Black Sunday (5 page)

A faint whisper. "Is my duty done?"

"It is done. Hold on, old friend, I will bring morphine now and then a doctor."

Fasil was feeling his way aft through the dark hold when Hassan's pistol went off behind him. He paused and leaned his head against the ship's cold iron. "You will pay for this," he whispered. He was talking to a people that he had never seen.

__________

The old man on anchor watch was still unconscious, with a swollen lump on the back of his head where Fasil had slugged him. Fasil dragged him to the first mate's cabin and laid him on the bunk, then sat down to think.

Originally the plan was to have the crates picked up at the Brooklyn dock by the importer, Benjamin Muzi. There was no way of knowing if Larmoso had contacted Muzi and enlisted his aid in this treachery. Muzi would have to be dealt with anyway because he knew far too much. Customs would be curious at the absence of Larmoso. Questions would be asked. It seemed unlikely that the others on the ship knew what was in the crates. Larmoso's keys were still dangling from the lock on the forward compartment when the captain was killed. Now they were in Fasil's pocket. The
plastique
must not go into New York Harbor, that was clear.

First Mate Mustapha Fawzi was a reasonable man and not a brave one. At midnight when he returned to the ship, Fasil had a brief conversation with him. In one hand Fasil held a large black revolver. In the other he held $2,000. He inquired about the health of Fawzi's mother and sister in Beirut, then suggested that their continued health depended largely on Fawzi's cooperation. The thing was quickly done.

__________

It was 7 P.M. Eastern Standard Time when the telephone rang in Michael Lander's house. He was working in his garage and picked up the extension. Dahlia was mixing a can of paint.

From the amount of line noise, Lander guessed the caller was very far away. He had a pleasant voice with a British clip, similar to Dahlia's. He asked for the "lady of the house."

Dahlia was at the phone in an instant and began a rather tedious conversation in English about relatives and real estate. Then the conversation was punctuated with 20 seconds of rapid-fire slangy Arabic.

Dahlia turned from the phone, covering the mouthpiece with her hand.

"Michael, we have to pick up the
plastique
at sea. Can you get a boat?"

Lander's mind worked furiously. "Yes. Make sure of the rendezvous point. Forty miles due east of the Barnegat Light a half-hour before sunset. We'll make visual contact with the last light and close after dark. If the winds are over force five, postpone it for exactly 24 hours. Tell him to pack it in units one man can lift."

Dahlia spoke quickly into the telephone, then hung up.

"Tuesday the twelfth," she said. She was looking at him curiously. "Michael, you worked that out rather quickly."

"No, I didn't," Lander said.

Dahlia had learned very early never to lie to Lander. That would be as stupid as programming a computer with half-truths and expecting accurate answers. Besides, he could always tell when she had even the temptation to lie. Now she was glad that she had confided in him from the beginning on the arrangements for bringing in the
plastique.

He listened calmly as she told him what had happened on the ship.

"Do you think Muzi put Larmoso up to it?" he asked.

"Fasil doesn't know. He never had a chance to question Larmoso. We have to assume Muzi put him up to it. We can't afford to do otherwise, can we, Michael? If Muzi dared to interfere with the shipment, if he planned to keep our advance payment and sell the
plastique
elsewhere, then he has sold us out to the authorities here. He would have to do that for his own protection. Even if he has not betrayed us, he would have to be dealt with. He knows far too much, and he has seen you. He could identify you."

"You intended to kill him all along?"

"Yes. He is not one of us, and he is in a dangerous business. If the authorities threatened him on some other matter, who knows what he might tell them?" Dahlia realized she was being too assertive. "I couldn't stand the thought of him always being a threat to you, Michael," she added in a softer voice. "You didn't trust him either, did you, Michael? You had a pickup at sea all worked out in advance, just in case, didn't you? That's amazing."

