High above the field, looking out at the curve of the stands, Fasil recalled the matching curves of the shaped charge and, in spite of himself, he was impressed with the genius of Michael Lander.
The stadium spread its sides open to the sky, labial, passive, waiting. The thought of those stands filled with 80,985 people, moving in their seats, the stands squirming with life, filled Fasil with an emotion that was very close to lust. This was the soft aperture to the House of War. Soon those spreading sides would be engorged with people, full and waiting.
“Quss ummak,” Fasil hissed. It is an ancient Arab insult. It means “your mother’s vulva.”
He thought of the various possibilities. Any explosion in or close to the stadium would guarantee worldwide headlines. The gates were not really substantial. The truck possibly could plow through one of the four entrances and make it onto the field before the charge was set off. There would certainly be many casualties, but much of the explosion would be wasted in blowing a great crater in the earth. There was also the problem of traffic in the small, choked streets leading to the stadium. What if emergency vehicles were parked in the entrances? If the president was here, surely there would be armed men at the gates. What if the driver were shot before he could detonate the charge? Who would drive the truck? Not himself, certainly. Dahlia, then. She had the guts to do it, there was no question about that. Afterward, he would praise her posthumously at his news conference in Lebanon.
Perhaps an emergency vehicle, an ambulance, might have a better chance. It could be rushed onto the field, siren wailing.
But the nacelle was too big to fit inside an ordinary ambulance, and the truck that now carried it did not look anything like an emergency vehicle. But it did look like a television equipment truck. Still, an emergency vehicle was better. A big panel truck, then. He could paint it white and put a red cross on it. Whatever he did, he would have to hurry. Fourteen days remained.
The empty sky pressed on Fasil as he stood at the top of the stands, wind fluttering the collar of his coat. The open, easy sky gave perfect access, he thought bitterly. Getting the nacelle into an airplane and then hijacking it would be next to impossible. If it could be done through some ruse of carrying the nacelle as freight, he was not sure Dahlia could force a pilot to dive close enough to the stadium, even with a gun at the man’s temple.
Fasil looked to the northeast at the New Orleans skyline; the Superdome two miles away, the Marriott Hotel, the International Trade Mart. Beyond that skyline, a scant eight miles away, lay New Orleans Lakefront Airport. The fat and harmless blimp would come over that skyline to the Super Bowl on January 12 while he struggled like an ant on the ground. Damn Lander and his putrid issue to the tenth generation.
Fasil was seized with a vision of what the strike might have been. The blimp shining silver, coming down, unnoticed at first by the crowd intent on the game. Then more and more of the spectators glancing up as it came lower, bigger, impossibly big, hanging over them, the long shadow darkening the field and some of them looking directly at the bright nacelle as it detonated with a flash like the sun exploding, the stands heaving, possibly collapsing, filled with twelve million pounds of ripped meat. And the roar and shock wave rolling out across the flats, deafening, blasting the windows out of homes twenty miles away, ships heeling as to a monsoon. The wind of it screaming around the towers of the House of War, screaming Faseeeeeel!
It would have been incredibly beautiful. He had to sit down. He was shaking. He forced his mind back to the alternatives. He tried to cut his losses. When he was calm again, he felt proud of his strength of character, his forbearance in the face of misfortune. He was Fasil. He would do the best he could.
Fasil’s thoughts were concerned with trucks and paint as he rode back toward downtown New Orleans. All was not lost, he told himself. It was perhaps better this way. The use of the American had always sullied the operation. Now the strike was all his. Not so spectacular perhaps, not a maximum-efficiency air burst, but he would still gain enormous prestige—and the guerrilla movement would be enhanced, he added in a quick afterthought.
There was the domed stadium, on his right this time. The sun was gleaming off the metal roof. And what was that rising behind it? A helicopter of the “skycrane” type. It was lifting something, a piece of machinery. Now it was moving over the roof. A party of workmen waited beside one of the openings in the roof. The shadow of the helicopter slid across the dome and covered them. Slowly, delicately, the helicopter lowered the heavy object into the gap on the roof. The hat of one of the workmen blew away and tumbled, a tiny dot bouncing down the dome and out into space, tumbling on the wind. The helicopter rose again, freed of its burden, and sank out of sight behind the unfinished Superdome.
