The Levanter (33 page)

He went quickly along the alleyway to his cabin.

Aziz and the other two were already out on the deck and making for the bridge companionway, Aziz in the lead with the automatic. As he started up the companionway there was a sharp crack and I saw him swing around, clutching at the rail.

It was Patsalides firing down from the bridge. He had heard the shot in the saloon and was taking no chances. If the front-fighters had had their machine pistols it might have been a different story, but now they had to take cover by the companionway while the wounded Aziz sniped up at the bridge with the automatic.

I went to Captain Touzani.

Because he had half-turned when he tried to draw the revolver, Ghaled’s bullet had smashed through his left arm and into his side. The blood was spreading on his shirt but more of it seemed to be coming from his arm. With the uninjured one he was still trying to get the revolver out of his pocket.

I got it out for him, but kept hold of it.

He began swearing and tried to sit up. I told him to save his breath and lie still.

Then I went along the alleyway to Ghaled’s cabin.

He had the
Serinette
out of its case and was setting it up on the desk The tape antenna was already extended by the open porthole.

He heard me and turned.

“I told you to go up to the bridge.”

“Comrade Salah,” I said, “nobody can go up to the bridge.”

And then I fired at the
Serinette.

I fired three shots from the revolver.

All were aimed at the music box, the
Serinette.

I then went back to the saloon.

There, for a moment, I didn’t quite know what had happened. When they had gone out to attack the bridge, the front-fighters had left the saloon door wide open. Now there was a blinding blue-white light blazing through it. It was the approaching patrol boat’s searchlight, but when I realized that I paid it no more attention. Touzani was still swearing away. I told him again to save his breath. I heard the engine room telegraph and felt the vibration cease. We were stopping. I went to the walkie-talkie and pressed the transmit button.

“Hadaya, this is Howell. Do you hear me?”

“Yes. Is that a patrol boat attacking you?”

“I don’t know, but we are stopping. I have orders from
Comrade Salah. The operation is cancelled You understand? The operation is cancelled. You are to jettison your deck cargo and return to base. You hear?”

“Why doesn’t Comrade Salah himself speak?”

“He is wounded. But those are his orders. Obey them immediately. You hear?”

“I hear. Is he badly wounded?”

I switched off the set without answering.

If the
Jeble
5
had then headed straight for Tel Aviv she might still have been able to launch a few rockets before she herself came under fire from the patrol boat. Though I didn’t for a moment think that Hadaya was the type to go in for suicide attacks, it was possible that the front-fighters in charge of the rocket-launchers were.

It was better, I thought, for them to believe that they were still answerable to Comrade Salah.

The lieutenant who commanded the Israeli patrol boat was a sharp-eyed, thin-lipped young man with sandy hair and freckles. I met him and his boarding party on the after well-deck. He gave me a formal salute and was very stiff at first. He had been briefed.

“Captain Touzani?”

“Captain Touzani is wounded. My name is Howell.”

“Ah yes, the owner.” His English was correct and only slightly accented. “I must ask you if you have requested assistance from the navy of Israel.”

“Yes, I have.”

“Why, please?”

“We were being hijacked by four passengers. One, the one who shot at and wounded the captain, is dead. Another was himself wounded by the first mate. That man has a gun but I think that he has now fired off all his ammunition. The other two hijackers are still loose but they have no firearms.”

He seemed to relax. “You call them hijackers, sir. Did these passengers attempt to take over the vessel by force?”

They did.”

“And intimidate the captain, compelling him to steer a certain course?”

“Yes, though they didn’t succeed.”

“Whether they succeeded or not is immaterial. By committing these offenses on the open sea these men are pirates, Mr. Howell.”

“Whatever they are I’m glad to see you, Lieutenant.”

But he had already begun snapping out orders in Hebrew.

It took only a few minutes to round up the unwounded front-fighters. Though they had managed to break the padlock on the special compartment door, they were still wrestling with the clip. They submitted sullenly. Meanwhile a trained first-aid man from the patrol boat had been attending to the wounded.

When he had made his report, Patsalides and I conferred with the lieutenant on the bridge.

