TEN O’CLOCK ON A cold, Tuesday morning. The air so clear the skyline of Manhattan seemed etched in deep, blue glass. Johnny Katanos and Muzzafer sat in a black van parked by a meter across from a large, supermarket parking lot. Their position gave them a perfect view of the lot and they carefully inspected the cars entering and leaving.
They were looking for any sign of surveillance, nervous because the appointment they waited to keep (and which would not take place for hours) represented one of the few times their paths would intersect the main currents of international terrorism. On this day, for these few hours, they would be vulnerable to betrayal from outside the group. Of course, they could not have manufactured the instruments with which they would attack New York, nor did they have the means to smuggle weapons across borders, so the situation was truly unavoidable.
Still, Muzzafer had seen so many of his friends taken in situations like this, he couldn’t stop tapping his fingers on the door handle, and Katanos finally reached out a hand to slow him down.
“Ease up, man. Relax. I’m the one gonna retrieve the merchandise. You’re gonna take off, remember?”
Muzzafer smiled ruefully. “I think I fear the idea of betrayal more than actually being captured. You can sustain yourself in prison with your hatred, but it’s hard to get over the sense that someone you trusted, that you called your comrade, sold you out.”
“Shit, where I come from, you expect your partner to rat. If he don’t that’s when you get surprised. Anyways, there’s nothing we can do, but watch the drop. What’s coming is coming and that’s the end of it.”
“Maybe not the end,” Muzzafer shook his head.
“What’s more to do?”
“We can hope they didn’t pick an asshole to make delivery.”
In January of 1961, Julio Rafael Ramirez had come to the United States to spy on the tens of thousands of refugees who fled Cuba after Fidel Castro’s revolution. As these refugees were, for the most part, allowed to leave with nothing but the clothes on their backs, they were more than a little resentful, especially considering they had formed the bulk of the wealthy and middle classes under the dictator, Batista. Fidel was not unmindful of this situation. Suspecting that the American government might take advantage of their resentment, spurring the dissident expatriates on to deeds of sabotage and assassination, he asked twenty student supporters to go into exile with the refugees. They settled in Miami, Florida, and Union City, New Jersey, had gotten married, established businesses, had babies and christenings and first Holy Communions. Julio Ramirez, financed by the Cuban government, opened a barber shop on Kennedy Boulevard in Union City, never growing rich, but paying the bills all the same. This fall, from university student to barber, gave credibility to his tale of disenchantment with Cuban Marxism. Over the years, he’d established his roots within the community. He’d married, had children and continued to report each month to a representative of the Cuban Mission to the United Nations.
Unfortunately, Julio no longer enjoyed his work. He’d never really been an adventurous child, but as a young man—his imagination fired by a brother who’d gone to the mountains in the earliest days of the revolution—he’d seen Fidel’s request as a golden opportunity to serve the cause of world socialism. He was fifty-two now, and while he hadn’t exactly become a capitalist, he definitely preferred sitting at home with “The Cosby Show” to undertaking secret missions.
But Julio did what he was told, because his sponsors left him no choice. He could not return to Cuba and he didn’t have enough information to interest the Americans. He’d realized long before, that his life, as well as the lives of his wife and children, would be worthless should the refugee community discover his true loyalties.
Fortunately for Julio’s sense of well-being, he was not used very often. Instead of penetrating to the heart of Omega 7, Julio had remained on the outside, confining his efforts to membership in the most public religious and civic organizations. Havana saw him as a messenger, a mule to be used only for operations requiring the talents of a mule. On this particular evening, he’d been ordered to pick up a small ford van at Fort Hamilton Parkway and 99th Street, in Brooklyn, and deliver it to a supermarket parking lot in Queens. He was to wait inside the truck until a man in a green, corduroy jacket approached from the front with his hands in his pockets. The man would enter the van on the driver’s side, whereupon they would proceed to a nearby subway stop and Julio would find his way home.
