Dynamite Fishermen (Beriut Trilogy 1)

by Fleming, Preston

  Then Prosser recalled that barely a day had gone by since Ed Pirelli had passed Abu Ramzi’s information about the Palestinian bomb maker and his car-bomb smugglers to Lebanese G-2 and the Phalange. A shiver passed over him when it occurred to him that perhaps his own report might have offered the Phalange a pretext for the shelling.

  The other ballplayers and those who had come to watch the game observed the chaos beyond the center field fence with only the dimmest comprehension. What they saw overpowered their reason. At first they felt helpless in the face of such suffering and wished desperately for it to end. By degrees, however, their anxiety and frustration became intermixed with impatience at having to remain under cover. They huddled in clusters of five or six for a quarter of an hour discussing what to do next. Meanwhile, Harry and the black technician, more out of boredom than bravery, left the safety of the stadium’s shadow to retrieve an ice chest from the team’s bench.

  While team members passed around cans of beer and soda, Prosser noticed the first base umpire split off from a group of AUB players and walk out onto the field. The umpire was a silver-haired Texan of about fifty, who, after having taught physical education at the American University of Beirut for most of his adult life, had recently been promoted to athletic director. To Prosser’s surprise, upon reaching first base, the umpire shouted to the AUB captain to take the field.

  “Play ball!” he cried over the blare of car horns and the crackle of sporadic gunfire. “Embassy at bat. Top of the fifth. No outs.”

  The AUB coach shrugged and waved his team onto the field. Shellings came and went, but the athletic director could not be disobeyed if the coach wanted to keep his job. The students hesitated—for a moment unsure of their coach’s decision—and then, one by one, took their positions. The home plate umpire, a Canadian businessman, also watched and waited to see what the others would do. Then he, too, donned his wire mask and took his place behind the catcher. The U.S. embassy team, which led the students by a score of 5 to 0, appeared less than eager to begin.

  “Hey, wait a minute,” objected Baldwin, the embassy’s aging pitcher. “How do you know the shelling is finished? It may not be over just yet. I think we ought to wait. We don’t want anybody hurt out here.”

  “It’s over, it’s over. Take my word for it, okay? Let’s get on with the game,” the athletic director replied impatiently. “Come on. Let’s play ball!” he shouted toward the embassy’s bench.

  Colonel Charlie Ross, the silver-haired U.S. defense attaché, walked calmly out from the shade of the stadium to address the first base umpire.

  “Say, Ralph, those were just the incoming rounds,” he said. “We haven’t seen the outgoing yet. For all we know, we may be in the middle of an artillery duel here.”

  “The colonel’s right,” Baldwin added. “Let’s give it a little more time. In fact, some of these folks might just as soon call it a day and go home once the air clears.”

  “Gentlemen,” the athletic director replied, turning to face both men, “I said, ‘Play ball.’ You have a choice: you can either play ball or forfeit. Take your pick.”

  Baldwin and the colonel looked at each other in disbelief. Then the colonel wheeled around and shouted back to the rest of the team. “The man says, ‘Play ball,’ troops. So let’s hustle! Batter up!”

  Baldwin stared at the colonel in bewilderment and started toward the bench. Four or five team members followed closely behind.

  “You know, it’s pretty goddamned stupid for us to be risking our lives over a lousy ball game,” the black technician said to Harry as they prepared to leave the shelter of the stadium wall.

  “I can’t believe we’re doing it either,” Harry replied with a shrug. Then he lifted the end of the ice chest and beckoned with his free hand for the technician to help him carry it to the bench.

  “You, too?” Prosser called out to them as they passed. He picked up his mitt and rose to his feet.

  “Yeah, I know it’s stupid,” Harry replied, “but I can’t bear the thought of forfeiting to the little creeps.”

  Prosser put aside thoughts of the shelling and followed Harry to the bench. The Lebanese had their problems and he had his. Theirs would just have to wait until the ball game was over.

