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  Lander might be able to fool the ground crew for a few vital seconds by claiming the nacelle contained some esoteric piece of television equipment but the ruse would not last long. There would be violence, and after the takeoff Fasil would be left in the open on the airfield, possibly in a converging ring of police. Fasil did not think his role worthy of his abilities. Ali Hassan would have performed this function if he had not been killed on the freighter. It was certainly not a job that would justify the loss of Muhammad Fasil.

  If he was not trapped at the takeoff site, the best chance of escape was an air hijack to a friendly country. But at Lakefront Airport, a private facility on the shore of Lake Pontchartrain, there were no long-range passenger flights. He might take over a private aircraft with range enough to reach Cuba, but that would not do. Cuba could not be depended upon to shield him. Fidel Castro was tough on hijackers, and in the face of an enraged America he might hand Fasil over. Besides, he would not have the advantage of a planeload of hostages, and no private plane would be fast enough to escape the American fighters screaming into the sky from a half dozen coastal bases.

  No, he had no desire to fall into the Gulf of Mexico in some smoke-filled cockpit, knowing it was all over as the water rushed up to smash him. That would be stupid. Fasil was fanatic enough to die gladly if it were necessary to his satisfactions, but he was not willing to die stupidly.

  Even if he could slip across the city to New Orleans International, there were no commercial flights with range enough to reach Libya without refueling, and the probabilities of making a successful refueling stop were low.

  The House of War would be enraged as it had not been since Pearl Harbor. Fasil recalled the words of the Japanese admiral after the strike at Pearl: “I fear we have awakened a sleeping giant and filled him with a terrible resolve.”

  They would take him when he stopped to refuel—if he ever got off the ground. Very likely air traffic would be frozen within minutes of the blast.

  It was clear to Fasil that his place was in Beirut, leading the new army of front-fighters who would flock to him after this triumph. It would be a disservice to the cause for him to die in New Orleans.

  Now Lander clearly had the qualifications to carry out the technical end. Having seen him, Fasil was confident that he was willing to do it. Dahlia appeared to have control of him. There simply remained the problem of last-minute muscle at the airport. If Fasil could arrange for that, then there was no need for his actual presence. He could be waiting in Beirut with a microphone in his hand. A satellite link to New York would have his picture and his statement on worldwide television in minutes. He could hold a news conference. He would be in a stroke the most formidable Arab in the world.

  All that would be required at the New Orleans airport was a couple of skilled gunmen, imported at the last minute, under Dahlia’s command and ignorant of their mission until just before they went into action. That could be accomplished. Fasil had made up his mind. He would see the nacelle through the final stages of its construction, would see that it got to New Orleans. Then he would leave.

  To Fasil, Lander’s progress with the huge bomb was maddeningly slow. Lander had asked for the maximum amount of explosives the blimp could carry, with shrapnel, under ideal conditions. He had not really expected to get as much as he asked for. Now that it was here he intended to take full advantage of it. The problem was weight and weather—the weather on January 12 in New Orleans. The blimp could fly in any conditions in which football could be played, but rain meant extra weight and New Orleans had received seventy-seven inches of rain in the past year, far more than the national average. Even a dew covering the blimp’s great skin weighed seven hundred pounds, detracting that much from its lifting power. Lander had calculated the lift very carefully, and he would be straining the blimp to the utmost when it rose into the sky carrying its deadly egg. On a dear day, with sunshine, he could count on some help from the “superheat” effect, added lift gained when the helium inside the bag was hotter than the outside air. But unless he was prepared, rain could ruin everything. By the time he was ready to take off, some of the ground crew would almost certainly have been shot and there could be no delay in getting airborne. The blimp must fly, and fly immediately. To allow for the possibility of rain, he had split the nacelle, so that part of it could be left behind in bad weather. It was a pity that Aldrich did not use a surplus Navy dirigible instead of the smaller blimp, Lander reflected. He had flown Navy airships when they carried six tons of ice, great sheets of it, that slid down the sides and fell away in a glittering, crashing cascade when the dirigible reached warmer air. But those long-extinct ships had been eight times the size of the Aldrich blimp.

