Retribution

by Ian Barclay

  “Yes. I could have told you which two beat the Jordanian even if you hadn’t told me their names. They just can’t wait to join Allah in Paradise, real going-to-meet-my-Maker types. It scares the shit out of me to have cannon fodder like that around. Is that all Abu Jeddah thinks of us two? You know what those two maniacs have? Eight heavy instant-detonation grenades. One each for the six of them, and one each for us.”

  Hasan was pleased by the look of consternation on Naim’s face at this news. He didn’t have to explain its significance. When the two Palestinians barricaded themselves into Istanbul’s Neve Shalom synagogue in September 1986, along with the worshipers, they intended that no one would escape alive, including themselves. But they did not want to leave their bodies for possible identification by the Turkish authorities and through this, possible discovery of the group responsible. After they machinegunned the Jews in the temple, they released the grenades close to their bodies so that the force of the blasts splattered pieces of their flesh all over the synagogue’s freshly stuccoed and painted walls. Naim had read later that one had held the grenade next to his head, which was found embedded in the ceiling forty feet overhead. The other clutched the grenade to his stomach, and the only recognizable parts of him left were his two legs below the knees.

  “Abu Jeddah knows I won’t do suicide runs,” Naim said firmly.

  Hasan nodded slowly. “No need to remind him of it. I think we’ve just got the scrapings of the barrel here.”

  “You think that Israeli report on bombing the camp was true?”

  “If this is all Abu Jeddah can send us, it’s beginning to look like it,” Hasan answered.

  “My messages deny it,” Naim said, self-importantly emphasizing that he received information which Hasan did not.

  “Don’t you start believing everything you’re told, Naim, or we’re all done for.”

  His pride deflated, Naim humbly asked the older and more experienced man, “What do we do?”

  “Put those two cowboys, Mosbah and Mousa, out in the front lines so they can show us how good they are.”

  Naim laughed and signaled to the waiter for more Scotches.

  Mosbah drove. “You meet Naim?”

  “For a few minutes,” Mousa said.

  “What did you think of him?”

  “Like Hasan. Like the Jordanian in Marbella. He’s been in the West too long.”

  Mosbah said, “They talked to me like we weren’t the same—like they were high-class Europeans and I was a low-class Arab. But they haven’t gone soft. You can see that.”

  “You think they’ve been carrying out all the raids here in Europe?”

  “Some of them, not all. Abu Jeddah has operatives all over the world. He can pick and choose who, where, and when. We’re all part of a huge army of freedom fighters.”

  Mousa asked, “What did Naim tell you to do?”

  “He told me to steal a car and pick you up.”

  “You know your way around?”

  “Well enough in the central part,” Mosbah said. “What did he tell you to do?”

  “Bring along the antitank launcher and one projectile. Hasan kind of sneered at me and said make it big. I thought you’d know all the details.”

  Mosbah shook his head and made a turn. “I think they’re testing us, seeing what we’re capable of when left to our own initiative. One thing I don’t want to do is much more driving around. It’s two in the morning. We’re liable to be stopped any time when things get really quiet.”

  Barcelona was a late-night city but people and traffic were fast beginning to thin out in the streets.

  “Look for a target,” Mousa said. “Something big.”

  They thought about firing the rocket into one of the big hotels, like the Ritz, Avenida Palace, or Hotel Diplomatic and abandoned this only when Mosbah had a better idea. The car needed gas. He filled the tank at an all-night station near several tourist hotels, made a round of the block, and came to a stop about a hundred meters from the pumps.

  Mousa poked the shoulder-held launcher out one rear side window, sighted on a gas pump, and pressed the release button. The 30 mm projectile streaked from the launching tube. The rocket’s nose slammed squarely into the midsection of the pump, and this impact set off the high explosives carried in the missile’s cylinder.

  The blast ripped open the fuel lines to the storage tank beneath and ignited the contents. The liquid fuel and fumes enclosed in the tank exploded and in turn set off blasts in the five other tanks.