Fasil no longer thought about trucks. He could always get a truck. Sweat stood out on his face. He was wondering if the helicopter worked on Sundays. He tapped the driver and told him to go to the Superdome.
Two hours later, Fasil was in the public library studying an entry in Jane’s All the World’s Aircraft. From the library he went to the Monteleone Hotel, where he copied the number from a telephone in a lobby booth. He copied another number from a pay phone in the Union Passenger Terminal, then went to the Western Union office. On a cable blank, he carefully composed a message, referring frequently to a small card of coded numbers glued inside his camera case. In minutes, on the long line beneath the sea, the brief personal message flashed toward Benghazi, Libya.
Fasil was back in the passenger terminal at nine a.m. the next day. He removed a yellow out-of-order sticker from a pay phone near the entrance and placed it on the telephone he had selected, a booth at the end of the row. He glanced at his watch. A half-hour to go. He sat down with a newspaper on a bench near the telephone.
Fasil had never before presumed on Najeer’s Libyan connections. He would not dare to do it now, if Najeer were still alive. Fasil had only picked up the plastic explosive in Benghazi after Najeer’s arrangements were made, but the code name “Sofia,” coined by Najeer for the mission, had opened the necessary doors for Fasil in Benghazi. He had included it in his cable, and he hoped it would work again.
At nine thirty-five a.m., the telephone rang. Fasil picked it up on the second ring. “Hello?”
“Yes, I am trying to reach Mrs. Yusuf.” Despite the scratchy connection, Fasil recognized the voice of the Libyan officer in charge of liaison with Al Fatah.
“You are calling for Sofia Yusuf, then.”
“Go ahead.”
Fasil spoke quickly. He knew the Libyan would not stay on the telephone long. “I need a pilot capable of flying a Sikorsky S-58 cargo helicopter. The priority is absolute. I must have him in New Orleans in six days. He must be expendable.” Fasil knew he was asking something of extreme difficulty. He also knew that there were great resources available to Al Fatah in Benghazi and Tripoli. He went on quickly, before the officer could object. “It is similar to the Russian machines used on the Aswan High Dam. Take the request to the very highest level. The very highest level. I carry the authority of Eleven.” “Eleven” was Hafez Najeer.
The voice on the other end was soft, as though the man were trying to whisper over the telephone. “There may not be such a man. This is very hard. Six days is nothing.”
“If I cannot have him in that time, it will be useless. Much will be lost. I must have him. Call me in twenty-four hours at the alternate number. The priority is absolute.”
“I understand,” said the voice six thousand miles away. The line went dead.
Fasil walked away from the telephone and out of the terminal at a lively pace. It was terribly dangerous to communicate directly with the Middle East, but the shortage of time demanded taking the chance. The request for a pilot was a very long shot. There were none in the fedayeen ranks. Flying a cargo helicopter with a heavy object suspended beneath it is a fine art. Pilots capable of doing it are not common. But the Libyans had come through for Black September before. Had not Col
onel Khadafy helped with the strike at Khartoum? The very weapons used to slay the American diplomats were smuggled into the country in the Libyan diplomatic pouch. Thirty million dollars a year flows to Al Fatah from the Libyan treasury. How much could a pilot be worth? Fasil had every reason to hope. If only they could find one, and soon.
The six-day time limit Fasil had stressed was not strictly true, since two weeks remained before the Super Bowl. But modifications on the bomb would be necessary to fit it to a different aircraft, and he needed lead time and the pilot’s skilled help.
Fasil had weighed the odds against finding a pilot, and the risk involved in asking for one, against the splendid result if one could be located. He found the risk worth taking.
What if his cable, innocent as it appeared to be, was examined by the U.S. authorities? What if the number code for the telephones was known to the Jew Kabakov? That was hardly likely, Fasil knew, but still he was uneasy. Certainly the authorities were looking for the plastic, but they could not know the nature of the mission. There was nothing to point to New Orleans.
