Dynamite Fishermen (18 page)

The student became fascinated by the mysterious colonel, who alluded to having fought the Phalangist enemy across the length and breadth of Lebanon since civil war broke out in 1975. The young man eagerly accepted the officer’s invitation to join. When the colonel suggested a few weeks later that the youth taper off his involvement with the General Union to avoid becoming identified publicly with Palestinian causes, he did so without hesitation. From then on the colonel advised him to live quietly, be patient, and await further instructions.

From time to time during the spring of 1980, the colonel summoned the youth to meetings at odd hours in nondescript workers’ cafés, always hinting darkly that the time was approaching for decisive action against the Zionists, Phalangists, Western imperialists, reactionary Arab states, and other enemies of the Palestinian Revolution. When at last he asked if the student was ready to take part in the armed struggle against these enemies, he assented.

Not long afterward Colonel Hisham began to assign his new recruit a series of simple tasks, most of which involved the purchase of common household objects or the gathering of facts in the public domain. The student bought electrician’s tools, relays, and timers. He combed the rue Hamra bookstores for street maps of European capitals. He collected sample visa applications from every Western embassy in the city. Each time he completed an assignment, his mentor praised him lavishly and overpaid him for his expenses.

By fall the tasks became more challenging. The student spent entire afternoons trying to locate the offices of American and French companies doing business in West Beirut, only to find that most of the firms had long since fled the country. Likewise, night after night he drove past popular nightspots without finding a single one where American, British, or French embassy employees gathered regularly in substantial numbers.

Although Colonel Hisham reacted with understanding to these minor failures, each time he sent the young man out again. One evening in November, the colonel summoned him to a seaside café in Raouché where they had met several times before.

“You have made commendable progress these last months,” he told the young man with obvious satisfaction. “I think you are ready to take on additional responsibilities.”

“Thank you,” the youth replied, his cheeks coloring with pride. “Until now I have done nothing but train and carry out insignificant errands. Give me a mission—a real mission—and let me show you what I can do.”

“That will come soon enough,” the colonel answered, lighting a Marlboro. “First you must go to Syria for advanced training in the special work we do. The course is a difficult one, but if you succeed you will return here as a second lieutenant in the Eagles of the Revolution.”

Tears of pride and patriotism welled up in the student’s eyes. “I can begin immediately. Just tell me what is required and I will go.”

“Be patient,” Colonel Hisham replied with a reassuring smile. “I have already requested a place for you in the next course, and the high command will inform me when your turn is at hand. From this moment on, you may consider yourself a cadet. From today, your life belongs to the Revolution.”

In December of 1980 and January of the following year, the student was given sensitive tasks that included reporting on the political activities of his fellow students and occasional foot surveillance against his professors. Finally in February 1981 the colonel announced that the specialized training would soon begin. The next day the student departed for an isolated military camp in Syria’s eastern desert. There he spent six weeks learning basic techniques of clandestine communication, disguise, false documentation, smuggling, assembly of explosive devices, abduction, assassination, and other skills of the professional terrorist. His reaction, particularly to the training in firearms and explosives, was nothing less than total fascination.

Two days after the young man’s return to Beirut in March of 1981, Colonel Hisham met him at an upscale coffee and sweets shop near rue Verdun and gave him a black-and-white photograph of a tall, sturdily built foreigner dressed in a dark business suit who was leaning forward to unlock a car door. Written on the back of the photo was a Ras Beirut address.

“The man in the photograph lives at the address on the reverse side,” the colonel said. “Your assignment is to record the time when he leaves his apartment each morning and when he comes home at night. Try to find out whether he walks or drives to work and what routes he uses, then draw the routes on a map. Is that clear?”

“I will begin at once,” the student declared solemnly. “How soon must I submit my report?”

“Two weeks from today. But act without haste and use the entire time allotted, for it is of the greatest importance that you not be detected. The man you are to observe is no fool, and if you follow him too closely he will suspect you at once and your mission will have failed. Understood?”

The student took the photo and stared hard at it, as if to imprint the foreigner’s features in his mind’s eye. The man in the photograph was Conrad Prosser.

* * *

Prosser continued his morning run eastward toward the American embassy, unaware that he was being observed. To occupy his thoughts, he studied the assortment of faces that populated the Corniche at this early hour. There were employees en route to work, AUB students walking to class, a few runners like himself, hardy swimmers clambering over the railing to and from the rocks below, and a never-ending lineup of loiterers, by far the greater number of them young men.

As he approached the orange juice stand opposite the AUB bathing beach, he noticed a florid, thickset Lebanese man of about fifty dressed in a royal blue exercise suit, matching golf cap, and spotless white tennis shoes. The Lebanese, who looked like the sort who paid others to do his exercise for him, drank a glass of freshly squeezed juice while waiting at the curb. Flanking him were a pair of lean young bodyguards in camouflage uniforms with folding-stock Kalashnikov rifles slung low across their waists. Prosser had seen the trio many times before at this hour, always relaxing and bantering with the juice seller in the same spot until their Range Rover arrived to pick them up.

When Prosser reached the empty wooden guard shack across the street from the American embassy, he turned back the way he had come, staying close to the seawall and watching the waves from the previous night’s storm slam into the rocks.

His absorption in watching the waves was disturbed by two simultaneous bursts of automatic rifle fire coming from less than 150 meters behind him. He looked up in time to see a dark blue sedan careening away from the juice stand, automatic rifles blazing away from three of its open windows with muzzles aimed just over the heads of anyone who might intervene. Within seconds of the car’s getaway, scores of people began to converge around the three figures sprawled on the sidewalk in spreading pools of their own blood. Although it was difficult to see very far through the gathering crowd, he recognized one of the victims by his royal blue exercise suit and the other two by their camouflage fatigues.

