Dean Ing - Soft Targets

by Soft Targets(lit)

  Thanks to the drugs, Everett did not feel his bruised kidney, the hairline fracture, and other modest rearrangements of his middle-aged anatomy. The Denver people had done very well by him. But there were things they could not do.

  Curbing impatience, he said, "Let's assume I stay put, don't hassle my nurse, and take lunch in approved fashion," with a glance at the in-travenous feeding apparatus.

  The surgeon folded his arms. "If," he promp-ted.

  "If I can trade the nurse for a staff member in here to-"

  "Contraindicated. We're trying to excite regrowth around that flap torn in your tympanum, Mr. Everett. At your age, a blown eardrum is tough to repair. The nurse stays, the FCC goes."

  "My left ear's okay, though. And even a felon gets one telephone call."

  After a judicious pause: "You've got it." He spoke to the nurse for a moment, stopped with his hands on the door. "We're starting you on solid foods, provided you make that one call and no more. We can haggle, too. Agreed?"

  "Agreed." More or less, his tone implied.

  "By the way, which note do you hear?"

  "I haven't the foggiest," Everett admitted. "Why?"

  Deadpan: "If it's 'A' natural, you might take up composing. Robert Schumann heard that note for years; nearly drove him up the chimney."

  "Have you ever considered a bedside man-ner?"

  The doctor grinned. "If you needed it, you'd get it. You're on the mend," he said, and walked out.

  Maury Everett watched the door swing shut, thinking of channels. FCC staff to network hon-chos? Dave Engels? Both too slow, and always loss of fidelity when the message was indirect.

  The hell with it. "Nurse, I want you to call NBN Hollywood and get just one man on the line. I want nobody else, I want him with all possible speed, and it might help if you tell him Commissioner Everett is itching to lay the tush of terrorism."

  She waited starchily, receiver in hand. "You're to avoid all excitement. Is this an obscene call?"

  "Everybody's a comedian," he grunted. "But the only one I want is Charlie George."

  * * *

  Everett never knew exactly when the whistle died in his cranium. It was gone when he donned street clothes six days later, and that was enough. He was shaky, and he wore an earplug in his right ear, but he was functioning again. A staff member packed his bag because there was no wife to do it, and brought the taxi because he wasn't going home first. The office would sim-ply have to improvise until he had recuperated in Palm Springs-a tender negotiation with militant medics, based on his promise to relax with friends at the California resort city. He did not tell them it would be his first visit, nor that he had met only one of those close friends in casual encounters. He did mail a note to one other Commissioner, outlining his decision. He signed it, 'Zebulon Pike'; Engels would enjoy that.

  Everett did not feel the Boeing clear the runway, so deep was he into a sheaf of clippings collated by his staff. A dozen dissident groups had claimed so-called credit for the Pueblo blast, each carefully outlining its reasons, each hope-ful that its motive would be touted. As usual, Everett noted with a shake of the massive head, our media system had accommodated them all.

  Yet only one group was armed with guilty knowledge: Fat'ah, led by the wraithlike Iraqi, Hakim Arif. Shortly after the blast, a United Press International office took a singular call from Pueblo, Colorado. It spoke in softly ac-cented English of a microwave transmitter hidden in a tennis ball on a synagogue roof. It spoke of galvanized nails embedded in explosives. It correctly stated the exact moment of the blast, to the second.

  These details were quickly checked by the UPI. Each detail was chillingly authentic. The caller went on to demand that Fat'ah, the only true believer in Palestinian justice, be given a base of operations for its glorious fight against Jewish tyranny. Ousted by Jordan, then ostensi-bly from Syria, Fat'ah was simply too militant even for its friends. It had nowhere to go. It chose, therefore, to go to the American people. Its channel of choice was a hideous explosion that left nearly a dozen dead and three dozen injured, half a world away from its avowed enemy.

  When the caller began to repeat his spiel, police were already tracing the call. The message was on its fourth re-run when a breathless assault team stormed a Pueblo motel room. Not quite abandoned, the room contained a modified telephone answering device which, upon re-ceiving a coded signal, had made its own prear-ranged call with a tape cartridge. The device was altogether too cunning: when an officer disgus-tedly jerked the telephone receiver away, it blew his arm off. The Federal Bureau of Alcohol, To-bacco, and Firearms was still theorizing about the devices used, but was quite positive about the sophistication of the user.

