Dynamite Fishermen (3 page)

Like Prosser, Landers was in his early thirties, a veteran of two previous tours abroad, and a volunteer for duty in Lebanon. The two men had become friends nearly four years earlier when both began Arabic-language training at the Foreign Service Institute in Washington. For ten months, six hours a day, Landers, Prosser, and four other diplomats languished in a drab U.S. State Department annex across the Potomac from Georgetown University, practicing an endless series of dialogues in Levantine Arabic about bargaining for fruits and vegetables, registering automobiles, and opening checking accounts. While Prosser went on to spend another ten months at the State Department’s language school in Tunis, reading decade-old Arabic news stories and listening to tapes of Arabic radio broadcasts about the United Nations and the Nonaligned Movement, Landers was assigned to staff a visa window at the U.S. consulate in Alexandria, Egypt.

Landers and Prosser were both large men, one or two inches above six feet and each having the bone structure and musculature of a wrestler or linebacker. Unlike his colleague, however, Landers had long given up strenuous exercise and now possessed the sagging paunch and jowls of an athlete gone to seed. On most evenings he could be found dining, drinking, and chasing air hostesses in the company of his regular Lebanese and European drinking companions at one of Beirut’s many surviving nightspots.

Prosser, on the other hand, rarely joined the group, even on the rare nights when he was not working. Harry had once said that Prosser was not at all the sort he would have picked out as a spy. The Agency officers he had met in Washington and Cairo were generally ex-military types who had attended state colleges and dressed in polyester leisure suits, looking more like life insurance salesmen than the diplomats they pretended to be. During the consular training Landers had undergone before embarking for Egypt, the Agency men taking the course were always the ones who sat in the back reading newspapers and who spent the lunch hour at topless bars on Arlington’s Wilson Boulevard. Most of them put in the minimum effort necessary to get by in the course without disgracing themselves.

To Landers’s way of thinking, Prosser had always seemed out of place in Beirut, too much the clean-cut Midwestern boy to lurk with cloak-and-dagger in cobbled alleys and covered bazaars. At diplomatic functions Prosser invariably appeared punctually in a dark Brooks Brothers suit, observed protocol to the letter, and scrupulously sought out wallflowers for conversation. To Landers this seemed to demonstrate his friend’s team spirit and adherence to his State Department cover. To Prosser it was merely the sort of bottom-fishing that junior case officers all over the world were expected to practice.

Landers had not been surprised when he learned from an Agency man who had served with him in Alexandria that Prosser’s first tour of duty, in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, had been anything but successful. Though by all accounts a gifted linguist, skilled reporter, and perceptive student of Saudi political and military affairs, Prosser had failed miserably at the intelligence officer’s essential task, which was to recruit new spies. Whether the Saudis were too wealthy to be tempted by money, too disgruntled with U.S. support for Israel to serve American foreign policy, or too agile to be caught in Prosser’s net, not a single Saudi had been induced by Prosser to sell the kingdom’s secrets to Uncle Sam. Few in Jeddah Station had expected him to see a second overseas posting. He would be recalled to Headquarters, assigned to a country desk, and put on the shelf.

As it happened, there had been an immediate opening for a junior Arabist in Beirut, and Prosser was the only candidate available. Now, barely a year after his arrival in Lebanon, Prosser’s star was on the rise. Because of his fluency in Arabic, he had been given an unusually large number of agents to handle, most of whom spoke no other language than Arabic. As these were the informants who tended to have the best access to hard-to-get intelligence on the Lebanese left, the Palestinian National Movement, and the Syrian army, his reporting soon began receiving higher ratings than that of any other officer in the station. Further, the necessity of attending three or four agent meetings a day in widely scattered locations around the city forced him to venture out from the safety of the embassy at times when few others were inclined to do so, earning him a reputation for dedication to duty and a cool head under fire.

