Soft Targets

Hakim met his eyes in the mirror. 'Was that a question?'

'Deduction, Hakim. The briefcase seems heavy—and you are smiling.'

'A wise man smiles in adversity,' Hakim quoted, reloading six rounds into the clip.

'I trust Rashid was smiling at the last,' Guer­rero said obliquely. 'We shall miss him.'

'Rashid was a fool. You cannot load down an underpowered aircraft and maneuver it, too.'

'A fool, then,' Guerrero shrugged. 'I agree that a satchel charge would have been simpler.'

Hakim's irritation was balanced by the utility of the sinewy Guerrero. The Panamanian^'s suggestions were good, and he did not press them. Yet his conversation always provoked broader answers than Hakim cared to give. 'You agree with whom? Have you toured the Statue of Liberty, Guerrero? A satchel charge might disfi­gure the torch; nothing more. The thing is full of steel girders inside. I planned to destroy it ut­terly. Think of the coverage,' he breathed, and chuckled.

They were past Queens, halfway to the site of Farmingdale on Long Island, before Hakim spoke again. 'The new funds,' he said as if to himself, 'will pour into accounts for Fat'ah exactly as long as our coverage is adequate. But our supporters may not enjoy last night's media sport at Fat'ah expense.^'

Guerrero nodded, remembering. But to prattle is to reveal, and this time Guerrero said nothing. Amateur films had caught the hapless Rashid, his handmade bomb shackles hopelessly jammed, as he veered away after his first pass over the great green statue, the previous day. The canister weighed nearly three hundred kilos and as it dangled swaying from the little Piper, Rashid must have seen and accepted his immi­nent death; must have known he could neither land, nor long maintain control. To his credit, he had fought the craft into a shallow turn and straightened again, many kilometers from his target but prepared for another and more suici­dal assault. With any luck he might have com­pleted his run, barely off the surface of the har­bor, to crash directly into the Statue of Liberty. But the new fireboat hovercraft were very quick, faster under these circumstances than the Piper that careened along at all of ninety kilometers per hour.

Hakim sighed. What ignominy, to be downed by a stream of dirty salt water! Still, 'The network commentator made Rashid a martyr,' he asserted.

'To what? Idiot liberation, he said. And,' Guerrero reminded him, 'NBN news did not carry the story well. `A terrorist quenched with a water pistol,' indeed. It is la palabra, the word? Provocative.'

'As you are,' Hakim said shortly. 'Let me worry about media, and let the Americans worry about our next demonstration.'

'Our next demonstration,' Guerrero echoed. It was not quite a question.

'Soon, Guerrero, soon! Be silent.^' Again Hakim felt moisture at his temples, forcing him to acknowledge a sensation of pressure. Harass­ment was the guerrilla's tool; when he himself felt harassed, it was better to cancel the opera­tion. Yet he dared not. Something in Guerrero's attitude, indeed in Hakim's own response to the smug mockery of television, said that Hakim must choke that dark laughter under a pall of smoke.

He shifted his cramped legs to sit atop the briefcase as they skirted Mineola. Soon they would roll into the garage at Farmingdale, soon he would bear the briefcase inside with a show of indifference, reviewing the site again to assure its readiness for—for whatever; he did not know what.

Fat'ah must be ready with only four members now, and he could not easily muster more on short notice. The Syrian site would again be secure for a time, now that Hakim could furnish bribes; but Damascus is not Farmingdale, New York and Hakim knew that he was improvising. Fat'ah could not afford always to improvise. Nor could it afford to delay vengeance for the Rashid defeat.

The double-bind was adversity. Hakim forced himself to smile, thinking of smoke. Of black smoke and of media, and of Leah Talith who would be warm against him in the chill Long Island night. He vowed to deny himself the third, which facilitated the smile, and knew that he could now concentrate on the first two.

* * *

Forty kilometers away in an office of The Tombs, Manhattan, Assistant Chief Inspector Dolby was slavering into his telephone. 'Because it doesn't make any goddam sense, that's why,' he snarled. 'If you were gonna heist a Zee Twenty-Eight Camaro, why pick one that'd just tried to hump a stripped Volkswagen? And when you figure that one out, tell me why you'd take the Volks too. I mean, where's he gonna fence fresh junkers, Damico?'

