Blood Diamonds - [Kamal and Barnea 05]

by By Jon Land

  “1967,” Ben managed, a thick lump growing in his throat. His mouth felt pasty, the way it felt when he knew a fight was coming.

  “How much do you know?”

  “I know that the Palestinian Council voted to accept arms from the Soviet Union to launch guerrilla strikes against the Israelis. My father was the lone dissenter. But the weapons were never delivered.”

  “Yes, they were,” said Petroskov. “You see, I was one of the drivers...”

  Jafir Kamal checked his watch. The trucks would be coming from Jordan across the Allenby Bridge any moment. From there they would take the desert road toward Jericho where the weapons inside them would be distributed among two dozen smaller vehicles to confuse any Israeli spies who might be lurking about. A small Jordanian force, Jafir Kamal knew, had set up a security perimeter between the bridge and the desert road on the chance an Israeli patrol should appear on the scene.

  The contents of those trucks were the best chance the Palestinians had to use the Israelis’ own tactics against them. A guerrilla war, an armed intifada, would force Israel to concentrate a huge measure of her forces internally, thereby weakening any response to a threat from the outside. The other Arab countries would not sit still if they saw the Palestinians rise up. Not this time. So went the thinking.

  Jafir Kamal alone knew how wrong that thinking was. The Arab countries held the Palestinians in only slightly higher esteem than they held the Israelis. They would use the Palestinian people while making no move to help them directly. Israel’s response to armed rebellion would be swift and excessive. Palestinians would be slaughtered indiscriminately in reprisal, perhaps even driven deeper into the West Bank until they were squeezed against the Jordan River. His people might just as well shoot themselves before the Israelis did.

  Jafir Kamal had planted his charges strategically across the Allenby Bridge. He had wired them together himself his fingers scraped raw from the effort that culminated in him peeling the rubber back to twist them around the screws below the plunger. The old detonating device was a relic left over from World War II, crude but effective. He would wait on the other side of the bridge and depress the plunger once all the Russian trucks carrying arms into Palestine had made their way onto the bridge.

  He waited in the cover of some meager brush, further camouflaged by a mist rising off the Jordan River. The night was cold and Jafir Kamal felt chilled to the bone. He thought of the family he had started here and then raised in the United States, fully believing he would see them again. He did not consider himself a martyr, nor did he look at this as a suicide mission. The council members would come to their senses, ultimately realizing he was right. And if they didn’t, Jafir Kamal would recruit new leaders to take their place and steer his countrymen to an existence eventually independent of both Israel and, just as importantly, the corruptive influence of Palestine’s Arab neighbors. Allies whose friendship came with a wink thrown over their shoulders and fingers crossed behind their backs.

  Jafir Kamal never regretted coming back to Palestine, even though he knew he was leaving the hero he had once been behind. This was a task more important than any he had performed fighting the Israelis in 1948 and then helping to hold his people together after they had lost. People had wept the day he left Palestine. He had left because it was the best thing for his family. After the Six-Day War had proved him right six months later, Jafir Kamal had returned because it was the best thing for his country.

  He spotted the first Russian truck as it turned onto the bridge four hours late, closer to dawn than he had been hoping for. The extra time had left him stiff and freezing, and he rubbed his hands to flush the life back into them. The last moments were the hardest of all, the waiting and hoping that the moist night and sea air would not disable the wire he had so painstakingly laid after nightfall.

  The second truck turned onto the bridge and followed the lead one’s measured pace atop the rickety structure, damaged earlier by stray ordnance. Jafir Kamal twisted the plunger to the right and drew it upward. A single press down now would drive metal against metal and blow the trucks before they reached the other side. The heat of the incendiary devices would rupture the tires and shred the trucks’ undersides. With their vehicles disabled, the Russian drivers and accompanying guards would have time only to flee before the inevitable explosions. No way they would be able to salvage even a single rifle from the shipment. But they would all survive and find their way safely back to their families.

  Jafir Kamal found that very important, even as he watched a third truck follow the first two onto the bridge. He was more glad than ever that he had spared his two sons this life they would have inevitably fallen into had he had not taken them to the United States. The curse of living a long life in Palestine would have been to watch one or both of them die. Jafir Kamal knew the odds as well as any man, and those odds had led to his emigration. Someday he would explain it all to his sons. Someday he would explain to them what he had done on this night, too.

  The fourth truck dropped onto the Allenby Bridge, the lights of the fifth not far behind it. Jafir Kamal was counting seconds now, tasting the thick air on his breath. He couldn’t swallow. His right hand felt stiff again, so he joined his left one over it.

  The final truck finally pulled on to the bridge, the lead one just a hundred yards from this side. More spacing than was ideal, but it had to be now.

  Jafir Kamal pressed down on the plunger with both hands.

