“The Saladin Brigades distributed a leaflet, announcing that the Swede would be released in return for the freedom of Bassam Odwan,” Omar Yussef said. “Besides, I witnessed the kidnapping. The gunmen were wearing Saladin Brigades headbands.”
“Anyone can get headbands made and anyone with a computer and a fax machine can call himself the Saladin Brigades. The leaflet didn’t come from us.”
“If you don’t have him, where should I look?”
“It’s not so easy to know who to trust and who to suspect in Rafah,” Abu Jamal said. “Of course, we expect to come under attack from the Jews-our holy Koran says that we will be in a continuous battle with them until the Day of Judgment. But now it’s other Palestinians who kill my men.”
“Like Bassam Odwan.”
“Like him.”
“These other Palestinians, do they steal your new missiles, too?”
Abu Jamal’s face was immobile. I have his attention, Omar Yussef thought.
“If you find the Swede,” Omar Yussef said, “you may find your missile, too.”
Abu Jamal’s dark eyes flickered.
Omar Yussef puzzled out what he had to say as he went along, speaking slowly and determinedly. “The Swede was kidnapped because he questioned the purchase of academic degrees by officers of the Preventive Security. Bassam Odwan was killed for shooting Lieutenant Fathi Salah. Fathi’s brother, Yasser, is in the Preventive Security. Odwan told me he was alone with Fathi when the shots were fired by a single shooter.”
“You met Bassam?”
“In his jail cell. Another UN man, James Cree, was blown up by the Saladin Brigades from Gaza City, but it was on the orders of someone in Rafah, who may, in fact, have been trying to kill me.”
Abu Jamal winced at the mention of James Cree. Someone powerful has blamed you for an embarrassing attack on the UN, Omar Yussef thought.
“The orders to kill the UN man came from Rafah,” Omar Yussef said. “From Yasser Salah.”
Now Abu Jamal spoke slowly and carefully. “Why did Salah want to kill you?”
“I had been to his family home in Rafah to investigate the kidnapping of the Swede. Yasser Salah is the one who connects all these strands. That’s where we’ll find the missile.”
Abu Jamal coughed and spat into a tissue. “Lieutenant Fathi Salah came to us to sell the missile. He was a Military Intelligence officer. Perhaps they have the missile.”
Omar Yussef shook his head and stroked his mustache. “Fathi was scared and alone when he met Odwan. That’s because he was operating without the permission of his boss General Husseini.”
“Why didn’t he sell the missile to General Husseini?”
“He would have, but Yasser couldn’t allow that. If his boss, Colonel al-Fara, discovered that he’d sold such a strategic weapon to his greatest rival, it would’ve been the end for Yasser.”
“Selling the missile to the Saladin Brigades was the neutral option?”
Omar Yussef nodded. “But something went wrong in the sale. It didn’t matter to Yasser, because he could still sell the missile to Colonel al-Fara. But he had to get rid of his brother, first.” Omar Yussef rubbed his palms as though washing them. “He knew General Husseini would blame Odwan for Fathi’s killing.”
“So Yasser Salah sold out his own brother. But why would he kidnap the Swede?”
“I don’t know yet. Perhaps it had to do with his degree from al-Azhar. He bought the degree so he could be promoted. Maybe he feared being demoted or punished for corruption, if the bogus degrees were exposed.”
Abu Jamal shook his head. “It’d be too risky for Yasser. Anyway, al-Fara’s officers get promotions for corruption. You may be right about the missile though.” He leaned toward Attiah and whispered. The burly man went to the back of the apartment and spoke into a phone in a low voice. “We’ll go to look for the missile at Salah’s house,” Abu Jamal said.
“When?”
“We had another mission planned for late tonight, so everyone’s on standby. We’ll be ready soon.”
“We’ll come with you.”
Abu Jamal clicked his tongue and raised his chin. No.
“You’re forgetting the Swede.” Omar Yussef stared at Abu Jamal.
The head of the Saladin Brigades squeezed his chin thoughtfully in his good hand. “All right. Stay out of the way, though. I don’t want another UN guy’s death blamed on the Saladin Brigades.”
If I die, Omar Yussef thought, you won’t have any trouble. No one will so much as pick up the phone to call you.