Prosser entered the living room from the foyer, expecting to find scattered clusters of people engaged in typical cocktail party chatter. Instead he found three dozen assorted Europeans, Arabs, and Americans gathered in a circle around a shapely Arab girl performing a spirited belly dance. The guests clapped, stomped their feet, gestured, and sang along with the music, exhorting the woman to perform more and more suggestive movements. In style and technical skill she rivaled many of the professionals Prosser had seen perform in Cairo and Damascus; in youthful beauty she surpassed them all. She wore a cocktail dress rather than a dance costume, and a long silk sash tied across her hips accentuated her movements. She danced tirelessly, moving her long legs and full hips with abandon and clearly relishing the rapt attention she received.

Prosser wrenched his eyes away from her undulating hips long enough to spot Harry Landers on the west balcony, as Wadih had predicted, delivering a comic monologue to a trio of young Lebanese businessmen in suits.

Landers wore a jacket without a tie and gesticulated artfully with an empty pilsner glass in one hand and a cigarette in the other as he built toward his punch line. A momentary silence met its arrival, and then polite and slightly puzzled laughter followed. Landers shrugged off the setback and took Prosser’s approach as an opportunity to make his exit.

“Connie! I was starting to worry about you. Of all nights to be coming back from the East Side, for Christ’s sake. It sounds like they’re rehearsing for World War Three out there.”

Over the music Prosser could make out the rumble of faraway howitzers and crumps of mortar fire closer by. Distant flashes illuminated the night sky like lightning from a storm at sea. He had intended to regale Landers with a blow-by-blow account of his latest trip across the Green Line, but now that the opening was there it somehow didn’t seem worth repeating. Back in the safety of a diplomatic cocktail party, it seemed no more worthy of merit than enduring a lightning strike when taking shelter from a thunderstorm. To boast of it would somehow be immodest and might bring the lightning even closer next time.

“Tonight they pulled a new one,” Prosser said. “They closed the museum crossing and didn’t bother to tell me about it. Just waved me right through. The trouble was, when I arrived on this side the Syrians wanted to send me back.”

“It would have served you right. Not even the Lebs are stupid enough to cross town on a night like this. One of these days we’re going to miss you around here.”

Wadih arrived with a tray of drinks. Prosser took his cocktail and Landers traded his empty pilsner glass for a full one. Both men lifted their glasses in a toast.

A flash illuminated the empty field for an instant, and then a blast rocked the air. Whiskey and vermouth splashed over Prosser’s nose and down his chin. He bent forward to fish his handkerchief from his breast pocket. “Some wedding. I’d like to see what they do for a divorce.”

Landers set down his glass to wipe the beer from his lapels. Across the field, an assault rifle fired another dozen rounds. “That was it,” he replied.

The two Americans laughed as they put away their damp handkerchiefs, but they had barely finished when the gunfire erupted from somewhere within their own building. They turned and watched in astonishment as an Arab youth in his early twenties wearing jeans and a blue polo shirt fired nearly an entire AK-47 magazine at the moon from the balcony of the apartment adjacent to Harry’s. Encouraged by his companions, a second youth in brown desert-camouflage fatigues removed a pistol from his waistband and fired seven shots out over the horizon.

One of the trio to whom Landers had earlier told his joke, a slender Lebanese man of about twenty-five, now broke away from the other two and pushed through the crowd to the railing opposite the rifleman. He called out something that from its tone was clearly a rebuke, although the exact words, delivered in a North Lebanese dialect, were unclear. The gunman across the railing gave a quizzical look over his shoulder and tossed off a similarly indecipherable reply. Four or five seconds passed. Landers’s Lebanese guest spoke again, this time with heavy sarcasm.

The rifleman in the adjacent apartment now took deliberate aim and fired a six-shot burst in the air just wide of Harry’s balcony. A woman shrieked. The handful of guests who had been chatting on the balcony scrambled for cover.

“Now we’re really in for it,” Landers said with a hint of panic. “Can you make out what they’re saying?”

“Only a few of the words,” Prosser replied. “I think our Leb just told your neighbor with the gun to put the thing away before he calls in the Syrian army.”

“What did the other one say?”

“He’s pointing to his pals and saying they
are
the Syrian army.”

“Shit,” Landers muttered. “The old man and his family next door are from Damascus. Maybe they’re not bluffing.”

