Dynamite Fishermen (2 page)

An instantaneous surge of adrenaline pushed him into action. Ignoring the damage to the Renault, he let out the clutch and felt the car shoot backward—accelerating until the engine screamed—then he wrenched the steering wheel sharply to the left so that the car’s nose swung around to face forward again. Without touching the brakes, he shifted into first again and began retracing his way to the Phalange checkpoint. He came to a stop in a sheltered spot directly opposite the sentry box and leaned on the car’s horn.

“Damn you—you nearly had me killed!” he roared in Arabic above the din. “How do I get out of here? Out,
sortie
—which way?”

The militiaman peered over the shoulder-high barricade and gazed open-mouthed at Prosser like some mute fish.

“I said which way out, which way back to Achrafiyé? Damn you, speak up!”

The soldier, unaccustomed to hearing curses in Arabic from the mouth of a
khawaja
, and perhaps embarrassed at having offered such disastrous advice, pointed south. “Take that street—there, to the right,” he answered, shouting to make himself heard. “It will take you back across the main road toward the museum crossing.”

Prosser eyed him suspiciously and did not budge. “Is it open?”

“Perhaps,” the soldier answered, shrugging and lapsing once more into surliness. “But in any case that is the direction. Go without delay. Once the shelling has begun, no place in Achrafiyé will be safe.
Yalla! Vite!
”

Prosser was still not satisfied with the Phalangist’s directions, but by now the noise level had made further discussion impossible. To his left and right, stray bullets nipped at the upper stories of abandoned villas. In a vacant lot less than a block away, a mortar crew fired a string of three rounds, each sudden crump driving the breath back into his throat.

He raced up the hill in the direction the Phalangist had suggested, taking the narrow and poorly surfaced lanes much too fast in the darkness and praying he would encounter no other vehicles along the way. He kept up the pace until he reached the Hôtel-Dieu de France Hospital, perched on the southern slope of Jebel Achrafiyé overlooking the Lebanese National Museum at the border of the no-man’s-land separating Christian East Beirut from the Muslim West Side. He pulled up beneath a flickering streetlight to inspect the damage. Five tidy entry holes the size of dimes pierced the Renault’s fender. Two or three bullets had gone on to shatter the left front headlamp and parking light and to tear a long diagonal gash in the plastic grille, but none had penetrated the radiator. Grateful for his good luck, he scrambled back to his seat and pressed on toward the National Museum.

At the roundabout in front of the Palais de Justice he fixed a wary eye on the helmeted head of a Phalangist peering out at him from the hatch of an armored personnel carrier. Discerning that the soldier had no intention of stopping him, he pressed on toward the west. A hundred meters ahead he spied a late-model Mercedes passing through the Lebanese army checkpoint on its way west into the no-man’s-land. He smiled at his good fortune: the crossing was still open.

Prosser pulled up to the roadblock opposite the National Museum, where a steel-helmeted sentry wearing the signature red and black armband of the Lebanese army military police waved him through without so much as a second glance. Then he shifted up through the gears once more and watched the speedometer needle move steadily to the right as he entered the no-man’s-land.

He drove straight ahead, gas pedal held nearly to the floor, for what seemed like miles through the inky darkness before he recognized the Hippodrome racecourse, then the Argentine and Czech embassies, and at last the twin rows of black-and-white-striped oil drums marking the western side of the museum crossing. In a moment he would be under the protection—if one could call it that—of the Syrian army. All the way across the no-man’s-land, he had noticed only a deafening cacophony of rocket, shell, and machine-gun fire. Now the distinctive sound of each weapon rang out with an odd clarity that he had never sensed before.

The sentry, a malnourished sergeant with a gaunt face and sunken eyes, examined Prosser’s diplomatic identity card without apparent comprehension. After staring at the card for several long moments, he turned on his heel and carried the card off to a small stone structure some twenty meters away, returning with an officer whose uniform identified him as a captain in the Syrian Special Forces. The captain gestured for Prosser to lower his window once more, then handed him the card.

