The journey lasted two hours. The first hour was on a smooth road, then the truck made a left turn on to what was obviously a dirt road. It slowed down by about half and lurched and bumped along so that Mirek had to hold on tightly. His backside was getting sore when they finally came to a stop. He heard voices in Arabic and then the flap was opened and he jumped down.
His first impression was that he was in a concentration camp. The truck had pulled into a compound surrounded by high wire fences topped by floodlights. Their glare lit the place like the noonday sun. To his right was a long, modern concrete building. To the left, three rows of wooden prefab huts that looked as if they had been there a very long time.
The Arab motioned and led him to a door in the concrete building. He opened it, put his head through, said something in Arabic and then ushered Mirek in and closed the door behind him.
It was a Spartan office. There was one desk, a chair behind it and a chair in front. A tall, wide man was sitting in the chair behind. He had blond, crewcut hair above a face that had travelled long and sometimes painfully. He was in his late forties. Next to him on a small low table was a radio set. He was dressed in faded army fatigues, again without insignia. He was reading a slip of paper. Without looking up he said in American-accented German:
‘This says you are fluent in German. You’re to get the Grade “A” course and Grade “A” accommodation.’ He looked up with a grin. It didn’t reach the slate-blue eyes. ‘That means you get a room to yourself and a lot of personal instruction.’
He pushed himself to his feet and held out his hand. ‘Werner, I’m Frank. I should say that I hope you’ll enjoy yourself here, but I know you won’t.’
They shook hands. Mirek winced from the pressure and tried to apply it back. It was like gripping a piece of mahogany.
‘Have you had dinner?’
Mirek shook his head. Frank looked at his watch and gestured at the vacant chair.
‘OK, sit down. We’ll just go through a couple of formalities and then go over to the canteen. Have you had a long journey?’ ‘Very long,’ Mirek answered, sitting down. ‘You might say months, and none of it comfortable, especially the last few days.’
Frank arranged his features into an expression that sought to convey sympathy. He chuckled and said, ‘Well, this isn’t the Hilton but like I said you’re on the Grade “A” course. Your people must be loaded. The food is good. I saw to that myself when I arrived last year. You just can’t train people on lousy food. Now to business.’ A hard tone crept into his voice. ‘This is not a political or ideological camp so there are no lectures of that nature. Nor is there any discussion. None, you understand? Discussion is taboo.’ He was looking hard at Mirek, who nodded firmly.
‘Second: no personal questions. Right now there are twenty-five trainees here. From all over. Like you, they’ve been given a single name. That’s all to be known about them. In a set-up like this we have to guard against infiltration. Our lives depend on that. It’s been tried twice since I’ve been here. So anyone asking personal questions gets punished . . . and Werner, the only punishment here is death . . . understand?’
‘Is that what happened to them?’
Frank’s lips grinned again. ‘Yes, eventually. One was French — SDECE. The other German - BND. We did you people a favour . . . You’re gonna be here thirty days. It’s not long though it will seem at times like thirty years. There’ll be no days off. When you enter here you enter our discipline. You do what the instructors tell you. Every tiny thing they tell you. You will leave here a highly trained assassin or you won’t leave at all. Got it?’
‘Got it!’
Mirek was fit from a lifetime of habit and discipline. The SB had trained him to shoot accurately with a rifle and hand gun. They had trained him in unarmed combat.
After two days in what was called camp ‘Ibn Awad’ he felt nothing but a novice.
The fitness instructor was a woman. An Arab terrorist called Leila; named, he assumed, after her illustrious predecessor. She had a severe, attractive face and a lithe body. At their first meeting she asked him how fit he was and he replied with masculine pride, ‘Very.’ An hour later his pride was shattered. She did every exercise with him. At the end, while he lay with his cheek against the hot sand gasping for breath, she had only a faint sheen of sweat on her upper lip.
‘You will be fit,’ she said. ‘In thirty days you will.’
The firearms instructor was a small saturnine Portuguese in his fifties. His first question was: ‘Can you shoot straight?’
‘Yes, I’ve been trained.’
