Soft Targets Read online

  "Or out of it, as Allah is merciful," he rejoined. "Perhaps I shall be merciful, too."

  "If God wills," she said in Arabic.

  "Or perhaps—" he waited until she met his eyes again, "I shall beat you."

  "Perhaps you will," she said, not flinching.

  Hakim Arif whipped the mare mercilessly up the trail with the reins, enjoying the experience, the control, especially enjoying the memory of the girl's eyes. They had dilated again at his threat. Under a westering sun he sped back to the stable. He was thinking: spawn of pain. We Fat'ah are the children of El Aurans after all...

  Over an hour later he found the Fat'ah site, temporary as it must be but better situated than he had expected. The bungalow commanded a clear view of the San Jose skyline in the dusk and, on three sides, open pastures beyond car­bine range. On the fourth side a swath of scrub oak followed a brook so near the house he could almost leap from its porch into thick cover. He accepted congratulations for his work in Pueblo as though spurning praise, yet Hakim was pleased. He let his distant smiles and nods say so. Let those idiots in the PLO show all the ersatz egalitarianism they liked: Fat'ah, born of Al Fat'h, born of injustice, was effective because he, Hakim Arif, was so. It was essential to strike a balance between fellowship and personal supremacy—yet a little fellowship became a heavy weight.

  Only after his site inspection did Hakim con­jure a show of warmth, with a ritual embrace for gaunt, silent Rashid and then for Chaim. He traced the new scar tissue across the forehead of Chaim Mardor with a finger. "An honorable wound," he said, thinking otherwise. He caught the gaze of Bernal Guerrero, who stood slightly apart from the others, stalwart in khaki work clothes. "And now, Guerrero: welcome." He of­fered the handclasp then the embrace.

  "My regrets that we could not meet in Damas­cus," the Panamanian said, his bow formally correct.

  Hakim felt the aura of strength, like a physical shield of energy surrounding the strongly-built latino. Independent, ingenious, cold; he would need firmer leadership than the PLO had pro­vided. "I share your regret," said Hakim. "Talith, bring us bread."

  They sat cross-legged on the living room floor, Hakim tearing chunks from the uncut loaf. He placed a piece in each mouth, then chewed a piece himself. With this ritual he invoked the ancient Arab law of hospitality; no matter that he thought it a hollow gesture. Rashid, and perhaps Guerrero, would luxuriate in the rite that placed them under Hakim's protection. The site was, for the time, the home of Fat'ah; and Hakim Aril was Fat'ah.

  Then: "They say you are clever with electronic devices, Guerrero."

  "I can fix a toaster," Guerrero smiled. Then, sensing that he had been too flippant on such short acquaintance, he went on. "Or a trans­ceiver, or a squib time-delay. From what I have seen of the Pueblo blast, perhaps not as well as you.”

  Hakim grunted with pleasure. If Guerrero was hinting for an explanation he was doing it ex-pertly. Besides, a recapitulation of the recent events might impress them afresh. "Talith, bring us sweet coffee, and my briefcase. I have some new devices of French design, manufactured in Canada. They will be of use." He darted a glance at Guerrero. "You are prepared to emplace communication devices tonight?"

  "A sus ordenes, at your orders," Guerrero said. "But the roads across the coast range are few and well-patrolled. In my van is a vehicle that avoids the highways."

  Hakim hesitated. Even an expert cyclist would have little chance to make good time through those low precipitous mountains. He said as much.

  "It is not a scrambler bike," Guerrero said eas­ily. "While repairing a small rotary engine last year I learned that it powered a shrouded impel­ler. The unit is slung beneath a parafoil, senor. What I have in the van is my gift to Fat'ah."

  He seemed willing to continue, which would effectively wrest the moment from Hakim. Worse, it would consume minutes which Hakim needed to familiarize the Panamanian with the new microprocessors. "I assume you are profi­cient," he said curtly, then took the briefcase from Talith. Moments later he was again the undivided center of attention. And of control.

  Guerrero was quicker than quick, more im­pressed with the microprocessors than his fellows because he understood their multiple func­tions without delay. "With the battery packs and ordinary communication devices patched to these units," he mused, "Fat'ah can be everywhere at once."

