Dirty Harry 10 - The Blood of Strangers (14 page)

But Ellie, knowing full what he meant, had every intention of paying a visit to the warehouse. She thanked Lawson for helping her get this far and left him at the first hole.

She had just gotten off the green when the first artillery barrage of the morning began. It was furious and loud—quite close. The answering fire, from Syrian peacekeeping forces, was equally loud—and equally close.

Directly overhead, there was a painful shriek as a rocket slued down toward the green. Ellie had been in Beirut only a day and a half, but it was long enough for her to comprehend the danger she was in. She threw herself down, her hands over her head, though this protective gesture was, she realized, a rather futile one.

The rocket landed several hundred yards downrange, producing an enormous roar and a black cloud of smoke. The battle continued, but no other rockets came near the golf course that morning. The fact that this one had hit the green was probably a mistake, an error committed by an artillery commander, a slight maladjustment in the sighting.

Whatever the case, this error had left a vast crater where the first hole had been, and nothing but a few shreds of clothing and charred bone to indicate that Doug Lawson and his caddy had once been among the living.

C H A P T E R
T e n

H
arry opened his eyes. He wasn’t sure whether he had dozed off or not, but one thing was certain: he was fully conscious now. The lunatics were at it again, filling the air with gunfire and lobbing shells back and forth.

Peering out through the slats of the barrier, he renewed his vigil. He could not be sure that he hadn’t missed Kayyim, but he decided he would wait another few hours before giving up. Having been in this abandoned grocery store for some fifteen hours, he was terribly thirsty. Hunger was there too, but he did not feel it nearly as acutely.

Not that he necessarily knew what he would do should Kayyim appear with his various associates. He was only one man, armed with a Soviet gun of uncertain reliability whose ammunition was virtually spent.

Nor had he a plan in mind for escaping his shelter should Kayyim fail to materialize. Across the street, there were perhaps two dozen commandos, some teenagers such as those that had confronted him the day before, others older and more experienced fighters from the looks of them. Having no uniform of his own, Harry would immediately draw their attention if he revealed himself, and there was no reason why they wouldn’t turn their guns on him.

But whatever divine providence had aided him yesterday appeared to be at work again today. For suddenly two men, both wearing olive-green uniforms—to signify they belonged to some kind of army—drove up the street in a jeep and parked in front of the grocery store.

The man on the passenger side got out and walked resolutely across the street, disappearing into the apartment building. He left his driver sitting at the wheel.

Harry crawled out from under the barrier and, without attracting the notice of the listless driver, managed to get within spitting distance of the jeep.

The driver abruptly turned, spotted him, hesitated, then, clumsily, tried to wrest his handgun from its holster. Still keeping low, Harry bridged the distance that separated him from the vehicle, his Makarov directed at the driver’s head.

Seeing the threat, the driver gave up any effort to resist. He was young and nervous, afraid that he would become another anonymous victim in this incomprehensible war.

Harry got into the jeep and gestured to the driver, since he had no words to communicate with him, indicating that he should back up all the way to the end of the block, just out of sight of the commandos in front of the building. This the driver did.

There, at the corner, half-concealed by a barricade of sandbags, the two of them sat, the nervous driver and Harry, who now had a second gun, seized from his captive, in this case, a serviceable .38 automatic. He would have preferred his Magnum back, but this was certainly an improvement.

Moreover, he found a pair of binoculars in the jeep and these he used to keep up his surveillance.

Around midmorning, when the sun was particularly fierce, Kayyim came into view. So did Achmed. Achmed wore a bandage on his right arm, probably an injury sustained in the fire yesterday. Couldn’t have happened to a nicer fellow, Harry thought.

Not unexpectedly, Kayyim was accompanied by several other men who divided themselves into two cars, both armored limousines with tinted glass so that Kayyim’s enemies, scattered throughout the city, wouldn’t be able to see him in his passage from one sector to the other.

As soon as the two limousines started on their way, Harry told the driver to follow them. He complied.