He listened for long moments, nodding, tapping his teeth with a pencil. 'Okay, I'll tell you what I think, I think the officer on duty is also on dago red.' Listening again, he began to tap on his cheek. 'I don't give a rat's ass how many eyewitnesses he claims, total strangers don't just rush up three minutes after a crash and bodily, BOD-i-ly, pick up two tons of crunched Camaro coupe and cram it into a truck.'

Shorter pause. Then a yelp. 'Twenty? You can't get twenty men around a Camaro. Well, belay that, maybe you could. But why would you want to?'

He began to experiment, tapping his cheek and moving his lantern jaw. Pause. 'Oh, hell, poor little kid. She DOA? Well, at least there's definitely a crime, up 'til now I had serious doubts . . . For one thing, your alleged wreck and your alleged truck and your alleged twenty bad dudes are gone, right? And nobody's reported a theft of any green Camaro today.'

Pause. 'Look, I can roll when I get a report on the little girl, but you haven't convinced me there was any grand theft auto, much less two. Just some glass in the street, and what else is new? Whaddaya want from me, Damico?'

Listening again, he found the trick and hap­pily tapped his cheek to a simple rhythm. Then sighing: 'Okay, right. I will. Hey, my other phone's lit. Yeah—what? Uh, Mary Had A Little Lamb. Talent, huh? S'long.'

He punched into the other line in time to take the call. 'Dolby here . . . Can you rush it, Canfield? I'm about to go off shift.' He started tapping again until his eyes glazed. 'Hold it. Let me tell you: it's a green Zee Twenty-Eight, and the Volks ain't got any wheels at all.' Pause 'I'm psychic is how. Go on.'

Dolby started scribbling. Now and then he grunted into the mouthpiece. At last he blew out a mighty breath. 'What I think, Canfield, is we don't have enough forms in the Pee Dee. We only got an Unusual Occurrence Report, when we also need a Can You Top This report. Hey, are you sure it ain't some fucking movie crew that staged a wreck in that alley?' His jaw throbbed as he heard the next response. 'No, I guess not—for sure they wouldn't leave it with a stiff in it. You sure it's a real live corpse?'

Dolby closed his eyes, pinched the bridge of his nose. 'No, Canfield, it's just been a very long Monday for a very short temper. And before you file a report, would you kindly tell me how the Camaro driver could've been dead as long as you say, when he was in another wreck half an hour ago with the same Volkswagen. . . . Never mind, I just know. But you got no lab experience, how come—' He closed his eyes again, very gently. 'I see. Not just stiff, you mean cold stiff. How cold? Well shit, take his temperature, I guess . . . For all I care you can shove it up his— wait a minute. You said there was some ID on him?'

Dolby scribbled again. 'Ahboudi; courier? Hold it. If the deader had Algerian diplomatic courier status it changes a few things; like, I can dump this in the lap of a Special Services officer, thank God.'

Dolby took down more details, then laid down the receiver. After a few minutes he said to Someone beyond his ceiling light fixture: 'Let me make You a little bet. I bet You my gold badge if there's a deep-frozen ayrab courier up front, Meyer Cohane's JDL boys are in back of it.'

It was a wager even God could not have won.

The New York Police Department found its decision above Dolby, below the Mayor. In return for certain immediate information, the PD elected not to press charges against members of the Jewish Defense League who, all in fun, had removed two vehicles after the collision only to place them elsewhere. The driver of the Camaro, they insisted, had been dead when they arrived at the scene.

This was a luminous understatement inas­much as Moh'med Ahboudi, an Algerian na­tional with loose consular connections, had been missing from his duties for several weeks. He had been in a freezer for most of that time, after expiring in a brief contest for his freedom. Ahboudi's wounds were frontal skull frac­ture, broken knuckles, and a ruptured spleen, all of which might possibly be consistent with a very unusual automobile accident. But it also explained why Meyer Cohane, though a full-fledged Rabbi, was persona non grata in Israel. Police records of his enemies tended to be short and untidy.

In the spirit of good fellowship, the JDL fingered the man who had perforated the Camaro—oddly enough, with no bullet holes in the driver—because they had been tailing the gunman. They were virtually certain of his iden­tity: the Iraqi, Hakim Arif.

The JDL was terribly sorry that it could offer no reason why Arif should also be followed by Moh'med Ahboudi, but there it was: Ahboudi was a sloppy tail and had paid the price. Finally, the JDL was sorry they could not lay