Dynamite Fishermen (27 page)

The colonel leaned back and gazed straight into Abu Khalil’s eyes before speaking. “It is a pleasure to see you again so soon, Abu Khalil. Please excuse me if I sounded surprised when you called. It is just that I receive so few visitors when I am in Beirut.”

“On the contrary, we beg your pardon for interrupting your work,” Abu Khalil replied. “We would not have come here, except that it seemed a more suitable place to speak frankly with you than at my cousin’s house.”

“You need not apologize, Abu Khalil,” the colonel answered with an easy laugh. “You made the correct choice. In what way can I assist you and the lieutenant?”

“It is a somewhat delicate matter,” Abu Khalil began. “For some months we and others in the Democratic Front have become disturbed by the incorrect line taken by the the group’s leadership. It has aligned itself too closely with Fatah and Yasir Arafat and has taken far too lenient a stance toward the Phalange and the Lebanese authorities. At the same time, these leaders have not paid proper attention to the correct line being pursued by Syria. Frankly speaking, we no longer feel completely at home in such an organization.”

“I see,” the colonel acknowledged with a noncommittal nod. “What particular positions have led you to this conclusion?”

“One need not search far for them. There is the cease-fire with the Zionists in the south, and the prohibition against foreign operations against the Zionists and their Western sponsors, and the secret cooperation with the Phalange on security matters, and now the constant hints at compromising our national rights to win favor with the Americans. There is no other word for it than treason, and the armed struggle must reject such treachery.”

“I must agree with you, of course, Abu Khalil. Still, who is capable of carrying forward the armed struggle if Arafat and his kind do not? Who else has their material resources and their prestige before world opinion?”

“You are playing with me, I think, Colonel,” Abu Khalil replied. “Surely you know that Syria is willing to support certain elements who have are capable of carrying out, shall we say, direct action against our common enemies. That is why I chose to speak to you.”

“So you want to speak to someone in Damascus who might give you similar support?”

“Not at all. I have come to offer you my support and that of the cadres who stand with me.”

The colonel drew back in his chair and straightened up. “I am honored by your offer, Abu Khalil. But as you may know, I am a specialist, and I have need for only a few men with special skills.”

“We have those skills. That is why I have brought Lieutenant Fakhri; he attended university for two years and studied demolitions in East Germany for six months last year. He has already trained many commandos for missions into the occupied territories. I have others like him.”

“Such skills might indeed be useful. But there is something I do not understand, Abu Khalil. Why would a man like you, after so many years in command of a fighting unit for the Democratic Front, give up that command to carry out special operations in the pay of the Syrians? Especially a man who fought in the mountains in 1976 to keep the Syrian army out of Lebanon?”

“For me the liberation of the occupied homeland has always come before all else,” Abu Khalil replied. “Everything I have done over these last years has been aimed at a single goal. Now that the leaders of the Democratic Front no longer seem to share this goal, I must seek other like-minded comrades. My guiding purpose remains the defeat of the Zionists and those who do their work, whether it be the Phalangists or the Americans.”

Colonel Hisham cocked an eyebrow. “The Americans? Why should they concern you? What have we ever gained by attacking American targets?”

“I do not suggest for a moment striking the Americans to the same extent as we do the Zionists. Only in Lebanon, where they aid the Phalange at every step, building up Bashir Gemayel to be the next dictator of the Lebanese state and conspiring against us with the central government. Everyone knows that Beirut is the center for American intelligence in the region. We must teach them to tread more carefully here.”

“And how would you propose to do it?”

“That is not for me to say. I expect that you will have some projects in mind. American officials roam freely about the city; they are not so difficult to find.”

“And so it is for this that you offer your help?” There was a note of final judgment in the colonel’s voice that alarmed Abu Khalil.

