Dynamite Fishermen (14 page)

The pitcher’s name was Tom Baldwin, and when not playing baseball he was the director of a Baptist parochial school in East Beirut. Aside from being a phenomenal pitcher, he was also a skillful hitter and fielded as well barehanded as most players did with mitts. No one on the team could deny that Baldwin was the main reason for the embassy’s strong standing in the league. The team might even have edged out the marines for first place had it not been for the games lost on Sundays, when Baldwin observed the Sabbath.

At bat was one of the better AUB players, a pocket-sized Lebanese student named George, who was the offspring of a Lebanese father and an American mother. Although his powerful swing and careful eye easily made up for his diminutive stature, George felt it was necessary to compensate further by directing a constant stream of insults at members of the opposing team. As a result, he was decidedly unpopular among the embassy players, who now baited him mercilessly and urged him to end the inning by becoming Tom’s seventh strikeout victim.

The count was 1-2 after George hit a long foul ball just wide of the third base line. Baldwin threw a trick pitch underneath his leg, which, to Prosser’s surprise, was nearly as fast as the man’s normal pitches. It landed square in the center of Prosser’s catcher’s mitt and stung his palm; it was too far outside for a strike. George flashed a smug grin back at his teammates to show that he was not so easily taken in.

Prosser crowded close behind George and signaled for Baldwin to throw a fastball, high and inside. Baldwin nodded and aimed a sizzling fastball at the batter’s wrists. When George stepped back from the plate without swinging, the umpire called him out on strikes. Enraged by the call, the student heaved his bat against the backstop and hounded the official off the field, cursing him in gutter Arabic at every step.

Prosser held the ball high in the air and trotted out toward the mound to greet Baldwin as he came in to the bench. “Perfect job, Tom!” he said.

“We sure skunked him, didn’t we?” Baldwin replied, taking off his hat and wiping his forehead with a red bandanna. “George is a clever hitter, though. I don’t think he’ll fall for that trick again.”

Baldwin lowered his bulky frame onto the bench while Prosser picked up a bat to make a few half-speed practice swings before the AUB students took the field. The first man in the batting order was Harry Landers, who carried himself well despite the extra inches around his waist. He swung on the first pitch, hitting a line-drive double directly over second base.

Prosser stepped up to the plate. The infielders were playing him deep because of Harry’s line drive and because Prosser had hit a hard ground ball past the shortstop on his last turn at bat. He took a ball and then watched a strike go over the outside corner of the plate. On the third pitch he laid a bunt down the third base line. It took two limp bounces in the dust before rolling idly to a stop at the midpoint between third and home plate. Prosser reached first base just as the pitcher picked up the ball and realized he had no place to throw it. Harry advanced to third.

The next batter was a black communications technician on temporary assignment to the embassy in Beirut. Prosser had met him only once and didn’t know whether he was a good hitter, but he was powerfully built and had a picture-perfect swing. Remembering the long fly ball that he had driven over the head of the center fielder on his first turn at bat, the outfielders moved back. On the second pitch the technician hit a flat line drive over the head of the shortstop that sent the center fielder running in toward the infield. Harry scored easily, with Prosser following closely behind. The technician held at third base.

Within seconds after Prosser passed home plate and bent over double behind the backstop to catch his breath, a pair of artillery shells screamed overhead and exploded somewhere to the west. A moment later three more shells whistled over the playing field, falling scarcely more than a kilometer away, each one exploding with a sharp crack that reverberated among the stuccoed apartment houses nearby.

Then, after a short pause, another two rounds flew past and landed at about the same distance away. After that, single shells appeared at random intervals—five seconds apart, three seconds, ten seconds. Prosser counted sixteen explosions in all.

When the players and their fans heard the first pair of shells fly past, they lost no time in scrambling for cover in the lee of the soccer stadium some fifty meters behind the backstop. From the sound of the first few explosions, Prosser guessed that the shells were high-explosive 155-millimeter rounds being fired from Phalange positions in Beirut’s eastern suburbs. The initial rounds, he surmised, had landed either in his own Minara neighborhood or along the public beaches south of the Bain Militaire.