  Chapter 10

  Prosser was pleased with the shortcut that Rima had shown him. The street ran parallel to the route he usually took between the embassy and the Galerie Semaan checkpoint south of the city. But while his usual route seemed perpetually congested, this one was completely clear. As soon as he noticed the blackened, bullet-scarred buildings lining the western side of the street, he understood why. The route ran within a few blocks of no-man’s-land, and it was only because of the recent cease-fire that the route was now temporarily safe enough to use.

  “This is a real find. I’ve never been through this stretch so quickly,” he told her.

  “For one who knows the city well, there is always a way around the traffic and the checkpoints.”

  “I want to learn them all. Will you show me?”

  “It will take much time, batta. I think you might be too busy,” she teased, using the Arabic nickname she had chosen for him, which meant “duckling.”

  “I’ll make the time,” he replied, taking his eyes from the rubble-strewn avenue long enough to caress the back of her neck. “So where did we decide to have lunch? Jouniyé, Tabarja, Byblos?”

  “Jouniyé and Tabarja will be too crowded,” she said, wrinkling her nose. “Let us try Byblos. The fish at Pepe’s is the best in Lebanon, and we can have a table on the terrace overlooking the Roman harbor.”

  “Then Pepe’s it is,” he answered. “But driving is thirsty work. Reach back and hand me a beer, will you?”

  Rima turned around and, kneeling against the leather back of the seat, removed two red-and-white cans of Beck’s from the cooler on the backseat.

  A few minutes later they reached the intersection with Corniche el Mazraa. To the east, a queue of vehicles a kilometer long inched toward the museum crossing. At Rima’s direction Prosser pushed through the nearly gridlocked intersection and continued south along the western outskirts of the middle-class Palestinian enclave of Fakhani. Passing through Pepsi Cola Circle, he studied the collection of armored personnel carriers, multiple rocket launchers, antiaircraft guns, and heavy machine guns parked around its circumference.

  Nearly all the hardware belonged to Fatah or various other Palestinian groups—there was not a single Syrian soldier or Lebanese gendarme in sight. Indeed, the neighborhood was the closest thing to a Palestinian homeland that the PLO had achieved in its decade of armed struggle since its adherents had been expelled from Jordan in 1970. Unlike the squalid refugee camps of Sabra, Shatila, and Burj el Brajneh nearby, Fakhani was an established neighborhood where Palestinians lived in well-tended apartment buildings and operated shops and small businesses of all kinds. At every turn, however, one saw the red, white, and green Palestinian flag hanging from trees and lampposts, displayed behind shop windows, and painted on freshly whitewashed walls. According to both Abu Ramzi and Abu Khalil, the cellars, basements, and underground garages of the neighborhood were packed with enough arms and ammunition to keep a sizable army fighting for years.

  Prosser recalled the occasion when he had come to Fakhani during the previous summer to shop for bargain-priced Palestinian embroidery and souvenir Fatah T-shirts at a PLO-owned handcrafts store. He had realized shortly after stepping out of his car that it had been foolish of him, as an American official, to venture into the area, but he had played dumb and returned safely with the merchandise he had wanted. Had anyone challenged him, he could easily have been seized as an enemy spy. In the absence of diplomatic relations between the United States and the PLO, asserting diplomatic immunity would have been futile.

  He headed south again and passed the Cité Sportive Stadium, where a column of military trucks waited outside the cargo entrance. He had read in the morning newspaper that a PLO rally and military pa
rade in the stadium were planned that evening. He made a mental note to avoid the route upon his return, when crowds would be gathering outside the entrance. A kilometer beyond the stadium, he turned east onto the two-lane road that led through the populous slum of Shiyah toward the Galerie Semaan crossing.

  As the clogged traffic moved forward in spurts through Shiyah, he examined the ramshackle shops and cinder-block homes whose corrugated metal roofs were held down by bricks and stones. Donkey carts plodded along the side of the road, unfazed by the attempts of their motorized competition to overtake them. Packs of ragged children played in the dusty alleys.