  The two recruits stared delightedly at the great ball of flame fifty meters high and listened to the majestic roar of destruction and tinkling of plate glass windows.

  When a chunk of concrete the size of a basketball sailed through the air and tore off the trunk door, Mosbah drove away.

  The police said it was an accident, but a gas station attendant, before he died of burns at the hospital, told a nurse he had seen a man fire a rocket from a car and the nurse told a newspaper reporter. Two died, eight were badly hurt, the damage outside the gas station was mostly restricted to broken glass.

  Staying at the Avenida Palace, four floors above Naim Shabaan, Richard Dartley was awoken by the blast. He hurriedly dressed and went outside. Two hours later he returned with no evidence that it had been anything other than an accident. The only reason he had for being in Barcelona was that rail ticket that had fallen from Claudine’s purse. Still, it was a bit of a coincidence… When he saw in one of the next day’s evening newspapers what the nurse said, he at last knew for sure he was on the right track.

  Mosbah and Mousa rented a room in a rundown hotel near the docks. The place had a side entrance to a badly lit street. No one would live there. This would be their meeting place for this series of attacks only. The two recruits ordered four-inch-diameter steel pipe cut into three-foot lengths at a plumber’s supply store. At a construction site they paid workers to steal them cinder blocks and bags of cement.

  With Naim’s permission, they enlisted two of the other recruits and explained the plan to them in the hotel room. The other two were so grateful to meet their comrades and talk Arabic again, they would have agreed to anything. They met with four stolen cars with deep trunks at a quiet area on the edge of Montjuich Park. One carried sand in a two-gallon plastic bucket from a nearby playground, another brought buckets of water from a fountain. In each car trunk they cemented the bases of five lengths of three-foot-long steel pipe in cinder blocks, propping the pipes up at a forty-degree angle with other cinder blocks. The pipes were aimed rearward, and they carefully measured the clearance from the mouth of the side-by-side pipes over the rear wall of the trunk. They closed the trunks and left the cars parked until the quick-drying cement had set.

  Richard Dartley was back to wandering city streets, hoping he might chance upon something. But Barcelona was many times the size of Nice, with many more tourist sights and museums, and this time he had no clear objective in mind like Claudine in Nice. He bought himself a radio with earphones so he could listen to newscasts from time to time, although Europeans seemed generally uninterested in having hourly news or up-to-the-minute information on world events. As it happened, he didn’t need a radio to direct him to the scene of the next attack—he heard it plainly with his own ears. Five explosions, slightly and irregularly apart, any single one in itself nothing very startling, in this series meant only one thing to Dartley’s ears—rockets.

  He waved to a taxi, but the driver had heard the explosives also and didn’t want to go in that direction.

  “Yo soy un medico,” Dartley explained and handed the man a large bill, which melted his heart.

  The rockets had hit buildings at various levels on a block on the south side of Avenida Primo de Rivera. Dartley guessed that the Tourist Information Center had been the target, although its offices had not been hit. One projectile had hit the sidewalk, punching a small hole in the asphalt and downing about a dozen pedestrians. Another had left a huge black burn mark on the side wa
ll of a building. Three others seemed to have entered windows, and fires were burning inside.

  Dartley moved away quickly. His job was not to help victims but to catch the perpetrators. He needed to see how these rockets had been launched. He found the car on the opposite side of the Avenida, its trunk angled out from the sidewalk. Smoke was still rising from the row of five pipes angled upward in the trunk. A crowd was beginning to gather round the car. Dartley pressed in close enough to examine the trunk latch. A timing device had been attached to automatically open it. He had seen all he needed to see and hurried away.

  As he walked he took a tourist map of the city from his pocket and glanced at it from time to time. The chief points of interest for tourists were clearly marked. The cathedral and Gaudi’s church of La Sagrada Familia—but so far they had avoided churches. The fantasy architect Gaudi’s park was too far from the city center. The Picasso Museum, which was less than a mile from where he stood, would be a good choice if the terrorists had more rockets to spare. He hailed a cab.

