At Close Quarters

by Gerald Seymour

  In all the years of his young life Abu Hamid had never seen such luxury. He stared around him. His eyes roved from the whispering hush of the air conditioning machine in the wall to the heavyweight softness of the leather sofa to the teak table to the sparkle of the decanter and glasses to the fitted pile carpet to the hi-fi cabinet to the dull true silver of the photograph frames

  ... could not help himself, a child in a glittering treasure land.

  He saw the welcome smile of Major Said Hazan. The major was far back in a tilted chair, his polished shoes on the polished desk top. The major was waving him inside, waving with his stumped fist for him to cross the carpet pile in his dust-laden boots. Abu Hamid knew the man who sprawled in the depths of the sofa. He knew the man only by a given code name. He knew that the man was designated as the head of the military wing of the Popular Front. He knew that the man was believed to be at least number three and possibly number two in the command ranking of the Popular Front. He knew that the man had once himself opened a package sent from Stockholm to the offices of the Popular Front in Beirut... that was many years before, but many years did not restore a right arm taken off at the elbow, nor three fingers amputated from the left fist, nor smooth away the wounds of the shrapnel in his neck and jaw.

  "Of course you know our Brother. You are welcome, Hamid. I hear good things of what you are achieving with the young fighters. I hear only good things of you . . . "

  He stared at them both, in turn, these veterans of the war against the state of Israel, and the scars of their war.

  A ruined face, a lost arm and a lost grip of fingers. Was that how he would end? A face that his Margarethe would shrink from, hands that could not caress the white smooth skin of his Margarethe . . .

  "Come, Hamid, sit down."

  The door was closed behind him. He sat on the edge of the sofa, he felt the leather sink under him.

  "I have sad news for you, Hamid. Your commander in Simferopol has gone to a martyr's resting place, but he died in his uniform, his life was lost in the service of Palestine . . . A car accident... most sad. We all grieve for his passing."

  No expression was possible on the unlined skin of the major's face. Abu Hamid saw no change in the eyes or at the mouth of the Brother. The understanding came as a fast shaft. The commander and Abu Hamid and Major Said Hazan had been the only persons directly involved in the shooting at Yalta. Three persons, now two persons.

  "I want two men, Hamid. I want two of your best recruits."

  Abu Hamid looked across the width of the sofa to the Brother. Their eyes did not meet. Again he understood.

  They were the proxies, the Palestinians. He was learning, sharply, quickly.

  "What skills would the two men have?" Abu Hamid's recruits were raw, not yet expert in weapons or explosives.

  "Courage, commitment. They will join others. You will go back to the Beqa'a this morning. You will choose the two men. You will take them to the Yarmouq tomorrow . . . What is it, Hamid? I can see your impatience.

  Anger, is it? Or passion, is it? Tomorrow, Hamid, you will have the time to attend to your lady. Today the revolution has need of you ... your best men, remember."

  "It will be done, Major."

  Holt had a sore head. He walked half a pace behind Martins and Crane. It was a part of the airport that was new to him. He hadn't been to Israel before, nor had he been to South Africa, so he had never come this way.

  It was the airport high-security corridor, quarantined from "ordinary" flight passengers, reserved for the two flights thought to be most greatly at risk from terrorist attack. He had seen it on television, of course, but the sight of the police and the dogs and the Heckler and Koch machine pistols still startled him. Policemen patrolling and parading in front of him with attack dogs on short leashes, with machine pistols held in readiness across their chests. He wondered how long they would have, how many fragments of seconds in which to beat off an attack. He wondered how long it would take them to snap out of the Musak swimming calm of the corridor, how long to get the safety to Off, to get the finger from the guard to the trigger. He wondered how they slept at night, how they rested, relaxed with their kids. And if he found the man in the Beqa'a, and Crane shot him, would that make their lives easier?

  They settled into the chairs of the departure lounge, the same departure lounge in which, months before, an alert El Al security man carrying out the final personal baggage checks had been suspicious of a bag carried by a 32-year-old Irishwoman, Anne Murphy. When the security man emptied the bag he believed it still too heavy. When he stripped up the bottom of the bag he found underneath three pounds of oily soft orange-coloured plastic explosive, manufactured in Czecho-slovakia. The potential of the explosive was equivalent to the simultaneous detonation of 30 hand-grenades.

