Dynamite Fishermen (Beriut Trilogy 1)

by Fleming, Preston

  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.

  “Are the technicians finished yet?” a quiet voice asked from behind the spotlights.

  “They have only to insert the screws in the door panels, and the automobile will be ready, Colonel,” answered the voice of a fourth young man working under the lights.

  Colonel Hisham leaned forward into the car’s trunk to inspect the handiwork of one of the technicians and then withdrew into the darkness to join the man who had addressed him. In the moment between pulling his head out of the trunk and retreating from the light, it was possible to identify the fourth man as a clean-cut youth in a green polo shirt.

  “Come outside, Lieutenant,” the colonel responded as soon as the youth made a move to join him. “We have some remaining business to discuss.”

  The two men emerged into daylight and started down the dirt path separating the cinder-block shed from the stone farmhouse. Colonel Hisham walked with difficulty, requiring a cane to support the weight borne by his right leg. He had also dropped nearly ten kilos of body weight since the firefight two months earlier that had left him in the hospital for six weeks with gunshot wounds in his leg and shoulder. But he still projected a look of prosperous ease, wearing a neatly pressed khaki safari suit opened at the throat to reveal a hand-beaten gold Aleppo chain as thick as a pencil. A new pair of wraparound French sunglasses shielded his eyes, and even his suntan seemed to be on the road to recovery.

  “How many kilos were you able to load?” he asked the youth as soon as they were out of earshot from the mechanics.

  “A few grams over fifty-five kilos,” came the reply. “I used all the Semtex you gave me, plus most of the American C-4. Do you wish to insert the detonators yourself, or shall I?”

  “There will be no detonators in this load. The explosives are to be left at a prearranged location to be recovered later by a colleague of ours. I will give you a map and a drawing of the place. Once you are certain that you can give an accurate description of his destination, explain to the old man the precise route he is to take and the exact location of where he is to leave the car. Make him repeat his instructions aloud to you three times.”

  “Yes, sir. Understood. When is he to depart?”

  “Leave here with him no later than half past nine. The sentries at the Galerie Semaan checkpoint are to be relieved at noon and will be tired and careless during the last hour of their duty. Make the old man drive you as far as Bhamdoun, and then follow behind him with Sergeant Zaki as far as Aley. From there he must make his way alone.”

  The younger man glanced anxiously at the farmhouse and bit his lower lip, as if pondering whether he dared question the colonel further on an important detail. “If you will permit me to ask, Colonel, what is to become of the old man afterward? If the explosives are not to detonate—as is the usual method—upon his opening the door, how can we be certain he will not report to the Lebanese authorities all he has seen and heard?”

  The colonel’s lips formed a condescending smile. “The point has not been overlooked, Lieutenant. Upon his arrival, the old man will be picked up by our men and taken to a remote place, where he will be liquidated. If for some reason this does not take place as planned, the old man knows that his daughter and grandchildren are in our hands. He will say nothing.”

  “And is there any further assignment for the mechanics when they have finished their work on the Mercedes? If not, I plan to release them. This is the third automobile they have prepared for us in as many days. They are eager to return to their barracks for some sleep.”

  “Not quite yet, Lieutenant. I have one more assignment for them. By afternoon a truck will arrive here with two hundred kilos of Semtex that must be in Beirut by tomorrow night. Tell them to conceal it in any way they can. I will explain upon your return from Aley.”

  “Two hundred kilos!” the young lieutenant exclaimed in exasperation. “But it has taken us three days to prepare less than one hundred fifty!”

  The older man put his arm around the youth’s shoulders and gestured with his cane that they should continue on the path toward the stone farmhouse. “The job will not be as difficult as you expect, Lieutenant,” he continued. “We will use the truck itself for concealment, as you will see. But still it will be no ordinary operation. When we have finished, news of our deed will be heard in every capital in the world.”

  A relaxed smile spread across the colonel’s face, and his eyes took on a dreamy quality that was the opposite of their usual coldness. “Come, I will give you the map now. Our work will soon be over.”

  Chapter 22

  Wednesday

  Prosser was breathing hard by the time he finished the long uphill run from the sea to rue Californie on his way back to the Hala Building. Upon reaching the parking lot, he stopped to catch his breath. At once he noticed the gray Volvo sedan that had been waiting across the street since the start of his morning run. From a distance of thirty or forty meters, he could see that the driver was slightly above medium height, in his early or mid-twenties, and wore a neatly trimmed mustache and straight black hair grown long over the ears. Although the young man hid behind dark, aviator-style sunglasses and turned his face away as Prosser stared at him, Prosser knew exactly where he had seen this particular driver before.

  Prosser advanced toward the entrance of the Hala Building, passing as he did between a pair of olive-green Range Rovers at the curb directly opposite the lobby. The vehicles belonged to Nasib al Khatib, the military commander of the Red Fursan, who now occupied a five-bedroom apartment in the east wing of the building with his wife, their three school-age boys, and two teenage servant girls. Along the back wall of the lobby, al Khatib’s principal driver, a graying Kurd in his forties with a sizable paunch, sat drinking sweet mint tea with Abu Ali, the concierge.

