Dahlia sat on the side of Najeer’s bed with a small tape recorder in her lap. He had ordered her to make a tape for use on Radio Beirut after the strike was made. She was naked, and Najeer, watching her from the couch, saw her become visibly aroused as she talked into the microphone.
“Citizens of America,” she said, “today the Palestinian freedom fighters have struck a great blow in the heart of your country. This horror was visited upon you by the merchants of death in your own land, who supply the butchers of Israel. Your leaders have been deaf to the cries of the homeless. Your leaders have ignored the ravages by the Jews in Palestine and have committed their own crimes in Southeast Asia. Guns, warplanes, and hundreds of millions of dollars have flowed from your country to the hands of warmongers while millions of your own people starve. The people will not be denied.
“Hear this, people of America. We want to be your brothers. It is you who must overthrow the filth that rules you. Henceforth, for every Arab that dies by an Israeli hand, an American will die by Arab hands. Every Moslem holy place, every Christian holy place destroyed by Jewish gangsters will be avenged with the destruction of a property in America.”
Dahlia’s face was flushed and her nipples were erect as she continued. “We hope this cruelty will go no further. The choice is yours. We hope never to begin another year with bloodshed and suffering. Salaam aleikum.”
Najeer was standing before her, and she reached for him as his bathrobe fell to the floor.
Two miles from the room where Dahlia and Najeer were locked together in the tangled sheets, a small Israeli missile launch sliced quietly up the Mediterranean.
The launch hove to one thousand meters south of the Grotte aux Pigeons, and a raft was slipped over the side. Twelve armed men climbed down into it. They wore business suits and neckties tailored by Russians, Arabs, and French-men. All wore crepe-soled shoes and none carried any identification. Their faces were hard. It was not their first visit to Lebanon.
The water was smoky gray under the quarter moon, and the sea was riffled by a warm offshore breeze. Eight of the men paddled, stretching to make the longest strokes possible as they covered the four hundred meters to the sandy beach of the Rue Verdun. It was four eleven a.m., twenty-three minutes before sunrise and seventeen minutes before the first blue glaze of day would spread over the city. Silently they pulled the raft up on the sand, covered it with a sand-colored canvas, and walked quickly up the beach to the Rue Ramlet el-Baida, where four men and four cars awaited them, silhouetted against the glow from the tourist hotels to the north.
They were only a few yards from the cars when a brown-and-white Land Rover braked loudly thirty yards up the Rue Ramlet, its headlights on the little convoy. Two men in tan uniforms leaped from the truck, their guns leveled.
“Stand still. Identify yourselves.”
There was a sound like popping corn, and dust flew from the Lebanese officers’ uniforms as they collapsed in the road, riddled by 9 mm bullets from the raiders’ silenced Parabel lums.
A third officer, at the wheel of the truck, tried to drive away. A bullet shattered the windshield and his forehead. The truck careered into a palm tree at the roadside, and the policeman was thrown forward onto the horn. Two men ran to the truck and pulled the dead man off the horn, but lights were going on in some of the beachfront apartments.
A window opened, and there was an angry shout in Arabic. “What is that hellish racket? Someone call the police.”
The leader of the raid, standing by the truck, shouted back in hoarse and drunken Arabic, “Where is Fatima? We’ll leave if she doesn’t get down here soon.”
“You drunken bastards get away from here or I’ll call the police myself.”
“Aleikum salaam, neighbor. I’m going,” the drunken voice from the street replied. The light in the apartment went out.
In less than two minutes the sea closed over the truck and the bodies it contained.
Two of the cars went south on the Rue Ramlet, while the other two turned onto the Corniche Ras Beyrouth for two blocks, then turned north again on the Rue Verdun....
Number 18 Rue Verdun was guarded round the dock. One sentry was stationed in the foyer, and another armed with a machine gun watched from the roof of the building across the street. Now the rooftop sentry lay in a curious attitude behind his gun, his throat smiling wetly in the moonlight. The sentry from the foyer lay outside the door where he had gone to investigate a drunken lullaby.
