Cody's Army by Jim Case

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