Black Sunday

22

ON THE AFTERNOON OF DECEMBER 30, a massive search was begun at Tulane Stadium in New Orleans in preparation for the Sugar Bowl Classic to be played on New Year’s Eve. Similar searches were scheduled for December 31 at stadiums in Miami, Dallas, Houston, Pasadena-every city that would host a major college bowl game on New Year’s Day.

Kabakov was glad that the Americans finally had marshaled their great resources against the terrorists, but he was amused by the process that prompted them. It was typical of bureaucracy. FBI Director John Baker had called a top-level meeting of FBI, National Security Agency, and Secret Service personnel the previous afternoon, immediately after his talk with Kabakov and Corley. Kabakov, sitting in the front row, felt many pointed stares while the assembled officials emphasized the flimsiness of the evidence pointing to the target—a single magazine, unmarked, containing an article about the Super Bowl.

Each of the heavyweights from the FBI and the National Security Agency seemed determined not to let another out skepticize him as Corley outlined the theory of an attack on the Super Bowl game in New Orleans.

Only the Secret Service representatives, Earl Biggs and Jack Renfro, remained silent. Kabakov thought the Secret Service agents were the most humorless men he had ever seen. That was understandable, he decided. They had much to be humorless about.

Kabakov knew that the men in this meeting were not stupid. Each of them would have been more receptive to an uncommon idea if the idea were presented to him in privacy. When surrounded by their peers, most men have two sets of reactions—the real ones and those designed for evaluation by their fellows. Skepticism was established as the proper attitude early in the meeting and, once established, prevailed throughout Corley’s presentation.

But the herd principle also worked in the other direction. As Kabakov recounted Black September’s maneuvers before the strike at Munich and the abortive attempt on the World Cup soccer matches six months ago, the seed of alarm was planted. On the face of it, was an attack on the Super Bowl less plausible than an attack on the Olympic Village? Kabakov asked.

“There’s not a Jewish team playing” was an immediate rejoinder. It did not get a laugh. As the officials listened to Kabakov, dread was present in the room, subtly communicated from one listener to the next by small body movements, a certain restiveness. Hands fidgeted, hands rubbed faces. Kabakov could see the men before him changing. For as long as he could remember, Kabakov had disturbed policemen, even Israeli policemen. He attributed this to his own impatience with them, but it was more than that. There was something about him that affected policemen as a trace of musk carried on the wind sets the dogs on edge, makes them draw closer to the fire. It says that out there is something that does not love the fire; it is watching and it is not afraid.

The evidence of the magazine, supplemented by Fasil’s track record, began to loom large and was extrapolated by the men in the meeting room. Once the possibility of danger was admitted, one official would not call for less stringent measures than the next: Why just the Super Bowl as a possible target? The magazine showed a packed stadium—why not any packed stadium? My God, the Sugar Bowl is New Year’s Eve-day after tomorrow—and there are bowl games all over the country on New Year’s Day. Search them all.

With apprehension came hostility. Suddenly Kabakov was acutely aware that he was a foreigner, and a Jew at that. Kabakov was instantly aware that a number of the men in the room were thinking about the fact that he was a Jew. He had expected that. He was not surprised when, in the minds of these men with their crisp haircuts and law school rings, he was identified with the problem rather than with the solution. The threat was from a bunch of foreigners, of which he was one. The attitude was unspoken, but it was there.

“Thank you, old buddies,” Kabakov said, as he sat down. You don’t know from foreigners, old buddies, he thought. But you may find out on January 12.

Kabakov did not think it reasonable that, once Black September had the capability to strike at a stadium, they would hit one that did not contain the president in preference to one that did. He stuck with the Super Bowl.

On the afternoon of December 30 he arrived in New Orleans. The search was already under way at Tulane Stadium in preparation for the Sugar Bowl. The task force at Tulane Stadium was composed of fifty men-members of the FBI and police bomb sections, police detectives, two dog handlers from the Federal Aviation Administration with dogs trained to smell explosives, and two U.S. Army technicians with an electronic “sniffer” calibrated on the Madonna recovered from the Leticia.

New Orleans was unique in the fact that Secret Service personnel aided in the search and in the necessity for doing the job twice—today for the Sugar Bowl and on January 11, the eve of the Super Bowl. The men went about their work quietly, largely ignored by the crew of maintenance men putting the final touches on the stadium.