  Balance must be close to perfect with either the entire nacelle or three-quarters of it. That meant having optional mounting points on the frame. These changes had taken time, but not so much time as Lander had feared. He had a little over a month before the Super Bowl. Of that month he would lose most of the last two weeks flying football games. That left him about seventeen working days. There was time for one more refinement.

  He set up on his workbench a thick sheet of fiberglass five inches by seven and one-half inches in size. The sheet was reinforced with metal mesh and curved in two planes, like a section of watermelon rind. He warmed a piece of plastic explosive and rolled it into a slab of the same size, carefully increasing the thickness of the plastic from the center toward the ends.

  Lander attached the slab of plastic to the convex side of the fiberglass sheet. The device now looked like a warped book with a cover on only one side. Smoothed over the plastic explosive were three layers of rubber sheeting cut from a sick-room mattress cover. On top of these went a piece of light canvas bristling with .177 caliber rifle darts. The darts sat on their flat bottoms, glued to the canvas closer together than the nails in a fakir’s bed. As the dart-studded canvas was pulled tight around the convex surface of the device, the sharp tips of the darts diverged slightly. This divergence was the purpose of curving the device. It was necessary if the darts were to spread out in flight in a predetermined pattern. Lander had marked out the ballistics with great care. The shape of the darts should stabilize them in flight just like the steel flechettes used in Vietnam.

  Now he attached three more layers of dart-covered canvas. In all, the four layers contained 944 darts. At a range of sixty yards, Lander calculated, they would riddle an area of one thousand square feet, one dart striking in each 1.07 square feet with the velocity of a high-powered rifle bullet. Nothing could live in that strike zone. And this was only the small test model. The real one, the one that would hang beneath the blimp, was 317 times bigger in surface area and weight and carried an average of 3.5 darts for every one of the 80,985 persons Tulane Stadium could seat.

  Fasil came into the workshop as Lander was attaching the outside cover, a sheet of fiberglass the same thickness as the skin of the nacelle.

  Lander did not speak to him.

  Fasil appeared to pay little attention to the object on the workbench, but he recognized what it was, and he was ap palled. The Arab looked around the workshop for several minutes, careful not to touch anything. A technician himself, trained in Germany and North Vietnam, Fasil could not help admiring the neatness and economy with which the big nacelle was constructed.

  “This material is hard to weld,” he said, tapping the Reynolds alloy tubing. “I see no heliarc equipment. Did you farm out the work?”

  “I borrowed some equipment from the company over the weekend.”

  “The frame is stress-relieved as well. Now that, Mr. Lander, is a conceit.” Fasil intended this as a joking compliment to Lander’s craftsmanship. He had decided his duty lay in getting along with the American.

  “If the frame warped and cracked the fiberglass shell, someone might see the darts as we rolled it out of the truck,” Lander said in a monotone.

  “I thought you would be packing in the plastic by now, with only a month remaining.”
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  “Not ready yet. I have to test something first.”

  “Perhaps I can be of assistance.”

  “Do you know the explosive index of this material?”

  Fasil shook his head ruefully. “It’s very new.”

  “Have you ever seen any of it detonated?”

  “No. I was instructed that it is more potent than C-4. You saw what it did to Muzi’s apartment.”

  “I saw a hole in the wall and I can’t tell enough from that. The most common mistake in making an antipersonnel device is putting the shrapnel too close to the charge, so the shrapnel loses its integrity in the explosion. Think about that, Fasil. If you don’t know it you should know it. Read this field manual and you will find out all about it. I’ll translate the big words for you. I don’t want these darts fragmented in the blast. I am not interested in merely filling seventy-five institutes for the deaf. I don’t know how much buffer is necessary between the darts and the plastic to protect them.”

