by Ian Barclay
Abu Jeddah was pleased that Naim had kept communications to a minimum because of a new development—or rather the recurrence of an old problem. All radio messages in the Middle East were routinely monitored by the Zionists for use by their imperialist friends and also by the British, through a Royal Signals unit based on Cyprus. High-speed, large memory computers processed the coded messages, looking for repetitions and patterns to enable cryptographers to break the codes used. Their success rate had become frighteningly high. The only sure way to beat the airwave code-breakers was to use a new page from an Arabic book as the basis for the code for each message, with the page order predetermined in some way. In essence this provided a new code for each message and worked well between two established and safe points of communication. However, if the Arabic book fell into enemy hands, as it so easily could in mobile combat situations, it could provide the enemy with a dangerous tool for disinformation as well as information. In fact, sending false messages to the Palestinians might be more valuable to the enemy than decoding Palestinian messages.
Abu Jeddah always trained his men not to send stuff to him in code that he could read in the next day’s newspapers. Naim had obeyed, mentioning only that Ali Khalef had been killed by an American agent whom they later tried to kill in a Paris hotel. Ali was actually dead, that had been confirmed. The attack on an American tourist in a small hotel in the rue de Rennes left an African hotel employee dead. The American was last seen running out of the hotel and jumping into a taxi. The newspapers assumed he jumped on the first available plane home. Abu Jeddah knew better.
This American was the most dangerous type of CIA agent. He might appear to be solitary but he was not—a vast network of imperialist spies lay everywhere to help him. Somehow through their sophisticated technology, they were already able to detect a pattern behind Naim’s moves and to place this field man in position to strike against him. Naim and Hasan had proved their courage, but they did not have the intellectual endowments to fight something like this. No matter where they went or what they did, this CIA agent would use his mysterious edge to move in and destroy them.
Abu Jeddah could see that it would only be a matter of time before yet another brave Palestinian comrade for freedom petered out in utter futility, with scores of lives wasted and the Ostend Concordance signed. His reputation depended on preventing that treaty. If it was signed, he would be nothing. Everyone would say that Abu Jeddah had failed. There would be no more honors, no more financial generosity, no more blind obedience to him… The heavy man in the bathrobe agitatedly jumped out of his chair and paced up and down between the swimming pool and the sandbagged entrance to the underground bomb shelter.
Abu Jeddah had a vision of the future. The Arabs had been skilled mathematicians and astronomers when the Europeans were wearing wolfskins and chasing each other with bronze axes. Later they had followed Mohammed and Islam had brought them greatness. Abu Jeddah saw Karl Marx as the new Prophet, a man whose teachings would bring a new dawn to the Arab world. The imperialists would be broken, the Zionists would be driven from his homeland, and leftist Moslems, Jews, and Christians would live peaceably side by side, sharing the collective wealth. Many of the Palestinian guerrillas had laughed at this as a dream, but Abu Jeddah carefully explained to them his definition of the difference between a dream and a vision. A dream was only make-believe, not real, while a vision was something men died for.
The day was getting hot already. He shucked off his bathrobe and sandals, plunged into the pool, and swam several lengths in an awkward dog paddle. Emerging cool and refreshed, he went inside the house to take care of more paperwork and make some decisions before inspecting the recruits undergoing intensive training in his nearby camp. They would finish their maneuvers well before the midday heat set in.
The walls of his office were lined with maps, each covered with clear plastic so they could be marked with a felt-tip pen and erased. The maps were all new except one, which was yellowed and ragged, showing the Middle East with Palestine still intact and with the old Arab town names instead of the new Hebrew ones.
Abu Jeddah turned on the electric ceiling fan and sat for a while watching the sheets of papers flutter on his desk from the draft. He had twenty-one men and three women in training. Some spoke a little English and a little French. None were fluent. None had ever been outside the Arab world. The oldest was twenty. His problem was to decide the best time to unleash them on the Common Market countries.
