The Danger Within

by E. L. Pini

  A loud beep nipped G’s rookie philosophical bullshit in the bud. It was Ami’s pager. He apologized and got up to make the call, only to speak a single “okay” into the phone on his way out of the room before spinning around to face the rest of us like a magician waiting for applause.

  “If you ask me”—he pulled out the rabbit— “we have confirmation that our Gaza Hamas buddies are waiting on an SA300 missile battery.”

  G whistled, a low, appreciative sound. “The SA300 is classified as a tie-breaker. It’s the most effective operative antiaircraft system the Russians have. We should attack immediately, before it’s operational.”

  He presented a mobile missile system on the screen and added, “You’re already familiar with our OB3. Four F-16Is to bomb the convoy, four more for cover, one with electronic countermeasures—and just in case, there’ll be two fuel tankers and two 6694 rescue choppers in the vicinity.” He glanced at his wristwatch. “If there are no questions, I really need to fly. Thank you.”

  “Good luck, if we don’t see you before then,” I added, attempting to fill the void of Froyke’s absence. G smiled, gave me a two-finger salute, and left.

  I really would’ve liked to know how Ami, that sly fox, had managed to confirm the Gaza shipment at precisely the right moment. I caught his attention and signaled him to meet me outside so we could talk, but then I got bogged down by the group of joking young intelligence and air force officers, and Tamir, whose every glance made me think of Eran. I remembered how pleased I had been when he was summoned to interview for Unit 8200 before he was drafted, and how he’d instead forced Ya’ara and me to sign the form permitting him to join a combat unit despite being an only child. Ya’ara wouldn’t hear of it, at first—eventually, she’d conceded. “He’s a big boy,” I’d told her. “Practically a man. He knows what he wants.” Today he’s a big dead boy. My thoughts spun to Anna. Another big girl, who is still alive. What’ll happen to her after the convoy is destroyed and they get around to damage control? I have to extract her, as soon as possible. This despite the fact that my paranoia had no actual, concrete justification. No problems had arisen thus far. On the contrary—her relationship with Imad seemed to grow closer by the day. Anna, sexy and uninhibited, with the beauty of a Greek goddess, mostly preferred women, but left a sliver of hope for the occasional male. Her innate madness only made me want her more. On top of all that, she came from the perfect family. Her grandfather was the SS Colonel von Stroop. Her aunt, “Tante Hannah,” had been known to crush the occasional head of a Jewish baby against the wall. Her father was a multimillionaire who mostly funded anarchist organizations. Her mother was killed in a Baader-Meinhof street fight, after firing at two policemen while attempting to escape a robbery of a Deutsche Bank in a town near Bremen.

  Anna, who wanted more than anything to atone for her insane legacy, had volunteered with Doctors Without Borders and, out of all of the possible godforsaken shitholes, landed in the Balata refugee camp near Nablus. The same refugee camp where her mother and her buddies from the Baader-Meinhof Group had gone to study the art of intelligence gathering, urban warfare and sabotage. Her presence in Balata was the only reason we’d met, and I sometimes wondered how coincidental that encounter had actually been.

  “The usual?” Ami asked with a sort of fatherly patience, pulling me out of the fog of self-doubt and into an equally cloudy reality.

  “Affirmative,” I replied. “But to sum up, Froyke is convinced that the Rome bombing was aimed at us.”

  Ami started the jeep. “What about you?”

  “Nope. Seemed more like a pilot to me. It started in Rome, but it won’t end there.”

  “He usually listens to you.”

  I nodded, adding, “He said it doesn’t matter, they killed three good Jewish families and that pisses him off.”

  “Understandable,” said Ami. “Where was he today? Leg thing again?”

  “Tests. He’s at Hadassah Hospital. Bella says it doesn’t look good. And it ain’t just his leg.”

  “Kishon cancer5?”

  “I really hope not,” I said, thinking someone should really some up with a combat doctrine for the war on cancer.

  Eran, Ya’ara, and now Froyke? Am I on some heavenly shit list?

  7.

  Babai greeted us with a flurry of ahlans and pats on the back. I secretly hoped that this genial Palestinian had no idea what Ami and I did for a living. Ami assured me that we were good.