The search did not interest Kabakov much. He did not expect the searchers to find anything. What he did was stare into the face of every employee of Tulane Stadium. He remembered how Fasil had sent his guerrillas to find employment in the Olympic Village six weeks ahead of time. He knew the New Orleans police were running background checks on stadium employees, but still he stared into their faces as though hoping for an instinctive, visceral reaction if he saw a terrorist. Looking at the workers, he felt nothing. The background check exposed one bigamist, who was held for extradition to Coahoma County, Mississippi.

On New Year’s Eve, the Tigers of Louisiana State University lost to Nebraska 13-7 in the Sugar Bowl Classic. Kabakov attended.

He had never seen a football game before and he did not see much of this one. He and Moshevsky spent most of the time prowling under the stands and around the gates, ignored by the numerous FBI agents and police in the stadium. Kabakov was particularly interested in how the gates were manned and what access was allowed through them after the stadium was full.

He found most public spectacles annoying, and this one, with the pom-poms and the pennants and the massed bands, was particularly offensive. He had always considered marching bands ridiculous. The one pleasant moment of the afternoon was the flyover at halftime by the Navy’s Blue Angels, a neat diamond of jets catching the sun during a beautiful slow roll high above the droning blimp that floated around the stadium. Kabakov knew there were other jets too—Air Force interceptors poised on runways nearby in the unlikely event that an unknown aircraft approached the New Orleans area while the game was in progress.

The shadows were long across the field as the last of the crowd filtered out. Kabakov felt numbed by the hours of noise. He had difficulty understanding the English of the people he heard in conversation, and he was generally irritated. Corley found him standing at the edge of the track outside the stadium.

“Well, no bang,” Corley said.

Kabakov looked at him quickly, watching for a smirk. Corley just looked tired. Kabakov imagined that the expression “wild-goose chase” was in wide use at the stadiums in other cities, where tired men were searching for explosives in preparation for the games on New Year’s Day. He expected plenty was being said here, out of his hearing. He had never claimed that the target was a college bowl game, but who remembered that? It didn’t matter anyway. He and Corley walked back through the stadium together, heading for the parking lot. Rachel would be waiting at the Royal Orleans.

“Major Kabakov.”

He looked around for an instant before he realized the voice came from the radio in his pocket. “Kabakov, go ahead.”

“Call for you in the command post.”

“Right.”

The FBI command post was set up in the Tulane public relations office under the stands. An agent in shirtsleeves handed Kabakov the telephone.

Weisman was calling from the Israeli embassy. Corley tried to deduce the nature of the conversation from the brief replies Kabakov made.

“Let’s walk outside,” Kabakov said, as he handed back the telephone. He did not like the way the agents in the office pointedly avoided looking at him after this day of extra effort.

Standing at the sideline, Kabakov looked up at the flags blowing in the wind at the top of the stadium. “They’re bringing in a helicopter pilot. We don’t know if it’s for this job, but we know he’s coming. From Libya. And they’re in a hell of a hurry.”

There was a brief silence as Corley digested this information.

“How much of a make have you got on him?”

“The passports, a picture, everything. The embassy is turning our file over to your office in Washington. They’ll have the stuff here in a half hour. You’ll probably get a call in a minute.”

“Where is he?”

“Still on the other side—we don’t know where. But his papers will be picked up in Nicosia tomorrow.”

“You won’t interfere—”

“Of course not. We are leaving the operation strictly alone on that side. In Nicosia we’re watching the place where they get the papers and the airport. That’s all.”

“An air strike! Here or somewhere. That’s what they had in mind all the time.”

“Maybe,” Kabakov said. “Fasil may be running a diversion. It depends on how much he knows we know. If he is watching this stadium or any stadium, he knows we know plenty.”

In the New Orleans office of the FBI, Corley and Kabakov studied the report on the pilot from Libya. Corley tapped the yellow Telex sheet. “He’ll be coming in on the Portuguese passport and leaving on the Italian one with the U.S. entry stamp already on it. If he flashes that Portuguese passport at any entry point, anywhere, we’ll know it within ten minutes. If he is part of this project, we’ve got them, David. He’ll lead us to the bomb and to Fasil and the woman.”

“Perhaps.”

