Dirty Harry 10 - The Blood of Strangers (12 page)

Harry had an idea what kind of measures he was referring to, but said nothing.

“What does the CIA know about me? Why did it stage a deliberate provocation in California?”

Harry presumed he was talking about the assassination attempt, but he could no more answer Kayyim’s first question than he could his second. He kept silent.

This silence infuriated Kayyim who struck him savagely with his hand, turning first one cheek, then the other, a fiery shade of red. Still Harry didn’t react.

“Well, then, if you refuse to say anything you shall accompany us downstairs.”

Downstairs was the cellar and it was reached by several steep flights that descended through hallways composed of dull gray cinder blocks.

Harry was flanked by Achmed on one side and another man in a camouflage suit on his other. They held his arms in a painful grip. Kayyim was a few steps in front of him and the fourth was bringing up the rear with a Soviet Makarov. The only thing Harry knew about the Makarov was that it discharged a 9 x 18 mm cartridge and that while it was not very powerful, it was effective at close range. The man behind him was scarcely twelve inches away. To Harry that was very close range.

From what Harry could gather, this was an apartment building of some kind, but he saw no one else on the stairs. It might be that the building was inhabited entirely by sympathizers of Kayyim’s cause. Harry doubted whether he was the first person to visit “downstairs.”

Even with the cinder blocks and the outside walls of the structure, the rumble of the rockets and the artillary fire was still audible and from time to time the stairs vibrated in response.

They had gotten to the second floor—Harry could gaze down and see the grim gray door that led to the cellar—when the whole building seemed to rock, and cement and plaster and other debris came cascading down, accompanied by poisonous fumes. All at once the stairwell was filled with dense black smoke.

Harry realized an opportunity when he saw one. Though his eyes stung and he was gagging like his captors, he concentrated his energies on hurtling himself down the remaining stairs, dragging with him Achmed and his companion. The momentum of his forward motion was such that it took the three of them right into Kayyim who couldn’t see where he was going. Kayyim, with a curse that got lost in a coughing fit, tumbled and fell—but fell where? Harry couldn’t see; he had vanished into the smoke. But that was not his immediate concern—he just wanted to get the hell out of this place.

Achmed smashed into a wall and surrendered his hold on Harry. But the man in the camouflage suit, hung on tenaciously. The man behind fired his Makarov though what he thought he was aiming at was hard to say. His eyes smarting, his lungs aching with the smoke and the lack of oxygen, Harry took his free hand and sent a hard right into the man’s face. Because his eyes were tearing as copiously as Harry’s he hadn’t seen the blow coming and with a cry, he pitched back, his nose a bloody shambles, releasing his grip as well.

Harry struggled back the way he came, hoping to find a door that could take him to freedom. The man with the Makarov seemed to have the same idea. Because when Harry got to the next landing and found a door which, mercifully, had not been locked, he was waiting for him. Right behind the door.

But there was smoke funneling into this adjoining corridor too, and when he fired it was the smoke that he hit and not Harry. Harry dropped to the floor. The man fired again. The bullet singed his scalp, leaving a trail of blood over his right ear. As he stepped back to adjust his aim and get farther away from the smoke, Harry picked himself up and plowed right into him, butting him in the chest with his head.

The Makarov flopped out of his hand. He attempted to grab it, but Harry scooped it up and fired it. The man crumbled slowly, his knees buckling, then giving way, finally he was sucked into the smoke and could be seen no more.

A faint glimmer of light up ahead inspired Harry to accelerate his pace in spite of the growing pain in his chest. Behind him there was a great deal of commotion, shouts, and detonations, but when he looked back he could see nothing other than whorls of toxic smoke.

True to the promise of the light, there was a route of egress that took him out of the building. The shelling seemed to have temporarily abated although sporadic sniper fire could be heard coming from various points in the neighborhood.

