A Patriotic Nightmare. Don E. Post

doors to the balcony. His watch showed eight-thirty. Rarely did he sleep so late. Voices and motors could be heard coming from the marina. He called room service and ordered coffee and toast and then took a shower. The waiter arrived just as he finished shaving. He tipped the young boy and then carried his coffee and toast onto the balcony to enjoy the morning. After a few sips he suddenly noticed that The Medallion had disappeared. “That’s strange,” he muttered in disbelief. He jumped up and got his binoculars. Scanning the Mediterranean from north to south it seemed evident that the buyers had left.

      Puzzled, he hastily finished dressing and then went out on the balcony and stood for a few moments trying to collect his thoughts. He decided to take a walk through the village and wait until noon for Ghaleb and his friends to show up. If they didn’t, he would leave. He felt a strange discomfort. Something was wrong. As he carefully studied the room, it hit him. He had not left the binoculars on the dressing table with the lens-caps off last night. He always put everything back in place. He knew that for sure. He looked in his valise to see if he could detect any other disturbance. He kept traveler’s checques strapped to his body and never left anything of value in his room. Maybe some of the hotel staff tried to find something valuable. Maybe they used the binoculars for their own pleasure. Ahh, maybe the Arabs had searched his stuff.

      His plane tickets seemed undisturbed. Yet, his KGB instincts registered alarm. He felt a chill. He strapped his plane ticket to his body with his traveler’s checques, stashed everything else neatly in his valise, then rigged the rest so he could tell if they had been tampered with and left for a walk through the village.

      Returning to his room at eleven-thirty, he checked the valise and found that all the traps seemed intact. Maybe I’m too cautious, he thought. He took his binoculars, stepped out on the balcony and scanned the Marina. He found the yacht anchored closer to shore. The moment he spotted her, the phone rang. Ghaleb’s cheerful voice asked, “How are you this morning?”

      “Fine. You?”

      “Oh, we are fine. We motor down coast and moor in secluded bay. One can’t be too cautious.”

      “Yes, I wondered where you had gone.”

      “Can I come your room and maybe we come to agreement, yeah? Maybe we order something to eat there, yeah?”

      “Yes. You know I’m in room three-forty-eight.” A slight laugh could be heard, then Ghaleb hung up. Yuri realized that he should have brought a de-bugging device. “Stupid,” he said aloud, as he swung his fist in the air. He quickly searched the phone, lamps, table, bed and all other nooks and crannies that make nice homes for bugs. Nothing.

      Twenty minutes later Ghaleb knocked on the door. Yuri ordered a light lunch for the two as they settled down to talk business at the small corner table. In a quiet whisper Ghaleb said, “Yuri, we want first order for fifty million U.S. dollars in arms. Give banking information and we can put one million in advance.” Yuri pulled out a piece of paper with the company letterhead, indicating the Swiss bank, banker, account number and information for wire transfers. Ghaleb slid the paper into a manila folder and stuffed it into his briefcase, then added, “If this shipment goes well, we will buy about one hundred million dollars more over the next few months.”

      Yuri nodded. “Good, we will be happy to help you.”

      “In addition to arms you show us, we want three-thousand blast and three-thousand fragmentation land-mines,” Ghaleb said. “The frags can be variety of regular trip-wire, above ground, and boundary and directional type. Let us know what you have. And can you get us Italian plastic mines?”

      “I’ll send you list of what we have. I don’t know if we can get Italian mines, but I’ll let you know. Since the Americans went to war against you people it is difficult to get armaments like we use to. Send the rest of the order to me in Marseille,” Yuri said matter-of-factly. “We will confirm receipt of funds. You must arrange to have someone inspect the cargo at the warehouse in Odessa. They can watch them loaded. We will pay the expenses of four of your inspectors while in Odessa. We can also arrange someone with us who speaks Arabic, if you need. Upon loading, but before the ship leaves the harbor, we will expect notice that the rest of the funds have been sent to our Swiss account. Is all acceptable?”

      “Yes, agreeable,” Ghaleb said with a nod of his head. Then he rose and shook Yuri’s hand. “We look forward to business with you. Good-bye.”

      Yuri, relieved that the Arab had left and elated over the deal, walked to the balcony and watched as Ghaleb, joined by two of the bodyguards from the boat, walked down to the marina, climbed into the small motorboat and sped toward The Medallion. Why are the Mideasterners always looking back at the terrible times? he wondered. They take revenge, then those people take revenge and the killing never ends. He remembered how relieved he had been when his country pulled out of Afghanistan. What a nightmare. And now he’s selling arms to those he once fought against and whose aim is to bring down the West. The Americans hadn’t helped themselves by getting impatient with the diplomatic path. I guess it’s their instant gratification culture. Now every Arab is a potential killer. Ah well, this is a dirty business, but someone has to provide the weapons. Screw them all!

      Yuri grabbed his valise, checked out and headed back to Tunis to catch his flight home. As he flew out over the blue Mediterranean for the short hop to Marseille, he gazed out at the beauty of the area and thought how easily arms sold in this world. But he couldn’t shake the uncomfortable feeling that something seemed amiss.

      In a modest room on the third floor of the U.S. Embassy at 144 Avenue de la Liberte, in Tunis, CIA agent and Paris station chief, Mark Easton, encrypted a message about Yuri Tavanovich’s arms sale for his colleagues in Langley, Virginia. The CIA’s French counterpart had been monitoring Yuri’s construction firm and Russian staff in Marseille since opening day. The French and the CIA knew Yuri’s group was selling Russian arms to terrorist organizations, but neither the arms nor the funds ended up in France so the French had not been able to take legal action. The French did the surveillance and the CIA chased the guns and money. Yuri’s group had been strangely silent since the World Trade Center bombing. The Americans were persuaded that their demonstration of power in Iraq had silenced them for good. The French had notified the U.S. Embassy in Paris the night Ghaleb called Yuri Tavanovich’s home and asked to meet in Tunisia. Alarmed, Mark had immediately hopped a French military flight to Tunis and picked up Yuri’s trail as he left the airport terminal the next morning.

      Mark had observed Yuri checking in at the El Hana Palace Hotel and he had checked in at the nearby Diar El Andaloui hotel, and then driven to Yuri’s hotel.

      He had a cup of coffee in the main dining room, and then roamed the hotel grounds to gain familiarity with the environment. He noticed the hotel manager eyeing him suspiciously. Finally the manager approached him to see if he could help with anything. Mark explained that he needed a site for a small convention of his company’s salesmen and was deeply enchanted with his fine hotel. Mark handed the man a business card presenting himself as a marketing consultant to a leading French cosmetics firm.

      At this point, the manager lost his suspicious edge and became eager to go over every detail of his hotel’s design, pointing out all the nooks and crannies of the property. Mark took detailed notes. During the course of the conversation Mark mentioned that he had planned to meet a colleague there, but he hadn’t shown up. Had any European types checked in lately? The manager walked back to the front desk and asked the clerk the name of the European who had checked in earlier. The clerk looked at his computer screen and said, “The man is Russian because his name is “Ta-van-o-veetch.”

      “No, that’s not my friend. But is that man middle age, thinning black hair, about five feet ten inches?”

      The clerk and manager looked at each other, shrugged their shoulders, held out their arms, palms up and with a tilt of the head to one side said, “No, sorry, this man did not look like that.”

      “He seemed a strong and stout man, the manager said. “He had reddish cheeks like the people in Scandinavia or Russia. His brown hair had fallen out a lot. How do you say…uhh.”

      “Balding?”