  We were seated at our usual table, a fair distance from the rest, with a full view to the tall, noisily crashing waves of the Mediterranean. I’ve always loved the smell of the sea, and I closed my eyes, indulging in it. I felt it widening my nostrils, letting more oxygen into my system.

  A young waiter, just barely a teenager, set the table with thirteen small appetizer plates, a bottle of El Namroud arak, two glasses and ice. We both ordered deep-fried red mullets. I squeezed half a lemon over the fish and sprinkled the chopped parsley, and then Ami switched our plates.

  “Freeloader,” I grumbled at him and squeezed the second half of the lemon.

  “Really squeezing that lemon for all it’s got,” he answered with a mouthful of fish. “A lot of that going around.”

  We clinked our first glasses of arak.

  “Now talk,” I said.

  Ami glanced around and pulled his chair closer to the table.

  “My guy from Gaza, the one who confirmed the intel on the SA300s? He has a cousin, abu Seif, lives up in Ghajar. Works for me too. He sells drugs to a Hezbollah gang. I turn a blind eye, which really pisses the blues off—not that there’s much they can do about it—and get pretty decent coverage, sometimes more than decent. What you might actually give a shit about, if you ask me, is the word I just got from two different sources, the Gaza guy and his cousin up north. According to them, this old fuck called Qawasameh, a clan elder who lives in Balata, recently received a grant of… wait for it… thirty thousand dollars from the Iranians.”

  Ami refilled our glasses and downed his immediately, apparently waiting for my applause. But I was battling an internal nightmare scenario, one in which Ami’s snitch reports back to the bad guys that the Israelis had intel on a convoy about to leave Shabwah, and their source… was Anna.

  I refused to imagine the rest. The arak bottle had been completely neutralized by this point. Ami flipped it over and tapped the bottom. No arak came, but the boy came running with a new bottle and a plate of fish, which he placed at the center of the table.

  “Sargo, red mullet, White Steenbras, baby mackerel. On the house. T’fadalu, enjoy.”

  “Shukran, thank you.”

  “Afwan.”

  The arak draped over my senses like a soft blanket. Thirty thousand dollars from the Iranians could mean only one thing. The recipient had a son who had become a shahid—a martyr. The Iranians nurture the shahids, compensate them for the property destroyed by the IDF, and pay around twenty grand to the family of any shahid who accomplishes a quality bombing. Thirty grand, that’s about the highest they’ll go—reserved only for the truly spectacular.

  “Have you seen any serious shahid action lately?” I inquired.

  Ami shook his head. “Nope. Which is why I’m telling you.”

  We each retreated into ourselves. This was how our meetings usually ended. Both Ami and I carried our fair share of baggage.

  “Uncle Ami” was a substitute father to Eran whenever I was away on some bullshit mission that took longer than expected. And I’d played guardian angel to Tikva, Ami’s old lady, making sure that she had a steady supply of her fabled Keytruda—impossible to get in Israel—until it was no longer needed. The Big C had defeated her eventually, and in many ways him as well.

  “And if you ask me,” he said, “this Qawasameh might be linked to your thing. But I’m just guessing here. Anyway, I’ll look into the Iranian grant, and if it’s
what I think it is, we’ll have to look into accounts in Italy, Saudi Arabia, France… fuck me, everywhere.”

  We kept drinking, and afterwards Ami offered in utter seriousness to drop me off at Agur, but, due to the arak and the time, he was forced to leave me at the government central facility in Tel Aviv, where I’d left the jeep earlier.

  “Sure you’re okay to drive?”

  “If you are, so am I,” I replied, but I didn’t feel as confident as I knew I sounded. Still, I climbed into the jeep and headed home.

  8.

  The second bottle of arak was precisely one bottle too many. I reluctantly abstained from the enjoyable twists and calm agricultural landscape of Route 383, instead choosing the dull efficiency of Highway 1. I was blinded by the headlights of approaching vehicles, forced to shield my eyes and thus block a significant portion of the road. I’m not entirely certain, but I believe my eyes closed at least once, and by the time I’d opened them, I had to break left in a panic to return to the road.