  The explosive, the timer, and the detonator had been supplied to a plump-faced Jordanian called Nezar Hindawi by senior officers of Syrian Air Force Intelligence. It was intended that the pregnant Miss Murphy would be blown out of the sky along with all the passengers and crew, that the disintegrating aircraft would crash in the mountains of Austria, that all evidence of guilt should be destroyed.

  Holt's mind was dead to his surroundings. His head ached from the excess of alcohol that he had consumed the night before. But sitting in that same departure lounge should have made him think of those events. In reprisal the government of the United Kingdom had broken diplomatic relations with the Syrian Arab Republic. Sir Sylvester Armitage had gone into the folklore of Foreign and Commonwealth with his booming "Bloody Nonsense". Sir Sylvester Armitage had been targeted, and Miss Jane Canning had walked in front of him onto the steps of the Oreanda Hotel in Yalta. The beginning of this story was in this departure lounge, leading to Gate 23 of Terminal One, months before. Holt sat with his chin on his chest and the throb in his temples. Crane sat and slept. Percy Martins sat and pondered the final elusive clues of the day's crossword.

  A little before 5.00 a.m., in a deep grey dawn haze, a British Airways Tristar slammed down onto the tyre-scarred runway of the international airport east of Tel Aviv.

  It was just 29 days since a trio of British diplomats had boarded an aircraft at Moscow's Vnukovo airport for a flight to the Crimea.

  10

  In the same jeep, with the same silent driver, Abu Hamid escorted his two chosen recruits to the Yarmouq camp.

  Both were 17 years old. All of the way back from Damascus the previous day he had considered which of his sixty he should proposition.

  Mohammed was the most obvious choice because he was always the loudest to complain at the boredom of the training, to harangue his fellow recruits of time wasted when they should have been carrying the war into the Zionist state, he would eat, chew, choke on his words. The second, Ibrahim, had been brought to Abu Hamid's notice by the murmured accusation that he was a thief, that he pilfered the paltry possessions of his fellow recruits. Well, he could thieve to his content in the state of Israel. The choice had been made by Abu Hamid alone. He had found Fawzi gone when he had returned to the camp. Gone smuggling, the bastard, gone to organise the early summer cropping of the hashish fields, to gather his cut from the merchants who traded in transistor radios and Western liquor and fruit and vegetables out of the Beqa'a. He had seen both men separately in his tent. He had spoken to them of the glory of the struggle against Israel, and of the love of the Palestinian people for the heroism of their fighters, and of the money they would be paid when they returned. Both men, separately, had agreed. Easier for Abu Hamid than he could have dared expect. The exhortation and the bribe, good bedfellows, working well together. He had wondered if they were frightened, if they dreamed of death. He wondered if the one guessed that he had been chosen because he had made a bastard nuisance of himself in the tent camp, the other because he was whispered to be a thief.

  Abu Hamid cared not at all what they knew.

  The jeep was stopped at the entrances to the Yarmouq camp: the sentries radioed to Administratio
n for an officer to come.

  Abu Hamid whistled quietly to himself. He had the statistic in his head, their chance was one in 100. A one in 100 chance of his seeing them again.

  It was the Brother who came to the gate. Abu Hamid saw the loose empty sleeve of the Brother's jacket. He told the Brother the names of the two men that he had brought, he watched as the Brother peered inside the jeep at the two men, weighing them. The Brother gave Abu Hamid two sealed envelopes, then politely asked Mohammed who was the boaster and Ibrahim who was the thief to come with him.

  He watched them go. He watched the barrier lift for them, fall after them. He saw the camp swallow them.

  He tore open the first envelope. The form carried the heading of the Central Bank of Syria. It told him the number of an account in which the sum of 5000 American dollars had been lodged in his name. His chortling laughter filled the front of the jeep. Abu Hamid owned nothing. He had no money, no things even that were his own. He felt his chest, his lungs expand with the excitement; his head sing. He ripped open the second envelope. A single sheet of paper, a handwritten address.

