Black Market

“Vets Five. Green Band is now affirmative. I will repeat-Green Band is now affirmative… Blow it all up… and God help us all.”

3

Brooklyn

“Yougotaquarter, sir? Please! It's real cold out here, sir. You got two bits?… Awhh, thank you. Thanks a lot, sir. You just saved my life.”

Around seven-thirty that evening, on Brooklyn 's Atlantic Avenue, a familiar bag man called Crusader Rabbit was expertly soliciting loose change and cigarettes. The bag man begged while he sat huddled like a pile of soiled rags against the crumbling red brick facade of the Atlantic House Yemen and Middle East restaurant. The money came to him as if he were a magnet.

After a successful hit, forty-eight cents from a trendy-looking Brooklyn Heights teacher type and his date, the street bum allowed himself a short pull on a dwindling halfpint of Four Roses.

Drinking while begging change was counterproductive, he knew, but sometimes necessary against the raw cold wintertime. Besides, it was his image.

The deep slack cough that followed the sip of whiskey sounded convincingly tubercular. The bag man's lips, bloated and pale, were corpse white and cracked, and they looked as if they'd bled recently.

For this year's winter wardrobe, he'd carefully selected a sleeveless navy parka over several layers of assorted, colored lumberman's shirts. He'd picked out open-toed high-topped black sneakers, basketball player snow bird socks, and painter's pants that were now thickly caked with mud, vomit, and spit.

The tourists, at least, seemed to love him. Sometimes they snapped his picture to bring home as an example of New York City 's famed squalor and heartlessness. He enjoyed posing. Asked them for a buck or whatever the traffic would bear. He'd hold his two puffy shopping bags and smile extra pathetically for the camera. Pay the cashier, sport.

Now, through gummy, half-closed eyes, Crusader Rabbit stealthily watched the usual early evening promenade along Atlantic Avenue 's Middle Eastern restaurant row.

It was a constant, day-in day-out noisy bazaar here: transplanted rag-headed Arabs, college assholes, Brooklyn professionals who came to eat ethnic. In the distance there was always the clickety-clack of the subway.

A troop of counter kids from McDonald's was passing by Crusader Rabbit, walking home from work. Two chunky black girls and a ski

“Hey, McDonald's. Whopper beat the Big Mac. Real tough break. Gotta quarter? Something for some McCoffee?” Crusader coughed and wheezed at the passing trio of teens.

The kids looked offended; then they all laughed together in a high-pitched chorus. “Who asked you, aqualung? You old geek sheet-head. Kick your ass.”

The kids continued merrily on. Rude little bastards when Ronald McDonald wasn't watching over their act.

If any of the passersby had looked closer, they might have noticed certain visual inconsistencies about the bag man called Crusader Rabbit. For one thing, he had impressive muscle tone for a sedentary street bum. His shoulders were unusually broad, and his legs and arms were as thick as tree limbs.

Even more unusual were his eyes, which were almost always intently focused. They sca

There was also the small matter of the quality of the dirt and dust thickly caked on his ankles, on his exposed toes. It was all a little too perfect. It was almost as if it might actually be black Kiwi shoe polish-shoe polish carefully applied to look like dirt.

The conclusion was obvious after a careful and close look at the street bum. Crusader Rabbit was some kind of undercover New York cop on a stakeout…

Which Crusader Rabbit truly was.

His real name was Archer Carroll, and he was currently the chief terrorist deterrent in the United States. He had been on a stakeout for five weeks, with no end in sight.

Meanwhile, across the busy Brooklyn street, inside the Sinbad Star restaurant, two Iraqi men in their early thirties were sampling what they believed to be the finest Middle Eastern cooking available in New York City. They were the objects of Arch Carroll's long and painful stakeout.

The Iraqi men had purposely chosen a rear alcove of the small, cozy restaurant, where they noisily slurped thick carob bean soup. They gobbled up mint-flecked tabbouleh and cream-colored hummus. They eagerly munched greasy mixtures of raisins, pine nuts, lamb, Moroccan olives, their favorite things to eat in the world.

As they savored the delectable food, Wadih and Anton Rashid were also immensely enjoying their official American immunity from criminal prosecution and harassment, something guaranteed them by the FBI. On the strictest orders from Washington, the two brothers, admitted Third World terrorists, were to be treated like foreign diplomats on UN duty in New York. In return, three marines, convicted “spies,” were soon to be released from a Lebanese jail.

New York and federal police authorities were permitted to act against the Rashid brothers only if the Black September killers actually moved to endanger property or life in the United States. These, of course, were two of their favorite avocations in past residences: Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Paris, Beirut, and most recently London, where they had coldbloodedly murdered three young women, college-age daughters of Lebanese politicians, in a Chelsea sweetshop.

Back out on Atlantic Avenue, Arch Carroll shivered unhappily in the probing, icy-cold fingers of the rising night wind.

At times like these Carroll wondered why it was that a reasonably intelligent thirty-five-year-old man, someone with decent enough prospects, someone with a law degree, could regularly be working sixty- to seventy-hour weeks, invariably eating stone-cold pizza and drinking Pepsi-Cola for di

Was it perhaps because his father and two uncles had been pavement-pounding city cops?

Was it because his Mickey Fi

Or did it have to do with incomprehensible things he'd seen a decade and a half ago in Vietnam?

Maybe he just wasn't a reasonable, intelligent man, as he'd somehow always presumed. Maybe, if you got right down to it, there was some kind of obvious short circuit in the wires of the old brain, some form of synaptic fuck-up. After all, would a really bright guy with all of his marbles be standing here freezing his dick off like this?

As Arch Carroll pondered the tangible mistakes of his life, his full attention began to wander. For several minutes at a clip he'd stare at his sadly wiggling toes, at the equally fascinating burning ember of his cigarette, at almost anything mildly distracting.

Five-week-long stakeouts weren't exactly recommended for their entertainment value. That was exactly how long he'd been watching Anton and Wadih Rashid, ever since the State Department had let them come into New York for their sabbatical.

Suddenly, Carroll's attention snapped back.

“What the…” he mumbled as he stared down the congested street. Is that who it looks like? he asked himself. Can't be… I think it is… but it can't be.

Carroll had noticed a ski

Carroll squinted his eyes for a better look at the approaching figure.

He just couldn't believe it!

He stared down the street, his eyes smarting from the bite of the wind. He had to make sure.