Smart Bombs

by Len Levinson

  “We’re ready when you are, Captain,” Butler said.

  Captain Sinclair looked at Lieutenant Jordan. “Take her up.”

  “Take her up,” repeated Lieutenant Jordan.

  Sailors at the consoles twirled dials and pulled levers. Butler felt the front of the submarine point upwards. The crew was ready and waiting with the rubber boat and oars. Butler, Farouk, and Wilma wore black camouflage outfits over traditional Arab garb, and underneath the Arab garb they carried plastic demolition materials, blasting caps, guns, knives, radios, laser pens, and various other implements common to the trade of secret agents.

  The submarine leveled off and the crew members ran up the ladderwells like monkeys. Butler, Farouk, and Wilma followed them up, with Captain Sinclair close behind. The sailor on top opened the hatch and they all spilled out onto the deck. Butler heard shells exploding while he still was in the submarine, and when he came up to the conning tower, he could see that the city of Beirut was burning and shattering before his eyes. The Christians and Moslems still were trying to kill each other, and neither side would make the slightest concession. It was another example of the human race gone insane.

  The sailors tossed the rubber boat over the side, then handed ropes to Butler, Farouk, and Wilma.

  “Good luck,” Captain Sinclair said, shaking their hands.

  Farouk went over the side first and got in the rubber boat. Wilma went next, and then came Butler. They cast off the lines and sailors aboard the submarine gathered them up. Farouk took the oars in hand and started rowing toward shore, while Wilma sat in the front of the rubber boat and Butler sat in back, watching buildings explode and topple to the ground in Beirut.

  “Am I headed in the right direction?” Farouk asked, squinting ahead.

  “Yes,” replied Butler. “The fishing boats are straight ahead.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yes, I’m sure.”

  Wilma pointed her long, elegant finger toward shore. “I think the fishing boats are farther to the left.”

  “They are not,” Butler said. “Please pipe down.”

  She gave him a dirty look that Butler could perceive even on the dark and moonless night. Farouk continued pushing toward shore, and in back of them the submarine slipped beneath the waves. They were alone now and moving ever closer to war-torn Beirut.

  When they were about halfway to shore, Butler said, “I’ll take the oars now.”

  “I’m not tired yet,” Farouk replied.

  “I said I’ll take the oars.”

  “He said he’s not tired,” Wilma chimed in.

  “Listen here, you two,” Butler said through clenched teeth, for he was getting angry. “I’m in command here, and I don’t want any more back talk. Is that clear?”

  “Yes,” said Farouk.

  “Uh-huh,” said Wilma.

  “Then change places with me, Farouk.”

  “But I’m not tired yet.”

  In motions so fast his hands were a blur, Butler reached under his clothes and pulled out his Colt .45. “I’m going to blow your fucking brains out if you don’t do as you’re told,” he said to Farouk, pointing the gun at his nose. “You’re endangering my life and the success of this mission with your bullshit.”

  “I just realized that I’m tired,” Farouk said, staring into the mouth of the gun.

  He got up and exchanged places with Butler, who kneeled between the oars, picked them up, and started rowing. Wilma was sitting on her knees in front of him, and he looked over her shoulder and saw the masts of the fishing boats straight ahead. He pushed toward them, and as the rubber boat drew closer, he saw that the old scows were tied up side by side to each other, making floating piers that extended into the water.

  Buildings close to the waterfront were ablaze, and Butler was worried that they’d be seen. Machine guns chattered within the depths of the city, and rifle fire could be heard from all directions. He rowed toward a line of fishing boats.

  “Keep your heads down,” he said. “Farouk, get your knife out. I’m going to row toward those fishing boats, and we’ll climb aboard one. I want you to puncture holes in this rubber boat so that it’ll sink, and then as soon as we get on the fishing boat, we have to get rid of all this camouflage gear, got it?”

  “Got it,” Farouk said.

  “How about you, Ms. Willoughby?”

  “Got it.”

