At Close Quarters

by Gerald Seymour

  This girl will go to the checkpoint at the entrance to the security zone, where there are the Israeli surrogates of the fascist South Lebanese Army, and the Israelis with their personnel carriers, and the torturers of the Shin Bet. When she is amongst them she will fire the explosives. They will go to their hell, she to her paradise."

  His eyes never left the girl. She was a wraith. What Abu Hamid could see of her face was dry and pale. He could not see fear, he could not see boredom. Could it be real? Could a girl have such love of martyrdom that she would lead a donkey laden with explosives amongst the enemy, that she would obliterate herself and her enemy? He knew of the Shi'a car bombers, the heroes who had ploughed their vehicles into the American embassy, and the French embassy and the Marine camp in Beirut. He knew of the car bomb that had been driven against the walls of the Shin Bet headquarters in Tyre during the enemy's occupation of the city. He knew that the cars approaching the security zone were treated with such suspicion that a better chance now existed for approaching close with a donkey or a mule or a pack horse. Could a girl have such little love of life?

  "She is an example to us all. By seeing her, by knowing of her, we are honoured. She visits you in order that you may be encouraged by the memory of her bravery, when the time comes for you, yourselves, to go south and fight the enemy who denies you your rightful homeland. Show her your love, show her your admiration."

  Abu Hamid raised his fist in the air. White knuckles, the fist punching.

  "Long live the Palestine Revolution."

  The recruits shouted their answer, echoed his words.

  "All glory to the martyrs of the Palestine Revolution." "

  The cheering soared.

  "Strength to the enemies of the state of Zion."

  "Courage for the fighters whose cause is just."

  The girl did not smile. Slowly she rolled her head so that she gazed flatly at each and every one of the recruits who yelled their support of her. She turned. She seemed to speak a word into the ear of the donkey. She stood for a moment in profile to Abu Hamid. He saw the bulge, he saw the weight forward and low on her stomach. He knew she was pregnant. She led the donkey away and out of the camp. The recruits cheered her all the way, but she never looked back.

  Abu Hamid dismissed the recruits and they stood silently at the camp gate as the girl and the donkey became small figures on the rough track.

  Fawzi beamed. He walked to Abu Hamid.

  "She is to go through all the villages between here and the security zone. It has a great effect on the villagers, just as she has made a great impression on your men. When she has made her attack, a film of her will be shown on the television, it is already made."

  "Is she...?"

  "Drugged? You surprise me, Abu Hamid . . . She is a fighter, she is like yourself."

  Fawzi drove away in his jeep. He caught up the girl and her donkey before they reached the tarmac road.

  When he strained his eyes, Abu Hamid could see them. A girl and a donkey, and just behind them the jeep of the Syrian army.

  They worked hard at their training that morning. No back-chat, only studied concentration. They worked at the lesson of the platoon in attack on a hillside against a defended position, with the support of .50 calibre machine guns and RPG-7 launchers.

  That morning Abu Hamid did not find the need to repeat any part of his teaching.

  Holt drank his water. It was a new discipline to him, to ration himself. He must have looked with obvious longing at his water bottle, because he was aware of the smear of amusement at Noah Crane's mouth.

  The merchant braked, slowed his Mercedes.

  Ahead of him, down the straight road running from north to south under the east slope of the Beqa'a valley, was a column of Syrian army trucks. The trucks, more than a dozen of them, he estimated, had pulled across onto the hard shoulder of the road. He came forward slowly. Always his way to pass a military convoy slowly, so that he could see what the convoy carried. And always better to go slowly past the Syrian military, with the window wound down the better to hear any shouted instructions - they would only shout once, they would shout and if their shout was ignored they would shoot.

  There was a jeep stopped at the head of the convoy, and he saw a very fat young lieutenant talking, arm waving, to another officer. Heh, who was he, Menachem, to laugh at the grossness of a young soldier?

