by David Rose
Yet Adam feels as if everything he’s done for the past three months has been impelling him toward this moment. He’s barely tried to figure out why his need to be present is so overwhelming, and he knows that it’s a little late to be recognizing that he may be running an enormous risk: if he ends up losing his own life, many will call him irresponsible. But something inside him insists it is vital that he’s here, not only to bear witness, but to help, though he cannot even dimly guess what such help might be.
On the roof, the moonshadows blur the men’s silhouettes. Still working in silence, they are bolting together the sections of a ladder. Crossing from one building to another will take a steady nerve; it must be more than seventy feet from the flat roof’s edge to the ground. At last their bridge is complete. It slopes downhill; the roof of the kidnapper’s building must be somewhat lower down. The first man’s journey is the most precarious, but once he’s over, he holds the ladder for his companions, and one by one they crawl across. Adam counts them over. He hopes this isn’t an omen; they are thirteen.
Can Khader’s confidence that the kidnappers know nothing about the impending attack really be justified? His plan seems so elaborate, and Adam is amazed that the roof team seems to have reached its objective without disturbing anybody’s sleep. Yet thus far, everything has been unrolling smoothly. The only movement he can see is from the Hamas men, and there is no sign that anyone else in Yebna is awake. Just a few more minutes, and as his new friends say, insh’Allah, it will all be over.
Some of the men on the roof gather around the half-enclosed portal that marks the top of the stairwell, while the others take up positions along the parapet, scanning the gloom as they clutch their Kalashnikovs, like archers on a medieval castle’s battlements. Adam checks his watch once again: four forty-five. Across the open ground, he sees the last of Khader’s teams emerge from the alley behind the building and enter by the double front doors, altogether nine of them. The doors don’t even squeak, and, furtive as cats, the men vanish inside. Presumably now they’re starting to climb the stairs. It shouldn’t take them long to reach the apartment next to the kidnappers.
For a moment, the breeze increases in strength, sighing through the loose-fitting timbers of the shack and making them rattle. It makes Adam start. Apart from what might have been a couple of shots just after they arrived, it’s the loudest sound he’s heard since leaving Khan Younis. He looks at his watch a final time and braces himself. Ninety seconds to go. The next thing he expects to hear is the sound of the stun grenades the men at the front of the two entry parties are carrying.
But it isn’t.
There is an explosion; not inside the building, but, so it seems, on or just below the roof. Its blast wave catches Adam in the solar plexus like an undefended hook from a professional heavyweight, crushing his ribs against his lungs, while the boom scours his eardrums. It feels as if he’s lost a layer of cells somewhere inside his head; the world is muffled, his entire sense of being knocked off balance. He looks at Rafiq. His eyes reflect his own shock and panic, while little by little Adam grasps that screams are now echoing across Yebna.
At first, the roof is hidden by smoke. Atomized debris, hurled up into the atmosphere, is starting to fall, accompanied by the barbecue stench of burnt human flesh. When the cloud starts to clear, it becomes apparent that the blast must have been carried upward from somewhere inside the stairwell; the portal structure on the roof has been completely destroyed. Up there, no one is still standing. Adam assumes the men who poured down the stairs must all be dead or horribly injured. So far as he can make out, two or three of the parapet sentries look as if they may still be alive. He sees one crawl away from the edge. Up there, nothing else moves.
It’s been an eternal thirty seconds since the blast when Rafiq, suddenly jolted from his marble immobility, grabs his arm and issues contradictory instructions. “Down! Mr. Adam, get down! We are under attack! We must run!”
But nothing else happens. No one attacks, and no one fires a weapon. The tinnitus in Adam’s ears is beginning to clear, and the screaming is becoming less muffled. He looks at Rafiq and pulls him to his feet. “Come on!” he shouts. “We must get in there! We need to know what’s happening—and what they have done with my wife!”
Rafiq hesitates, his eyes still round with terror. Finally he beckons to the men on either side in the cordon. Adam draws his gun, and they advance toward the doors. He slides back the safety catch. It’s not a Walther like the weapon he used at the range in Buckinghamshire, but a silver Smith and Wesson nine-millimeter automatic.
