“What if a new man didn’t know your name?” Murdock asked.
“Then the guard would use his cell phone to check.”
They went past two doors and up to the third one, which had two men standing in front of it.
Murdock checked the alley — not more than fifteen feet wide, not made for cars, none present, the buildings sagging and faded and some leaning out over the street. There was a general odor of decay, rot, and dirt.
They stopped at the front of the building with the two guards. Captain Sartan stepped forward and said a few words to the guards, who both had silenced Uzis and wore clean clothes but no uniforms. One opened a door and motioned them inside.
Once past the door, Murdock was swept up in an Oriental fantasy. The air smelled of flowers, and he saw a small waterfall to his right with tropical flowers blooming in and around it. The room was large, with a vaulted ceiling, draperies on the walls, and a thick carpet under their feet.
Captain Sartan smiled as he saw the looks of surprise on the SEAL faces. Two young women in harem costumes of frilly net pantaloons and sequined tops met them and waved them forward past a woman playing a small harp and another playing a plaintive Russian balalaika. Now the walls held oil paintings that could have been old-master originals. At the end of the room a door stood open a foot, with a huge man standing guard. He was dressed like a Moorish eunuch, complete with bare chest, red sash, pantaloons, boots, and a deadly-looking two-foot curved sword. His arms were crossed. When he saw Captain Sartan, he bowed and stepped aside. The door swung open and inside, the room was starkly futuristic, with metal walls, a thin carpet on the floor, ranks of computer terminals and video screens around one wall. On the other side sat a man behind a free-form desk of highly polished cherry wood.
He stood, grinned, and held out both arms. Sartan stepped forward for the hug and kisses on both cheeks.
Murdock could still see the wind and sun deeply ingrained in the old fisherman’s face. He was broad and thick, with no neck at all, with a bull head hacked from a chunk of granite that had stringy gray hair combed over the top and down one side.
“Sartan, you old bastard. Where have you been? Heard you tried to sell your boat. Does that relic still run?”
“Better than that yacht of yours, Marnin, you son of a cockroach’s mother. How have you been? You’re losing weight. Too many harem girls at the same time. I keep telling you that no man can handle more than two at a time and keep them both happy.”
“How is my first love Jemina? I always told her she was too good for you. You kept her pregnant and barefoot and now she’s going to college.”
“What can a man do?” Sartan turned and waved at the SEALs. “My good friend, these are special men. They are called the masters of the sea, the avenging gods that come out of the deep; they are three of the famous United States Navy SEALs.”
Marnin’s eyes widened and then snapped. “Yes, yes. I saw a demonstration once in the harbor. Impressive. Men’s men. Can I entertain you with men’s women?”
“Not this time, you old coot. We’re here on business.”
“Fishing. Good. I can now afford to buy you a trawler and you can fish off Ethiopia just like the swells in the high-rent district do. I can have it here next week, you outfit it locally, and I’ll pick up the tab and you can be off fishing in a month or so.”
“You’re not buying me a damned trawler. I told you that before. We have more important problems.” Captain Sartan reminded him about the floating booby traps. “We want to find out who makes them, who imports them, who supplies them, who buys them, and who dumps them in the surf.”
“Take about ten minutes. Old friend, you don’t want much.” He flicked an unseen spot off the shoulder of his thousand-dollar suit, and then nodded. “These hooligan schelmps. Their bombs killed one of my men. They have a complicated operation.”
“You know about it?”
“Just enough to stay away. They kill people for sport.”
“Arabs?”
“What other schelmps would do this to women and children out playing in the water and on the sand?” His face worked, and a tear slid out of one eye that he slashed at with one hand.
“Can you give us a name, a starting place?”
“More like an ending. I know for sure that it is that dog of a fishing boat captain Gabi Zekharyah who does the dropping. He would sell his own mother into a whorehouse for a hundred shekels.”
“You’re positive?”
“A thousand percent. But if you hit him first, the rest of the operation will fall back and set up somewhere else.”
“A starting place?”
“International Food and Novelties. We have citizens from a hundred and twelve different countries in Israel. Many of them yearn for foods and desserts and familiar items from their homelands. This outfit imports the stuff from all over the world.”
“Including China and North Korea?”
“Yes. A good Jewish business, run by an honest and fair man. But he has a traitor in his midst and he doesn’t know it. We’re not sure who it is. I didn’t look beyond there. The bombings slacked off and I had other vital concerns.”
“The inside man is an Arab?”
“As far as we know. He sets up the buys in China. When they arrive with a special notice, he sets them aside for his specific customer and takes payment, and enters the cash into the company books so nothing is lost and the company even makes a profit on the sale. I lost one man trying to get farther. He had been watching the firm for a week, and noted certain non-employees coming and going from the back door. He phoned me one night about one o’clock and said he would have good news for me in the morning. We found his body floating in the harbor the next afternoon.”
A voice sounded from one of the computers. Marnin stood at once, went to it, and sat down and typed in a few words. He came back and smiled. “Business,” he said. “When one of my target stocks drops to a certain price during trading, I put in a buy order on-line. Beats the hell out of a stock broker.”