“But where were they planning to get a chopper for him? If the target is the Super Bowl, one of the people here has it set up”

“Yes. And close by. They don’t have a lot of range.” Kabakov ripped open a large manila envelope. It contained one hundred pictures of Fasil in three-quarter profile and one hundred prints of the composite drawing of the woman. Every agent in the stadium carried the pictures. “NASA did a good job on these,” Kabakov said. The pictures of Fasil were remarkably clear, and a police artist had added the bullet stripe on his cheek.

“We’ll get them around to the flying services, the naval station, every place that has helicopters,” Corley said. “What’s the matter with you?”

“Why should they get the pilot so late? It all fits very nicely except for that. A big bomb, an air strike. But why so late with the pilot? It was the chart from the boat that first suggested a pilot might be involved, but if it was a pilot who marked the chart, he was already here.”

“Nautical charts are available all over the world, David. It might have been marked on the other side, in the Middle East. A safety factor. An emergency rendezvous at sea, just in case. The chart could have come over with the woman. And as it turned out, they needed the rendezvous when they thought Muzi was unreliable.”

“But the last-minute rush for the papers doesn’t fit. If they had known far in advance that they were going to use the Libyan, they would have had the passports ready long ago.”

“The later he was brought into it, the less chance of exposure.”

“No,” Kabakov said, shaking his head. “Rushing around for papers is not Fasil’s style. You know how far ahead he made the arrangements for Munich.”

Anyway, it’s a break. I’ll get the troops out to the airports with these pictures first thing tomorrow,” Corley said. ”A lot of the flying services will be closed over New Year’s. It may take a couple of days to talk to them all.”

Kabakov rode up in the elevator at the Royal Orleans Hotel with two couples, both laughing loudly, the women in elaborate beehive hairdos. He practiced understanding their speech and decided the conversation would not have made sense if he had understood it.

He found the number and knocked on the door. Hotel-room doors all look blank. They do not admit that there are people we love behind them. Rachel was there all right, and she hugged Kabakov for several seconds without saying anything.

“I’m glad the flatfeet gave you my message at the stadium. You could have invited me to meet you down here, you know.”

“I was going to wait until it was over.”

“You feel like a robot,” she said, releasing him. “What have you got under your coat?”

“A machine gun.”

“Well take it off and have a drink.”

“How did you get a place like this on short notice? Corley had to go home with a local FBI agent.”

“I know someone at the Plaza in New York, and the same people own this hotel. Do you like it?”

“Yes.” It was a small suite, very plush.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t fix Moshevsky up.”

“He’s right outside the door. He can sleep on the couch—no, I’m kidding. He’s all right at the consulate.”

“I sent for some food.”

He was not listening.

“I said some food is on the way. A Chateaubriand.”

“I think they’re bringing in a pilot.” He told her the details.

“If the pilot leads you to the rest of them, then that’s it,” she said.

“If we get the plastic and we can get all of them, yes.”

Rachel started to ask another question and bit it off.

“How long can you stay?” Kabakov asked.

“Four or five days. Longer if I can help you. I thought I’d go back to New York and catch up on my practice and then come back on, say, the tenth or the eleventh—if you’d like me to.”

“Of course I’d like you to. When this is over, let’s really do New Orleans. It looks like a good town.”

“Oh, David, you’ll see what a town it is.”

“One thing. I don’t want you to come to the Super Bowl. Come to New Orleans, fine, but I don’t want you around that stadium.”

“If it’s not safe for me, it’s not safe for anybody. In that case people should be warned.”

“That’s what the president told the FBI and the Secret Service. If there is a Super Bowl, he’s coming.”

“It might be canceled?”

“He called in Baker and Biggs and said that if the Super Bowl crowd cannot be adequately protected, himself included, he will cancel the game and announce the reason. Baker told him the FBI could protect it.”

“What did the Secret Service say?”

“Biggs doesn’t make foolish promises. He’s waiting to see what happens with this pilot. He isn’t inviting a damned soul to the Super Bowl and neither am I. Promise me you won’t come to the stadium.”

“All right, David.”

He smiled. “Now tell me about New Orleans.”

Dinner was splendid. They ate beside the window and Kabakov relaxed for the first time in days. Outside, New Orleans glittered in the great curve of the river, and inside was Rachel, soft beyond the candles, talking about coming to New Orleans as a child with her father and how she had felt like a great lady when her father took her to Antoine‘s, where a waiter tactfully slipped a pillow onto her chair when he saw her coming.