"Yeah, amazing," Lander said. "One thing. Nothing happens to Muzi until after we have the plastic. If he has gone to the authorities, to get immunity for himself in some other matter or whatever, the trap will be set at the dock. As long as they think we are coming to the dock, they are less likely to fly a stakeout team out to the ship. If Muzi is hit before the ship comes in, they'll know we're not coming to the dock. They'll be waiting for us when we go out to the ship." Suddenly Lander was furious and white around the mouth. "So Muzi was the best your camel-shit mastermind could come up with."

Dahlia did not flinch. She did not point out that it was Lander who went to Muzi first. She knew that this anger would be suppressed and added to Lander's general fund of rage as, irresistibly, his mind was drawn back to the problem.

He closed his eyes for a moment. "You'll have to go shopping," he said. "Give me a pencil."

Chapter 5

Now that Hafez Najeer and Abu Ali were dead, only Dahlia and Muhammad Fasil knew Lander's identity, but Benjamin Muzi had seen him several times, for Muzi had been Lander's first link to Black September and the plastic.

From the beginning, the great problem had been obtaining the explosives. In the first white heat of his epiphany, when he knew what he would do, it had not occurred to Lander that he would need help. It was part of the aesthetic of the act that he do it alone. But as the plan flowered in his mind, and as he looked down on the crowds again and again, he decided they deserved more than the few cases of dynamite that he could buy or steal. They should have more attention than the random shrapnel from a shattered gondola and a few pounds of nails and chain.

Sometimes, as he lay awake, the upturned faces of the crowd filled his midnight ceiling, mouths open, shifting like a field of flowers in the wind. Many of the faces became Margaret's. Then the great fireball lifted off the heat of his face and rose to them, swirling like the Crab nebula, searing them to charcoal, soothing him to sleep.

He must have plastic.

Lander traveled across the country twice looking for plastic. He went to three military arsenals to case the possibilities for theft and saw that it was hopeless. He went to the plant of a great corporation that manufactures baby oil and napalm, industrial adhesives and plastic explosives, and he found that plant security was as tight as that of the military and considerably more imaginative. The instability of nitroglycerine ruled out extracting it from dynamite.

Lander checked newspapers avidly for stories about terrorism, explosions, bombs. The pile of clippings in his bedroom grew. It would have offended him to know that this was patterned behavior, to know in how many bedrooms sick men keep clippings, waiting for their day. Many of Lander's clippings carried foreign datelines---Rome, Helsinki, Damascus, The Hague, Beirut.

In a Cincinnati motel in mid-July the idea came to him. He had flown over a fair that day and was getting mildly drunk in the motel lounge. It was late. A television set was suspended from the ceiling over the end of the bar. Lander sat almost directly beneath it, staring into his drink. Most of the customers were facing him, turned on their stools, the bloodless light of the TV playing over their uplifted faces.

Lander stirred and came alert. Something in the expression on the faces of the customers watching television. Apprehension. Anger. Not fear exactly, for they were safe enough, but they wore the look of a man watching wolves from his cabin window. Lander picked up his drink and walked down the bar until he could see the screen. Film of a Boeing 747 sitting in the desert with heat shimmer around it. The forward end of the fuselage exploded, then the center section, and the plane was gone in a belch of flame and smoke. The program was a rerun of a news special on Arab terrorism.

Cut to Munich. The horror at the Olympic Village. The helicopter at the airport. Muffled gunfire inside it as the Israeli athletes were shot. The embassy at Khartoum where the American and Belgian diplomats were slain. Al Fatah leader Yasir Arafat denying responsibility.

Yasir Arafat again at a news conference in Beirut, bitterly accusing England and the United States of aiding the Israelis in terrorist raids against the guerrillas. "When our revenge comes, it will be big," Arafat said, his eyes reflecting double moons from the television lights.

A statement of support from Col. Khadafy, student of Napoleon and Al Fatah's constant ally and banker: "The United States deserves a strong slap in the face." A further comment from Khadafy---"God damn America."

"Scumbag," said a man in a bowling jacket who stood next to Lander. "Bunch of scumbags."

Lander laughed loudly. Several of the drinkers turned to him.

"That funny to you, Jack?"

"No. I assure you, sir, that is not funny at all. You scumbag." Lander put money on the bar and walked out with the man shouting after him.