Chapter 27
It was eleven that night before Abu Jamal decided he had gathered sufficient weaponry to be certain of taking out the Salah home. Omar Yussef paced the darkness above the stationery store. He was sure Yasser had the missile, but he couldn’t be positive that this second Salah brother was also behind Wallender’s kidnapping. If he was wrong, he wanted to know quickly, so he could pursue different leads to free the Swede.
Omar Yussef gave a low growl of frustration. These were hopeless thoughts-if Wallender wasn’t at Salah’s house, he wasn’t going to find him at all. His colleague would remain at the mercy of whichever of the different gangs might be holding him. The Saladin Brigades would reclaim their missile, have it copied, shoot it over the border fence into Israel, and draw down a new war on the people of Gaza. At least someone will be happy, he thought. He clenched his fists behind his back.
Heavy footsteps approached fast from the rear of the apartment. In the darkness around the far sofa, the orange tip of Sami’s cigarette dipped toward the coffee table and was crushed out. He was standing next to Omar Yussef when Attiah Odwan came to the door. Across his strong, rounded chest, he braced a Carl Gustav sub-machinegun. He had eight grenades clipped to his belt and his vest was bulky with spare magazines for the gun. He gestured with his head for them to follow.
At the foot of the stairs, three jeeps idled with their headlights off. The men inside had wrapped their keffiyehs around their faces against the dust. Omar Yussef never wore this checkered scarf, but he wished he had one now, even though it was a mark of rustic simplicity. He couldn’t tell if he was cold because he wore only a shirt or because the tension in his muscles cut off his blood. He coughed and sat beside Sami in the first jeep. Abu Jamal came quickly down the stairs. He put on a green forage cap and took his place in the front seat. Attiah Odwan jogged to the corner of the main street and glanced quickly along it before gesturing to the convoy to move. He slid into the back seat beside Omar Yussef.
As he edged across the seat to make room, Omar Yussef struck his head on something metal. The blow reignited the bruises from Wallender’s kidnapping and he grunted with the pain. He turned to glare at one of the gunmen in the luggage space at the back of the jeep, who was withdrawing the thick tube of a shoulder-launched missile like the one Omar Yussef had seen used against General Husseini’s home that morning. The gunman put the missile next to another which he held upright between his legs. The gunman tapped his knuckle against the missile launcher where it had hit Omar Yussef’s head and shrugged, his apologetic eyes showing between the folds of his keffiyeh.
“Be careful,” Omar Yussef said. “One bullet will be enough to blow my head off. Don’t waste your missile.”
Abu Jamal glanced to the rear of the jeep and spoke to the man with the LAW anti-tank missiles. “When we get there, stay close to me.”
The jeeps went fast down the main street. If it had been quiet in the early evening, now it was ghostly and empty. The nights in Rafah belonged to the gunmen, the smugglers and, sometimes, the Israeli undercover squads.
Sami lit a cigarette and handed the pack to the grateful gunmen in the back. Attiah Odwan declined the smokes.
“What do you intend to do at Salah’s house?” Omar Yussef asked Abu Jamal.
Abu Jamal’s head and shoulders rocked with the jolting of the jeep over the rough road. He was loose and relaxed. “We will achieve revenge for Attiah’s brother,” he said.
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Omar Yussef knew there would be more deaths tonight. In the quiet jeep, he wondered if his reasoning about Yasser Salah was correct. What if he was bringing down this merciless, heavily armed force on an innocent family? A low hint of panic pulsed through him. He thought perhaps he should slow the gunmen down, while he ran through his logic again. “You might need Yasser Salah alive,” he said. “To guide you to where the missile is hidden.”
“Someone in the family will remain alive to show us,” Abu Jamal said. “I don’t expect it will be Yasser. He isn’t the type.”
“Yasser knows the truth,” Attiah said, quietly.
Omar Yussef turned to the burly man squeezed onto the back seat next to him. “The truth, Attiah?”
“The Salah family demanded the death of my brother Bassam, because they said he killed their son,” Attiah said, staring into the dusty darkness beyond the window. “Their demand was correct under our traditions of blood vengeance. But it wasn’t true that Bassam was the killer. Now, under those same traditions, I will take revenge. My revenge is true.”
