Dynamite Fishermen (31 page)

Prosser pulled onto the shoulder of the highway beside a closely spaced row of poplars and waited, with both front windows wide open to detect the sound of gunfire, for more westbound vehicles to pass through. Roughly two minutes later he pulled out behind a battered old Mercedes taxi and came up to speed with it, remaining six or seven car lengths behind it while listening intently through the open windows for the sound of small arms fire.

The highway led through treeless fields dotted with brittle-looking scrub bushes and brownish clumps of tall grass. The charred and rusted shells of bullet-ridden automobiles lay strewn along the shoulder in a belt extending fifty meters or more to the right and left. Beyond them stood isolated houses and shops, long since abandoned by their owners. Now their window frames were stuffed with sandbags, and their walls were so riddled with bullets and shrapnel that they looked like the surface of limestone cliffs that had been eroded by the pounding of heavy surf.

When Prosser had followed the battered Mercedes halfway across the no-man’s-land, dense gray smoke began spewing out of the taxi’s tailpipe and the vehicle lost speed. Casting a sidelong glance as he overtook the taxi, Prosser noticed that its windshield had turned a frosty white, forcing the driver to hold his head out the window as he steered.

More smoke billowed out of the Mercedes’s engine compartment. A moment later the car’s drooping front end began to pitch and buck violently until the ancient vehicle finally veered to the right and rolled into a drainage ditch some three hundred meters short of the Syrian army checkpoint. There it rested, listing severely to port and thereby pinning shut the bottom edge of the driver’s door.

Prosser had no intention of being a Good Samaritan under the circumstances and cruised on toward the safety of the Syrian barricades. There a lanky, red-haired lieutenant, seemingly unaware of what had happened to the taxi, came out from behind his sandbagged sentry box to inspect Prosser’s identification. The flinty-eyed young officer took up the diplomatic identity card without a word and then stepped back. With a silent toss of the head, he summoned Prosser to get out of the Renault and open the trunk.

Following three paces behind, he watched Prosser unlock and open the lid. As he did so, however, four of his men who were mounted on a T-54 tank some twenty meters to the right began to howl with uncontainable laughter. Losing interest in the groceries in Prosser’s trunk, the lieutenant bade Prosser close the lid while he turned around to see what had so amused the men.

In the distance the old taxi driver emerged headfirst from the window on the passenger side of the taxi and from there onto its hood to curse and shake his fist at an invisible assailant. He stomped his foot through the already shattered windshield, kicked away the glass from the driver’s side, and then wheeled around again to curse the distant soldiers, alternately raising his clenched fist over his head and pointing north into the no-man’s-land. His fury steadily mounting, he grasped the breast of his shirt in both hands and tore it open at the neck as if to dare the unseen sniper to shoot at him again. He retained that defiant posture for what seemed a count of ten before climbing down, walking around to the trunk, and retrieving a jack and a spare tire.

One of the soldiers stood on the T-54’s turret, unbuttoned his own camouflage shirt, and mimicked the old man’s movements, even dancing a little jig step before collapsing with laughter.

“Grandfather,” shouted a swarthy sergeant standing atop a sandbagged wall. “You must give them a better place to aim—something worth shooting at.” He cupped his hands around his crotch and did a grotesque crab step.

“
Yaa
, Uncle, leave the car behind; it’s ours now,” heckled a pimply-faced teenage private.

“Uncle, Uncle, you’re facing the wrong way—turn around,” roared a third. “Let the Phalangists have a chance at you!”

The old man seemed to ignore the shouts, if he heard them at all, and set to work jacking up the side of the car that was out of the ditch.

The lieutenant called out to a stocky corporal inside the sentry bunker behind him. “
Yaa
, Bilal, come with me; we must bring the old man here.” He unslung his assault rifle and climbed into the seat next to Prosser while the corporal got in behind him. “
Yalla.
We go,” he ordered Prosser, pointing over his shoulder at the disabled taxi. “Drive quickly.”