  “But look at how much is in a claymore-type device—”

  “That’s no indication. I’m dealing with longer ranges and infinitely more explosive. Nobody has ever built one this big before. A claymore is the size of a schoolbook. This is the size of a lifeboat.”

  “How will the nacelle be positioned when it is detonated?”

  “Over the fifty-yard line at precisely one hundred feet altitude, lined up lengthwise with the field. You can see how the curve of the nacelle conforms to the curve of the stadium.”

  “So—”

  “So, Fasil, I have to also be sure that the darts will disperse in the correct arc, rather than blowing out in big lumps. I’ve got some leeway inside the skin. I can exaggerate the curves if I have to. I’ll find out about the buffer and about the dispersal when we detonate this,” Lander said, patting the device on his workbench.

  “It’s got at least a half kilo of plastic in it.”

  “Yes.”

  “You can’t set it off without drawing the authorities.”

  “Yes, I can.”

  “You would have no time to examine the results before the authorities came.”

  “Yes, I will.”

  “This is—” He nearly said “madness,” but stopped himself in time. “This is very rash.”

  “Don’t worry about it, A-rab.”

  “May I check your calculations?” Fasil hoped he could devise a way to stop the experiment.

  “Help yourself. Remember, this is not a scale model of the side of the nacelle. It just contains the two compound curves used in dispersing the shrapnel.”

  “I’ll remember, Mr. Lander.”

  Fasil spoke privately with Dahlia as she was carrying out the trash. “Talk to him,” he said in Arabic. “We know the thing will work as it is. This business of the test is not an acceptable risk. He will lose everything.”

  “It might not work perfectly,” she replied in English. “It must be without flaw.”

  “It does not have to be that perfect.”

  “For him, it does. For me, too.”

  “For the purpose of the mission, for what we set out to do, it will work adequately the way it is.”

  “Comrade Fasil, pushing the button in that gondola on January twelfth will be the last act of Michael Lander’s life. He won’t see what comes after. Neither will I, if he needs me to fly with him. We have to know what’s coming after, do you understand that?”

  “I understand that you are beginning to sound more like him than like a front-fighter.”

  “Then you are of limited intelligence.”

  “In Lebanon I would kill you for that.”

  “We’re a long way from Lebanon, Comrade Fasil. If either of us ever sees Lebanon again, you may try at your convenience.”

  14

  RACHEL BAUMAN, M.D., SAT BEHIND a desk at Halfway House in the South Bronx, waiting. The addict rehabilitation center held many memories for her. She looked around the bright little room with its amateurish paint job and pickup furniture and thought about some of the ravaged, desperate minds she had tried to reach, the things that she had listened to, in her volunteer work here. It was because of the memories the room evoked that she had chosen this place to meet with Eddie Stiles.

  There was a light rap on the door and Stiles came in, a slight, balding man looking around with quick glances. He had shaved for the occasion. A patch of tissue was stuck to a nick on his jaw. Stiles smiled awkwardly and fiddled with his cap.

  “Sit down, Eddie. You’re looking well.”

  “Never better, Dr. Bauman.”

  “How’s the tugboat business?”

  “To tell you the truth, dull. But I like it. I like it, understand,” he added quickly. “You done me a good turn getting me that job.”

  “I didn’t get you that job, Eddie. I just asked the man to look you over.”

  “Yeah, well, I’d never have got it otherwise. How’s with you? You look kind of different, I mean like you feel good. What am I talking? You’re the doctor.” He laughed self-consciously.

  Rachel could see that he had gained weight. When she met him three years ago, he had just been arrested for smuggling cigarettes up from Norfolk in a forty-foot trawler, trying to feed a seventy-five dollars a day heroin habit. Eddie had spent many months at Halfway House, many hours talking to Rachel. She had worked with him when he was screaming.

