With twelve bags in the cockpit, the loading operation paused while the three in the boat passed the bags forward, stowing them in the cabin in the bow. It was all Lander could do to keep himself from ripping open a bag and looking at the stuff. It felt electric in his hands. Then came the next twelve bags and the next. The three working in the boat were wet with sweat despite the cold.
The hail from the lookout on the bridge was nearly carried away by the wind. Fasil spun around and cupped his hands behind his ears. The man was waving his arms and pointing. Fasil leaned over the rail and yelled down, “Something’s coming, from that way—east. I’m going to look.”
In less than fifteen seconds he was on the bridge, snatching the binoculars from the frightened lookout. He was back on the deck in an instant, wrestling with the cargo net, yelling over the side.
“It’s white with a stripe near the bow.”
“Coast Guard,” Lander said. “What’s the range—how far away?”
“About eight kilometers, he’s coming fast.”
“Swing it down. Goddamn it.”
Fasil slapped the face of the crewman beside him and put the man’s hands on the lifting tackle. The cargo net bulging with the last twelve bags of plastic swayed over the sea and dropped quickly, ropes squealing in the blocks. It dropped into the cockpit with a heavy thump and was quickly lashed down.
On the freighter deck, Muhammad Fasil turned to the sweating crewman. “Stand at the rail with your hands in sight.” The man fixed his eyes on the horizon and appeared to be holding his breath as Fasil went over the side.
The mate standing in the cockpit could not take his eyes off Fasil. The Arab handed the man a roll of bills and pulled out his revolver, touching the muzzle to the man’s upper lip. “You have done well. Silence and health are one. Do you understand me?”
The man wanted to nod, but was prevented by the pistol under his nose.
“Go in peace.”
The man went up the ladder as rapidly as an ape. Dahlia was casting off the bowspring.
While this was going on, Lander looked almost pensive. He had demanded from his mind a projection of possibilities based on all he knew.
The patrol boat, approaching from the other side of the ship, could not see him yet. Probably the sight of the freighter hove to had aroused the Coast Guard’s curiosity, unless they had been tipped off. Patrol boat. Six in these waters, all eighty-two feet, twin diesels, one thousand six hundred shaft horsepower, good for twenty knots. Sperry-Rand SPB-5 radar, crew of eight. One .50 caliber machine gun and an 81-mm mortar. In a flash Lander considered setting fire to the freighter, forcing the cutter to stop and render aid. No, the first mate would scream piracy and the hue and cry would go up. Search planes would come, some of them with infrared equipment that would pick up the heat of his engines. Darkness coming. No moon for five hours. Better a chase.
Lander snapped back to the present. His deliberations had taken five seconds.
“Dahlia, rig the reflector.” He slammed the throttles open and heeled the big boat over in a foaming curve away from the freighter. He headed toward the land, forty miles away, the engines roaring at full throttle and spray flying back as they smashed through moderate seas. Even heavily laden, the powerful boat was doing close to nineteen knots. The cutter had a slight edge in speed. He would keep the freighter between them as long as he could. He yelled down to Fasil in the cockpit. “Monitor 2182 kilocycles.” This was the International Radio-Telephone Distress frequency and a “calling frequency” used in initial contacts between vessels.
The freighter was well astern now, but as they watched, the cutter appeared, still beyond the freighter but coming hard, throwing a big bow wave. As Lander looked back over his shoulder he saw the cutter’s bow swing slightly until it pointed dead at him.
Fasil scrambled up the ladder until his head was above the level of the flying bridge. “He’s ordering us to halt:”
“Fuck him. Switch to the Coast Guard frequency. It’s marked on the dial. We’ll see if he calls for help.”
With the running lights off, the boat raced toward the last glow in the west. Behind them, graceful white bow and bow wave gleaming in the last light, the Coast Guard cutter charged like a terrier.
