‘No, ya Shaikh,’ yelled Ahmat. ‘Like I just got signed by Oman—under fire, as it should be. These are the enemies of my people!’
‘Now!’ roared Kendrick as he and the young, muscular ruler crashed forward into the figures in front of them, shoulders and extended arms propelling the screaming terrorists into the circle of soldiers. The line broke! The assault on the ten-foot-high double stacks of heavy crates was total… and Evan and Ahmat surged through balloon-trousered legs and flailing arms to the wood and the wide metal straps, their pliers working furiously. The bindings snapped and the crates tumbled down as if exploded from within, the weight and strength of a hundred assaulters precipitating their violent descents. Wooden slats everywhere came apart, and where they did not, maniacal hands prised them apart. Then, like starving locusts attacking the sweet leaves of trees, the terrorists of South Yemen and the Baaka Valley crawled over the crates, yanking out weapons from their plastic casements and throwing them to their brothers while shrieking and straddling the large cartons that took on the grotesque images of coffins.
Simultaneously, the Palestinian team from the West Bank heaved boxes of ammunition all around and over the collapsed wooden mountain of death, supplied by the seller of death, Abdel Hamendi. The guns were varied, all types and all sizes, ripped with abandon from their soft recesses. Many did not know what shells went into which weapons, but many others, mainly from the Baaka, did, and they instructed their less sophisticated brothers from South Yemen.
The first repeating machine gun that was fired in triumph from atop the ersatz pyramid of death blew off the face of the one who pulled the trigger. In the midst of staccato sounds everywhere, others were fired; there were several hundred fruitless clicks, but also dozens of explosions where heads and arms and hands were blown away. Blown away!
Hysteria fed upon hysteria. Terrorists threw down their guns in terror, while others used their hands and whatever implements they could find to prise open the unmarked crates everywhere. It was as the young sultan of Oman had predicted. Items of equipment were dragged out all over the pier, yanked from boxes and unfolded or pulled apart or ripped from their plastic casings… and displayed for all to see. As each piece was examined, the crowds went wilder and wilder, but no longer in triumph, instead in animal fury. Among the items were infrared binoculars with smashed lenses, rope ladders with their rungs severed, grappling hooks without points, underwater oxygen tanks with holes drilled in the cylinders; flamethrowers, their nozzles crushed together guaranteeing instant incineration to whoever operated them and anyone within thirty yards; rocket missile launchers without detonating caps, and again, as Ahmat had projected, landing craft held up to show where the seams had been split, all of which threw the manic crowd into paroxysms of rage over the betrayal.
In the chaos, Evan weaved through the hysterical bodies to the warehouse at the midpoint of the huge pier; he pressed his back against the wall and sidestepped to within three feet of the massive open doors. The white-suited Hamendi was shouting in Arabic that everything would be replaced; his and their enemies in the Bahrain depots who did this would be killed, every one killed! His protestations drew looks of narrow-eyed suspicion from those he addressed.
And then a man in a dark conservative pinstriped suit appeared rounding the corner of the warehouse and Kendrick froze. It was Crayton Grinell, attorney and chairman of the board for the government within the government. After his initial shock, Evan wondered why he was astonished, even surprised. Where else could Grinell go but to the core of the international network of arms merchants? It was his last and only secure refuge. The lawyer spoke briefly to Hamendi, who instantly translated Grinell’s words, explaining that his associate had already contacted Bahrain and learned what had happened. It was Jews! he exclaimed. Israeli terrorists had assaulted an island depot, killed all the men on watch, and done these terrible things.
‘How could that be?’ asked a stocky man in the only pressed revolutionary uniform replete with at least a dozen medals. ‘All these supplies were in the original crates, even boxes within cartons, the casings unbroken. How could it be?’
‘The Jews can be ingenious!’ screamed Hamendi. ‘You know that as well as I do. I shall fly back immediately, replace the entire order, and learn the truth!’
