At the Point of a. 38

15

Rashid Abd El-Din permitted himself to feel a glimmer of satisfaction. He knew he had to ration this feeling, because it was not a moment to relax. Trouble could be waiting around the next turn. But so far these Americans had been as spreadable as butter. Some he had had to buy. They had sold themselves without hesitation. Those he had had to frighten had turned pale on command, sweat had stood out on their foreheads, their legs had changed from flesh to cotton. This had all been highly satisfactory to him. He had always disliked the idea of Americans, and now he found that he disliked them as intensely in person.

He was tooling along the Expressway in the comfortable front seat of the big stolen hearse. The limousine, carrying three of his comrades, with their guns on the back seat amid bunches of gladioli, was twenty meters ahead. They drove with their headlights on, which Rashid had been told was the custom in American funeral processions. It was a fine sunny morning, too warm for neckties-the kind of weather Rashid preferred. A stately blimp drifted overhead. The ugly city stretched away on either hand. Great grotesque signs were everywhere. The wealth of this country was unbelievable, sickening.

He lit a kif cigarette, and sucked fragrant smoke into his lungs. Fuad Sabri, the driver, said nothing but his throat worked with desire. Rashid laughed and passed the cigarette to him.

“Only one breath for you,” Rashid said. “One long breath. You must keep watching the mirror for police or soldiers, the road for holes, the other traffic. I have a few minutes to think about nothing until I tighten up again for the assault at the airport.”

“Assault? But I thought the gate was to be unlocked.”

“We must be ready for accidents.”

Taking the cigarette back, he drew on it deeply. He was filled with respect for his bravery and cleverness, the bravery and cleverness of his comrades and friends. With such fighters, success was sure.

“You spoke of police,” Fuad said softly, his eyes moving to the mirror.

A gray vehicle with a revolving beacon came up fast on their left. Rashid reached down to caress the tommy gun wedged alongside his leg. The police car passed, passed the limousine, and continued to hurtle along the highway after somebody else.

Rashid pitched the half-smoked cigarette out the window. When they were safely in the airplane, streaking across the Atlantic toward home and the embraces of the camp women, when all the Jews were dead and the news of their coup was making its way into the consciousness of the world, that would be the time to congratulate themselves.

And yet it was true, so far his men had behaved superbly, with exemplary discipline. He had proved his major contention, that enemy leaders could be abducted from a crowded hotel in an American resort city at the height of the season, with little or no commotion. Highly placed comrades had refused to believe it could be done. He had succeeded in persuading them, finally, that even if something went amiss, he could fall back on their usual confused scenario: the political harangues delivered through a bullhorn, the hoods and the face masks, highly publicized threats and demands, and then the increasing strain through the tense hours of negotiation, and finally success. Or capitulation. Or death.

But that, some of the theoreticians argued, was the proper object of such an action-to die, to show the masses that there were some Arabs, at least, who had kept the early fervor. Rashid put it to those who had been selected to go with him. To a man, they had voted his way, a quick pounce, a clean escape.

And it had worked like a daydream, everything to the minute. He had made a deliberate exertion, not to let his judgment be affected by contempt for these Jews, for the ways they chose to enjoy themselves in that gaudy hotel. The lobby was a parvenu’s idea of luxury-goldfish inside a glass wall, machine-made carpet, a glare of light, fat ugly people. Heavily creamed, they lay elbow to fat elbow on chairs around a pool. They played cards. They fell asleep reading magazines. And when they saw the nakedness of the guns-the fear on those buttery faces had been like an intoxication to Rashid, a happiness.

It couldn’t be done? They had herded nineteen people together without causing a ripple. Eighteen, minus the blonde whore, had crowded together into two elevators. Each time they stopped on the way down, the people who had signalled stepped back to wait for the next car, seeing that these were clearly too full to carry anybody else. The prisoners stood in cowed silence, their fat necks trembling.

And then the elevator Rashid was in stopped at the lobby level.

“Stay in your places,” he told the passengers quietly.

He had pressed the button for the basement, and while the electronic controls thought it over before deciding that it was correct to continue, the prisoners looked out into the lobby, in which brightly-clad tourists were coming and going as usual, checking in, checking out. Whores waited for victims. Jewelled old ladies sat like vegetables. And if only one of the prisoners had burst out of the car, shouting, the situation would have blown apart. The Arab raiders were outnumbered three-to-one. Each had a responsibility for one of the main Jews. The gun was in Rashid’s right hand, the bullhorn in his left. He had his speech by heart. “Americans! Jews! We are Arabs of the Black September, we demand the release of forty-three of our comrades in Israeli jails-”

It was a delicate moment. Rashid, for one, never doubted that their prisoners would stand quietly like cattle, as their relatives had once gone so unresistingly to the gas chambers. The children clung to their mothers’ clothing. Fear was written in plain letters on each face. If any of the lobby guests noticed anything odd or menacing, they assumed it would be taken care of by someone else, and continued toward the cabanas or one of the many bars for a pre-lunch martini. They were vacationing. Melodrama was far from their minds.

The doors closed. They descended to the basement, where the other group was waiting. Reconnaissance, carried out by Rashid himself the previous afternoon, had disclosed a utility room with only one door and tiny windows near the top of the cinderblock walls. He had bought a hasp and a staple at a hardware store, and installed it. One of his men today had brought a padlock. He ordered the committee members to stand apart, and drove all the rest of the prisoners into the room.