He wondered if Lander was delirious. Nonsense. People didn’t lie around delirious with fever anymore. But crazy people sometimes rave, fever or no. If he were on the point of blabbing, Dahlia would kill him.
In Israel, at that moment, a sequence of events was under way that would have far greater bearing on Fasil’s request than any influence of the late Hafez Najeer. At an airstrip near Jaffa, fourteen Israeli airmen were climbing into the cockpits of seven F-4 Phantom fighter-bombers. They taxied onto the runway, the heat distorting the air behind them like rippled glass. By twos they drove down the asphalt and leaped into the sky in a long, climbing turn that took them out over the Mediterranean and westward, toward Tobruk, Libya, at twice the speed of sound.
They were on a retaliatory raid. Still smoking at Rosh Pina was the rubble of an apartment house hit by Russian Katyusha rockets, supplied to the fedayeen by Libya. This time the reply would not be against the fedayeen bases in Lebanon and Syria. This time the supplier would suffer.
Thirty-nine minutes after takeoff, the flight leader spotted the Libyan freighter. She was exactly where the Mossad said she would be, eighteen miles out of Tobruk and steaming eastward, heavily laden with armaments for the guerrillas. But they must be sure. Four Phantoms remained at altitude to provide cover from Arab aircraft. The other three went down. The lead plane, throttled back to two hundred knots, passed the ship at an altitude of sixty feet. There was no mistake. Then the three of them were howling down upon her in a bomb run, and up again, pulling three and a half G’s as they streaked back into the sky. There were no cries of victory in the cockpits as the ship ballooned in fire. On the way home, the Israelis watched the sky hopefully. They would feel better if the MIGs came.
Rage swept Libya’s Revolutionary Command Council after the Israeli attack. Who on the Council knew of the Al Fatah strike in the United States will never be determined. But somewhere in the angry halls at Benghazi, a cog turned.
The Israelis had struck with airplanes given to them by the Americans.
The Israelis themselves had said it: “The suppliers will suffer.”
So be it.
20
“I TOLD HIM HE COULD GO to bed, but he said his orders are to put the box in your hands,” Colonel Weisman, the military attaché, told Kabakov, as they walked toward the conference room in the Israeli embassy.
The young captain was nodding in his chair as Kabakov opened the door. He snapped to his feet.
“Major Kabakov, I’m Captain Reik. The package from Beirut, sir.”
Kabakov fought down the urge to grab the box and open it. Reik had come a long way. “I remember you, Captain. You had the howitzer battery at Qanaabe.” They shook hands, the younger man obviously pleased.
Kabakov turned to the fiberboard carton on the table. It was about two feet square and a foot deep and was tied with twine. Scrawled in Arabic across the lid was “Personal property of Abu Ali, 18 Rue Verdun, deceased. File 186047. Hold until February 23.” There was a hole gouged through the corner of the box. A bullet hole.
“Intelligence went through it in Tel Aviv,” Reik said. “There was dust in the knots. They think it hadn’t been opened for some time.”
Kabakov removed the lid and set the contents out on the table. An alarm clock with the crystal smashed. Two bottles of pills. A bankbook. A clip for a Llama automatic pistol— Kabakov felt sure the pistol had been stolen—a cuff link box without the cuff links, a pair of bent spectacles, and a few periodicals. Doubtless any items of value had been taken by the police and what was left had been carefully sifted by Al Fatah. Kabakov was bitterly disappointed. He had hoped that for once the obsessive secrecy of Black September would work against the terrorist organization, that the person assigned to “sanitize” Abu Ali’s effects would not know what was harmless and what was not, and thus might miss some useful clue. He looked up at Reik. “What did this cost?”
“Yoffee got a flesh wound across the thigh. He sent you a message, sir. He—” the captain stammered.
“Go on.”
“He said you owe him a bottle of Remy Martin and—and not that goat piss you passed around at Kuneitra, sir.”
“I see.” Kabakov grinned in spite of himself. At least the box of junk had not cost any lives.
