by Jim Case
“I’m still alive, Sharon. I’m relying on you to take care of our people in there. You have that woman with the bad heart, don’t you?” Sharon nodded, her face pinching now with worry about the drawn, painful expression on the captain’s face.
“Take care of her. If she gets worse, if she needs medical attention, call your guard and make a fuss. These Arabs treat their women badly, but they are sentimental about them at the same time. Play on their sympathies.”
“Captain, I think you need a doctor, too.”
“No, just a sneaky kidney punch. We’ve got to talk about how to get out of here.”
“They have a series of roving guards with submachine guns, Tom,” Jenks reported. “Place is crawling with guards. Then at the wall, which is maybe thirty yards out there, there are more guards on top. At the one end I can see is a mounted machine gun.”
“Great, the place is a fort.”
“I heard a State Department man talk to some pilots about a month ago,” Jenks said. “He told us the government would never let there be another drawn-out hostage situation. He said Uncle Sam would move in and end it.”
“Sounds a bit ominous, doesn’t it.” Sharon said. She scowled. “Well, I’m going to take care of my people the best I can. And I won’t be afraid to complain if I need to. The first thing I’m going to demand is more cots. We have only six in here and eighteen women. It’s degrading and inhuman.”
“Be careful how you talk to these men, Sharon,” Jenks warned. “They are not diplomatic.”
“We’ve got to get out of here,” Ward growled. “I have a bad feeling. I think they are going to kill more of us to send a message to our government. I have a black, terrible feeling.”
“No, Captain, they made their point at the airport,” Sharon argued. “They know those two brutal deaths shocked the whole world; it’s enough. Any more would be overplaying their hand. These men seem smarter than that. What we have to do is hang on and work an escape if we can.”
“We probably shouldn’t let them see us talking through here,” Ward said. “Close up most of the panel, just leave part of it open.”
“That won’t really help you any this time, Captain,” Abdel suddenly snarled as he looked through from the women’s side. He slammed the panel shut and screamed, “What you doing, dumb woman!”
The others had backed away, but Sharon stood there in front of him, her arms folded under her breasts. She still wore the white-blouse and blue-skirt airline uniform. She had given her blue jacket to one of the women the previous night.
“Are you in charge here?” she demanded in a strong, no-nonsense voice. “If you are, I want to tell you that we need more places to sleep. We have eight elderly women and they simply can’t sleep on the floor. We need cots, and sheets, and blankets…”
Abdel grabbed Sharon’s arm and pulled it upward until she had to rise on her tiptoes.
“Shut up!” Abdel hissed. “Western women are all whores. Look at you! Your big tits are pushing out against your shirt. You don’t even cover your face. And your legs, you show off half your legs to tease a man. It’s a wonder you don’t get raped every hour!”
He let go of her arm and reached toward her breasts. She slapped his hand away. Before she could admire her quick work, Abdel had one hand grasping her breast and the other with a sharp knife blade pushing against her throat.
“You strike me again, American whore, and I’ll strip you right here and spread your legs and make you beg for death.”
“Take your hands off me!” Sharon shouted, her voice steel and fury. “Take your hands off me or I’ll find you wherever you are and castrate you with a dull knife.”
Abdel stepped back as if he had been shot, stared at her in disbelief, and then put the knife back in its belt sheath.
“Yes, American whore,” he said quietly, ominously. “I will enjoy tearing your clothes off and showing you how a woman should be treated. You will learn to love it.”
He stepped back and slammed the wall panel shut.
“There will be no more talking through the wall, no more plotting to escape. And there will be no more cots or blankets. This is not a resort. You are my prisoners, and I will deal with you any way I wish to!”
Abdel turned and marched out of the room.
Sharon ran to the door and heard the lock click in place, then a heavy bar slide into brackets.
She turned to the women in her care. They were her only concern. She checked on Mrs. Vereen again. She was stable, but Sharon was sure the woman needed medical care.
