Authors: Jim Case
They had been staking out Christus’s place for two long, hot days, ever since the PLGF informant had contacted Rallis.
Rallis still did not know the informant’s name; it had been but a voice on a telephone two days earlier, but since Rallis
was the one who had drawn the assignment of breaking up the terrorist cells, which appeared more and more to make Athens their
home base for launching terrorist attacks in the area, he had some time ago reached the decision that he needed all the help
he could get, including terrorist informants like the one whose “information” had brought him and the three other men to Caningo
Street.
He had risen through the ranks during his fifteen years with the department—due for the most part to his tenacity and skill
as a policeman and his record for bringing to a successful conclusion nearly every assignment handed to him—but this terrorist
business was something else again. He had learned that the hard way; typical criminals were invariably apprehended because
their greed or lust got the better of them and a betrayed woman or a double-crossed accomplice would eventually come forward
or be tracked down to supply the pieces of the puzzle.
That was hardly the case with terrorists; their religious beliefs and zeal for their cause generally canceled out their taking
up with loose women who would talk. Nor did greed enter the equation, he had come to learn. These were killers who committed
their crimes for their people and their faith, not for their pocketbooks, and that kind of motivation was most difficult to
crack with standard police operating procedures. There had been some arrests, but nothing of consequence. There had been too
little to go on.
That was until the phone call; the whispering voice telling Rallis only that “something very big” was about to happen—a PLGF
initiative, is how the caller had put it—the anonymous informant claiming that even he did not know the details. The only
information he furnished was that the weapons and armaments for such an operation were to be obtained within the next day
or so from Anton Christus, and that had been enough for Rallis to set up this stakeout; for he and his men to perspire profusely
in their car across from Christus Imports, waiting, waiting, waiting.
He had begun to grow more than a bit skeptical by the middle of this second day. The police knew about Christus, certainly,
though knowing and proving were two distinctly different kettles of fish.
Christus had come to police attention several times, relating to both drug and weapons smuggling, and had been under surveillance
from time to time, though not by Rallis’s unit, but nothing had ever come from it. The importer was as careful as he was rumored
to be successful in the black-market underworld and so far he had not spent one night in jail, though Rallis knew of several
underworld murders that could be laid at his doorstep, probably carried out by his henchmen, but much as this present supposed
opportunity to close Christus’s career once and for all appealed to him, it actually paled to insignificance next to the real
reason he had put himself on the front line on this stakeout when he could have been safely riding it out behind his desk
at Headquarters.
A chance at closing in on the Palestine Liberation Guerrilla Force meant a chance to arrest Farouk Hassan and his unit, the
prime movers of the PLGF, and that, Rallis knew, would be just the ticket to make his superiors overlook his practically nonexistent
progress thus far in tracking down and rooting out the terrorist cells known to be operating in this city.
The Greek government had its antiterrorist division, of course, but they had been of little help to Rallis since they really
knew little more than he did, and in any event you could not expect a government agency to be overly cooperative with a unit
with a similar function at the local level.
He had come to the conclusion that hunting terrorists was like hunting shadows. They had no set base of operations, being
constantly on the move, totally mobile, and generally the participants of any action—like the Rome or Vienna airport massacres,
converged on a city from different points of origin—generally traveling on Syrian or Iraqui passports, sometimes days, sometimes
only hours, before the action was to commence. You did not know what they were up to until the guns opened fire and the innocent
went screaming and dying with blood splashing everything in sight.
Rallis noted the van up ahead picking up speed, unable to travel very fast but weaving more between the hubbub of vehicles,
bicycles and pedestrians.
“Don’t lose them,” he rasped at the driver.
Detective Giorgios steered through an opening in the traffic where a tourist bus was loading near Omonia Square.
“I won’t, Inspector. Do you really think Christus will lead us to al Hussan?”
“He’d better,” growled Rallis. “This is the only lead we’ve got.”