Inside the lobby there is chaos. All or most of the apartments’ occupants are already there or making their way down the stairs in their nightclothes: a panicking sea of children, babies, mothers, fathers and the elderly, shouting in Arabic, unsure whether they should be going outside or staying where they are, fearful of further danger. Where is Khader? Adam remembers that he wasn’t with the rooftop group, but with the team who climbed from the lobby. Finally he sees him, struggling to deal with a trio of men who yell and jab their fingers, demanding answers that he cannot begin to give. Only four of the men who had been in his group are with him; the other five are missing, as well as all those who were on the roof.
Adam yells at him. “Khader! Get everyone outside! The building may be unsafe, it could collapse, and there may still be terrorists.”
Khader’s uniform is dark with blood, but so far as Adam can see, it is not his own; he must have been protected by the men in front of him, and it was they who absorbed the full force of the blast. He staggers a little; he’s dazed. But he accepts Adam’s instructions, and somehow produces the first semblance of control, barking orders at Rafiq and the other Hamas men in the lobby, so getting everyone onto the waste ground by the tunnel outside. He tells two of the young militiamen to begin a search of the apartments to make sure everyone is out, though to go no higher than the third floor. Finally he steps outside, away from the noise and tumult. He takes out his cell phone, and, Adam guesses, calls to summon help. At last the evacuation is complete, and Adam joins him in front of the building.
“In a few minutes there will be a fire truck, and ambulances,” Khader says, his words coming in gasps. “It was an IED. They left a tripwire at the bottom of the stairs going up to the roof, attached to a hand grenade. That was taped to a shell from a mortar. The wire went tight on someone’s leg as they came down the stairs. It pulled the pin out. The grenade triggered the mortar shell. I was at the back. We were just climbing up. Four of the others are okay. I think all the others are dead.”
Khader’s words sound more like sobs. “I have not seen a bomb like this before in Gaza. It is like the bombs that al-Qaeda make in Iraq.” He pauses, momentarily overcome. “And now they have killed so many Muslims.”
“What about Morgan? Where’s Morgan? Khader, have you been into the apartment where she was being held?” Adam can’t stop his own surge of panic. “Was she caught in this? Is she dead too?”
“I have not entered the apartment. I was trying to get those who are not hurt down here safely. I am sorry. Now we will go to see. I have a flashlight.”
Followed by Rafiq and four of his men, they start to climb the stairs, their weapons at the ready. Even from the lobby, Adam hears men’s groans floating down from above. Only Khader has a light, and behind him, the darkness is suffocating; they must navigate by touch. When they reach the second floor, the hard stone surface of the steps becomes wet. It’s only the beginning of a sticky cataract of blood, a stream of gore from the shredded men higher up, who were caught by the brunt of the explosion.
Higher still, the fading moonlight and the first dawn glimmer deliver more illumination. The roof around the top of the stairwell has been blown out, leaving a crater with the top tier of stairs balanced precariously against its lip. On the third floor, right at the bottom of the next flight of stairs, two of the men from Khader’s party lie motionless, apparently blown down bodily by the blast wav
e; they have no visible injuries. On the floor above, one flight of stairs below the roof, they reach the place where the bomb must have been situated. Here another seven or eight have been killed outright. Adam sees a scalp, with hair still attached; a hand; a blown-off lower leg. The bodies dam the blood collecting between them in pools, several inches deep, the springs where the cascade on the stairs begins. Saying nothing, Khader gestures to Rafiq that he should check the roof. From somewhere up there, Adam makes out a word being spoken by someone in terrible agony: “ummu,” “mother.” There’s something wooden up there too, and it smells as if it is burning.
Khader points beyond the bodies to the door of one of the fourth-floor apartments. The design of the landing is L-shaped, protecting it from the blast. “This is the one,” he says. He starts to turn the handle.
At once a voice yells from behind the door in Arabic and English, “Kefhair! Stop!”