She turned toward the other women who watched her. “Is one of you a nurse or doctor? Mrs. Vereen needs care.” She watched the women shake their heads and went back to Mrs. Vereen.
“Now, don’t you worry, Mrs. Vereen. We’re going to be out of here sometime tomorrow, and we’ll have a doctor take good care of you. Just try to relax, and hold on.”
Sharon held her hand and the woman looked up and smiled. It was something, she thought. At least she could be doing something for her passengers.
It was 14:12 hours, the day after the hijacking.
CHAPTER
FOURTEEN
Gorman stared across his desk at the slightly built Lebanese man. He was not yet twenty, but already he had killed a U.S. diplomat and tried to bomb an embassy car. Gorman did not believe in turning trash like this over to the East Beirut militia.
If the killer knew the right people in the Christian Forces militia, he could go free, despite his being a Shiite. Sometimes the Christian Forces operated in a strange fashion. Better to settle matters right there on United States soil and have it over with.
“Camel shit, you little bastard!” Gorman bellowed.’ Who else worked with you when you killed Phillips?”
There was no reply. Gorman nodded and one of his men drove his fist into the Shiite’s unprotected belly. He grunted and sagged forward. Another man behind him grabbed his bound wrists and jerked him erect.
“We have all day, asshole!” Gorman snarled at him. “The games we play get rougher and rougher. You ain’t seen nothing yet.”
It had been established that the Arab spoke English, at least enough to understand the questions. He only glared at them and tried to spit on Gorman.
“Filthy pig!” Gorman screamed and slammed his own fist into the man’s jaw. Gorman pulled back his aching hand. He had forgotten how it hurt a hand to smash it against a hard jawbone.
“Who were you working with? Was it the Amal, or the Hezbollah, or the Jihad? Maybe you’re a Sunni. Tell me, damn it, and you might have a chance to live.”
“To die for Allah is everlasting glory!” the prisoner screamed.
“Allah? You murder and bomb and rape and steal for Allah? Sounds like some real kind of a camel-shit god.”
The Lebanese man surged forward, his right foot lashed out, grazing Gorman’s scrotum enough to bring a sharp, piercing pain.
“Bastard!” Gorman rushed the man, his hands around his throat, choking him. The prisoner’s struggles only increased Gorman’s fury. His hands tightened around the yielding flesh until he saw the Arab’s eyes bulge.
“No, damn it!” he said, relaxing and stepping back. “That would be too fucking easy for him, too quick. Take him down to the storage room, where we can have a little bit of privacy.”
The prisoner gasped and coughed, wheezed to get his breath back, and was still wheezing and gurgling when the three agents hurried him out of the second floor office and down the back steps to the storage room that Gorman had used before. He followed them a few minutes later, after detouring to the kitchen to get one small item. He carried the tool in a paper sack as he went to the basement and found that the guards had already stripped the prisoner naked.
“He don’t look so fucking tough to me,” Gorman said. “Like in Nicaragua. Those damn gigaboos didn’t know when they had a good thing going. We had to move in and teach them a damn painful lesson. Got to be the same way with this asshole, I guess. Where’s the
stick?”
One of his men handed Gorman an electric cattle prod that had the power turned up to the maximum amps.
“Know what this is, killer?” Gorman asked the Arab, who was sucking in breath with an effort. The prisoner nodded.
“So why don’t we make it easy. What’s your name?”
“Ronald Reagan,” the Arab spat.
“Asshole.” Gorman sighed. He touched the metal end of the prod to the prisoner’s thigh, causing him to leap away, his whole body trembling.
“Tie him,” Gorman said. Quickly, the guards bound the Arab’s hands to an overhead beam and then fastened his ankles to twenty-pound cement pier blocks on the floor. He was spread-eagled standing up.
“Now, camel dung, what’s your name?” Gorman asked.
The prisoner made no reply.