  Prosser nodded to the two men as he entered the foyer and had started toward the stairwell door when, on impulse, he stuffed his key ring back into the pocket of his running shorts and walked over to them.

  “Sabah al khair, brothers,” he greeted them in Arabic.

  “Sabah an-nour,” Abu Ali replied. “Tea?” he suggested, holding out an empty glass.

  “Shukran, laa,” Prosser declined with a relaxed smile. “Excuse me for interrupting, but I just wanted to ask whether either of you has noticed the young man sitting in the Volvo just outside the parking lot. He’s been there for the past half hour and seems to be watching the building. Is he one of your men?”

  The driver looked at Abu Ali and shrugged.

  “It’s the gray Volvo sedan. If he’s not one of your Fursan, it may be wise to find out what he’s doing here. I do not like the look of him.”

  The driver appeared mildly irritated at having his repose disturbed but stood up all the same, calling for his assistant in the back room and the two bodyguards standing by in the Range Rovers to join him.

  “These men watch everyone,” Abu Ali noted with admiration, touching his forefinger to his cheekbone. “Don’t worry; they will soon learn what is his business.”

  Prosser wished the concierge a good day and went up to his apartment to shower and dress for work.

  Meanwhile, the militia chief’s driver sent th
e two off-duty bodyguards around the rear of the Volvo while he and his assistant approached from the front. In an instant the driver concluded that the stranger did not reside in the neighborhood and therefore had no business waiting outside the Fursan leader’s residence.

  “Hawiyyatak,” he demanded without explanation.

  “What for? Who the devil are you?” snapped the young man in the Volvo.

  “Never mind who we are. Give me your papers. Yalla.”

  “Bugger off,” the young man replied in Arabic and started to roll up the window with his left hand while he turned the ignition with his right.

  Instantly the chief driver’s assistant thrust the muzzle of his AK-47 through the window and against the young man’s temple.

  The youth froze and then withdrew from his trouser pocket a Syrian-issued Palestinian refugee document. The chief driver snatched the paper from his hand, read it with a scowl, and then stuffed it into his shirt pocket and ordered his three comrades to bring the stranger indoors for questioning.

  Some forty minutes later Prosser rode the elevator back down to the ground floor and noticed fresh drops of blood leading in a broken line across the lobby from the concierge’s room out to the parking lot. He followed the trail outside in time to see two Fursan fighters laboring to stuff the limp figure of an unconscious young man into the rear seat of the Volvo.

  Prosser returned hurriedly to the lobby to confront the concierge. “Where did this blood come from, Abu Ali?” he asked sharply. “What is going on here?”

  “The guards brought the man inside for questioning, siidi.” the old man replied with a self-important air. “He was armed, and they suspected that he was sent to harm Commander Nasib.”

  “Oh, my God. What did they do with him? Is he still alive?”

  “What has become of him is none of my concern, siidi,” Abu Ali answered defensively. “All I know is that they are taking him away from here, and a good riddance it is. Praise Allah.”

  Prosser cursed himself for not foreseeing what would happen if he left the Fursan to their own devices. He had expected the youth to be sent away with a warning or perhaps after close questioning, but he had not expected him to be beaten or killed. He turned his back on the concierge and went out to the parking lot. The old man followed him with his eyes, shrugged unrepentantly, and lit another cigarette.

  The Volvo was nowhere to be seen.

  * * *

  By the time Prosser set out for East Beirut, the morning rush-hour traffic had largely dispersed, leaving a clear route along rue Ahmed Chaouqi between the hotel district and the port crossing. Already the young sporting set and wealthy sun worshippers had begun to filter into the St. Georges Yacht Club, which had survived along with the swimming pool and sun deck when the adjacent hotel in the same complex was rendered uninhabitable during the Battle of the Hotels.

  As Prosser passed the club’s marina, he watched a gleaming white speedboat head out into the Bay of Beirut with two slalom skiers in tow. He imagined the club’s waiters in starched white jackets serving freshly squeezed orange juice at poolside and wished he were going no farther than one of the club’s deck chairs.

  But he was crossing the Green Line again today, and the way led past not only the hulking shells of the St. Georges Hotel, the Phoenicia, and the Holiday Inn but also through the remnants of Beirut’s once-famed red-light district, Zeitouné. Six or seven years ago rue Ahmed Chaouqi had been lined with a dazzling assortment of cabarets, bars, and seraglio-like brothels that catered to the tastes of Gulf oil sheikhs, Western oil drillers, European businessmen, and merchant seamen from the world over. Now all that remained were tumbledown ruins overgrown with weeds, a few carelessly built cinder-block squatters’ hovels and a row of nameless one-room bordellos catering to the lowest imaginable appetites. A handful of Egyptian and Lebanese prostitutes of indeterminate age sat on bar stools outside the entrances, tossing off lewd remarks to pedestrians and aggressively soliciting the attention of passing lorry drivers.