  He pushed the form of the Central Bank of Syria into the breast pocket of his tunic and buttoned it down, he thrust the address into the driver's face. The driver shrugged, started the engine, turned the wheel.

  When Abu Hamid looked back at the gate he could no longer see the backs of the Brother or of Mohammed and Ibrahim.

  He was driven into the centre of Damascus.

  The jeep driver seemed to pay no attention to traffic lights at Stop or to pedestrian crossings. Away from the wide streets, into the warren alleys of the old city. Past the great mosque, past the colonnade of the Roman builders, past the marble Christian shrine to John the Baptist. Through the narrow roads, weaving amongst the cymbal clashing sherbet sellers, past the stalls of spices and intricate worked jewellery, past the tables of the money changers, past the dark recesses of the cafes, inside the vast sprawl of the Souq al Hamadieh. Only military vehicles were allowed inside the tentacles of the souq lanes, and only a military vehicle would have had the authority to force a way through the slow shuffling morass of shoppers, traders. He supposed he could have bought a street, he thought he could have cleared a table of jewellery, a shop window of stereo equipment, a clothing store of suits, he had in his tunic breast pocket a bank order form from the Central Bank of Syria for 5ooo American dollars. He could have bought flowers for Margarethe, champagne for Margarethe. He could take her to restaurants, the best, and order a feast of mezza and the burgol dish of sweet boiled crushed wheat and the yalanji dish of aubergines stuffed with rice and the sambosik dish of meat rissole in light pastry and unleavened bread and as much arrack as they could drink before they fell.

  He could buy her what she wanted, he could buy himself what he wanted. He had been paid for the success at the Oreanda in Yalta.

  The driver stopped. He pointed. He pointed down an alley too narrow for the vehicle. He wrote on the paper beside the address a telephone number to call for transport back into the Beqa'a.

  Abu Hamid ran. Shouldering, pushing, shoving his way through the throng.

  He saw the opened door, the stone steps.

  He ran up the steps. The wooden door faced him.

  The handle turned, the door swung.

  "Well done, sweet boy, well done for finding me."

  His Margarethe, in front of him. Her fair hair flopped to her shoulders, her body sheathed in a dress of rich wine-coloured brocade. His Margarethe standing in the heart of a quiet oasis, in a room of cool air, standing in the centre of a faded deep sinking carpet, standing surrounded by hanging dark drapes and the heavy wood furniture, intricately carved. He thought it was the paradise that the Old Man of the Mountains had spoken of, the paradise of the Assassins.

  "Wasn't I good to find it, wasn't I good to find such a place for us?"

  No questions in his mind. No asking himself how a foreigner with only the handout crumbs from the table of the regime could find paradise, quiet, clean comfort, amongst the alleys of the souq. He was kissing her, feeling the warm moisture of her lips, scenting the hot skin of her neck, clutching the gentle curves of her buttocks then her breasts.

  The news was bursting in him. He stood away from her. He beamed in pride. He pulled the form from the Central Bank of Syria from his pocket.

  "A piece of paper..."

  "Read the paper."

  He saw the moment of confusion, then the spread of concentration, then the drift of disbelief.

  "For what?"

  " I t i s f i v e thousand dollars, f o r m e . "

  "For what?"

  "For what I have done."

  "It's a joke, yes? What have you done?"

  "Not a joke, it is real. It is for me. It is the paper of the Central Bank of Syria."

  "You have not done anything, sweet boy. You are a revolutionary soldier . . . why is this given to you?"

  Abu Hamid stood his full height. He looked up, into the eyeline of Margarethe Schultz. He said sternly, "For what I have done this is the reward of the Syrian government."

  She blinked, she did not understand. "You have done nothing. You came to Syria, you lived in a camp. You went to the Crimea, you were one of many, you came back. Now you are in a camp in Lebanon. What in that history is worth five thousand dollars?"

  "It is payment for what I have done for the Syrians."

  "Sweet boy, you are a fighter of the Palestine revolution, not an errand kid of the Syrians."

