by Jim Case
The prearranged passing through of customs with their weapons had been managed without a hitch, thanks to connections made at the airport by the PLGF’s local cell.
Farouk’s only real concerns had been the depletion of his unit, the fact that they were not carrying the full armament and ammunition required for an operation such as this, and the fact that Tahia seemed to be suffering from such a state of nerves that he had feared she might draw suspicion to them before the hijack even began. But that had not happened.
He had signaled the others that the operation was to commence when he had stepped up to the magazine rack at the front of the passenger section.
That was when Tahia had gone into her act up front and within minutes the crew and all one-hundred-and-fifty passengers had come under their control.
He knew how Tahia felt. He felt the same way. It had been only hours since he had seen Ali bloodied and dying. A cold rage filled him to deliver some kind of retribution, even if only upon this collection of tourists and businessmen and miscellaneous travelers, but he knew he must control his grief until the time was right and he must trust his brother’s lover to show the same strength, as she had up to now.
At this moment, Hallah stood at the rear of the plane after having collected the passports of all aboard and separating the Israli and American passports from the others.
The passengers remained seated, frightened, immobile, under the weapons aimed at them.
Abdel emerged from the flight deck and nodded.
“We are ready. I have radioed the message. It is time to select the first one.”
Sharon Adamson had been in the galley with one of the other stewardesses, chatting about nothing, in the moments before they were to begin walking down the aisles, collecting emptied drinking cups and the like, when the woman’s screams from up front had brought them running—into the barrels of the automatic weapons held by Arabs, one at the front of the plane, one at midsection.
She stood now near the front entrance, where she and the three other flight attendants had been told to stand. She watched the drama unfold before her with the numbing shock of realization at how quickly one’s life could be turned upside down.
The Athens-Tel Aviv flight was not a long one, but glancing out across the passengers, she felt the same sense of responsiblity she always took to heart, only magnified.
Her eye caught the elderly American couple that had been so nice coming aboard—the Marcuses, their names had been; charming folks who had been bubbling with enthusiasm for their travels, their “second honeymoon,” as Mr. Marcus had chuckled affectionately.
There was Mrs. Vereen, an overweight woman in middle-age whose shortness of breath and flushed complexion made Sharon think the woman probably had a heart condition.
And the children, at least a dozen of them.
She was afraid, she readily admitted to herself, but not so afraid that she could look away from the anxiety etched across the face of every passenger aboard.
The terrorist she had heard referred to as Abdel emerged from the cabin and spoke to the other man, who was obviously the leader, who nodded and turned to Sharon while Abdel and the man at midsection kept the hostages covered.
“Miss,” the man said, with a nod to the stack of passports that had been gathered and placed in an empty seat nearby, “I want you to reach into this pile of American passports and hand me one.”
She lost her voice for a moment. Cold fingers seemed to wrap themselves around the base of her spine. She knew the methods of these madmen and she knew what was about to happen, and yet she was stunned that she was being asked to be a part of it.
This can’t be happening! her mind screamed.
“W-why?” she asked before she could stop the word from coming out. “You…you’re not going to hurt any of these people, are you? They haven’t done anything to you!”
He glared at her straight on for a moment and she saw things she did not understand in his eyes.
“You will do as I say. Pick one of the passports. Hand it to me. That is an order.”
The passengers overheard this exchange, and nervous murmurings began rippling through the rows of seats.
She suddenly felt very strange, as if somehow detached from what was happening around her, as if this was all happening to someone else, not to Sharon Adamson of Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, with a planeload of tourists on a hijacked jet in Beirut, Lebanon.
She said, very quietly and in a voice she did not quite recognize as her own, “I will not help you. Do with me what you will.”
The man named Abdel started to turn in her direction, raising his weapon.
“The bitch. Farouk, let me—”
Farouk lifted a hand.
“No.” He stalked over close to her and she could smell him. She smelled his hate.
“It is too late to help anyone,” he told her.
Then he made a fist and hit stewardess Adamson on the jaw.
Sharon’s eyes rolled back in her head and everything went black for her.
CHAPTER
NINE
Ten minutes after Cody received word that they had a mission, the four of them kicked out of the new style military “Jeep” in front of their operations center on the sprawling Andrews Air Force Base.
All four were grimy, splotched with camou black on hands and face. They wore camou fatigues well dirtied after a grueling four-hour exercise in the woodsy, marshy section at which they had been training for the past two weeks.
“About time they hand us something,” Hawkeye groused with a belch.
“It has been getting real tedious,” Murphy agreed. “Almost got me to longing for my choppers and that mayor’s wife.”
“Imagine this will shoot teatime all to Hell,” Caine snorted.
Cody knew what they meant. He’d been getting restless, too.
Cody’s Army, as Lund had dubbed it half kiddingly, was ready, and for the past two weeks it had been a case of all dressed up with nowhere to go.
The training helped relieve the tedium but it had proved unnecessary. Caine, Hawkins, and Murphy had kept themselves hard and in shape, every bit as battle-ready as they were back in Nam.