  They had been in motion less than a minute when they heard another five explosions up ahead. The driver braked, shook his head, and said he was going home.

  It was too late now for Dartley to go to the Picasso Museum just to see another abandoned car with five smoking tubes in the trunk. He fished the map from his pocket and said, “Take me to the Gran Teatro del Liceo.”

  Since this was in a different direction, the driver agreed. The opera house was on the western side of the Ramblas, near the Plaza Real. He found himself a café on the eastern side at a safe distance from the Gran Teatro. No performance seemed to be in progress there this afternoon, but this would probably not affect the terrorists’ choice of target. He ordered a coffee and a pastry at a sidewalk table and waited. Nobody here seemed to have heard anything about rocket attacks elsewhere in the city.

  Before his order arrived, he noticed a Ford being left by a young man, who could be an Arab, with its trunk angled out into the street in the general direction of the opera house.

  Dartley watched him get out of the car, which was being left in an illegal parking space, lock the door behind him, and walk north along the Ramblas. Dartley was ready to sound the alarm and then follow him, when he saw the young man settle himself down at a café table farther along. Feeling a bit of a paranoid fool, Dartley subsided in his chair again. His coffee and pastry arrived.

  He almost groaned as he saw the Ford’s trunk pop open. A couple of seconds later the first rocket screamed out, then another, another, five in all. Aghast, people watched them slamming into the front of the opera house, without being quite able to connect what had happened in the car trunk with what was happening down the wide street on the far side. People stood. They shouted, ran in different directions, screamed. Dartley nearly lost contact with the young man in the panic.

  Following him through the narrow streets of the old city, Dartley realized the man was doubling back toward the harbor and the car. He heard another five rockets as he followed him and caught a sideview of the youth’s smiling face. The bastard was having a big day. There were lots of others hurrying through the narrow streets to get away from the disasters, so following the youth was not a problem.

  He seemed to be too young to Dartley to be either of the men who had escaped him at the training stables in Ireland. From this he had to assume there were no longer only two of them. When a man hunts alone, the way Dartley liked to do, he has to keep careful tabs on numbers since they have a lot to do with the odds against his success. At the rate these fuckers were throwing rockets around this afternoon, they badly needed to be thinned out.

  On a dingy street near the harbor Dartley realized he had made a mistake. The terrorist he was following had passed another young man with no sign of recognition, Dartley thought this might be another Arab and possible confederate, so he quickened his pace. The second one spotted Dartley as a tail and was moving up to warn the first, trying to do so without letting Dartley see what he was doing.

  But the one Dartley had originally been following paid no heed. Dartley guessed he had been trained in desert camps to crawl under barbed wire and scale walls, but not how to detect someone following behind in a peacetime city. Tails are rare in a combat zone. Finally Dartley’s shadow crossed the street so that he was between him and the driver of the Ford. Then he stepped into à doorway and disappeared from view.

  Dartley almost laughed out loud. He had no weapons, so he flexed and unflexed his hands in anticipation. This was almost good clean fun.

  He listened to the leather soles of his shoes ring out on the flagstones of the narrow sidewalk, knowing that his hidden assailant would be timing his attack by them. His steps never faltered as he neared the doorway. Just before it he marked time, standing in place with three perfectly regular-sounding steps. The Arab sprang out into empty air and received a violent flying kick on his left temple.

  Dartley regained his balance and with his right toe shattered the youth’s spine. Satisfied that if his attacker survived the kick to his temple he would never think straight again, and that if he survived the damage to his spinal column he would never walk straight again, Dartley picked up the hunting knife his opponent had dropped.

  He showed the knife to some onlookers who had stopped. “He tried to rob me,” Dartley explained.

  A man with a large mustache removed a yellow-papered cigarette from his mouth and spat carefully into the downed youth’s face. The others nodded in approval.

