Beirut Incident (3 page)

Now, driving down the Ras Tanura road in a hot, dusty Jeep, I was sweaty again. But it wasn't the same. I grinned to myself as I drove through the Dhahran compound gate. It soon would be.

I stopped at the security office and left word with Dave French, SAMOCO's chief security officer, where to pick up Raschid and the Dutchman. I brushed off his congratulations and desire for details. "I'll give it all to you later, Dave, right now I want a drink and a bath, in that order."

What I really wanted, I told myself as I climbed back into the Jeep, was a drink, a bath, and Betty Emers. I had been too busy with Hamid Raschid and his gang to have spent more than a few phone calls with Betty since that first night. I had a little catching up to do.

I halted the jeep outside my Quonset hut and clambered out. Something was wrong.

As I reached for the doorknob I could hear the strains of Bunny Berrigan's "I Can't Get Started" coming through the door. That was my record, all right, but I certainly hadn't left it playing when I went out that morning.

I pushed open the door, furious. Personal privacy was the only surcease from the steaming cauldron of Saudi Arabia and I was damned if I would see it violated. If it was one of the
sadikis,
I told myself, I'd have his hide, but good.

With one motion, I threw open the door and stormed in.

Lounging comfortably on my bed, a tall, glistening drink in one hand and a half-smoked cheap cigar in the other was David Hawk, my boss from AXE.

"Good afternoon, Nick," Hawk said calmly, his grim-visaged New England countenance as close to a smile as he ever allowed. He swung his legs around and came to a sitting position on the side of die bed.

"What on earth are you doing here?" I stood in front of him, towering over the small, gray-haired man, my legs spread defiantly, arms akimbo. Forget Karachi. Forget Delhi. Forget Bangkok, Kyoto, Kauai. David Hawk wasn't there to send me off on vacation.

"Nick," be admonished quietly. "I don't like to see you lose control of yourself."

"Sorry, sir. A temporary lapse — the sun." I was still seething, but contrite. He
was
David Hawk, a legendary figure in counter-espionage, and he
was
my boss. And he was right. In my business, there is no place for a man who loses emotional control. You either retain your control at all times, or you die. It's as simple as that.

He nodded amiably, the foul smelling cigar firmly clamped between his teeth. "I know, I know." He leaned forward to peer at me, squinting slightly. "You look awful," he observed. "I gather you've finished the SAMOCO thing."

There was no way he could have known, but somehow he did. The Old Man was like that. I strode over and stooped to examine myself in the mirror.

I looked like the sandman. My hair, usually jet black with just a few flecks of gray, was matted with sand, and so were my eyebrows. The left side of my face was a stinging pattern of scratches, as if someone had worked me over with coarse sandpaper, caked with a dried mixture of blood and sand. I hadn't even realized I'd been bleeding. I must have scraped myself worse than I'd thought scrabbling up the sand dune. For the first time, also, I realized my hands were tender from pressing them against the hot metal of the truck out in the desert.

Ignoring Hawk, I threw off my bush jacket and slipped out of the holsters that held Wilhelmina and Hugo. Wilhelmina would need a thorough cleaning, I thought to myself. I quickly got rid of my shoes and socks and then stepped out of my khaki pants and shorts, all in one motion.

I headed for the shower in the back of the Quonset hut, the sharp coolness of the air conditioner icy on my skin.

"Well," Hawk commented, "you're still in good physical shape, Nick."

Complimentary words from Hawk were really rare. I tightened my stomach muscles and surreptitiously stole a glance downward at my bulging biceps and triceps. There was a puckered reddish-purple depression on my right shoulder, an old gunshot wound. A long, ugly welt ran diagonally across my chest, the result of a knife fight in Hong Kong years ago. But I could still press over six hundred pounds, and my records back at AXE Headquarters still carried "Top Expert" classifications in marksmanship, karate, skiing, horsemanship, and swimming.

I spent a full half-hour in the shower, soaping, rinsing, and just letting the icy spikes of water blast the grime off my skin. After I had toweled myself vigorously, I donned a pair of khaki shorts and rejoined Hawk.