At first, Harry’s appearance did not excite very much interest. Most of those who had gathered out front—and the vast majority of them were clad in paramilitary uniforms and brandished AK47’s—were busy trying to extinguish the fire that the explosion had caused or else were watching the proceedings with varying degrees of excitement. Some looked plain bored, as though this was such a routine occurrence that it wasn’t worth making much of a fuss over.

From this new vantage point, Harry could see better the damage the rocket attack had inflicted on the building in which he’d been held prisoner. Much of the roof had caved in, and two of the upper floors were no longer there at all. At least Kayyim had a good sense of timing. Had he decided to pay a call on Harry ten minutes after he did, Harry might not have been alive to greet him.

Not all the commandos were so preoccupied by the fire that Harry could evade detection entirely. Because Harry was tall and a Westerner, and because in all the confusion he had forgotten to hide the Makarov, he aroused a certain suspicion in the mind of at least one teenager who carried his Soviet-made automatic with as much confidence as a veteran of several wars.

He called to Harry in Arabic, but Harry did not respond. Never mind that he didn’t know Arabic, he knew very well what the youth wanted—an explanation for his presence in their midst. Having none, Harry smiled at him and continued on across the street, hoping to take refuge among a cluster of buildings, a few of which had so far escaped devastation.

But the youth was not about to let Harry go so easily. He rounded up a few of his cronies and pointed Harry out to them. It was as though Harry was a strange specimen of jungle life that had suddenly been sprung loose from a zoo. Now they were all shouting to him, both in Arabic and French. There could be no doubting the message they were communicating. “
Arretez
!
Arretez
!”

But Harry had no intention of stopping. He kept right on going, quickening his step as he took in deep draughts of air, welcoming the relief of oxygen after so much smoke.

Though he was walking away from them—and there were now four or five of them—he did not permit them out of his sight.

He saw that the one who had pointed him out to begin with was about to imbue his verbal command with the authority of his AK47. Raising it to his shoulder, he sighted Harry and again issued his order to halt.

Harry did not need to be convinced of the gravity of the situation. This boy would not hesitate to fire, if only to show his friends that he was as heroic as the kids down the block. It was Beirut’s way of keeping up with the Joneses.

Very carefully, Harry turned so that he was nearly facing the youth. The others had not raised their weapons; instead they were watching with amused expressions, as though this was really a game, like soccer, in which death was no more serious than a knee injury.

Other than this small group, no one else seemed to be aware of what was happening. Harry believed that it would only be a matter of minutes before Kayyim recovered enough to mount a full-scale search for him.

Still facing the youth, he began to back away. The youth shouted at him again to halt, more vehemently this time, somewhat incredulous that Harry persisted in disobeying him.

Now his companions brought their Kalashnikovs up and trained them on Harry. This brought him to a complete halt. The expressions on the faces of these youths were deadly serious; they had killed before and were ready to again. It occurred to Harry that he did not know who these teenagers were, whether they were leftists or rightists, Christian Phalangists or Moslems or Palestinians. It was bad enough to die violently, but it was worse when one didn’t know whose cause was sending one to that grave.

The group of them approached Harry, cautiously, for he held the Makarov even though they kept signaling him to drop it.

Then there was a loud report from somewhere overhead. Harry looked up and at first saw nothing, then he gazed back at the youth directly in front of him. There was a small round red hole in his forehead the size of a dime. He seemed to be reflecting on this latest development, but the reflection didn’t last long. He dropped to the ground. No sooner had he done so, than there was a barrage of gunfire, all coming from overhead.

Another dropped, a third tried scuttling across the street before a round caught him in the crook of his back and sent him sprawling. Another managed to dodge the hail of bullets, only to pivot about at the last moment and take a shot at Harry, perhaps because he blamed him for this sudden onslaught. His bullet never found its target. But his action invited a response. Harry’s aim was better, and in any case, he’d had more practice.

The youth spun about, his AK47 clattering to the ground. When he managed to draw his hands away from the wound, he found that there was very little left of his stomach. The shock was too much for him; he slipped down by a heap of sandbags to watch his life ebb away.