Gorman held the cattle prod against the man’s scrotum and pushed the button. Four, five, six seconds he pressed the jolting rod against the young Shiite soldier’s testicles. The prisoner screamed and then clamped his mouth shut as his body shook and jolted with the electric shock.
When Gorman pulled the prod away, the prisoner sagged forward, held up only by his wrists tied to the ceiling beam.
“Passed out, Chief,” one of the agents said.
“Too quick. Maybe he’s faking.” Gorman touched his cheek with the prod, but there was no reaction to the sharp jolt of electrical current.
“Wake him up. I’ve got another idea that you guys are going to get a boot out of.” He took the eight-inch, heavy meat cleaver from the paper sack. “I figure we can play fingers and toes with our young killer. Hard to keep quiet when you’re losing your fingers one joint at a time.”
A knock sounded on the door. Gorman motioned with his hand for one of the men to see who it was.
“It’s Nelson, sir.”
“Yeah, let him in.”
Nelson took one look at the prisoner, lifted his brows, then spoke softly to Gorman.
“I followed Cody and his bunch like you told me to, but they parked down by the Green Line, and the next thing I knew they vanished down an alley. By the time I got there, nobody knew anything. I hung around for an hour and they didn’t come back. Maybe he and the girl got themselves blown up over on the west side.”
“Not likely. Nelson, you really fucked up. How in hell do you expect me to…forget it. Get out of here. Maybe I’ll have more luck with this piece of stinking meat than I did with you.”
Nelson took one more look at the unconscious man and hurried out of the room.
Several miles to the southeast of the American Embassy, below the hippodrome and the beautiful pine forests around the Palace Omar Beyhum, lies the section of Beirut known as Badaro. This part of Beirut borders on Rue De Damas, the general dividing line between East and West Beirut, commonly called the Green Line.
All her life Oma Yafi had lived across the Green Line on the West Side of Beirut. She and her husband ran a small shop for copper goods across from the law courts building and beyond Avenue Sami Solh. Their shop had provided enough income to feed their young family and pay most of their bills.
She looked up quickly now as the bell rang over the door, and she saw her husband rush into the store. She was nursing her four-month-old baby at her large breast, still flushed and heavy with milk.
“Hurry, hurry!” her husband, Nabih, screamed at her. “We must get the panels up over the windows. There is trouble outside. 1 just saw a dozen armed men down the block and they are not from this area. They could be another faction, one who hate the Amal!”
Nabih struggled with a four-by-four-foot square of half-inch-thick plywood toward the front door of the little store. Just as he opened the door there came a blinding flash, then a roar such as Oma had never heard before, and everything in the shop came crashing down around her and her baby. She fell to the floor, holding her daughter to her breast, and rolled under a heavy table.
Hundreds of copper pots and pails and decorations cascaded from the walls and ceiling, where they had been carefully hung to show off their best features.
The sound had been terrible. Oma was sure she could not hear a thing. Her ears rang like cymbals being clashed. The air was thick with the dust of centuries, but the table kept the heavy copper and brass pots from her and her baby. Huge chunks of the plastered walls and ceilings fell as well. Some of the plaster was four inches thick where it had been recoated decade after decade.
Oma lay under the table until the last of the pots had fallen. Slowly she realized that she could hear rifle and machine gun fire outside. Her hearing was coming back.
For a moment all was quiet, then another explosion shook the building and more plaster fell. This blast must have been outside, perhaps next door. She waited again.
Men yelled.
Machine guns and automatic rifles stuttered out their deadly messages.
A grenade exploded.
Then a sullen, strange silence filled the street and the ruined store where Oma and her daughter lay. Slowly she pushed back from the protection of the table. She kicked a vase worth forty pounds out of her way and crawled from under the table.
Tears sprang to her eyes as she stared at the destruction of the shop. No one could have done a more complete job if he had planned where to plant the explosives. The small room’s dividing wall had been blasted into rubble, the front windows were blown outward, three-foot-square chunks of heavy plaster littered the floor. Copper pots and pans and vases had been smashed and scarred and strewn about like garbage in the street.
