At Close Quarters

by Gerald Seymour

  "Where does he lead us?"

  The Director General said heavily, "The road goes directly to Damascus."

  "Where he is beyond our reach."

  The Director General produced a small leather notebook from his inside pocket. "'They must never be beyond our reach', Prime Minister. May I quote you your words? I keep this with me always. You said two years ago, when speaking of the threat of terrorism, 'We need action, so that the terrorist knows he has no safe haven, no escape'. Your very words, Prime Minister.

  As I remember, you were heavily applauded."

  "What do you have?"

  "A face; we hope soon to have a name."

  The Prime Minister's head was shaking, the eyes ranged anywhere in the room but back to the Director General's face. "We cannot just storm into Damascus, of all places."

  "Miss Canning was a member of my team. I have never taken anything you have said, Prime Minister, to be empty rhetoric."

  "He'll be beyond reach," the Prime Minister said.

  "He'll have to hide well."

  "There is something I have to know."

  "Yes, Prime Minister?"

  "Were the deaths of the ambassador and your Miss Canning condoned by the government of the Soviet Union?"

  "We think that they knew nothing of it - may not know it now. Hence the embarrassment, hence the deception."

  "I find it beyond belief that Syria, a client state, for God-'s sake, would instigate a terrorist outrage inside the Soviet Union."

  "They may be a client state, Prime Minister, but not subservient. Their missile systems, for instance, won't allow Soviet personnel near Soviet hardware. Most certainly they do not take orders. They had a target - a motive too if you accept their twisted logic - and they would have believed with some justification that they could get away with it."

  "I repeat myself ... We cannot just storm into Damascus."

  "And I repeat myself... We need action, so that the terrorist knows he has no safe haven . . . I will keep you fully informed."

  The flies surged in the room, careless of the swatting irritation of the commander.

  He gestured that Abu Hamid should sit. He brought him a can of Pepsi from the fridge. The sounds of the camp drifted through the windows.

  "What do you want of me?"

  "Major Said Hazan," Abu Hamid said.

  "You have pleased him."

  "His face."

  "What of his face?"

  "What happened to his face, his hands?"

  "You are not a child to be frightened, Hamid. You are a fighter."

  "Tell me what happened."

  "He was a pilot, MiG-21. In combat over the Golan Heights in 1973 he was shot down, hit by a Sidewinder air-to-air missile fired from a F-4 Phantom. There was fire in the cockpit. He had to level out before he could eject. He is not a man to panic, he waited. He would not know the meaning of panic. When it was safe to eject, then he did so. His parachute brought him down behind his own lines. His face was rebuilt in Leningrad.

  Perhaps in the hospitals there they are not experienced in such injuries."

  Abu Hamid drained the Pepsi. "I just wanted to know."

  The commander leaned forward, his face close to Abu Hamid's. "You should understand, Hamid, that a man, with his face and his hands on fire, who does not panic, does not eject until the right time, that man is to be treated with caution."

  "What are you telling me?" Abu Hamid's finger flicked at the scar hole on his cheek.

  "That Major Said Hazan works now for Air Force Intelligence, that he has great influence..."

  "I have performed a service for him. I am his friend."

  "Be careful, Hamid."

  "He told me today that I would be rewarded for what I did. He himself signed the chit for my girl to come to the camp. On his orders cars have been sent for me, bills have been paid."

  "Then you are indeed his friend," the commander said softly.

  He was a clever young man, with a bachelor's degree in physics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In the reserve of the Israeli Defence Forces he held the rank of sergeant, in civilian life he was a research scien-tist for a company specialising in the manufacture of military electro-optics. He was said to have the most complete knowledge among all the reservists of the labyrinthine computer files held by Military Intelligence on Palestinian personnel.