He was still puffing away. There might have been a hint of humor in his eyes, but there was none in the coldness of his voice.

"Feel better now?" he asked.

"I sure do!" I filled a snifter to the halfway mark with Courvoisier, added a single cube of ice and the barest splash of soda. "All right," I said resignedly, "What's up?"

David Hawk took his cigar from his mouth and squeezed it between his fingers, staring at the smoke curling up from the ash. "The President of the United States," he said.

"The President!" I had a right to be surprised. The President almost always kept out of AXE affairs. Although our operation was one of the most sensitive in the government, and certainly one of the most vital, it also often overstepped the bounds of morality and legality that any government must, at least on the surface, espouse. I'm sure the President was aware of what AXE did and, to some small degree at least, aware of how we did it. And I'm sure he was appreciative of our results. But I knew, too, that he'd rather pretend we didn't exist.

Hawk nodded his crew-cut head. He knew what I was thinking. "Yes," he said, "the President. He has a special assignment for AXE and I'd like you to handle it."

Hawk's unblinking eyes pinned me to my chair. "You'll have to start right away… tonight."

I shrugged my shoulders in resignation and sighed. Goodbye, Betty Emers! But I was flattered I'd been chosen. "What does the President want?"

David Hawk permitted himself the ghost of a smile. "It's sort of a lend-lease deal. You'll be working with the FBI."

The FBI! Not that the FBI isn't good. But it's not in the same league with AXE or some of the counter-espionage organizations in other countries that we have to contend with. Like the Ah Fu in Red China for instance, or the N.OJ. of South Africa.

To my mind, the FBI was an effective, dedicated group of amateurs.

Hawk read the thoughts in my expression and held up a palm. "Easy, Nick, easy. This is important. Very important, and the President asked for you himself."

I was dumbfounded.

Hawk continued. "He heard about you from the Haitian affair, I know, and probably from a couple of other assignments. Anyway, he asked for you specifically."

I rose to my feet and took a few quick turns up and down the short length of what served as my living room. Impressive. Few men in my business are personally selected at the Presidential level.

I turned to Hawk, trying not to show my prideful pleasure. "Okay. Would you fill in the details?"

Hawk sucked on his cigar, which had gone out, then looked at it in surprise. No cigar, of course, should dare go out when David Hawk was smoking it. He looked at it in disgust and scowled. When he was good and ready, he began explaining.

"As you probably know," he said, "the Mafia these days is no longer a ragtag collection of Sicilian hoods running bootleg whiskey and bankrolling floating crap games."

I nodded.

"In recent years — beginning, say, about twenty years ago — the Mafia began moving more and more into legitimate business. They did very well, naturally. They had the money, they had the organization, they had a ruthlessness that American business had never dreamed of before."

I shrugged. "So? This is all common knowledge."

Hawk ignored me. "Now, however, they're in trouble. They've expanded so far, and diversified so much, that they're losing their cohesiveness. More and more of their young men are going into legitimate enterprise, and the Mafia — or the Syndicate, as they call themselves now — is losing control over them. They still have the money, of course, but their organization is breaking down and they're in trouble."

"Trouble? The last report I read said organized crime was at its peak in America, that it had never done as well"

Hawk nodded. "Their income is up. Their influence is up. But their organization is breaking down. When you're speaking of organized crime now, you're not just talking about the Mafia. You're also talking about blacks, Puerto Ricans, Chicanos out west, and Cubans in Florida. Everybody is getting into the act.

"You see, we've been aware of this trend for quite a long time now, but so has the Mafia Commission." He permitted another pale smile to soften his weathered features. "You do know what the Commission is, I presume?"

I gritted my teeth. The Old Man can be so goddamned infuriating when he takes that patronizing air. "Of course I know!" I said, my irritation at his method of explaining this assignment obvious in my voice. I knew very well what the Commission was. Seven of the most powerful Mafia
capos
in the United States, each the head of one of the major families, named by their peers to serve as a governing board, the court of final appeal, Sicilian style. They didn't meet often, only when a major crisis threatened, but their decisions, carefully considered, absolutely pragmatic, were inviolable.

