Dynamite Fishermen (Beriut Trilogy 1)

by Fleming, Preston

  The Syrian officer suddenly broke out into a grin. “No, no, no. Of course not. Go to Minara. Go home. Do as you wish,” he replied with an amiable shrug, as if to reassure the foreigner that he meant no offense. “I only wished to caution you against crossing here so late, when our fighters are expecting trouble from the east. That you have survived your trip is proof of your good fortune. At times like these the Phalangist snipers normally lie in wait on the rooftops of those buildings and fire at everything that moves.”

  Prosser could not help taking a quick glance back along the road he had traveled. “Believe me, Captain, I have no intention of trying this again.”

  “You speak Arabic very well for a foreigner,” the Syrian offered. “What is your work here?”

  “I’m at the American embassy.” Prosser waited for the reaction.

  “American embassy—very, very good!” the Syrian exclaimed enthusiastically, emboldened to test his rudimentary English. “I like America too much! But for Syrian military man, no visa to America. Visa very difficult.” He paused. “If I come to American embassy, you give me visa?”

  Prosser laughed. “Inshallah, Captain,” he replied. “But visas are for the consul to decide, not me. For a visa, you must speak to the consul.”

  “You speak for me?” The Syrian flashed an unctuous grin. “You help me take visa?”

  Prosser reached into his trouser pocket and handed the officer one of his business cards. “Here is my card, Captain. If you come to see me at the embassy, I will take you to the consul. We will speak to him together.”

  The Syrian struggled to pronounce the name Conrad Prosser using the Arabic transliteration on the reverse side of the card, coming out with something like “Cone-rod Bruiser.” Prosser nodded his approval.

  “You go to Minara now, Mister Cone-rod,” the captain continued in English. “Many bad Lebanese here, kill too much. Nobody stop them kill—not even Syrian army. Lebanese crazy, crazy too much.” He pocketed Prosser’s card, gave a casual salute, and waved the traveler forward.

  Prosser returned the salute and drove off along the deserted boulevard, bemused as usual by the nearly universal Arab ambition to obtain a visa to the United States. While he did not question the captain’s sincerity in applying, there was little chance the man would follow through. Apart from the fact that Syrian officers posted to Lebanon carried no passport in which a visa might be stamped, an unauthorized visit to the American embassy would probably land the man ten years at hard labor. But, then again, there was always the chance he might take the risk, and if he did Prosser would be more than willing to strike a deal. Beirut was full of people desperate enough to turn traitor for the chance to start over.

  “Crazy Lebanese—crazy too much,” he mimicked before patting the area along his waistband where the envelope filled with reports from Maroun was concealed.

  A momentary thrill sent his pulse racing when he thought of the splash that Maroun’s information would make at CIA Headquarters and the tale he would be able to spin for Harry Landers about how he drove right into a firefight. Then he pressed the accelerator and sped off toward Ras Beirut as if to outrun the trouble that seemed to be chasing him home.

  Chapter 2

  The granite-faced apartment block stood alone at the western end of rue Schubert on a steep rise that dominated the coastal road. All around it sprawled low heaps of broken cinder blocks, warped scaffolding timbers, and twisted iron reinforcing rods that had been left behind when construction was completed two years earlier. Prosser parked a block away and approached along the unlit street, moving without haste in the light of the half-moon, a steady sea breeze drying the sweat that beaded on his forehead and moistened the closely cropped hair at his temples.

  From behind him came the distant reverberation of artillery along the Green Line, with shell bursts coming at three- or four-second intervals, already two or three times as frequent as when he had crossed the no-man’s-land. The opening guitar riff of “Under My Thumb” reached his ears from the crowded balcony of an upper-story apartment. That would be Harry’s party, he thought. He stepped into the lobby, nodding politely as he passed the wizened bawwaab who continued to smoke his hubbly-bubbly and listen to lugubrious Arabic orchestral music from a cheap pocket transistor.