“The Faysal man’s wound is not serious,” he said. “However, Captain Touzani has a broken arm and at least one broken rib. The bullet is still in him. He should not be moved until we have proper medical assistance. I suggest that you put into Ashdod, where it can be waiting for him.”

“What about the prisoners?”

“A
vessel of amy nation arresting pirates on the open sea, Mr. Howell, is entitled to bring them to trial in the courts of her own country.” He was reciting a learned lesson. “As they have been arrested by an Israeli ship they will go for trial in Israel.”

“Very well.”

“There is one matter about which I was to consult you, Mr. Howell, that of a second ship. We saw what looked like a fishing schooner about a mile away from you and under power, but no second ship.”

“I doubt if it’s of much interest to you now, Lieutenant. The schooner was the second ship, and I’m sure you could easily catch her if you wanted to. But she won’t ask for assistance. You’ll have to stop her and ask for her papers. She’s Syrian, but they’ll be in order. There’ll be no incriminating evidence. That’s overboard by now. I’ll tell your people all about it when I see them. By the way, you had better take the dead man with the live prisoners.”

“Very well, if you wish.”

“He’s down in the ship’s papers as Yassin, but his real name is Salah Ghaled. I’d like him off the ship.”

“Oh.” He looked nonplussed. His briefing hadn’t covered everything; but he recovered quickly and with a grin. “I think the sooner we are in Ashdod the better for everyone, Mr. Howell.”

I could not but agree.

Lewis Prescott

August

Michael Howell should have had better luck.

The crime of piracy on the open sea occupies a special place in international law. It is the one “international” crime that has been precisely defined and that all nations have joined in condemning. Although the penalties for those convicted of it may vary from state to state, the laws on this subject have been accepted by all. Difficulties of interpretation have been rare and usually of a technical nature.

The district court in Ashdod had no difficulty in dealing with the
Amalia Howell
case. The accused were charged only with piracy, and politics were kept out of it. The chief prosecution witnesses were Captain Touzani and First Mate Patsalides. Neither of them in their evidence referred to the PAF; and the defence, whose line was that the prime offender was dead, was naturally careful not to mention it. During the course of the trial one of the defendants, Aziz Faysal, alleged that Mr. Howell had murdered Salah Ghaled, but no evidence was produced to support the allegation. The court concluded that Ghaled had been killed in a general exchange of shots between the crew and the pirates when the latter attempted to take over the vessel.

Mr. Howell himself issued no formal denial of the charge. In the circumstances this was not surprising. By the time the trial took place, so many other, and wilder, charges had been hurled at his head that issuing denials had become for him a somewhat pointless exercise.

Before sailing from Latakia on board the
Amalia Howell
he had been told by Ghaled that a supply of PAF detonators had been lost in Israel. The loss had been described at the time as a “minor mishap”, and, from Ghaled’s point of view, perhaps that was all it was. But for Mr. Howell it was a catastrophe.

What happened in Israel was this:

On June 28 a bus from Haifa bound for Tel Aviv stopped at Nazareth to pick up passengers. These included a party of eight American tourists. Some rearrangement of the contents of the baggage compartment at the back of the bus was necessary in order to make room for the tourists’ bags and cases. In the course of this rearrangement a small but heavy carton which had been put aboard the bus in Haifa, together with other packages for delivery in Tel Aviv, fell to the ground.

A series of explosions followed. They were not big explosions, but there were a lot of them, and then the carton caught fire.

Nobody was injured, and the bus was eventually allowed to proceed. No publicity was given to the incident. The police were naturally interested in finding out who in Haifa had sent the carton and who in Tel Aviv was to have been the recipient. Publicity would have warned both parties. As the carton had been quite badly burned the task of deciphering the writing on the charred labels was taken over by a police laboratory. The results, if any, of the investigation have not so far been announced.

All that is known publicly is what Mr. Robert S. Rankin, of Malibu, California, heard and saw.

