Fasil started to ask the man to be quiet. Then he changed his mind. If he were rude, the driver would remember him.
“You know what happened in Houston with the As trodome. They got cutesy with the Oilers and now they play in Rice Stadium. These guys don’t want that to happen. They got to have the Saints, you know? They want everybody to see they’re getting on with it, the NFL and all, so they work over the holidays too. You think I wouldn’t work Christmas and New Year’s double time and a half? Ha. The old lady could hang up the stockings by herself.”
The taxi followed the curve of U.S. 90, turning northwest, and the driver adjusted his sunshade. They were nearing Tulane University now. “That’s the Ursuline College on the left there. What side of the stadium you want, Willow Street?”
“Yes.”
The sight of the great, shabby tan-and-gray stadium aroused Fasil. The films of Munich were running in his head.
It was big. Fasil was reminded of his first close view of an aircraft carrier. It went up and up. Fasil climbed out of the taxi, his camera banging against the door.
The southeast gate was open. Maintenance men were coming in and out in the last rush before the Sugar Bowl game. Fasil had his press card ready, and the same credentials he had brought on his flight to the Azores, but he was not stopped. He glanced at the vast, shadowy spaces under the stands, tangled with iron, then walked out into the arena.
It was so big! Its size elated him. The artificial turf was new, the numbers gleaming white against the green. He stepped on the turf and almost recoiled. It felt like flesh underfoot. Fasil walked across the field, feeling the presence of the endless tiers of seats. It is difficult to walk through the focal area of a stadium, even an empty stadium, without feeling watched. He hurried to the west side of the field and climbed the stands toward the press boxes.
High above the field, looking out at the curve of the stands, Fasil recalled the matching curves of the shaped charge and, in spite of himself, he was impressed with the genius of Michael Lander.
The stadium spread its sides open to the sky, labial, passive, waiting. The thought of those stands filled with 80,985 people, moving in their seats, the stands squirming with life, filled Fasil with an emotion that was very close to lust. This was the soft aperture to the House of War. Soon those spreading sides would be engorged with people, full and waiting.
“Quss ummak,” Fasil hissed. It is an ancient Arab insult. It means “your mother’s vulva.”
He thought of the various possibilities. Any explosion in or close to the stadium would guarantee worldwide headlines. The gates were not really substantial. The truck possibly could plow through one of the four entrances and make it onto the field before the charge was set off. There would certainly be many casualties, but much of the explosion would be wasted in blowing a great crater in the earth. There was also the problem of traffic in the small, choked streets leading to the stadium. What if emergency vehicles were parked in the entrances? If the president was here, surely there would be armed men at the gates. What if the driver were shot before he could detonate the charge? Who would drive the truck? Not himself, certainly. Dahlia, then. She had the guts to do it, there was no question about that. Afterward, he would praise her posthumously at his news conference in Lebanon.
Perhaps an emergency vehicle, an ambulance, might have a better chance. It could be rushed onto the field, siren wailing.
But the nacelle was too big to fit inside an ordinary ambulance, and the truck that now carried it did not look anything like an emergency vehicle. But it did look like a television equipment truck. Still, an emergency vehicle was better. A big panel truck, then. He could paint it white and put a red cross on it. Whatever he did, he would have to hurry. Fourteen days remained.
The empty sky pressed on Fasil as he stood at the top of the stands, wind fluttering the collar of his coat. The open, easy sky gave perfect access, he thought bitterly. Getting the nacelle into an airplane and then hijacking it would be next to impossible. If it could be done through some ruse of carrying the nacelle as freight, he was not sure Dahlia could force a pilot to dive close enough to the stadium, even with a gun at the man’s temple.
Fasil looked to the northeast at the New Orleans skyline; the Superdome two miles away, the Marriott Hotel, the International Trade Mart. Beyond that skyline, a scant eight miles away, lay New Orleans Lakefront Airport. The fat and harmless blimp would come over that skyline to the Super Bowl on January 12 while he struggled like an ant on the ground. Damn Lander and his putrid issue to the tenth generation.
Fasil was seized with a vision of what the strike might have been. The blimp shining silver, coming down, unnoticed at first by the crowd intent on the game. Then more and more of the spectators glancing up as it came lower, bigger, impossibly big, hanging over them, the long shadow darkening the field and some of them looking directly at the bright nacelle as it detonated with a flash like the sun exploding, the stands heaving, possibly collapsing, filled with twelve million pounds of ripped meat. And the roar and shock wave rolling out across the flats, deafening, blasting the windows out of homes twenty miles away, ships heeling as to a monsoon. The wind of it screaming around the towers of the House of War, screaming Faseeeeeel!
It would have been incredibly beautiful. He had to sit down. He was shaking. He forced his mind back to the alternatives. He tried to cut his losses. When he was calm again, he felt proud of his strength of character, his forbearance in the face of misfortune. He was Fasil. He would do the best he could.
Fasil’s thoughts were concerned with trucks and paint as he rode back toward downtown New Orleans. All was not lost, he told himself. It was perhaps better this way. The use of the American had always sullied the operation. Now the strike was all his. Not so spectacular perhaps, not a maximum-efficiency air burst, but he would still gain enormous prestige—and the guerrilla movement would be enhanced, he added in a quick afterthought.
There was the domed stadium, on his right this time. The sun was gleaming off the metal roof. And what was that rising behind it? A helicopter of the “skycrane” type. It was lifting something, a piece of machinery. Now it was moving over the roof. A party of workmen waited beside one of the openings in the roof. The shadow of the helicopter slid across the dome and covered them. Slowly, delicately, the helicopter lowered the heavy object into the gap on the roof. The hat of one of the workmen blew away and tumbled, a tiny dot bouncing down the dome and out into space, tumbling on the wind. The helicopter rose again, freed of its burden, and sank out of sight behind the unfinished Superdome.
Fasil no longer thought about trucks. He could always get a truck. Sweat stood out on his face. He was wondering if the helicopter worked on Sundays. He tapped the driver and told him to go to the Superdome.
Two hours later, Fasil was in the public library studying an entry in Jane’s All the World’s Aircraft. From the library he went to the Monteleone Hotel, where he copied the number from a telephone in a lobby booth. He copied another number from a pay phone in the Union Passenger Terminal, then went to the Western Union office. On a cable blank, he carefully composed a message, referring frequently to a small card of coded numbers glued inside his camera case. In minutes, on the long line beneath the sea, the brief personal message flashed toward Benghazi, Libya.
Fasil was back in the passenger terminal at nine a.m. the next day. He removed a yellow out-of-order sticker from a pay phone near the entrance and placed it on the telephone he had selected, a booth at the end of the row. He glanced at his watch. A half-hour to go. He sat down with a newspaper on a bench near the telephone.