None had the skills to last long, like Naim and Hasan. They would go down quickly but in a blaze of glory, taking down many times their own number with them in spectacular butcheries across Europe. He wanted to soften up and further batter the. Europeans before releasing them as his final coup. The Europeans would not realize that of course. They would think there was still worse ahead unless they announced their intention not to sign the concordance. Greece had done so already. France was showing signs of weakening. Was it too early to unleash them? Should he let Naim and Hasan prepare the ground some more?
“Someone who is determined to die and take some of his enemies with him generally will find a way to succeed,” Colonel Yitzhak Bikel told his two lunch guests in the high-rise apartment building at the edge of Jerusalem. “As soon as we come up with one way to stop them, they come up with another to do it. The assassin has been a tradition here in the Middle East for at least nine hundred years. He’s not about to stop now.”
“Yes, of course, my dear fellow,” Group-Captain Godfrey Bradshaw told him, “but these chaps we’re talking about now are not whirling dervishes and so forth. Some of them live better than you and I do. In fact, I’ve heard them called Gucci terrorists because of their fondness for quality goods—though I must state frankly that I find these Italian designs far too flashy in comparison to sensible British goods.”
“The Italians do make good wines,” General Gerrit van Gilder observed, pointedly taking a very sparing sip of the Israeli red wine the colonel had served with lunch.
Bikel ignored the implied criticism of the wine. “These assassins today are not so far removed from the whirling dervishes that you mentioned. Marco Polo reported that assassins-to-be were kept in beautiful gardens and supplied with affectionate women so that they could have a foretaste of the paradise which would be their reward after martyrdom. Today some of them settle for what seems to them to be paradise on earth—money, Western luxury, women, drugs, alcohol. They don’t believe they’re going to have an afterlife, and so they buy into life with what they have to offer—youth, courage, skill. From their own experience they know nothing good lasts very long.”
“You say this as an Israeli?” Bradshaw asked. “That nothing can be done about these terrorists?”
“Not about the zealots themselves, no. The ones we can and need to control are those who pay the expenses, which are considerable. You two come here and ask that we Israelis do something about the June 4–New Arab Social Front. What do you mean do something’? You mean kill their gunmen and bomb throwers. We Israelis say yes, certainly we will do that for you. And that is all you want. You will look no further.”
“It’s taken us long enough to get even this far,” van Gilder remarked impatiently. “You Israelis will have to talk peace with the Palestinians and give them some land.”
“They will never negotiate peace with us while Arafat and other cowboys have more to gain in personal power from a state of war,” Bikel said heatedly. “But those are our problems. All you need is to get them out of your flower beds, right?”
“Something like that,” van Gilder conceded.
“Well, I think we’ll have something to show by this evening,” Bikel promised.
“Good show,” Bradshaw said.
None of the three guards at Abu Jeddah’s headquarters answered the tape-recorded calls of the imans at noon for the second prayers of the day. All were Marxist–Leninists and hadn’t kneeled toward Mecca in years. Inside the compound Abu Jeddah floated in the pool, havi
ng returned from inspecting the recruits at his training camp. He heaved himself out of the water and sipped some spiked coffee. A smell of lamb pieces roasting on a spit came from the kitchen. He ate the food listlessly when it was served to him. His mind was still not decided on what to do in Europe. He heard the guard descend from the roof, driven down by the heat or lured by the smell of food or both. Sleep… After an hour’s rest in a cool, dark room, then he would decide…
Even the sun-loving lizards crept into the shade. Men and beasts huddled down from the sun’s heat almost as if they were weathering a high wind. Peace descended on Lebanon. These early afternoon hours, when gunmetal was too hot to touch, were the only daylight times that calm seemed restored to the war-ravaged land.