“Make no noise above a whisper, you people,” he said, “if you want your men to live. That is the best advice I can give you.”

Sayyid closed the door and clapped on the padlock. The Jew Weinberger, whose blonde doxie had been executed by Rashid as a way of establishing his control, had a dangerous look. Rashid had already punched into his inner computer the notation that he should be careful with this one, and he touched him with the muzzle of the tommy gun.

“What is six million dollars? You can raise it with one advertisement in the New York Times.” Lou Solomon, the oldest man there, according to his dossier a famous doctor, said peaceably, “It’s a humiliation, Andrew, but do we have a choice?”

“This could be a lynching,” Weinberger said.

A lynching, exactly. Rashid knew the word, but it hadn’t occurred to him before. He said politely, “This way, gentlemen.”

They entered a dank corridor and soon were climbing a flight of cement stairs. Sayyid, two steps ahead, halted the group’s movement with a gesture, and went on into the pantry adjoining the kitchens. Finding it empty, he waved the Jews to the service entrance.

Now came the difficult job of loading them one by one into the hearse. The Arabs stationed themselves at intervals. They could be seen from the beach, and it was important to hurry. One of their prisoners collapsed, and had to be lifted. Rashid saved Weinberger for last, and used two men to drive him. An absurd but somehow threatening figure in his flowered beach clothes, Weinberger looked at the guns, at the bathers throwing Frisbees on the sand, and climbed in without help.

“Shoot that one first if there’s trouble,” Rashid told a guard.

The two vehicles kept close together through the Collins Avenue traffic, and presently were crossing the causeway to Miami. It was 11:28. A textbook operation, swift and efficient.

They put on speed after reaching the expressway, but kept in the right-hand lane. They passed the international airport, a large graveyard and crematorium.

“They’re fools,” Fuad said suddenly. “And these people are millionaires? I didn’t expect them to disgust me so much. If you want to know my opinion, I wish it had been less simple.”

“There is more to come.”

“Who would suspect we are about to steal an airplane of the mighty United States Air Force? I predict it will go on being simple, easy and simple. And when we get back we will have difficulty persuading the women that we were ever in danger.”

And that, of course, called down the lightning.

The limousine blew up. Rashid’s first improbable thought was that it had run over a mine. The front end rose from the pavement, the trunk sprang open. They were travelling at eighty kilometers an hour. One wheel blew off, and rolled away into a tomato field, bowling down staked plants. Fuad, in the hearse, was riding his brake. The crippled limousine swerved, crossing in front of another rapidly moving car. Horn blaring, that car managed to squeeze through the gap between limousine and hearse. The limousine struck the divider and lost a second wheel. The long, shiny, ostentatious car bumped down and turned over, sliding on its side, rotating, for another fifty feet before it came to rest, on fire.

Rashid hadn’t been using his belt, and he was thrown forward against the unpadded dashboard. He was yelling. The brakes grabbed unevenly, taking the hearse onto the rough shoulder. For an instant, unaccustomed to the behavior of big cars under stress, Fuad lost command and nearly piled them up among the tomatoes. The hearse rocked and shook and came back, missing the wreck by millimeters.

“Gold did this!” Rashid yelled. “A bomb-”

He spun out of the hearse before it was completely at rest, yelling at Fuad to pull the hood-latch. The hearse had come about broadside to the traffic, blocking both lanes. Fuad was unable to understand. In mild shock, he stared ahead, gripping the wheel. Rashid hammered on the hood, then came back and punched him in the face through the open window.

Still Fuad couldn’t make himself understand what the leader wanted. Rashid pulled the door open and hunted for the inside latch. He yanked it. Running back, he found the outside release, and the hood snapped up, like an animal opening its jaws.

He was fighting panic. The immense engine was steaming and clicking. He had no time, absolutely no time at all. There were hundreds of tubes, wires, connections, coiling and doubling back. Then he saw a black cancerous growth taped to the fuel line as it came into the fuel pump from beneath. It was ticking faintly.

He scratched frantically at the tape with his fingernail, without finding the juncture. He tried to pull it loose, but merely endangered the fuel-line connection. Inside the lump, nearly concealed by the tape, he caught a glint of white plastic: some kind of small ball.

Fuad had finally released the steering wheel and come out of the hearse. He saw Rashid under the hood, struggling. His brain unfroze. An open knife jumped into his hand.

“Here.”

Rashid snatched it away and sawed through the tape. The device came free in his hand. Whirling in one quick motion, he flicked it away. If he had taken time to cock his arm, they would have been blown apart. He threw it like the plateshaped objects the Americans played with on the beach, and it went off in the air above the tomatoes. A cone of liquid flame poured to the ground.

The force of the blast tore the buttons off Rashid’s shirt and tumbled him into Fuad’s arms. One of the armed Arabs had jumped down from the rear of the hearse. Rashid shouted at him to stay where he was, and ran toward the wreck.

Two of the three Arabs had been thrown clear. Sayyid, the young student, lay huddled at the edge of the road, his clothing torn, without his gun, mumbling to himself in Arabic. The driver, nearby, was burning. Rashid tore off his own coat and beat out the flames. The third Arab was still in the limousine.

Rashid called for Solomon, the Jewish doctor, to look at the burned man. One look was enough.

“If you can get him to a hospital in five minutes, maybe,” Solomon said. “There’s one in Coral Gables. Otherwise no.”

“A hospital? Obviously not,” Rashid said. “Leave him.”