‘At still targets?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then forget every single thing you’ve learned.’
The camp boasted a very sophisticated animated range. Painted metal figures rose and sank, moved left and right and sped forward and back. They were painted to resemble Israeli soldiers, male and female, their faces hideous caricatures of Jewish features. The Portuguese gave Mirek a Heckler & Koch VP70. ‘There are twelve rounds in the magazine. You get a point for every hit.’
Mirek got one point. He couldn’t believe it. The instructor was sanguine. He picked up half a dozen stones, walked away a few paces, turned and said sharply, ‘Catch.’ One by one he rapidly tossed the stones towards Mirek. To his left, to his right, high and low. Mirek caught them all. The Portuguese walked back, stood squarely in front of him and held out his hands, palms up.
‘Put your hands on my hands.’
Mirek did so. The instructor’s hands were small, the fingers dry. The tip of one little finger was missing.
‘You may have played this game as a boy. I try to slap the top of one or both of your hands. The moment I move, you pull your hands away.’
Mirek had played it as a boy - and been good. They took turns at it. After ten minutes the tops of Mirek’s hands were red and stinging. He had only laid half a finger on the Portuguese.
Without a word the little instructor picked up a stick and drew the letter ‘S’ about forty feet long on the sand. He pointed.
‘I want you to walk down that line rapidly. Try to keep both feet on it.’
Mirek asked, ‘What’s this got to do with shooting?’
‘Everything. Do it.’
He did quite well.
‘Now back. This time, at a trot.’
Again he did well. The instructor drew a very straight line about fifty feet long.
‘Stand at the end.’
Mirek stood at the end.
‘Look at that line closely. Then close your eyes and walk down it slowly.’
Mirek did so. He walked until the instructor called, ‘OK.’ He turned and looked back. He had strayed very slightly to the left. He looked at the instructor. He was nodding in satisfaction.
‘Werner, you have co-ordination, timing and balance. I will teach you how to combine that so you are able to shoot a man at ten yards, a hundred yards or a thousand yards. Shoot him and kill him.’
Frank was the instructor for unarmed combat and knife fighting. The camp had a well-equipped gym. They stood facing each other across a broad mat.
‘What do you know about this sort of thing?’
‘I’ve done a little judo and some karate.’
Frank grinned. ‘Forget all that crap. That stuff is for ego and exhibitions. I’m going to teach you how to kill or maim a man in half a second. To maim is easy: eyes, throat or testicles. To kill is a bit more complicated but Cavalho tells me you’re fast and well balanced so you’ll learn. Hold out your hands.’
Mirek raised his arms.
‘Spread your fingers.’
Mirek spread his fingers.
Slowly Frank touched each of them in turn and counted to ten.
‘Those are your ten primary weapons.’ He pointed at Mirek’s feet. ‘Those are your two secondary weapons.’
‘What about the outer edges of my hands?’ asked Mirek.
Frank shook his head in disgust. ‘I told you to forget
that karate crap. Look.’ He moved closer and grasped Mirek’s right wrist and extended his arm. He ran a finger down the arm to a point opposite the palm and bent the elbow slightly. ‘The karate chop. In your case the point of impact is about two feet from your shoulder.’ He pulled the arm straight and stiff. ‘Now the tips of your fingers are about nine inches further forward. It’s like boxing. The longer you reach, the better. I’ll tell you a fact, Werner. No black belt karate would have ever laid a finger on Mohammed Ali.’
He took Mirek over to a long table. On it was a row of small buckets filled with coarse sand. Next to them was a row of springed finger exercisers. Frank pulled a bucket towards him, stiffened the fingers of both hands and plunged them one after the other deep into the sand. He did it rhythmically for about a minute and said, ‘Take one to your room. Do this for half an hour in the mornings and at night.’
He shook the sand from his hands and pointed at the exercisers. ‘They’re different strengths. Choose one that you can just squeeze closed. Do the same thing with that. Every few days move up to a more powerful spring.’
He took both of Mirek’s hands in his and studied them. Then he raised his head, looked him in the eyes and said with emphasis, ‘They’re good fingers. Do what I tell you and in a month you’ll have ten good weapons.’