  The inhabitants of the area were predominantly Shiite Muslim refugees from the agricultural areas of southern Lebanon, descendants of peasants who had lived on plantations under a form of feudalism that survived well into the twentieth century. During the mid-1970s increasing numbers of the peasants had been forced off the land by Israeli air strikes aimed at Palestinian commando bases in the south. By March of 1978, when the Israeli army invaded South Lebanon to drive the PLO out of the border areas, the Shiites had become the majority in South Beirut. Later both the continuing Israeli air raids in the southern part of the country and a skyrocketing birthrate had added to the number of poor Muslims in the southern suburbs of the capital until by the end of 1980 it had reached several hundred thousand.

  Prosser had met a number of the refugees and had sensed their rising anger at the United States for supplying the weapons that Israel was using in the south. He also saw how their militancy toward the U.S. had intensified since the beginning of the Tehran embassy hostage crisis. Washington’s simultaneous rapprochement with Iran’s archenemy, Iraq, only confirmed the spreading conviction among the Lebanese Shiites that America was the Great Satan.

  Suddenly Rima grabbed his elbow and called his attention to a cobalt blue Mercedes 280S parked in a driveway to the left of the road. The gleaming sedan, incongruously free of the dull layer of dust that covered everything else in view, was surrounded by four children between five and ten years of age. The children peered greedily at the luggage piled high in the backseat. The oldest child, a boy of about ten in a soiled white jalabiyya, smashed a heavy, gray cinder-block fragment against the rear passenger window. The safety glass cracked and buckled, but a second and a third blow still failed to penetrate.

  Prosser pulled to a stop at the curb.“The little bandits,” he muttered between clenched teeth. “Stay here; I’ll be back in a minute.” He unlocked the door and started to get out.

  Rima seized his arm. “No, batta, it is too dangerous to stop here.” She looked nervously behind her at the cars that were unable to edge their way around the Renault on the narrow road. Meanwhile, the oldest child had succeeded in smashing through the window and was attempting to clear away enough glass to reach through and unlock a rear door.

  “But we can’t just stand by and let those little bastards loot the goddamned car.” Prosser said.

  “Leave it, batta. It is none of our concern.”

  In the rearview mirror he could see the long line of cars stopped behind him. Horns blared. He looked for a place to pull off the road farther ahead but saw none.

  “All right, I won’t stop here. But there must be somewhere to pull off the road up ahead. I’m not about to let them get away with this.” He put the car into gear and pulled away from the curb with a screech of tires.

  “Forget them,” Rima said. “Behind such children are men who will shoot you for daring to interfere.”

  In his mirror he saw that the children had opened the doors of the Mercedes and were already greedily carrying off boxes and suitcases. Then the stalled queue of cars ahead of him moved forward. He followed them and moments later spotted a policeman directing traffic in the middle of the intersection some fifty or sixty meters ahead. A police motorcycle was parked at the side of the road.

  “Terrific! A cop! Give me a few seconds to tell him what’s going on, and then I promise to forget about the whole business.”

  “Ha!” Rima snorted. “Do you truly expect the police to intervene? That one is with the traffic police. He will do nothing about a criminal matter. Batta, why do you persist in this? Let the children take the entire car if they wish. Why should it concern you?”

  As the Renault drew closer to the policeman, Prosser slowed down to a crawl and called out to attract the policeman’s attention, but his voice was drowned out by the sound of horns behind him urging him forward. The policeman gestured toward the oncoming lane of cars, his back turned to the Renault. At last Prosser gave up and drove through the intersection.

  “Well, at least I tried,” he said under his breath. “That’s more than anyone else did.”

  “The others have learned that one must sometimes look the other way if one is to survive,” she replied.

  Prosser bristled. “Well, if surrendering to the lowest elements of society is what it takes to survive, Rima, then I frankly don’t see how Lebanon’s future is much worth the effort.”

  “Husayn used nearly the same words soon after his return to Beirut,” Rima replied bitterly. “I see that you and my brother think alike. By Allah, batta, I fear for you both.”