Omar Yussef thought about that for a while. “Do you expect the Salahs to put up much of a fight, Abu Jamal?”
Abu Jamal lifted his hands before him in a shrug. “Those who die for the resistance go to Heaven,” he said. “Those whom we kill go to Hell.”
I don’t believe in Heaven, Omar Yussef thought. He looked into the murky night. They were in the half-demolished section of Rafah, where the walls were pocked with bullet holes, framed by jagged, blasted edges ripped by tank shells. And Hell is right here.
The first jeep slowed and rounded the corner of the alley that led to the Salah family home. It crept toward the sandy lot where James Cree had parked the UN Suburban a day and a half earlier. Omar Yussef frowned. It seemed so long ago, almost as if Cree had been dead as many years as his namesake in the British War Cemetery. How old would that make me? he thought. I’ve lived lifetimes today.
The second jeep came alongside it and the last one rolled around to the west of the house. The gunmen climbed quietly from their jeeps. Omar Yussef stepped stiffly onto the sand, rolling his shoulders after being squeezed between Sami and Attiah.
The house was dark. Through the swirling dust, Omar Yussef could see the black canvas of the mourning tent flapping in the wind and hear its low, steady resonance. The olive trees rustled above the perimeter wall. He took a few steps down the lane and looked toward the garage at the back of the house, which he and Cree had passed as they left the day before. His eyes strained into the darkness. A faint rim of light glowed around the door between the garage and the garden. The wind gusted and Omar Yussef blinked against the dust. When he opened his eyes, the light in the garage was out. Someone knew they were there.
The gunmen scuttled across the sand toward the perimeter wall. Omar Yussef went after them. He picked out Abu Jamal by the peak of his forage cap and whispered his name. He wanted to tell him about the light in the garage. Abu Jamal turned.
A sudden burst of thick, popping gunfire spat from the house. Its baritone harmonized with the bass of the slow, flapping canvas tent. Abu Jamal dropped to his knees. He lifted his Kalashnikov and returned fire toward an upstairs window of the Salah house. His men took cover behind the wall ringing the olive grove. Abu Jamal followed them quickly, still shooting.
Omar Yussef crouched in the middle of the sandy lot, just where he had been when the firing began. He saw the orange muzzle-flashes of the gun upstairs in the Salah home, but when he looked around him in the dark, everything was black. Someone grabbed his waist and trotted him toward the cover of the wall. He fell forward, but he kept going, scrambling on all fours across the sand. He dropped to the ground at the wall and pushed his glasses back into place. He turned, panting. Sami smiled and patted his arm.
The gunmen gathered on either side of the gate, preparing to charge the house. A flash ripped out of the darkness and part of the wall disintegrated. The explosion lifted two of the gunmen and dropped them in the sand a few yards from the gate. Omar Yussef felt the explosion as a wave of deeper heat in the humid night. Yasser booby-trapped the entrance, he thought. One of the men on the sand cried out in pain. Another volley chattered from the machinegun in the upstairs window and both of the fallen gunmen were still. Attiah stood and fired toward the window.
Abu Jamal signaled to the man with the two LAW missiles strapped to his back. The man nodded, readied one of the missiles and edged toward the gate. His shoulders lifted as he took a deep breath. He stepped into the open and fired toward the top of the house. The shell streaked bright blue and red through the window where the gunshots had originated. It struck the cement inside with a sound like the falling of a tall tree and filled the room with light.
The gunmen lifted their heads and watched the glare turn to a smoky billow of darkness. The man with the missile turned to Abu Jamal, nodding excitedly. A rattle of shots came from another upstairs window and he fell. He dropped the spent missile-launcher and clutched his stomach. Abu Jamal dragged him out of the line of fire. He rolled the moaning gunman onto his side, pulled the remaining anti-tank launcher from his back and set it against the wall. He tore the man’s T-shirt to examine the wound.
Attiah leaned against the broken end of the wall, returning fire. The smoke from the room where the missile had struck was thicker now, obscuring the top floor almost completely. The fire had spread to the other rooms. Amid the gunfire, Omar Yussef heard a woman scream. Attiah rounded the wall and, keeping low, charged toward the front door of the house.