  The computer failed to throw up any reference to the crow's foot scar. The failure told the sergeant that the man of the photokit likeness had not been in IDF

  custody since the scar was acquired. A disappointing start . . . He was left with the computer and with thousands of IDF and Mil Int photographs. There were few concrete items in the information he had that would help him to reject material unlooked at. A flight to Syria told him that his subject would not be a member of the Palestine Liberation Organisation's Force 17. A man of Force 17 would never fly via Damascus. But the men had flaking allegiance. A fighter who was now in the Popular Front, or the Domestic Front or the Struggle Front, could have been in Force 17 a few years before

  . . . It would be a long slog with the green screen, and the photograph bank.

  The sergeant reckoned from the age of the subject, and from the fact that he had been taken to Simferopol for a platoon leader's course, that it was possible he had been in Beirut when the Palestinians evacuated in the summer of 1982. There were 1787 photographs available from the days when the Palestinians had trooped down to the docks and boarded the boats that would sail them to exile. The photos were blown up from American newsreel coverage that had been purchased unedited by the Israeli Broadcasting Corporation. The sergeant put up every print onto a screen for magnification. Each photograph was studied meticulously.

  For five days the photographs flashed in front of him in his room, the blinds drawn over the windows, a cone of light from the projector to the screen.

  He had a dogged persistence.

  After 1411 failures his squeal of triumph was heard in the adjacent rooms and corridors. He had found a thin young man riding on the top of the cab of an open lorry, a short-haired young man with a thinly grown moustache. A young man who had a rifle aloft in one hand, and whose second hand was raised in the V-Victory salute. He saw the wound on the upper left cheek. Standing close to the screen, a magnifying glass in his hand, he found the lines of what the report called the crow's foot . . . Back to the computer. The number of the photograph fed in. The search for cross reference information. Long moments of stillness and then the rush began.

  Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

  Of the six men shown in the photograph, two had subsequently been identified.

  One man in the photograph named after his capture in the security zone ... but later released when 1190

  Palestinians and Lebanese Shi'as were freed in exchange for three IDF soldiers. The sergeant cursed.

  The second man who had subsequently been named

  . . . captured, a dinghy chased to the shore by a patrol boat. A night gun battle on the beach close to Nahariya, lit by helicopter flares. Four infiltrators dead, one captured. Link with Popular Front.

  Late in the night, while the prison slept, two army interrogators drove into the floodlit courtyard of the Ramla gaol. A convicted prisoner was roused from his cot, taken to a room where no prison warder was permitted to be present.

  The prisoner was shown the photograph. He knew the man. He remembered his name.

  Four days later an East German news magazine appeared. The eighteenth page of the magazine showed a scrum of Palestinian recruits struggling for the privilege of ripping a chicken to pieces. One man in the photograph wore a khaffiyeh scarf around his throat, where it had slipped when he bit into the feathered wing of the chicken.

  The face was in tight focus.

  6

  While his friend poured the coffee, the station officer peered down at the photograph.

  His friend was Zvi Dan. The photograph from the magazine page had been enlarg
ed and the scar was clear to the naked eye.

  "You've done me damn well. A name for Chummy and a date and a place."

  "But we have nothing much else with which to link him apart from the Beirut picture. Anything further can only be supposition."

  Zvi Dan's career as an infantry officer had been cut short 15 years before when an exploding artillery shell on the Golan Heights had neatly severed his left leg immediately below the knee, and only two days before the cease-fire had wound up the battles of Yom Kippur.

  He had faced the prospect of civilian life or of finding military work that could be conducted away from the operational area. He had made major, Military Intelligence. He specialised in the study of Palestinian groups who were known to have firm links abroad, and whose operations against Israel were often far from his country's frontiers.

  "I think that in London they are pretty concerned with this one. I think they'll take all the supposition they can get."

  "Then we should begin to play the jigsaw."