  “What did you want to see me about, Dr. Bauman? I mean, I’m glad to see you and all and if you was wondering if I’m clean—”

  “I know you’re clean, Eddie. I want to ask you for some advice.” She had never before presumed on a professional relationship, and it disturbed her to do so now. Stiles noted this instantly. His native wariness warred with the respect and warmth he felt for her.

  “It’s got nothing to do with you,” she said. “Let me lay it out for you and see what you think.”

  Stiles relaxed a little. He was not being asked to commit himself about anything immediately.

  “I need to find a boat, Eddie. A certain boat. A funny-business boat.”

  His face revealed nothing. “I told you I would tugboat and that’s all I do is tugboat, you know that.”

  “I know that. But you know a lot of people, Eddie. I don’t know any people who carry on funny business in boats. I need your help.”

  “We level with each other, always have, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “You never blabbed none of the stuff I told you when I was on the couch, right?”

  “Nope.”

  “Okay, you tell me the question and who wants to know.”

  Rachel hesitated. The truth was the truth. Nothing else would do. She told him.

  “The feds already asked me,” Stiles said when she had finished. “This guy comes right on board in front of everybody to ask me, which I don’t appreciate too much. I know they asked some other—guys of my acquaintance.”

  “And you told them zip.”

  Stiles smiled and reddened. “I didn’t know anything to tell them, you know? To tell you the truth I didn’t concentrate too hard. I guess nobody else did either, they’re still asking around, I hear.”

  Rachel waited, she did not push him. The little man tugged at his collar, stroked his chin, deliberately put his hands back in his lap.

  “You want to talk to the guy who owns this boat? I don’t mean you yourself, that wouldn’t be—I mean, your friends want to.”

  “Right.”

  “Just talk?”

  “Just talk.”

  “For money? I mean, not for me, Dr. Bauman. Don’t think that, for God’s sake. I owe you enough already. But I mean, if I was to know some guy, very few things are free. I got a couple hundred. You’re welcome, but it might—”

  “Don’t worry about the money,” she said.

  “Tell me again from where the Coast Guard first spotted the boat and who did what.”

  Stiles listened, nodding and asking an occasional question. “Frankly, maybe I can’t help you at all,
Dr. Bauman,” he said finally. “But some things occur to me. I’ll listen around.”

  “Very carefully.”

  “You know it.”

  15

  HARRY LOGAN DROVE HIS BATTERED pickup along the perimeter of United Coal Company’s heavy equipment compound on his hourly watchman’s round, looking down the rows of bulldozers and dirt buggies. He was supposed to watch for thieves and conservation-minded saboteurs, but none ever came. Nobody was within miles of the place. All was well, he could slip away.

  He turned onto a dirt track that followed the giant scar the strip mine had gouged in the Pennsylvania hills, red dust rising behind the pickup. The scar was eight miles long and two miles wide, and it was growing longer as the great earthmov ing machines chewed down the hills. Twenty-four hours a day, six days a week, two of the largest earthmovers in the world slammed their maws against the hillsides like hyenas opening a belly. They stopped for nothing except the sabbath, the president of United Coal being a very religious man.

  This was Sunday, when nothing but dustdevils moved on the raw wasteland. It was the day when Harry Logan made a little extra money. He was a scavenger and he worked in the condemned area that would shortly be uprooted by the mining. Each Sunday Logan left his post at the equipment compound and drove to the small abandoned village on a hill in the path of the earthmovers.

  The peeling houses stood empty, smelling of urine left by the vandals who smashed the windows. The householders had taken everything they thought was valuable when they moved out, but their eye for salable scrap was not so keen as Logan’s. He was a natural scavenger. There was good lead to be found in the old-fashioned gutters and plumbing. Electrical switches could be pried from the walls and there were showerheads and copper wire. He sold these things to his son-in-law’s junkyard. Logan was anxious to make a good haul on this Sunday because only an eighth of a mile of woods remained between the village and the strip mine. In two weeks the village would be devoured.