But just as they passed by the apartment building, the officer whose jeep this was appeared. He saw his driver, he saw Harry, and his initial reaction was to wave in confusion as though this would be sufficient to get his jeep back.

When he realized finally that his jeep had been hijacked, he shrieked in outrage and gave orders to the commando standing nearby to open fire. With no time to aim, they fired blindly at the receding vehicle. But the fusillade was so intense, they could not help but achieve some success.

Bullets smashed into the chassis, but they did not stop the jeep. They did succeed, however, in stopping the driver who took several rounds in the back and one in the head. Harry, flattened as much as possible in the small space available to him, wrestled the wheel from the dying man’s hands and fought to maintain control of the jeep before it went crashing onto the sidewalk where several intrepid vendors had set up stalls.

At last, he was beyond the line of fire and he risked sitting up again. Pushing the dead driver out into the street, he took over his place behind the wheel. To his dismay he found the driver had left the seat wet with blood.

The two limousines up ahead on Ramlet el-Baida Avenue were still in sight; it was impossible to determine whether their occupants were aware that they were being tailed. The sudden outbreak of gunfire should have alerted them. On the other hand, they might be so accustomed to unexpected incidents of violence that it simply made no difference to them.

Harry, having had no opportunity to acquaint himself with the geography of Beirut since his arrival, had no idea where he was going. So many streets were characterized by bombed-out buildings and scattered rubble that it was difficult to distinguish one neighborhood from the other. Where was the Christian sector, where the Moslem, and which was he in now? He knew that there was something called the Green Line which divided one from the other but how close he was to it was a perfect mystery to him.

The only thing he could be certain of was that he was on Chouron Street and that to his right there was a sign hanging over a darkened establishment which said:
La Grotte aux Pigeons.
The Grotto of Pigeons. He suspected that the pigeons had long ago flown away.

There was other traffic on this street, mostly military vehicles of one sort or another, half-tracks, and trucks with soldiers hanging off them. Now and then, an ambulance with the symbol of the Red Crescent screamed by. From time to time, he would spot some small evidence of normalcy: a klatch of women gathered around a fruit stand, arguing vociferously with the man who was weighing and selling them the produce, or a boy no older than ten speeding along on a skateboard, oblivious to the gunshots that periodically punctuated the silence.

Now the two limousines were slowing down; Harry could not make out why until the hulking form of a tank came into view. It bore Syrian markings. A roadblock.

Maybe this was the famous Green Line, maybe it was just another roadblock, but whatever it was, it did not bode well for Harry. He had no documents, after all, and he would be hard-pressed to explain how he came to have a jeep or why the driver’s seat was covered with fresh blood. People might be able to get away with a great deal in this turbulent atmosphere but he didn’t see how he could pull this one off.

A Syrian Army officer in a tight suit stepped up to the lead limousine and conferred briefly with the chauffeur. Then he waved the two cars through.

Harry hung back, as he was only half a block away from where the tank had taken up position, but the Syrian could see him and was gesturing to him to come forward and undergo inspection too. Harry considered his chances. The tank’s gun was pointing down the street directly at him. There were three soldiers, as far as could see. Others presumably were in the tank.

Hell, he thought, I’ve gotten this far. No sense in going back; he would probably run into another roadblock no matter which direction he turned. Grasping the wheel in one hand, and gripping hold of the confiscated .38 in the other, he pressed his foot down all the way on the gas, and gunned the jeep forward. To avoid the gunfire, he lowered his head below the windshield although this meant that he couldn’t see where he was going; he just hoped he got through the roadblock in one piece.

The Syrians had not quite anticipated this action and were slow to react. The turret of the tank revolved slightly while the gun was repositioned. There was a concussive roar as it discharged, throwing up a ball of fire and smoke, but the jeep was going so fast that the shell went far off its mark. The jeep rocked and listed back and forth, yet its momentum was undisturbed. Harry kept a tenuous grip on the wheel and steered the jeep forward.