Most important, to Cody’s way of thinking, was that these good friends—Hawkeye Hawkins, Rufe Murphy, and Richard Caine—had lost none of their enthusiasm for a good scrap if the cause was just.
He led the way into a squat cinder-block building that showed only one story above the ground but dropped three levels below.
“Lund said it was a big one. Let’s see what they have.”
Two minutes later, they walked into the third basement level of their quarters, an elaborate electronic war room with one twenty-foot-long wall covered with a huge video map that was computer-programmed and adjusted. Now an out-of-sight hand changed the screen to Europe, then to the Mideast, and at last zoomed in on Beirut, Lebanon.
There were a dozen soft, swivel, rocker chairs in the twenty-foot-square room. Each chair fronted a long table at which microphones perched expectantly beside steaming cups of coffee and platters high with sandwiches. Rufe grabbed four and began chowing down.
Besides Cody’s Army, four more men sat in the chairs. One was Pete Lund, next to him sat an Army general, then a Marine colonel, and a civilian who had State Department stamped on his forehead where frown wrinkles were growing deeper by the second.
Lund led it off.
“Gentlemen, welcome to Beirut. This is not a replay, this is a whole new shoe, another incident, almost a carbon copy of the TWA hijack a few months back. But this one is not going to last as long or end the same way.
“The takeover of the Air Mediterranean Flight 766 from Athens to Tel Aviv was by the Palestinian Liberation Guerrilla Force. We know little of this group, which we are assured is a radical splinter from the PLO. Members of this PLGF have been involved in only minor bombings and some kidnapings before, nothing this ambitious.
“The PLGF are demanding the release of seven hundred
Lebanese revolutionary prisoners still held in an Israeli camp outside of Tel Aviv. These were captured in the Israeli invasion of Lebanon more than two years ago.
“The PLGF has given Israel and us a forty-eight-hour deadline, then they will begin executing one passenger an hour if their demands are not being met. Now please watch this satellite transmission from Beirut television. The hijackers notified the Beirut tower well in advance so that television crews were on hand at the airport when the hijacked plane landed.
“We taped this transmission less than an hour ago from a satellite transmission, showed it to the President, and he told us to come right over here and get into operation. Roll the videotape please.”
The screen went black for a moment, then an eight-foot-square lit in the center of the wall and they saw what had to be the Beirut airport.
An excited voice came on speaking Arabic, which was quickly translated into English, sometimes overlapping.
“Here we are at the Beirut, Lebanon airport where the Air Mediterranean flight 766 has just landed. A band of courageous Palestinians on board have liberated the airliner and are holding the crew and passengers in custody.”
As the voice continued the camera moved closer to a 727 commercial passenger aircraft, where two persons appeared at its passenger door. A boarding ramp was hastily rolled up to the airliner.
A gunman wearing a long black hood that completely covered his head appeared at the door and waved the two ground crewmen away. When they were clear, the gunman pulled forward a gray-haired woman who seemed to be in her sixties and motioned for her to go down the steps.
She hung back. The gunman slapped her twice with his open hand, jolting her head from side to side.
The translation picked up again.
“Now a passenger is being brought out. The radio man at the tower said the woman would be Mrs. Esther Marcus of New York City—oh, she fell!”
On the screen the elderly woman could be seen to trip and then fall against the railing. The Arab gunman with his Uzi submachine gun jerked her up and pushed her forward.
A moment later an elderly man appeared at the door of the plane and was forced down the steps. He was about the same age as the woman.
“Now Mr. David Marcus is coming down the steps. Mr. Marcus has a heart condition and high blood-pressure, but he was selected for the honor and so he must participate,” the translator droned on.
The two hooded terrorists now had the man and woman on the tarmac under the nose of the plane and forced both to kneel. The woman fell down but was hoisted to her knees while her skirt slid up her thighs.
The narrator translator continued. “I’m not sure what they are doing now. The Marcus couple are looking at each other, yes, they both are weeping.”
The camera zoomed in on a tight shot of David Marcus. Tears seeped down his cheeks. He held one arm protectively around his wife. One of the hooded gunmen forced the old man’s arm away from her. The hijacker lifted the submachine gun and held it at the back of David Marcus’s head.
The woman screamed and pushed the gun away, throwing her arms around her husband. The second hooded figure slammed his Uzi against her head, stunning her, and pulled her away from David Marcus.
The translator came on again. “The gunman shouted, ’I do this for the liberation of my seven hundred fellow countrymen being held illegally by Israel.’ Oh, my God!”
The camera zoomed in close again on the weapon’s muzzle pressed against the back of David Marcus’s head. Then the Uzi fired.
The man slammed forward, blood and skull fragments sprayed in the air. David Marcus jolted to the tarmac face-first; his body twitched two or three times, then lay still. He was dead before his face skidded onto the black surface. A pool of crimson-red blood formed on the tarmac below his head. The woman beside him screamed and swung her fists at the hooded murderer, then in total frustration and agony dropped on top of her dead husband.
The two masked figures dragged Mrs. Marcus off her husband’s corpse and forced her to kneel next to him.