  Zvi Dan worked from an office in the Ministry of Defence. His quarters were apart from the main complex of buildings that stretched the length of Kaplan. His base was surrounded by a coiled fence of barbed wire and with additional armed guards on the gate. He had access to Mossad files and to Shin Bet interrogations of captured Palestinians. He read voraciously. In the small circle where his name was known he was credited with supplying the information that had led to the arrest of a Jordanian who intended to carry on board a Swiss airliner two hand grenades for a hijacking attempt on the Cyprus-Jordan leg of the flight. He had supplied the lead that enabled the Belgian police to raid a video arcade in a small town in the north of the country and arrest two Palestinians and a Belgian couple, and uncover 40 lbs of plastic explosive. His warnings had led to the interception at sea of two yachts being used by Palestinian infiltrators, the Casselardit and the Ganda. If he regarded these as little victories Major Zvi Dan could - and did - count as catastrophic defeats the assault on the synagogue in Istanbul, 22

  Turkish Jews killed; the slaughter at Rome's Fiumicino airport, 86 killed and wounded; the massacre at Vienna's Schwechtat airport, 49 killed and wounded.

  The station officer said, "I'll put my pieces on the board. The British ambassador in Moscow insults a Syrian diplomat, practically with a loud hailer, the entire diplomatic community looking on, right in the Syrian's master's sitting room. Claims of Syrian innocence in the El Al bomb laughed to scorn in public. Total humiliation of Syrians. Two: our man in Moscow is assassinated oblique stroke mugged in the Crimea, close to a military school where Palestinians are trained.

  Three: same evening a Syrian Air Force plane lands at the airport next door to the school and flies on to Damascus, en route sending a message saying in effect Mission Achieved. Four: our eyewitness at the shooting gets a clear view of Chummy and from that we follow through to the evacuation from Beirut in '82 and a member of the PFLP contingent. The last piece I can put on the board is what I'll call the Dresden photograph, that puts Chummy at a camp outside Damascus possibly seven, eight days ago. Those are my pieces."

  "You want this Abu Hamid?"

  "We want him, even if we have to go to Damascus to get him."

  Zvi Dan laughed, a quiet croak in his throat, and the laugh brought on the hacking cough of the persistent smoker.

  "Damascus would be easy. Damascus pretends it is an international city. There are businessmen travelling to Damascus, and there are academics, and there are archaeologists. It is a city of millions of people. In a city you can come shoulder to shoulder with a man. You can use the knife or the silenced pistol or the explosive under the car he drives. If it were Damascus then I would already offer you my felicitations, even my congratulations . . . the scar is only an inch across so you have to be close to identify the man you want."

  "The girl who was killed, she was one of ours," the station officer said quietly. "Don't worry about getting close. We'll walk onto the bridge of his nose if we have to. That's the sense of the messages I am being sent from London."

  The coughing was stifled. Zvi Dan beat his own chest.

  There was the rustle of the packet, the flash of the lighter, the curl of the smoke. The end of the nicotined finger stubbed at the Dresden photograph.

  "Look at them. Other than the man you want they are all raw recruits. They are children who have joined the Popular Front and here they are participating in the first ceremony of induction. There will have been a parade, and there will have been a speech by a big man from the government. It is what always happens They will have been in Damascus for a few days only.

  They will be moved on. They will go to a field training camp where they will be taught, not well, the art of small-unit operations. Your man, the man you want, the older man amongst them, he will travel with the children as their instructor. Possibly it is a reward for what he achieved in Yalta. They will go to a training camp with their instructor for perhaps half a year."

  "Where would the camp be?"

  "Where it is impossible for you to be close, shoulder to shoulder." For a moment the face of Zvi Dan was lost in a haze of smoke. "In the Beqa'a Valley."

  "Oh, that's grand," said the station officer. "The 19

  bus goes right through the Beqa'a Valley."

  The valley is a fault, it is a legacy of rock strata tur-bulence of many millennia ago.

  The valley floor is some 45 miles in length, and never more than ten miles in width. It is a slash between the mountains that dominate the Mediterranean city of Beirut, and the mountains that overlook the hinterland city of Damascus. It is bordered in the north by the ancient Roman and Phoenician city of Baalbeck, and in the south by the dammed Lake Quaroon.

