by Dane Hartman
I’m staying at the Commodore. I’ll also have access to the U.S. Embassy and to the station in S.F. and the network in N.Y. So if you need anything or need to contact anyone let me know. I’m holding the fort for you. E.
Harry quietly tore up the note and scattered the shreds in a way such that the note could never be reassembled. For the second time today, he had to admit that having Ellie around was not the worst thing that could have happened to him. She’d saved his life in Paris, who knows but he might have to call on her to do the same in Beirut.
As Kayyim promised, customs posed no difficulty. The three of them were passed right through without any official glancing at either their papers or their baggage. There were certain advantages to being a sponsor of terrorism with millions of dollars to spend. For one thing, one probably got invited to lots of parties.
A limousine, armor-plated with bullet-resistant glass and equipped with a machine gun mounted on the trunk that could be operated by the passengers within, was waiting to receive the minister and his party of two. In any other country, a fortified car like this would have made Harry feel quite secure. But not here in Beirut.
A shrill whine woke him that seemed to electrify the air. What made sure that he was awake was the enormous explosion that followed the whine. Within seconds, the walls began to shudder and the glass in the windows cracked further.
Unaccustomed to waking up in the middle of the war, Harry was not immediately able to orient himself. For one thing, his whole system was out of whack, from the exhausting journey that had taken him thousands of miles from California, and all the food and drink he’d consumed along the way. He had no idea how long he’d slept; his watch was missing. The only thing he could say for certain was that it was daylight, from the angle of the sun, midafternoon. Another rocket came down somewhere in the vicinity, and another, and another. It was unnerving, listening to them, and downright discouraging when one began to realize one of them might come careening down right on top of you. How did people get used to this sort of thing? Harry wondered.
He had a plan, he remembered that quite distinctly. It had seemed to him a reasonably good plan too. He had intended to go with Kayyim only so far, discover where he was staying in the city, then slip away. He had even worked out a way to do this; aside from Achmed and the chauffeur, Kayyim had no other protection that Harry could see. No one had relieved Harry of his weapon.
But he should have known that on his own territory, Kayyim would play by other rules, rules that Harry was unacquainted with. It could be that he hadn’t been thinking straight, that the torturously long plane trip combined with the incident at Orly had knocked more than the wind out of him.
Otherwise, why would he be here in a large white room somewhere in the middle of Beirut? Possibly he’d been drugged, more likely he’d collapsed because his body had given out. He tried the door; it didn’t budge. He stepped over to the windows; they were arched and once had probably yielded a panoramic view. But now they were so cracked from the noise of explosives that you could barely see out of them. They, too, were locked. Breaking them wouldn’t be difficult but it would hardly make sense. It seemed that Harry was very high up and there was nothing out there but a sheer drop that would leave a man looking like a pool of jelly when he came to the end of it.
His watch wasn’t all that was missing; gone too were his gun—that was to be expected—his wallet, his passport, as well as Muhammed Ajai’s wallet and passport. Harry had the feeling that the only reason he’d been spared thus far was because Kayyim was anxious to find out how much the U.S. authorities knew about his operations.
There was a pitcher of water gone lukewarm some time during the night. That was all the refreshment available. A bedpan had also been provided. These two items evidently constituted Kayyim’s notion of hospitality.
Harry thought he had nothing to lose by pounding on the door to see what kind of response he would get.
None was the answer.
He sat back on the bed. Nothing to do but wait and listen to rockets turn what little that was left intact in Beirut into rubble.
Without any way of measuring time more accurate than the relative position of the sun in the sky, Harry couldn’t say whether twenty minutes or two hours had gone by when he heard the key turn in the lock. The wait had been endless. But he did not necessarily welcome an end to it.
With Kayyim was the inevitable Achmed. But two other men had come along, perhaps thinking the show would be well worth the price of admission. They all had the air of men who liked pumping a great many volts of electricity into people.
“You slept comfortably?” Kayyim inquired. He was no less cordial than he’d been on the plane, but he was no more sincere.
“You have any cold water?” Harry asked, gesturing to the pitcher. “This has gone stale.”
“That can be arranged . . . later.”
Later, thought Harry dismally. How much later?
Kayyim circled Harry, hands clasped behind his back. His friends stood by, evidently restless for him to get on with it.
“You killed Muhammed Ajai,” Kayyim said flatly.
“He was ready to do the same to me.”
“Muhammed Ajai was a good man,” Kayyim muttered. “You are an agent of the U.S. imperialist clique.”
“I wouldn’t put it that way,” Harry replied.
“But you don’t deny that you are an agent?”
“It wouldn’t do any good to ask you to let me contact the U.S. Embassy?” Harry was feeling a little giddy. Even though his life was in peril he somehow could not quite take this whole affair seriously. Imperialist clique indeed.
“No, I am afraid it wouldn’t. You are with the CIA.”
He was not making it a question.
“No, I am with the San Francisco Police Department. It’s just that I took a wrong turn somewhere along the way.”
Kayyim exchanged a few words with the man standing next to Achmed. Suddenly, they were all laughing. Kayyim returned his attention to Harry. “If you do not tell us the truth we will be forced to take measures.”