  I got home just in time for the final newscast of the day, which mostly involved the Rome bombing and interviews with the victims’ families, neighbors and colleagues. The three pensioners worked eight-hour shifts, sometimes nights, crouching over their lathes and drills and white-hot welding machines, and when they’d finally taken the single holiday they could afford, some fuck-hole went and murdered them. It’s different when the victims have names and faces, children and grandchildren. I promised them, and myself, and mostly Froyke, that I would find said fuck-hole and personally destroy him. Hebrew labor, locally sourced.

  I turned the TV off and tried to focus. The convoy, I thought, when does the convoy leave? According to Anna’s latest estimate, the threatening procession of “tie-breaker” antiair missiles that G had been so worried about left in twenty-four hours. The photos from the NSA satellite also pointed to unusual activity in the camp. Our satellite was apparently in the satellite garage for some periodic maintenance.

  How would I extract Anna without raising Imad’s suspicions, and without exposing her to our American comrades? And what about Froyke, who was still in the hospital? “It ain’t just his leg this time,” Bella had said. Then what the hell was it? And how would I locate and capture the Rome bombers, who hadn’t bothered to leave as much as a crumb of forensic evidence?

  It was as though an electron gun was implanted in my brain, accelerating thought particles to bounce around and crash into my skull. I got up from the couch, placed my head under the faucet in the shower, let the water run over my face and neck. When I took my head out of the water, I realized I had forgotten to bring a towel, and instead shook my head to spray off the droplets like a dog drying off from sea. Garibaldi stared at me curiously, and I thought I noticed a forgiving smile on his large face. Adolf was his usual apathetic self.

  Nir, who used to serve under me back in The Unit before becoming chief dog handler in the Oketz canine unit, had given me Adolf after his handler had been killed at the Nablus Kasbah. Adolf had refused any attempt to assign him a new handler and had eventually ended up with me.

  “He can be catatonic, sometimes. A perfect match,” said Nir.

  “Why Adolf?” I inquired. “After the late Mister H?”

  Nir softly patted the dog’s head, but Adolf froze in response, standing at stiff attention.

  “There you have it. He’s exceptionally obedient, but extremely ruthless when attacking. So, yeah, we named him after Herr H.”

  Suddenly I remembered that I hadn’t weeded around Eran’s grave yet. My flight was scheduled to leave tomorrow afternoon, and it wasn’t like I was getting any sleep tonight anyway—I’d sleep on the flight. In that case, I had time. Just needed to clear my head a bit. I arranged my tasks in my Google calendar, in order of urgency:

  Weed and clean around the tombstone.

  Check on Froyke.

  Talk to Nora and Albert. I need them to plot the course of the suicide bomber, and that of the explosives. Who is the supplier?

  Plan Anna’s extraction. This would require the director’s approval. This could probably wait because it wasn’t that urgent—unless… I tried to put the thought away, but it bounced back with a vengeance. What if it became necessary to extract her immediately? Froyke… Froyke had to get better.

  Be patient. At least until Ami found out why the old man from Balata had gotten his Iranian grant. Like Ami, I also had the vague feeling that this was somehow related to the Rome bombing.

  I went to the shed and took out a large green garbage can, gardening tools and powerful quartz lighting. I pulled out the nut grass that had taken root around the grave—you have to take out the tuber, or it grows back. I pruned Eran’s grapevine and drastically reduced the number of grape clusters, to deepen the flavor. That was how Eran and I liked our wine. I washed the grave and the black basalt headstone, which Froyke and Ami had transported from Ramat Hagolan in The Unit’s REO truck. I embraced the cold stone.

  Time doesn’t heal. It’s really quite the opposite. The pain of the grief, of missing him, grew sharper and cut deeper with every passing day. I hugged the rock as hard as I could, but the pain wouldn’t stop. Eran’s face was lost in a haze, like the pixelated blurs that hide the faces of anonymous sources on TV, and I couldn’t reach him—sometimes it felt like the pain just grew sharper with time while the image of Eran faded.

  I’d recently read, in Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood, the following sentence: “Death in that place was not a decisive element that brought life to an end… but one of many elements comprising life.” To me, it seemed to be the other way around—Eran’s life had been a brief segment, lost and forgotten within a long death. I loved him so much. My baby… those chubby legs and the sweet, soft baby smell that I’d inhaled obsessively, that intoxicating scent that clung to him, or to me at least, until he’d left me. These days, I can no longer recall the smell. Garibaldi, who’d sat in silent observation up until this point, got up and licked my face, attempting to comfort me.

