Blood Diamonds - [Kamal and Barnea 05]

by By Jon Land

  “These? I was painting the walls of the Protective Security Service’s new headquarters when your Russian friend’s call reached me. I came straight here, glad to have an excuse not to finish.”

  Ben realized this was the first time he had seen al-Asi without the company of a single guard. But he didn’t need Armani to stand out. His gait and demeanor remained enough to make fellow visitors to the airport take a second look and then shrink slightly away.

  “Come,” al-Asi continued, “I have a car waiting. There are fresh clothes inside. You can change on the way.”

  “To where?”

  “Beirut. And Pakad Barnea.”

  “I would have talked her out of going, if I’d had the opportunity,” al-Asi said, once they were outside the terminal, heading to a parking lot made of hard-packed dirt across the street from the airport.

  “Wait, I thought you said you talked to her.”

  Al-Asi frowned. “Unfortunately, my pissed-off Israeli counterparts must have reached the Palestinian Authority with their tale of my insubordination. Deactivating my phone was my first punishment. Assassination will likely be my second.”

  “Then how do you know where Danielle is?”

  “She left a message, Inspector, at Rafiq’s, the building supply store in Ramallah where I have been doing all my shopping.”

  “What happened to your driver?” Ben asked when they reached the colonel’s Mercedes.

  Al-Asi frowned. “He’s been reassigned. Another punishment, I’m afraid.”

  “Your bodyguards?”

  “The same,” al-Asi said and climbed into the car.

  Ben followed, checking the area nervously to see if anyone long intimidated by the colonel’s power might be lurking to take advantage of his fall from grace.

  “The Russian who contacted me never explained his reason for doing this,” al-Asi resumed, after starting the engine. “He told me it would be better hearing the story from you.”

  Ben pulled from his pocket the now wrinkled, dog-eared snapshot of his father and the boy about to serve Jafir Kamal tea. “He helped me because of this.”

  Al-Asi looked over at the picture, clearly recognizing it.

  “This is the photo you gave to Anatolyevich,” Ben finished.

  “Because I wanted him to realize I knew things about him no one was supposed to. Makes a man wonder how much more I know.”

  Ben let his eyes linger briefly on the two faces in the picture. “You knew Anatolyevich would show it to me, of course.”

  “I was counting on it.”

  “Because you didn’t know how to tell me the truth yourself.”

  “There are some things that are difficult even for friends to share.”

  “You can share it with me now,” Ben said, and looked across the seat squarely at al-Asi. “You are the boy in the picture, aren’t you, Colonel?”

  * * * *

  Chapter 76

  A

  l-Asi nodded, ever so slightly.

  “I always wondered why you took such a great interest in me,” Ben muttered. “Almost from the moment I returned to Palestine. Always my guardian, my protector.”

  “It seemed the least I could do,” the colonel sighed.

  “You were there when my father blew up the Russian trucks,” Ben said, recalling Petroskov’s tale of that night. “You attacked Omar Shaath after he shot my father.”

  Al-Asi smiled sadly. “It was the first time I ever struck a man, believe it or not. My family always believed I was too weak and frail to fight. I was relegated to the work carried out in back rooms. Perhaps if I hadn’t struck Shaath that night, that’s where I would still be.”

  “What happened next?”

  Young Nabril al-Asi stood trembling over Omar Shaath’s body, wondering if he had killed him. But the big man’s chest rose and fell, and the boy could hear his breath wheezing. He could have finished the job easily enough, if he had to, glad in any case that it wasn’t necessary.

  Al-Asi then crouched down alongside Jafir Kamal. The man’s breathing was weak and muffled. He had fallen on his stomach, but his legs must have scrunched up slightly when he tried to move. The boy could see a wide dark stain on the back of Jafir Kamal’s shirt and the ground around him was wet with blood.

  Around him chaos had broken out. Men shouted and screamed, illuminated by the thickening flames as they tried to reach the trucks burning on the bridge. Someone was yelling for Shaath.

  Al-Asi decided to use the chaos to his advantage. He was not strong, being small and frail for his fourteen years, but his first thought was to hoist the unconscious form of Jafir Kamal over his shoulders. The effort failed miserably twice, as the boy’s knees buckled under the weight.

  Finally he laced his hands beneath Jafir Kamal’s armpits and dragged him further into the brush, painting a splotchy trail of blood in their wake. Al-Asi knew where the great hero had left the vehicle he had driven here, because he had hidden himself in the trunk. He had listened to the council members discuss the shipment’s arrival and was certain Jafir Kamal would take steps to thwart it. He couldn’t say whether he actually agreed with Kamal or not, but he worshipped the great hero, who had treated even such a small boy respectfully despite his youth and poverty.

  Al-Asi knew he was betraying the confidence of the council members on this night and that bothered him. They had taken him in, and this was how he repaid them. One of the council members had even brought him into his family, more as servant than surrogate son, yet still a move that put a roof over his head.

