Dynamite Fishermen (Beriut Trilogy 1)

by Fleming, Preston

  “Tell me something, batta,” she ventured. “Have you even once turned back when you thought the road too dangerous?”

  He pondered the question. “Sure I have. Plenty of times. Why?”

  “It is just that sometimes I wish you were more careful.”

  “But I am careful. Unfortunately, conditions around here have a way of changing, and safe places don’t always stay safe. When that happens, as it did a minute ago, often the best choice is to put your head down and keep on moving.”

  “No, I think you have a different reason for what you do,” she ventured. “To some men, retreat is hateful, more hateful than anything—even dying, perhaps.”

  “Of course it’s hateful, Rima, and often it’s a hell of a lot riskier than going forward to face the enemy. If I have to die, I’d rather do it with my boots on. Not that I expect to die anytime soon, mind you.”

  “Tell me, habibi, what do you see in your future? Do you have a dream? Something you must stay alive for?”

  “For me, the future is no further than June of next year, when my tour of duty here is over. My dream is to still be here when June comes. Beyond that I have no time for dreams.”

  “So you are like us Lebanese; you live only for the present,” she concluded softly.

  “If you say so. I enjoy what I do, and they say it’s useful to my country. That, and going out at night for fun sometimes, and seeing a bit of the countryside on weekends, is all I need. At least for now. Why do you ask? Are your dreams so very different?”

  “If you had asked me even a few weeks ago, I would have said no. Since the events I have done nothing but live for the present. But now my present seems to have come to an end. For me Lebanon is finished. I must have something more to live for than an end to the fighting. That is why I have been giving thought to returning to France and finishing my doctorat. And if I do, I must leave by the end of summer.” She gave Prosser a searching look.

  “That’s not very far off,” he said, showing the degree of concern that he sensed she expected of him. “I was hoping we would have more time to get to know each other.”

  “I would also like that,” she replied evenly. “But it seems that your work keeps you too busy for such things. The weekends do not offer us much time if we are to know each other well before August.”

  “I don’t work all the time, you know. We could meet for dinner once or twice a week. Would that help?”

  “It would please me to see you more often than I do now,” she offered.

  “I’m free tomorrow night. Why don’t we reserve a table at the Coral Beach? Perhaps Husayn would like to bring a date and join us.”

  “But I don’t want to see Husayn. I want to see you.”

  He could see that this was not the time and place to arrange a meeting with Rima’s brother. If he pushed too hard, he might spook them both. His approach to Husayn would have to wait.

  “Then how about the Myrtom House? A table for two in the corner?”

  She nodded but still appeared to be waiting for him to address some unspoken issue.

  “Are you sure there isn’t something else bothering you?” he asked.

  She pressed her lips together tightly as she translated the right words from Arabic into English. “How shall I say this, batta? It is simply that you have a certain…reputation. What am I to think on those nights when you are not with me? I have met others from your embassy. Not one of them works at night as you do. Huda tells me that her Gregory comes home by half past five every day.”

  “Greg is an administrative officer, Rima. His job is at his desk. My work is outside the embassy, meeting people and trying to find out what’s going on in this country. You just can’t compare the two.”

  “And Don? I know for certain he returns to his apartment by six o’clock every night, because Salwa always has dinner ready for him by then.”

  “Don Davenport is a security officer, Rima, not a political officer. And, frankly, he ought to know better than to have Salwa living with him. It’s against department rules, and he happens to be the one responsible for enforcing them.”

  Rima was not persuaded.

  Prosser reached across and took her hand. “Listen, I’m sorry if it seems unreasonable to you that I spend so much time at my work,” he said. “But it’s not as if I’m out chasing after other women when I’m not with you.”

  “Oh, batta, that was not what I meant. I just want to be with you more of the time.” She took his hand in both of hers and held it tightly.

  “I’m doing my best,” he replied after another moment’s silence. “Let’s take it one step at a time, all right? August is still a long way off.”

