Thomas Harris: Black Sunday

“Firebombing a hospital,” Ali mused. “He has experience in this sort of thing, then.”

“He was captured flying a rescue helicopter. He was trying to retrieve the crew of a downed Phantom,” Dahlia said. “You have seen my report.”

“I have seen what he told you,” Najeer said.

“He tells me the truth. He is beyond lying,” she said. “I have lived with him for two months. I know.”

“It’s a small point, anyway,” Ali said. “There are other things about him of much more interest.”

During the next half hour, Ali questioned her about the most intimate details of the American’s behavior. When he had finished, it seemed to Dahlia that there was a smell in the room. Real or imagined, it took her back to the Palestinian refugee camp at Tyre when she was eight years old, folding the wet bedroll where her mother and the man who brought food had groaned together in the dark.

Fasil took over the questioning. He had the blunt, capable hands of a technician, and there were calluses on the tips of his fingers. He sat forward in his chair, his small satchel on the floor beside him.

“Has the American handled explosives?”

“Only packaged military ordnance. But he has planned carefully and in minute detail. His plan appears reasonable,” Dahlia answered.

“It appears reasonable to you, comrade. Perhaps because you are so intimately involved with it. We will see how reasonable it is.”

She wished for the American then, wished these men could hear his slow voice as, step by step, he reduced his terrible project into a series of clearly defined problems, each with a solution.

She took a deep breath and began to talk about the technical problems involved in killing eighty thousand people all at once, including the new president of the United States, with an entire nation watching.

“The limitation is weight,” Dahlia said. “We are restricted to six hundred kilos of plastique. Give me a cigarette please, and a pen and paper.”

Bending over the desk, she drew a curve that resembled a cross section of a bowl. Inside it and slightly above, she drew another, smaller curve of the same parameter.

“This is the target,” she said, indicating the larger curve. Her pen moved to the smaller curve. “The principle of the shaped charge, it—”

“Yes, yes,” Fasil snapped. “Like a great claymore mine. Simple. The density of the crowd?”

“Seated shoulder to shoulder, entirely exposed at this angle from the pelvis up. I need to know if the plastique— ”

“Comrade Najeer will tell you what you need to know,” Fasil said loftily.

Dahlia continued unfazed. “I need to know if the explosive Comrade Najeer may choose to give me is prepackaged antipersonnel plastique with steel balls, such as a claymore contains. The weight requested is of plastique only. The containers and this type of shrapnel would not be of use.”

“Why?”

“Weight, of course.” She was tired of Fasil.

“And if you have no shrapnel? What then, comrade? If you are counting on concussion, allow me to inform you—”

“Allow me to inform you, comrade. I need your help and I will have it. I do not pretend to your expertise. We are not contending, you and I. Jealousy has no place in the Revolution.”

“Tell her what she wants to know.” Najeer’s voice was hard.

Instantly Fasil said, “The plastique is not packaged with shrapnel. What will you use?”

“The outside of the shaped charge will be covered with layers of .177 caliber rifle darts. The American believes they will disperse over 150 degrees vertically through a horizontal arc of 260 degrees. It works out to an average of 3.5 projectiles per person in the kill zone.”

Fasil’s eyes widened. He had seen an American claymore mine, no bigger than a schoolbook, blast a bloody path through a column of advancing troops and mow down the grass in a swath around them. What she proposed would be like a thousand claymores going off at once.

“Detonation?”

“Electric blasting cap fired by a twelve-volt system already in the craft. There is an identical backup system with separate battery. Also a fuse.”

“That’s all,” the technician said. “I am finished.”

Dahlia looked at him. He was smiling—whether from satisfaction or fear of Hafez Najeer, she could not tell. She wondered if Fasil knew the larger curve represented Tulane Stadium, where on January 12 the first twenty-one minutes of the Super Bowl game would be played.

Dahlia waited for an hour in a room down the hall. When she was summoned back to Najeer’s office, she found the Black September commander alone. Now she would know.

The room was dark except for the area lit by a reading lamp. Najeer, leaning back against the wall, wore a hood of shadow. His hands were in the light and they toyed with a black commando knife. When he spoke, his voice was very soft.

“Do it, Dahlia. Kill as many as you can.”

Abruptly he leaned in to the light and smiled as though relieved, his teeth bright in his dark face. He seemed almost jovial as he opened the technician’s case and withdrew a small statue. It was a figure of the Madonna, like the ones in the windows of religious articles stores, the painting bright and hurriedly executed. “Examine it,” he said.

She turned the figure in her hands. It weighed about a half-kilo and did not feel like plaster. A faint ridge ran around the sides of the figure as though it had been pressed in a mold rather than cast. Across the bottom were the words MADE IN TAIWAN.

“Plastique,” Najeer said. “Similar to the American C-4 but made farther east. It has some advantages over C-4. It’s more powerful for one thing, at some small cost to its stability, and it is very malleable when heated above 50 degrees centigrade.

“Twelve hundred of these will arrive in New York two weeks from tomorrow aboard the freighter Leticia. The manifest will show they were transshipped from Taiwan. The importer, Muzi, will claim them on the dock. Afterward you will make sure of his silence.”

Najeer rose and stretched. “You have done well, Comrade Dahlia, and you have come a long way. You will rest now with me.”

Najeer had a sparsely furnished apartment on an upper floor of 18 Rue Verdun, similar to the quarters Fasil and Ali had on other floors of the building.

Dahlia sat on the side of Najeer’s bed with a small tape recorder in her lap. He had ordered her to make a tape for use on Radio Beirut after the strike was made. She was naked, and Najeer, watching her from the couch, saw her become visibly aroused as she talked into the microphone.

“Citizens of America,” she said, “today the Palestinian freedom fighters have struck a great blow in the heart of your country. This horror was visited upon you by the merchants of death in your own land, who supply the butchers of Israel. Your leaders have been deaf to the cries of the homeless. Your leaders have ignored the ravages by the Jews in Palestine and have committed their own crimes in Southeast Asia. Guns, warplanes, and hundreds of millions of dollars have flowed from your country to the hands of warmongers while millions of your own people starve. The people will not be denied.

“Hear this, people of America. We want to be your brothers. It is you who must overthrow the filth that rules you. Henceforth, for every Arab that dies by an Israeli hand, an American will die by Arab hands. Every Moslem holy place, every Christian holy place destroyed by Jewish gangsters will be avenged with the destruction of a property in America.”

Dahlia’s face was flushed and her nipples were erect as she continued. “We hope this cruelty will go no further. The choice is yours. We hope never to begin another year with bloodshed and suffering. Salaam aleikum.”