Dynamite Fishermen (17 page)

The Palestinian accepted the money without taking his eyes off the road and stuffed it into his back pocket. Usually he riffled through the bills with his thumb and devoured them with his eyes.

Prosser wondered whether Abu Khalil would continue to sulk at their next meeting or would begin serving up more and better information. The time had come to put the agent to the test.

He took a scrap of paper out of his shirt pocket and handed it to Abu Khalil. “Just so you won’t forget, here is a list of questions about Colonel Hisham. Take it with you and memorize the key points before you see him.”

“I will find out what I can, but the colonel is not a stupid man. I must move slowly if I am to gain his confidence.” He made a sinuous movement with his hand that simulated the motion of a snake. “Also, my friend, I urge you and your friends at the American embassy to take precautions. This is a dangerous time for foreigners in Beirut, particularly those whose governments have sided with Iraq in the war with Iran. Supporters of Iran are plotting revenge in the Lebanese arena, and the Syrians are turning a blind eye to it. So beware of anyone who follows you on the street, and above all, carry your weapon wherever you go.”

As if to convince by example, Abu Khalil lifted his windbreaker to show a Czech 9-millimeter self-loader tucked into his waistband.

“You must be joking, Abu Khalil,” Prosser replied uneasily. “I am a diplomat. What excuse would I have to carry one of those? If a soldier found it on me at a checkpoint, he might take me for a spy.”

“To be without a weapon in West Beirut is worse than foolish,” Abu Khalil replied gravely. “Here, any man who respects himself is armed. Many Lebanese would take great pleasure in killing someone from the American embassy if they knew there would be no risk in it. Think about it, Tommy. If you wish, I can get you a pistol like mine.”

“Thanks,” Prosser replied, clasping Abu Khalil’s shoulder affectionately. “But my superiors in Washington would never allow it.”

“The men who give such an order understand nothing about Lebanon,
habibi
. If I were in your place, I would disregard it.”

Sometimes Prosser suspected that Abu Khalil was right ,but so far he had never had an occasion to go around armed in a foreign capital. If there were ever a need to arm himself for an operation, the normal procedure would be for Pirelli to seek authorization from Headquarters to issue one of the Browning 9-millimeter pistols in the station’s arms vault. Otherwise it was a serious violation of Agency rules for a case officer to carry a deadly weapon, and Prosser didn’t feel strongly enough about the matter to risk his career over it.

They drove past a brightly lit snack shop, and in the light Prosser held an index card close to his face to consult his checklist once more before bringing the meeting to a close.

“All right, Abu Khalil, just one more item of business. Turn up the hill at the Sunrise Hotel, and I’ll show you where to drop me off.”

They drove along the Corniche past the Riviera Hotel and turned right near the spot where they had encountered the gun battle the night before. The Toyota was a third of the way up the hill when they heard a momentary roar followed a second later by a thunderclap, the reverberations of which lingered long amid the brick and concrete buildings. The roar and the detonation had both come from the west, but a quick glance across the hillside showed no smoke or other telltale signs of an explosion.

“B-7 at two o’clock. Probably the Saudi embassy,” Abu Khalil observed, using the street term for a Soviet rocket-propelled grenade. As he spoke, a boxy four-door Fiat careened down the hill toward them with its headlights off, straddling the centerline and narrowly missing the Toyota as it raced by.

Prosser strained to catch a glimpse of the car’s occupants in the darkness. “Probably the Shiites again,” he ventured. “They threw a bundle of dynamite over the wall a couple months ago when the Saudis first started backing Saddam against the Ayatollah. I suppose it will only get worse.”

Abu Khalil remained silent, concentrating instead on watching the road ahead and the darkness beyond the glow of the nearest streetlamps. They reached the top of the hill and saw smoke rising from behind the walls of the Saudi compound, just as Prosser had predicted. Lights were already appearing in apartment windows all over the neighborhood.

“Hell, we’re heading right into the middle of it, Abu Khalil. Come on; let’s scram before the gendarmes arrive. I’ll get out here. You can continue straight across rue Bliss and keep on going.”