Perhaps Julio’s sense of importance would have been less compromised if he’d known he carried enough plastic explosives in the cargo area to blow the little Ford back across the Hudson River, but the rear of the van was sealed off and the doors welded shut, so he had no opportunity to examine the merchandise. The sellers were, of course, Cuban, good friends of Muzzafer’s and enthusiastic supporters of his projects, but the ordnance, automatic weapons, and a hodgepodge of special explosives, had been smuggled into South Carolina, along with 27 tons of marijuana, by Colombian guerrillas anxious to finance their own revolution. From South Carolina, it has been trucked as ordinary freight aboard a Penn Central trailer and received in Brooklyn by an attaché of the Cuban Mission, acting under the umbrella of diplomatic immunity. Then it had been left to cool for six months, just in case.
It is interesting to note that payment had been given long before delivery. It wasn’t that the Cubans didn’t trust Muzzafer. Actually, they would have financed the project from beginning to end if Muzzafer had been willing to surrender control. Of course, Muzzafer preferred to pay, parting with almost all the contents of Ronald Chadwick’s suitcase. Then Julio Ramirez had been chosen to make delivery precisely because he was a nonentity who was not only unlikely to be caught, but who could tell his interrogators nothing in any event. The neighborhood in which the van was parked was predominantly Italian and Jewish. The neighborhood of delivery was Greek and Czech. There would be no Cubans to recognize Ramirez. To the all-white worlds of Bay Ridge, Brooklyn and Astoria, Queens, Julio was just another spic.
Julio was not unaware of his status within these communities and his nervousness was evident as he drove out the Gowanus Expressway toward Bay Ridge Parkway. More than once, the good citizens of Bay Ridge had taken the stick to their darker brethren. But Julio needn’t have worried. The garage was located on an industrial block with an auto-parts store on one side and an aluminum warehouse on the other. There were black and Puerto Rican workers in abundance and nobody paid the slightest attention to him. Everything went smoothly, as usual. The keys to the garage worked on the first attempt and the van started immediately. Julio pulled the Ford out, replacing it with his own car, a dusty, green Renault, and carefully locked the garage door.
The van rolled smoothly over the ruts and dips on 86th Street and Julio was able to let his attention wander. He drove through Bay Ridge and Bensonhurst toward Sheepshead Bay. Easter was approaching and, with the first warm weather, the shoppers were out along 86th Street. Julio noted the small, family-owned clothing and furniture stores. On one block, Wo Fong’s Cantonese Delight was flanked by Slim’s Bagels and Gino’s Best Pizza. Julio recalled his mother’s cousin, Emilio Evans, who’d fled Cuba on a small boat in 1980. He’d wanted to work in Julio’s shop and they’d taken a long drive by way of an interview. Newly arrived from a country where toilet paper was rationed, Emilio could not stop talking about the abundance of America. It wasn’t even the supermarkets or department stores that impressed him so much. The small shops, the butcher stores and fruit stands and hardware stores, often pressed one against the other in some obscure New Jersey neighborhood, seemed absolutely miraculous. Where did the money come from? Growing up in Cuba, Emilio had been led to believe that the majority of American workers lived in grinding poverty, but these Cuban-Americans not only had cars and color television sets, but videocassette recorders and ten-speed bicycles as well. They were sending their children to heavily subsidized state colleges while paying off thirty-year mortgages.
Julio turned north on Bedford Avenue and began the long drive through the center of Brooklyn. The shops on 86th Street gave way to blocks of single family homes set back on what were, for New York, substantial pieces of property. The owners were almost exclusively Jewish and the children played on immaculately kept lawns, the boys tossing Frisbees or baseballs while the girls gossiped on porch swings. The husbands were returning from work, driving Cutlass Supremes into driveways, trudging through unlocked front doors, attaché case in hand. A firm universe, established and secure. It did not seem possible that the Bedford Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn began just on the other side of Foster Avenue and was the start of the largest black ghetto in America. Bedford Stuyvesant, Crown Heights, Bushwick, Brownsville, East New York—a world of dark people which extended into Queens through Jamaica and Hollis and St. Albans right to the border of Nassau County, and included more than a million and a half citizens.
