Peace, Love and Lies

by Oren Sanderson

  But it would be much better if he got one of my superiors in the loop, so my ass was covered,” she added after few seconds.

  Harel understood at once. Five minutes later, a fax arrived from the tactical headquarters at the airport. Above Harel’s signature was a single line of text, ‘I hereby instruct and authorize, in coordination with the chief of military intelligence, the jamming of every transmission in the area of Ben Gurion Airport between one and six a.m.’

  Harel had balls. Dana was covered.

  “You have four hours,” Dana grumbled but sounded pretty satisfied.

  “We need to return to the airport in an hour anyway,” I pointed out, feeling my nerves stretch dangerously.

  We stayed for an hour in the control wagon, listening to the Night Birds show on Army Radio. The transmission to the plane never came back. Half an hour remained until the deadline set by Harel. Micko fell asleep and snored softly. Ronny was smoking and looking at us with tired eyes through a cloud of smoke.

  Only Hezi was pacing restlessly inside the wagon. He kept getting up and sitting down. Suddenly, he said, “Actually, there’s a log of all cell phone calls somewhere. There must be, right?”

  “The responder is automatic,” Dana explained. “But the phone company charges users automatically according to their phone numbers.”

  “We’re in luck! Why did you wait until now?” Ronny, who had hardly said a word, was beyond himself. Micko awoke from the noise, tried hard to open his eyes and asked what the whole fuss was about.

  “You wanted to hear the call. I’m really sorry,” Dana added, embarrassed. “Let me check and see what I can do.” She made a few quick phone calls in a matter-of-fact tone.

  “Now all we can do is wait,” she noted as she finished the last call. “It’s a matter of minutes.”

  The internal phone rang and we tensed up.

  “The number?” she asked. “Yes, yes, I’m writing it down. Four-five-nine-four. Alright, thanks. Now check the general index for a name. Yes. I have authorization.” She gave an authorization number and listened for another minute. Then thanked the caller politely and lay down the phone.

  “It’s a cell phone in use by the army,” she said. We waited, stunned. “This specific phone was assigned to operations branch, but the index shows a sub-assignment,” she stopped for a second and looked at us with a blank face. “It was sub-assigned to the Liaison Unit to Foreign Forces, LUFF.”

  Micko, awake by now, sat up as pale as snow and couldn’t utter a word.

  “Two-two-five-four-five-nine-four,” I said. “Isn’t that your number, Micko?” I took out a little, plasticized card, given to me by the sergeant major who had drafted me, with all the numbers for LUFF personnel. The number wasn’t on the card.

  “I don’t know that number,” said Micko in clear determination. “I have no idea what you are talking about.” To my ears, he sounded a mix of astonishment and fear. “In any case, our time is up. We need to get back to the airport. Enough with these games.” He was angry.

  “And someone will just go on reporting our every move?” asked Ronny. “With the agent that Harel is planting in our crew, they will massacre us before we even film the first shot.”

  “So you shouldn’t agree to take the agent on board.”

  Micko may have been right, but his defeatist attitude drove me crazy. “And we should surrender to both the spy and the hijackers?” I asked.

  “No,” Micko responded. “We will only augment the rescue operation’s chances of success.”

  “Or, we can still locate the leak,” Hezi said.

  “The time to play games is over.” Micko sounded determined. “It’s almost six a.m. There’s no time for more investigations. What are you doing?” he looked at Hezi who was dialing from Dana’s phone.

  “… five-nine-four,” Hezi finished reading off the phone number. “Now is a good time to wake up our leaking friend; as good as anytime,” he had almost finished talking when a ringing was heard from inside Micko’s handbag.

  * * *

  Chapter 25

  Micko pulled the phone out of his bag and pressed the power button to turn it off.

  “It’s not ringing anymore,” said Hezi and looked curiously at Micko.

  “This phone is not mine,” said Micko. “Someone switched my phone!” There was a heavy silence in the confined space. I quickly checked my phones. One belonged to CNN and another one belonged to the LUFF.

