Black Sunday

4

AT THAT MOMENT THE FREIGHTER Leticia was crossing the twenty-first meridian en route to the Azores and New York City. In her deepest forward hold in a locked compartment were twelve hundred pounds of plastique packed in gray crates.

Beside the crates in the total darkness of the hold, Ali Hassan lay semiconscious. A large rat was on his stomach and it was walking toward his face. Hassan had lain there for three days, shot in the stomach by Captain Kemal Larmoso.

The rat was hungry, but not ravenous. At first Hassan’s groans had frightened it, but now it heard only shallow, glottal breathing. It stood in the crust on the distended stomach and sniffed the wound, then moved forward onto the chest.

Hassan could feel the claws through his shirt. He must wait. In Hassan’s left hand was the short crowbar Captain Larmoso had dropped when Hassan surprised him at the crates. In his right hand was the Walther PPK automatic he had drawn too late. He would not fire the gun now. Someone might hear. The traitor Larmoso must think him dead when he came into the hold again.

The rat’s nose was almost touching Hassan’s chin. The man’s labored breathing stirred the rat’s whiskers.

With all his strength, Hassan jabbed the crowbar sideways across his chest and felt it gouge into the rat’s side. The claws dug in as the rat leaped off him, and he heard the claws rasp on the metal deck as it ran.

Minutes passed. Then Hassan was aware of a faint rustling. He believed it came from inside his trouser leg. He could feel nothing below his waist and he was grateful for that.

The temptation to kill himself was with him all the time now. He had the strength to bring the Walther to his head. He would do it, too, he told himself, as soon as Muhammad Fasil came. Until then he would guard the boxes.

Hassan did not know how long he had lain in the darkness. He knew his mind would be clear for only a few minutes this time, and he tried to think. The Leticia was a little more than three days from the Azores when he caught Larmoso snooping at the boxes. When Muhammad Fasil did not receive Hassan’s scheduled cable from the Azores on November 2, he would have two days to act before the Leticia sailed again—and the Azores were the last stop before New York.

Fasil will act, Hassan thought. I will not fail him.

Every stroke of the Leticia’s aged diesel vibrated the deck plates beneath his head. The red waves were spreading behind his eyes. He strained to hear the diesel and thought it was the pulse of God.

Sixty feet above the hold where Hassan lay, Captain Kemal Larmoso was relaxing in his cabin, drinking a bottle of Sapporo beer while he listened to the news. The Lebanese army and the guerrillas were fighting again. Good, he thought. Turds to them both.

The Lebanese threatened his papers and the guerrillas threatened his life. When he put into Beirut or Tyre or Tobruk, both had to be paid. The guerrillas not so much as the camel-fucking Lebanese customs.

He was in for it with the guerrillas now. He knew he was committed from the moment Hassan caught him at the boxes. Fasil and the others would be after him when he returned to Beirut. Maybe the Lebanese had learned from King Hussein and would drive the guerrillas out. Then there would be only one faction to pay. He was sick of it. “Take him there.” “Bring the guns.” “Speak nothing.” I know about speak nothing, Larmoso thought. My ear did not get this way from a hasty shave. Once he had found a limpet mine attached to the Leticia’s scaly hull, fuse ready to be set if he should refuse the guerrillas’ demands.

Larmoso was a large, hairy man whose body odor made even his crew’s eyes water, and his weight sagged his bunk halfway to the floor. He opened another bottle of Sapporo with his teeth and brooded while he drank it, his small eyes fixed on an Italian magazine foldout depicting heterosexual buggery, which was taped to the bulkhead.

Then he lifted the small Madonna from the floor beside his bunk and stood it on his chest. It was scarred where he had probed it with his knife before realizing what it was.

Larmoso knew of three places where he might turn explosives into money. There was a Cuban exile in Miami with more money than sense. In the Dominican Republic there was a man who paid Brazilian cruzeiros for anything that would shoot or explode. The third possible customer was the U.S. government.