  According to a Newsweek bio, the leader of Fat'ah was a meticulous planner. When Hakim Arif was twelve years old, U.S. and Israeli agen-cies were still aiding Iran in the design of its secret police organ, SAVAK. Thus SAVAK was still naive and Hakim already subtle when the boy visited Iran with his father on a routine brib-ery expedition. During the night, security ele-ments of SAVAK paid a lethal call on the elder Arif. The boy evaporated at the first hint of trou-ble, taking across rooftops with him most of the emeralds his father had earmarked for Iranian friends. SAVAK knew a good joke when it was played on them, and praised the lad's foresight. They would have preferred their praise to be posthumous; in the Middle East, drollery tends to be obscure.

  Hakim took his secondary schooling in English-speaking private schools under the benevolent-and venal-gaze of relatives in Syria, who never did discover where the jewels were. Hakim also came under sporadic crossfires between Arab guerrillas and their Israeli coun-terparts, and he knew where his sympathies lay. Newsweek hinted that young Hakim might have taken additional coursework in an academy of socialist persuasion near Leningrad. How he got into an Ivy-league American school was anybody's guess, but a thumbnail-sized emerald was one of the better suppositions.

  Trained in finance, media, and pragmatism, Hakim Arif again disappeared into the east after his American training-but not before leaving indelible memories with a few acquaintances. He quoted the Koran and T.E. Lawrence. He was not exactly averse to carrying large amounts of cash, and protection for it, on his person. He won a ridiculously small wager by chopping off the end of a finger. And he was preternaturally shy of cameras.

  Hakim and Fat'ah were mutually magnetized by desire and bitterness, but not even Interpol knew how Hakim Arif came to lead a guerrilla band that rarely saw its leader. One thing seemed clear about his emergence: anyone too devious for Carlos Sanchez developed a certain mystique among the terrorist cadre. Even luna-tics have a lunatic fringe; the Fat'ah group devel-oped a positive genius for wearing its welcomes threadbare among groups that were only half crazy.

  Thwarted by security forces in Turkey, England, Syria, and Jordan, Fat'ah was evidently fingering the tassels at the end of its tether. Perhaps Hakim had peddled his last emerald; the fact seemed to be that the goals of Fat'ah, reachable by sufficient injections of cash into the proper places, were elusive.

  This was not to say that cash could not be raised. According to magazine sources, Libyan President Muammar Qaddafi had shelled out two million dollars to Carlos Sanchez for his Vienna raid on ministers of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries in December of 1975. Analysts of the Third World eventually shifted from their initial opinion that Qaddafi had acted out of personal pique. The final con-sensus was that Qaddafi and OPEC had simply sustained a corporate disagreement, just as other businesses sometimes have disagreements. Nothing personal; the bullets and the blood had been merely business. The biggest. As usual.

  An even larger investment--some said as large as five million dollars from Swiss accounts controlled by Giangiacomo Feltrinelli-had been made toward the massacre at the Olympic Village in Munich, in 1972. Hakim Arif had later contrived a brief and uneasy alliance with the Black September movement precisely because of its success; not with the Israelis so much as with the money they had squeezed from Feltrinel
li.

  Hakim himself was rumored to have a dark angel in the person of a sheikh living in and around an English country estate. The anglo-phile sheikh could afford a castle, and walled grounds envied by many a British peer, more easily than the English could afford the sheikh. The nabob had been gently dissuaded only in 1977 from driving his special-bodied ten-meter Rolls across his rolling meadows in search of the once-tame deer that infested his estate. It was not the speeding that his neighbors minded; the Rolls was on very, very private property. The complaints stemmed from the submachine gun bullets that sprayed beyond the sheikh's property whenever he sought the deer. There may have been no close connection between the sheikh's forced moratorium on the deer hunts and his decision, a month later, to put Hakim Arif on salary.