  “You’re right!” I announced. “The phone I have isn’t the one I got at the LUFF either. Someone switched the phones around.”

  “When was the last time you received a call on the original phone that they gave you?” Hezi asked me.

  “It was before the meeting there last night, about six hours ago.”

  “Who else was at that meeting?”

  “Micko, Raus, Uzi Bar-Sela and Oshri the sergeant major who wasn’t doing much,” I replied.

  “We don’t have time to start checking everyone,” Micko pointed out.

  The others looked deflated as well. The solution had seemed close for a while, but then it seemed to evade us. We were about to start the broadcast from the plane while the spy was still among us, reporting to the hijackers on everything that was about to happen.

  “We’ll just have to take a calculated risk,” Ronny tried to comfort me.

  “It’s a good thing they switched your phone too,” Micko whispered to me in a slightly trembling voice. “Otherwise I would have had a lot of explaining to do.”

  I wasn’t completely certain about Micko’s innocence but was more worried about whoever was up there, at the top of the chain of command. Someone up there knew about the spy and had decided to let him operate. I could only pray that he knew what he was doing.

  * * *

  Chapter 26

  Seven am Israel time, which is midnight in New York, is an hour and a half past America’s television prime time. Any politician contemplating running for office or pulling out of a race would do well to announce it between seven-thirty eastern and ten-thirty, which is the time slot for the evening’s last news show. Otherwise, he just wouldn’t make it into the news. When dealing with a hijacked plane, the situation was slightly different. If Karni succeeds in getting dramatic footage from the plane, it will be rebroadcast in a loop for a whole day from coast to coast on all the news shows as well as on the international edition, but nothing would be broadcast on the following day. A plane hijacking can headline a news show for a maximum of twenty-four hours unless there is a spectacular rescue or a brutal massacre. Any of these might bring the story back to the headlines, but then it will live for only twelve more hours. Life is stronger than any TV drama and the next TV drama is even stronger than life, and so on.

  Karni tightened her shoe laces.

  “So I won’t trip over them in case we have to run,” she explained while undoing and retying her laces even tighter. Contrary to her custom, she quickly put on make-up and even combed her hair. Ronny checked the camera, the batteries, and the backup batteries as a matter of routine. The events of the past hours had left no visible mark on him. The soundman seemed to be smoking indifferently but an uncontrollable twitch of an unruly nerve in his eyelid revealed his nervousness. A yellow airport jeep picked up the three and started driving slowly towards the hijacked plane. I went back up to the tactical headquarters. I was no longer exhausted and drained. A shot of renewed adrenaline made me jump into a folding chair offered by the ever-devoted Shoshi. I watched the TV monitors in a trance, trying to listen to all four loudspeakers at once.

  The plane door opened as the jeep came to a halt alongside it. Someone shouted in Arabic in the jeep’s direction, “Climb up on the wing.” The jeep drove forward and the three climbed on top of the engine cover and from there to the wing. The emergency door opened wider and they disappeared into the plane. I followed their thermal images. The three took no more than one step inside the plane. Their thermal images stopped in their tracks. The a
udio transmission became muffled and sounded like an undecipherable chirp. After a long while, the audio cleared and we heard Taysir say, “Their IDs are alright, but you will stay on the floor until I finish checking.”

  “Keep this up for one more minute and we have no deal. I’m out of here,” we heard Karni’s voice say. “There’s a limit to what I will take for the sake of a broadcast.”

  There followed a long silence.

  “You’re OK, the cameraman is OK, but the soundman isn’t staying here!” we heard Taysir’s voice say. “The cameraman can record sound as well. You don’t need the soundman.” Then Ronny’s voice was heard and I felt a sudden chill. “Without the soundman, the video will be a bit screwed up, and the audio will be very screwed up, and nobody will understand what you’re saying.”

  “They’ll understand. They’ll understand very well,” Taysir said slowly. “Just like they understood everything we’ve been saying so far.”