He dropped the hands and pointed to Mirek’s shoes. ‘On a mission, in fact all the time, wear hard shoes. Preferably with steel inside the toe caps. Buy ordinary shoes a size too large and give them to a cobbler. He’ll put the steel in.’
They moved on to knives. There was a selection on the table. Hunting knives, flick knives, spring knives, a Bowie knife, ordinary kitchen knives and, next to them, a stubby felt-tipped marker pen. Frank gestured at them with a disdainful sweep of a hand. ‘If you’re in a situation where it’s dangerous to carry a concealed hand gun then it’s equally dangerous to carry an obvious weapon, including these. This, though, is different.’
He picked up the marker pen, uncapped it and drew a broad blue line on the table top. ‘Innocuous, no?’ Suddenly he turned. Mirek heard a click and jumped back at the sharp pinpoint of pain on his chest. He looked down. There was a splodge of blue ink on his fatigues. Frank laughed and held up the pen. It still had its felt tip but now it was at the end of a thin tube of tapering metal. He up-ended it on the table and pressed. The metal slid back into the casing. He drew another blue line. Once again the marker pen was just that.
Frank gave Mirek that smile again. ‘Light-weight alloy with a titanium tip. Sharper than a needle.’ He hefted it in his hand. ‘Weighs only a few grammes more than a normal pen.’ He showed Mirek the brand name: ‘Denbi’. ‘You press the “D” . . . so.’ The blade slid out like a snake’s tongue. ‘If I’d wished it you’d be dead now.’ He took his arm and led him over to a plastic dummy of a well-built man. The plastic was transparent. Mirek could see all the organs inside brightly coloured. The dummy was on a stand. Frank turned it slowly, saying, ‘There is not one vital spot in a human body that is more than four inches from the skin. That blade is four inches long. You will learn where to put it and how. With that in your hand you carry death within three seconds.’
The explosives instructor was a Japanese called Kato. Mirek had been led to believe that Japanese were polite people. Kato was not. He confronted Mirek outside a thick concrete bunker. A short, stocky man of indeterminate age. His face was square and his lips downturned in a permanent sneer. One arm was stiff with a black glove on the hand. Kato held it up.
‘I lost this because somebody fucked up. Not me. A fucking fool.’ He gestured with it at the bunker and then at a thick high wall fifty yards away. ‘Here it is not only theory. Here we make things to blow things up. Buildings, cars . . . and people. It is fucking dangerous, Werner. If you make a mistake here you are dead. I don’t give a fuck about you dead or alive, but your mistake can also blow me up . . .’ Mirek nodded soberly. Kato snorted. ‘You think you understand but you don’t. When you’re holding a rocker bomb in your hands, trying to place it . . . then you’ll understand. You’ll understand with the sweat in your eyes and your balls cringing into your fucking belly.’ He smiled evilly and pointed to the thick high wall. ‘But you’ll be doing that on your own behind there and I’ll be here waiting with a bucket and spade in case the explosion is premature.’
Coldly Mirek said, ‘I’m sure with such a good instructor such an event won’t happen.’
Kato’s sneer deepened and he turned to the bunker saying, ‘I’ve lost two in this camp. Such things usually go in threes.’
The bunker was air conditioned and dehumidified. One part of It was sealed off with steel doors. To one side were half a dozen wooden chairs facing a blackboard. The other side, screened off by a glass partition, was a fully equipped laboratory. Kato gestured at the blackboard.
‘Here you learn the theory. Here you learn how to make the bombs; rocker bombs, radio-controlled bombs, body bombs, land mines, sea mines, door mines, limpet mines . . .’ The evil grin again. ‘I could even teach you how to make nuclear bombs . . . but I won’t. I’m Japanese. The Emperor would not like it.’
Mirek could not tell whether he was being serious or ironic.
Kato gestured at the lab. ‘There you do the practical. You learn how to make a bomb with ingredients you can buy in any chemist shop. You learn to make a bomb as small as your finger or big enough to blow up a city block.’ He tapped Mirek gently on the arm. ‘You will also learn to make a bomb which you can swallow and carry in your body into any place and destroy anyone.’ He sighed sadly. ‘But I assume you are not a Muslim anxious for instant and eternal paradise.’