  The merchant weighed on the scales some nineteen stone . . . He saw a young girl leading a donkey.

  The girl and her donkey were at the far end of the convoy, coming past it. He drove onto the same hard shoulder, he switched off his engine. No one looked at him. He listened but there was no shouted instruction.

  The canvas roofing of the lorries had been rolled down.

  He saw that they carried troops. A dozen lorries could carry two companies of infantry, the mental arithmetic was second nature to the merchant. The troops crowded to the sides of the lorry and watched the girl and her donkey come alongside them, move forward. Faintly, he could hear the shouting voice of the gross young lieutenant who had gone from the side of the officer and now offered explanation to the soldiers. As the girl led her donkey past each truck, so the soldiers cheered her.

  Deep in his mind where the truth of his existence was hidden, the merchant swore. He recognised the signs, and it would be two days before he was again in a position to make a drop. A long time ago he had been offered a radio. He had declined, he had said he would not be able to learn how to use it, and anyway he had known that a signal sent to Israel was a signal sent also to the men of Syrian Intelligence. He preferred the dead letter.

  The bomber would be paraded through the Beqa'a.

  The bomber would be used to jolt the commitment of the young. He could see that the bomber was herself scarcely more than a child.

  The merchant, Menachem, saw his controller, Major Zvi Dan, rarely. Never more than twice a year. The last time, smuggled by the IDF through the night across the border, he had talked to Zvi Dan about the bombers.

  The bomber was just a slip of a girl. He could piece together what Zvi Dan had told him, late and over whisky, about the bombers.

  "You know, Menny, the IRISHBAT found a car bomb in their sector, abandoned. They made it safe, and then they looked to see why it was abandoned. You know why, Menny? It was abandoned because it had run out of petrol . . . " The merchant could remember how they had laughed, hurting their stomachs laughing.

  "They are not all suicide people, we had one who came up to the checkpoint and surrendered, and said that the girl who was with him had already run away. Do you know with another, Menny, the bastard Syrians gave him a flak jacket to wear and they told him that way he would survive the explosion of his own car, and in the car was more than 150 kilos of explosive. More recently, they have taken to a remote firing. The bomber goes to the checkpoint, but the detonation is remote, from a command signal, from a man who is hidden perhaps a kilometre away. That is because they know that not every recruit wishes to hurry to martyrdom. We have learned, Menny, that the bombers are not so much fanatics, as simple disturbed kids. There was one who was with child and did not dare face her father, there was a boy who had quarrelled with his father and run away, there was one whose father was accused by the Syrian military of crimes and who volunteered to save his father from gaol. Believe me, Menny, they are not all Khomeini fanatics. Most are sick kids. We know, we have captured eleven of the last sixteen sent to the security zone. I tell you what is the saddest thing. They make a film of the kids, and they show it on the television, and they make great heroes of the kids. There is a village in the security zone where live the parents of a boy who drove the car for one of the big Beirut bombs, and now it is like his home is a tourist attraction, and his father is a celebrity, and the kid's picture is everywhere on the walls. Heh, Menny, what sort of cretin takes a holiday in south Lebanon? Only a Jew, if the discount is good." More laughter, more whisky. A conversation of many months back.

  There were
times, in the loneliness of his subterfuge life, that the merchant doubted his own sanity. There were times when his mind ached for a return to the buoyant, carefree students on the campus in the Negev desert. He saw the girl leading the donkey. Zvi Dan had told him that the men of Syrian Intelligence scoured the villages of the Beqa'a for kids who would drive a car bomb, for kids who would lead a donkey bomb. He thought that the girl and the donkey and the heavy bags slung on the rib cage of the beast were an abomination.

  One day he would go back to his students . . . on a day when there were no more donkey bombs, no more car bombs, Menachem would go back to his lecture room.

  Whatever he saw, whatever its importance, he would not break his routine. It would be two days before he could report the coming threat to a road block leading into the security zone.