  “I’m letting you out alive through the emergency exit,” he turned to the soundman. “But you’re going to run. You will run fast and far. If I wanted to make sure you won’t cause trouble, I’d kill you now, so you better run. Yallah, go on, scram.”

  “CNN Atlanta is ready for a live broadcast,” It was Karni again. “In twenty minutes, the satellite slot will close and it will take you three or four hours to get on the air again.”

  “Don’t you tell me what to do,” Taysir said with contempt. “As a CNN lady, you should know that all the satellites are waiting just for that now. Now, get organized because I am ready.”

  Television’s Channel Two was the first to pause the music and announce, “We are now going, courtesy of CNN, live to Ben Gurion Airport and inside the hijacked airplane.” They cut to a slide of the plane. CNN was showing the content of a beer bottle poured joyfully over a rock, and then they cut to a blonde anchorwoman, somewhat embarrassed, who announced, “We now go live to the hijacked Israeli Air Force plane. Our reporter, Karni Meridor, will be talking to the Palestinian guerilla commander, Taysir Abu Shahid. Karni, can you hear us?”

  The image of three shiny stripes appeared on the three monitors. The monitors lit up and then it was Karni’s face in the poor light, her hair cut short and her eyes penetrating. ‘Karni, we did it,’ flashed through my mind. This was a certain Pulitzer Prize. Karni didn’t miss a beat.

  “Good evening, Cathy,” she started and sounded natural as if she had been reporting news for the last twenty years. “As you know, it’s been thirty hours since the air force plane has been standing on the tarmac at Ben Gurion Airport after it was hijacked in mid-air on its way to a peace summit in Egypt, and returned to land here. It took a lot of convincing, but the hijackers’ leader agreed to say a few words to us.” The camera zoomed out a bit and Karni turned to the man by her side. He was tall and lanky. His gaze looked dark and tormented.

  “You are holding twenty-two people at gunpoint, inside a booby-trapped plane, and as I understand, the whole thing could blow up at any minute. Taysir Abu Shahid, what is it that led you to such a terrible situation?” As soon as she finished asking the monitor turned black. A whistle was heard and then a thud. All three monitors remained dark. After a moment, the monitor showed the anchorwoman in Atlanta. “We apologize for the technical difficulty due to difficult transmission conditions. We will resume our transmission from the plane momentarily. Ben Gurion Airport, can you hear me?” The monitor showed Abu Shahid once again. The fax photos we had received during the day did not do him justice. He looked tired and had stubble but he looked younger than his photos. He blinked and tried to look at the camera. He had a piercing gaze.

  “The suffering of my people is such that a hijacked plane with twenty-two hostages on board is insignificant in terms of pain and sorrow.”

  We had a smart tough enemy here, or rather a talent. Taysir went on.

  “If anyone is watching us now, if even ten people are watching, then it’s worthwhile. If there are a hundred or a hundred thousand watching, or as you like to brag, fifty million viewers watching, then let the whole world know that Taysir Abu Shahid is of no importance. What matters is the Palestinian nation. Let my daughter know that her life will be worth nothing without us; that we are fighting and we are ready to go all the way for the sake of our people and for her future. Once the Zionists realize that we have no other way and that we will go all the way and nothing will stop us, only then will they give us an honorable solution.”

  The camera moved to Karni’s face “An honorable solution, Mr. Abu Shahid,” she said, “Many Jews are convinced that your honor begins where Jewish honor is trampled. And it may be the end of their lives too. The Israeli government has already declared its readiness to pay a high price in order to reach an honorable political compromise with you. The Israeli government is ready to sit down and negotiate, and things happen—”

  It was bad. Karni was a foreign ministry cadet again. Not a reporter.