Although no shell fell closer to the ball field than five or six hundred meters, each of the last half dozen had appeared to land amid the crowded beaches and sidewalks at the western end of the Corniche. As usual on summer Saturdays, the seaside promenade was packed with working-class Muslims, many of them Shiite refugees from the city’s southern suburbs.

Well before the last shell had fallen, a nauseating, panic-inspiring din of sirens, screams, and car horns arose from the Corniche and spread rapidly from west to east. Across the wrought-iron fence from center field, Prosser watched crazed men, women, and children scatter in all directions to seek cover. Mothers hastily packed up the picnic lunches they had spread out among the tall weeds of the median strip while fathers searched frantically for missing children. Bursts of automatic-rifle fire and the muffled pops of pistol shots punctuated the roar of the mob as drivers fired through open windows to bully their way forward in the snarled traffic. Militia vehicles beat them at this game, however, with their youthful riders hanging onto the post-mounted .50-caliber machine guns with both hands like water skiers, firing blindly into the air to clear a path for the ambulances following closely behind.

Even in a city long inured to war and brutality, the deliberate shelling of civilian crowds on their day of rest seemed a particularly heinous act to Prosser and to the other Westerners now lined up against the wall of the soccer stadium. Prosser tried to make logical sense of it, recalling that the weekend before, a Syrian-backed militia had launched a salvo of Katyusha rockets across the Bay of Beirut to the beach clubs of Jouniyé. Although the rockets had fallen short of the beaches and had not harmed any Christian bathers, the local newspapers reported that the Phalange war council had vowed to retaliate.

Then Prosser recalled that barely a day had gone by since Ed Pirelli had passed Abu Ramzi’s information about the Palestinian bomb maker and his car-bomb smugglers to Lebanese G-2 and the Phalange. A shiver passed over him when it occurred to him that perhaps his own report might have offered the Phalange a pretext for the shelling.

The other ballplayers and those who had come to watch the game observed the chaos beyond the center field fence with only the dimmest comprehension. What they saw overpowered their reason. At first they felt helpless in the face of such suffering and wished desperately for it to end. By degrees, however, their anxiety and frustration became intermixed with impatience at having to remain under cover. They huddled in clusters of five or six for a quarter of an hour discussing what to do next. Meanwhile, Harry and the black technician, more out of boredom than bravery, left the safety of the stadium’s shadow to retrieve an ice chest from the team’s bench.

While team members passed around cans of beer and soda, Prosser noticed the first base umpire split off from a group of AUB players and walk out onto the field. The umpire was a silver-haired Texan of about fifty, who, after having taught physical education at the American University of Beirut for most of his adult life, had recently been promoted to athletic director. To Prosser’s surprise, upon reaching first base, the umpire shouted to the AUB captain to take the field.

“Play ball!” he cried over the blare of car horns and the crackle of sporadic gunfire. “Embassy at bat. Top of the fifth. No outs.”

The AUB coach shrugged and waved his team onto the field. Shellings came and went, but the athletic director could not be disobeyed if the coach wanted to keep his job. The students hesitated—for a moment unsure of their coach’s decision—and then, one by one, took their positions. The home plate umpire, a Canadian businessman, also watched and waited to see what the others would do. Then he, too, donned his wire mask and took his place behind the catcher. The U.S. embassy team, which led the students by a score of 5 to 0, appeared less than eager to begin.

“Hey, wait a minute,” objected Baldwin, the embassy’s aging pitcher. “How do you know the shelling is finished? It may not be over just yet. I think we ought to wait. We don’t want anybody hurt out here.”

“It’s over, it’s over. Take my word for it, okay? Let’s get on with the game,” the athletic director replied impatiently. “Come on. Let’s play ball!” he shouted toward the embassy’s bench.

Colonel Charlie Ross, the silver-haired U.S. defense attaché, walked calmly out from the shade of the stadium to address the first base umpire.

“Say, Ralph, those were just the incoming rounds,” he said. “We haven’t seen the outgoing yet. For all we know, we may be in the middle of an artillery duel here.”