  For a long moment nothing happened and it seemed nothing would. Then white flashes erupted all across the bridge a flicker of an instant before the rumble of explosions pierced Jafir Kamal’s ears. The percussion of the blasts knocked him backwards and kicked his breath away. He looked up from the ground to see the hoods and undercarriages of all the trucks ablaze, the Russian drivers lunging down from the smoking cabs to run for their lives.

  But the driver of the second truck in the convoy tried foolishly to drive on. His truck belching smoke and flames, he grazed the lead truck and squeezed by it before the fuel tank ignited and blew the back end of his truck into the air. It seemed to teeter on its nose briefly before spilling onto its side and collapsing a section of the bridge.

  Flames licked at the already blackened steel of the toppled truck. Jafir Kamal rushed toward it in the open, covering his hands with his jacket and pulling himself to the driver’s door of the cab which was now parallel to the sky. The thin fabric did little to protect Jafir Kamal’s flesh, just enough to mask the pain as he closed his fingers around the latch and yanked the door open.

  The driver was inside, still semi-conscious. Jafir Kamal reached down into the building heat and smoke and grabbed him. He raised the man to his waiting second hand and yanked him upward, though not all the way out.

  “Push with your legs!” Jafir Kamal ordered him, their eyes meeting for one long moment. “Help me help you! Push!”

  He saw the man’s feet kick and then push enough for Jafir Kamal to hoist him all the way out and drag him to safety on the other side of the bridge. Exhausted, he barely managed to stagger off into the smoke and confusion, his lungs on fire.

  Jafir Kamal made it back to the cover of the nearby brush beyond the bridge and sank his hands to his knees. He intended to rest just for a moment when something with the force of a powerful kick pounded his back. Then he felt something warm oozing through his shirt, instantly cooling in the chilly night. Remembered the sound of a crack that had reached only the edge of his consciousness.

  I’ve been shot. . .

  That thought registered a moment before the sound of footsteps crunching rapidly over the ground made Jafir Kamal twist painfully round and find the shape of Omar Shaath looming over him.

  * * * *

  Chapter 73

  I

  did not learn the big man’s name until another time,” Petroskov finished, his fingers bleached of blood from squeezing the steering wheel so hard through the duration of the story. His teeth ground nervously togethe
r. “Shaath must have been leading the team sent to meet our convoy. That’s why he was in the area.”

  “You saw Shaath kill my father,” Ben said from the passenger seat in what had started as a question. He was surprised the words came out at all. Questions he had posed all his life finally answered.

  “Shoot, yes,” Colonel Petroskov told him. “Kill, no.”

  “You said he was holding the gun, ready to fire again.”

  “Maybe he did; I’m not sure. I am sure I saw someone come up behind Shaath and strike him with a branch or a log in the head. Shaath doubled over. The figure hit him again. Twice. Shaath went down.”

  “Did you see who it was?” Ben posed eagerly.

  “Someone small.”

  “A boy?”

  “I thought so, yes.”

  “The one in the picture with my father?”

  “I was too far away and it was too dark. I couldn’t be sure.”

  Ben’s mouth felt clogged. He couldn’t swallow. “And my father?”

  He could see Petroskov’s thick shoulders shrug behind the wheel. “I must have passed out. When I woke up, your father—and the boy— were gone. Where . . . ?” He finished with another shrug, a sadder one that left him looking weak. “This makes me even with him. He saved me and now I have saved you. I will escort you to a military airfield where a plane is waiting to take you back to your country My debt is paid.”

  “Not yet. Not until you tell me about Dubna.”

  “You already know everything.”

  “Does that include you working with Anatolyevich?”

  “What makes you—”

  “Because you’re in charge of security for this sector. And at the storage facility Belush told me it was soldiers who carted away the shipments of his Black Death all three times.”

  Petroskov didn’t bother denying the allegation. “In the absence of regular salaries, we of the Russian military have been forced to be creative.”

  “You knew all along what you were helping to smuggle.”

  “All the more reason I was glad to see it out of my country.”

  “Your men drove the crates of Black Death to the nearest port. Loaded them onto the Peter the Great, or another freighter like it, as directed by Anatolyevich.”

  Petroskov’s empty stare confirmed Ben’s words.

  “To be shipped where?” he demanded, resuming. “Who bought them?Where were they going to end up?”

  Colonel Yuri Petroskov took a deep breath before responding to Ben’s staccato burst of questions. “West Africa,” he said. “A rebel leader named Latisse Matabu in Sierra Leone.”

  * * * *

  * * * *

  Chapter 74

  D

  anielle eased the pushcart down the Corniche, the pedestrian-only promenade that rims the Beirut beachfront to the north.

  The day had dawned hot and by late morning the sun burned hotter still, steam vapor lifting from stray puddles pooled in a brief rain the night before. Few people paid her any attention and those who did usually shook their heads or frowned in disdain.