“Shhh!” Prosser interrupted. He cocked an ear toward the disputants. “No, our Leb isn’t buying it. I think he’s insulting them now...”

At that moment the resourceful caterer Wadih, who had disappeared from the balcony just after the explosion, returned, leading a portly man of forty or forty-five dressed in an expensive, Italian-cut business suit. The self-assured and meticulously groomed newcomer addressed the neighbors in a soothing voice, although neither Prosser nor Landers could hear what the two had said. In a little more than a minute, he had somehow prevailed on the neighbor with the assault rifle to put down his weapon.

As he conversed with them, tensions gradually subsided, and barely five minutes after he appeared, the neighbors retired indoors. His task finished, the elegantly attired peacemaker now turned to the younger Lebanese guest who had first challenged the gun-toting neighbor. He tossed off a few derisive words, as if to dismiss the younger man from his presence, and then turned his back. The younger man, unruffled, spoke a single word in reply. The peacemaker colored and left the balcony without turning around.

The younger Lebanese man, now alone at the railing, turned to reenter the apartment while the other guests, careful to avoid his gaze, made studied efforts to resume their earlier conversations. The fellow was physically unimposing. Standing no more than five foot eight—though his frame appeared to possess a wiry strength—he could not have weighed more than 150 pounds. His face was classically handsome, with a Roman nose, square jaw, and a replica of Errol Flynn’s pencil-thin mustache. His clothes were of fashionable French cut. Prosser glanced at the man’s feet, expecting to see white Italian slip-ons, and was startled to see that on one foot he wore a plaster cast tinted a bright neon green. Having noticed Landers and Prosser staring at him, he changed course to join the two Americans, addressing himself to Landers as if Prosser did not exist.

“Harry, how could you invite a man like Maarouf Zuhayri into your home? Such a man is not fit for decent society. Surely he could not be a friend of yours.”

“I didn’t invite him,” Landers replied calmly. “A guest brought him. But I’m damned happy he came. If he hadn’t been here to calm down the neighbors, I don’t know what the hell I would have done.”

“He did nothing but let them save face,” the young Lebanese man replied indignantly. “I was the one who stopped them.”

“Excuse me, Husayn, but that wasn’t quite how it looked to me,” Landers countered gently. “All you seemed to do was get them hopping mad. Hell, why not let them have their fun? We could have stepped indoors for a while. Hell, gunfire at weddings is as Lebanese as hummus and
baba ghannouj
.”

Husayn’s face flushed and he struggled to retain his composure. “In America, would you permit drunken fools to fire automatic weapons from your apartment building? Do you consider us Lebanese such savages that we should tolerate it?”

When neither American replied, Husayn shrugged and produced a contrite smile. “Forgive me, Harry. Of course, you are right. I am your guest. It was not proper for me to take matters into my own hands without consulting you.”

Landers laid his hand on his guest’s shoulder.“Forget it, Husayn. What do you say we just relax and have a good time, eh? Here, let me introduce you to a friend of mine from the embassy, Conrad Prosser. Con, meet Husayn al Fayyad. Husayn lives in Germany these days, but he’s back in town for a month or two to settle his father’s estate.“

Prosser reached out and took Husayn’s small, almost delicate hand and was surprised at the strength of his grip.

“Con works in the political section at the embassy,” Landers continued. “If you want to complain about guys like Zuhayri, he’s the one to talk to. He’s always interested in hearing what the thugs are up to in this town.”

In fact, Maarouf Zuhayri was one such thug with whom Prosser was already quite familiar. He had heard some months before that the Jaffa-born businessman made a fortune buying used construction machinery and off-quality building materials in Western Europe and was reselling them at an exorbitant profit in Saudi Arabia and Iraq. By most accounts an ostentatious and vainglorious sort, Zuhayri could be found most nights entertaining friends and clients at West Beirut’s most expensive nightspots.

According to his file at Headquarters, the Agency’s interest in him began in the late 1970s when he made the first of many large cash contributions to the Fatah organization, most of which were paid directly to individual Fatah officials for special projects. In practice this meant that whatever portion of the money the officials neglected to pocket for their personal use would be earmarked for special operations and terrorism.