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."