  The poverty left over from Lebanon’s endless civil war had created a new subculture in Beirut: pushcart women. Often homeless or destitute, they roamed the Corniche and the downtown streets between the Christian and Muslim ghettos carrying all their possessions, squeezed in amidst mops, rags, and cleaning products, in search of brief cleaning jobs. They would knock on the doors of homes, apartments, and office buildings in the hope of finding windows to be washed, floors to be mopped, or rooms to be scoured. The women were willing to work for coins and enough people took pity on them to provide the pennies needed to get them through the day.

  Danielle had paid the equivalent of roughly ten dollars for this pushcart. Its previous owner had gratefully parted with everything lashed upon it in return, rushing away in glee before Danielle could change her mind.

  She had come upon the woman on the Corniche, shortly after venturing up from the docks. Danielle had tied her boat down at an empty slip at the harbor just before dawn, happily surprised by the utter lack of security compared to the frequent patrols she recalled from twelve years ago. In fact, there were few boats of any kind moored as far down as the new marina where the St. George Hotel yacht club had been in 1990. Beyond that the only change of note visible from the docks was a seawall constructed around a huge stretch of beachfront, including the area where Danielle’s Sayaret team had come ashore.

  The once bustling and noisy downtown streets of Beirut had looked utterly quiet upon her arrival, not a single light burning she could see from the waterfront. Clearly, anyone moving about at night would invite concern and attract suspicion. That meant Danielle’s best chance at success would lie in daylight when the sheik’s security might be more lax. When an attack would be least expected.

  Especially an attack undertaken by a single person.

  The means to mount that attack had come to Danielle the moment she first laid eyes on the pushcart. Back in the speedboat’s cramped cabin, she inventoried the previous owner’s dingy, discolored dresses and chose the largest, the one with the most material. She then tried it on, satisfied that it hung shapelessly over her, billowing to the sides.

  Plenty of room to conceal the bricks of plastique explosives supplied by Sasha Borodin. There was ample space on the pushcart to store the detonators and timing mechanisms, plenty to tuck in a pair of submachine guns and pistols, ammo and grenades as well.

  The walk along the Corniche to central Beirut where the sheik’s compound was located proved much longer than she had remembered. The air felt super-heated and the concrete of the promenade, dappled by cracks and creases, created an oven effect that defied the sea breeze’s weak attempts to cool the day down.

  The Corniche quickly grew too cluttered with people for comfort, even at this early hour, and Danielle veered to the left. She waited for a man peddling a bicycle with fresh loaves of bread hanging from a rack suspended over his handlebars to pass, before easing her pushcart off the promenade onto the street. A young woman on Rollerblades just missed colliding with Danielle and struggled to keep her balance.

  “Intabih!” she blared. “Watch out!”

  Danielle paid her no heed and shoved her pushcart to the other side of the street. The Beirut sidewalks were in too great a state of disrepair to use, leaving her to cling to the muck-strewn gutters. Occasionally a wheel would get lodged against a piece of debris, or mired in a rut, and it would take all of Danielle’s strength to thrust her cart free.

  Her cover held all the way across to Allenby Street, nonetheless, past beautiful early century buildings so brilliantly restored as to seem textbook examples of Ottoman or Venetian flair. Fading signs placed in their windows advertised future tenants like Coca-Cola and Merrill Lynch. But these buildings remained as empty as the burned-out shells on the outskirts of town where the renovation efforts hadn’t yet reached. The compound of Sheik Hussein al-Akbar lay just a few blocks ahead, across the street from the beachfront hotels. Beyond the compound was a side street called El Sayad where the Sayaret commandos had parked their truck a dozen years before.

  The very spot to which Danielle was headed now.

  * * * *

  Chapter 75

  B

  en saw Colonel Nabril al-Asi waiting in the crowded arrivals terminal of Gaza Airport, hastily rebuilt after the recent shelling, as soon as he filed through the door with the rest of the passengers on the plane from Cairo. The colonel looked distinctly uneasy standing amidst so many people. As Ben approached, he saw a man shove his way forward, jostling al-Asi, the colonel suspended between intentions of how to respond.

  The flight Petroskov had arranged for Ben in Dubna had gone only as far as a private airstrip in Iran. From there a car drove him to Tehran where he boarded a plane that was like a cattle car for a flight to Cairo, where he transferred again, this time onto an ancient converted military transport for the trip to Gaza.

  “You look exhausted, Insp
ector,” al-Asi greeted. Ben realized the colonel’s hair had grown more salt than pepper lately, and the cocky, almost insolent sneer was missing from his expression. “I’m sorry to say that you will have no time to rest.”

  “And you look. . . disguised,” Ben returned, making no effort to hide how relieved he was to see him. Petroskov had been true to his word, having obviously managed to contact al-Asi to inform him Ben was on his way home.

  The colonel looked down at his own clothes: workman’s attire that made him seem a common laborer, instead of the Armani-clad spymaster who was one of the most powerful men in Palestine. Dried droplets of paint bled down his shirt. His pants were stained with dirt at the knees.