He was on a tour of the Holy Land with Mrs. Rankin and they were among the passengers on the bus who joined it at Nazareth. Mr. Rankin is a motion picture executive, and when he and his wife arrived in Rome a few days later they were invited to a dinner party. One of their fellow guests was a roving American gossip columnist. During the evening Mr. Rankin told her about the exploding carton. The columnist, who was short of copy that week, used the story.

Here is Mr. Rankin’s own account of the incident:

“It was the damnedest thing. The guy with the baggage dropped this carton on the ground. Not carelessly, you understand. If it had been a case of Scotch nothing would have been broken. He just gave it a hard jolt. Well, the next moment it was like the Fourth of July. Suddenly, a lot of bangs -
pah - pah - pah!
I thought it was a machine gun at first and yelled to Mrs. Rankin to get down. But no -
pah
-
pah
-
pah!
And there were these bits flying all over the place. Bits! What do you think they were? Flashlight batteries, that’s what! Ordinary flashlight batteries going off like Chinese firecrackers. I picked one of the cases up and kept it. One of those that had gone off, I mean. An army man took the rest away. I kept it as a souvenir and because I thought nobody would believe me otherwise. I mean, flashlight batteries! Of course they weren’t real batteries. Our guide said they had this sort of trouble once in a while. At the airport a month or so back he said they found explosive detonators in some woman’s shoes, hidden in the heels. It’s the Palestinians.”

In Paris two days later, Mr. Rankin was asked by a reporter from a French news magazine if he could see the battery case. The magazine published a photograph of it. The label had been singed, but the Green Circle trademark and the words “Made in Syria” were clearly visible.

The government of Israel tends to assign the responsibility for hostile acts committed by foreign based groups of Palestine guerrillas to each group’s host country, and to determine its reprisal policies accordingly. Smuggling in detonators disguised as flashlight batteries was clearly a hostile act, no matter which guerrilla group was involved.

In Damascus, Dr
.
Hawa hastened to dissociate his ministry from the Green Circle trademark. In his statement he pointed out, quite truthfully, that the Green Circle dry-battery factory was a private enterprise of the Agence Howell, that no government money was involved in its financing, and that Michael Howell, a foreign entrepreneur resident in Syria, had no official standing whatsoever.

On the heels of Dr. Hawa’s statement came the publication of Mr. Howell’s and Miss Malandra’s confessions by Colonel Shikla’s department.

In Damascus they meant to defend themselves by discrediting Michael Howell, and they succeeded. The Arab press, hysterical as ever, tore into him with everything they had.

And they had plenty. Here was this Howell, a rich businessman whose family company had battened for years on poor Arab countries, revealed as an Israeli provocateur and spy. Having joined or having pretended to join the Palestinian liberation cause he had then proceeded to betray it in the vilest way. Worse, he had organized treacherous murder plots against Arabs who refused to be blackmailed by his agents. Nor was blackmail his only source of profit. In his factories he had made illegal arms and sold them to the very
fedayeen
whom he later betrayed. Among his known victims was the Palestinian patriot Salah Ghaled, lured aboard a Howell ship and murdered for Howell’s Zionist masters; though perhaps Ghaled’s fate was merciful when one thought of other Howell victims delivered bound to the Israeli usurper and condemned to rot in the Zionist concentration camps.

To this sort of insensate attack there can be no real defence. The victim can only wait for it to exhaust itself. Mr. Howell’s initial response had been a blank and steadfast denial of all the charges. However, when the European press took up the story, he changed his tactics and began to explain. He would have done better, perhaps, to have stayed with the denials. They at least had been unequivocal. Of the explanations that could not be said.

In August I had occasion to go again to Beirut, where I talked to Frank Edwards about Mr. Howell. He had recently been in Israel and had discussed the case with contacts there. For reasons which seemed to me very sound, the government of Israel had refused to comment publicly on either the “Green Circle Incident” or the Arab charges against Mr. Howell. Frank Edwards’ contacts, however, had been more forthcoming, and he had picked up some intriguing scraps of information. The idea of someone doing a full-length feature on the subject was mooted. Frank Edwards knew Mr. Howell slightly and could set up an interview with him. As I had been the one to interview Ghaled it seemed logical that I should now interview the man who had been accused of murdering him, and write the feature.