Colonel Hisham picked up the phone, and Abu Khalil cast a meaningful glance at Lieutenant Fakhri. Suddenly the colonel put down the receiver and gave a smile that did not look genuine. “The tea is late, as usual,” he said, “and Abu Atef’s line is not working. Excuse me, I will call for him down the hall.” He walked in carefully measured steps toward the door.

No sooner did Lieutenant Fakhri’s hand move toward his belt than Colonel Hisham bolted for the door. He was outside before the younger man could draw his Tokarev pistol and take aim. As Abu Khalil drew his own Colt automatic, he heard the colonel shouting for the guards.

“Kill him,” Abu Khalil ordered, expecting the guards to come into view at any moment with their assault rifles blazing on full automatic.

The lieutenant fired twice. Colonel Hisham pitched over sideways on the second shot; then he tried to rise and keep going until a third and fourth shot brought him down for good.

But Lieutenant Fakhri did not fire the second pair of shots fast enough to allow for a safe retreat back into the office. Five slugs from a burst of automatic fire let off by the first Gazan penetrated the lieutenant’s heart and lungs and left him dead before his knees hit the floor. Abu Khalil took advantage of that long burst of fire to put a .45-caliber slug through the first Gazan’s eye socket and to drop the second guard with a bullet through the lower spine before the latter squeezed off his first and only round.

Abu Khalil took a final look at the four fallen men and reentered the office, bolting the door behind him and walking with unhurried coolness to the desk. There he removed the maps from under the fan, folded them three times, and slipped them under his waistband. He searched the drawers as well, but found nothing worth taking—although he noted with interest the colonel’s nickel-plated Smith & Wesson revolver in the drawer by the telephone. On second thought he slipped it into his waistband as well.

With his hearing momentarily impaired from the gunplay, Abu Khalil might not have realized that reinforcements had already arrived, had it not been for a pistol shot outside the door that gave away their presence. He stepped out onto the balcony, sized up the situation, and considered his options: flee immediately and risk being shot in the back, or wait to ambush the reinforcements as they burst in. He moved away from the glass balcony door and took up position behind the exterior wall, his eyes and forehead barely protruding above the sill of the casement window.

A string of eight or nine shots from an assault rifle shattered the door and door frame where the lock and deadbolt had been. The door swung open and slammed against the rear wall. Then there was stillness.

Abu Khalil remained motionless at the window. Moments later another burst of gunfire rang out in the corridor. Suddenly the Egyptian tea boy leapt through the doorway, raking the wall above the desk with automatic fire and knocking the electric fan off the desk like a tenpin. He never saw Abu Khalil’s face in the window, and probably never felt the pair of .45-caliber slugs that ripped through his chest on either side of his heart.

Abu Khalil ejected the nearly empty magazine from his pistol and inserted a fresh one from his trouser pocket before replacing the pistol in his waistband. Then he swung his leg over the balcony railing and lowered himself so that his feet were no more than two meters above the ground. He landed awkwardly on his heels and fell backward, but arose unharmed and began running as quickly as he could out through the courtyard.

When Abu Khalil emerged onto rue Tariq el Jedide, he was surprised to find the usually crowded streets nearly deserted. Through the roaring and buzzing in his damaged ears, he picked out the sounds of air raid sirens amid the clamor of car horns and distant antiaircraft fire and recognized immediately that an Israeli air strike was under way.

He set out at a brisk trot down the middle of the street toward the spot where he had left his Toyota. But before he could reach it, the shock wave of an Israeli five-hundred-pound bomb falling little more than a block away upset his balance and sent him sprawling to the pavement. Estimating that he was probably in little danger of being pursued further by Colonel Hisham’s men, he stopped running and ducked into the empty lobby of a movie house that had just opened for the matinee.

Under normal circumstances, even in Beirut, Abu Khalil’s choice of sanctuary would have served him well, since not even the largest projectiles used in the city’s artillery duels were powerful enough to bring down an apartment block the size of the one where he had now taken refuge. That morning, however, Abu Khalil had not reckoned with American-made “smart bombs,” the sophisticated laser-guided projectiles that were specifically designed to penetrate several layers of concrete so that any explosive ordnance located inside the target building would be detonated in sympathy with the bomb’s blast.