  Butler rowed toward the fishing boats. Slowly he closed the distance between the rubber boat and them. Finally they approached the last boat at the end of the pier.

  “Grab the boat,” Butler told Wilma as they glided closer.

  Wilma grabbed the gunwale of the fishing boat.

  “Sink this fucking thing!” Butler told Farouk.

  Farouk had his knife out and plunged it into the rubber boat. Butler took his old British commando bayonet out and did the same thing. The rubber boat hissed and began to sink into the Mediterranean Sea.

  “Abandon ship!” Butler said.

  Butler, Farouk, and Wilma jumped from the rubber boat onto the fishing boat. Turning around, they saw the rubber boat sputter and bubble and sink beneath the waves. Then they removed their black camouflage clothing and threw them after the rubber boat. Now, in flowing Arabian robes and burnooses, with Wilma wearing a veil over her face, they scrambled over the fishing boats toward the central dock, but upon nearing it, a figure with a rifle loomed up at them out of the darkness.

  “Halt—who goes there!” the figure shouted.

  “Poor fishing folk,” Farouk replied, bowing.

  Butler and Wilma also bowed, to show their respect and humility. #

  “Where’s your fish?” asked the sentry.

  “Alas, we have none. We have fished all night, and caught nothing. Perhaps the war is scaring the fish away.”

  “Come up here, and let me look at you.”

  They climbed from the fishing boat onto the dock, and the sentry looked them over. The sentry wore a khaki uniform and cloth cap, and it couldn’t be discerned whether he was a Christian, a Moslem, or what.

  “Get on with your business,” the sentry said at last. “And hereafter, don’t be slinking around the docks. You’re liable to be shot by mistake.”

  “Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”

  Butler, Farouk, and Wilma bowed and moved off toward the burning city of Beirut. They walked quickly, the men on the outside and Wilma between them.

  “That was too close for comfort,” Butler said. “We’re lucky the man was cool-headed. Otherwise he’d have shot first and asked questions afterwards.”

  Wilma looked ahead at the flames and shell bursts. “How are we going to get through all that?”

  “I don’t know. We’ll have to get a vehicle from someplace.”

  The three undercover agents entered the devastated city of Beirut. They passed through the financial district, which was utterly demolished, and a bit farther, saw Moslems and Christians fighting for control of the Holiday Inn. Skirting the perimeter of the battle, they continued west. At one point they had to hide in an alley filled with rubble, while motorized detachments of one of the armies went past. They left the alley, and halfway down the block, they saw a dead child lying in the gutter. The child was no more than twelve, its chest caked with blood, its eyes wide open and staring. This is the face of war, Butler thought.

  They continued through the shelling and machine gun fire, dashing from shelter to shelter. Once they had to take cover in a cellar filled with the refugees of the war. Another time they hid in a sewer with a family that had been living there since the war began. And once, in a cemetery, they huddled behind gravestones as shells burst all around them. Butler looked around the gravestone at Beirut covered with sheets of flame, and thought that the whole world might look like that if this mission failed.

  On the other side of the cemetery, they saw a jeep that had hit a telephone pole. The driver and two passengers were lying in the middle of the road with bullet holes through them; evide
ntly they’d been ambushed. The engine of the jeep was still running.

  “It looks like this might be our vehicle,” Butler said, jumping into the cockpit.

  The gearshift lever was in neutral; the driver must have been braking when he’d been shot. Butler shifted into reverse, and to his gratification, the jeep backed away from the telephone pole. He pulled up the emergency brake, got out, and checked the front damage. There wasn’t much, only a dented fender and grille. The radiator and engine were still intact.

  “Pile in,” Butler said. “I’ll drive.”

  Farouk got beside Butler on the front seat, and Wilma sat in back. Butler gunned the engine, shifted into gear, and sped off in the direction of the Syrian border. But to get there, they still had to pass through a considerable portion of Beirut. Butler steered around heaps of corpses and the rubble of buildings. He drove down streets lined with burning buildings. On Kalif Avenue there was a roadblock, but Butler veered around it and kept on going. They ducked their heads as bullets whizzed all around them, but Butler kept going and soon the little jeep was out of range.