He looked at the SEALs. “I know you boys are good, but be damn careful around that International Food place.”
He stood. “Now, excuse my bad manners. I have guests. How about something to drink, to eat? Anything? What can I bring you?”
“Actually, we should be getting to work, some backgrounding on this International Food firm,” Murdock said. “We definitely do not want to wind up floating in the bay.”
“I like this boy,” Marnin said. He pointed at someone across the room, and a moment later a man rolled a small cart across the room. On top was a jeweler’s black velvet cloth with four square jewelry boxes setting on it.
He handed one to each of the men. “Nothing for you, but something for that special woman at home. With my compliments. If there is any enforcing kind of work you need done along the lines you’ve been talking about, please come and see me.” He shook each man’s hand and led them toward the door.
“Marnin, you old fish scaler,” Captain Sartan said. “You take care of yourself.”
The man who controlled half the crime in Tel Aviv smiled. “Now you can be sure of that.”
Outside the front door, one of the guards walked them the fifty feet to the mouth of the alley and the more civilized street. Then he returned to his post.
“Now there is the kind of friend to have,” Murdock said. “Can we trust what he said about the foreign food importer?”
“We can trust him with our lives,” Sartan said.
Lam lifted his brows. “So if what he says is true, we will be trusting him with our lives. Let’s get started.”
29
To get started, the SEALs and Captain Sartan drove past the big food-importing firm.
“Looks like any other business,” Lam said. “Offices, big loading dock for a dozen trucks at once, and their name plastered on everything you can see.”
“How can we penetrate a big outfit like that when we’re looking for one individual?” Jayb
ird asked.
“Might not be that hard if we had time,” Murdock said. “But we’d need cooperation from the owner. The man we want has to be one of the managers, or at least somebody who puts in orders to foreign markets.”
“So looks like we work up the food chain here,” Jaybird said. “We know the delivery outfit, and we know the one getting the goods. How many kinds of foreign foods would a fishing boat order anyway?”
“When do the fishing boats get orders brought to them?” Murdock asked.
Captain Sartan shrugged. “Most of them get supplied each morning; then they don’t worry about refrigeration. Some boats on the other end of the scale get goods for a week at a time.”
“So could be an 0300 delivery, three A.M.?” Murdock asked.
“That’s when mine used to come. I seldom had anything delivered from International Food and Novelties.”
“So it looks like that’s our next hot appointment,” Lam said. “Only, how do we stake out the boat and not look out of place?”
“I’ve seen a few street people, bums and winos, sleeping it off on the sidewalks,” Jaybird said. “You have many of them around town?”
“Too many. They get to be a real problem.”
“Good, we can be three winos deep in our cups and sleeping on the sidewalk.”
The SEALs agreed.
“You’ll be wanting to carry firearms?” Sartan asked.
“I’m almost never without one,” Jaybird said.
“We’ll need some protection and enforcement ability,” Murdock said.
“Better have your colonel talk to the police and get yourselves deputized, or at least get gun permits.”
“Should be no problem,” Murdock said. “Do any of the fishing boats get in early?”
“Three or four of them. They have contracts to supply hotels and restaurants with the fresh fish catch of the day. If it isn’t caught that day, they can’t advertise it that way, and the Health Administrator watches them like a hungry lion in a herd of African antelope.”
“I’d like to walk past the boats, maybe past where Zekharyah docks, again, just to get the feel of the place,” Murdock said.
They did. The fishing dock here was on a mole, a triangular-shaped wharf that extended out into the bay at a forty-five-degree angle, then took a turn to the left parallel with the shore, and then another forty-five-degree angle coming back toward the shore pier. It gave access to both sides of the wide dock for moorage and discharge and onboarding cargo via small flatbed electric trucks that plied the pier continuously. Zekharyah’s boat, the Gimbra II, had its dockage midway in the third leg. Only one boat on that leg was at its berth unloading the early morning catch.
Sartan knew the captain and the crew. He told them some friends of his wife were in town and he was giving them the ten-shekel tour. They continued to the end of the mole, and watched the boats coming and going in the harbor.
“About the tides,” Sartan said. “They will help boost the floaters highest on the sand, but it’s the waves, the breakers, that really push the items through the surf and into shore.”
“Then the bombs would have to be dropped near the surf line, or maybe inside the first wave,” Jaybird said.
“Yes, otherwise a north-south current along the coast could pick up a bunch of them and send them a hundred miles down the coast.”
“So the men dropping off the packages of bombs know what they are doing.”
“They’ve had enough practice to get it down to perfection,” Murdock said. “We need to chop off the tail of this snake and work back up to its head.”
“How are we going to stake out this pier?” Captain Sartan asked.
Lam grinned. “Hey, that’s the easy part. We can put ten men around his boat and he’ll never see a one.”
“On the other boats,” Sartan said. “But won’t the other captains warn him? This is a tight little community, and even if Zekharyah is a bastard, the other captains will help protect him.”