  No act of terrorism, of course, would be paid very well by its well-wishers unless it achieved that crucial phenomenon, media coverage. The sheikhs, Qaddafis, and Feltrinellis would pay more for one well-covered disemboweling than for a thousand committed in secret. Media coverage, especially on television, gave the criminal a chance to publicize his motives and his potency. The news magazines implied that the emergence of Hakim Arif in the United States was an omen of spilled guts.

  They also gave coverage to Hakim's motives, and his potency.

  Everett paused in his reading to gaze wistfully out at California's mighty Sierra range that stretched below the Boeing. Somewhere below, near Lake Tahoe, was a cabin he knew well; hoped to visit again. With the dusting of early snow on sawtooth massifs, the Sierra looked as cold and hard as the heart of Hakim Arif. What sort of egoist did it take to shorten his pinkie on an absurd wager, yet shun photographers? A very special one, at the least. Everett resumed reading.

  The conservative Los Angeles Times, the pre-vious Monday, had devoted too much space to a strained parallel between law enforcement agencies and Keystone Kops. The smash hit of the new TV season was a Saturday night talk show in which a battery of clever NBN hosts deigned to talk, live, only with callers who were already in the news. Soon after midnight after the Pueblo disaster, a caller had identified himself as Hakim Arif. A reigning cinema queen was discussing oral sex at 12:17:26, and found herself staring into a dead phone at 12:17:30. Hakim was speaking.

  Incredibly, the Iraqi responded to questions; pre-recording was out of the question. While Hakim launched into the plight of Palestinian Arabs and the need for funding to continue his heroic- struggle, network officials feverishly col-laborated with police, the FBI, and several tele-phone companies. Hakim was obviously watch-ing the show, to judge from his critique of one host's silent mugging.

  Hakim used no terms objectionable enough to require bleeping. He merely promised to repeat his Pueblo entertainment in larger and more vulnerable gatherings until, in its vast wisdom and power, the United States of America found a haven for Fat'ah. And oh, yes, there was one condition: the country of the haven must adjoin Israel.

  While voiceprint experts established the iden-tical patterns of the Pueblo and NBN show voices, a co-host asked if Hakim realized that he was asking for World War Three. Hakim, chuckling, replied that he trusted the superpowers to avoid exaggerated responses to Fat'ah responses to Israeli banditry.

  As Hakim chuckled, a Lockheed vehicle lifted vertically from Moffett Field in central Califor-nia for nearby Santa Cruz. Its hushed rotors car-ried four case-hardened gentlemen over the coast range in minutes to a parking lot two hundred yards from the Santa Cruz telephone booth which composed one link in Hakim's tele-phone conversation. Police cordoned the area and awaited the fight.

  There was no fight. There was only another clever device in the booth, relaying the conver-sation by radio. Its sensors noted the approach of the bomb squad to the booth with the `out of order' sign, and suddenly there was no tele-phone, no device, and no booth; there was only concussion. The Times surmised that Hakim could have been within thirty miles of the booth. No one, including Hakim, knew that the Lockheed assault vertol had passed directly over his bungalow in San Jose. Nor that a sweep-winged parafoil had narrowly missed a redwood tree while banking upward from a school playground near Soquel, California.

  Hakim's next call passed through another booth in Capitola, near Soquel and Santa Cruz, to CBS. Hakim was in excellent spirits. Govern-ment agencies were in overdrive, steering madly with many corrections. No one was in position to corral even one arm of Fat'ah and when Hakim was good and ready, he closed down his media operation.

  By the time his bungalow had been discov-ered, Hakim had a two-day start. That is, said the private report compiled for Everett by friends of David Engels, if it had been Hakim. Fingerprint gambits, falsely planted prints, were com-mon in disinformation games. The Iraqi's M.O. varied, but he always knew how to use available channels, including the illegal importation of some of his materiel from Quebecois sources. There was more, and Everett forced himself to read it. Beyond his old-fashioned reading glasses, his eyes ached. Presently he closed them and tried to ignore the faintly resurgent whistle in his head.

  MONDAY, 3 NOVEMBER, 1980:

  Two flights and a limousine later, Maurice Everett declined help with his suitcase and carried its reassuring bulk in Palm Springs heat toward a featureless sloping lawn. At least, it seemed to have no features until he strode through a slot in the grassy berm and realized that this comedian knew how to use money.