As far as he could tell from the skimpy dossier on the PLGF, Farouk Hassan
was
the Palestinian Liberation Guerrilla Force; a wily, ruthless mass-murderer whose rage was fueled by memories of the humiliations
his own people had suffered over the years.
As the unmarked police car threaded through the traffic, Giorgios staying back far enough so as not to crowd the van up ahead
and yet always keeping the van in sight, Rallis reflected on the kind of man he hoped to apprehend this day.
Hassan had been born about the time of Israel’s war of independence, and the boy’s family had been forced from their home
in Galilee to settle in the yarmouk refugee camp near Damascus. Hassan’s dossier had informed Rallis that even as a boy, little
Farouk had loved to play hide and seek, staying hidden long after everyone had ceased searching for him.
Farouk had gone on to attend Damascus University, where he received a degree in Arabic literature, though much of his time
had also been spent consuming and absorbing the works of Marx, Lenin, and Mao, which had resulted in a prominent role in student
politics.
He took a job for a short time as a schoolteacher, but it had not been long before Hassan had signed up as a foot soldier
in the Palestinian struggle, at first assigned to hunting recruits in the Palestinian camps in Jordan, and receiving his first
taste of combat during King Hussein’s Black September war on the PLO in 1970. Up to this point, Rallis knew Hassan’s b.g.
had been not very different from thousands of other young men of Palestinian descent in the Mideast, but his interest had
perked when he’d read about Hassan being sent to the Soviet Union for training as a battalion commander, after which Farouk
had commanded a topflight combat unit along Beirut’s Green Line until the early 1980s when a group of disenchanted guerrillas
broke away from the PLO to form the PLGF, and Farouk had gone along to sign on as their operations chief and secretary-general.
Since then, Farouk Hassan had left his mark on the pages of Mideast history with a list of terror atrocities that had an effectiveness
unrivaled in their design to attract world media attention instantly and completely.
It was rumored, but not substantiated, that Farouk’s younger brother, Ali, had lately joined the ranks of the PLGF’s strategists.
To Rallis, these were enemies worth the effort it would take to catch them.
The van with Christus and Apodaka, one block ahead, turned onto Pireos after leaving the Square, traveling southwest.
Rallis wondered if this would prove to be what the Americans called a wild goose chase, but for some reason he did not think
so. Athens is a compact city nestled on the sea, its central area small, and he knew it would not be long before the van’s
destination became apparent if their destination was somewhere in Athens, as he was sure it would be.
“Radio the other units,” he instructed Giorgios. “Tell them to stand by and to be ready for anything.”
Tahia Ahmed, sitting on the floor of the back of the van, said sternly to the new man, “Najib, you must stop your fidgeting.”
She turned to the man behind the steering wheel of the parked vehicle. “Ali, tell him to relax. He will draw attention to
us the minute we step out of the van, the way he’s shaking.”
Najib Yaqub, rail thin with a harsh, thin-lipped visage, lost some of his nervous demeanor, glaring at her.
“Mind your tongue, woman. I—”
Ali Hassan turned sideways in the front seat to look back at Yaqub, who sat with his back against the opposite side of the
inside of the van from Tahia.
“She’s right, Najib. I know this is your first mission for the organization, so—”
“You are not such a battle-hardened veteran yourself, Ali,” Najib bristled.
“I have enough experience to have been placed in charge of this operation,” Hassan snapped. “I forgive your loose tongue and
account it to a case of nerves on your first assignment. We all experience that the first time. Allah will grant you strength
when the time comes.”
Najib lowered his eyes contritely.
“Of course, Ali, I spoke out of turn. It would perhaps ease my mind, though, to know more about what I am a part of.”
Hallah al Molky snorted from where he sat in the passenger seat, an Ingram MAC-10 submachine gun resting on his lap beneath
view of passersby on the sidewalks.
“Have you not been told, Najib? This is how we operate, and we would have it no other way. You and I arrived in Athens this
morning from Damascus. Ali and Tahia arrived here this morning from Istanbul. We pick up these weapons from Christus, as you’ve
been told, then Ali drives us to where his brother is staying and after we connect with Farouk and Abdel,
then
the four of us learn why we have been brought to Athens, and not a moment before. You had your chance to back out long ago.”
