"You'll be at Langley tomorrow?"
"I'll be there all right. Don't let Kabakov get your ass in a crack."
__________
Each Thursday morning the American intelligence community meets in a windowless, lead-shielded room in Central Intelligence Agency headquarters at Langley, Va. Represented are the CIA, FBI, National Security Agency, the Secret Service, the National Reconnaissance Office, and the military intelligence advisors to the joint Chiefs of Staff. Specialists are called in when necessary. The agenda has a subscription list of fourteen. There are many subjects to be discussed and time is strictly limited.
Corley spoke for ten minutes; Fowler for five, and the representative from the Immigration and Naturalization subversive section had less time than that.
Kabakov was waiting in Corley's small office at FBI headquarters when he returned from the meeting.
"I'm supposed to thank you for coming," Corley said. "State is going to thank the ambassador. Our ambassador in Tel Aviv is going to thank Yigal Allon."
"You're welcome, now what are you going to do?"
"Damn little," Corley said, lighting his pipe. "Fowler brought a stack of tapes recorded off Radio Cairo and Radio Beirut. He said they were all threats of various kinds that came to nothing. The Agency is voiceprinting your tape against them."
"This tape is not a threat. It was made to be used afterward."
"The Agency is checking its sources in Lebanon."
"In Lebanon the CIA buys the same shit we do, from a lot of the same people," Kabakov said. "The kind of stuff that's two hours ahead of the newspapers."
"Sometimes not even two hours," Corley said. "In the meantime, you can look at pictures. We've got about a hundred known Al Fatah sympathizers on file, people we think are in the July 5th movement here. Immigration and Naturalization doesn't advertise it, but they have a file on suspicious Arab aliens. You'll have to go to New York for that."
"Can you put out a general customs alert on your own authority?"
"I've done that. It's our best bet. For a major job they probably would have to bring in the bomb from outside, that is
if
it's a bomb," Corley said. "We've had three small explosions linked to the July 5th movement in the past two years, all at Israeli offices in New York. From that---"
"One time they used plastic, the other two were dynamite," Kabakov said.
"Exactly. You do keep up, don't you? Apparently there's not much plastic available here or they wouldn't be lugging dynamite around and wouldn't blow themselves up trying to extract nitroglycerine."
"The July 5th movement is full of amateurs," Kabakov said. "Najeer would not have trusted them with this. The ordnance would be separate. If it's not already here, they'll bring it in." The Israeli rose and walked to the window. "So your government is making its files available to me and telling customs to watch out for fellows with bombs and that's all?"
"I'm sorry, Major, but I don't know what else we can do with the information we have."
"The U.S. could ask its new allies in Egypt to pressure Khadafy in Libya. He bankrolls Black September. The bastard gave them $5 million from the Libyan treasury as a reward for the Munich killings. He might be able to call it off if Egypt pushed him hard enough."
Colonel Muammar Khadafy, head of Libya's Revolutionary Command Council, was wooing Egypt again in his drive to build a solid power base. He might respond to pressure from the Egyptians now.
"The State Department is staying out of it," Corley said.
"U.S. intelligence doesn't think they're going to strike here at all, do they, Corley?"
"No," Sam Corley said wearily. "They think the Arabs wouldn't dare."
Chapter 4
At the moment the freighter
Leticia
was crossing the 21st meridian en route to the Azores and New York City. In her deepest forward hold in a locked compartment were 1,200 pounds of
plastique
packed in gray crates.
Beside the crates in the total darkness of the hold, Ali Hassan lay semiconscious. A large rat was on his stomach and it was walking toward his face. Hassan had lain there for three days, shot in the stomach by Captain Kemal Larmoso.
The rat was hungry, but not ravenous. At first Hassan's groans had frightened him, but now he heard only shallow, glottal breathing. He stood in the crust on the distended stomach and sniffed the wound, then moved forward onto the chest.
Hassan could feel the claws through his shirt. He must wait. In Hassan's left hand was the short crowbar Captain Larmoso had dropped when Hassan surprised him at the crates. In his right hand was the Walther PPK automatic he had drawn too late. He would not fire the gun now. Someone might hear. The traitor Larmoso must think him dead when he came into the hold again.
The rat's nose was almost touching Hassan's chin. The man's labored breathing stirred the rat's whiskers.
With all his strength, Hassan jabbed the crowbar sideways across his chest and felt it gouge into the rat's side. The claws dug in as the rat leaped off him, and he heard the claws rasp on the metal deck as it ran.
Minutes passed. Then Hassan was aware of a faint rustling. He believed it came from inside his trouser leg. He could feel nothing below his waist and he was grateful for that.
The temptation to kill himself was with him all the time now. He had the strength to bring the Walther to his head. He would do it too, he told himself, as soon as Muhammad Fasil came. Until then he would guard the boxes.