  * * *

  The drive to Byblos took slightly more than an hour. They followed the coastal highway into the town center and then parked in the old Roman harbor opposite the ancient two-story limestone villa that housed Pepe’s fish restaurant. When they entered, the owner embraced Rima like an old friend and led them to a table with a splendid view of the ancient port. Moments later the headwaiter brought them a stainless-steel tray piled high with shrimp, crab, lobster, smelt-like sultan brahim, and other fresh seafood from which to select their entrées. In addition, Prosser ordered a mezzé for two and a bottle of Ksara Blanc des Blancs.

  “I’m sorry Husayn couldn’t join us,” he commented to Rima when the headwaiter departed with the tray. “Did he say why not?”

  “He was planning to visit some men in Shtaura. They once fought in the militia with him and he thought they might be able to help him.”

  “I don’t recall Husayn mentioning which militia he was in.”

  “The munazzamat ‘amal al shuyu’ii. How do you say that in English?”

  “Communist Action Organization.”

  “I have heard it called by that name as well,” Rima said, “but do not be misled. During the events only a small fraction of the fighters in the organization were Marxists. Most were students and intellectuals like Husayn who advocated radical secular reform for Lebanon. Husayn is certainly no believer in communism, and I doubt that he ever was.”

  “So what does he believe in?” Prosser asked.

  “His work. His family and friends. For him there is nothing else.”

  “No political ideology? That sounds very un-Lebanese.”

  “The fighting changed him that way.”

  The headwaiter brought the wine, followed by an assistant carrying a tray with a modest mezzé, including Arab bread, an assortment of raw vegetables, and several dips and salads.

  “How much combat did Husayn see?” Prosser continued after the mezzé was laid out.

  “He fought from the outbreak of the war in 1975 until February of 1976. But he seldom speaks of those times. He told me of his experiences only once, and I think it upset him too much to open the subject again.”

  “When I first met Husayn, he said something about a disagreement with some other officers during the siege of the Holiday Inn. Did he ever tell you about it?”

  “Of course. It is the reason he went to Germany.”

  “How did it happen?”

  Rima took a deep breath and put down her glass of wine. “First, batta, you must understand that, although Husayn belonged to the organization throughout the Events, during most of the fighting he was assigned to a Palestinian unit. It was because he had taken part in earlier assaults on tall buildings in the commercial district that he was assigned to lead a squad of Palestinian fighters in the f
inal assault on the Holiday Inn.

  “Even after the lobby and mezzanine were taken, it required many hours to capture and clear the upper floors one by one. The fighting was extremely bloody, and many of the Palestinian boys in Husayn’s squad were killed or wounded. Those who survived were crazy with fear. When their victory was complete, the commanding officer ordered all the prisoners taken to the roof in small groups for execution. Husayn was guarding four Phalangist boys from the mountains, brave boys who had been captured only because they were knocked unconscious by a grenade that exploded very close to them. Husayn said every one of them had serious wounds, but none was afraid to die.

  “When Husayn led them to the roof, he had a horrible feeling about what would happen there. A strong wind was blowing off the sea, and the noise of the battles below seemed very far away to him. Over the edge of the building he could see fires burning for kilometers in all directions and countless explosions and tracer paths. On the roof the Palestinians were burning paper and trash and wooden furniture in oil drums, and the light from the fires gave everything an unnatural appearance. He said the smell of blood made him gag.

  “Husayn saw at once that some of the Palestinian fighters had been celebrating their victory by making a brutal sport of killing the Phalangist prisoners. Not by ordinary execution, but each in a different and more horrible way than the last. He watched them shoot several prisoners and push them over the edge of the roof. Others were hacked into pieces with knives and fire axes. Some had benzine poured on them and were set on fire like human torches and forced over the side by men with bayonets. One Palestinian tied a long rope around the neck of a Christian boy and tied the other end to an iron railing. Then the Palestinian pushed him over the railing. When the rope broke, the Palestinian became enraged, doubled it, and hanged three more prisoners the same way.