tell you, nol” Najib’s cry became a pleading whine. “It was not I! I am loyal!”
“It could be no other way,” Abdel glowered with an air of finality. He reached toward a shoulder-holstered pistol beneath his jacket, his gaze centered unblinkingly on Najib. “We have been dealing with Christus for years. He did not cross us. This is your first mission, Najib. You have made it your last.”
Najib saw what was coming and knew there was no place to run. He stumbled back a few paces until his back was against the wall and the whine in his throat climbed into a scream. “Please, no…Allah forgive me…I’m sorry!”
Abdel yanked out his pistol, attaining a straight-armed target acquisition with one smooth motion as he triggered a round from a West German 9mm P-38 that cored Najib Yaqub’s forehead, splashing brains, blood, and skull fragments mural-like across the wall behind him.
Khaled holstered his pistol before Yaqub’s body collapsed to a messy heap in the corner.
“I would have preferred his death to be more befitting a traitor,” Abdel commented almost conversationally. “That is, particularly slow and humiliating, but…,” he shrugged slightly, “… we have no time to spare.”
Tahia tore her eyes from the sight of Najib’s gory corpse, now shivering as if from an intense chill. She felt faint. Reality was unraveling all about her.
There came shouting, then automatic gunfire from downstairs, at the door to the alleyway.
Khaled unholstered his pistol again.
“Police,” he snapped above the clatter of weapons from below.
A three-man defense team had been set up on the building’s first level.
Hallah crossed to the door of the room and slammed it shut; then he tilted a wooden chair against the door handle.
“That won’t hold the swine for long,” he breathed.
Tahia could tell he was enjoying himself like a boy playing at a game.
Abdel moved to a throw rug across the room before an archway. He kicked the rug aside to reveal a trapdoor. He knelt and flipped the door open.
“Let’s go,” he snarled. “We can still carry out the mission! We will have less firepower, the weapons we carry now, but we can still take over an airplane. We cannot turn back now.”
Tahia rushed to the couch to join Farouk in starting to help Ali to his feet.
“We’ll make it,” she breathed fiercely in Ali’s ear as she came to him, some of his blood smearing across her cheek.
Ali shook his head weakly.
“No…no, leave me…I’m finished anyway…I can hold them off…give me my gun, that’s all I ask… I’ll die as a warrior should …”
“No!” Tahia shrieked. “Farouk,” she beseeched, “tell him he must come with us.”
Farouk shook his head, no, solemnly. He pressed his lips to his brother’s forehead once, holding Ali tightly to him, then he pulled away from his brother and stood.
“No, Ali is right.” He took Tahia by the arm and brought her to her feet. “Come. Abdel is right, too. The mission must come first. You know that, Tahia. There is no other way for us.’
The gunfire ceased from outside and downstairs.
Tahia knew what she had to do, much as it hurt to do it.
She placed Ali’s Beretta in his limp right hand.
“Farewell, my love,” she whispered softly, “until Paradise.”
Rallis poked his head cautiously around the bullet-riddled
doorway.
The bit of burnt cordite irritated his eyes and nostrils as he gazed in on the sight of three bodies sprawled in and around a narrow companionway with an archway leading to the darkened ground floor of this house.
A stairway reached up to the second level and a trail of glistening pools of blood showed in an unbroken trail up those stairs to a closed door at the top. Giorgios, looking nervous and scared, joined Rallis just outside the doorway.
“Cover me,” Rallis instructed.
He left his cover and started up the stairs hurriedly, his eyes and pistol scanning the hazy shadows.
Abdel closed the trapdoor after them, cutting off all light except for a finger of penlight which he pointed ahead of them. He and Tahia and Farouk hustled down the narrow stairs of the hidden passageway.
“This house is owned by our organization,” Abdel explained to Tahia’s unasked question. “This passageway will take us to a basement connected to the building next door.”
Tahia’s heart hammered against her rib cage.
They ran down the steps, their rapid breathing and footfalls seemingly magnified inside her ears by the nearly suffocating closeness of the walls and the low ceiling of this passageway.
Then sounds of gunfire could be heard popping off with a removed, distant sound from behind several walls away, and each report stabbed like a burning knife into Tahia’s guts. She stopped.
“We must go back! Oh, Ali—”
Farouk grabbed her arm, urging her onward.
“Ali does what he must. So must we. Hurry, Tahia. We fight on for Ali. Nothing must stop us!”
The words of her lover’s brother ignited something inside Tahia that overcame the sorrow she felt.
“And nothing will stop us,” she told Farouk.
The gunfire from upstairs stopped.
Abdel was so far ahead, he was not in sight.
Tahia choked back the sobs and tears she wanted to unleash. She and Farouk hurried to catch up with Abdel, to get away from there.
Rallis stood up from the floor of the room, cautious and slow even though he had convinced himself in the preceding heartbeats that he was alone in this second-floor level of the house except for two dead men, a wafting haze of gunsmoke, and the receded echoes of the brief, blistering exchange of gunfire that came after he had kicked in the door of the room while bullets had zipped out at him from inside. Barely missing him, the ammo had been fired by the man he had recognized instantly as Ali Hassan.