She and Kabakov planned a mighty dinner at Antoine’s for the night of January 12, or whenever his business was concluded. And full of Beaujolais and plans, they were happy together in the big bed. Rachel went to sleep smiling.

She awoke once after midnight and saw Kabakov propped against the headboard. When she stirred he patted her absently, and she knew he was thinking of something else.

The truck carrying the bomb entered New Orleans at eleven p.m. on December 31. The driver followed U.S. 10 past the Superdome to the intersection with U.S. 90, turned south and came to a stop near the Thalia Street wharf beneath the Mississippi River Bridge, an area deserted at that time of night.

“This is the place he said,” the man at the wheel told his companion. “I’m damned if I see anybody. The whole wharf is closed.”

A voice at his ear startled the driver. “Yes, this is the place,” Fasil said, mounting the running board. “Here are the papers. I’ve signed the receipt.” While the driver examined the documents with his flashlight, Fasil inspected the seals on the tailgate of the truck. They were intact.

“Buddy, could you let us have a ride to the airport? There’s a late flight to Newark we’re trying to catch.”

“Sorry, but I can‘t,” Fasil said. “I’ll drop you where you can get a taxi.”

“Christ Jesus, it’ll be ten bucks to the airport.”

Fasil did not want a row. He gave the man ten dollars and dropped the drivers off a block from a cabstand. He smiled and whistled tunelessly between his teeth as he drove toward the garage. He had been smiling all day, ever since the voice on the pay phone at the Monteleone Hotel told him the pilot was coming. His mind was alive with plans, and he had to force himself to concentrate on his driving.

First he must establish complete dominance over this man Awad. Awad must fear and respect him. That Fasil could manage. Then he must give Awad a thorough briefing and include a convincing story on how they would escape after the strike.

Fasil’s plan for the strike itself was based largely on what he had learned at the Superdome. The Sikorsky S-58 helicopter that had attracted his attention was a venerable machine, sold as surplus by the West German Army. With its lift capacity of 5,000 pounds, it could not compare with the new Skycranes, but it was more than adequate for Fasil’s purpose.

To make a lift requires three persons—the pilot, the “belly-man,” and the loadmaster—as Fasil had learned while watching the operation at the Superdome. The pilot hovers over the cargo. He is guided by the belly-man, who lies on the floor back in the fuselage, peering straight down at the cargo and talking to the pilot via a headset.

The loadmaster is on the ground. He attaches the cargo hook to the load. The men in the aircraft cannot close the hook by remote control. It must be done on the ground. In an emergency, the pilot can drop the load instantly by pressing a red button on the control stick. Fasil learned this in conversation with the pilot during a brief break in the lifting. The pilot had been pleasant enough—a black man with clear, wide-set eyes behind his sunglasses. It was possible that this man, introduced to a fellow pilot, might allow Awad to go up with him on a lift. A fine opportunity for Awad to further familiarize himself with the cockpit. Fasil hoped Awad was personable.

On Super Bowl Sunday he would shoot the pilot immediately, and any of the ground crew that got in the way. Awad and Dahlia would man the helicopter, with Fasil on the ground as loadmaster. Dahlia would see to it that the craft was positioned correctly over the stadium and, while Awad still waited for the order to drop the nacelle, she would simply touch it off under the helicopter. Fasil had no doubt that Dahlia would go through with it.

He worried about the red drop button though. It must be rendered inoperative. If Awad, through nervousness, actually dropped the device, the effect would be ruined. It was never designed to be dropped. A lashing on the cargo hook would do it. The hook must be lashed tight at the last second before the lift, when Awad could not see what was going on beneath the helicopter. Fasil could not trust some imported front-fighter to take care of this detail. For this reason, he himself must be the loadmaster.

The risk was acceptable. He would have much more cover than he would have had at Lakefront Airport with the blimp. He would be facing unarmed construction workers rather than airport police. When the big bang came, Fasil intended to be driving toward the city limits, toward Houston and a plane to Mexico City.

Awad would believe to the last that Fasil was waiting for him in a car in Audubon Park beyond the stadium.

Here was the garage, set back from the street just as Dahlia described. Once inside with the door closed, Fasil opened the rear of the truck. All was in order. He tried the engine on the forklift. It started instantly. Well and good. As soon as Awad arrived and his arrangements were complete, it would be time to call Dahlia, tell her to kill the American and come to New Orleans.