Harry had an idea what kind of measures he was referring to, but said nothing.
“What does the CIA know about me? Why did it stage a deliberate provocation in California?”
Harry presumed he was talking about the assassination attempt, but he could no more answer Kayyim’s first question than he could his second. He kept silent.
This silence infuriated Kayyim who struck him savagely with his hand, turning first one cheek, then the other, a fiery shade of red. Still Harry didn’t react.
“Well, then, if you refuse to say anything you shall accompany us downstairs.”
Downstairs was the cellar and it was reached by several steep flights that descended through hallways composed of dull gray cinder blocks.
Harry was flanked by Achmed on one side and another man in a camouflage suit on his other. They held his arms in a painful grip. Kayyim was a few steps in front of him and the fourth was bringing up the rear with a Soviet Makarov. The only thing Harry knew about the Makarov was that it discharged a 9 x 18 mm cartridge and that while it was not very powerful, it was effective at close range. The man behind him was scarcely twelve inches away. To Harry that was very close range.
From what Harry could gather, this was an apartment building of some kind, but he saw no one else on the stairs. It might be that the building was inhabited entirely by sympathizers of Kayyim’s cause. Harry doubted whether he was the first person to visit “downstairs.”
Even with the cinder blocks and the outside walls of the structure, the rumble of the rockets and the artillary fire was still audible and from time to time the stairs vibrated in response.
They had gotten to the second floor—Harry could gaze down and see the grim gray door that led to the cellar—when the whole building seemed to rock, and cement and plaster and other debris came cascading down, accompanied by poisonous fumes. All at once the stairwell was filled with
dense black smoke.
Harry realized an opportunity when he saw one. Though his eyes stung and he was gagging like his captors, he concentrated his energies on hurtling himself down the remaining stairs, dragging with him Achmed and his companion. The momentum of his forward motion was such that it took the three of them right into Kayyim who couldn’t see where he was going. Kayyim, with a curse that got lost in a coughing fit, tumbled and fell—but fell where? Harry couldn’t see; he had vanished into the smoke. But that was not his immediate concern—he just wanted to get the hell out of this place.
Achmed smashed into a wall and surrendered his hold on Harry. But the man in the camouflage suit, hung on tenaciously. The man behind fired his Makarov though what he thought he was aiming at was hard to say. His eyes smarting, his lungs aching with the smoke and the lack of oxygen, Harry took his free hand and sent a hard right into the man’s face. Because his eyes were tearing as copiously as Harry’s he hadn’t seen the blow coming and with a cry, he pitched back, his nose a bloody shambles, releasing his grip as well.
Harry struggled back the way he came, hoping to find a door that could take him to freedom. The man with the Makarov seemed to have the same idea. Because when Harry got to the next landing and found a door which, mercifully, had not been locked, he was waiting for him. Right behind the door.
But there was smoke funneling into this adjoining corridor too, and when he fired it was the smoke that he hit and not Harry. Harry dropped to the floor. The man fired again. The bullet singed his scalp, leaving a trail of blood over his right ear. As he stepped back to adjust his aim and get farther away from the smoke, Harry picked himself up and plowed right into him, butting him in the chest with his head.
The Makarov flopped out of his hand. He attempted to grab it, but Harry scooped it up and fired it. The man crumbled slowly, his knees buckling, then giving way, finally he was sucked into the smoke and could be seen no more.
A faint glimmer of light up ahead inspired Harry to accelerate his pace in spite of the growing pain in his chest. Behind him there was a great deal of commotion, shouts, and detonations, but when he looked back he could see nothing other than whorls of toxic smoke.
True to the promise of the light, there was a route of egress that took him out of the building. The shelling seemed to have temporarily abated although sporadic sniper fire could be heard coming from various points in the neighborhood.
At first, Harry’s appearance did not excite very much interest. Most of those who had gathered out front—and the vast majority of them were clad in paramilitary uniforms and brandished AK47’s—were busy trying to extinguish the fire that the explosion had caused or else were watching the proceedings with varying degrees of excitement. Some looked plain bored, as though this was such a routine occurrence that it wasn’t worth making much of a fuss over.
From this new vantage point, Harry could see better the damage the rocket attack had inflicted on the building in which he’d been held prisoner. Much of the roof had caved in, and two of the upper floors were no longer there at all. At least Kayyim had a good sense of timing. Had he decided to pay a call on Harry ten minutes after he did, Harry might not have been alive to greet him.
Not all the commandos were so preoccupied by the fire that Harry could evade detection entirely. Because Harry was tall and a Westerner, and because in all the confusion he had forgotten to hide the Makarov, he aroused a certain suspicion in the mind of at least one teenager who carried his Soviet-made automatic with as much confidence as a veteran of several wars.
He called to Harry in Arabic, but Harry did not respond. Never mind that he didn’t know Arabic, he knew very well what the youth wanted—an explanation for his presence in their midst. Having none, Harry smiled at him and continued on across the street, hoping to take refuge among a cluster of buildings, a few of which had so far escaped devastation.