  As the sun rose in the east behind them, they were clearing the outskirts of Beirut and heading for the desert. The Syrian border was only fifty miles away, and Damascus only about twenty-five miles beyond that. They entered the desert, and soon the tumult of Beirut could no longer be heard. They passed Arabs riding camels, and little oases in the middle of nowhere. The air was hot and still, and sweat poured off their bodies.

  “It seems to me,” Wilma said, “that it would have been much easier if we’d just flown directly to Damascus.”

  “With the explosives?” Butler asked.

  “That’s right too. I forgot about the explosives.”

  “If the Syrian customs people found the explosives onus, we would go directly to jail, and the last place any of us want to be is in a Syrian jail. Lawrence of Arabia was in a Syrian jail, and we all know what happened to him.”

  “What was that?” Wilma asked.

  “He was sodomized.”

  “Ugh.”

  They stopped at the next oasis for water and to eat some of the protein bars they’d brought along with them. Butler consulted his maps and was able to determine that they were only ten miles from the Syrian border. Wilma took off her burnoose and shook out her lustrous black hair. Farouk smoked an Egyptian cigarette and scratched his mustache. They sat in a circle around Butler’s maps.

  “We can’t afford to take the chance of going through Customs,” Butler said, “so we’ll have to go off the road and drive over the desert, crossing the border at some remote point where they don’t have guards.”

  “What if we get lost in the desert?” Wilma asked.

  “We’ll become food for the vultures, and then the sun will bleach our bones. Someday Bedouins will come upon us and wonder who we were.”

  “They will also wonder,” Farouk said, “what we were doing with all the plastic bombs.”

  “They won’t even know what they are,” Butler replied. “I only hope they don’t try to eat them, because they’ll get very sick, and might even explode if they get too close to a fire.”

  “Very funny,” Wilma said sarcastically.

  Butler stood and folded his maps. “Fill the canteens with water, just in case.” He checked his compass to make sure it was working all right. His plan was to drive in a southerly direction for a few miles, then head due east for about twenty miles, and finally swing north again, where he’d get on the same road they had been on, only it would be in Syria.

  They got in the jeep and Butler steered off the road into the desert. The rear wheels kicked back spumes of sand as he sped along. It reminded Butler of a dune buggy he once drove in Southern California, but that had been close to Laguna Beach, and now he was in the Middle East, where death could come suddenly, viciously, and for no good reason.

  The jeep zoomed across the desert. It climbed hills and zipped along the horizon, its three occupants hanging on for dear life. At noon with the sun a blazing ball directly overhead, Butler glanced at the speedometer and saw that they’d already come fifteen miles through the desert. Soon they’d swing north and get on the road to Damascus. He checked the fuel; there was plenty. The temperature gauge showed a normal reading, and Butler was reflecting happily on how well everything was going, when suddenly the radiator exploded, sending a geyser of hot water into the air. Butler was startled, and reflexively pulled the wheel to the right. The jeep spun around on the sand and came to a halt.

  “Uh-oh,” Butler said.

  “I knew you were going too fast,” Wilma told him accusingly.

  “Much too fast,” Farouk agreed.

  “I was not going too fast. The problem was that the temperature needle evidently was broken.”

  Wilma sniffed the hot desert air. “The radiator would not have overheated if you weren’t going so fast.”

  “We’re not out here on a picnic,” Butler reminded her. “We’re on a mission of the utmost importance, and we can’t afford to be leisurely.”

  “Haste makes waste,” Wilma replied.

  “If you keep bugging me, I’m going to waste you.”

  “You just try it, Buster.”

  “Oh shit,” Butler replied, his shoulders sagging. This was why he always preferred to go on missions alone. You didn’t have to put up with the bullshit of other people. “Okay,” he said, trying to summon up the qualities of leadership. “There’s no point in crying over spilt milk or broken radiators. Let’s pull ourselves together and get moving.”