Dahlia had finished clamping the passive radar reflector to the handrail on the bridge. It was a kite-shaped assembly of metal rods, which she had bought in a marine supply store for twelve dollars, and it trembled as the boat plunged through the seas.
Lander sent her below to check the lashings. He wanted nothing to come adrift in the pounding the boat would have to take.
She checked the cockpit first and then worked forward to the cabin where Fasil frowned at the radio.
“Nothing yet,” he said in Arabic. “Why the radar reflector?”
“The Coast Guard would have seen us anyway,” Dahlia said. She had to yell in his ear to be heard in the plunging boat. “When the Coast Guard captain sees that the chase will continue into darkness, he will have his radar operator get a fix on us and track us while he can still follow visually—then there will be no problem identifying the blip we make on his screen after the light is gone.” Lander had explained all this at tiresome length. “With that reflector, it is a big, fat blip, distinct from interference from the waves. Like the image of a metal boat.”
“Is—”
“Listen to me,” she said urgently, glancing upward toward the bridge above their heads. “You must not act familiar with me in any way, or touch me, do you understand? You must speak only English in his presence. Never come upstairs in his house. Never surprise him. For the sake of the mission.”
Fasil’s face was lit from beneath by the radio dials, his eyes glowing in their shadowed sockets. “For the mission, then, Comrade Dahlia. As long as he functions, I will humor him.”
Dahlia nodded. “If you don’t humor him, you may find out how well he functions,” she said, but the words were lost in the wind as she climbed aft.
It was dark now. There was only the faint light of the binnacle on the bridge, visible to Lander alone. He could see the red and green running lights of the cutter clearly and its big searchlight boring into the dark. He estimated that the government vessel had about a half-knot advantage and his lead was about four-and-a-half miles. Fasil climbed up beside him. “He’s radioed customs about the Leticia. He says he’s going to take us himself.”
“Tell Dahlia it’s almost time.”
They were pounding toward the sealanes now. Lander knew that the men in the cutter could not see him, yet the vessel matched every slight course alteration he made. He could almost feel the fingers of the radar on his back. It would be better if there were some ships ... yes! Off the port bow were the white range lights of a ship, and as the minutes passed he raised her running lights. A freighter northbound and plowing along at a good rate. He altered course slightly to pass under her bows as closely as possible. Lander saw in his mind the patrol boat’s radar screen, its green light glowing on the face of the operator watching the big image of the freighter and the smaller one of the speedboat converge, the blips glowing bright each time the sweep went around.
“Get ready,” he yelled to Dahlia.
“Let’s go,” she said to Fasil. He did not ask questions. Together they pulled the little platform with the floats clear of the lashed-down explosives. Each float was made of a five-gallon drum and each had a pinhole in the top and an ordinary faucet in its underside. Dahlia brought the mast from the cabin and the radar reflector from the bridge. They clamped the reflector to the top of the mast and set the mast in a socket on the platform. With Fasil’s help she attached a six-foot line to the underside of the platform and secured the other end to a heavy lead weight. They looked up from their work to see the lights of the freighter hanging almost over them, its bow like a cliff. In a flash they were past it.
Lander, angling north, looked back over the stern to keep the freighter between him and the patrol boat. Now the radar blips ha
d merged, the greater height of the freighter shielding Lander’s boat from the radar impulses.
He estimated the distance back to the cutter. “Half turn on the faucets.” A moment later, he cut the engines. “Overboard.”
Dahlia and Fasil dropped the floating platform over the side, the mast wagging wildly until the weight hanging down beneath the platform steadied it like a keel, holding the radar reflector high above the water. The device rocked again as Lander rammed the throttles home and headed straight south in the blacked-out boat.
“The radar operator can’t be sure if the image of the reflector is us or something new, or if we’re running along on the other side of the freighter,” Fasil said. “How long will it float?”
“Fifteen minutes with the faucets half open,” Dahlia said. “It will be gone when the cutter gets there.”