The two guards slept in their chairs in the shade cast by the wall. The roof man squatted down beside them. He was more dedicated and did not doze. Grown used to letting his eyes unfocus and his thoughts drift to a stop for hours on end, he showed no more signs of life than the lizards—only a slow rising and falling of the ribcage as he breathed. But just as the reptiles were nearly impossible to approach unseen, so was he. In addition, as roof man, the sky was his realm as well as the land.
He saw the planes as they came over the horizon and was already shouting before the sounds of the engines reached them, “Two bombers! Three-plane fighter escort!”
They might have been friendly Syrian aircraft. The roof man knew they were not. He recognized almost instinctively the deadly style Israeli pilots used. The two bombers were ejecting dummy metal targets every few seconds to deflect the land-to-air rockets. They needn’t have bothered. The radar operators and missile men were asleep.
Abu Jeddah and his staff ran from the house to the bomb shelter. Before they reached its sandbagged entrance, next to the pool, they felt the ground vibrate beneath their feet over and over again and heard the thump of bombs exploding on impact.
“The training camp!” the roof man yelled. “They’re not hitting us. They’ve found the camp.”
He ran to a Toyota four-wheel-drive vehicle. Abu Jeddah jumped in beside him and one of the other guards climbed in over the side as the roof man drove the vehicle along the bumpy track toward the camp.
The smoke, dust, and shouts left no doubt in their minds what the target had been. The long, low building constructed of blocks with a flat tar roof was crumpled. Those uninjured worked feverishly with their bare hands to lift the fallen masonry off those trapped inside. They carried out the injured, the dead, and the near-dead.
Abu Jeddah circulated among them, touching people, offering praise and encouragement. This was a test from Allah. They must overcome every adversity. They were brothers and sisters united in a common goal. Some had been chosen as martyrs for Islam. This was not a time to mention international socialism.
As he went around comforting and encouraging, he was also counting. From a force of twenty-one male and three female recruits, he had five males and one female uninjured. They happened not to be in the building for the midday rest because they were being disciplined for minor infractions and were working in the kitchen and latrines. This was what he was left with to campaign in Europe!
They loaded the injured onto trucks to take them to the makeshift hospital at Taanayel. Then they laid the dead out side by side on the ground and began to dig graves.
The roof man spotted a plane flying south, very high overhead.
Abu Jeddah looked up and shook his fist in impotent fury at it. “Now they take photographs of our misfortunes for their imperialist friends! It is not enough for them to kill and maim us, they want pictures of it too!”
He strode across and pulled the picks and shovels from the six uninjured recruits. “You will not dig graves for your brothers and sisters. We will do that. You will make graves for the murderers responsible for this. You leave in the next few days for Europe to wreak vengeance for our cause. Go now, bid farewell to your loved ones.”
CHAPTER
10
As a result of the terrorist outrages at Père Lachaise cemetery and the Café Arizona, the president of the French Republic, the prime minister, and the government were accused in the press of ineptitude, laxness, stupidity, and a variety of other things. To show the voters their concern, the elected officials ordered the police to make some visible efforts to arrest the terrorists, even if these efforts amounted to nothing and caused more disruption than anything else. The police immediately set up checkpoints on various routes, which caused traffic backups and made the people thus delayed complain, but feel more secure now that the government was finally doing something.
One such checkpoint was in operation on the road between the airport and Nice, which also included coastal traffic from Cannes and Antibes and points west along the French Riviera. It was not a roadblock, and anyone looking like a French-born citizen or northern European or American was waved through. But the police stared at people as if they knew things about them. The word was already out to dope dealers to detour inland through the mountains—only out-of-towners would be caught. The police manning the checkpoint knew all these things and expected that no wonders would be performed. It was all a game.
When a pretty woman driving an ordinary family car reached the two policemen covering eastbound traffic, they told her to pull over for a car search, just for the hell of it. The drivers in front and behind her were sour-faced men—she looked high-strung and strident, just the sort for them to have fun with. Instead of pulling in to the side of the road, she hit the gas pedal, knocked the two cops on their asses, and caused a multiple-car collision as drivers swerved to avoid being hit by her.