‘What do we do in the meantime?’ asked the obvious leader of South Yemen’s revolutionary regime. ‘What do I tell our brothers from the Baaka Valley? We are all, all of us, disgraced!’
‘You will have your vengeance as well as your weapons, be assured.’ Grinell spoke again to the arms merchant, and once more Hamendi translated. ‘I am informed by my associate that our radar clearances are only in effect for the next three hours—at an extraordinary expense to me personally, I might add—and we must leave at once.’
‘Restore us our dignity, fellow Arab, or we will find you and you will lose your life.’
‘You have my guarantee that the first will happen, and there will be no necessity for the second. I leave.’
They were going to get away! thought Kendrick. Goddamn it, they were going to get away! Grinell had given Hamendi the unctuous words, and both of them were going to fly out of this hub of insanity and go on doing their insane, obscene business-as-usual! He had to stop them. He had to move!
As the two arms merchants walked rapidly out of the doors of the warehouse and around the corner of the building, Evan raced across the opening—as one more hysterical terrorist—and thrashed his way towards the two well-dressed men through the excited crowds on the pier. He was within feet of Crayton Grinell, then inches. He pulled his long-bladed knife out of its scabbard on his belt and lunged, circling his left arm around the American attorney’s neck and forcing him to pivot, to confront him face to face, inches one from the other.
‘You!’ screamed Grinell.
‘This is for an old man who’s dying and thousands of others you’ve killed!’ The knife plunged into the lawyer’s stomach, and then Kendrick ripped it up through the chest. Grinell fell to the planks on the pier amid a multitude of rushing, paranoid terrorists who had no idea that another well-dressed terrorist had been killed and lay beneath them.
Hamendi! He had raced ahead, oblivious of his associate, determined only to reach the vehicle that would take him to his radar-cleared plane out of South Yemen across hostile borders. He must not reach it! The merchant of death could not be allowed to deal in death any morel Evan literally sledgehammered a path through the onslaught of running, screaming figures to the base of the pier. There was a wide ascending stretch of concrete that led up to a dirt road, where a Russian Zia limousine waited, the exhaust-fumes indicating that the engine was roaring, waiting for the car’s escaping passenger. Hamendi, his white silk jacket billowing behind him, was within yards of his escape! Kendrick called upon strengths within him that defied the outer regions of his imagination and raced up the concrete incline, his legs about to collapse, and then they did collapse twenty feet from the Zia as Hamendi approached the door. From his prone position, his weapon barely steadied by both trembling hands, he fired again and again and again.
Abdel Hamendi, the king of the court of international arms merchants, reached for his throat as he fell to the ground.
It was not over! screamed a voice in Kendrick’s mind. There was something else to do! He crawled down the concrete incline, reaching into his pocket for a map code Blue had given everyone in case of separation and possible escape. He tore off a fragment, taking a small blunt pencil from another pocket, and wrote the following in Arabic:
Hamendi the liar is dead. Soon all the merchants will die for everywhere the treachery has begun, as you have seen for yourself this day. Everywhere they have been paid by Israel and the Great Satan America to sell us defective weapons. Everywhere. Reach our brothers everywhere and tell them what I have told you and what you have witnessed this day. No weapons from this day on can be trusted. Signed by a silent friend who knows.
Painfully, as though the wounds from the island off Mexico had returned, Evan got to his feet and ran as fast as he could back into the angry, still shrieking crowds towards the doors of the warehouse. Feigning hysterical pleas to Allah over the death of a brother, he fell prostrate in front of the small group of leaders, which now included those from the Baaka Valley in Lebanon. As hands came down to offer comfort he shoved the paper towards them, rose suddenly to his feet screaming, and raced out of the warehouse doors, disappearing into the now wailing, grieving crowds kneeling beside mutilated corpses everywhere. In panic he heard the bass-toned whistles from the cargo ship—signals of departure! He pummelled his way to the far side of the pier, where he saw Khalehla and Ahmat standing by the gangplank, shouting up to the men on deck, if possible more panicky than himself.