Black Sunday

19

THE DELTA JET APPROACHED New Orleans over Lake Pontchartrain, maintaining considerable altitude over the water, then swooped down toward New Orleans International Airport. The swoop lifted Muhammad Fasil’s stomach unpleasantly, and he cursed under his breath.

Pneumonia! The woman’s precious pet got drunk and fell out in the rain! The fool was half delirious and weak as a kitten, the woman sitting beside him in the hospital, bleating expressions of pity. At least she would see to it that he kept his mouth shut about the mission. The chances of Lander being able to fly the Super Bowl in fifteen days were exactly nil, Fasil thought. When the stubborn-headed woman was finally convinced of that, when she saw that Lander could do nothing but puke in her hand, she would kill him and join Fasil in New Orleans. Fasil had her word for it.

Fasil was desperate. The truck bearing the bomb was moving toward New Orleans on schedule. Now he had a bomb and no delivery system. He must work out an alternate plan, and the place to do it was here, where the strike would be made. Hafez Najeer had erred very badly in allowing Dahlia Iyad to control this mission, Fasil told himself for the hundredth time. Well, she controlled it no longer. The new plan would be his.

The airport was jammed with the crowd arriving for the Sugar Bowl, the college invitational bowl game that would be played in Tulane Stadium in three days. Fasil called eight hotels. All were full. He had to take a room at the YMCA.

The cramped little room was quite a comedown from the Plaza in New York, where he had spent the previous night—the Plaza, with the national flags of foreign dignitaries hanging in front and a switchboard accustomed to placing international calls. The flags of Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Turkey hung among the others during the present United Nations session and calls to the Middle East were common. Fasil could have had a comfortable conversation with Beirut, arranging for the gunmen to report to New Orleans. He had finished encoding his message and was ready to make the call when he was interrupted by Dahlia on the telephone, telling him of Lander’s stupid debacle. Angrily, Fasil had torn up his message to Beirut and flushed it down his elegant Plaza toilet.

Now he was stuffed in this shabby cell in New Orleans with the plan a shambles. It was time to look over the ground. Fasil had never seen Tulane Stadium. He had depended on Lander for all that. Bitterly he walked outside and flagged a taxi.

How could he make the strike? He would have the truck. He would have the bomb. He could still send for a couple of gunmen. He would have the services of Dahlia Iyad, even if her infidel was out of it. Although Fasil was an atheist, he thought of Lander as an infidel, and he spat as he muttered the name.

The taxi mounted the U.S. 90 expressway over downtown New Orleans and headed southwest into the afternoon sun. The driver kept up a steady monologue in a dialect barely intelligible to Fasil.

“These bums now don’t want to work. They want something for nothing,” the driver was saying. “My sister’s kid used to work with me when I was plumbing, before my back went out. I never could find him half the time. You can’t do any plumbing by yourself. You have to come out from under the house too many times, you don’t have nobody to hand you stuff. That’s why my back went out, all the time crawling under and coming back out.”

Fasil wished the man would shut up. He did not shut up.

“That there’s the Superdome, which I think they’re never gonna finish. First they thought it would cost 168 million dollars, now it’s two hundred million dollars. Everybody says Howard Hughes bought it. What a mess. The sheet metal workers took a walk first, and then…”

Fasil looked at the great bulge of the domed stadium. Work was under way on it, even through the holiday. He could see tiny figures moving on it. There had been a scare in the early stages of the mission that the Superdome would be completed in time for the Super Bowl, rendering the blimp useless. But there were still big gaps visible in the roof. Not that it mattered now anyway, Fasil thought angrily.

He made a mental note to investigate the possible use of toxic gas in closed stadiums. That might be a useful technique at some future time.

The taxi shifted into the high-speed lane, the driver talking over his shoulder. “You know, they were gonna have the Super Bowl there, they thought for a while. Now they got a terrific cost overrun because the city thinks it looks bad, embarrassing you know, not to be through with it. Double time and a half they’re paying to work on it through the holidays, you know. Put on a show of really hustling to finish it by spring. I wouldn’t mind some of that overtime myself.”

Fasil started to ask the man to be quiet. Then he changed his mind. If he were rude, the driver would remember him.

“You know what happened in Houston with the As trodome. They got cutesy with the Oilers and now they play in Rice Stadium. These guys don’t want that to happen. They got to have the Saints, you know? They want everybody to see they’re getting on with it, the NFL and all, so they work over the holidays too. You think I wouldn’t work Christmas and New Year’s double time and a half? Ha. The old lady could hang up the stockings by herself.”

The taxi followed the curve of U.S. 90, turning northwest, and the driver adjusted his sunshade. They were nearing Tulane University now. “That’s the Ursuline College on the left there. What side of the stadium you want, Willow Street?”

“Yes.”

The sight of the great, shabby tan-and-gray stadium aroused Fasil. The films of Munich were running in his head.

It was big. Fasil was reminded of his first close view of an aircraft carrier. It went up and up. Fasil climbed out of the taxi, his camera banging against the door.

The southeast gate was open. Maintenance men were coming in and out in the last rush before the Sugar Bowl game. Fasil had his press card ready, and the same credentials he had brought on his flight to the Azores, but he was not stopped. He glanced at the vast, shadowy spaces under the stands, tangled with iron, then walked out into the arena.

It was so big! Its size elated him. The artificial turf was new, the numbers gleaming white against the green. He stepped on the turf and almost recoiled. It felt like flesh underfoot. Fasil walked across the field, feeling the presence of the endless tiers of seats. It is difficult to walk through the focal area of a stadium, even an empty stadium, without feeling watched. He hurried to the west side of the field and climbed the stands toward the press boxes.

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 Colonel 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.