Soft Targets

'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 ac­ cented English of a microwave 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.

Hakim took his secondary schooling in English-speaking private schools under the benevolent—and venal— gaze of relatives in Syria, who never did discover where the jewels were. Hakim also came under sporadic crossfires between Arab guerrillas and their Israeli coun­terparts, and he knew where his sympathies lay. Newsweek hinted that young Hakim might have taken additional coursework in an academy of socialist persuasion near Leningrad. How he got into an Ivy-league American school was anybody's guess, but a thumbnail-sized emerald was one of the better suppositions.

Trained in finance, media, and pragmatism, Hakim Arif again disappeared into the east after his American training—but not before leaving indelible memories with a few acquaintances. He quoted the Koran and T.E. Lawrence. He was not exactly averse to carrying large amounts of cash, and protection for it, on his person. He won a ridiculously small wager by chopping off the end of a finger. And he was preternaturally shy of cameras.

Hakim and Fat'ah were mutually magnetized by desire and bitterness, but not even Interpol knew how Hakim Arif came to lead a guerrilla band that rarely saw its leader. One thing seemed clear about his emergence: anyone too devious for Carlos Sanchez developed a certain mystique among the terrorist cadre. Even luna­tics have a lunatic fringe; the Fat'ah group devel­oped a positive genius for wearing its welcomes threadbare among groups that were only half crazy.

Thwarted by security forces in Turkey, England, Syria, and Jordan, Fat'ah was evidently fingering the tassels at the end of its tether. Perhaps Hakim had peddled his last emerald; the fact seemed to be that the goals of Fat'ah, reachable by sufficient injections of cash into the proper places, were elusive.

This was not to say that cash could not be raised. According to magazine sources, Libyan President Muammar Qaddafi had shelled out two million dollars to Carlos Sanchez for his Vienna raid on ministers of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries in December of 1975. Analysts of the Third World eventually shifted from their initial opinion that Qaddafi had acted out of personal pique. The final con­sensus was that Qaddafi and OPEC had simply sustained a corporate disagreement, just as other businesses sometimes have disagreements. Nothing personal; the bullets and the blood had been merely business. The biggest. As usual.

An even larger investment--some said as large as five million dollars from Swiss accounts controlled by Giangiacomo Feltrinelli—had been made toward the massacre at the Olympic Village in Munich, in 1972. Hakim Arif had later contrived a brief and uneasy alliance with the Black September movement precisely because of its success; not with the Israelis so much as with the money they had squeezed from Feltrinelli.

Hakim himself was rumored to have a dark angel in the person of a sheikh living in and around an English country estate. The anglo­phile sheikh could afford a castle, and walled grounds envied by many a British peer, more easily than the English could afford the sheikh. The nabob had been gently dissuaded only in 1977 from driving his special-bodied ten-meter Rolls across his rolling meadows in search of the once-tame deer that infested his estate. It was not the speeding that his neighbors minded; the Rolls was on very, very private property. The complaints stemmed from the submachine gun bullets that sprayed beyond the sheikh's property whenever he sought the deer. There may have been no close connection between the sheikh's forced moratorium on the deer hunts and his decision, a month later, to put Hakim Arif on salary.

No act of terrorism, of course, would be paid very well by its well-wishers unless it achieved that crucial phenomenon, media coverage. The sheikhs, Qaddafis, and Feltrinellis would pay more for one well-covered disemboweling than for a thousand committed in secret. Media coverage, especially on television, gave the criminal a chance to publicize his motives and his potency. The news magazines implied that the emergence of Hakim Arif in the United States was an omen of spilled guts.

They also gave coverage to Hakim's motives, and his potency.

Everett paused in his reading to gaze wistfully out at California's mighty Sierra range that stretched below the Boeing. Somewhere below, near Lake Tahoe, was a cabin he knew well; hoped to visit again. With the dusting of early snow on sawtooth massifs, the Sierra looked as cold and hard as the heart of Hakim Arif. What sort of egoist did it take to shorten his pinkie on an absurd wager, yet shun photographers? A very special one, at the least. Everett resumed reading.

The conservative Los Angeles Times, the pre­vious Monday, had devoted too much space to a strained parallel between law enforcement agencies and Keystone Kops. The smash hit of the new TV season was a Saturday night talk show in which a battery of clever NBN hosts deigned to talk, live, only with callers who were