  “Come,” I said, and the two beasts escorted me to the bedroom. I collapsed on the bed and fell asleep fully clothed.

  9.

  At 6 a.m., I dove into the pool and swam two miles in sixty minutes, as per the Ironman training regimen recommended by the Mossad trainer.

  After that I drove to Hadassah Hospital. I blatantly ignored the protesting security guard at the entrance to the oncology department and entered the room. The sharp smell of acetone hung in the air, one I’d recognized by this point as the stench of chemo, mixing with the smell of piss and sweat and whatever they put in the air to mask the disinfectants and the other medicinal smells. They combined to create a silent, powerful despair. The smell of surrender.

  I noticed Froyke’s prosthesis tossed on the floor by the bed when I entered the room. I picked it up and leaned it against the wall. As slowly as humanly possible, I raised my eyes and looked at him. Froyke was hooked up to a terrifying assortment of equipment, tubes and electrodes, which gave him a vaguely Transformer-like quality. I wasn’t sure if he was breathing on his own spontaneously or on a respirator, if his condition was stable or steady or whatever goddamn expression they use, which all mean the same thing—my friend is fucked. Another one bites the dust.

  My father was killed in ’73, the Yom Kippur War, at the battle of the Chinese Farm. I was born after he died, knowing him only as a gravestone. Mom would visit him every Friday and return crying and muttering, introducing me for the first time to that odd phrase—“what I feared has come upon me.” Job had managed to fuck with my head twice already with this bleak decree and seemed to be building toward a third.

  I leaned down, bringing my head near Froyke’s nose. He was breathing. When I placed a hand on his damp forehead, a pleasant voice from somewhere behind me exclaimed, “Excuse me!”

  I turned to face a smiling, visibly amiable young woman, quite pretty, in a white lab co
at. As I attempted to guess if she was a student or a girl scout volunteer, she held out her hand. “Verbin.”

  “And how is this information relevant to me?” I replied, fully intending to get out of there as soon as possible. But something about her kept me there.

  “Are you his son?” she asked, with a glint of hope.

  “Negative,” I said. “A friend. I’ll be on my way. Good morning, Miss…” I read the name tag on her chest. “Doctor Verbin? Really? A doctor already?”

  “Negative.” She smiled. “Spare costume left over from Purim6.”

  She radiated warmth like sunlight on a cold day. I was fascinated.

  “Ehrlich!” A hoarse whisper rose from Froyke’s bed. His lids rose heavily, and he nodded me over, a slight, nearly imperceptible motion. I poured water into a cup, but he shook his head. I lowered my ear to his lips.

  “You catch those schmucks yet?”

  I stroked his forehead and politely signaled for the pretty doctor to piss off. She whispered something in the security guard’s ear and they both left the room. I have those rude moments sometimes.

  “Not yet,” I whispered. I found a handkerchief and gently wiped the sweat from his brow. I told him about the imminent departure of the convoy and my fears regarding Anna. He waved them away and sank back into his pillow. I realized it was time for me to go. I considered finding the pretty doctor and apologizing—she didn’t deserve my attitude.

  I went out into the hall. She was nowhere to be seen. I sent myself a reminder—“Verbin. Froyke’s doctor”—and lumbered away from there. I hate hospitals, and I especially loathe the idea of a cancerized Froyke, plugged into tubes and respirators and smelling of acetone and despair. Eran, Ya’ara and Froyke were the people I’d loved most in this world. After Eran was killed, Ya’ara had disappeared, evaporated into thin air. I’d tried to hold on to her as best I could, tried to convince her to make a brother for Eran. She’d just smiled her sad smile, and after that it was only a hologram of her floating around the house, tall and barefooted as I loved her most, in a thin floral Bavarian summer dress, a thick blond braid and a rectangular men’s watch on her thin, sculpted wrist. Until the day I brought Eran back, with his slab of black basalt. Bella had told me then that Ya’ara stayed only to look after me until Eran got there, and only then allowed herself to return to the Bavarian skies. I wondered if the Bavarian angels called her Ya’ara or Forest7.