As Julio made the right turn onto Empire Boulevard and began to drive, his surroundings grew more and more threatening. Whole blocks of devastated four- and five-story tenements, their windows covered with gray, galvanized sheet metal, seemed to lean toward the street, almost beckoning him. Knots of men, gathered around aluminum drums filled with burning trash, threw grotesque shadows across the alleyways. Night was falling quickly and the old women scuttled down the streets, seeking the safety of locked doors. The total effect was demonic and Julio began to sense an awful malevolence. He felt like an angel strayed into hell and he fought his fear with anger and indignation. He remembered the white world, the Anglos who associated him with this horror. To them, if you were a spic or a nigger, this was your only world, the sum total of all your possibilities, and nothing you could ever achieve would rid them of this attitude. Julio became more and more impatient at the red lights, cursing under his breath and drumming his fingers on the steering wheel. By the time he saw the mouth of the Interboro Parkway, he could control himself no longer. He slapped his foot down on the gas pedal and shot free of the ghetto.
Unfortunately for Julio, black Brooklyn had had an identical effect on another good New Yorker, Dr. Morris Katz, who hit the accelerator of his Olds Regency at almost the same second, so that the two of them flew toward a space large enough for only one. Seeing this, they simultaneously jammed on the brakes, sending both cars into counter-clockwise spins. The two vehicles, as if their dance had been choreographed by Hollywood stuntmen, spun around each other twice before coming to a stop. Julio, furious, opened the door, leaped out and came within an eyeblink of being just the asshole Muzzafer, sitting in a parking lot ten miles away, was afraid of. But then he remembered himself for the first time since crossing Foster Avenue. He looked at his van and recalled that he was carrying an unknown cargo to an unknown group of terrorists on behalf of the Communist government of Cuba. Without a word, in a near panic, he got back into the truck, locked the door and drove off toward Queens.
The remainder of the journey was smooth and uneventful. New York parkways are dirty and gray and essentially featureless. There wasn’t a great deal of traffic going north and Julio stayed in the right-hand lane, driving slowly and carefully. He took the Interboro Parkway into the Grand Central, an eight-lane highway connecting upper Manhattan, through Queens, to the further reaches of Long Island, and whisked past Flushing Meadow Park and La Guardia Airport, getting off at Hoyt Avenue, the last exit before the Triboro Bridge. Astoria, like Bay Ridge, was active and prosperous, bustling with shoppers, and the supermarket parking lot was crowded. He waited less than five minutes before being approached. The man was tall and moved very quickly, entering the van through Julio’s door. Julio shifted to the helper side of the front seat. He was careful not to look directly into the man’s face. There was no conversation, no “hello” and no “good-bye.” They arrived at the elevated subway stop at 31st Street and Julio got out, heading immediately up the stairway to the train.
Johnny Katanos took the van back home to his friends. He drove slowly at first, wandering through quiet residential neighborhoods, eyes on the image in the rearview mirror. Then he began to turn corners quickly, without signaling, pulling immediately to the curb and snapping the headlights off. Though he could find no sign of pursuit, he persisted. Driving along 21st Street toward Long Island City, he turned into a closed carwash, accelerating through the lot to emerge on 20th Street heading in the opposite direction. He drove across the 59th Street Bridge into Manhattan, turned left onto Second Avenue, then swung quickly back onto the bridge toward Queens. He parked the van in a diner parking lot and went inside for dinner, watching all the time from a booth by the window. He saw nothing.