  Prosser thought of Colonel Hisham and his Eagles of the Revolution and wondered whether he would still be here a week from now, not to mention two months later. Then he thought of Husayn al Fayyad, who knew the colonel and had reason to hate him and thus might be willing to talk. The choice was clear. He had to reach Husayn quickly—with Rima’s help or without it. If the approach to Husayn offended her, it might bring their personal relationship to an unhappy end, but that was the risk one always took in using one’s friends to spot and develop new agent prospects. After all, that’s why the Agency had sent him here. If he was going to succeed in Lebanon, he knew, he would have to recruit an agent very soon. And right now Husayn al Fayyad looked like the best shot he had.

  Chapter 19

  Prosser watched Rima’s red Peugeot turn right off the Qarantina Highway and descend along the sweeping curve of the access road toward the port’s eastern gate. He then broke off and circled back to the east. After twenty minutes of nerve-racking driving through the congested commercial districts of Dora and Mar Youssef, he crossed the coastal autostrade and made for the hills east of suburban Jdaide to check for surveillance. Within a few minutes of having begun his ascent, the temperature dropped at least ten degrees, and in place of prickly pears and scrub he noticed tall pines appearing in thin stands along the side of the road.

  As he surveyed the city below, it occurred to Prosser that this must have been how Beirut had looked before the Lebanese civil war. The city appeared so prosperous and peaceful from these hills that one could easily mistake the view for one of southern France or the Italian Riviera. Only when approaching sea level did one see the ugly scars left by shells, bullets, decay, and neglect.

  Prosser remembered the first time he had driven along this road for one of his early car meetings with Maroun. Nearby, the agent had told him, was a ravine where nearly every night during the darkest months of the civil war, Phalange security men had arrived in dump trucks to dispose of the bodies of Palestinian and Lebanese Muslim civilians abducted at random around East Beirut. Most of the victims had been rounded up in groups of ten to twenty, solely on the basis of their religious and ethnic background, then executed with production-line efficiency in retaliation for Christians similarly kidnapped and murdered in West Beirut.

  Although every morning the central government’s gendarmes would comb the ravine for new bodies to take back to the morgues, the government had no power to stop the butchery. Now, in the summer of 1981, such random abductions were rare, but the central government was still powerless to intervene. Prosser scanned the depths of the ravine and could not help wondering when the last corpse might have been dumped there and how many bleached bones remained scattered among the rocks.

  Having detected no sign that anyone was following him, Prosser came back out of the hills by a different road to rejoin the northbound autostrade. A few kilometers farther along, in the coastal suburb of Antélias, he left the autostrade for the main shopping street and found a parking space two blocks from the high-rise apartment block where Maroun Ghaffour’s brother-in-law lived. Through the open car window he counted ten stories up from the ground level and instantly recognized Maroun’s profile behind the sliding glass doors where he’d said he would be.

  Prosser entered the building through the rear entrance, took an ele
vator to the eighth floor, walked the remaining two stories, and pressed the doorbell of the first apartment on the left. Maroun ushered him into the apartment with a whispered greeting.

  “Peter, we have a small problem. My wife insisted on coming with me this morning—she is in the kitchen at this very moment. Can you come again the day after tomorrow? I am very sorry, but I had no way of keeping her away, since it is, after all, her brother’s apartment. To tell the truth, Peter, I think she suspected me of having a rendezvous with a woman.” He chuckled and looked back over his shoulder with a conspiratorial air. “You know how wives are.”

  “Don’t give it another thought, Maroun,” Prosser replied. “The day after tomorrow will be fine. Same time, same place.”

  “Very good. But before you go you must take this. In it is a complete report on the arrests of the car bomb smugglers.”

  He handed over a sealed envelope that Prosser slipped into his breast pocket without opening.

  “Did any of the prisoners mention a Palestinian named Colonel Hisham?”

