"If there is no one else to whom you will communicate your information, then you have to wait."
The traveller settled deeper into the comfort of the armchair. The outer office was cool, pleasantly furn-
ished. He had walnuts in a bag, their shells already cracked. "My information is only for Major Said Hazan."
The clerk did not trouble to hide his contempt. The man stank, was dressed like a peasant. His shoes had brought the street dirt onto the carpet.
"He has gone to a meeting, I do not have a time for his return."
"Then I shall wait."
The pieces of walnut shell flaked to the carpet. The traveller made no attempt to retrieve them. He chewed happily on the crisp interior.
Holt saw the dust plume spitting from behind the wheels of the jeep. He reached for the binoculars. He saw the markings above the jeep's engine, presumably Syrian army. He saw that a single passenger sat beside the driver.
His sight became a blur. Holt's head slashed sideways, away from the road view, away from the jeep. The magnified vision leaped from the roadway to the camp, from the tents to the camp entrance, from the sentry to the cook.
The cook had come out of the camp. He had skirted the wire. The cook now climbed the slope on the west side of the camp. Holt could see that he was scavenging.
In the hugeness of the binoculars' tunnel vision the cook seemed about to step into the overhang of rock. Holt could see that he whistled to himself. He watched him smile, pleased, because he had found a length of dried wood. He watched him tuck the length of wood under his arm and climb again. He watched him, slowly and unhurried, hunting for more wood, and climbing the slope.
Holt did not know where Noah Crane hid.
At the entrance to the camp Abu Hamid jumped clear of the jeep and strode through the gap in the wire. The jeep reversed away.
He saw Fawzi's lesson. He thought that Fawzi would have messed his trousers if he had ever been called on to fire a heavy machine gun in combat. His throat was dry. He walked to the cooking area. He saw the dead fire. No coffee warming. High on the hill slope above the camp he saw the cook foraging for wood.
The vision of the binoculars roved.
The cook had an armful of wood, so much now that he had wavered twice as if uncertain whether more was needed.
The open falling ground was devoid of cover except for long-dead trees lying strewn and ossified. The sun had burnt the bark from them.
The deep clumsily-dug ditch.
Refuse bags and the sheets of discarded newspaper, trapped on the coiled wire. The men were all sitting, bored and listless, no longer attentive to the gesturing officer in front of his class.
The new arrival . . .
The new man in the camp walked to stand behind the sitting instructor, listened for a few moments, turned away.
The binoculars followed him.
Something in the stride, something in the bearing.
The twin eyepieces were rammed against Holt's eyebrows and cheekbones. He had seen the right side of the face, he had seen the full of the face, he had seen the short curled hair at the back of the head.
The new man now seemed to walk aimlessly. A tent floated in front of him. Holt swore.
The man reappeared, doubling back, smoking Left side of the face.
Holt could hardly hold the binoculars steady. Breath coming in pants, hands trembling. He gulped the air down into his lungs. He forced the air down into his throat, breathing as a sniper would, winning control of his body. Crane's bible, breathing critical.
He saw the man's left hand raised to his face. He saw the finger peck at a place on the left cheek. He saw the hand drop.
Holt saw the crow's foot scar.
The breath shuddered out of his chest.
The vision of the binoculars bounced. The tunnel of sight bounced, fell. He had seen the crow's foot scar.
The shadow pit of the well of the scar, four lines of the scar spreading away from the dark centre.
The cook . . .
The cook still coming up the hill, bending here and there for a piece of wood, carefree.
Abu Hamid . . .
Seen beside the other men in the camp, Holt thought Abu Hamid was taller than he had remembered him, and thinner, and his hair was longer and falling to the olive green collar of his fatigue top. All doubt was gone.
He felt a huge surge of exhilaration - and he recognised it, a sudden, sharper, stronger fright. But Noah Crane and young Holt had done it, they had walked into the bloody awful Beqa'a valley, and they had found him.
They had him at close quarters, had traced him behind the lines, on the other side of the hill. And where the hell was Noah Crane?