There would be a reward, of course, but Larmoso knew that there would also be other advantages in a deal with the Americans. Certain prejudices held against him by U.S. Customs might be forgotten.

Larmoso had opened the crates because he wanted to put the bite on the importer, Benjamin Muzi, for an unusually large payoff, and he needed to know the value of the contraband in order to figure out how much he could demand. Larmoso had never trifled with Muzi’s shipments before, but persistent rumors had reached him that Muzi was going out of business in the Middle East, and if that happened Larmoso’s illicit income would drop sharply. This could very well be Muzi’s final shipment, and Larmoso wanted to make all he could.

He had expected to find a whopping shipment of hashish, a commodity Muzi often bought from Al Fatah sources. Instead he found plastique, and then Hassan was there, going for his pistol like a fool. Plastique was heavy business, not like a normal drug deal where friends could put the squeeze on one another.

Larmoso hoped that Muzi could solve the problem with the guerrillas and still turn a profit on the plastique. But Muzi would be furious at him for fooling with the crates.

If Muzi did not want to cooperate, if he refused to pay off Larmoso and make amends to the guerrillas for him, then Larmoso intended to keep the plastique and sell it elsewhere. Better to be a wealthy fugitive than a poor one.

But first he must take an inventory of what he had to sell, and he must get rid of certain garbage in the hold.

Larmoso knew that he had hit Hassan squarely. And he had given him plenty of time to die. He decided he would sack up Hassan, weight him in the harbor at Ponta Delgada while there was only an anchor watch aboard, and dump him in deep water when he cleared the Azores.

Muhammad Fasil checked the cable office in Beirut hourly all day. At first he hoped Hassan’s cable from the Azores had only been delayed. Always before, the cables had come by noon. There had been three of them—from Benghazi, Tunis, and Lisbon—as the old freighter plowed westward. The wording varied in each, but they all meant the same thing—the explosives had not been disturbed. The next one should be “Mother much improved today” and it should be signed Jose. At six p.m., when the cable had still not arrived, Fasil drove to the airport. He was carrying the credentials of an Algerian photographer and a gutted speed graphic camera containing a .357 Magnum revolver. Fasil had made the reservations as a precaution two weeks before. He knew he could be in Ponta Delgada by four p.m. the next day.

Captain Larmoso relieved his first mate at the helm when the Leticia raised the peaks of Santa Maria early on the morning of November 2. He skirted the small island on the southwest side, then turned north for San Miguel and the port of Ponta Delgada.

The Portuguese city was lovely in the winter sun, white buildings with red tiled roofs, and evergreens between them rising nearly as high as the bell tower. Behind the city were gentle mountain slopes, patched with fields.

The Leticia looked scalier than ever tied at the quay, her faded Plimsoll line creeping up out of the water as the crew off-loaded a consignment of reconditioned light agricultural equipment and creeping down again as crates of bottled mineral water were loaded aboard.

Larmoso was not worried. The cargo handling involved only the aft hold. The small, locked compartment in the forward hold would not be disturbed.

Most of the work was completed by the afternoon of the second day, and he gave the crew shore leave, the purser doling out only enough cash to each man for one evening in the brothels and bars.

The crew trooped off down the quay, walking quickly in anticipation of the evening, the foremost sailor with a blob of shaving cream beneath his ear. They did not notice the thin man beneath the colonnade of the Banco Nacional Ultra marino, who counted them as they passed.

The ship was silent now except for Captain Larmoso’s footsteps as he descended to the engine room workshop, a small compartment dimly lit by a bulb in a wire cage. Rummaging through a pile of cast-off parts he selected a piston rod, complete with wristpin assembly, which had been ruined when the Leticia’s engine seized off Tobruk in the spring. The rod looked like a great metal bone as he hefted it in his hands. Confident that it was heavy enough to take Hassan’s body down the long slide to the bottom of the Atlantic, Larmoso carried the rod aft and stowed it in a locker near the stem along with a length of line.