Khader and Adam exchange glances. Khader lets fly a stream of invective in his own language, then gets a lengthy reply.
“He says there is another IED in the apartment,” Khader says. “The tripwire is behind the door.” He yells up the stairwell to Rafiq, whose face appears at the edge of the roof crater. He tosses down a Swiss army penknife.
“We must cut the wire and make it safe. These scissors will be enough,” Khader says. “The guy on the other side says it is made with dental floss. I think he’s telling the truth. I have heard they use this when they are in a hurry.”
“For fuck’s sake do it gently,” Adam says. Involuntarily he holds his breath while Khader opens the door. Thankfully it swings outward. Khader bends down, pulls out the scissors from the penknife, and snips the white thread.
“You can come in.”
Adam follows him, holding his gun in front of him with both hands, waving it from side to side to cover the room, just as he’s seen at the movies. The blinds at the windows are open, and outside the sky is turning from black to blue. In the middle of the room is a fortification made of sandbags, the nest for a heavy machine gun. The weapon remains unused. Besides himself and Khader, the room has just one other occupant, a sallow, bearded man in early middle age, who wears a stained white jallabiya. He lies slumped against the wall, next to the IED. Blood oozes from exit wounds in both of his kneecaps. Judging by the quantity he’s already lost, he must have been shot some time ago. He raises a hand in a pained and weary greeting.
“Welcome,” he says. “My name is Abu Mustafa. You must be Adam Cooper. I have heard a lot about you. I am sorry. I’m so sorry for everything. Mrs. Cooper is not here.”
“What have you bastards done with her? Where is she? What the hell has happened?”
“She is okay. She is alive, and she is not hurt, but they have taken her. Karim, Aqil, and the others.” Abu Mustafa grimaces. “They have all gone.”
“Taken her where?”
“To Egypt. Through the tunnel. I tried to stop them. I was going to shoot them with the machine gun but Karim was too quick. I think he had overheard me talking to your wife. He rushed into the room when I was not ready and held a gun to my head, while one of his men put bullets in my legs. Then I watched while they took Morgan, and they put the bombs by the stairs and the door to this apartment. They knew you were coming. Karim has a source in the Hamas mukhabarat. He knew you would try to attack from the roof. He has friends waiting on the Egyptian side in Rafah. I think they are Yemenis. They have a truck. I don’t know where they will go.”
“The tunnel? How did they get her to the tunnel?” Adam is incredulous. “It’s out there, in the open ground, and the Hamas guys have been guarding it. I was there with them. Before that, they were watching it for hours. They can’t have gone that way.”
Abu Mustafa shakes his head. Each time he speaks, it takes a greater effort. “Not through the tunnel outside. That is for smuggling, for business. There is another one. Inside this building. Smaller. The opening is in the basement. Karim’s clan. They live here. They made it. Please—I need water. There is a bottle.”
Khader brings it, unscrews the top and puts it to Abu Mustafa’s lips. He takes a mouthful, sighs heavily, and it seems to revive him. He speaks up again, his voice stronger, as if he just remembered something. “They have Abdel Nasser too.”
“Abdel Nasser?”
“Her Palestinian contact.”
So Morgan is with her lover. Even at this moment of crisis, Adam is assailed by emotions he had almost forgotten about: pain and jealousy. “I know who he is,” he says thickly.
“They were keeping him in another apartment. I did not know he was here until just before they left. He is sick. Very bad smell. They shot his legs before, when they captured him. If Morgan will not talk to Karim, he will cut off his head. Before, when she made the video, he had a knife and threatened him. That is why she confessed.”
“When did they leave? How much head start do they have?”
“Not long. I am not sure, but I think less than one hour.”
“And you? Where do you fit in to all this?”
“I am nothing.” Abu Mustafa sounds utterly defeated. “I want to go home. I have had enough. I want to go home. Amman.” His voice is fading again, and he looks as if he’s starting to lose consciousness. He closes his eyes but his lips are still moving, and Adam strains to listen above the mounting tumult coming from outside: sirens, more shouts, the sounds of diesel vehicles being driven at speed and then stopping. In a momentary lull he realizes that Abu Mustafa is muttering the names of his wife and children, talking to them quietly in Arabic, as if they are here with him.