No one was hurt seriously and the incident would have been buried inside the Paris papers, if mentioned at all, had not a Japanese tourist taken a series of photos which were bought by the national press agency and sold to papers worldwide. One photo showed a frustrated policeman with a submachine gun being forced to hold his fire for fear of hitting innocent people. Several of the pictures showed the face and hair of the pretty woman, slightly blurred by the windshield and thus useless for identification.
Dartley’s arm was healing well, with no infection or swelling. The hooker had taken him to her hungry young doctor and he had cleaned the wound. She earned another hundred by buying him a fresh set of clothes. A turquoise shirt with pearl buttons wouldn’t have been his choice, but so long as there were no bloodstains, he didn’t complain. It struck Dartley that neither the doctor nor she might have been so cooperative if he had tried to pay them off in French francs. But gunshot wounds and American hundred-dollar bills were associated in the French mind with TV and movies, not with everyday life. To them he was from another planet.
Back to his search for the two Palestinians, Dartley watched every television newscast and scanned a selection of newspapers for anything that might provide him with a lead to their present whereabouts or future movements. Greece would not sign. Holland was sticking by its announced intention to sign. Britain and Ireland were expected to stand by the concordance. France was rumored to be backing down. The French government leaders were continuing to take a personal beating in the daily press.
Resting his arm, Dartley sat in the spring sunshine at café tables, flipping through the pages of papers and magazines, watching pretty girls, passing the time. The photos of the car breaking through the checkpoint outside the Riviera city of Nice caught his attention. He looked at the woman’s face in one paper, put that one down and looked in another. He hurriedly went through all the papers to see which ones ran the best shots of her. He might be wrong but he thought not. He couldn’t swear to it in court, yet he was reasonably certain that the woman driving this car was the one who had followed him in Père Lachaise cemetery, had come to his hotel room with him, and had steered the Palestinians to him. if Claudine was in Nice, chances were they were too.
These photos might have scared her away from Nice. Then again, they might not, since the indistinct image of her face through the
windshield glass and the grainy photo reproduction on the newsprint could hardly cause her much alarm. Still, he had recognized her.
Dartley got his things together and a couple of hours later boarded a plane for the sixty-minute flight to Nice.
The water was still too cold for swimming, but pale Europeans were out on the pebble beach working on their tans. Some of the women wore only the bottom half of a bikini and did not seem shy about lying on their backs and showing off their charms. Dartley walked along Nice’s famous Promenade des Anglais, ten feet above the beach. This was between seasons—winter’s wealthy retirees and summer’s youth culture—and the place wasn’t crowded.
The sea was clean and properly Mediterranean blue. Palms and bougainvillea grew on the center divider of the busy highway, and exhaust fumes floated over the stony beach. Dartley checked the faces, as well as the breasts, of pretty sunbathers as he walked along. Some peddlers trudged along the beach stones selling chocolate, beer, and soda from straw baskets. On the Promenade itself kids on motor scooters and light motorbikes brushed close by startled elderly men who shouted curses after them, waving their sticks. One kid tried to buzz Dartley for the hell of it. As he brushed by on Dartley’s left, uninjured side, he found himself against a solid unyielding shoulder that unseated him from his motorbike. The kid bit the raspberry-colored asphalt and the bike scraped along on its side before its engine stalled. The kid picked himself up, giving Dartley the look of a hurt innocent as he limped to the bike. Last Dartley heard of him, he was still trying unsuccessfully to start the machine.
He kept walking around the old part of the city and back on the Promenade again, constantly looking for Claudine, until the lights flicked on along the entire length of the Promenade. He stayed for a while on a wooden bench, looking out at the dark sea which was slapping softly on the beach stones. To the east a lighthouse flashed regularly every three seconds. Another, to the west, gave two longer flashes, spaced three and seven seconds apart.