  No sooner had he stepped inside the lobby than the music was interrupted by the sharp thunderclap of high explosives detonating perhaps a hundred meters away. The shock of the blast rattled the badly fitted sliding windows in their flimsy aluminum frames and, for an instant, forced the breath from his chest. The ancient doorman, leaning back on his folding wooden chair just inside the door, drew again from his hubbly-bubbly and opened a tabloid newspaper, apparently unperturbed.

  “Masaa’ al khair, Uncle,” Prosser greeted him. “They’re starting early tonight, eh?”

  “Abu Daoud’s daughter was married today,” the man replied without looking up. “That is only for celebration.”

  Prosser laughed. “Ah, of course. And Abu Daoud is...?”

  The bawwaab put down the mouthpiece of the hubbly-bubbly. “He owns the building behind us. He is zayeem for this neighborhood.”

  “Well, Uncle, do you suppose our friend Abu Daoud would mind if I took a look out back?”

  “Please,” the old man answered with indifference. “As you wish.”

  Prosser left the lobby and walked around the east side of the building. A hundred and fifty meters to the north stood another newly built apartment building, its windowless profile facing him and its long front, ribbed from top to bottom with broad terraces, facing the shimmering Mediterranean.

  On the terrace two stories below the roof, several scores of revelers crowded forward against an iron railing. Strobe-like flashes from the muzzle of an automatic rifle fired from the edge of the crowd lit up the side of the building and were mirrored in the glass doors behind. A split second afterward, the staccato reports reached his ears.

  Moments later a dim, sputtering flame fell in a wide arc from the same spot and burst into a brilliant ball of intense white light two or three meters above the ground. Prosser felt a sharp puff of humid air in his face as the crash reached him, then a ringing in both ears. Gunfire was so commonplace in Beirut that one hardly noticed it after one’s first few days in the city, but this was the first time he had seen or heard of dynamite sticks being used as party favors.

  He returned to the lobby and reached for the elevator call button.

  “Which apartment?” the bawwaab inquired, still without lifting his eyes from his tabloid.

  “Mr. Harry, the American consul.”

  “Eighth floor. Ahlan wa sahlan.”

  * * *

  Prosser was only an hour late—not at all tardy by Middle Eastern standards. The door opened, and for a moment he thought he was at the wrong party. A lively Lebanese folk dance was playing, not the British rock that Harry Landers usually favored when the rugs were rolled back.

  “Good evening, Mr. Prosser.” A rotund waiter of about fifty in a starched white jacket and black silk bow tie closed the door behind him. It was Wadih, a professional caterer who could be found serving drinks and canapés nearly every night of the week on West Beirut’s diplomatic cocktail circuit.

  “Masaa’ an-nour, Wadih. If you’re here, I must have come to the right place.”

  “It is always a pleasure, Mr. Prosser,” the waiter replied with an indulgent smile. “May I bring you something?”

  “A dry Manhattan, straight up. That’s—”

  “With French vermouth, not Italian,” Wadih cut in with evident pride in knowing the preferences of his clientèle. “Mr. Landers is on the west balcony. I will join you there in a moment.”

  Harry Landers, the most senior of the four young vice consuls at the American embassy, was arguably the best-known American diplomat in Beirut. As chief of the visa section, he possessed near-absolute authority to grant or refuse nonimmigrant visas to the United States and considerable power over immigrant visas as w
ell. While this alone would have been more than adequate grounds for many Lebanese to lionize him, Landers was blessed with a gregarious and easygoing nature that won friends even among those whose visa applications were inevitably denied.

  Like Prosser, Landers was in his early thirties, a veteran of two previous tours abroad, and a volunteer for duty in Lebanon. The two men had become friends nearly four years earlier when both began Arabic-language training at the Foreign Service Institute in Washington. For ten months, six hours a day, Landers, Prosser, and four other diplomats languished in a drab U.S. State Department annex across the Potomac from Georgetown University, practicing an endless series of dialogues in Levantine Arabic about bargaining for fruits and vegetables, registering automobiles, and opening checking accounts. While Prosser went on to spend another ten months at the State Department’s language school in Tunis, reading decade-old Arabic news stories and listening to tapes of Arabic radio broadcasts about the United Nations and the Nonaligned Movement, Landers was assigned to staff a visa window at the U.S. consulate in Alexandria, Egypt.