He pointed to a grocery stall on the left that had already closed for the night. “Stop here. Okay, then, we’ll meet again on Tuesday at half past nine. I’ll be at the old place in the rue Bahrain.
Ma’assalama
, Abu Khalil.”

Abu Khalil nodded and pulled the Toyota over. The two men shook hands one last time before Prosser stepped out onto the sidewalk and watched the sedan speed across the intersection out of sight.

Chapter 12

Monday

Prosser pressed his arm and shoulder against the white concrete pillar in the Hala Building’s lobby and extended his right leg behind him to stretch the muscles in his hips and upper thighs. As he performed this daily pre-jogging ritual, he surveyed the parking lot and driveway for people or vehicles that seemed to be out of place. Abu Ali, now at the end of his long night shift as concierge, picked up a broom and began to sweep dust and cigarette butts out the lobby door. He interrupted his slow-motion routine to let Prosser pass.

The asphalt of the driveway was still wet from a freak rain that had fallen during the night. Prosser did his best to avoid the larger puddles as he ran down the narrow channel between the parked cars lining both sides of the street. At rue Bliss he turned right toward the old lighthouse that gave the Minara neighborhood its name, and in less than a minute he began the winding descent to the Corniche.

For a moment, as he rounded the first bend, he had a sweeping view over the western coast of the Ras Beirut peninsula. Far out to sea he spied the purplish-gray clouds that had brought rain during the night and watched the orange ball of the sun rising behind them. Then he noticed a sandbag barrier blocking his path some thirty yards ahead. A militiaman in the faded burgundy uniform of the Fursan manned the barrier that had been erected apparently overnight in front of the entrance to the Renaissance Tennis Club.

The Fursan served as the military arm of the Arab Democratic Party, an obscure faction formed earlier that spring by a clique of Northern Lebanese warlords under the sponsorship of Rifaat al Asad, the ambitious younger brother of Syrian president Hafez al Asad. Although
Fursan
was the Arabic word for knights or cavaliers, the group’s unusual wine-red uniforms quickly earned it such nicknames as the Red Guards and the Khmer Rouge. Some cynics even claimed that the Fursan were not even Lebanese but rather Syrians who belonged to Rifaat’s paramilitary defense companies and were only temporarily seconded to the Fursan.

Early one morning in April the Fursan had materialized in West Beirut as if out of thin air to occupy the Renaissance Club’s tennis courts and soccer field. Prosser had watched from his balcony as the militia seized control of the sports complex that until then had been the exclusive preserve of foreign diplomats and the Lebanese sporting class.

At first the group had surrounded the club with jeeps, trucks, and armored personnel carriers, moving the vehicles onto the club’s soccer field through gaps torn through its perimeter wall by an antiquated Soviet-made T-52 tank. Then they occupied the clubhouse and set up tents and dug foxholes on the remainder of the grounds while bulldozers and heavy earth-moving equipment arrived to prepare trenches, bunkers, and vehicle dugouts. To anyone who observed the operation, it was abundantly clear not only that the Fursan had come to stay but also that they were not counting on the goodwill of the militias into whose territory they had intruded.

Prosser checked the encampment from his balcony every morning during the weeks that followed. The periodic inspections of the ragtag Fursan troops; their attempts at precision marching drills; and their practice firings of mortars, antiaircraft guns, and other heavy weapons out to sea were often hilarious. Most of the time, however, the men sat around their tents playing cards, drinking tea, doing their laundry, cooking, and eating. Their real work, many people suspected, went on at night. Residents of the Minara neighborhood were quick to blame the Fursan for the wave of burglaries, armed robberies, automobile hijackings, and sexual assaults that had beset Ras Beirut within days of their arrival.