“Where are you going?” the captain asked in an unexpectedly accommodating tone.

“Ras Beirut,” Prosser replied.

“Where in Ras Beirut? Hamra? Verdun? Corniche?”

“Minara. I am going home to sleep,
inshallah
.” He laid his pressed palms against his cheek and closed his eyes in the universal pantomime for sleep.

“The crossing is closed,” the captain answered unsympathetically. “Who told you to cross?”

“Closed? What do you mean? It can’t be closed,” Prosser burst out. “The sentry let me pass!” He felt a surge of anger and frustration, fueled by his lingering resentment against the Phalangist who had nearly sent him to his grave a quarter of an hour before. “What am I supposed to do now, go back?”

The Syrian officer suddenly broke out into a grin. “No, no, no. Of course not. Go to Minara. Go home. Do as you wish,” he replied with an amiable shrug, as if to reassure the foreigner that he meant no offense. “I only wished to caution you against crossing here so late, when our fighters are expecting trouble from the east. That you have survived your trip is proof of your good fortune. At times like these the Phalangist snipers normally lie in wait on the rooftops of those buildings and fire at everything that moves.”

Prosser could not help taking a quick glance back along the road he had traveled. “Believe me, Captain, I have no intention of trying this again.”

“You speak Arabic very well for a foreigner,” the Syrian offered. “What is your work here?”

“I’m at the American embassy.” Prosser waited for the reaction.

“American embassy—very, very good!” the Syrian exclaimed enthusiastically, emboldened to test his rudimentary English. “I like America too much! But for Syrian military man, no visa to America. Visa very difficult.” He paused. “If I come to American embassy, you give me visa?”

Prosser laughed. “
Inshallah
, Captain,” he replied. “But visas are for the consul to decide, not me. For a visa, you must speak to the consul.”

“You speak for me?” The Syrian flashed an unctuous grin. “You help me take visa?”

Prosser reached into his trouser pocket and handed the officer one of his business cards. “Here is my card, Captain. If you come to see me at the embassy, I will take you to the consul. We will speak to him together.”

The Syrian struggled to pronounce the name Conrad Prosser using the Arabic transliteration on the reverse side of the card, coming out with something like “Cone-rod Bruiser.” Prosser nodded his approval.

“You go to Minara now, Mister Cone-rod,” the captain continued in English. “Many bad Lebanese here, kill too much. Nobody stop them kill—not even Syrian army. Lebanese crazy, crazy too much.” He pocketed Prosser’s card, gave a casual salute, and waved the traveler forward.

Prosser returned the salute and drove off along the deserted boulevard, bemused as usual by the nearly universal Arab ambition to obtain a visa to the United States. While he did not question the captain’s sincerity in applying, there was little chance the man would follow through. Apart from the fact that Syrian officers posted to Lebanon carried no passport in which a visa might be stamped, an unauthorized visit to the American embassy would probably land the man ten years at hard labor. But, then again, there was always the chance he might take the risk, and if he did Prosser would be more than willing to strike a deal. Beirut was full of people desperate enough to turn traitor for the chance to start over.

“Crazy Lebanese—crazy too much,” he mimicked before patting the area along his waistband where the envelope filled with reports from Maroun was concealed.

A momentary thrill sent his pulse racing when he thought of the splash that Maroun’s information would make at CIA Headquarters and the tale he would be able to spin for Harry Landers about how he drove right into a firefight. Then he pressed the accelerator and sped off toward Ras Beirut as if to outrun the trouble that seemed to be chasing him home.

Chapter 2

The granite-faced apartment block stood alone at the western end of rue Schubert on a steep rise that dominated the coastal road. All around it sprawled low heaps of broken cinder blocks, warped scaffolding timbers, and twisted iron reinforcing rods that had been left behind when construction was completed two years earlier. Prosser parked a block away and approached along the unlit street, moving without haste in the light of the half-moon, a steady sea breeze drying the sweat that beaded on his forehead and moistened the closely cropped hair at his temples.