“Then he will follow the ship north to see if we’re alongside?”
“Perhaps.”
“How much can he see of us now?”
“A wooden boat at this range, not much if anything. Even the paint is not lead-based. There will be some wake interference from the ship. The engine noise from the ship will help too, if he stops to listen. We don’t know yet if he’s taken the bait.”
From the bridge, Lander watched the lights of the patrol boat. He could see the two high white range lights and the red portside running light. If she turned toward him, he would see the green starboard light come around.
Dahlia was beside him now and together they watched the cutter’s lights. They saw only red, and then as the distance increased they could make out only the white range lights, then nothing but an occasional beam of the searchlight, raised by a wave, probing the empty dark.
Lander was aware of a third presence on the bridge.
“A nice piece of work,” Muhammad Fasil said.
Lander did not answer him.
7
MAJOR KABAKOV’S EYES WERE RED and he was irritable. The clerks in the New York office of the Immigration and Naturalization Service had learned to walk softly around him as he sat, day after day, studying mug shots of Arab aliens living in the United States.
The ledger-sized books piled on either side of him at the long table contained, in all, 137,000 photos and descriptions. He was determined to look at every one. If the woman was on a mission in this country, she would have established a cover first, he was convinced of it. The “suspicious Arab” file maintained sub rosa by Immigration had contained few women, and none of them resembled the woman in Hafez Najeer’s bedroom. Immigration and Naturalization estimated there were some 85,000 Arabs on the Eastern Seaboard who had entered the country illegally over the years and appeared in nobody’s file. Most of them worked quietly at inconspicuous jobs, bothered no one and rarely came to the attention of the authorities. The possibility plagued him that the woman might be one of these.
Wearily, he turned another page. Here’s a woman. Kather ine Ghalib. Working with retarded children in Phoenix. Fifty years old and looks it.
A clerk was at his elbow. “Major, there’s a call for you in the office.”
“Very well. Don’t move these damned books. I’ll lose my place.”
The caller was Sam Corley in Washington.
“How’s it going?”
“Nothing yet. I’ve got about eighty thousand Arabs to go.”
“I got a report from the Coast Guard. It may not be anything, but one of their cutters spotted a power boat next to a Libyan freighter off the Jersey coast yesterday afternoon. The boat ran from them when they went to take a look.”
“Yesterday?”
“Yeah, they had been busy with a ship fire way out and they were coming back. The freighter was out of Beirut.”
“Where’s the ship now?”
“Impounded in Brooklyn. Captain’s missing. I don’t know the details yet.”
“What about the boat?”
“Gave them the slip in the dark.”
Kabakov swore viciously. “Why did it take them so long to tell us?”
“Damned if I know, but there it is. I’ll call Customs up there. They’ll give you a rundown.”
The Leticia’s first mate and acting captain, Mustapha Fawzi, talked with customs officers for an hour in his little cabin, waving his arms in air thick with the acrid smoke of his Turkish cigarettes.
Yes, the boat approached his ship, Fawzi told them. The boat was low on petrol and requested assistance. Following the law of the sea, he helped them. His description of the boat and its occupants was vague. This event took place in international waters, he stressed. No, he would not voluntarily permit a search of his vessel. The ship, under international law, was Libyan territory and was his responsibility after the most unfortunate falling overboard of Captain Larmoso.
Customs did not want an incident with the Libyan government, particularly now with the Middle East inflamed. What the Coast Guard saw would not constitute sufficient probable cause for a search warrant to be issued. Fawzi promised a deposition on Larmoso’s accident, and the customs officers left the ship to confer with the departments of Justice and State.
Fawzi drank a bottle of the late captain’s beer and fell soundly asleep for the first time in days.
A voice seemed to be calling Fawzi from far away. His name was repeated in a deep voice and something was hurting his eyes. Fawzi awoke and raised his hand to shield his eyes from the blinding flashlight beam.