For an instant Prosser considered refusing the command but thought better of it when he remembered that he was carrying secret documents given to him by Maroun and the other agent he had met that morning on the East Side. He could ill afford being subjected to a body search. “As you wish,” he replied, turning around and starting back across the no-man’s-land.

“That uncle…he is a brave old donkey,” the corporal observed with grudging respect after a long silence.

“But a very stupid one,” replied the red-haired officer. “He does not respect his own life.”

Prosser made a U-turn just beyond the taxi, as instructed, and braked abruptly as they pulled even with the old Lebanese man. The corporal swung open the door and ordered the man to get in.

“I cannot,” the white-haired taxi driver insisted. “I must repair the car and have it in Ouzai in an hour, or I will be missed.”

“Leave the taxi. It is finished,
khalas
. You may go on to Ouzai when we have finished our report.”

“But that will be too late! I must complete the repairs without delay and go on to Ouzai!”

The corporal fired a round into the dirt near the old man’s feet. “
Yalla
, Uncle, come with us at once, or the next bullet will be through your foot.”

The old man started to protest again, but when he saw the rifle muzzle lowered once more, he reluctantly took a place in the backseat beside the corporal. Once the door slammed shut, Prosser let out the clutch and raced back toward the Syrian barricades.

“The taxi stays here,” the lieutenant declared in an uncompromising voice. “When we have finished our questioning, then you may go wherever you like.”

The old Lebanese man said nothing but seemed no less agitated than before. He mumbled to himself as if working out some kind of fallback plan.

The Renault pulled up alongside the sentry bunker a second time to let out the two Syrians and their charge. “You may go now,” the officer told Prosser with a brusque nod as he handed him back his identity card.

But before Prosser could react, he heard a roar followed by a gigantic thunderclap from somewhere behind them. Then he turned and saw one of the soldiers on the T-54 pointing a rocket-propelled grenade launcher at the disabled taxi. The soldiers, bored to distraction by their monotonous duties, appeared to have felt the need for some impromptu target practice and had found the old taxi too tempting a target to ignore.

Prosser spotted another soldier kneeling behind a low wall and aiming a second grenade launcher with the aid of a sandbag bench rest. The soldier fired.

No one was prepared for what happened when the 150-gram high-explosive warhead detonated the 55 kilograms of explosives concealed in artificial recesses throughout the automobile. The soldiers scrambled for cover from the falling dirt and debris as a lopsided mushroom cloud rose high over the crater where the taxi had been.

The old Lebanese, who had dropped to his knees in horror when the first grenade was launched, toppled over from the vicious kick the stocky corporal aimed at the small of his back. As the corporal drew back his foot for a second kick, the lieutenant’s voice rang out. “Stop it, you fool! We need him alive for questioning. Fetch a rope and bind his hands and feet.” Then the lieutenant remembered that Prosser was still among them.

“Nice shooting,” Prosser told him. “That thing packs one hell of a punch.”

“
Yalla
, go now,” he barked, dismissing Prosser with an angry wave of the hand. “Go now, and praise Allah that the car bomb sent by those murdering Phalangist sons of whores did not kill the lot of us.”

Chapter 23

The elevator door opened and Prosser emerged onto the landing at the head of the stairway serving the embassy’s west wing. Opposite him was a flimsy plywood door painted a dreary shade of pale green rarely seen outside of government-owned buildings. He punched a five-digit combination onto the circular face of the Simplex lock and entered. At the end of a corridor some ten meters long were two more doors: one massive door of gray steel spanning the entire height and width of the corridor, and beyond it a smaller, white-painted hardwood door. The steel door was already open. Prosser punched in the combination to the white door, twisted the metal latch, and entered the embassy’s telecommunications unit.

He proceeded directly to a bank of safes along the right wall of the outer office where the communicators kept their desks and where he and the chief of station usually met at the opening of business to sort through the morning’s incoming cable traffic. On most evenings between seven and eight, the two of them returned to the communications center to receive the cables dispatched from Headquarters at the start of Washington’s business day, seven time zones away.