  "Indeed," Hakim smirked. "Perhaps I shall tell you how I used them in Canada. But another time," he said, seeing Talith check her wristwatch. "Tonight I shall require remote voice relays at two telephone locations. Show me, Guerrero, how you would use my components."

  Guerrero made mistakes only twice, then cor­rectly assembled the devices three times without error. At length Hakim was satisfied and called for a light meal. Talith, in her wisdom, had managed to obtain honey-rich, multilayered baklava as their dessert. Hakim found himself salivating for it and so, perforce, refused it. He had seen the jumble of communication equipment arranged by Talith and Rashid but this, too, he ignored for the moment. Then it was time for Guerrero's departure, and he sent Talith and Rashid out on picket duty.

  Guerrero's van combined a short wheelbase with all-terrain tires under a long cargo com­partment. At Hakim's acid comment on the garish paint, Guerrero pointed out that, by California standards, it was subdued. The van culture, springing from the recreational vehicles of the seventies, was invading the west coast to such an extent that one could purchase, direct from Detroit, vans covered with tinted plastic bubbles and fantastic painted panoramas. While he enthused over the uses of a van, Guerrero was proving his point.

  With Chaim's help, dark green dacron and black-painted aluminum tubing from the van soon became a spidery frame topped by fabric. In places the fabric was taut over the slender tub­ing; across most of its span it draped limp. The vehicle had no tail surfaces but featured two swept wings, the lower wing staggered behind. Guerrero boasted that the dual wing gave his craft such a low stall speed that, unlike earlier parafoils, it could fly at the pace of a trotting man. Despite the darkness, Hakim could see that Guerrero's perch was a padded bike seat, mounted above the enclosed driveshaft. Ahead of the rider was the little rotary engine; behind him, the shrouded impeller. It started quickly with the rasping whirr of a big lawnmower.

  A loaded pack frame leaning against his knee, Hakim cupped one hand to his cheek and leaned forward. "If your landing is not gentle, Guerrero, your cargo will dig your grave."

  "I can land in any clearing," Guerrero joked, "with the landing gear I was born with." He flexed his knees and gestured for the pack.

  Guerrero settled the pack straps over his shoulders, adjusting the twenty-kilo mass, test­ing the freedom of his arms. Hakim realized that, as Guerrero straddled the machine and lifted it clear of the ground, he was momentarily supporting over fifty kilos of dead weight. His takeoff seemed ludicrous for only a moment, a bow-legged trot down the smooth slope of clear­ing. Then the whirr of the rotary engine was lost in the rush of high-pressure air as Guerrero opened the valve of his air bottle. The great advantage of the air rocket, Hakim saw, lay in the fact that it had no visible exhaust. If it was a relatively low-impulse power unit, it was cer­tainly more than enough for the parafoil.

  In twenty meters Guerrero was running in space, then bending forward to lie semi-prone as the parafoil wafted upward. A sprinter could have outrun him. The cold-gas rocket abruptly ceased its hiss and Hakim saw the parafoil gently accelerate, now climbing at a shallower angle. Guerrero claimed that the thing could exceed legal highway speeds but only now did Hakim believe him. Guerrero might see by the glow of the city, but his own craft was invisible to Hakim, even its exhaust glow hidden from below.

  A whistle from Chaim brought the pickets back, Chaim taking Talith's carbine with a swift check of its safety. "You will kill one of us yet, Leah," he said as the mechanism clicked. They followed Hakim into the bungalow.

  Hakim forced his thoughts away from Guer­rero, who was gliding above the starlit ravines somewhere to the wes
t. The parafoil was a technology he deeply mistrusted, but once he had felt the same way about microprocessors. He strode to the living room, determined to hide his delight with the new media center, genuinely concerned that it might not be adequate.

  Despite himself: "Ah," he breathed, jubilant as he surveyed the media center Talith had as­sembled at his orders, with the help of Rashid. Four small TV sets half-encircled a desk which also faced an expanse of window. Four mul­tiband radios were ranged to one side. All sets had earplugs. Three telephones were within reach. Note pads, blank card files, colored pens, typewriter, videotape recorder and two audio tape cassette machines filled much of the work­ing space. The squat table underfoot was almost hidden beneath stacks of directories; Bay Area numbers, Los Angeles numbers, Washington numbers, precisely as he had specified. Hakim knew the dangers of heavy dependence on help supplied by the various telephone companies. There were ways to trace one from his patterns of inquiry. Unless, of course, one mastered the sys­tem.