“Good evening, Mustapha Fawzi,” Kabakov said. “Please keep your hands above the sheet.”
Sergeant Moshevsky, looming huge behind Kabakov, flicked on the lights. Fawzi sat up in bed and called upon God.
“Freeze,” Moshevsky said, holding a knife beneath Fawzi’s ear.
Kabakov pulled up a chair and sat down at the bedside. He lit a cigarette. “I would appreciate a quiet conversation now. Will it be quiet?”
Fawzi nodded and Kabakov motioned Moshevsky away. “Now Mustapha Fawzi, I am going to explain to you how you will help me at no risk to yourself. You see, I will not hesitate to kill you if you do not cooperate, but I have no reason to kill you if you are helpful. It’s very important that you understand that.”
Moshevsky stirred impatiently and delivered his line. “First let me cut—”
“No, no,” Kabakov said, raising his hand. “You see, Fawzi, with men less intelligent than yourself it is often necessary to establish, first, that you will suffer terrible pain and mutilation if you displease me and, second, that you will get some marvelous reward if you are useful. We both know what the reward usually is.” Kabakov flicked the ash from his cigarette with the tip of his little finger. “Ordinarily, I would let my friend break your arms before we talked. But you see, Fawzi, you have nothing to lose by telling me what has happened here. Your noncooperation with Customs is a matter of record. Your cooperation with me will remain our secret.” He flipped his Israeli identification onto the bed. “Will you help me?”
Fawzi looked at the card and swallowed hard. He said nothing.
Kabakov rose and sighed. “Sergeant, I am going out for a breath of air. Perhaps Mustapha Fawzi would like some refreshments. Call me when he has finished eating his testicles.” He turned toward the cabin door.
“I have relatives in Beirut.” Fawzi was having trouble controlling his voice. Kabakov could see the heart pounding in his thin body as he sat half-naked in the bunk.
“Of course you do,” Kabakov said. “And they have been threatened, I am sure. Lie to Customs all you like. But don’t lie to me, Fawzi. There is no place where you will be safe from me. Not here, not at home, not in any port on earth. I have respect for your relatives. I understand these things and I’ll cover for you.”
“The Lebanese killed Larmoso in the Azores,” Fawzi began.
Moshevsky had no taste for torture. He knew Kabakov hated it as well. It took a conscious effort for Moshevsky to keep from smiling as he searched the cabin. Each time Fawzi’s recitation faltered, Moshevsky paused in his work to scowl
at him, trying to look disappointed at not getting to carve him up.
“Describe the Lebanese.”
“Slender, medium height. He had a cut on his face, scabbed over.”
“What was in the bags?”
“I don’t know. As Allah is my witness. The Lebanese packed them from the crates in the forward hold. He allowed no one near them.”
“How many were in the boat?”
“Two.”
“Describe them.”
“One tall and thin, the other smaller. They wore masks. I was frightened. I did not look.”
“What did they speak?”
“The bigger spoke English with the Lebanese.”
“The smaller?”
“The smaller said nothing.”
“Could the smaller have been a woman?”
The Arab flushed. He did not want to admit being frightened by a woman. It was unthinkable.
“With the Lebanese holding a gun, with your relatives threatened—it was these thoughts that made you cooperate, Fawzi,” Kabakov said gently.
“The smaller could have been a woman,” Fawzi said finally.
“You saw her hands on the bags?”
“She wore gloves. But there was a lump at the back of her mask that might have been her hair. And there is the thing of her bottom.”
“The thing of her bottom?”
“Rounded, you know. Wider than a man’s. Perhaps a shapely boy?”
Moshevsky, rummaging through the refrigerator, helped himself to a bottle of beer. Something was behind the bottle. He pulled it out and handed it to Kabakov.
“Did Captain Larmoso’s religion require him to keep religious articles in his refrigerator?” Kabakov asked, holding the knife-scarred figure of the Madonna close to Fawzi’s face.
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