But the youth was not about to let Harry go so easily. He rounded up a few of his cronies and pointed Harry out to them. It was as though Harry was a strange specimen of jungle life that had suddenly been sprung loose from a zoo. Now they were all shouting to him, both in Arabic and French. There could be no doubting the message they were communicating. “Arretez! Arretez!”
But Harry had no intention of stopping. He kept right on going, quickening his step as he took in deep draughts of air, welcoming the relief of oxygen after so much smoke.
Though he was walking away from them—and there were now four or five of them—he did not permit them out of his sight.
He saw that the one who had pointed him out to begin with was about to imbue his verbal command with the authority of his AK47. Raising it to his shoulder, he sighted Harry and again issued his order to halt.
Harry did not need to be convinced of the gravity of the situation. This boy would not hesitate to fire, if only to show his friends that he was as heroic as the kids down the block. It was Beirut’s way of keeping up with the Joneses.
Very carefully, Harry turned so that he was nearly facing the youth. The others had not raised their weapons; instead they were watching with amused expressions, as though this was really a game, like soccer, in which death was no more serious than a knee injury.
Other than this small group, no one else seemed to be aware of what was happening. Harry believed that it would only be a matter of minutes before Kayyim recovered enough to mount a full-scale search for him.
Still facing the youth, he began to back away. The youth shouted at him again to halt, more vehemently this time, somewhat incredulous that Harry persisted in disobeying him.
Now his companions brought their Kalashnikovs up and trained them on Harry. This brought him to a complete halt. The expressions on the faces of these youths were deadly serious; they had killed before and were ready to again. It occurred to Harry that he did not know who these teenagers were, whether they were leftists or rightists, Christian Phalangists or Moslems or Palestinians. It was bad enough to die violently, but it was worse when one didn’t know whose cause was sending one to that grave.
The group of them approached Harry, cautiously, for he held the Makarov even though they kept signaling him to drop it.
Then there was a loud report from somewhere overhead. Harry looked up and at first saw nothing, then he gazed back at the youth directly in front of him. There was a small round red hole in his forehead the size of a dime. He seemed to be reflecting on this latest development, but the reflection didn’t last long. He dropped to the ground. No sooner had he done so, than there was a barrage of gunfire, all coming from overhead.
Another dropped, a third tried scuttling across the street before a round caught him in the crook of his back and sent him sprawling. Another managed to dodge the hail of bullets, only to pivot about at the last moment and take a shot at Harry, perhaps because he blamed him for this sudden onslaught. His bullet never found its target. But his action invited a response. Harry’s aim was better, and in any case, he’d had more practice.
The youth spun about, his AK47 clattering to the ground. When he managed to draw his hands away from the wound, he found that there was very little left of his stomach. The shock was too much for him; he slipped down by a heap of sandbags to watch his life ebb away.
By this point, Harry had disappeared, taking refuge inside an abandoned grocery store whose protective barricade, composed of corrugated metal, was easily removed. Through the shuttered window of the store, Harry had a view of the building he’d just escaped from.
He decided to wait there amid the rank smells of rotting fruits and vegetables. In the darkness, Harry hoped that sooner or later Kayyim would reappear and lead him to whomever it was he had come to Beirut to see. In the meantime, he gave silent thanks for preserving him this far though it wasn’t God to whom his gratitude was intended. Since God was probably too far up in the heavens to care, Harry directed his thanks to the anonymous snipers for whom heaven was an asphalt rooftop.
C H A P T E R
N i n e
The intermittent shelling bothered her at first, though she could imagine adapting to it if she had to. More aggravating were the deafening sonic booms that shook the city every time Israeli F16’s flew over on reconnaissance and bombing missions.
Sleep under such circumstances was nearly impossible, and after trying for several hours, she abandoned the effort. Though she had certainly expected no tourists roaming through the lobby and corridors of her hotel, she had not expected quite so many journalists, nor would she have believed that they could conduct their lives as though there was nothing unusual about nonstop sniper fire and constant artillary bombardment.
There were not, however, many female journalists, and none who were as attractive and elegant as Ellie Winston, and so she had little difficulty eliciting the attention and interest of a number of men. As war correspondents, they inevitably were skeptical of her capabilities, especially when they learned that her only experience to date had been as a local San Francisco anchorwoman.
But more important than clothes and visuals was the for dinner and volunteering to scrounge about those few fashionable boutiques left open in the city for additions to her travel-depleted wardrobe. She spent her first day acquainting herself with these men, accepting three lunch engagements and two dinner engagements—all scheduled at hour intervals so that she could make them, more or less, on time, and always in a different restaurant—disappointing her dates by refusing food, claiming an uncertain stomach. But she did drink a glass of wine with each so that she could keep her resolve.
Without Harry around, without even knowing where in Beirut he might be, she had to use her own ingenuity. She had to get new clothes, and this she was able to accomplish with the aid of her male admirers who carried her dimensions with them on a slip of paper. She needed also to find a camera crew or failing that, a man armed with a Nikon who could supply her with the visuals necessary to supplement the story she hoped to have by the time she was ready to return home.