Next he took from the galley one of the cook’s big burlap garbage bags and carried it forward through the empty wardroom toward the forward companionway. He draped the bag over his shoulder like a serape and whistled between his teeth, his footfalls loud in the passageway. Then he heard a slight sound behind him. Larmoso paused, listening. Probably the noise was only the old man on anchor watch walking on the deck above his head. Larmoso stepped through the wardroom hatch into the companionway and went down the metal steps to the level of the forward hold. But instead of entering the hold, he slammed its hatch loudly and stood against the bulkhead at the foot of the companionway, looking up the metal shaft to the hatch at the top of the dark steps. The five-shot Smith & Wesson Airweight looked like a child’s licorice pistol in his big fist.

As he watched, the wardroom hatch swung open and, as slowly as a questing snake, the small, neat head of Muhammad Fasil appeared.

Larmoso fired, the blast incredible inside the metal walls, the bullet screaming off the handrail. He ducked into the hold and slammed the hatch behind him. He was sweating now, and the rank smell of him mixed with the smells of rust and cold grease as he waited in the darkness.

The footsteps descending the companionway were slow and evenly spaced. Larmoso knew Fasil was holding the railing with one hand and keeping his gun trained on the closed hatch with the other. Larmoso scrambled behind a crate twelve feet from the hatch Fasil had to enter. Time was on his side. Eventually the crew would straggle back. He thought of the deals and excuses he might offer Fasil. Nothing would work. He had four shots left. He would kill Fasil when he came through the hatch. It was settled.

The companionway was quiet for a second. Then Fasil’s Magnum roared, the bullet blasting through the hatch and sending metal fragments flying through the hold. Larmoso fired back at the closed hatch, the .38 special bullet only dimpling the metal, and fired again and again as the hatch flew open and the dark shape tumbled through.

Even as he fired the last round, Larmoso saw by the muzzle flash that he had shot a sofa pillow from the wardroom. Now he was running, tripping and cursing, through the dark hold toward the forward compartment.

He would get Hassan’s pistol. He would kill Fasil with it.

Larmoso moved well for a big man, and he knew the layout of the hold. In less than thirty seconds he was at the compartment hatch, fumbling with the key. The stench that puffed over him when he opened the hatch gagged him as he plunged inside. He did not want to show a light, and he crawled across the deck in the black compartment, feeling for Hassan and muttering softly to himself. He butted into the crates and crawled around them. His hand touched a shoe. Larmoso felt his way up the trouser leg and over the belly. The gun was not in the waistband. He felt on either side of the body. He found the arm, he felt it move, but he did not find the gun until it exploded in his face.

Fasil’s ears were ringing and several minutes passed before he could hear the hoarse whisper from the forward compartment.

“Fasil. Fasil.”

The guerrilla shone his small flashlight into the compartment, tiny feet scurrying from the beam. Fasil played the light over the red mask of Larmoso, lying dead on his back, then stepped inside.

Kneeling, he took the rat-ravaged face of Ali Hassan in his hands. The lips moved.

“Fasil.”

“You have done well, Hassan. I’ll get a doctor.” Fasil could see that it was hopeless. Hassan, swollen with peritonitis, was beyond help. But Fasil could kidnap a doctor a half hour before the Leticia sailed and make him come along. He could kill the physician at sea before the ship reached New York. Hassan deserved no less. It was the humane thing to do.

“Hassan, I will be back in five minutes with the medical kit. I will leave the light with you.”

A faint whisper. “Is my duty done?”

“It is done. Hold on, old friend. I will bring morphine now and then a doctor.”

Fasil was feeling his way aft through the dark hold when Hassan’s pistol went off behind him. He paused and leaned his head against the ship’s cold iron. “You will pay for this,” he whispered. He was talking to a people that he had never seen.

The old man on anchor watch was still unconscious, with a swollen lump on the back of his head where Fasil had slugged him. Fasil dragged him to the first mate’s cabin and laid him on the bunk, then sat down to think.

