Black Sunday Read Free Page A

her arm. It was Muhammad Fasil. A bullet had cut a bloody stripe across his cheek. He wrapped his tie around his hand and held it to the wound.
    "Najeer?" he asked.
    "Dead."
    "Ali, too, I think. His window blew out just as I turned the corner. I shot at them from the car, but---listen to me carefully. Najeer has given the order. Your mission must be completed. The explosives are not affected, they will arrive on schedule. Automatic weapons also---your Schmeisser and an AK-47, packed separately with bicycle parts."
    Dahlia looked at him with smoke-reddened eyes. "They will pay," she said. "They will pay 10,000 to one."
    Fasil took her to a safe house in the Sabra to wait through the day. After dark he took her to the airport in his rattletrap Citroën. Her borrowed dress was two sizes too large, but she was too tired to care.
    At 10:30 P.M., the Pan Am 707 roared out over the Mediterranean, and, before the Arabian lights faded off the starboard wing, Dahlia fell into an exhausted sleep.

Chapter 2
     
    At that moment, Michael Lander was doing the only thing he loved. He was flying the Aldrich blimp, hovering 800 feet above the Orange Bowl in Miami, providing a steady platform for the television crew in the gondola behind him. Below, in the packed stadium, the world-champion Miami Dolphins were pounding the Pittsburgh Steelers.
    The roar of the crowd nearly drowned out the crackling radio above Lander's head. On hot days above a stadium, he felt that he could smell the crowd, and the blimp seemed suspended on a powerful rising current of mindless screaming and body heat. That current felt dirty to Lander. He preferred the trips between the towns. The blimp was clean and quiet then.
    Only occasionally did Lander glance down at the field. He watched the rim of the stadium and the line-of-sight he had established between the top of a flagpole and the horizon to maintain exactly 800 feet of altitude.
    Lander was an exceptional pilot in a difficult field. A dirigible is not easy to fly. Its almost neutral buoyancy and vast surface leave it at the mercy of the wind unless it is skillfully handled. Lander had a sailor's instinct for the wind, and he had the gift the best dirigible pilots have---anticipation. A dirigible's movements are cyclical, and Lander stayed two moves ahead, holding the great gray whale into the breeze as a fish points upstream, burrowing the nose slightly into the gusts and raising it in lulls, shading half the end zone with its shadow. During intervals in the action on the field, many of the spectators looked up at it and some of them waved. Such bulk, such great length suspended in the clear air fascinated them.
    Lander had an autopilot in his head. While it dictated the constant, minute adjustments that held the blimp steady, he thought about Dahlia. The patch of down in the small of her back and how it felt beneath his hand. The sharpness of her teeth. The taste of honey and salt.
    He looked at his watch. Dahlia should be an hour out of Beirut now, coming back.
    Lander could think comfortably about two things: Dahlia and flying.
    His scarred left hand gently pushed forward the throttle and propeller pitch controls, and he rolled back the big elevator wheel beside his seat. The great airship rose quickly as Lander spoke into the microphone.
    "Nora One Zero, clearing stadium for a 1,200-foot go-around."
    "Roger, Nora One Zero," the Miami tower replied cheerily.
    Air controllers and tower radio operators always liked to talk to the blimp, and many had a joke ready when they knew it was coming. People felt friendly toward it as they do toward a panda. For millions of Americans who saw it at sporting events and fairs, the blimp was an enormous, amiable, and slow-moving friend in the sky. Blimp metaphors are almost invariably "elephant" or "whale." No one ever says "bomb."
    At last the game was over and the blimp's 225-foot shadow flicked over the miles of cars streaming away from the stadium. The television