Hassan did not know how long he had lain in the darkness. He knew his mind would be clear for only a few minutes this time, and he tried to think. The
Leticia
was a little more than three days from the Azores when he caught Larmoso snooping at the boxes. When Muhammad Fasil did not receive Hassan's scheduled cable from the Azores on November 2, he would have two days to act before the
Leticia
sailed again---and the Azores were the last stop before New York.
Fasil will act,
Hassan thought. I
will not fail him.
Every stroke of the
Leticia's
aged diesel vibrated the deck plates beneath his head. The red waves were spreading behind his eyes. He strained to hear the diesel and thought it was the pulse of God.
Sixty feet above the hold where Hassan lay, Captain Kemal Larmoso was relaxing in his cabin, drinking a bottle of Sapporo beer while he listened to the news. The Lebanese army and the guerrillas were fighting again.
Good,
he thought.
Turds to them both.
The Lebanese threatened his papers and the guerrillas threatened his life. When he put into Beirut or Tyre or Tobruk, both had to be paid. The guerrillas not so much as the camel-fucking Lebanese customs.
He was in for it with the guerrillas now. He knew he was committed from the moment Hassan caught him at the boxes. Fasil and the others would be after him when he returned to Beirut. Maybe the Lebanese had learned from King Hussein and would drive the guerrillas out. Then there would be only one faction to pay. He was sick of it. "Take him there." "Bring the guns." "Speak nothing."
I know about speak nothing,
Larmoso thought. My
ear did not get this way from a hasty shave.
Once he had found a limpet mine attached to the
Leticia's
scaly hull, fuse ready to be set if he should refuse the guerrillas' demands.
Larmoso was a large, hairy man, whose body odor made even his crew's eyes water, and his weight sagged his bunk halfway to the floor. He opened another bottle of Sapporo with his teeth and brooded while he drank it, his small eyes fixed on an Italian magazine foldout depicting heterosexual buggery, which was taped to the bulkhead.
Then he lifted the small Madonna from the floor beside his bunk and stood it on his chest. It was scarred where he had probed it with his knife before realizing what it was.
Larmoso knew of three places where he might turn explosives into money. There was a Cuban exile in Miami with more money than sense. In the Dominican Republic there was a man who paid Brazilian cruzeios for anything that would shoot or explode. The third possible customer was the U.S. government.
There would be a reward, of course, but Larmoso knew that there would also be other advantages in a deal with the Americans. Certain prejudices held against him by U.S. Customs might be forgotten.
Larmoso had opened the crates because he wanted to put the bite on the importer, Benjamin Muzi, for an unusually large payoff, and he needed to know the value of the contraband in order to figure out how much he could demand. Larmoso had never trifled with Muzi's shipments before, but persistent rumors had reached him that Muzi was going out of business in the Middle East, and if that happened Larmoso's illicit income would drop sharply. This could very well be Muzi's final shipment, and Larmoso wanted to make all he could.
He had expected to find a whopping shipment of hashish, a commodity Muzi often bought from Al Fatah sources. Instead he found
plastique,
and then Hassan was there, going for his pistol like a fool.
Plastique
was heavy business, not like a normal drug deal where friends could put the squeeze on one another.
Larmoso hoped that Muzi could solve the problem with the guerrillas and still turn a profit on the
plastique.
But Muzi would be furious at him for fooling with the crates.
If Muzi did not want to cooperate, if he refused to pay off Larmoso and make amends to the guerrillas for him, then Larmoso intended to keep the
plastique
and sell it elsewhere. Better to be a wealthy fugitive than a poor one.
But first he must take an inventory of what he had to sell, and he must get rid of certain garbage in the hold.
Larmoso knew that he had hit Hassan squarely. And he had given him plenty of time to die. He decided he would sack up Hassan, weight him in the harbor at Ponta Delgada while there was only an anchor watch aboard, and dump him in deep water when he cleared the Azores.
__________
Muhammad Fasil checked the cable office in Beirut hourly all day. At first he hoped Hassan's cable from the Azores had only been delayed. Always before, the cables had come by noon. There had been three of them---from Benghazi, Tunis, and Lisbon---as the old freighter plowed westward. The wording varied in each, but they all meant the same thing---the explosives had not been disturbed. The next one should be "Mother much improved today" and it should be signed Jose. At 6 P.M., when the cable had still not arrived, Fasil drove to the airport. He was carrying the credentials of an Algerian photographer and a gutted speed graphic camera containing a .357 Magnum revolver. Fasil had made the reservations as a precaution two weeks before. He knew he could be in Ponta Delgada by 4 P.M. the next day.
__________
Captain Larmoso relieved his first mate at the helm when the
Leticia
raised the peaks of Santa Maria early on the morning of November 2. He skirted the small island on the southwest side, then turned north for San Miguel and the port of Ponta Delgada.