Originally the plan was to have the crates picked up at the Brooklyn dock by the importer, Benjamin Muzi. There was no way of knowing if Larmoso had contacted Muzi and enlisted his aid in this treachery. Muzi would have to be dealt with anyway because he knew far too much. Customs would be curious at the absence of Larmoso. Questions would be asked. It seemed unlikely that the others on the ship knew what was in the crates. Larmoso’s keys were still dangling from the lock on the forward compartment when the captain was killed. Now they were in Fasil’s pocket. The plastique must not go into New York Harbor—that was clear.

First Mate Mustapha Fawzi was a reasonable man and not a brave one. At midnight when he returned to the ship, Fasil had a brief conversation with him. In one hand Fasil held a large black revolver. In the other he held two thousand dollars. He inquired about the health of Fawzi’s mother and sister in Beirut, then suggested that their continued health depended largely on Fawzi’s cooperation. The thing was quickly done.

It was seven p.m. Eastern Standard Time when the telephone rang in Michael Lander’s house. He was working in his garage and picked up the extension. Dahlia was mixing a can of paint.

From the amount of line noise, Lander guessed the caller was very far away. He had a pleasant voice with a British clip, similar to Dahlia’s. He asked for the “lady of the house.”

Dahlia was at the phone in an instant and began a rather tedious conversation in English about relatives and real estate. Then the conversation was punctuated with twenty seconds of rapid-fire slangy Arabic.

Dahlia turned from the phone, covering the mouthpiece with her hand.

“Michael, we have to pick up the plastique at sea. Can you get a boat?”

Lander’s mind worked furiously. “Yes. Make sure of the rendezvous point. Forty miles due east of the Barnegat Light a half hour before sunset. We’ll make visual contact with the last light and close after dark. If the winds are over force five, postpone it for exactly twenty-four hours. Tell him to pack it in units one man can lift.”

Dahlia spoke quickly into the telephone, then hung up.

“Tuesday the twelfth,” she said. She was looking at him curiously. “Michael, you worked that out rather quickly.”

“No, I didn‘t,” Lander said.

Dahlia had learned very early never to lie to Lander. That would be as stupid as programing a computer with half-truths and expecting accurate answers. Besides, he could always tell when she had even the temptation to lie. Now she was glad that she had confided in him from the beginning on the arrangements for bringing in the plastique.

He listened calmly as she told him what had happened on the ship.

“Do you think Muzi put Larmoso up to it?” he asked.

“Fasil doesn’t know. He never had a chance to question Larmoso. We have to assume Muzi put him up to it. We can’t afford to do otherwise, can we, Michael? If Muzi dared to interfere with the shipment, if he planned to keep our advance payment and sell the plastique elsewhere, then he has sold us out to the authorities here. He would have to do that for his own protection. Even if he has not betrayed us, he would have to be dealt with. He knows far too much, and he has seen you. He could identify you.”

“You intended to kill him all along?”

“Yes. He is not one of us, and he is in a dangerous business. If the authorities threatened him on some other matter, who knows what he might tell them?” Dahlia realized she was being too assertive. “I couldn’t stand the thought of him always being a threat to you, Michael,” she added in a softer voice. “You didn’t trust him either, did you, Michael? You had a pickup at sea all worked out in advance, just in case, didn’t you? That’s amazing.”

“Yeah, amazing,” Lander said. “One thing. Nothing happens to Muzi until after we have the plastic. If he has gone to the authorities, to get immunity for himself in some other matter or whatever, the trap will be set at the dock. As long as they think we are coming to the dock, they are less likely to fly a stakeout team out to the ship. If Muzi is hit before the ship comes in, they’ll know we’re not coming to the dock. They’ll be waiting for us when we go out to the ship.” Suddenly Lander was furious and white around the mouth. “So Muzi was the best your camel-shit mastermind could come up with.”

Dahlia did not flinch. She did not point out that it was Lander who went to Muzi first. She knew that this anger would be suppressed and added to Lander’s general fund of rage as, irresistibly, his mind was drawn back to the problem.

He closed his eyes for a moment. “You’ll have to go shopping,” he said. “Give me a pencil.”