“My God! They killed him! Shot him in cold blood. I’m sorry, it’s so tragic. The translation, yes, I forgot. The killer shouted that he was doing this for Lebanon. He shouted that the criminal Israelis must set his starving seven hundred countrymen free. Then he murdered David Marcus. Now…oh, my God! Now they are forcing Mrs. Marcus to kneel. Surely they are not going to…they wouldn’t dare to…not again!”
The zoom lens showed only Mrs. Marcus’s face now on the giant screen. In back of her there was some motion. Then the camera pulled back a little to show the Uzi’s muzzle against the back of her head.
The weapon fired once and Esther Marcus’s eyes widened, her mouth flew open before her whole body smashed out of the frame to the blacktop runway.
“My God! They did it again. They murdered Mrs. Marcus and the gunman said the same thing as before!”
The giant screen showed a wider shot of the scene now that included the plane’s nose, the two bodies, and the ramp. One of the hooded terrorists went to Mr. Marcus and fired a three-round burst into his head, then moved to the woman and did the same. He lifted his weapon in the air, and then both the terrorists hurried back up the steps. They returned from inside the plane a minute later and threw the body of a man to the runway. Then they left and closed the plane’s door.
Over this scene the translator continued with a shaky voice. “A short time later, by radio, the terrorists made these demands: One. The United States and Israel must make plans at once to release seven hundred Lebanese prisoners Israel still detains. These men must be returned to Lebanon within forty-eight hours of the current time.
“Two, there will be no attempt made to free the hostages from the aircraft or all will die.
“Three, there will be no retaliation against any PLO organization or personnel, or all the hostages will die.
“Four, if satisfactory negotiations are not completed for the release of the seven hundred within forty-eight hours, one of the hostages will be killed every hour on the hour.
“Negotiations are to be made through the good offices of Majed Kaddoumi in Beirut. Set our prisoners free!”
The lights came up softly as the image faded on the screen. When the TV feed was gone the lights were up fully.
Cody felt the familiar rage building in his gut. The anger against all those who took advantage of the weak and defenseless. The brazen brutality of these killings sickened him.
“Bloody bastards!” Caine whispered.
“Fucking sonsofbitches!” Hawkeye blurted.
“I owe them muthus! I owe them hard!” Rufe raged.
The four-star Army general stood and looked at Cody. “Gentlemen, this will not be another TWA flight 847 hijacking. The United States government cannot permit that to happen. We must deal with this quickly, with total dedication, and we must fight as deadly and as dirty as the terrorists do. No negotiations and no prisoners is our firm resolve in this matter.”
He looked at the four men. “I am assured by the President, and by Mr. Lund, that you four are the men to do the job. I hope they are right. You have the full resources of the United States government and military establishment at your disposal. I wish you luck, and more to the point, good hunting.”
Pete Lund stood as the general eased into his chair. “So far we have little to go on. You will be briefed in code on your flight. You leave in a B-52 taking a training flight to Tel Aviv in exactly one hour and twenty-two minutes.
“We are not certain how many hijackers there are. At least two, the hooded ones we saw on the ground in the film. There must be more, perhaps as many as six to eight more on board. The deadline time clock began at 18:36 Beirut time, which was 11:36 today here. Beirut is seven hours ahead of us. We were notified of the hijacking at 12:02. We have a less than forty-six-hours before the next innocent hostage is scheduled to die.
“The third person to die on the aircraft was the flight engineer, Yamir Abudah, an Egyptian national. He was k
illed, evidently, in the takeover of the plane.”
A phone blinked beside Lund. The civilian next to Lund picked it up, listened, then whispered to the CIA man.
“We have just been informed that the hijackers have utilized contacts at the airport and rolled onto the field with a heavily armored column. They have commandeered airport buses and taken away the one-hundred and twenty passengers and the crew of seven from the aircraft.
“They left the airport, which is under control of the Amal Militia, without a shot being fired. Then under heavily armed escort have transported the hostages somewhere into West Beirut. We no longer have the advantage of knowing where they are, or of the chance for a friendly rescue attempt with the aid of the Christian Forces Militia who control East Beirut.”
“So now we have to find the hostages before we can do anything,” Cody growled.
“Exactly, and you’ll be dealing within a hostile nation. These men and women of West Beirut are in a constant state of war, heavily armed and eager to die for the glory of Allah. Our man from the Near East desk at State can help us understand the situation in Beirut.”
The civilian stood. He looked even more worried now than before.
“Gentlemen, this will be difficult. Beirut is a madhouse. There is little stability there and no consistency except that of terror and constant warfare. There is no central government that has any power. Amin Gemayel is the president, with almost no authority or day-to-day operating muscle. He is leader of the Phalange Party. All of the major political and militia groups oppose him.
“Yes, yes, I know. From time to time they have accords, cease-fires and treaties among the three major forces fighting in Lebanon, but just as quickly these are shattered.
“Several of these groups opposing the East Beirut forces include:
“The Shiite Amal Militia, one of the stronger and better-armed outfits in Beirut. The Sixth Brigade is one of their largest units.
“Hezbollah, or the Party of God, is a large, heavily armed group. This is a rival Shiite faction, not controlled by the Amal. Often they shoot at the Amal people, and sometimes at each other.