  Talith stood near, gnawing a full underlip, watching him assess the media center. "Rashid; Chaim," he rapped suddenly. "Are you prepared to spend the night as pickets?"

  Both straightened. "We are Fat'ah," said Chaim. Rashid only nodded.

  "Rashid, could you fly that thing?" Hakim was staring out the window toward the mountains again.

  "With practice, sire," was the whispery reply. "My experience is all in fixed-wing craft."

  "Learn," Hakim ordered, and knew it would be done. He dismissed them both.

  Behind him, Leah Talith coughed. He turned, waiting. "Shall I take picket duty?"

  "Stay," he said, toying with the HP from his new briefcase. After a moment he continued, "How long have you known Guerrero?"

  "Since El-Hamma," naming a Syrian training base. El-Hamma was near enough to Damascus to suit Hakim's purposes—and the purposes of the Syrian army as well. Syrian regular army units, Al-Sa'iqa, the PLO, and the alphabet-soup of irregular terrorist armies all over the world boasted graduates of this ghastly seminary. But Talith seemed to think something more was re­quired and added, "I was with him on a border raid last year. His night vision is supernatural; he always sees things the rest of us miss."

  "Or would like us to think so," Hakim coun­tered.

  Talith did not speak again for a moment. "He is in awe of you," she said then, sensing a guarded stance in Hakim's attitude. The lie might set the Fat'ah leader at ease. "For one thing, the man is not of our blood. He does not understand all of our customs even yet. For example, he does not know how to address you." Her hesitancy suggested that Talith shared Guerrero's concern.

  Hakim had not risen this far by allowing cyni­cism to show in his voice. "Do we fight for democracy? Is my name Hakim? Then Hakim it is!" His face softened, faint lines around his jaw the only sign that Hakim was entertaining a pri­vate amusement. "If you can conceive of a Chris­tian Trinity, you can hold the dual concept that I am Fat'ah—but also Hakim."

  Talith, deeply ingrained with religious im­ponderables, accepted this self-assessment by Hakim as a god, yet an equal of his followers. She knew how this attitude would be identified by her psychology professors: mad as a March hare. It had not occurred to her that Hakim was simply cynical. Her professors had psychology as their religion, and Talith had Fat'ah as hers.

  Hakim began to play with his new equipment, not waiting for Guerrero's call, half-expecting to see a brief new starbloom on the silhouetted peaks to the west. It was nearly an hour before the news programs, but the girl flicked a finger toward the videotape. He fumbled it into opera­tion and saw that she had edited earlier newscasts into a television festival of the Pueblo hor­ror. Hakim settled back into a chair, note pad ready, and watched his favorite show.

  TUESDAY, 28 OCTOBER, 1980:

  Like a dry bearing in his head, a thin pure tone pierced Everett's awareness. "When will I quit hearing that whistle," he demanded.

  The white smock shrugged. "It goes with the injury," the physician replied. "With luck, another day or so. No, don't try to sit up, you'll disturb the tubes. Follow orders and you'll be up in a few days, Mr. Everett. You're a big healthy animal; give your system a chance."

  Everett glanced out the window of the Denver hospital. The fine cloudless day was lost to him, and he to the Rockies. "Hell of a day to be down."

  "But a very good day to be alive," the doctor insisted. "You were blown ten meters, mister. Some others weren't so lucky, including a whole handful of TV people. You have no idea how much outcry the networks are making over those five particular fatalities."

  Thanks to the drugs, Everett did not feel his bruised kidney, the hairline fracture, and other modest rearrangements of his middle-aged anatomy. The Denver people had done very well by him. But there were things they could not do.

  Curbing impatience, he said, "Let's assume I stay put, don't hassle my nurse, and take lunch in approved fashion," with a glance at the in­travenous feeding apparatus.

  The surgeon folded his arms. "If," he promp­ted.

  "If I can trade the nurse for a staff member in here to—"

  "Contraindicated. We're trying to excite regrowth around that flap torn in your tympanum, Mr. Everett. At your age, a blown eardrum is tough to repair. The nurse stays, the FCC goes."

  "My left ear's okay, though. And even a felon gets one telephone call."

