"Sideslip is nominal," Salim reported grimly, his dark eyes glancing
down at the churning sea only a couple of hundred meters below them. "I
think we're going to be all right."
"We have just had an example of how an oversight can destroy an
operation," Ramirez declared, turning back to the main cabin. "We will
not succeed if we get careless, lose discipline. I have planned this
operation down to the last small detail. You have all been briefed,
over and over." He paused and examined the men. Sometimes he felt as if
he were lecturing children, but these were no children. "Each of you
knows what his job is. I expect you to do it with exactness and
precision. The next oversight anyone here makes will be his last. Am I
understood?"
There was silence, then finally a voice came from the litters in the
darkened cabin aft, barely audible above the roar of the twin engines.
It was Jean-Paul Moreau, the Frenchman. He hated flying, and he
particularly hated flying with an Iranian at the controls.
"What the hell happened?"
"Someone on . . . presumably a raft of some kind. We took a couple of
rounds of small-arms fire." He glanced back, making sure his voice
reached Peretz in the weapons station. "The last Swatter was left
turned on, armed, and it must have been hit. Probably the detonator. A
stupid oversight."
"Looks like the mistake was mine," came the voice of Peretz, trying,
unsuccessfully, to sound contrite. "Can't win them all, baby."
Back to his smart-ass self, Ramirez thought, still gritting his teeth
in anger. But he pushed it aside. "Forget it. In this business you only
look back if you can profit from your mistakes. We just learned what
happens when we forget our mission. The matter is closed."
"Now"--he returned his attention to the main cabin-- "when we set down at
the facility, I expect total discipline. Nothing less will be
tolerated. Is that understood?" He motioned Peretz out of the weapons
station and took his place there.
Would these men hold together the way he required? As he looked them
over, he felt confident. He had had enough experience to smell success.
Sabri Ramirez had definitely been around the track. Born in Venezuela
almost half a century earlier, the son of a prominent Marxist lawyer,
he had become an ardent revolutionary by age twenty. At twenty-five he
went off to Cuba, but it was only later, while attending Patrice
Lumumba University in the Soviet Union, that he discovered his true
ideological core --it turned out he actually despised "the oppressed of
the earth," along with curfews, books, and lectures. No, what he really
wanted to join was not the Party, but the party--good living, women,
fame. And he wanted the last most of all. After nine months his lack of
ideological fervor got him summarily expelled. He actually felt relief.
With an eye to where the action was, he immigrated to Beirut . . . and
prudently became a Muslim by conversion. Then he started making
contacts--Beirut had always been a good place to make contacts. The
payoff was quick. He was young, obviously brilliant, and he would do
anything. In the early 1970s he was recruited by the terrorist group
known as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and assigned
leadership of its European unit. Off he went to Paris, the posting of
his dreams.
He had long fantasized about making himself a legend as one of the
world's leading terrorists, and he was soon succeeding beyond his
fondest imaginings. In 1974 he graduated from the PFLP and formed his
own group. A Middle Eastern gun-for-hire, it was known as the
Organization of the Armed Arab Struggle. The designation, he thought,
had a nice revolutionary ring, which he had long since learned
mattered. His new enterprise--terrorism-to-go--soon attracted such major
clients as Libya and Iraq. Among his more celebrated achievements were
the bombing of a French Cultural Center in West Berlin, exploding a
suitcase bomb at a Marseilles railroad station, and placing an
incendiary device aboard the French "bullet train."
Although he never had cared about ideology, he appreciated the
importance of a correct political stance in the Islamic world, and
therefore he frequently posed as the leader of an "armed struggle"
against the "Zionist Enemy." But always, however, at a profit. He had,
in fact, perfected the fine art of extortion, pressing the
"reactionary" regimes of Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the
Gulf sheikdoms into paying protection money disguised as "revolutionary
donations." After he engineered the 1975 OPEC incident in Vienna in
which eleven oil ministers were taken hostage, and then blew up a
seaside resort, killing a Kuwaiti official, he began receiving regular
payoffs from all the Gulf states.
Finally, in 1984, he closed out operations under the OAAS name, moved
to Damascus, and began training Syrian intelligence agents. By that
time, he had become a chimera, a legend whose nickname, the Hyena, was
linked to every car bomb in Europe. And by that time also, the Hyena (a
name he despised) had become the stuff of popular fiction, as well as
of dossiers on three continents.
Having reduced terrorism to a science--a boring science --he then
temporarily retired. But now, after the American invasion of the Middle
East, he had decided to come back for one last score, to do what he had
been dreaming about for years. The Americans had unwittingly provided
the perfect opportunity. Why not seize it? This time, however, he
wanted to do it himself, not with an army of half-crazed radical
Muslims. . . .
He stepped up to the cockpit and examined the rows of gauges. "Hold the
airspeed under a hundred knots. And make sure you keep her on the
deck."
Then he checked down below. "Peretz, this time make sure all the
weapons stations are switched off. That's _off."_
The Israeli nodded, this time without his usual grin.