The Commission was one of the strongest ruling bodies in the world, when you took into consideration its effect on crime, violence and, perhaps most importantly, big business. I scanned my memory bank. Bits and pieces of information were beginning to click into place now.

I frowned in concentration, then recited in a monotone: "Government Security Information Bulletin Number Three-twenty-seven, June eleven, 1973. 'Latest information indicates the Syndicate Commission now comprises the following:

" 'Joseph Famligotti, sixty-five, Buffalo, New York.

" 'Frankie Carboni, sixty-seven, Detroit, Michigan.

" 'Mario Salerno, seventy-six, Miami, Florida.

" 'Gaetano Ruggjero, forty-three, New York, New York.

" 'Alfred Gigante, seventy-one, Phoenix, Arizona.

" 'Joseph Franzini, sixty-six, New York, New York.

" 'Anthony Musso, seventy-one, Little Rock, Arkansas. »

Easy. I waved a casual hand in the air-conditioned atmosphere. "Shall I give you a breakdown on each one of them?"

Hawk glared at me. "That's enough, Carter," he snapped. "I know you have a photographic mind… and you know I won't tolerate even subliminal sarcasm."

"Yes, sir." I would only take that sort of thing from David Hawk.

In slight embarrassment, I moved over to the hi-fi set and took off the three jazz records that had played through. "I'm sorry. Please continue," I said, sitting down again in the captain's chair facing Hawk.

He picked up where he'd left off a few minutes before, prodding the air in front of me with his cigar for emphasis. "The point is, the Commission can see as well as we can that success is gradually modifying the Syndicate's traditional structure. Like any other group of old men, the Commission is trying to block change, trying to bring things back to the way they used to be."

"So what are they going to do?" I asked.

He shrugged. "They've already started. They're bringing in what amounts to a whole new army. They've been recruiting all over Sicily, young, tough banditos out of the hills, just like they were when they — or their fathers — began."

He paused, chewing on the end of the cigar. "If they succeed well enough, the country could be in for a wave of gang violence that would match what we went through in the early 20s and 30s. And this time it would have racial overtones. The Commission wants to run the blacks and Puerto Ricans out of their territories, and they're not going to go without a fight, you know that."

"No way. But how are the old Dons getting their new recruits into the country?" I asked. "Have we any idea?"

Hawk's face was impassive. "We know exactly — or rather, we know the mechanism if not the details."

"Just a minute." I got up and took both our glasses over to the plasticized little counter that served as both bar and dinner table in SAMOCO's executive officer quarters. I made him another Scotch and water, splashed some brandy and soda into mine along with another ice cube, then sat back down again.

"Okay."

"It's really well done," he said. "They siphon their recruits through Castellemare in Sicily, then take them by boat to the island of Nicosia — and you know how Nicosia is."

I knew. Nicosia is the sewer of the Mediterranean. Every bit of slime that oozes out of Europe or the Middle East eventually coagulates in Nicosia. In Nicosia, the prostitute is the sophisticate, and what the others do on lower social scales is indescribable. In Nicosia, smuggling is an honored profession, thievery an economic mainstay, and murder a pastime.

"From there," Hawk went on, "they're smuggled on to Beirut. In Beirut, they are given new identities, new passports, then sent on to the States."

That didn't seem too difficult, but I was sure I didn't have all the details. Details were not one of Hawk's strongpoints. "That shouldn't be too hard to stop, should it? Just order extra security checks and identification data on everyone entering the country with a Lebanese passport."

"It isn't as easy as that, Nick."

I knew it wouldn't be.

"All their passports are American. They're forged, we know that, but they are so good we can't tell the false ones from the ones the government issues."

I whistled. "Anyone who could do that could make a small fortune in his own right."

"Whoever is doing it, probably is," Hawk agreed. "But the Mafia has lots of small fortunes to put out for such services."

"You could still put out a stop order on everyone coming from Beirut. It shouldn't really take too much interrogation to determine that the guy on the passport really comes from Sicily instead of the Lower East Side of Manhattan."