For the first time she thought of her husband. Nabih was just ready to go out the door! Where was he? She kicked through the pots toward the front door. At first she saw nothing, then from a large chunk of plaster she saw a hand extended. There was blood on the palm.
“Noooooooooo!” She rushed to the spot, fell to her knees and with a strength she had never possessed before, lifted the plaster block upward and tilted it until it crashed backward.
On the floor lay Nabih. His chest was a mass of blood. His neck had been riddled with shrapnel. Only his face escaped, and on it was a worried expression that had been frozen in place, and now would remain there forever.
Oma let the tears come. She fell on her dead and wailed and cried for long minutes. Then she lifted up, made sure her daughter was comfortable in the front carrying-sling around her neck and shoulder, and walked through the splintered wood, crashed glass and plaster to the open front where the door had been.
Once through the rubble, she headed aimlessly down the street. She could hear weapons firing ahead. She paid no attention to them. A machine gun chattered half a block down.
Bullets zipped through the air near her, but Oma Yafi did not hear them. She kept walking.
Halfway down the block, a Shiite soldier saw her and called to her. At last he ran out, grabbed her, saw the baby and led her to the safety of a doorway.
“You can get killed out there,” he scolded. She looked up at him, not understanding. Oma wore no veil, her blouse still sagged open where she had been nursing her baby and her left breast was in plain sight, large and bouncing with each step. The soldier stared at her undraped breast for a minute, then urged her deeper into the doorway. His hand reached for the woman’s naked nipple, but a rifle barrel cracked his wrist.
“No!” came the sharp order. The soldier’s sergeant loomed over him. “This one we save for the commander. He likes them young like this and he can even taste her milk!”
The sergeant caught Oma’s hand and helped her up. “Come with us, little mother. We have a safe place for you until we kill these pigs who attack us. Then I will take you to see the great Majed Kaddoumi himself.”
For the first time since she had seen her husband’s body on the floor of the shop, Oma Yafi took notice of where she was. She slowly shook her head.
“No, loyal soldier of the Shiites, I can’t go with you. By all that is sacred to Allah, I must go bury my husband. The sons of a camel blew up our store. T
hey killed my husband! You have to let me go bury him properly.”
The sergeant reached down and fondled her breast. It was the first that she realized she was not covered. She slapped away his hand and pushed her blouse together, quieting her baby’s faint cries.
“I am a good woman, loyal to the Shiites and to Allah. I must go and bury my husband.”
The sergeant, nodded. “Yes, that would be proper. Come down the alley a-ways until the fighting is over. Then we will take you to your husband when it’s safe to walk the street again.”
He took her three houses down, led her into a building that had a sentry on the alley door. Then he put her in a small room that had a bed, a chair, and a washbasin. When Oma looked around, the sergeant was gone. She tried the door and found that it was locked.
She sat down on the bed and tried to cry, but no tears would come. She was at the mercy of this band of militia, from whichever faction they were. Trapped in the middle of a war that she knew nothing about, she wished only that it would end.
She lay on the bed and began feeding her daughter.
CHAPTER
FIFTEEN
Ambassador Stewart Tabler peered over Cody’s shoulder and looked at the map and the circle Cody had drawn on it around the Furn El Chebbak section of Beirut just across the Green Line and west of the Pine Forest Park.
“Damn it, Cody, you’re supposed to be trying to find and rescue those hostages. That does not mean you are to commit suicide on a trip like this. Do you know anything at all about conditions on the other side of the Green Line?”
“Mr. Ambassador, no disrespect, but a couple of hours ago I carried Kelly McConnell’s body through a tunnel under the goddamned Green Line. Damn right I know about the Green Line. But to find out where the hostages are, I need to talk to Majed Kaddoumi. You going to invite him here for tea or midday prayers or something so I can talk to him?”