From behind him came the distant reverberation of artillery along the Green Line, with shell bursts coming at three- or four-second intervals, already two or three times as frequent as when he had crossed the no-man’s-land. The opening guitar riff of “Under My Thumb” reached his ears from the crowded balcony of an upper-story apartment.
That would be Harry’s party,
he thought. He stepped into the lobby, nodding politely as he passed the wizened
bawwaab
who continued to smoke his hubbly-bubbly and listen to lugubrious Arabic orchestral music from a cheap pocket transistor.

No sooner had he stepped inside the lobby than the music was interrupted by the sharp thunderclap of high explosives detonating perhaps a hundred meters away. The shock of the blast rattled the badly fitted sliding windows in their flimsy aluminum frames and, for an instant, forced the breath from his chest. The ancient doorman, leaning back on his folding wooden chair just inside the door, drew again from his hubbly-bubbly and opened a tabloid newspaper, apparently unperturbed.

“
Masaa’ al khair
, Uncle,” Prosser greeted him. “They’re starting early tonight, eh?”

“Abu Daoud’s daughter was married today,” the man replied without looking up. “That is only for celebration.”

Prosser laughed. “Ah, of course. And Abu Daoud is...?”

The
bawwaab
put down the mouthpiece of the hubbly-bubbly. “He owns the building behind us. He is
zayeem
for this neighborhood.”

“Well, Uncle, do you suppose our friend Abu Daoud would mind if I took a look out back?”

“Please,” the old man answered with indifference. “As you wish.”

Prosser left the lobby and walked around the east side of the building. A hundred and fifty meters to the north stood another newly built apartment building, its windowless profile facing him and its long front, ribbed from top to bottom with broad terraces, facing the shimmering Mediterranean.

 
On the terrace two stories below the roof, several scores of revelers crowded forward against an iron railing. Strobe-like flashes from the muzzle of an automatic rifle fired from the edge of the crowd lit up the side of the building and were mirrored in the glass doors behind. A split second afterward, the staccato reports reached his ears.

Moments later a dim, sputtering flame fell in a wide arc from the same spot and burst into a brilliant ball of intense white light two or three meters above the ground. Prosser felt a sharp puff of humid air in his face as the crash reached him, then a ringing in both ears. Gunfire was so commonplace in Beirut that one hardly noticed it after one’s first few days in the city, but this was the first time he had seen or heard of dynamite sticks being used as party favors.

He returned to the lobby and reached for the elevator call button.

“Which apartment?” the bawwaab inquired, still without lifting his eyes from his tabloid.

“Mr. Harry, the American consul.”

“Eighth floor.
Ahlan wa sahlan
.”

* * *

Prosser was only an hour late—not at all tardy by Middle Eastern standards. The door opened, and for a moment he thought he was at the wrong party. A lively Lebanese folk dance was playing, not the British rock that Harry Landers usually favored when the rugs were rolled back.

“Good evening, Mr. Prosser.” A rotund waiter of about fifty in a starched white jacket and black silk bow tie closed the door behind him. It was Wadih, a professional caterer who could be found serving drinks and canapés nearly every night of the week on West Beirut’s diplomatic cocktail circuit.

“
Masaa’ an-nour
, Wadih. If you’re here, I must have come to the right place.”

“It is always a pleasure, Mr. Prosser,” the waiter replied with an indulgent smile. “May I bring you something?”

“A dry Manhattan, straight up. That’s—”

“With French vermouth, not Italian,” Wadih cut in with evident pride in knowing the preferences of his clientèle. “Mr. Landers is on the west balcony. I will join you there in a moment.”

Harry Landers, the most senior of the four young vice consuls at the American embassy, was arguably the best-known American diplomat in Beirut. As chief of the visa section, he possessed near-absolute authority to grant or refuse nonimmigrant visas to the United States and considerable power over immigrant visas as well. While this alone would have been more than adequate grounds for many Lebanese to lionize him, Landers was blessed with a gregarious and easygoing nature that won friends even among those whose visa applications were inevitably denied.