  After a judicious pause: "You've got it." He spoke to the nurse for a moment, stopped with his hands on the door. "We're starting you on solid foods, provided you make that one call and no more. We can haggle, too. Agreed?"

  "Agreed." More or less, his tone implied.

  "By the way, which note do you hear?"

  "I haven't the foggiest," Everett admitted. "Why?"

  Deadpan: "If it's 'A' natural, you might take up composing. Robert Schumann heard that note for years; nearly drove him up the chimney."

  "Have you ever considered a bedside man­ner?"

  The doctor grinned. "If you needed it, you'd get it. You're on the mend," he said, and walked out.

  Maury Everett watched the door swing shut, thinking of channels. FCC staff to network hon­chos? Dave Engels? Both too slow, and always loss of fidelity when the message was indirect.

  The hell with it. "Nurse, I want you to call NBN Hollywood and get just one man on the line. I want nobody else, I want him with all possible speed, and it might help if you tell him Commissioner Everett is itching to lay the tush of terrorism."

  She waited starchily, receiver in hand. "You're to avoid all excitement. Is this an obscene call?"

  "Everybody's a comedian," he grunted. "But the only one I want is Charlie George."

  * * *

  Everett never knew exactly when the whistle died in his cranium. It was gone when he donned street clothes six days later, and that was enough. He was shaky, and he wore an earplug in his right ear, but he was functioning again. A staff member packed his bag because there was no wife to do it, and brought the taxi because he wasn't going home first. The office would sim­ply have to improvise until he had recuperated in Palm Springs—a tender negotiation with militant medics, based on his promise to relax with friends at the California resort city. He did not tell them it would be his first visit, nor that he had met only one of those close friends in casual encounters. He did mail a note to one other Commissioner, outlining his decision. He signed it, 'Zebulon Pike'; Engels would enjoy that.

  Everett did not feel the Boeing clear the runway, so deep was he into a sheaf of clippings collated by his staff. A dozen dissident groups had claimed so-called credit for the Pueblo blast, each carefully outlining its reasons, each hope­ful that its motive would be touted. As usual, Everett noted with a shake of the massive head, our media system had accommodated them all.

  Yet only one group was armed with guilty knowledge: Fat'ah, led by the wraithlike Iraqi, Hakim Arif. Shortly after the blast, a United Press International office took a singular call from Pueblo, Colorado. It spoke in softly ac­cented English of a micro
wave transmitter hidden in a tennis ball on a synagogue roof. It spoke of galvanized nails embedded in explosives. It correctly stated the exact moment of the blast, to the second.

  These details were quickly checked by the UPI. Each detail was chillingly authentic. The caller went on to demand that Fat'ah, the only true believer in Palestinian justice, be given a base of operations for its glorious fight against Jewish tyranny. Ousted by Jordan, then ostensi­bly from Syria, Fat'ah was simply too militant even for its friends. It had nowhere to go. It chose, therefore, to go to the American people. Its channel of choice was a hideous explosion that left nearly a dozen dead and three dozen injured, half a world away from its avowed enemy.

  When the caller began to repeat his spiel, police were already tracing the call. The message was on its fourth re-run when a breathless assault team stormed a Pueblo motel room. Not quite abandoned, the room contained a modified telephone answering device which, upon re­ceiving a coded signal, had made its own prear­ranged call with a tape cartridge. The device was altogether too cunning: when an officer disgus­tedly jerked the telephone receiver away, it blew his arm off. The Federal Bureau of Alcohol, To­bacco, and Firearms was still theorizing about the devices used, but was quite positive about the sophistication of the user.

  According to a Newsweek bio, the leader of Fat'ah was a meticulous planner. When Hakim Arif was twelve years old, U.S. and Israeli agen­cies were still aiding Iran in the design of its secret police organ, SAVAK. Thus SAVAK was still naive and Hakim already subtle when the boy visited Iran with his father on a routine brib­ery expedition. During the night, security ele­ments of SAVAK paid a lethal call on the elder Arif. The boy evaporated at the first hint of trou­ble, taking across rooftops with him most of the emeralds his father had earmarked for Iranian friends. SAVAK knew a good joke when it was played on them, and praised the lad's foresight. They would have preferred their praise to be posthumous; in the Middle East, drollery tends to be obscure.