  Landers and Prosser were both large men, one or two inches above six feet and each having the bone structure and musculature of a wrestler or linebacker. Unlike his colleague, however, Landers had long given up strenuous exercise and now possessed the sagging paunch and jowls of an athlete gone to seed. On most evenings he could be found dining, drinking, and chasing air hostesses in the company of his regular Lebanese and European drinking companions at one of Beirut’s many surviving nightspots.

  Prosser, on the other hand, rarely joined the group, even on the rare nights when he was not working. Harry had once said that Prosser was not at all the sort he would have picked out as a spy. The Agency officers he had met in Washington and Cairo were generally ex-military types who had attended state colleges and dressed in polyester leisure suits, looking more like life insurance salesmen than the diplomats they pretended to be. During the consular training Landers had undergone before embarking for Egypt, the Agency men taking the course were always the ones who sat in the back reading newspapers and who spent the lunch hour at topless bars on Arlington’s Wilson Boulevard. Most of them put in the minimum effort necessary to get by in the course without disgracing themselves.

  To Landers’s way of thinking, Prosser had always seemed out of place in Beirut, too much the clean-cut Midwestern boy to lurk with cloak-and-dagger in cobbled alleys and covered bazaars. At diplomatic functions Prosser invariably appeared punctually in a dark Brooks Brothers suit, observed protocol to the letter, and scrupulously sought out wallflowers for conversation. To Landers this seemed to demonstrate his friend’s team spirit and adherence to his State Department cover. To Prosser it was merely the sort of bottom-fishing that junior case officers all over the world were expected to practice.

  Landers had not been surprised when he learned from an Agency man who had served with him in Alexandria that Prosser’s first tour of duty, in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, had been anything but successful. Though by all accounts a gifted linguist, skilled reporter, and perceptive student of Saudi political and military affairs, Prosser had failed miserably at the intelligence officer’s essential task, which was to recruit new spies. Whether the Saudis were too wealthy to be tempted by money, too disgruntled with U.S. support for Israel to serve American foreign policy, or too agile to be caught in Prosser’s net, not a single Saudi had been induced by Prosser to sell the kingdom’s secrets to Uncle Sam. Few in Jeddah Station had expected him to see a second overseas posting. He would be recalled to Headquarters, assigned to a country desk, and put on the shelf.

  As it happened, there had been an immediate opening for a junior Arabist in Beirut, and Prosser was the only candidate available. Now, barely a year after his arrival in Lebanon, Prosser’s star was on the rise. Because of his fluency in Arabic, he had been given an unusually large number of agents to handle, most of whom spoke no other language than Arabic. As these were the informants who tended to have the best access to hard-to-get intelligence on the Lebanese left, the Palestinian National Movement, and the Syrian army, his reporting soon began receiving higher ratings than that of any other officer in the station. Further, the necessity of attending three or four agent meetings a day in widely scattered locations around the city forced him to venture out from the safety of the embassy at times when few others were inclined to do so, earning him a reputation for dedication to duty and a cool head under fire.

  Prosser entered the living room from the foyer, expecting to find scattered clusters of people engaged in typical cocktail party chatter. Instead he found three dozen assorted Europeans, Arabs, and Americans gathered in a circle around a shapely Arab girl performing a spirited belly dance. The guests clapped, stomped their feet, gestured, and sang along with the music, exhorting the woman to perform more and more suggestive movements. In style and technical skill she rivaled many of the professionals Prosser had seen perform in Cairo and Damascus; in youthful beauty she surpassed them all. She wore a cocktail dress rather than a dance costume, and a long silk sash tied across her hips accentuated her movements. She danced tirelessly, moving her long legs and full hips with abandon and clearly relishing the rapt attention she received.

  Prosser wrenched his eyes away from her undulating hips long enough to spot Harry Landers on the west balcony, as Wadih had predicted, delivering a comic monologue to a trio of young Lebanese businessmen in suits.