When he finished eating, he walked back to the van and began to drive straight toward his destination, going just fast enough to force pursuers to expose themselves, but not fast enough to attract the attention of ordinary policemen. He was convinced that they had brought it off, but he would not abandon his natural caution. Disaster, he believed, lay in wait around every corner, yet disaster could be avoided. It was a game he played. He would pretend that he had just that moment come alive, fully grown, and that his continued existence depended on constant vigilance. The minute he relaxed it was all over, and who could tell when he might be resurrected again? He tried to watch every window, every doorway. To be taken by surprise meant certain annihilation.
He drove to the end of Vernon Boulevard, then up onto the service road of the Long Island Expressway, passing the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and Maurice Avenue before turning right at 61st Street. Two blocks past Flushing Avenue, he made another right onto 59th Road, a block of brand-new, three-family homes, some still unoccupied. As he spun the wheel, he pressed the button on a brown, plastic transmitter and the garage door on the third house swung open. With a final, backward look, Johnny slid the van neatly into the garage and closed the door behind him.
This was their place of refuge, a true “safe house.” Its creation had been the topic of long debates in Algeria and, later, in Libya. Muzzafer had been accustomed to operating with the aid of local revolutionary groups, but in the United States they needed to be completely independent, which necessitated their finding a way to live anonymously. In Europe, most neighborhoods have been established for generations, many for centuries, and it would not be possible to move in without attracting attention, but in the constantly shifting neighborhoods of New York City’s outer boroughs, a sense of enduring community is impossible to find. Anonymity is part and parcel of everyday existence.
Muzzafer had used this condition to his own advantage. They had rented apartments in a house at 461-22 Fifty-ninth Road, in Ridgewood, Queens, under three different names. Effie Bloom and Jane Mathews lived on the top floor, girlfriends from Indiana come to study at New York University’s Graduate School of Social Work. John Katanos and Theresa Aviles, husband and wife, moved into the center apartment, Theresa telling the real-estate dealer that her husband was a long-distance trucker while she herself used to work at Citibank before she become pregnant. Muzzafer took the bottom floor, posing as an importer of oriental carpets, Muhammad Malik. It amused him no end to play the part of a Pakistani. Were Americans so unsophisticated as to be unable to tell the difference between an Asian and an Arab? Then he recalled that the British had one term to describe the Indian and the Egyptian. They referred to both as “wogs.”
It was Muzzafer’s habit to begin every meeting with a long story about life in the refugee camps of Palestine, stories which Johnny Katanos found both dull and amusing. Dull because they never varied—the same tale of injustice and deprivation was repeated time after time. Only the name of the characters changed, the characters and the towns and cities. The amusing part was the attention paid by the others and their obvious need to justify their actions. Having watched them in the performance of their duties, Johnny fully believed that they enjoyed what they were doing. Now why, he wondered, can’t they allow themselves to know it? Why do they have to pretend it has something to do with “justice”?
The meetings were rigidly controlled. Heeding the warnings of Hassan Fakhr, Muzzafer had insisted the two couples not associate with each other outside the house, and that even their relationships inside be no more intense than those of ordinary neighbors. Nevertheless, he wanted them to have a strong sense of solidarity and purpose; hence the stories. He could see the enthusiasm in the eyes of the women, Effie Bloom, Jane Mathews and Theresa Aviles, and though he could not read Johnny’s face at all, he was not worried about Johnny losing his desire for action.
And in truth, Johnny had no real interest in this end of the business. The fact that the group was committed to spreading fear throughout New York City and had the means to do so was proof enough that his own aims would be well-served. And just as Muzzafer had no doubt that Johnny Katanos would remain loyal as long as there were projects and the weapons to execute them, Johnny was certain that Muzzafer would continue to increase the intensity of his assault on America until they were caught. He did not, of course, include himself in the “they.” Nor did he exclude Theresa Aviles.
“The problem, as I see it,” Effie began, “is that we don’t have a hell of a lot of anything, so we have to find some way to stretch what we do have. That’s if we want to appear to be what we call ourselves—an army.”