Najeer had fallen asleep when Dahlia gently pulled free from him and walked into the bathroom. She stood under the shower for a long time, enjoying the stinging spray. Najeer was not an exceptional lover. She smiled as she soaped herself. She was thinking about the American, and she did not hear the footsteps in the hall.
Najeer half-started from the bed as the door to his apartment smashed open and a flashlight blinded him.
“Comrade Najeer!” the man said urgently.
“Aiwa:”
The machine gun flickered, and blood exploded from Najeer as the bullets slammed him back into the wall. The killer swept everything from the top of Najeer’s desk into a bag as an explosion in another part of the building shook the room.
The naked girl in the bathroom doorway seemed frozen in horror. The killer pointed his machine gun at her wet breast. His finger tightened on the trigger. It was a beautiful breast. The muzzle of the machine gun wavered.
“Put on some clothes, you Arab slut,” he said, and backed out of the room.
The explosion two floors below, which tore out the wall of Abu Ali’s apartment, killed Ali and his wife instantly. The raiders, coughing in the dust, had started for the stairs, when a thin man in pajamas came out of the apartment at the end of the hall, trying to cock a submachine gun. He was still trying when a hail of bullets tore through him, blowing shreds of his pajamas into his flesh and across the hall.
The raiders scrambled to the street and their cars were roaring southward toward the sea as the first police sirens sounded.
Dahlia, wearing Najeer’s bathrobe and clutching her purse, was on the street in seconds, mingling with the crowd that had poured out of the buildings on the block. She was trying desperately to think, when she felt a hard hand grip her arm. It was Muhammad Fasil. A bullet had cut a bloody stripe across his cheek. He wrapped his tie around his hand and held it to the wound.
“Najeer?” he asked.
“Dead.”
“Ali, too, I think. His window blew out just as I turned the corner. I shot at them from the car, but—listen to me carefully. Najeer has given the order. Your mission must be completed. The explosives are not affected, they will arrive on schedule. Automatic weapons also—your Schmeisser and an AK-47, packed separately with bicycle parts.”
Dahlia looked at him with smoke-reddened eyes. “They will pay,” she said. “They will pay ten thousand to one.”
Fasil took her to a safe house in the Sabra to wait through the day. After dark he took her to the airport in his rattletrap Citroën. Her borrowed dress was two sizes too large, but she was too tired to care.
At ten thirty p.m., the Pan Am 707 roared out over the Mediterranean, and, before the Arabian lights faded off the starboard wing, Dahlia fell into an exhausted sleep.
2
AT THAT MOMENT, MICHAEL LANDER was doing the only thing he loved. He was flying the Aldrich blimp, hovering eight hundred feet above the Orange Bowl in Miami, providing a steady platform for the television crew in the gondola behind him. Below, in the packed stadium, the world-champion Miami Dolphins were pounding the Pittsburgh Steelers.
The roar of the crowd nearly drowned out the crackling radio above Lander’s head. On hot days above a stadium, he felt that he could smell the crowd, and the blimp seemed suspended on a powerful rising current of mindless screaming and body heat. That current felt dirty to Lander. He preferred the trips between the towns. The blimp was clean and quiet then.
Only occasionally did Lander glance down at the field. He watc
hed the rim of the stadium and the line-of-sight he had established between the top of a flagpole and the horizon to maintain exactly eight hundred feet of altitude.
Lander was an exceptional pilot in a difficult field. A dirigible is not easy to fly. Its almost neutral buoyancy and vast surface leave it at the mercy of the wind unless it is skillfully handled. Lander had a sailor’s instinct for the wind, and he had the gift the best dirigible pilots have—anticipation. A dirigible’s movements are cyclical, and Lander stayed two moves ahead, holding the great gray whale into the breeze as a fish points upstream, burrowing the nose slightly into the gusts and raising it in lulls, shading half the end zone with its shadow. During intervals in the action on the field, many of the spectators looked up at it and some of them waved. Such bulk, such great length suspended in the clear air fascinated them.