“The colonel’s right,” Baldwin added. “Let’s give it a little more time. In fact, some of these folks might just as soon call it a day and go home once the air clears.”

“Gentlemen,” the athletic director replied, turning to face both men, “I said, ‘Play ball.’ You have a choice: you can either play ball or forfeit. Take your pick.”

Baldwin and the colonel looked at each other in disbelief. Then the colonel wheeled around and shouted back to the rest of the team. “The man says, ‘Play ball,’ troops. So let’s hustle! Batter up!”

Baldwin stared at the colonel in bewilderment and started toward the bench. Four or five team members followed closely behind.

“You know, it’s pretty goddamned stupid for us to be risking our lives over a lousy ball game,” the black technician said to Harry as they prepared to leave the shelter of the stadium wall.

“I can’t believe we’re doing it either,” Harry replied with a shrug. Then he lifted the end of the ice chest and beckoned with his free hand for the technician to help him carry it to the bench.

“You, too?” Prosser called out to them as they passed. He picked up his mitt and rose to his feet.

“Yeah, I know it’s stupid,” Harry replied, “but I can’t bear the thought of forfeiting to the little creeps.”

Prosser put aside thoughts of the shelling and followed Harry to the bench. The Lebanese had their problems and he had his. Theirs would just have to wait until the ball game was over.

Chapter 10

Prosser was pleased with the shortcut that Rima had shown him. The street ran parallel to the route he usually took between the embassy and the Galerie Semaan checkpoint south of the city. But while his usual route seemed perpetually congested, this one was completely clear. As soon as he noticed the blackened, bullet-scarred buildings lining the western side of the street, he understood why. The route ran within a few blocks of no-man’s-land, and it was only because of the recent cease-fire that the route was now temporarily safe enough to use.

“This is a real find. I’ve never been through this stretch so quickly,” he told her.

“For one who knows the city well, there is always a way around the traffic and the checkpoints.”

“I want to learn them all. Will you show me?”

“It will take much time,
batta
. I think you might be too busy,” she teased, using the Arabic nickname she had chosen for him, which meant “duckling.”

“I’ll make the time,” he replied, taking his eyes from the rubble-strewn avenue long enough to caress the back of her neck. “So where did we decide to have lunch? Jouniyé, Tabarja, Byblos?”

“Jouniyé and Tabarja will be too crowded,” she said, wrinkling her nose. “Let us try Byblos. The fish at Pepe’s is the best in Lebanon, and we can have a table on the terrace overlooking the Roman harbor.”

“Then Pepe’s it is,” he answered. “But driving is thirsty work. Reach back and hand me a beer, will you?”

Rima turned around and, kneeling against the leather back of the seat, removed two red-and-white cans of Beck’s from the cooler on the backseat.

A few minutes later they reached the intersection with Corniche el Mazraa. To the east, a queue of vehicles a kilometer long inched toward the museum crossing. At Rima’s direction Prosser pushed through the nearly gridlocked intersection and continued south along the western outskirts of the middle-class Palestinian enclave of Fakhani. Passing through Pepsi Cola Circle, he studied the collection of armored personnel carriers, multiple rocket launchers, antiaircraft guns, and heavy machine guns parked around its circumference.

Nearly all the hardware belonged to Fatah or various other Palestinian groups—there was not a single Syrian soldier or Lebanese gendarme in sight. Indeed, the neighborhood was the closest thing to a Palestinian homeland that the PLO had achieved in its decade of armed struggle since its adherents had been expelled from Jordan in 1970. Unlike the squalid refugee camps of Sabra, Shatila, and Burj el Brajneh nearby, Fakhani was an established neighborhood where Palestinians lived in well-tended apartment buildings and operated shops and small businesses of all kinds. At every turn, however, one saw the red, white, and green Palestinian flag hanging from trees and lampposts, displayed behind shop windows, and painted on freshly whitewashed walls. According to both Abu Ramzi and Abu Khalil, the cellars, basements, and underground garages of the neighborhood were packed with enough arms and ammunition to keep a sizable army fighting for years.