“Yoffee went in,” Reik said. “He had some funny credentials from a Saudi law firm. He had decided he would try to do it in one move, instead of bribing the clerk ahead of time—so they wouldn’t have time to fool with the box and the clerk couldn’t sell him a box of garbage. He gave the property clerk in the police station three Lebanese pounds and asked to see the box. The clerk brought it out, but set it behind the counter and said he would have to get clearance from the duty officer. That normally would have only meant another bribe, but Yoffee did not have great confidence in the credentials. He slugged the clerk and grabbed the box. He had a Mini-Cooper outside, and he was all right until two radio cars blocked the Mazraa in front of him at the Rue Unesco. Of course he went around them on the sidewalk, but they got a couple of rounds into the car. He had a five-block lead going down the Ramlet el Baida. Jacoby was flying the Huey, coming in to take him off. Yoffee climbed up through the sun roof of the car while it was still moving and we plucked him off. We came back at about a hundred feet in the dark. The chopper has the new terrain-following autopilot system and you just hang on.”
“You were in the helicopter?”
“Yes sir. Yoffee owes me money.”
Kabakov could imagine the heaving, dipping ride in the dark as the black helicopter snaked over the hills. “I’m surprised you had the range.”
“We had to put down at Gesher Haziv.”
“Did the Lebanese scramble any planes?”
“Yessir, finally. It took a little time for the word to get around. We were back in Israel in twenty-four minutes from the time the police saw the chopper.”
Kabakov would not display his disappointment at the contents of the box, not after three men had risked their lives to get it. Tel Aviv must think him a fool.
“Thank you, Captain Reik, for a remarkable job. Tell Yoffee and Jacoby the same for me. Now go to bed. That’s an order.”
Kabakov and Weisman sat at the table with Abu Ali’s effects between them. Weisman maintained a tactful silence. There were no personal papers of any kind, not even a copy of Political and Armed Struggle, the omnipresent Fatah handbook. They had picked over Ali’s belongings all right. Kabakov looked at the periodicals. Two copies of Al-Tali‘ah, the Egyptian monthly. Here was something underlined in an interview. “... the rumor about the strength of the Israeli Intelligence Services is a myth. Israel is not particularly advanced in its Intelligence as such.” Kabakov snorted. Abu Ali was mocking him from the grave.
Here were a few back issues of the Beirut newspaper Al-Hawadess. Paris-Match. A copy of Sports Illustrated dated January 21, 1974. Kabakov frowned at it. He picked it up. It was the on
ly publication in English in the box. The cover bore a dark stain, coffee probably. He flipped through it once, then again. It was mostly concerned with football. Arabs follow soccer, but the principal article was about—Kabakov’s mind was racing. Fasil. Munich. Sports. The tape had said, “Begin another year with bloodshed.”
Weisman looked up quickly at the sound of Kabakov’s voice. “Colonel Weisman, what do you know about this ‘Super Bow!’?”
FBI Director John Baker took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “That’s a hypothesis of considerable size, gentlemen.”
Corley stirred in his chair.
Kabakov was tired of talking into Baker’s blank face, tired of the caution with which Corley phrased remarks to his boss. “It’s more than a hypothesis. Look at the facts-”
“I know, I know, Major. You’ve made it very clear. You think the target is the Super Bowl because this man—Fasil, is it?—organized the Black September attack at the Olympic Village, because the tape you captured at Beirut refers to a strike at the beginning of the year, and because the president plans to attend the game.” He might have been naming the parts of speech.
“And because it would happen on live television with maximum shock value,” Corley said.
“But this entire line of reasoning proceeds from the fact that this man, Ali, had a copy of Sports Illustrated, and you are not even positive that Ali was involved in the plot.” Baker peered out the window at the gray Washington afternoon, as though he might find the answer in the street.
Baker had Corley’s 302 file on his desk—the raw information on the case. Kabakov wondered why he had been called in, and then he realized that Baker, professionally paranoid, wanted to look at him. Wanted to expose the source to his own cop instincts. Kabakov could see a stubborn set in Baker’s face. He knows he will have to do something,Kabakov thought. But he needs for me to argue with him. He does not like to be told his business, but he wants to observe the telling. He’s got to do something, now. Let him stew about it. It’s his move. “Thank you for your time, Mr. Baker,” Kabakov said, rising.