  Abu Shahid entered the frame and grabbed the microphone from her hand. I held my breath, afraid and worried. At the same time my professional awareness buzzed deep inside my mind, ‘What drama in a live broadcast.’ But Abu Shahid only wanted to express himself. He fired at the microphone, panting and breathing heavily, “An honorable solution? For forty-five years they have been finding traitors among us, they have fostered them, they have bought them with money, they have bought the whole world with their money, the big banks, the world media; even CNN was bought with their money. I want my people to have our own country and we don’t need anyone’s favors. We deserve nothing less than the other twenty-two Arab countries. None of them will look down upon us. It is their responsibility and that of Israel to give me what I deserve, and if they don’t, there will be an explosion, an explosion loud enough for everyone to hear.”

  “Loud enough for your daughter to hear?” Karni was far from giving up.

  “If it were only up to me, my daughter wouldn’t hear a single explosion all her life. But she was born into explosions and she is living with explosions. Maybe this one will save her—”

  “What if you get two weeks?” Karni interrupted him. “And the Israeli government agrees to discuss all your demands. For two weeks they will protect you and they will guard you. You can always go back to blowing things up. Would you agree to that?” Karni sounded again like the Israeli consul in New York seven years earlier. This was the bright Karni from Hunter College, she seemed determined not to let anyone silence her this time.

  “Enough, enough, shut down the transmission,” said Taysir.

  “Do you agree?” Karni was relentless and pressed on with a courage that bordered on madness. Suddenly I realized that someone, I wasn’t sure who had authorized her to make an offer to Abu Shahid.

  The camera showed Abu Shahid turning around. Karni followed him. “Will you give them two weeks?”

  Taysir turned to her. He looked menacing, “It’s a trap. They will kill me just like they are killing the Palestinian people.”

  “There is no trap.”

  The tension was thick in the air. On the screen and in our operation center, Karni sounded convinced and urging. “With fifty million people watching you—this is your chance. This is your insurance policy, sir. Two weeks. From here you will go to an Izz ad-Din al-Qassam camp in Southern Lebanon, they are waiting for you at Marj a-Zahur. You will have a bus and free passage from here all the way to Marj a-Zahur. CNN will escort you. The cameras will be there together with fifty million viewers. The Israeli government will have two weeks to come up with a solution that will be honorable to everyone—”

  “Shut down the transmission,” Abu Shahid interrupted her. “That’s enough. Shut down the transmission.”

  Karni was relentless, “Fifty million people are watching you and asking, yes or no? Is there a chance or is it just a show? Do you believe in a solution or do you believe in the bomb?”

  “I believe in the bomb,” said Abu Shahid with great difficulty. “But if this plan is rea
l, then I will accept it, not because of you and not because of CNN. I will accept it only because of Rahma, my daughter.”

  Karni looked straight at the camera and half-smilingly, said, “That is all from Ben Gurion Airport in Israel. Atlanta, back to you.”

  At CNN, wonderfully-blonde Cathy was quickly back on screen. Channel Two was back to transmitting songs with slides. Channel One showed an old fatherly anchorman saying, “Ben Gurion, Ben Gurion, we are going to our correspondent on the ground for a first reaction from the prime minister’s entourage at the airport. Can you hear me?”

  The station’s correspondent at the airport fired into the microphone, “We are here with the foreign minister’s chief of cabinet, Uzi Bar-Sela. Did the CNN offer catch you by surprise or you were the ones to initiate it?”

  Uzi pursed his lips and very slowly said, “We are very appreciative of CNN’s transmission and we are grateful for their help. The offer of two weeks to find a solution is agreeable to us and was authorized by us. We will do everything possible to make good on the new opening that was just discussed.”

  He must have been telling the truth but didn’t look very credible. Danny Taylor looked more convincing even when he was lying.

  “A bus will drive out of here carrying a terrorist who killed Jews,” shot the correspondent. “And will take him to Lebanon? Is the Israeli government going along with this arrangement?”

  “I will not repeat what I have just said,” Uzi replied sternly, but repeated his message nevertheless. “The CNN offer is agreeable to us and was authorized by us. We stand by it and we will act to implement it. I am not at liberty to add any more details and I think we need to pull our strength in order to implement this new opportunity that has just opened up.”