Fortune was also not with Abu Khalil when he chose this particular building, for in the basement beneath where he stood were two hundred cases of mortar shells, more than a hundred cases of rocket-propelled grenades, some fifty cases of antipersonnel mines and a half million rounds of small arms ammunition, all property of his own Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine. The television-guided smart bomb entered the building through the western wall of a second-story apartment, crashed through the lobby where Abu Khalil had taken shelter, and came to rest in the basement, where it detonated. Abu Khalil barely had time to see the ceiling crashing down on his head before his own organization’s weapons erupted under his feet and buried him beneath hundreds of tons of bricks and concrete.

* * *

Some twenty minutes after Conrad Prosser cleared the Galerie Semaan crossing and turned north along the coastal road, workers of the Lebanese Civil Defense Forces, the Palestine Red Crescent, and a variety of local militia groups worked frantically to locate survivors underneath the rubble left by the air strike. The air was thick with the dust of crushed concrete and the acrid smoke of a thousand small fires. The mangled hulks of burned-out cars still smoldered in the streets. Victims of the raid wandered through the impact area in a state of physical and mental shock, searching for relatives, friends, coworkers, and neighbors.

One of the columns of smoke Prosser had noticed while on the road past the Sabra camp rose from the remains of an apartment building and cinema located near rue Tariq el Jedide. Civil defense workers ignored this building because its eight stories had collapsed like an accordian, leaving a pile of debris that was now compressed to less than two stories in height. The workers presumed, based on long experience, that all the building’s inhabitants had either met instant death or been buried without hope of rescue. Prosser slowed down to watch the smoke billow skyward, gave an involuntary shudder, and drove on.

Chapter 21

Tuesday, Eight Weeks Later

The long shadows of early morning grew shorter in the dusty heat of Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley. The heat caused tiny beads of perspiration to form on the faces of the three mechanics as they labored to replace the door panels, fuel tank, and rear bulkhead of the twenty-year-old Mercedes. The three men, all Palestinians in their middle twenties who had trained as automobile mechanics in the Syrian army, worked with silent efficiency under the powerful floodlights that shone on them from all sides. Each was an expert in their common specialty, and each was capable of finding—or concealing—practically any amount of contraband in practically any model of Mercedes, BMW, Volvo, or Peugeot to be found on Middle Eastern roadways.

Their workshop was an abandoned cinder-block outbuilding no larger than a two-car garage nestled in the hills overlooking the market town of Shtaura, seat of the Syrian army’s headquarters in Lebanon. Since the outbuilding was not wired for electricity, a pair of portable gasoline-powered generators flanking its entrance provided the necessary current for the lights and power tools the men used in their work. The outbuilding had been selected because, apart from having a roof and swinging doors that still functioned, it stood far from the main highway amid a stand of evergreens that effectively shielded it from ground or aerial reconnaissance. To guard against intruders, a cordon of infantrymen from Saiqa, Syria’s controlled Palestinian militia, surrounded the building at a discreet distance of two hundred meters.

Some sixty meters away from where the mechanics worked, a wizened little man with alert blue eyes, two days’ growth of gray whiskers, and an expression of inexpressible sadness in his deeply lined face sat cross-legged and alone on the dirt floor of a century-old Lebanese farmhouse. As the house had been partially demolished by artillery fire during the advance of Syrian troops in 1976 and no longer possessed a roof, the little man sat with his back to the building’s eastern wall to avoid the direct rays of the sun. Despite his apparent discomfort, he made no attempt to leave.

Outside the doorway a pair of elite-unit commandos no older than twenty hunched forward on folding metal chairs listening to a Radio Damascus news broadcast. Their distinctive maroon-and-green camouflage uniforms, normally worn only by members of the Syrian Special Forces or Defense Companies, bore no insignia.