Mirek shook his head.
‘Not even by accident.’
He did not settle into a routine. He was hammered into it. The camp arose an hour before dawn. Everyone without exception. For half an hour Mirek did his finger exercises, then washed and shaved. Frank was strangely insistent on that. Either you had a beard or you shaved every day. Clean fatigues were worn every day. There was no precision drill as such, but Frank liked things done in an orderly way. Just before dawn the trainees gathered in the canteen and drank tea or coffee or tinned fruit juice. At dawn they were in the compound doing exercises. Everyone did them, trainees and instructors alike, led by Leila. These varied, but after about forty-five minutes always ended with press-ups. Each trainee had to go on until he could not do a single one more. When the last trainee was flat on his stomach, body heaving and face twisted in agony, the instructors would continue and do a brisk ten more. Mirek vowed on the third morning that by the time he left he’d outlast them all. Even Leila.
After exercises came the ‘run’. Again, everybody in the camp did it. On alternate days it was either four miles carrying a twenty-kilo pack, or eight miles carrying nothing. Leila always brought up the rear, driving the slower runners, but inevitably, as they approached the camp, she would lengthen her stride and cruise past everyone to be first through the gates.
After that, half an hour was allowed for breakfast. This was buffet-style and good. Mounds of fresh baked bread, plates of cheeses and cold meats, eggs and even steaks. There was no bacon or ham.
After breakfast the trainees split up into groups. Obviously some were specialising in certain aspects of terror and spent more time on that aspect. Mirek was getting a general training. About half of his instruction was in groups and the other half individual. The lunch break was two hours to avoid the full heat of the sun. Lunch was a light affair. Usually a soup followed by cold meats and salad. After lunch some of the trainees slept. Others sat around in the mess chatting or reading from the selection of books available - mostly thrillers, westerns or science fiction. There were no political books on the shelves. There was also a television and video. This was only used in the evening. The selection of videos paralleled the books. On his first night in the camp Mirek had been fascinated by the contrast of two dozen diverse terrorists engrossed by Gone With the Wind.
After lun
ch, four more hours of instruction. Then a shower, a change of fatigues and dinner. This was a lavish spread. Soup, a selection of pastas, Arab dishes, joints of beef and mutton and goat and fruit. Only water or fruit juices were drunk.
After dinner many of the trainees went straight to bed. The schedule was punishing. Others watched the video or read or chatted. Inevitably, in spite of the dire warnings against asking personal questions, they learned something about each other. No one actually asked questions but information was gleaned. Any group of young people living, learning and exercising together communicates. Within a week Mirek knew where the others had come from. There were two small groups of Spaniards: one Left-wing Basque Separatist; the other Francoite Fascists. There were two Italians from the Red Brigade and three from the Blacks. The group of five Germans which included two girls were more cohesive; all from a modern off-shoot of the Baader Meinhof vine. Two Filipino women, one very pretty, and one man, presumably from the Muslim Rebels. There was a solitary Irishman, a mournful man who sat by himself humming strange tunes. The rest were Arabs, mainly from the Lebanon. Four were Shi’ites of the Islamic Jihad group. They were the only ones who regularly unrolled their prayer mats and prayed to Mecca. They kept apart and had strange, set expressions on their faces. Mirek guessed that they would be the ones to swallow the body bombs and blast themselves and others to paradise and elsewhere.
* * *
On the tenth morning he did a hundred and fifty press-ups. The other trainees had given up long before. As he lay panting he sneaked a look at the instructors. Only two were still going. Frank and Leila. Frank was struggling. Leila was pumping her slim body up and down easily. Her dark eyes were watching him.
That night after dinner he was sitting naked on the bed in his room squeezing the hand exercisers. The door opened. It had no lock or bolt. Leila stood there. She silently looked at his body, then closed the door. He started to put aside the exercisers. She said, ‘Finish.’
In The Name of The Father Page 8