  Half a block ahead, a gasoline tank truck attempted to back into a filling station where a disorderly crush of waiting cars blocked all means of access to the pumps. Movement on the road was brought to a complete halt while station attendants and fuel-short customers argued over who ought to make way for the tank truck to move forward. Such scenes were commonplace since fuel rationing had gone into effect. Queuing was decidedly un-Lebanese.

  Prosser lowered the Renault’s windows and turned off the air conditioner to keep the engine from overheating. Within seconds of doing so, a toothless crone dressed in a torn and filthy black dress approached him from behind and demanded alms. He understood little of her odd patois of Arabic and French, but she wore a well-practiced look of distress on her face and reeked of alcohol.

  “Allah yaatiiki,” he told her, using the customary Arabic response to mendicants—“God will provide.”

  Nonetheless, she continued to hold her upturned palm in front of his face, and when he failed to respond, she gave a tug at his sleeve. Instinctively he reached for the dashboard controls and closed the window on her arm. The old woman drew her hand back in alarm and regarded Prosser with a mixture of hatred and fear before she moved on to the next car.

  Not many minutes later, the gasoline truck moved forward into the filling station, and the Renault slipped past it into the Minet el Hosn district. Prosser promptly raised the windows and switched off the air conditioner to keep out the odors from the landfill opposite the Hilton and Normandie Hotels. Five years earlier the landfill had been a delightful little cove used by patrons of the two luxury hotels as a private bathing beach. Now it served as Ras Beirut’s rubbish heap.

  The Normandie had closed its doors to business for the last time early in the civil war. Its new occupants were militiamen of the Independent Nasserite Movement, better known as the Murabitoun, who used its underground parking garage to store their arsenal of Soviet-made long-range field guns, Grad and Katyusha multiple-rocket launchers, and 120-millimeter heavy field mortars. During clashes with the Phalange, Murabitoun firepower was capable of probing deep into enemy territory and withdrawing promptly underground before the enemy could deploy counter-battery fire.

  From the seaside road, Prosser could see through their enormous picture windows the command posts that the militia had set up on the hotel’s mezzanine, using furniture looted from the rest of the complex. Presumably because the windows faced northwest, away from the battle lines, a few had miraculously survived the nightly artillery battles that raged farther inland and to the east.

  As he came around the bend, Prosser was surprised to see six or seven automobiles lined up at the sandbag bunker in front of the Normandie. Exposed as it was to sniper fire on two sides, this was hardly an ideal place for a checkpoint. But since there seemed to be no choice in the matter, he took his place in line. After five minutes or so an obese militiaman in his late thirties wearing a grease-stained khaki uniform and worn out leather sandals waved him forward for inspection.

  Neither of the two militiamen who stepped forward to conduct the search could have been more than sixteen years old. Their cheeks were still smooth, and their threadbare uniforms seemed too large for their scrawny frames. But when the Renault stopped beside them, the darker-skinned boy stepped right up to the car door without hesitation and aimed his rifle at Prosser’s head. The other one stood behind the first and covered him.

  “Out,” the first boy commanded mechanically in Arabic. “Search.”

  Prosser moved his right hand slowly to his shirt pocket and pulled out his diplomatic identity card. “Diplomasi,” he replied with deliberate slowness. “No search. Search forbidden.”

  The teenager took the card but did not look at it. Keeping his distance from Prosser, he waved the rifle’s muzzle back and forth between the car’s trunk and Prosser’s chest to indicate that he should move to the rear of the car. “Open. Search,” he ordered.

  The fairer-skinned youth approached the car from the
passenger side and opened both front and rear doors. He looked inside the glove compartment and under the seats but found nothing of interest.

  Prosser felt relief that he was not transporting any agent reports or other contraband on this trip. “I am a diplomat,” he repeated patiently. “No search. Search forbidden for diplomats.” He stood his ground as a matter of principle, but as long as the rifle remained trained on his chest, he knew he could not protest with much vehemence.

  Suddenly losing patience, the first youth pulled back the slide of his rifle and let it slam forward to seat a round into the chamber. At this Prosser realized the game was up. As slowly and conspicuously as he could, he pulled the keys out of the ignition, held them up for the boy to see, and accompanied him to the rear of the Renault to open the trunk. Once the second boy was satisfied that the vehicle carried no contraband, he nodded for Prosser to slam the lid and followed his dark-skinned partner to the next car without another word.

  Prosser started the engine and was about to put the car into gear when a tiny unwashed hand thrust a book of lottery tickets through the window and under his nose. It belonged to a frail youngster of no more than seven or eight, and he guessed from the boy’s tattered clothes, matted hair, and dirty face and hands that he had no home except the street.

  “Buy one, buy one,” the boy said dully in Arabic, tugging at Prosser’s sleeve for added emphasis until Prosser shook it free. “Buy one, buy one—you will win, you will win,” the boy persisted. He thrust the tickets once again into his customer’s face, but Prosser caught the boy’s wrist and gently pushed it back outside the window.