Omar Yussef grabbed Sami’s shoulder. “There’s a garage at the back. I saw a light in there before the shooting started.”
Sami nodded. They crept behind the wall, passing the side of the house.
“Lift me over into the garden,” Omar Yussef said. “You’re fit enough to follow me on your own.”
The wall was seven feet high. Omar Yussef put his foot in Sami’s linked fingers and the younger man shoved him until he could get his knee over the wall. Broken glass lined the top and Omar Yussef felt it slice his hands and leg. Bellowing through clenched teeth, he pushed himself quickly over and fell to the ground hard on his back. He rolled onto his front, keeping his bloody hands out of the sand. He came to his knees and gripped the front of his shirt tightly to stanch the bleeding from his palms. “Sami, there’s glass on the wall. Be careful.”
“Okay.”
At least two guns seemed to be firing inside the house. As Omar Yussef grimaced with the pain in his hands, a man in a white T-shirt rushed out of the back door and down the steps. He fired a few rounds into the house and fled across the garden. Only when the man was close to Omar Yussef did he see that it was Yasser Salah.
An olive tree splintered with the impact of a volley fired from inside the house, and Yasser Salah dropped to one knee. Attiah Odwan rushed out of the back door, spraying gunfire around the garden. Omar Yussef went down flat. Yasser took quick aim and fired. He pulled the trigger for the briefest moment, but it was long enough to hit Attiah with six shots. The burly man went down, dead. Omar Yussef gasped.
Yasser halted. He looked in Omar Yussef’s direction, peering into the darkness between the olive trees. Omar Yussef held still on the sand.
Above him, he heard a grunt and Sami came up onto the wall. Yasser lifted his rifle and fired. Sami dropped silently back from the wall. Yasser hurried to the garage, pulled open the door and shut it behind him.
“Sami?” Omar Yussef said.
“I’m okay, Abu Ramiz. I’ll be with you in a minute.”
“Are you hit?”
“Not really.”
“What does that mean?”
“Just a graze on the shoulder. Give me a second, okay?”
Omar Yussef stared at the door to the ramshackle garage. He heard shots inside the house and more than one woman screaming now. He went low across the sandy garden to the garage. As quietly as he could, Omar Yussef opened the door and entered.
A smal
l storm lantern stood on a workbench in the corner. It swung as Yasser Salah picked it up, casting a warm penumbra around him, but its light didn’t reveal Omar Yussef’s entry. With his other hand, Salah reached out and pulled a man toward him. The man’s hands were bound in front of him and his mouth was covered with black duct tape. His wavy, grayish blonde hair was dry and unkempt.
Omar Yussef resisted the temptation to call out to Magnus Wallender. He edged through the shadows toward the illuminated corner of the room.
Salah pulled a paraffin heater away from the wall. Below was a trapdoor. His smuggling tunnel, Omar Yussef thought. Salah lifted the trapdoor. The entrance was only three feet square and lined with wood. He cut the twine around Wallender’s hands and ripped away the tape on his face. Wallender bawled in pain, with his hand to his mouth. He bled through his stubbly beard and over his shirt. Salah stepped onto a ladder inside the shaft to the tunnel, holding the storm lantern. He pulled a pistol from the back of his pants and held it on Wallender. “Follow me down here,” he said. Wallender nodded, exaggeratedly compliant. His feet were on the top rungs.
Omar Yussef opened his mouth to call to Wallender. Instead his words were swallowed by the roaring blast of another shoulder-launched missile. It struck the side of the garage, knocking him to the ground and bringing down part of the wall behind him.
He forced himself onto his knees and scrambled toward the entrance of the tunnel. The flimsy garage creaked with the missile’s impact and he knew it was about to collapse. As he lowered himself into the tunnel, the wooden roof of the garage dropped. He looked down. At the foot of the shaft, twelve feet below, the glow of the lantern lit Magnus’s upper body. The Swede’s legs angled into the narrow tunnel that must have led under the border. Omar Yussef saw no sign of Salah. His hands bloodied the rungs of the ladder as he descended.
Above him, he heard another wall come down. The wooden supports of the shaft groaned and dirt puffed out through the gaps between the planks.
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