  The berm surrounded a sunken terrace open to the sun. Around the terrace and below ground level lay the translucent walls of Charlie George's hideaway. It reminded Everett of a buried doughnut, its hole a glass-faced atrium yawning into the sky, slanted solar panels more attraction than excrescence. It was thoroughly unlike the monuments erected to Mammon on the nearby acreages: it was logical, insulated, understated. Already, Everett liked Charlie George better for making sense even when he was not compelled to.

  Everett was nonplussed for an instant by theman who met him at the door like a sodbuster's valet. Denims tucked into beflapped, rundown boots; suspenders over an ancient cotton work shirt; a stubble of beard. Yet there was no mistak-ing the loose-jointed frame or the shock of corntassel hair over bushy brows, familiar to anyone who watched prime time television. Be-neath a strong nose was a mouth legendary for its mobility, from slack-jawed idiocy to prudish scorn. Everett realized with a start that it was speaking.

  "You wanted it informal," said Charlie George, and ushered Everett to a guest room.

  Everett removed his coat. "I thought you'd taken me too literally, Charlie. For a minute I thought you'd set this up in a vacant lot."

  "Just doing my bit for the Palm Springs image as the world's most elegant unfenced asylum. Complete with crazy proposals."

  "Not in my book," Everett replied. They dis-cussed their strategy while he changed into his scruffies. "I haven't sounded out all the members of the Commission," he admitted, wincing as he adjusted his pullover. "Wills is a reasonable sort, though, and I'll lay it out for him so he'll know how you propose to separate tele-vision from terrorism. These panel talks with the AP and UPI sure haven't excited him-or me. I like your scenario much better."

  The comedian kept his eyes sociably averted as Everett donned soft leather trousers. "We've been batting out details for an hour," he said.

  "Who's `we'?"

  Charlie leaned his head toward the window facing the atrium. "No net veepees, just a couple of pivotal people I told you about." He led Everett through a kitchen saturated with fra-grances of tortilla and taco sauce, into sunlight toward a buzz of male voices in a hidden corner of the atrium.

  They found two men seated, dividing their attention between sketch pads and bottles of Mexican beer. The smaller man made a point of rising; the taller, a point of not rising. "This is our friend in the feds," Charlie placed a gentle hand on Everett's shoulder. "Maury Everett: Rhone Althouse here, and Dahl D'Este over there."

  Althouse, the compact younger man, wore faded jeans and Gucci loafers. Only the footgear and a stunning Hopi necklace belied his undergraduate appea
rance. He was tanned, well-built, and his handshake had the solidity of a park statue. It was hard for Everett to believe that this pup was a media theorist who deserted academia for a meteoric rise in gag writing.

  "I hope you FCC guys move quicker separately than you do together," he said to Everett, with the barest suggestion of a wink.

  Everett smiled at the threadbare gibe. FCC de-cisions never came quickly enough for the in-dustry they regulated. "Don't bet on it," he replied. "I'm still pretty rickety today."

  D'Este, doodling furiously on a mammoth sketch pad, stopped to gaze at Everett with real interest. "I forgot," he said in a caramel baritone, "you were the star of the Pueblo thing. Perhaps you'll tell me about it." His tone implied, some other time, just we two.

  Everett accepted a Moctezuma from Charlie George and eased his broad back into a lawn chair. "All I know, literally, is what I've read since I woke up with tubes running into my arms. I expect to learn a lot more from you three, in hopes it won't happen again."

  "Ah," said D'Este, beaming. His elegant slen-der height was covered by a one-piece mauve velour jumpsuit which, Everett hazarded, might have been tailored expressly for this event. Dahl D'Este affected tight dark curls; his tan was by Max Factor. He hugged the sketch pad to his breast and stood to claim his audience. "Well then, the story thus far-" He paused as though for his host's permission and seemed gratified by some signal. "Charlie has this-wild idea that he can ring in a new era of comedy. Instead of avoiding the issue of terrorism in his shtick, and believe me, luv, we all do, he wants to create a truly fabulous character."