  Al-Asi wondered if he would still be welcome when all this was over.

  He found Jafir Kamal’s car in the darkness and, with great effort, managed to haul the great man into the backseat. The smells of burning oil and charred steel were strong even here and the carcasses of the Russian trucks on the Allenby Bridge continued to burn brightly enough to chase much of the darkness away.

  Climbing behind the wheel, al-Asi realized he had no idea where to go. There had been no reason to think that far ahead since he had never visualized himself in this position. He had accompanied Jafir Kamal merely to watch, not protect him. Attacking Shaath had been an inexplicable and totally unexpected reaction. A sudden explosion of passion stemming from the certainty that the big man was about to shoot Kamal again, shoot him as many times as it took until Jafir Kamal breathed no more.

  Al-Asi had felt terrified in that moment, yet remained passionate about attempting to save his hero. Shaath became the object of the hate that had been festering inside him.

  In his imagination the great Kamal would be so grateful for saving his life that he would adopt the boy and take him under his wing. Train him in the ways of the Palestinian warrior so he never need fear anything again.

  But where to go now?

  A doctor! Jafir Kamal needed a doctor!

  The muktar in his old village was a doctor. The muktar was in a refugee camp now, the same one in which the orphaned future head of the Palestinian Protective Security Service had lived until he ran away after being beaten. The refugee camp was several miles from here, a difficult drive at night with Israeli patrols and curfews to consider. But the boy managed to stay clear of the Israelis, in part by driving with his lights off the whole way. His pace was that of a crawl, the car further camouflaged by the utter blackness of the night.

  He parked on the outskirts of the camp that teemed with bodies squeezed into a muddy flat, living in tents. The stench of raw sewage, spoiled food, and human fear turned al-Asi’s stomach, even worse than he remembered.

  In the car’s backseat, Jafir Kamal moaned.

  He was still alive, that was something anyway, enough to give al-Asi hope. He rushed about the camp until he found his villagemuktar, a gruff man in his sixties who had gone to school in France. The muktar came carrying his medical bag, his hands dark with the dried blood of several wounded in this camp he had probably not been able to save.

  “The wound is bad,” the muktar reported, after
a quick examination of Jafir Kamal in the backseat under the spill of a flashlight.

  “Yes, I know.”

  “Who is this man?”

  “It is the great hero, Jafir Kamal himself. “

  The muktar returned to the unconscious form with renewed enthusiasm.

  “Can you save him, sidi?”

  “I will do the best I can. “

  “It wasn’t good enough,” al-Asi said to Ben in the front seat of his Mercedes, his voice so soft it barely carried over the quiet hum of the air conditioner. “Your father died that night. He never regained consciousness. I was with him—you should know that, at least.”

  “All these years and you never told me,” Ben responded, more shocked than dismayed by the tale.

  “I didn’t know how to, Inspector.”

  “The way you just did sounded pretty good.”

  Al-Asi took in a deep breath and held it briefly. “Would you have looked at me differently if I had told you the truth before?”

  “I suppose.”

  “You would have felt indebted?”

  “Of course.”

  “That’s your answer, my friend.”

  “What?” Ben posed, exasperated.

  “I did not want you acting out of debt when around me. You know my position, how I work. Everything I do is based on debt because debt means leverage. When someone owes me something they are far easier to persuade.” Al-Asi’s dark, heavy-lidded eyes sought him out. “I did not want you to be just another person for me to persuade. I thought too much of you for that.”

  “But it explains why you’ve been looking out for me almost from the day I returned to Palestine.”

  “No, Inspector, it doesn’t. I did what I did out of respect for you, not your father. A man must stand on his own. Early on, I may have tested you to see if you were someone I could trust with my friendship.”

  “And did I pass?”

  Al-Asi’s expression didn’t change. “I believe there are only two men of integrity in our country, Inspector. You are the second. You can see why I did not greet your pending move back to Detroit with great enthusiasm.”

  “It wasn’t you I was leaving, Colonel.”

  “Ah, well, my own people have apparently abandoned me, so why not you?” The colonel smiled strangely. “Can I share something with you, Inspector?”

  “Of course.”

  “I owe everything I am to your father, because the day he was killed was the day I realized what it took to survive.”

  “Omar Shaath recovered,” Ben reminded him.

  “I should have killed him when I had the chance.” The colonel’s blue eyes glistened playfully. “But I still had some growing up to do.”

  “You were never identified?”

  Al-Asi shook his head. “No one got a good enough look. Everyone assumed it must have been an accomplice of Jafir Kamal. Who would believe a weak young boy could accomplish so much? I went about my business, playing the dutiful slave while all the time learning how Palestine truly functioned.” A sad frown crossed his features. “It is not terribly different now than it was back then, is it?”