“They would, but they won’t see us either,” Murdock said. “We’ll be underwater waiting for him to make his move. We’ll already have taken the screw off his boat so he can’t run for it.”
“You can do that?”
“We’re part fish,” Jaybird said. “Mostly barracuda.”
They all laughed at that, and headed back along the concrete wharf toward the shore.
Back at the dock, Murdock asked where the delivery trucks usually stopped.
“For big shipments they use forklifts and boxes or pallet boards for the goods. Smaller packages they work with the little power tractors. Just a motor and a lift and a man pulls it along.”
“Where will the truck from International Food and Novelties stop at?” Lam asked.
“They always use a big bobtail truck, because they make a lot of deliveries. It would be back here where the cross street hits the one in front of the wharf.”
“What are you thinking, Jaybird?” Murdock asked.
“We take the truck up here, grab the driver, insist that he shows us which delivery is heading for Zekharyah’s boat, then we open it and check to be sure it’s the fireworks. We close it up. One of us about the same size as the driver puts on his uniform and hat if he has one, and makes the delivery. As soon as Zekharyah signs for the delivery, we take him down.”
“He’s going to be armed,” Sartan said. “Both of his men will have Uzis or some other submachine guns. A lot of fishermen could get hurt if everyone starts blasting away.”
Murdock scowled. “True,” he said. “So we don’t take his screw off. We use a high-speed boat and take him as soon as he separates from the other fishing boats.”
“I like that a lot better,” the boat captain said.
“By then the fishing captains will be talking about the shoot-out. They’ll identify Zekharyah’s boat, and the supplier is going to know seconds later,” Lam said.
“Means we have to take them both down at once,” Jaybird said. “One squad on the boat, one to take down the International Food place.”
“Be a lot better if we knew who we were hunting,” Murdock said. “Big business like that might have ten guys who buy goods and sign orders from foreign countries. Which one is our man?”
“I know the general manager there,” Sartan said. “He knows I’m out of business, but I could call him and tell him I was getting my feet under me and ask him about some supplies I used to get from him.”
“Take him out to lunch; then we could drop by your table, one of us at least,” Murdock said. “We can find out the specific man who orders goods from China. If there are two or three who work the China trade, we’ll take down all of them and find the right one.”
“Trade with China must be a haphazard thing,” Lam said. “Would they order in advance and keep fast-moving goods in stock until needed? Say, toys and knickknacks and nonperishable items?”
“Seems reasonable,” Captain Sartan said. “I’ll get a lunch date with him for today. We could take out that end of things even before the boat sails tomorrow.”
“Let’s do it,” Murdock said. He handed Sartan the cell phone the colonel had given him to use if he needed it. The Israeli thought a moment, took a card out of his wallet, and dialed a number on it.
Two hours later, Murdock sat with Captain Sartan at a hotel coffee shop not far from International Food and Novelties. The general manager of the firm, Kiva Nissan, shook Murdock’s hand and they sat down.
“I always come here because they buy food from us,” Nissan said. “They pride themselves on having at least one dish from over eighty different countries around the world.”
Murdock had been introduced as a family friend in Tel Aviv for a vacation.
“How do you like our little community here?” Nissan asked.
“I’ve hardly had time for the ten-shekel tour,” Murdock said.
Nissan ordered specialty sandwiches for them, and before the food came, Sartan turned serious.
“Kiva, I’m wo
rking with the Army and the police on a delicate matter. We need to know who in your firm handles orders to China.”
“I don’t understand. Food and novelties. We’re not talking about hand grenades and machine guns. Two men do the work with the Chinese, but I want to know a lot more about why you need to know their names before I can help you.”
Murdock spoke up. “Mr. Nissan, we are not accusing you or your firm of any wrongdoing. However, we think one of your employees may be doing a terrible thing to the people of Israel, may be causing hundreds to be injured, maimed, and killed.”
“How in the world? Food and novelties?”
“Mr. Nissan, you are aware of the savage and deadly floating booby traps that have been washing up on our beaches for the past eleven months.”
“Yes, terrible….” He stopped. “You mean you think…” He shook his head. “Both of these men have been with me for years. Both have families here, both are respected.”
“Is either one an Arab?” Sartan asked.
Nissan slumped in his chair. “Yes, I have tried to be even-handed about employing Arabs. They have a right to work as well as Israelis. I have twenty, maybe more Arabs working for me. To think that one of those two…” He shook his head again. “I simply can’t believe it could be true.”
“There is one way we can know for sure,” Murdock said.
“How? Anything. Now I must know.”
“I can tell you this, but it must go no farther. We know that one of your trucks makes deliveries almost daily to boats at the dock. The driver takes boxes to the Gimbra II, a fishing boat owned by Gabi Zekharyah. We are almost one-hundred-percent certain that he gets deliveries from your store, and later dumps the deadly booby trap bombs in the surf line as he heads out to fish.”
The sandwiches came, and the men only stared at them.
“This is true?” Nissan asked his countryman.
“We have everything but his admission.”
“How can you prove that one of my men…”
“When ordering from China, do you order in quantity, then break down the shipments for individual orders?”
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