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Improvised Sea Passage to Beirut, for a Price
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"We do this thing for escaped prisoners," he said confidently. He would leave it to us to persuade the Lebanese captain that we were not criminals, convicts or drug runners.
"Like a James Bond film," Assiotis said, his dry wit giving way to a rare smile.
Williams, who had made a similar journey in 1982, after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, offered a retort. "Without the women," he said.
The plan was in place until Assiotis called Captain Michel, the Lebanese end of the bargain. Captain Michel deemed it too risky, or perhaps our budgets too meager.
The most generous description of what followed might be persistence. To an outsider, it would have seemed a petulant display of deluded obstinacy. Calls were made, a little desperately -- to the Lebanese tourism minister, two advisers, the Lebanese ambassador in Cyprus, the Cypriot government spokesman, the deputy to the Lebanese transportation minister and the transportation minister himself. In turn, they made more calls, trying to earn us an exception to leave officially. A Cypriot policeman who looked uncannily like Cheech Marin was subjected to abject groveling. Appeals to a common God followed.
And at 11:30 p.m., an anonymous call came. We could leave.
Assiotis was woken up. In the six hours since we had talked, the price of passage had almost doubled, to an exorbitant 1,400 euros, or nearly $2,200, the calculation of risk never clear.
"I don't suppose that's for the two of us," Williams asked. It wasn't.
By 5 a.m., we were on the boat, the gleaming Azimuth 75. And by 10 a.m., we were at a yacht club in a Beirut suburb. A dozen worried passengers waited to depart, as a deckhand treated us to Turkish coffee and, of course, a requisite cigarette.
"Breakfast," Williams said, satisfied.