  Dartley slipped the knife inside the top of his pants and hurried after the driver of the Ford. He had no way of knowing if this man had looked back and seen anything. He had gained quite a bit of distance on Dartley but he didn’t seem to be moving any faster than before. He stopped outside a hotel, turned around and looked back. Dartley was more than a hundred yards behind him, yet he didn’t seem to notice him. He might have been puzzled where his comrade had gotten to. Then he went into the hotel, not the main way, but by a side entrance on this street.

  The American broke into a run. He pulled the knife as he ran through the door. A long corridor on the ground floor was empty. He ran up a flight of stairs and saw his prey walking halfway down a similar corridor on the second floor. Dartley took off after him.

  The terrorist turned when he heard him. Dartley had his right hand holding the knife behind his back, and he held his left index finger to his smiling lips in a plea for silence.

  The Arab was puzzled by this foreigner in this foreign place, not sure whether to be amused or alarmed. He did not want to give away the presence of their meeting place in this hotel by scuffling with a foolish stranger in the corridor. All the same, his hand drifted toward his gun pocket.

  The stranger surprised him with the speed in which he covered the space between them. He was caught by the lapels and a long-bladed knife seemed to come from nowhere. Its tip beneath his chin forced his face upward. He felt the stranger take his gun from his pocket. The pressure on the knife point was getting harder and harder.

  “Feen?” the stranger said to him in Arabic, further confusing him.

  He pointed to the second door down.

  Dartley pushed the terrorist’s pistol into his pants top and forced him along at knife pint. Any trouble, he intended to dispose of him without a warning gunshot. Dartley had a kind of talent for nonverbal communication, as evidenced by the fact that the Arab trotted along meekly as a lamb and knocked at the door.

  They heard a grunt from inside the room.

  Dartley lay the honed edge of the blade across the terrorist’s windpipe so he could really feel it while he talked. He said something in Arabic, too fast and too difficult for Dartley to understand. The American heard first one lock turn, then a second, and the door began to slowly open inward.

  With his left hand Dartley seized the terrorist by the hair, yanking his head back, drew the blade across his throat and booted him in the small of the back belly-first against the opening door.

  Blood spra
ying from his severed arteries and veins, he fell on his comrade opening the door. This youth screamed in horror, splashed with his friend’s blood. He backed into the room while Dartley checked that the Colt Commander .45 automatic he had taken was ready to fire.

  Another youth appeared. He held a grenade and was pulling the pin. Dartley fired and hit him in the gut, maybe too late to stop him from throwing that grenade through the door. He twisted into the corridor clear of the doorway, expecting any moment to hear the grenade rattle along the floor after him.

  Instead the wall quaked and buckled, plaster fell on his head, as the grenade blew in the room. He could hardly see in through the dust and smoke. The windows were gone, the ceiling was bared to the wooden lathes.

  In one corner he saw an entire jeans leg, sock, and running shoe. It took a moment to sink in that the limb was still in them.

  CHAPTER

  12

  Colonel Yitzhak Bikel, General Gerrit van Gilder, and Group-Captain Godfrey Bradshaw were playing penny poker with Israeli shekels in a safe house outside Tel Aviv.

  Bikel was in a jovial mood. “I don’t believe the Dutch would have jeopardized relations with Spain by doing it. The French would have botched up the job. I believe the Spanish when they say they didn’t do it. The Americans would have tried to involve us in it. And I know we didn’t do it. What do you say, Bradshaw? Why don’t you come clean about it?”

  “You can’t be saying, sir, that you believe Her Majesty’s government is responsible for the deaths of those four terrorists in Barcelona,” Bradshaw said with seemingly genuine indignation in his voice.

  “You have the capability in place there and you have every reason to strike back at them,” Bikel persisted.

  “Dammit, man, I’m not saying that we wouldn’t,” Bradshaw said. “I’m saying that we didn’t.”

  “To your knowledge,” van Gilder put in.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “They might not have told you,” van Gilder explained ponderously.