Because of the militia’s strained relations with the neighboring militias, particularly the Progressive Socialists and the Murabitoun, the Fursan were highly nervous about their perimeter security from the outset. Accordingly, their sentries were a uniformly ill-tempered bunch. To keep pedestrians on rue Bliss from peering past the chest-high wall that overlooked their encampment, Fursan troops manned sentry posts at one-hundred-meter intervals all the way from the Minara lighthouse down to the Corniche. That the residents of at least four multistory apartment buildings and a dozen or more villas already enjoyed full view of their campsite from the ridge overlooking the soccer field seemed to make no difference to the sentries. They would let nobody come near the wall.

Although Prosser generally took a different route every day for his morning run, more often than not he ran past the lighthouse and the tennis club to reach the Corniche. As he did so today, he skirted the edge of the Fursan’s wall until he approached the first red-uniformed sentry. When the militiaman gestured for him to step off the sidewalk into the street, Prosser pretended not to notice. Drawing abreast of the guard, he smiled and wished him a good morning in Arabic. In return the guard offered a menacing snarl and waved the muzzle of his rifle—first at Prosser’s feet and then toward the center of the street—while barking “Down! Down!” in Syrian-accented Arabic.

Prosser ignored the command and continued smiling until he made it past the guard post. He had gone no farther than ten paces when he heard the unmistakable metallic clack of a rifle’s bolt being pulled back and released to chamber a round. Prosser felt the hair stand up on the back of his neck and immediately sidestepped off the curb and into the street, just as the sentry had demanded. Without breaking his stride, he continued to run along the curb past the second sentry—a swarthy, heavy-set hoodlum with sinister hooded eyes—who ignored him.

Prosser passed one more guard post before he rounded a curve that put him out of the first guard’s line of sight and then stepped back onto the sidewalk.

“Okay, now shoot, asshole,” Prosser muttered peevishly as he continued down the hill. But no one was close enough to hear him, and the sentry had already won his point.

* * *

Arriving at sea level, Prosser crossed the road and ran along the iron railing that topped the seawall. He continued around the curve at the northwestern tip of Ras Beirut and then went east past the Riviera Hotel. The curbside vendors of coffee and snacks opposite the hotel had already connected the extension cords of their electric appliances to wires they had spliced illegally into the nearest streetlamp and were beginning to attract a steady stream of customers.

Fifty meters ahead, across the street from the PSP militia base, a handful of Druze fighters stood in line to buy breakfast at one of the vans. The neatly groomed militiamen, most of whom were under the age of twenty, jostled one another in typical adolescent horseplay and joked loudly while they waited, rifles slung across their backs.

Neither the soldiers nor Prosser noticed a young man dressed in freshly pressed blue jeans and a white polo shirt sitting nearby on the iron railing of the seawall and sipping tea from a white foam cup. Although the man was the same age as the militiamen, his eyes held the light of superior intelligence, and had Prosser seen him, he would have guessed him to be an AUB student on his way to class. The youth watched Prosser pass in front of the British embassy; then he casually tossed his cup over the seawall and consulted his watch. Jumping down from the iron rail, he pulled a small spiral notebook from his rear trouser pocket, jotted down the date and time, and then drew a rough map showing the exact route that the runner had taken that morning.

The young man actually had been an AUB student at one time, having enrolled as a freshman in 1978. Student politics, however, led him to neglect his course work, and to his parents’ dismay he had failed his final examinations. During the following autumn he transferred to Beirut’s Arab University, where political activities played a dominant role in campus life and where academic standards were anything but rigorous. The close proximity of the campus to the main offices of the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Lebanese Progressive National Movement facilitated his acquaintance with some of Beirut’s most celebrated radicals. The youth’s first official act as a registered student was to join the General Union of Palestinian Students. Before long he found himself being introduced to officials of the Palestinian guerrilla organizations who urged him repeatedly to deepen his commitment to the union.

In the winter of 1980, following a campus meeting of the General Union, a Palestinian using the nom de guerre Colonel Hisham appeared before the students representing a guerrilla group called the Eagles of the Revolution. He said that the Eagles needed clever and dedicated cadres to carry out special assignments against the enemies of the Palestinian and Arab peoples and asked whether the students were prepared to act on their principles.