The thought suddenly occurred to Prosser that it would be wise to stay clear of the crowd, as the onlookers would soon be joined by armed men from the local PSP, Murabitoun, PLO, and Syrian peacekeeping forces stationed nearby, not to mention the Lebanese
gendarmerie.
To have so many heavily armed men converging on the same spot so soon after a shooting was likely to make matters even worse. He crossed swiftly to the opposite side of the street just in time to see some of the bystanders lift the inert bodies into a pair of waiting taxis.

After distancing himself from the crowd, Prosser turned off the Corniche and started back up the hill toward the stone stairs that bisected the AUB campus and fed onto rue Bliss. Reaching the top of the stairs with very little breath to spare, he jogged at a slow pace the rest of the way back to his apartment. As he did so, the image of the middle-aged Lebanese man in the blue exercise suit would not leave him.

Although gangland-style assassinations among feuding political factions in Beirut were so commonplace that Prosser had long ago ceased to give them much thought, this was the first time he had ever seen one up close close. He thought of the murdered British journalist, the old man in pajamas stuffed into the Volvo’s trunk, the cast on Husayn al Fayyad’s foot, the rocket attack against the Saudi embassy, the shelling of the Corniche beaches, the car bombs, and now Abu Khalil’s report of a foreign spy being targeted for assassination, and he wondered how long he could remain unharmed by the city’s violence.

Prosser had always taken comfort in the apparent randomness of it all—out of the half million people in Beirut, only a few thousand would be injured or killed by the fighting in any given year. That gave him less than one chance in a hundred of becoming a casualty. Being a foreigner improved the odds, as did speaking Arabic and living in one of the safest buildings of the city. On the other hand, working at the American embassy worsened them, as did being an intelligence officer. Still, he thought to himself, one in a hundred were odds he could live with.

Chapter 13

Prosser climbed the stairs quickly, taking two steps at a time, and then, out of breath, he stopped on the landing to punch the four-button combination of the Simplex lock and enter the embassy communications center. Once inside he tossed his stack of draft cables into the communicator’s in-box and turned to leave. As he reached for the door, the communicator emerged from the radio room.

“Ah, I see you’ve left some goodies for me,” he remarked with an easygoing grin. “Will these be the last before lunch?”

Prosser nodded. “From me it’s the last you’ll see all day. But when Ed gets back from his meetings on the East Side, I expect he’ll have a few messages to send out toward closing time.”

The chief communicator looked displeased. “Why can’t you guys ever finish your writing at a decent hour? Last night Ray had to stay here till nine thirty. There’s no need for that.”

“I suggest you take that up with Ed,
habibi
. He’s the boss. I only write the stuff.”

“Come on, when you guys bring reports up here at six and seven o’clock, that means Ray and I have to stay here till nine poking them out. Can’t you write some of your reports in the morning once in a while?”

“I wish I could, but my agents don’t exactly keep regular hours. As I said, if you have a problem with that, talk to Ed. That’s why they pay him so much. By the way, you might as well plan on staying late tomorrow night, too. I have an agent meeting at nine thirty. Sorry about that.”

Prosser left the communications vault and rode the elevator down to the consular offices on the first floor, where he asked the Lebanese receptionist at the immigration counter whether Harry Landers was free. Hers was a face Prosser was certain he had not seen before. She was a pretty girl of about twenty or twenty-one, with a classic Lebanese profile, milk-white complexion, lustrous black hair cut to shoulder length, and a graceful, slender figure. Her simple but modish dress showed rather more taste than most of her overdressed colleagues, and when her eyes met his he sensed that she was also more spirited and intelligent than the giggly, overprotected girls from wealthy Lebanese families who usually found employment in the embassy. He made a mental note to ask Harry about her as she excused herself to determine whether the vice consul was free. She returned half a minute later with word that he would see Prosser right away.

He reached Harry’s door just as an elderly Lebanese couple was leaving the office. The old woman clutched her passport tightly to her breast with both hands, as if she were expecting someone to wrest it away from her at any moment. Her husband, a stick figure who seemed to have shrunk inside his dark blue serge suit, held her arm to escort her toward the lobby while casting a blissful look skyward as if his fondest prayers had just been answered. Prosser deduced that they had just been given immigrant visas. He stepped aside to let them pass and then knocked on the half-open door.

“Where have you been keeping yourself, Harry? It’s been days.”

Prosser rarely visited the consular offices and, when he did, it was usually because he wanted information. Not only did the consular files contain the visa applications, complete with photographs, of tens of thousands of Lebanese and third-country visa applicants, but the consular interpreters possessed encyclopedic knowledge of every political, religious, and cultural subgroup in Lebanon. Frequently the consulate picked up fast-breaking local news long before the political section or the ambassador’s office. In return for this information, Harry and the consul relied on Prosser and Pirelli to perform name checks, using the Agency’s vast computerized filing system, for all of the consular section’s immigrant visa applicants and for any nonimmigrant visa applicants who appeared suspicious.

“I meant to talk to you at the game on Saturday, Con, but with all the excitement I got sidetracked,” Harry said. “Now that it’s summer, the visa business has been murder. It seems like every Leb and his uncle wants to travel to the States by the end of June. Do you suppose they know something we don’t?”

“Possible, but not likely. It’s hardly a secret that the fighting around here peaks during the summer. You can’t blame the Lebs for wanting to keep their wives and kids out of harm’s way during the school holidays.”

“Yeah, yeah, that’s what my secretary keeps telling me. But after hearing the thousandth applicant insist that all he wants to do is visit
Monde du Disney
, it’s hard not to get a bit skeptical.”