  Maroun’s face darkened. “He was the expert who fabricated their bombs,” he answered. “One of our agents tells us that this Colonel Hisham is now in West Beirut, working on even larger ones.”

  “Against whom, Maroun?”

  “We do not know. But Bashir has already relayed to the Israelis everything we know about the colonel and the places he is known to frequent. I believe they have something special in mind for him.”

  “Can you get me a copy of what was passed to the Israelis?”

  “If you wish. But won’t Bashir, as a matter of course, present a copy to your superiors at the American embassy? After all, it was they who provided the information that led to the arrests.”

  Prosser tilted his head back, rolled his eyes, and made a sound resembling “tsk” that in the Levant means, “No way.”

  “Bashir can be relied upon to give us the absolute minimum he can get away with,” Prosser explained, “which is probably a glass of mint tea and a pat on the back. He’ll be offering a good deal more to the Israelis, because he knows they’re horse traders and he wants them to back his assault against West Beirut.”

  “Then I will bring a copy for you when we meet on Friday.”

  “Thanks, Maroun. Now I’d better get out of here before your wife catches sight of me. Is there anything you need from me on Friday?”

  The Lebanese shook his head.

  “Then ma’assalama, habibi.”

  * * *

  Prosser drove through the backstreets of Antélias and Jall ed Dib for twenty minutes along a preset surveillance detection route before heading back toward the port. Because the meeting with Maroun had been so short, he had plenty of time to get back to the embassy. He made several leisurely detours to become more familiar with neighborhoods that he might want to use for dead drops, car pickups, or brief encounters with his agents.

  Passing through the Dora commercial district once again, he overtook a column of eight empty tractor-trailers returning to the port to take on cargo and then came upon another dozen or more rigs queued up outside the port’s eastern gate. This was an auspicious sign, because if the port was still receiving trucks, it would almost certainly be safe for him to cross to West Beirut. He drove to the head of the queue, received a languid wave from the sentry, and entered the eastern side of the harbor complex.

  Traffic was sparse along the main road that led west past rows of warehouses serving the port’s second and third basins. Prosser drove at moderate speed into the cobbled main square. Then he skirted the water’s edge to the corner of a battered pre-1975 corrugated metal warehouse and turned left sharply onto the apron of the port’s first basin.

  Ahead and to his right was a narrow two-lane corridor leading west between an anti-sniper barrier of shipping containers stacked four high on one side and the water’s edge on the other. Although eastbound traffic was sparse and moved quickly, westbound traffic was already backed up for the corridor’s entire length. Prosser’s Renault was the last in a one-hundred-meter-long queue of cars and trucks waiting to enter the corridor. He reached back with his free hand for Monday’s International Herald Tribune and resigned himself to a long wait.

  Within minutes of settling back to read the sports section, Prosser heard muffled pops of antiaircraft fire to the southwest. High in the sky he observed a pair of glinting warplanes unloading shiny metallic streamers and parachute flares one thousand meters higher than the puffs of black flak smoke that erupted in the skies above the city. As the antiaircraft fire spread to cover the skies directly overhead, the pops became thunderous booms, yet the warplanes never seemed to go anywhere near the black puffs.

  Prosser watched a pair of the silvery aircraft circle around to the west and climb to rejoin another formation at a much higher altitude. The planes had to be Israeli, since the Israeli air force exercised total control of the airspace over western Lebanon, but from where he sat Prosser couldn’t tell whether they were mounting an air strike somewhere in the city or just carrying on the customary war of nerves against Beirut’s air defense network.

  The hammering of heavy machine guns several hundred meters to the south brought Prosser’s thoughts back down to earth. Within seconds more machine guns entered the fray, spreading panic among the drivers trapped along the waterfront corridor. Horns blared furiously as cars and trucks slammed against the wall of shipping containers and against each other in the desperate attempt to turn themselves around within the congested space and put some distance between themselves and the gunfire. Some drivers abandoned the effort entirely and fled on foot to seek cover in nearby warehouses. Not far away, field artillery and mortars began to open fire.