Lander had an autopilot in his head. While it dictated the constant, minute adjustments that held the blimp steady, he thought about Dahlia. The patch of down in the small of her back and how it felt beneath his hand. The sharpness of her teeth. The taste of honey and salt.
He looked at his watch. Dahlia should be an hour out of Beirut now, coming back.
Lander could think comfortably about two things: Dahlia and flying.
His scarred left hand gently pushed forward the throttle and propeller pitch controls, and he rolled back the big elevator wheel beside his seat. The great airship rose quickly as Lander spoke into the microphone.
“Nora One Zero, clearing stadium for a twelve-hundred-foot go-around.”
“Roger, Nora One Zero,” the Miami tower replied cheerily.
Air controllers and tower radio operators always liked to talk to the blimp, and many had a joke ready when they knew it was coming. People felt friendly toward it as they do toward a panda. For millions of Americans who saw it at sporting events and fairs, the blimp was an enormous, amiable, and slow-moving friend in the sky. Blimp metaphors are almost invariably “elephant” or “whale.” No one ever says “bomb.”
At last the game was over and the blimp’s 225-foot shadow flicked over the miles of cars streaming away from the stadium. The television cameraman and his assistant had secured their equipment and were eating sandwiches. Lander had worked with them often.
The lowering sun laid a streak of red-gold fire across Bis cayne Bay as the blimp hung over the water. Then Lander turned northward and cruised fifty yards off Miami Beach, while the TV crew and the flight engineer fixed their binoculars on the girls in their bikinis. Some of the bathers waved.
“Hey, Mike, does Aldrich make rubbers?” Pearson the cameraman was yelling around a mouthful of sandwich.
“Yeah,” Lander said over his shoulder. “Rubbers, tires, de icers, windshield wiper blades, bathtub toys, children’s balloons, and body bags.”
“You get free rubbers with this job?”
“You bet. I’ve got one on now.”
“What’s a body bag?”
“It’s a big rubber bag. One size fits all,” Lander said. “They’re dark inside. Uncle Sam uses them for rubbers. You see some of them, you know he’s been fooling around.” It would not be hard to push the button on Pearson; it would not be hard to push the button on any of them.
The blimp did not fly often in the winter. Its winter quarters were near Miami, the great hangar dwarfing the rest of the buildings beside the airfield. Each spring it worked northward at thirty-five to sixty knots, depending on the wind, dropping in at state fairs and baseball games. The Aldrich company provided Lander with an apartment near the Miami airfield in winter, but on this day, as soon as the great airship was secured, he caught the National flight to Newark and went to his home near the blimp’s northern base at Lakehurst, New Jersey.
When Lander’s wife deserted him, she left him the house. Tonight the lights burned late in the garage-workshop, as Lander worked and waited for Dahlia. He was stirring a can of epoxy resin on his workbench, its strong odor filling the garage. On the floor behind him was a curious object eighteen feet long. It was a plug mold that Lander had made from the hull of a small sailboat. He had inverted the hull and split it along the keel. The halves were eighteen inches apart and were joined by a broad common bow. Viewed from above, the mold looked like a great streamlined horseshoe. Building the mold had taken weeks of off-duty time. Now it was slick with grease and ready.
Lander, whistling quietly, applied layers of fiberglass cloth and resin to the mold, feathering the edges precisely. When the fiberglass shell cured and he popped it off the mold, he would have a light, sleek nacelle that would fit neatly under the gondola of the Aldrich blimp. The opening in the center would accommodate the blimp’s single landing wheel and its transponder antenna. The load-bearing frame that would be enclosed by the nacelle was hanging from a nail on the garage wall. It was very light and very strong, with twin keels of Reynolds 5130 chrome moly tubing and ribs of the same material.
Lander had converted the double garage into a workshop while he was married, and he had built much of his furniture there in the years before he went to Vietnam. The things his wife had not wanted to take were still stored above the rafters—a highchair, a folding camp table, wicker yard furniture. The fluorescent light was harsh, and Lander wore a baseball cap as he worked around the mold, whistling softly.