  She had passed the parked lorries. He could hear the shuffle of her feet, the clip of the donkey's hooves. He saw the sweating lieutenant amble towards his jeep. For the soldiers the parade was over.

  He saw the face of the girl, devoid of expression.

  He shouted through his opened window.

  "God is great."

  They were high above the village. Crane had pointed to it on his map, 'Aqraba. Holt watched through binoculars as the kids launched their rocks and Molotovs at the troops. It was like something he had seen on the television from Northern Ireland. From their vantage point, Holt not daring to move for fear of Crane's criticism, they watched a day-long battle between the kids and the soldiers, fought in a village square that was wreathed in tear smoke, and in the alleys behind the mosque. Sometimes, when the fight went against the soldiers, Holt heard Crane's chuckle. Sometimes, when the soldiers caught a youth and battered him with their rifle butts, Holt ground his teeth.

  He heard the voice in the corridor, and the clatter of feet.

  Martins tidied the newspaper. He had been through yesterday's Times, and the Herald Tribune, and that day's Jerusalem Post. Read them all from cover to cover, right down to the cost of a ten-year lease on a two bedroomed flat in West Kensington, to the discounts available in a jewellery store's winding up sale in Paris, to the price of a second hand Subaru car in Beer Sheba.

  He was nagged by frustration. Martins could recognise that he was the outsider, he was an intrusion in the smooth dealings between Tork, station officer in Tel Aviv, and his local contacts.

  He tidied his paper. He scraped out the debris from the bowl of his pipe into the saucer of the coffee cup that he had been given three hours before. He ignored the No Smoking sign stuck onto a window of the station officer's room.

  The door opened. Martins saw the station officer blink as the smoke caught his eyes. Sod him . . . The station officer tugged in with him a shallow long wooden box, olive green. No greeting, not as yet. The station officer's priority was to get to the window, shove it open, then to the air conditioner, switch it off.

  "Been able to occupy yourself?" the station officer asked curtly.

  "I've passed the time. What have you brought?"

  "A rifle."

  Martins tried to smile. "A present for the Ayatollah and the Mullahs?"

  "I beg your pardon?"

  "Just a joke."

  "Actually it is the rifle for Crane."

  "We brought Crane's rifle out from England - rather a lot of paperwork."

  "It wasn't the rifle he wanted."

  "Why didn't the bloody man say what he wanted? He test fired the Parker Hale, he didn't complain."

  "Perhaps you never asked him what he wanted.

  Perhaps you just told him what he was getting."

  "The man's impossible."

  "Just doesn't waste time arguing. What he would have told you he wanted if he had been asked was a model PM from Accuracy International, small firm down in Hampshire."

  "How did it get here?"

  "Israelis picked it up yesterday, shipped it out in their DipCorps bag to save time, avoid the export licence. I collected it this morning."

  Martins puffed, "That makes me look a complete fool."

  The station officer asked, "Would you like some more coffee?"

  "There are more important things than coffee. If it has not escaped you, I am in charge . . . Damn it, man, I didn't know you were smuggling a rifle out of the UK, I don't know where Holt and Crane are, I don't know when the jump off is, I have not been given access to the latest intelligence on the camp."

  "Unfortunate."

  "Meaning?"

  "You're going to have to live with it."

  "I'm a senior man in London, Tork . . . "

  "And this is Israel. Sorry . . . Decision taking is in Crane's hands, and stays there. Crane will decide on the jump off, on the route. He will make the decisions because he is going to be in the Beqa'a, and we are not, for which in all sincerity I thank God."

  "You and I are going to have to get one or two things straight."

  The station officer glanced up, heard the rasp in the voice. He thought a man who wore a three piece suit in the heat of Israel to be a fearful ass.

  "As I understand it, Mr Martins, you got the job, were sent out here, because there were no decisions to be taken - sorry."