  As Prosser had not quite reached the two-lane corridor, he felt he had a fair chance of maneuvering the Renault back off the apron and onto the cobbled square before incoming artillery and mortar fire closed in upon him. Indeed, no sooner did he shift into reverse than two mortar rounds dropped into the water 150 meters away. The drivers behind him sized up the situation at once, and most of them succeeded in backing out onto the wider portion of the loading apron, where several cars could turn around at the same time. Prosser followed suit and within seconds was speeding back across the commercial port’s central plaza toward East Beirut.

  After exiting through the eastern gate, Prosser pulled onto the shoulder along the ridge overlooking the harbor complex. The warplanes were gone now, as were the black puffs of flak smoke. He looked down over the central business district for signs of continuing battle, but despite the terrible din he could see no muzzle flashes or shell bursts—only pillars of smoke rising from the maze of crumbled walls and caved-in roofs.

  Now that he was safe, Prosser wondered what had become of the drivers left trapped along the water’s edge. What would he have done in their place? It seemed clear that had he arrived on the apron just a few minutes earlier, he, too, would have been caught between the container barrier and the water’s edge. He decided that if the situation ever arose again, he would leave his car and run for cover. Any low spot would suffice to protect him against shrapnel, which was the worst hazard. As for a direct hit, the odds were a million to one against.

  Prosser drove back to the Qarantina Bridge and headed south toward the Galerie Semaan crossing, surmising that the museum checkpoint would be closed because of the shelling. The neighborhoods he traversed now were far removed from the fighting, and their main roads bore the usual midday traffic, as did the Galerie Semaan crossing itself. Not until the Airport Circle did he begin to see any evidence that an aerial bombing might have occurred. There, stationed at varying intervals around the circle, were five 12.7-millimeter machine guns mounted on pickup trucks and four twin-barreled 23-millimeter antiaircraft cannons on flatbed trucks, all with barrels pointed skyward to await the warplanes’ return.

  As Prosser made his way past the main entrance of the Sabra refugee camp, he spotted at least fifteen jeeps and Land Rovers heading ea
st carrying uniformed conscripts with shaven heads, their eyes glassy with excitement and fear. Some waved their weapons wildly and fired into the air when their vehicles were forced to halt in the bumper-to-bumper traffic.

  On Prosser’s right, forty or fifty forlorn civilians, mainly women and children, huddled under the concrete skeleton of an unfinished four-story building and stared out as if awaiting some signal that it was safe to emerge. Although no bombs or rockets appeared to have fallen anywhere near them, the din from the firing must have been horrendous, and the eyes of the small children clinging to their mothers seemed filled with unutterable terror.

  About a kilometer and a half to the north, black columns of smoke rose and twisted toward the sky. Prosser heard the faint wailing of distant ambulances and wondered once again if aerial bombs had actually fallen on the city. He lowered his window and called out to a gray-bearded Arab dressed in a soiled jalabiyya and threadbare black waistcoat who stood at the side of the road to watch the twisting plumes of smoke.

  “What happened, Uncle?” he asked the man in Arabic. “Where is that smoke coming from?”

  “Fakhani and Tariq el Jedide,” the old man replied.

  “But those are residential neighborhoods,” Prosser replied, more to himself than to the Arab.

  The old man pulled a red plastic transistor radio from his waistcoat pocket and held it out for the foreigner to listen. “It is not me who says so. Listen, the Voice of Palestine. It says the Zionist planes struck at the offices of the Palestinian Resistance. Many hundreds have been killed. May Allah preserve them.” The old man shook his head in disbelief.

  Meanwhile, Prosser pondered whether the Voice of Palestine intentionally inflated its casualty estimates or whether Israel could have cold-bloodedly laid waste to a crowded residential neighborhood in order to exact Lebanese-style revenge upon leaders of the Palestinian Resistance.