He paused once, thinking, thinking. Then he went on smoothing the surface, raising his feet carefully as he walked to avoid tearing the newspapers spread on the floor.
Shortly after four a.m. the telephone rang. Lander picked up the garage extension.
“Michael?” The British clip in her speech always surprised him, and he imagined the telephone buried in her dark hair.
“Who else?”
“Grandma is fine. I’m at the airport and I’ll be along later. Don’t wait up.”
“What—”
“Michael, I can’t wait to see you.” The line went dead.
It was almost sunrise when Dahlia turned into the driveway at Lander’s house. The windows were dark. She was apprehensive, but not so much as before their first meeting—then she had felt that she was in the room with a snake she could not see. After she came to live with him, she separated the deadly part of Michael Lander from the rest of him. When she was with him now, she felt that they were both in a room with the snake, and she could tell where it was, and whether it was sleeping.
She made more noise than necessary coming into the house and sang his name softly against the stillness as she came up the stairs. She did not want to startle him. The bedroom was pitch dark.
From the doorway she could see the glow of his cigarette, like a tiny red eye.
“Hello,” she said.
“Come here.”
She walked through the darkness toward the glow. Her foot touched the shotgun, safely on the floor beside the bed. It was all right. The snake was asleep.
Lander was dreaming about the whales, and he was reluctant to come out of sleep. In his dream the great shadow of the Navy dirigible moved over the ice below him as he flew through the endless day. It was 1956 and he was going over the Pole.
The whales were basking in the Arctic sun, and they did not see the dirigible until it was almost over them. Then they sounded, their flukes rising under a chandelier of spray as they slid beneath a blue ice ledge under the Arctic Sea. Looking down from the gondola, Lander still could see the whales suspended there beneath the ledge. In a cool blue place where there was no noise.
Then he was over the Pole and the magnetic compass was going wild. Solar activity interfered with the omni, and, with Fletcher at the elevator wheel, he steered by the sun as the flag on its weighted spear fluttered down to the ice.
“The compass,” he said, waking in his house. “The compass.”
“The omni beam from Spitsbergen, Michael,” Dahlia said, her hand on his cheek. “I have your breakfast.”
She knew the dream. She hoped he would dream often of the whales. He was easier then.
Lander was f
acing a hard day, and she could not be with him. She opened the curtains and sunlight brightened the room.
“I wish you didn’t have to go.”
“I’ll tell you again,” Lander said. “If you have a pilot’s ticket they watch you really dose. If I don’t check in, they’ll send some VA caseworker out here with a questionnaire. He’s got a form. It goes like this—‘A. Note the condition of the grounds. B. Does the subject seem dejected?’ Like that. It goes on forever.”
“You can manage that.”
“One call to the FAA, one little half-assed hint that I might be shaky and that’s it. They’ll ground me. What if a caseworker looks in the garage?” He drank his orange juice. “Besides, I want to see the clerks one more time.”
Dahlia was standing by the window, the sun warm on her cheek and neck. “How do you feel?”
“You mean am I crazy today? No, as a matter of fact, I’m not.”
“I didn’t mean that.”
“Shit you didn’t. I’ll just go into a little office with one of them and we’ll close the door and he’ll tell me the new things the government is going to do for me.” Something lunged behind Lander’s eyes.
“All right, are you crazy today? Are you going to spoil it? Are you going to grab a VA clerk and kill him and let the others hold you down? Then you can sit in a cell and sing and masturbate. ‘God Bless America and Nixon.’ ”
She had used two triggers at once. She had tried them separately before, and now she watched to see how they worked together.
Lander’s memory was intense. Recollections while awake could make him wince. Asleep, they sometimes made him scream.
Masturbation: The North Vietnamese guard catching him at it in his cell and making him do it in front of the others.
“God Bless America and Nixon”: The hand-lettered sign the Air Force officer held up to the window of the C-141 at Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines when the prisoners were coming home. Lander, sitting across the aisle, had read it backward with the sun shining through the paper.
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