By this point, Harry had disappeared, taking refuge inside an abandoned grocery store whose protective barricade, composed of corrugated metal, was easily removed. Through the shuttered window of the store, Harry had a view of the building he’d just escaped from.

He decided to wait there amid the rank smells of rotting fruits and vegetables. In the darkness, Harry hoped that sooner or later Kayyim would reappear and lead him to whomever it was he had come to Beirut to see. In the meantime, he gave silent thanks for preserving him this far though it wasn’t God to whom his gratitude was intended. Since God was probably too far up in the heavens to care, Harry directed his thanks to the anonymous snipers for whom heaven was an asphalt rooftop.

C H A P T E R
N i n e

T
he intermittent shelling bothered her at first, though she could imagine adapting to it if she had to. More aggravating were the deafening sonic booms that shook the city every time Israeli F16’s flew over on reconnaissance and bombing missions.

Sleep under such circumstances was nearly impossible, and after trying for several hours, she abandoned the effort. Though she had certainly expected no tourists roaming through the lobby and corridors of her hotel, she had not expected quite so many journalists, nor would she have believed that they could conduct their lives as though there was nothing unusual about nonstop sniper fire and constant artillary bombardment.

There were not, however, many female journalists, and none who were as attractive and elegant as Ellie Winston, and so she had little difficulty eliciting the attention and interest of a number of men. As war correspondents, they inevitably were skeptical of her capabilities, especially when they learned that her only experience to date had been as a local San Francisco anchorwoman.

But more important than clothes and visuals was the for dinner and volunteering to scrounge about those few fashionable boutiques left open in the city for additions to her travel-depleted wardrobe. She spent her first day acquainting herself with these men, accepting three lunch engagements and two dinner engagements—all scheduled at hour intervals so that she could make them, more or less, on time, and always in a different restaurant—disappointing her dates by refusing food, claiming an uncertain stomach. But she did drink a glass of wine with each so that she could keep her resolve.

Without Harry around, without even knowing where in Beirut he might be, she had to use her own ingenuity. She had to get new clothes, and this she was able to accomplish with the aid of her male admirers who carried her dimensions with them on a slip of paper. She needed also to find a camera crew or failing that, a man armed with a Nikon who could supply her with the visuals necessary to supplement the story she hoped to have by the time she was ready to return home.

But more important than clothes and visuals, was the story itself. And that was the real reason she accepted invitations from these veteran correspondents to dine and drink with them. Most of them had been in Lebanon and elsewhere in the Middle East for years, reporting on coups and massacres, air strikes, hijackings, and wars. Certainly, Kayyim’s name would have come up in a variety of situations over the years. Ellie, far from making a show of her knowledge, feigned a kind of naiveté, confirming in the minds of the men who met her their original opinion of her—that she was beautiful and charming and good company, but hardly much of a reporter.

“Kayyim?” one of them, a
LeMonde
correspondent, asked. “How does it come that you know of him?”

Ellie explained that she had seen him deliver a speech in L.A., adding that several million dollars went with this speech.

“Notorious,
très dangereuse
,” was the Frenchman’s verdict. But he would add nothing to this. Ellie was already aware of how notorious and dangerous he was.

More forthcoming was the representative of
The London Telegraph.

“Kayyim, bloody Kayyim,” he said. “Is he in town? Last I heard he was home in Tripoli.”

“No, he came over here from the U.S. Any idea why he’d be here?”

The
Telegraph
man threw up his hands. “It could be any number of reasons. Kayyim is always coming through here. The word is he’s a middleman, buying weapons from some bloke here, then seeing that they’re shipped to whatever part of the world Qaddafi wants to stir up trouble.”

“You wouldn’t have any idea who this arms dealer might be?”

The Englishman shook his head. “I’ve heard rumors, there’s nothing but rumors in Beirut, rumors and blood, but that’s not generally the sort of thing I cover. No one’s interested actually. Not with so much killing going on. But there is someone who might know.”