  Landers wore a jacket without a tie and gesticulated artfully with an empty pilsner glass in one hand and a cigarette in the other as he built toward his punch line. A momentary silence met its arrival, and then polite and slightly puzzled laughter followed. Landers shrugged off the setback and took Prosser’s approach as an opportunity to make his exit.

  “Connie! I was starting to worry about you. Of all nights to be coming back from the East Side, for Christ’s sake. It sounds like they’re rehearsing for World War Three out there.”

  Over the music Prosser could make out the rumble of faraway howitzers and crumps of mortar fire closer by. Distant flashes illuminated the night sky like lightning from a storm at sea. He had intended to regale Landers with a blow-by-blow account of his latest trip across the Green Line, but now that the opening was there it somehow didn’t seem worth repeating. Back in the safety of a diplomatic cocktail party, it seemed no more worthy of merit than enduring a lightning strike when taking shelter from a thunderstorm. To boast of it would somehow be immodest and might bring the lightning even closer next time.

  “Tonight they pulled a new one,” Prosser said. “They closed the museum crossing and didn’t bother to tell me about it. Just waved me right through. The trouble was, when I arrived on this side the Syrians wanted to send me back.”

  “It would have served you right. Not even the Lebs are stupid enough to cross town on a night like this. One of these days we’re going to miss you around here.”

  Wadih arrived with a tray of drinks. Prosser took his cocktail and Landers traded his empty pilsner glass for a full one. Both men lifted their glasses in a toast.

  A flash illuminated the empty field for an instant, and then a blast rocked the air. Whiskey and vermouth splashed over Prosser’s nose and down his chin. He bent forward to fish his handkerchief from his breast pocket. “Some wedding. I’d like to see what they do for a divorce.”

  Landers set down his glass to wipe the beer from his lapels. Across the field, an assault rifle fired another dozen rounds. “That was it,” he replied.

  The two Americans laughed as they put away their damp handkerchiefs, but they had barely finished when the gunfire erupted from somewhere within their own building. They turned and watched in astonishment as an Arab youth in his early twenties wearing jeans and a blue polo shirt fired nearly an entire AK-47 magazine at the moon from the balcony of the apartment adjacent to Harry’s. Encouraged by his companions, a second youth in brown desert-camouflage fatigues removed a pistol from his waistband and fired seven shots out over the horizon. />
  One of the trio to whom Landers had earlier told his joke, a slender Lebanese man of about twenty-five, now broke away from the other two and pushed through the crowd to the railing opposite the rifleman. He called out something that from its tone was clearly a rebuke, although the exact words, delivered in a North Lebanese dialect, were unclear. The gunman across the railing gave a quizzical look over his shoulder and tossed off a similarly indecipherable reply. Four or five seconds passed. Landers’s Lebanese guest spoke again, this time with heavy sarcasm.

  The rifleman in the adjacent apartment now took deliberate aim and fired a six-shot burst in the air just wide of Harry’s balcony. A woman shrieked. The handful of guests who had been chatting on the balcony scrambled for cover.

  “Now we’re really in for it,” Landers said with a hint of panic. “Can you make out what they’re saying?”

  “Only a few of the words,” Prosser replied. “I think our Leb just told your neighbor with the gun to put the thing away before he calls in the Syrian army.”

  “What did the other one say?”

  “He’s pointing to his pals and saying they are the Syrian army.”

  “Shit,” Landers muttered. “The old man and his family next door are from Damascus. Maybe they’re not bluffing.”

  “Shhh!” Prosser interrupted. He cocked an ear toward the disputants. “No, our Leb isn’t buying it. I think he’s insulting them now...”

  At that moment the resourceful caterer Wadih, who had disappeared from the balcony just after the explosion, returned, leading a portly man of forty or forty-five dressed in an expensive, Italian-cut business suit. The self-assured and meticulously groomed newcomer addressed the neighbors in a soothing voice, although neither Prosser nor Landers could hear what the two had said. In a little more than a minute, he had somehow prevailed on the neighbor with the assault rifle to put down his weapon.