  “Not yet,” Ben agreed.

  * * * *

  Chapter 77

  D

  anielle pretended to be resting in the shade of El Sayad Street, seated on the rough sidewalk with her back against her push-cart. In reality she was reviewing her plan.

  According to intelligence reports Sasha Borodin had managed to obtain, the sheik had constructed an escape tunnel connected to the crumbling storm drains beneath Beirut that spilled into the Mediterranean. The entrance to those drains, and the sheik’s tunnel, was accessible through a square-grated hatch that rested between the pushcart and the sidewalk. The hatch had been made to open only from the inside, but Danielle had spent the last forty minutes using a file to wear down the latch on its underside. She had found the file amidst a collection of rusted tools in a box inside the pushcart that contained the sum total of a person’s life, enthusiastically sold for ten American dollars.

  Barely an hour before, she had snailed past Sheik Hussein al-Akbar’s fortress. Her breath shortened. The pounding of her heart made her ribs ache, as her mind transported her back to the last time she was here. Only then had she come to grips with how much that mission’s failure had haunted her. The downward spiral that began then had never really ended. Everything bad that had ever happened to her, it seemed, had its root in that night.

  Unfinished. . .

  So much in her life remained that way. Tenures in the Sayaret, Shin Bet, and National Police. Two pregnancies. Ben. The list went on. No sense of closure. Everything ending before its time, before she was ready.

  This was her chance to change all that. To finish what had hung out there uncompleted for more than a decade and change the course of so much which followed it.

  That thought filled Danielle with fresh resolve as she continued to ease her pushcart down the street. Drawing even with the front gate on Allenby Street, she had shoved her pushcart further out into the street, skirting perilously close to Beirut’s unforgiving traffic. She knew the move was foolish, stupid, but she couldn’t help herself. She needed to get closer, needed to see inside the compound. Touch what had been left out of her reach a dozen years ago.

  The experience bordered on surreal. The only other time she had viewed this place had been in Sayaret intelligence photos and a grainy picture on a television monitor broadcast from Captain Ofir Rosen’s hidden camera.

  The grounds within the fortress were lush and magnificent, perfectly kept and manicured. Guards patrolled at regularly spaced distances.

  A horn blew. Brakes squealed. Drivers shouted obscenities at Danielle through open windows, gesturing with their hands. They called her a tramp, a whore. Danielle gestured back, spitting their way.

  She hit the opposite curb so hard the cart nearly toppled, drawing the attention of the guard poised at the front gate. Danielle ducked her head but tried to look at him as she passed.

  The guard was holding a clipboard, lots of names and numbers written in Arabic. A checklist, it looked like.

  Danielle headed on, not gazing back.

  Now, sitting on the curb of El Sayad Street almost an hour later, Danielle at last felt the latch she’d been filing give way, freeing the hatch to open. All that remained was for her to pry the hatch open and duck down inside the underbelly of Beirut. She rose to her feet and, as unobtrusively as possible, slid the remainder of the equipment she would need into the vast pockets of her shapeless dress.

  The detonators Borodin had obtained, standard Israeli military issue, were digitally based and capable of being triggered by a single wireless transmitter. She stuffed timing mechanisms into her pockets as well, still uncertain what she would actually need once inside the fortress. The pistols and extra ammo were easy for her to conceal, the Uzi submachine guns considerably less so. Ultimately, Danielle decided to tote only one of them along.

  Satisfied she had everything she needed, Danielle purposely spilled the contents of a box set atop the pushcart and crouched to retrieve them as a ruse to get her closer to the hatch. From this angle the pushcart blocked view of both her and the hatch from the street, but she remained cautious as she wrapped her fingers around the steel grate and yanked upward.

  The grate lifted off with minimal resistance. Holding the Uzi under the ragged shawl covering her shoulders, Danielle lowered herself onto the ladder inside. Next she maneuvered the pushcart closer to the grate to better conceal it. Then she dropped a few more rungs before shouldering the Uzi and easing her hands through the hatch to fit the grate back into place. Her angle and the weight she was carrying made it awkward and difficult, but she managed the task and continued her descent.

  At the bottom of the ladder, Beirut’s storm drains broke off in four directions. Danielle gathered her bearings and chose the one that offered the most direct route to the sheik’s fortress. Above her the pushcart had been reduced to a mere sha
dow concealing the hatchway. Danielle was struck suddenly by the odd certainty she had left something crucial up above and a mental inventory of what she had stuffed on her person did little to alleviate her concern.

  Finally she passed it off to paranoia, common for all in such situations, and started off. Her feet sloshed through thin puddles of water, and the sunless cool of the subterranean tunnel chilled the sweat that had coated her face and soaked through her clothes. The air stank of fetid water, mold, and sewage run-off that Beirut’s crumbling infrastructure let spill into these drains and, ultimately, the Mediterranean.