The Portuguese city was lovely in the winter sun, white buildings with red-tiled roofs, and evergreens between them rising nearly as high as the bell tower. Behind the city were gentle mountain slopes, patched with fields.
The
Leticia
looked scalier than ever tied at the quay, her faded Plimsoll line creeping up out of the water as the crew off-loaded a consignment of reconditioned light agricultural equipment and creeping down again as crates of bottled mineral water were loaded aboard.
Larmoso was not worried. The cargo handling involved only the aft hold. The small, locked compartment in the forward hold would not be disturbed.
Most of the work was completed by the afternoon of the second day, and he gave the crew shore leave, the purser doling out only enough cash to each man for one evening in the brothels and bars.
The crew trooped off down the quay, walking quickly in anticipation of the evening, the foremost sailor with a blob of shaving cream beneath his ear. They did not notice the thin man beneath the colonnade of the Banco Nacional Ultramarino, who counted their as they passed.
The ship was silent now except for Captain Larmoso's footsteps as he descended to the engine room workshop, a small compartment dimly lit by a bulb in a wire cage. Rummaging through a pile of castoff parts he selected a piston rod, complete with wrist-pin assembly, which had been ruined when the
Leticia's
engine seized off Tobruk in the spring. The rod looked like a great metal bone as he hefted it in his hands. Confident that it was heavy enough to take Hassan's body down the long slide to the bottom of the Atlantic, Larmoso carried the rod aft and stowed it in a locker near the stern along with a length of line.
Next he took from the galley one of the cook's big burlap garbage bags and carried it forward through the empty wardroom toward the forward companionway. He draped the bag over his shoulder like a serape and whistled between his teeth, his footfalls loud in the passageway. Then he heard a slight sound behind him. Larmoso paused, listening. Probably the noise was only the old man on anchor watch walking on the deck above his head. Larmoso stepped through the wardroom hatch into the companionway and went down the metal steps to the level of the forward hold. But instead of entering the hold, he slammed its hatch loudly and stood against the bulkhead at the foot of the companionway, looking up the metal shaft to the hatch at the top of the dark steps. The five-shot Smith & Wesson Airweight looked like a child's licorice pistol in his big fist.
As he watched, the wardroom hatch swung open and, as slowly as a questing snake, the small, neat head of Muhammad Fasil appeared.
Larmoso fired, the blast incredible inside the metal walls, the bullet screaming off the handrail. He ducked into the hold and slammed the hatch behind him. He was sweating now, and the rank smell of him mixed with the smells of rust and cold grease as he waited in the darkness.
The footsteps descending the companionway were slow and evenly spaced. Larmoso knew Fasil was holding the railing with one hand and keeping his gun trained on the closed hatch with the other. Larmoso scrambled behind a crate twelve feet from the hatch Fasil had to enter. Time was on his side. Eventually the crew would straggle back. He thought of the deals and excuses he might offer Fasil. Nothing would work. He had four shots left. He would kill Fasil when he came through the hatch. It was settled.
The companionway was quiet for a second. Then Fasil's Magnum roared, the bullet blasting through the hatch and sending metal fragments flying through the hold. Larmoso fired back at the closed hatch, the .38 special bullet only dimpling the metal, and fired again and again as the hatch flew open and the dark shape tumbled through.
Even as he fired the last round, Larmoso saw by the muzzle flash that he had shot a sofa pillow from the wardroom. Now he was running, tripping and cursing, through the dark hold toward the forward compartment.
He would get Hassan's pistol. He would kill Fasil with it.
Larmoso moved well for a big man, and he knew the layout of the hold. In less than 30 seconds he was at the compartment hatch, fumbling with the key. The stench that puffed over him when he opened the hatch gagged him as he plunged inside. He did not want to show a light, and he crawled across the deck in the black compartment, feeling for Hassan and muttering softly to himself. He butted into the crates and crawled around them. His hand touched a shoe. Larmoso felt his way up the trouser leg and over the belly. The gun was not in the waistband. He felt on either side of the body. He found the arm, he felt it move, but he did not find the gun until it exploded in his face.
Fasil's ears were ringing and several minutes passed before he could hear the hoarse whisper from the forward compartment.
"Fasil. Fasil."
The guerrilla shone his small flashlight into the compartment, tiny feet scurrying from the beam. Fasil played the light over the red mask of Larmoso, lying dead on his back, then stepped inside.
Kneeling, he took the rat-ravaged face of Ali Hassan in his hands. The lips moved.
"Fasil."
"You have done well, Hassan. I'll get a doctor." Fasil could see that it was hopeless. Hassan, swollen with peritonitis, was beyond help. But Fasil could kidnap a doctor a half-hour before the Leticia sailed and make him come along. He could kill the physician at sea before the ship reached New York. Hassan deserved no less. It was the humane thing to do.
"Hassan, I will be back in five minutes with the medical kit. I will leave the light with you."