Lander knew no Arabs. He began to read accounts of the Arab-American groups sympathetic to the cause of the Palestinian Arabs, but the one meeting he attended in Brooklyn convinced him that Arab-American citizens' committees were far too straight for him. They discussed subjects such as "justice" and "individual rights" and encouraged writing to Congressmen. If he put out feelers there for militants, he rightly suspected, he would soon be approached by an undercover cop with a Kel transmitter strapped to his leg.

Demonstrations in Manhattan on the Palestinian question were no better. At United Nations Plaza and Union Square he found less than 20 Arab youngsters surrounded by a sea of Jews.

No, he needed a competent and greedy crook with good contacts in the Middle East. And he found one. Lander obtained the name of Benjamin Muzi from an airline pilot he knew who brought back interesting packages from the Middle East in his shaving kit and delivered them to the importer.

Muzi's office was gloomy enough, set in the back of a shabby warehouse on Sedgwick Street in Brooklyn. Lander was shown to the office by a very large and odorous Greek, whose bald head reflected the dim overhead light as they wound through a maze of crates.

Only the office door was expensive. It was of steel with two deadbolts and a Fox lock. The mail slot was belly-high, with a hinged metal plate in the inside that could be bolted shut.

Muzi was very fat, and he grunted as he lifted a pile of invoices off a chair and motioned for Lander to sit down.

"May I offer you something? A refreshment?"

"No."

Muzi drained his bottle of Perrier water and fished a fresh bottle out of his ice chest. He dropped in two aspirin tablets and took a long swallow. "You said on the telephone that you wished to speak to me on a matter of the utmost confidence. Since you haven't offered your name, do you have any objection to being called Hopkins?"

"None whatever."

"Excellent. Mr. Hopkins, when people say 'in confidence' they generally mean contravention of the law. If that is the case here, then I will have nothing whatever to do with you, do you understand me?"

Lander removed a packet of bills from his pocket and placed it on Muzi's desk. Muzi did not touch the money or look at it. Lander picked up the packet and started for the door.

"A moment, Mr. Hopkins." Muzi gestured to the Greek who stepped forward and searched Lander thoroughly. The Greek looked at Muzi and shook his head.

"Sit down, please. Thank you, Salop. Wait outside." The big man closed the door behind him.

"That's a filthy name," Lander said.

"Yes, but he doesn't know it," Muzi said, mopping his face with a handkerchief. He steepled his fingers under his chin and waited.

"I understand you are a man of wide influence," Lander began.

"I am certainly a wide man of influence."

"Certain advice---"

"Contrary to what you may believe, Mr. Hopkins, it is not necessary to indulge in endless Arabic circumlocutions in dealing with an Arab, especially since, for the most part, Americans lack the subtlety to make it interesting. This office is not bugged. You are not bugged. Tell me what you want."

"I want a letter delivered to the head of the intelligence section of Al Fatah."

"And who might that be?"

"I don't know. You can find out. I am told you can do nearly anything in Beirut. The letter will be sealed in several tricky ways and it must get there unopened."

"Yes, I expect it must." Muzi's eyes were hooded like a turtle's.

"You're thinking letter bomb," Lander said. "It's not. You can watch me put the contents in the envelope from ten feet away. You can lick the flap, then I'll put on the other seals."

"I deal with men who are interested in money. People with politics often don't pay their bills, or they kill you out of ineptitude. I don't think---"

"$2,000 now, $2,000 if the message gets there satisfactorily." Lander put the money back on the desk. "Another thing, I would advise you to open a numbered bank account in The Hague."

"To what purpose?"

"To put a lot of Libyan currency in if you should decide to retire."

There was a prolonged silence. Finally Lander broke it.

"You have to understand that this must go to the right man the first time. It must not be handed around."

"Since I don't know what you want, I am working blind. Certain inquiries could be made, but even inquiry is dangerous. You are aware that Al Fatah is fragmented, contentious within itself."

"Get it to Black September," Lander said.

"Not for $4,000."

"How much?"