  "You insult me. I am not an 'errand kid'."

  "Hamid, what did you do for the Syrians?"

  She was close to him, she stroked the hair of his neck.

  "Hamid, what did you do?"

  "I cannot..."

  "Damn you, what did you do?"

  "Don't make..."

  "What?"

  It came in a blurted torrent. "In the Crimea I killed the ambassador of Britain, I killed also one of his aides..."

  "For that they pay you?"

  "For that they reward me."

  She stood straight, contemptuous. He saw the heave of her breasts under the brocade of her dress.

  "Which is more important to you, the revolution for Palestine, or dollars earned as a hireling?"

  He said meekly, "I was going to buy things for you, good things."

  "I fuck you, sweet boy, because I believe in you I have found a purity of revolution."

  He handed her the bank order for five thousand American dollars. He watched as she made a pencil thin spiral of it, as she took from the table a box of matches, as she lit the flame, as she burned the wealth he could barely dream of.

  "You are not a hireling, sweet boy. In the purity of fire is the strength of the struggle of the Palestinian people."

  She lifted her dress, pulled it higher, ever higher. She showed him the spindle of her ankles, and her knees, and the whiteness of her thighs, and the darkness of her groin, and the width of her belly, and the operation scar, and the weight of her breasts. She was naked under her dress. She threw the dress behind her.

  She took him to her bed. She took the clothes from his body, kneeling over him, dominating. She straddled his waist.

  When he had entered her, he told her of the woman who had been a spy, the woman he had shot. As he told her of the killing, she pounded over him, squealing.

  Later, when he rested on the bed, when she had gone to the bathroom to sluice between her legs, he would reflect what her ardour for the clean struggle, the pure revolution, had cost him.

  Abu Hamid lay on his side on the bed. If an Arab girl had burned five thousand American dollars he would have killed her. He worshipped this European. Could not understand her, her love of his revolution, but could worship her. And she had waited for him, he thought she was a dream of pleasure.

  Her soft voice in his ear. "Will they hunt you?"

  "Who?"

  "The English whose ambassador you killed, the Israelis whose spy you killed."

  "In Damascu
s, in the Beqa'a, how can they?"

  "You will not be for ever in the Beqa'a. You will take the battle of the Palestinian revolution into Israel."

  If he told her of his fear, then he would lose her, he would be the assassin dismissed from paradise. He lied his courage.

  "I believe in the inevitability of victory."

  She kissed his throat, and the hairs of his chest. With her tongue she circled the crow's foot scar on his upper left cheek.

  He was a good looking boy, blond sun-bleached hair, a wind tanned face. The uniform looked well on him.

  He wore jauntily the sky-blue beret of a soldier on United Nations duty, and his shoulder flash denoted that he was a private soldier of NORBAT.

  He was Hendrik Olaffson. He was 23 years old. He was a nothing member of the Norwegian Battalion serving with the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon. He had been eight months with NORBAT in the north eastern sector of the U N I F I L command.

  Intellectually he was a nothing person, militarily he was a nothing person. To Major Said Hazan he was a jewel. Only to Major Said Hazan was Hendrik Olaffson any different to the thousands of private soldiers making up the U N I F I L force from France, Ireland, Ghana, Fiji and Nepal, men stationed in a buffer zone separating southern Lebanon from northern Israel.

  At the NORBAT checkpoint on the Rachaiya to Has-baiya road, it was usual for the U N I F I L troopers to talk to the travellers as they searched the cars for explosives and weapons. The common language of conversation was English, and it was unusual for the troopers to find a traveller who spoke English as well as they did themselves. From a first conversation four months earlier had come the promise of a small quantity of treated marijuana. Enough for one joint each for Hendrik Olaffson and the two soldiers who shared the next night sentry duty with him. The traveller was regularly on that road, the conversations were frequent, the marijuana became plentiful.

  In due course Major Said Hazan, who received a report each two weeks from the traveller, had learned of the political views of Hendrik Olaffson. One quiet day at the road block the traveller had heard the gushed hatreds of Hendrik Olaffson. The hatreds were for Jews.