Hallah turned his attention to watching the busy street scene outside. “You’ll be making me nervous before you’re done.”
Tahia Ahmed chuckled good-naturedly.
“That would be a change, seeing our young hotblood Hallah nervous. You wish the action had already begun, don’t you, Hallah?”
Al Molky, slightly built, not out of his teens, said in a man’s voice, without hesitation, “I live to slay the enemies of
Allah and our people.”
“As do we all,” nodded Ali. He wore a Beretta in a concealed shoulder holster. He glanced at his wristwatch, then back out
through the windshield at where Pireos street merged with Ermou at the foot of the Acropolis hill, near where a dozen or more
workmen labored near their vehicles, vans like this one, apparently on some sort of restoration project by the
Agora,
the original marketplace where Socrates met with his students; where vehicular traffic had to wind its way through workmen
and a human ocean of tourists and throngs of peddlers and street merchants, the air a lively human babble.
“Christus should be here by now.”
No one answered him.
Ali and Hallah kept watching the street for some sign of the Greek arms dealer’s vehicle, while Najib only stared down as
if in contemplation of the floor of the van.
Tahia moved to kneel, looking out the back windows of the van, watching down the crowded street in either direction with the
thought that the Greek arms dealer might choose not to follow the orders Ali had telephoned a short time before. She gripped
a 9mm Czech-made pistol. She suddenly wished very much that it was this time yesterday and that she and Ali were still back
at that hotel in Istanbul, in bed, making love.
Tahia loved Ali Hassan as much as she loved the cause to which she had dedicated her life; a love that had unexpectedly made
of life a precious thing, something it had not been for her before she had met him, and she found herself wondering if, at
this moment, he was thinking of her as she thought of him.
Hallah’s excited laugh interrupted her reverie.
“There they are! Christus may be late but by Allah he has not let us down.”
Tahia watched a commercial van glide from the opposite oncoming lane of traffic and ease to a stop, its rear end several feet
behind the back of their van.
“Everyone out,” ordered Ali. “Farouk has already taken care of the payment. We pick up what Christus has for us and get away
as quickly as possible. Act naturally, but keep your eyes open.” He added as they began debarking from the van, “There is
always the chance of trouble.”
Rallis unholstered his pistol from its shoulder holster when he saw the van up ahead, the one that read Christus Imports on
the side, pulling up back-to-back with a van parked at the curb amid the flow of crawling motor traffic and tourists.
“This is it,” he hissed.
The two detectives in the backseat unholstered their pistols.
“Gutsy bastards,” one of them said. “We can’t very well turn the Acropolis hill into a shooting gallery.”
“We can’t let them get away, either,” the other man in back pointed out with no enthusiasm.
“What should we do, Inspector?” Giorgios asked from behind the steering wheel.
A half block ahead, Christus and Apodaka were debarking from their van, while three young Arab men and an Arab woman stepped
from the van that had been parked, waiting.
“We can’t very well let them escape, either. Pull in, fast. Get ready, men. This won’t be easy. I’ll radio in backup. If we
can just get the drop on them close up by surprise, we may be able to keep the lid on.”
He did not think he sounded very convincing.
Giorgios floored the car’s accelerator when a break in the crowd parted and sent the police vehicle zipping forward to close
the distance on the two vans.
Rallis reached for the dashboard transceiver to broadcast to the backup units to close in, a rage coursing through him that
had nothing to do with his job of closing in on criminals.
He hated these terrorist vermin for desecrating this sacred place that stood as a monument to the glory and genius of men;
a shrine to lovers of beauty for more than 2,500 years: the Parthenon, the finest building of the ancient world; the Theater
of Dionysus, dating to the fourth century B.C., where were first presented the plays of Sophocles and Euripides; the Temple
of Athena Nike. All of it desecrated by animals who dealt in the slaughter of innocent civilians.