  "Fenner told you that ...? Well, you've got a nasty surprise coming to you. Control of this mission has been entrusted to me by the Director General, and I mean control. And one more thing: there is more to the work of the Service than the analyses that you fill your day in writing. I've read some of your stuff - 15 pages on the future of the Coalition here, eight pages on the prospect of a right wing backlash, 21 pages on future settlements on the West Bank, all the sort of crap that Fenner wants, the sort of gibberish that keeps Anstruther h a p p y . "

  "I am sorry if my material is too complex for you, Mr Martins."

  "You can think of it as complex if you wish, Tork, but you'd better get it into your head that this mission into the Beqa'a is of infinitely greater importance to the interests of the United Kingdom than the trivia with which you spend your days, and if this goes wrong, for your lack of co-operation, I'll have you gutted," Martins said.

  The station officer peered down at him. Twice in the last week his wife had asked him whether they were not duty bound to invite Mr Martins, out from London, to their flat for dinner. Twice the station officer had told his wife to forget it, leave the man to his hotel room.

  The station officer fancied he could hear the boast chat in London on the upper floors of Century. Problems, why should there be problems? Difficulties? Difficulties only existed to be overcome. A good show, a super big show.

  As if it was a gesture of defiance, Martins shovelled tobacco from his pouch and into the bowl of his pipe.

  "I'm going to be in Kiryat Shmona."

  "What for?"

  "Because I'm bloody well responsible."

  "Once they're over the frontier, once they've gone there's nothing you can do."

  "I have to be somewhere, and that's where I mean to be," said Martins.

  The station officer considered the alternative. He thought of having him fretting in his office for the next week, perhaps longer.

  "I'll take you up."

  Rebecca was the personal assistant to the major. She had been with him for more than two years. Major Zvi Dan liked to say, when he introduced her, that she was his eyes and his ears, that she alone understood the mysteries of the now computerised filing system. She was blessed also, he claimed, with an elephantine memory. At the end of each working day he would share with her his thoughts, his new found information, and they would be stored electronically in the computer and mentally in her head.

  Rebecca sat in the front passenger seat of the pick-up truck. She was out of uniform. She wore jeans and a blouse of brilliant orange. First she had smoothed her nails with a manicure stick, now she painted them purple, fingers and toes.

  Rebecca was a fixture in Major Zvi Dan's life. Perhaps he relied too greatly on her, on her memory and her organising skills. She bullied him - not that he compl
ained other than to her face. She made him go to the doctor at Defence when his leg stump ached intolerably, she forced him to eat when the work load bowed him down, she came once a week to his bachelor flat, high and overlooking the Ramat Gan quarter, to collect his dirty clothes and take them to a launderette.

  They had been parked at the side of the Nablus to Jenin road for a little more than an hour.

  Rebecca glanced up occasionally from her concentration to amuse herself at the growing anxiety of Major Zvi Dan. The major paced around the pick-up.

  He looked down at his watch. He fingered the automatic pistol that was tucked into the belt of his slacks. With binoculars he studied the pale rock strewn hills, and the small terraced fields from which the stones had been lifted to make walls.

  She heard the snort of Major Zvi Dan's exasperation.

  When they had first stopped, he had told her that within five minutes they would be making the ren-dezvous with Crane and the English boy. Five minutes drifting into more than an hour. He was cursing quietly, he was staring up the road, he was searching for the approach of two small and distant figures.

  "You should get something done about those eyes, Major."

  She heard the voice. She swung her head. Major Zvi Dan was rooted, peering down the rough hill slope that fell from the road. Small rocks only, low and hardy scrub bushes. She watched the head of the major tilt and twist as he tried to find the source. She could see no hiding place.

  "Crane?" Major Zvi Dan shouted. "Get the hell up here."

  The ground seemed to rise. The figure seemed to materialise. Where there was dung grey rock there was a standing man.

  "You need to get them looked at, Major."

  She laughed out loud.

  "Move yourself, Holt."