Black Sunday Read Free

of day would spread over the city. Silently they pulled the raft up on the sand, covered it with a sand-colored canvas, and walked quickly up the beach to the Rue Ramlet el-Baida, where four men and four cars awaited them, silhouetted against the glow from the tourist hotels to the north.
    They were only a few yards from the cars when a brown-and-white Land Rover braked loudly 30 yards up the Rue Ramlet, its headlights on the little convoy. Two men in tan uniforms leaped from the truck, their guns leveled.
    "Stand still. Identify yourselves."
    There was a sound like popping corn, and dust flew from the Lebanese officers' uniforms as they collapsed in the road, riddled by 9-mm bullets from the raiders' silenced Parabellums.
    A third officer, at the wheel of the truck, tried to drive away. A bullet shattered the windshield and his forehead. The truck careened into a palm tree at the roadside, and the policeman was thrown forward onto the horn. Two men ran to the truck and pulled the dead man off the horn, but lights were going on in some of the beachfront apartments.
    A window opened, and there was an angry shout in Arabic. "What is that hellish racket? Someone call the police."
    The leader of the raid, standing by the truck, shouted back in hoarse and drunken Arabic, "Where is Fatima? We'll leave if she doesn't get down here soon."
    "You drunken bastards get away from here or I'll call the police myself."
    "Aleikum salaam, neighbor. I'm going," the drunken voice from the street replied. The light in the apartment went out.
    In less than two minutes the sea closed over the truck and the bodies it contained.
    Two of the cars went south on the Rue Ramlet, while the other two turned onto the Corniche Ras Beyrouth for two blocks, then turned north again on the Rue Verdun...
    __________
     
    Number 18 Rue Verdun was guarded round the clock. One sentry was stationed in the foyer, and another armed with a machine gun watched from the roof of the building across the street. Now the rooftop sentry lay in a curious attitude behind his gun, his throat smiling wetly in the moonlight. The sentry from the foyer lay outside the door where he had gone to investigate a drunken lullaby.
    Najeer had fallen asleep when Dahlia gently pulled free from him and walked into the bathroom. She stood under the shower for a long time, enjoying the stinging spray. Najeer was not an exceptional lover. She smiled as she soaped herself. She was thinking about the American, and she did not hear the footsteps in the hall.
    Najeer half-started from the bed as the door to his apartment smashed open and a flashlight blinded him.
    "Comrade Najeer!" the man said urgently.
    "Aiwa."
    The machine gun flickered, and blood exploded from Najeer as the bullets slammed him back into the wall. The killer swept everything from the top of Najeer's desk into a bag as an explosion in another part of the building shook the room.
    The naked girl in the bathroom doorway seemed frozen in horror. The killer pointed his machine gun at her wet breast. His forger tightened on the trigger. It was a beautiful breast. The muzzle of the machine gun wavered.
    "Put on some clothes, you Arab slut," he said, and backed out of the room.
    The explosion two floors below, which tore out the wall of Abu Ali's apartment, killed Ali and his wife instantly. The raiders, coughing in the dust, had started for the stairs, when a thin man in pajamas came out of the apartment at the end of the hall, trying to cock a submachine gun. He was still trying when a hail of bullets tore through him, blowing shreds of his pajamas into his flesh and across the hall.
    The raiders scrambled to the street and their cars were roaring southward toward the sea as the first police sirens sounded.
    Dahlia, wearing Najeer's bathrobe and clutching her purse, was on the street in seconds, mingling with the crowd that had poured out of the buildings on the block. She was trying desperately to think, when she felt a hard hand grip