"Inquiries will be difficult and expensive and even then you can never be sure---"

"How much?"

"For $8,000, payable immediately, I would do my best."

"$4,000 now and $4,000 afterward."

"$8,000 now, Mr. Hopkins. Afterward I will not know you and you will never come here again."

"Agreed."

"I am going to Beirut in a week's time. I do not want your letter until immediately before my departure. You can bring it here on the night of the seventh. It will be sealed in my presence. Believe me, I do not want to read what is in it."

The letter contained Lander's real name and address and said that he could do a great service for the Palestinian cause. He asked to meet with a representative of Black September anywhere in the Western Hemisphere. He enclosed a money order for $1,500 to cover any expenses.

Muzi accepted the letter and the $8,000 with a gravity just short of ceremony. It was one of his peculiarities that, when his price was met, he kept his word.

A week later, Lander received a picture postcard from Beirut. There was no message on it. He wondered if Muzi had opened the letter himself and gotten the name and address from it.

A third week passed. He had to fly four times out of Lakehurst. Twice in that week he thought he was being followed as he drove to the airfield, but he could not be sure. On Thursday, August 15, he flew a night-sign run over Atlantic City, flashing billboard messages from the computer-controlled panels of lights on the blimp's great sides.

When he returned to Lakehurst and got into his car, he noticed a card stuck under the windshield wiper. Annoyed, he got out and pulled it loose, expecting an advertisement. He examined the card under the dome light. It was a chit good for a swim at Maxie's Swim Club, near Lakehurst. On the back was written "tomorrow 3 P.M. flash once now for yes."

Lander looked around him at the darkened airfield parking lot. He saw no one. He flashed his headlights once and drove home.

There are many private swimming clubs in New Jersey, well maintained and fairly expensive, and they offer a variety of exclusionary policies. Maxie's had a predominantly Jewish clientele, but unlike some of the club owners Maxie admitted a few blacks and Puerto Ricans if he knew them. Lander arrived at the pool at 2:45 P.M. and changed into his swimsuit in a cinderblock dressing room with puddles on the floor. The sun and the sharp smell of chlorine and the noisy children reminded him of other times, swimming at the officers' club with Margaret and his daughters. Afterward a drink at poolside, Margaret holding the stem of her glass with fingers puckered from the water, laughing and tossing her wet hair back, knowing the young lieutenants were watching.

Lander felt very much alone now, and he was conscious of his white body and his ugly hand as he walked out on the hot concrete. He put his valuables in a wire basket and checked them with the attendant, tucking the plastic check tag in his swimsuit pocket. The pool was an unnatural blue and the light danced on it, hurting his eyes.

There are a lot of advantages in a swimming pool, he reflected. Nobody can carry a gun or a tape recorder, nobody can be fingerprinted on the sly.

He swam back and forth lazily for half an hour. There were at least fifteen children in the pool with a variety of inflated seahorses and inner tubes. Several young couples were playing keepaway with a striped beach ball, and one muscle-bound young man was anointing himself with suntan oil on the side of the pool.

Lander rolled over and began a slow backstroke across the deep end, just out of range of the divers. He was watching a small, drifting cloud when he collided with a swimmer in a tangle of arms and legs, a girl in a snorkel mask who had been kicking along, apparently watching the bottom instead of looking where she was going.

"Sorry," she said, treading water. Lander blew water out of his nose and swam on, saying nothing. He stayed in the pool another half-hour, then decided to leave. He was about to climb out when the girl in the snorkel mask surfaced in front of him. She took off the mask and smiled.

"Did you drop this? I found it on the bottom of the pool." She was holding his plastic check tag.

Lander looked down to see that the pocket of his swimsuit was wrong side out.

"You'd better check your wallet and make sure everything is there," she said and submerged again.

Tucked inside the wallet was the money order he had sent to Beirut. He gave his basket back to the attendant and rejoined the girl in the pool. She was in a water fight with two small boys. They complained loudly when she left them. She was splendid to see in the water, and Lander, feeling cold and shriveled inside his swimming trunks, was angered at the sight.