It was now half past six, and Prosser dropped his outgoing draft messages in the wire basket on the centermost safe for Pirelli’s review and signature. Then he dialed the combination of the safe immediately to his left, opened the top drawer, and dropped in an armload of manila folders.

The files contained unanswered incoming cables from the preceding few days, drafts of unfinished outgoing cables, and copies of old cables that he kept as references. The armload of paper comprised the sum of the classified material that Prosser was permitted to retain from day to day. Because of the ever present risk that the embassy might suddenly be shelled or besieged, it was a strict rule within the station that whenever an officer was not inside the embassy, his files had to be stored upstairs in the vault.

Prosser had not seen Pirelli for five days, having returned the previous night from a long weekend in Cyprus to debrief a Syrian army captain who had walked into the U.S. embassy in Nicosia on Friday. The captain had said he was assigned to Syrian army headquarters in Shtaura and was in Cyprus on a weekend courier run. Because he was of relatively junior rank and had been in Shtaura only since April, his information on Syrian activities in Lebanon included little that was new to the station and nothing at all about Colonel Hisham or the Eagles of the Revolution. Nonetheless, Prosser believed the young captain to be a bona fide volunteer and was eager to discuss with Pirelli how the station might use him to learn about Syrian sponsorship of Lebanese-based terrorists.

Prosser entered the inner office where the station’s communicators usually worked when not sending and receiving encrypted messages. Seeing no one there, he presumed that the communicators were inside the self-contained module where their top-secret telecommunications and cryptographic equipment was installed. He returned to the bank of safes in the outer office, closed the door to his own safe, and headed for the door.

Just as he reached for the latch, the door opened and Ed Pirelli entered, carrying his own stack of manila folders.

“Welcome back, Con,” Pirelli greeted him. “Your walk-in looks like the genuine article. Headquarters still seems to harbor a few doubts, but don’t let that bother you. There will always be old women back there who can’t do anything but piss and moan and wring their hands when a new agent falls in our laps. A couple of meetings from now, it will be clear enough whether or not he has the access he says he has.”

“It would have been a lot tidier if he had brought some documents with him,” Prosser replied, “but I can’t blame him for not taking the risk. At a minimum, though, he seems to know the key players at Shtaura headquarters. Once he settles into his job there, he’s bound to pick up enough to earn his keep.”

“I would think so,” Pirelli agreed. “After another session or two in Nicosia, we can decide whether we want to handle him here in Beirut. We could certainly use an extra reporter on terrorism, now that Abu Khalil has dropped out of sight. It’s too bad about Khalil. He was a conniving son of a bitch, and damned expensive, but now and then he brought in some remarkable reporting.”

Prosser’s expression became one of resignation. “My last scheduled backup meeting with him is tomorrow night. If he doesn’t show up, I’m afraid all I can do is wait for his signal. Unfortunately, he doesn’t have a phone, and it’s not as if I can saunter into South Beirut and appear on his doorstep.”

“His name still hasn’t appeared on any casualty list?”

Prosser shook his head. “I’ve combed the PLO news releases, the fedayeen newspapers, and the DFLP’s house organs, but I haven’t come up with anything that looks like him. The DFLP has a number of men missing in the Israeli air raid on Fakhani, but they haven’t published a list. I’m beginning to wonder if it wasn’t the air raid.”

“Didn’t your bomb maker Colonel Hisham disappear at about the same time? Was his name on any of the casualty lists?”

Prosser hesitated for an instant and felt his face flush. No one had heard anything about the colonel in the two months since Abu Khalil had offered to contact him. Over the ensuing weeks, Prosser’s thoughts had turned again and again to that contact. In his reporting he had deliberately omitted mentioning Abu Khalil’s plan to seek out Colonel Hisham—and to kill him, if circumstances warranted it—in exchange for a sizable bonus.