  The sides of the valley, deep cut with winter water gullies, are bare and rock strewn, good only for goats and hardy sheep. The sides cannot be cultivated. But the valley floor has the richest crop-growing fields in all Lebanon. The Litani river, rising close to Baalbeck, bisects the valley running south to Lake Quaroon. The valley floor is a trellis of irrigation canals, not modern, not efficient, but able to offer life blood to the fields.

  The best vines of Lebanon, the best fruit, the best vegetables, all come from the Beqa'a, and the best hashish.

  The history of the Beqa'a is one of murder, conspiracy, feuding and smuggling. The people of the region whether they be Christian or Druze or Shi'a Muslim, have a reputation for lawlessness and independence. Government authority has always taken second place in the minds of the feudal landlords and the peasant villagers.

  Times, of course, have not stood still in the Beqa'a.

  The villagers are better armed, each community now possesses RPG-7 grenade launchers, heavy D S h K M

  machine guns, enough Kalashnikovs to dish them out to the kids.

  The villagers are well off by the standards of torn, divided Lebanon, because when all else fails the hashish market bails them out. The trade is across the rifts of politics and religion. Druze sells to Shi'a who sells to Christian who sells to Syrian.

  The Beqa'a now is a valley of pass papers and checkpoints. Shi'a checkpoints on the approaches to their villages. Druze checkpoints, Syrian army checkpoints on the main road from Damascus to Beirut, and more on the side roads that lead to their barracks, Palestinian checkpoints on the approaches to their training camps.

  They had reached the high spot. Behind them were the customs buildings and the missile site. Ahead of them the ground, dun and grey, shelved away into the valley.

  The recruits were in two military lorries, while Abu Hamid sat in the jeep driven by Fawzi, his liaison officer.

  Fawzi drove with enthusiasm, exhilarated in his role as middle man between the Popular Front training camp and the officers of Air Force Intelligence. Abu Hamid had thought that any man would be sick in his gut at such a job, but all the man cared for, all that he talked about on the climb to the mountain pass and the descent beyond, was the new-found opportunity for trade.

  "Trade" he
called it. Televisions and video cassette players and electric refrigerators would come to the Beqa'a from Beirut, freshly grown hashish would come from the valley, and Fawzi could take back to the old souq in Damascus as much as would cram into the covered back of his jeep. To Abu Hamid, the man was disgusting, the man was a criminal. He wondered how it was that Major Said Hazan would permit such a man to play a part in the Palestinian revolution.

  But he had hardly listened to Fawzi. Yes, he had the babble from the man, from his thick spittle-lined lips, but after a while he had paid him no attention, thought only of Margarethe.

  Abu Hamid did not know how long it would be until he next saw Margarethe. He had not been told. He fancied that if he put his hand under the vest below his tunic, and rubbed his hand hard against the skin, and that if he then put his hand against his nose, then he would smell the sweet scent of his Margarethe. With other women shyness made him brutal. It was so the first time with Margarethe, but she had slapped his face, right cheek and then left cheek . . . then come to him, rolled him onto his back, and loved him. He did not know where a woman had learned to love with such wild beauty. From that first time Margarethe made him love her with all the lights switched on; each time she stripped him, each time she straddled him. He could not comprehend why Margarethe Schultz worshipped the body of Abu Hamid, who did not have the money for shoes. He did not understand her dedication to the cause of a Palestinian homeland, did not understand the Red Army Faction of which she claimed to be a member.

  He had written to her on the last day of each month that he had been in Simferopol. And when she was naked she was beautiful to him . . .

  What was wonderful was that she had waited for him, waited for six months for his return.

  They were coming down into the valley.

  He could hear the protests of the brakes of the lorries behind him.

  "It is the hashish that gets the best price. I buy it here, I pay the major forty per cent of what I have paid.