“Khader, we must get this man help. Whoever he is, he does not deserve to die.”
Khader nods. “I will tell my men to make sure they give him first aid and take him to the hospital. But I have to tell you that right now, he is not at the top of my list of priorities.”
Back in the lobby, what must be the door to the stairs that lead to the basement is right in front of them, opposite the main opening onto the ground outside. There, Adam can see that two ambulances have already arrived from Rafah and Khan Younis, along with several trucks and SUVs—Hamas militia reinforcements. Men are pouring into the lobby and climbing the stairs, Executive Force members and Red Crescent paramedics. Khader steps outside and gets into the back of one of the trucks where he manages to change his clothes, swapping his bloodstained uniform for a plain black sports shirt and a pair of ill-fitting jeans. He also finds two big, heavy-duty flashlights. One of them he gives to Adam. In less than a minute, he returns.
“You are ready?” asks Khader.
“As much as I ever will be.”
Khader selects two of the men who have just arrived, and beckons to them and Adam to follow. He opens the door and they begin to descend, Adam holding the flashlight in his left hand, his gun in his right.
The stairs are steeper and narrower than those above, and as they go down, Adam is flooded by dread. How will they follow Morgan now? Khader has promised him they can go through the tunnel as far as Egyptian Rafah, but no further. He has contacts there, who may be able to give them information, but no transport, and in Egypt they would both be arrested: Khader because he is from Hamas, Adam because he has no Egyptian visa. In any case, his passport is back at Khader’s headquarters in Gaza City. Strange to think they left there only four hours ago. It feels like a geological epoch.
But his fears over what happens next are not the only source of Adam’s anxiety. A deep trepidation is tugging at his bowels, an overwhelming sense of danger. He’s heard of the animal instinct that makes the hairs on the backs of people’s necks and forearms stand on end, and now it’s happening to him. At last, after the stairs make a ninety degree turn, they reach the pitch-black basement room. The air is heavy, hot, and hard to breathe. Adam struggles to stop himself hyperventilating.
In the middle of the concrete floor, there’s a wooden frame, and set within it, a square, wooden trap door. It has a hand-sized slot cut in it to make it easy
to lift, but when Khader bends to open it, it’s jammed. He grips the handle and grunts with the effort while the others look on. Still the door won’t open.
“I’m sorry,” he says in English. “I’m sure this won’t take long.” He lies down and shines the flashlight through the hole, then inserts his fingers again and tries to feel its underside. “Aha. I think I’ve got it. There’s some kind of bolt, keeping it sealed from the inside. I’ll send one of the guys out to get an axe or something. We’ll have to try to break it.”
As he starts to give the order in Arabic, Adam hears the noise of a door they have not noticed being quietly opened in the shadows behind them. He wheels around and shines his lamp. Ten feet from the trapdoor, there’s a man, wild-eyed and bearded, dressed in a white waistcoat and pants: the final component of the three-stage trap which Karim has set in order to kill them.
The man starts to speak. Time has already slowed so much this night, but now it seems almost to stop entirely.
He utters his first two syllables in a high-pitched, melodious tenor. It sounds like an incantation: “Allah.”
In the time he takes to utter them, Adam takes in fully the appearance and design of his lethal device. Through his work as a lawyer, he’s read a lot about suicide bombs, and this one conforms to the standard al-Qaeda design, propagated by its international academies of bomb-making, so that it hardly varies from Iraq to the bazaars turned civilian slaughterhouses of the Northwest Frontier Province of Pakistan. Flat slabs of Russian PVV-5A military explosive encase the man’s torso, easily visible beneath his waistcoat. Connecting each slab is a thick and deadly red snake: an ex-Soviet military fuse made of pentaerythritol tetranitrate, PETN. Adam guesses that encasing the slabs is a fabric sheet, into which have been woven thousands of steel pellets: shrapnel to increase the bomb’s murderous power.