  Wilma hopped out of the jeep. “Some people just can’t admit it when they’re in the wrong,” she said.

  “It takes a real man to admit that he’s wrong,” Farouk added, adjusting his burnoose.

  Butler was seriously tempted to take out his Colt .45 and blow them both away, but that would never do, and besides, he might need them at some point later on in the mission, although he couldn’t imagine why he might need them later on. They both were a pain in the ass.

  “Are we ready to move out?” Butler asked, wiping sweat from his forehead with his sleeve.

  They nodded.

  “Then let’s go.”

  He headed in a northerly direction, where the road to Damascus was supposed to be.

  “Are you sure this is the right direction?” Wilma asked.

  “Quite sure.”

  “I think we should be going that way.” She pointed toward the east.

  “If you want to go that way, go that way.”

  “What makes you so sure I’m wrong?”

  “My compass.”

  “Maybe your compass needle is off, just like the temperature needle in the jeep was off.”

  “Maybe your brain is off,” Butler replied.

  At this point Farouk decided to throw in his two cents. “You don’t have to be insulting,” he said insultingly.

  “Shut your fucking mouth.”

  “What was that?”

  “I said shut your fucking mouth, both of you.”

  “I think your remarks are most uncalled-for,” said Farouk, who had lived in London for a time and spoke with a very proper British accent. “There is never any excuse for profanity.”

  “None whatsoever,” Wilma agreed.

  Butler wiped his nose with his sleeve. “I’m leaving in the direction I think we should go. You people can go wherever the fuck you want.” He checked his compass again, then began trudging north. He kept his ears perked up, and heard them falling in behind him. They would argue and complain, but finally they would do what they were told. Things could be worse. They could always be worse. Especially in the desert.

  Slowly and agonizingly they made their way toward the road to Damascus. The sun baked them and made their clothes stick to their bodies. Whenever they took a step, their feet sank into the sand and they had to pull them out. Their mouths became dry and they had to make numerous stops to drink water. Their legs ached and their lungs felt as though they were bre
athing the air inside a furnace. Butler found himself having fantasies of mint juleps and pitchers of lemonade. He saw himself in a bathing suit sitting beside the swimming pools of luxury hotels. He longed to stand in front of a high powered air-conditioning unit.

  “The asshole had to mess up the car,” Wilma grumbled during one of their water breaks.

  “I didn’t mess up the car.”

  “If you didn’t, who did?”

  “The person who forgot to fix the temperature gauge.”

  “Go ahead, blame it on somebody else.”

  “Why don’t you shut your big mouth?”

  “Why don’t you?”

  Farouk shook his head. “You two are like a couple of children. You must be in love, the way you’re arguing.”

  “In love!” Wilma spat out. “With him? Don’t be absurd!”

  Butler snorted. “The little bitch is half-crazy. Who could possibly love her?”

  “Half-crazy, am I!” she screamed, crouching over and snarling at him. “Who are you calling half-crazy, you moron?”

  Butler realized that the discipline of his little group was deteriorating rapidly. He had to take control and exercise command presence. “All right, let’s move out!” he ordered in his best military officer voice.

  “Listen to him,” Wilma sneered. “He thinks he’s back in the Army.”

  Butler decided to ignore her and start moving toward the Damascus Road. He knew they’d follow him, and sure enough, they did. Together they staggered across the desert, and Butler wondered where in the hell the road to Damascus was. He felt certain they should have reached it by now. The red ball of sun sank into the horizon on the west, and they were huffing and puffing like donkeys. It grew dark, and still they kept on, following the luminous needle on Butler’s compass. Finally at around nine o’clock in the evening, Butler decided they’d better stop for the night. They were all tired and he was afraid they might walk right over the road in the dark and keep going.

  “We’d better stop here for the night,” he said, holding up his hand.

  “Look at him,” Wilma said wearily. “He looks like Chief Sitting Bull standing up there.”