“Exactly,” Muzzafer said. “In fact, in some ways all antipersonnel devices already do that. You have a small core of explosive, surrounded by jagged metal. The metal is easy to come by and increases the damage tenfold.”
Theresa’s fingernails tapped the lace tablecloth absently. “I don’t see any reason why we can’t make antipersonnel devices. We’re not idiots, are we?” She looked from face to face, her shoulders hunched up to her ears, a characteristic gesture. Theresa was a short, wiry woman, very intense and very nervous, who loved to talk of life in the Dominican Republic. Of the small farming communities, the warm winds, the brilliant tropical flowers. She could also speak of the poverty and degradation of a life without money or a real job. In this setting, in New York City, poverty occupied most of her reflections on her homeland. She was absolutely loyal to Muzzafer and totally in love with Johnny Katanos. The utterly distasteful sex in Ronald Chadwick’s house had been Muzzafer’s test for her and for Effie as well. Theresa understood it as a test and was proud to have passed with honors.
“A pipe and a handful of common nails with a couple of firecrackers in the middle. When I was a kid, me and my girlfriend blew up this boy’s doghouse. Not with the dog in it, of course, but when the kid found out who did it, he never bothered us again.” Effie Bloom, tall and rawboned, sat in a gray leather armchair which she’d pulled up to the kitchen table. It was her apartment, hers and Jane’s, and she was very comfortable. “If we had enough pipe and enough nails, we wouldn’t need very much explosive. It would hardly touch our stock.”
“How much?” Muzzafer asked. “How much exactly? How many pounds of C-4 to how many pounds of nails to what length of pipe?” He nodded toward the kitchen where Jane Mathews was arranging mugs of hot coffee on a tray. “Shall we ask the expert?”
“Jane,” Effie called. “Are you coming in or what?”
“Or what,” Jane said, crossing the room to place the tray on the table. As a student of mechanical and chemical engineering, she was expected to answer any question on explosives. “There’s milk and sugar on the side. Does anyone want cookies?”
“We were talking about manufacturing our own antipersonnel devices,” Muzzafer said gently. Upsetting the relationship between Effie and Jane could easily lead to the destruction of his little army and he was careful never to criticize Jane in Effie’s presence.
“I know. I heard you talking. First, you have to consider the diameter of the pipe as well as the length. You have to measure the thickness of the pipe walls, how much explosive pressure they can withstand. Will the pipe be anchored or loose? If it’s anchored and one end is plugged, the energy of the explosion will be focused in a single direction and that’s where you get the most bang for the buck.” She smiled and laid her hand on Effie’s shoulder. “Simple, right? Now all we have to do is find a pipe supermarket and order the plugged and anchored special.”
Muzzafer’s mouth turned upward, a huge grin which only increased the sensitivity of his features. Johnny, watching the Arab closely, asked himself the same question Hassan had asked and answered it with the realization that if he saw Muzzafer on the street, he would swear the man was gay. No other possibility. Johnny flashed back to his early life, the years in juvenile institutions, sometimes for crimes, but more often because no one else would take him. In such a setting, unless he had someone to protect him, Muzzafer would be attacked every day of his life. The fantasy aroused Johnny Katanos and as he reached for his coffee, he let his left hand brush against Muzzafer’s arm, noting that the Arab, though aware of the pressure, did not move his arm away.
“Why don’t you take it, Jane? You and Effie,” Muzzafer said. “Let’s figure to use it in about three weeks. In the meantime, I want Theresa and Johnny to work with me on a little project. It’s a payback for the help we got from Mr. Khadafy. It seems there’s a certain Zionist living in Staten Island who has the ear of the American Defense Department. Our benefactors believe this Zionist played a big part in convincing Reagan to attack Khadafy and his family a couple of years ago. It’s to be a simple assassination and our first public work.” He raised his coffee cup in toast. “To the success of our efforts. May they all be as quick and as neat and as profitable as the demise of Mr. Ronald Jefferson Chadwick.”