A burst of gunfire tore the windshield apart, then all but ripped the windshield frame from its moorings. The right front wheel tire went flat, the jeep sank slightly in response, but it had been made to see military action, and it was a tough son of a bitch, and kept right on going.

Harry gave the wheel a sharp turn to the left, surprising his antagonists. There was a particularly loud hollow thud followed by a scream as the vehicle plowed into one of the soldiers and crushed him under its rear tires.

A sidelong glance disclosed a second soldier, backing away as he continued to fire his AKM. Harry returned the fire, surprising himself by hitting the man, not critically, but that didn’t matter; the soldier, disabled with a leg wound, had thrown down his weapon which was all that Harry wanted.

This seemed to be a newer district of the city he was coming into. In any case, he took the first turn he could, temporarily forsaking his pursuit of the limousines. His own safety came first.

No one followed him, there was no more fire; he had the street, whichever street this was, to himself. But where Kayyim had gone was another matter entirely. He explored the streets, but failed to turn up any sign of him.

Then, when he was about to give up and find a phone to see if Ellie were still at the Commodore, he came upon the limos by chance. They were parked on the rue Makdessi, right at the corner of Hamra, in front of a desolate-looking place called the Pickwick.

Harry gratefully abandoned his hijacked jeep; it was so shot-up by this point that he doubted he could have taken it much farther even if he had wanted to.

There was no problem in figuring out where Kayyim had gone because a commando, with an AKM, had taken up position in front of a building two doors down from the Pickwick. There was no telling from looking at the door what went on inside; on the upper floors many of the windows were gone and to all outward appearances, the building looked uninhabited. But Kayyim was here for some reason and Harry hadn’t come all this way, and endured two gun battles in less than a half an hour, not to discover what that reason was.

C H A P T E R
E l e v e n

E
llie looked around, but the man who had led her to this place had vanished. He was a Lebanese Christian, she’d been told, who had managed somehow to eke out an existence as a guide and consultant to the international community of newsmen. For a small fortune, he had agreed to take her to the alleged arms warehouse, and had even directed her to a small, overgrown passageway that was not easily seen from the street. All she had to do was follow it, he said, and she would find herself in the back of the warehouse. Somehow, Ellie had assumed that he would accompany her down this passageway, but this did not turn out to be the case.

She was tired and distraught; no sooner had she recovered from one act of violence than she was confronted with another. Witnessing Lawson’s death on the golf course earlier that morning had shocked her, not because the violence had struck at someone she actually knew, but because she didn’t feel much one way or the other about it. Her nerves seemed to have deadened.

Yet she was sensitive enough to the danger that pervaded the city to recognize how greatly she was tempting fate. Having escaped death or injury on so many occasions over the last few days, she understood that unless she stopped her investigation soon her luck would inevitably run out.

But though she was aware of all this, she could not bring herself to call it quits and go home. Undoubtedly, David Whittier would be waiting for her. She’d tried calling him from the hotel that morning, but there’d been no answer at his home. It wasn’t like him, generally he’d be there. However, she couldn’t worry about David now.

The passageway seemed to zigzag. On either side were structures built of gray stone to which tendrils of ivy and vine clung. Broken pavement and chipped stone made the walking difficult. After proceeding along this passageway for two or three minutes, she came to a door that looked as though it hadn’t been opened in some time; the hinges were rusty and when Ellie pulled, they squeaked loudly. The door wouldn’t give. She struggled with it and finally pried it open enough to be able to step inside.

The smell that greeted her was full of age, moisture, and rot. It was very dark. With her first step, Ellie stubbed her toe. She cried out, then quickly silenced herself. She listened to see if anyone had heard her. In contrast to the city outside, this place was soundless.

If she had known she would encounter something like this she would have brought along a flashlight, but by this time she understood how ill-prepared she was. Nonetheless, she proceeded cautiously, like a blind person, extending her hands to grope her way along.