The cook . . .
The cook had set down his gathered bundle, and come higher. He would collect another armful and then go back for the first. The cook meandered on the hill side, searching.
Abu Hamid . . .
Abu Hamid walked amongst the tents. To Holt he seemed a man without purpose. Sometimes he would insinuate himself close to the officer who lectured the young soldiers. Sometimes he would turn and walk away as if the lecture bored him. He flitted, he was aimless. Holt, in his mind, saw Jane and the ambassador.
He saw the blood rivers on the steps of the hotel. He saw the white pallor of death on her face, on his face.
He wondered if there was indeed a sweetness in revenge, or whether it would merely be a substitute, saccharine dose . . . He knew the excitement at the discovery of Abu Hamid, he could not imagine whether he would find pleasure, fruit, satisfaction in Abu Hamid dead. He had never hurt a human being in his life, not even at school, not even in a playground fight. No answers.
The cook ...
As if struck by an electric shock, the cook jerked backwards, scattering the branches of wood behind him.
Crane appearing, seeming to thrust himself up from under the feet of the cook. Holt saw everything. The tunnel of his binoculars was filled with the cook trying to heave himself backwards, with Crane rising and groping and grasping for him. The cook screamed, a shrill, carrying scream. The scream winnowed over the hillside. The scream was clear to Holt who was four hundred yards from the cook, to the tent camp that was six hundred yards from the cook. Holt heard the rising cadence of the scream. He saw the flash of the blade.
He saw the body of Crane merge with the body of the cook. He heard the scream cut, snuffed out.
Fawzi's words had been lost. The recruits had first stiffened, swung, then jacknifed to their feet. They had seen the cook on the hillside, seen him try to twist away, break into flight. They had seen the assailant. They had heard the death of the scream. Abu Hamid charged from in front of his own tent towards the class, towards the DShKM heavy machine gun.
Holt lay on his stomach pressing his body as far as he could back into the recess of the rock overhang. He saw the brightness of the blade, and he saw the cook crumple to his knees, then slide to his face. He realised at once the enormity of it. Their cover was gone. He was hiding, but Crane had no hiding place. He thought the cook might even have stepped on Crane, he thought the cook had been close enough to Crane to have actually put his boot onto the back of Crane's camouflaged head or the back of Crane's camouflaged body.
Holt watched Crane. The hugeness of the tunnel vision seemed to give him an intimacy with Crane who was four hundred yards further down the hillside. He believed he could see the turmoil of decision in Crane's features. Crane looked back down the hillside, down the slope towards the tent camp. Holt followed his eye line, flashed the tunnel view of the binoculars towards the tent camp. The recruits were streaming towards the entrance between the coiled wire. Back to Crane. Holt saw the hands of Noah Crane fumbling at his waist, then he saw him crouch. Sharp movements now, decision taken, mind made. Crane back onto his feet.
Holt saw that he no longer wore his belt. He peered again to be sure. Crane no longer carried his belt on his waist. According to Crane's bible the belt was never taken from th
e body, not to sleep, not to defecate. Crane no longer wore his belt. Crane had his back to Holt. He gazed up high onto the hillside as if his eyeline was a half a mile higher than the rock overhang, as if his eyeline was far to the south.
Holt heard Crane's shout. Crane's hands were at his mouth, cupped to amplify his shout. Crane bellowed towards a place on the hillside. Holt thought that Crane shouted in Hebrew, that he called a warning.
Crane started to run at an angle on the hillside.
More understanding, but then a child could have understood.
They were young, the pursuers. They were fast on the hillside. They were swarming amongst the rock outcrops, over the broken ground. He was taking them away. His warning was a deception, he was leading them away from Holt.
There was the first ranging burst from the machine gun. Three, four rounds. There was the first red light of a sighting tracer bullet.
Holt could not take his vision, his magnified gaze, away from Crane. The pursuers, teenagers, half the age of Crane, must gain, would gain, on the quarry. A second burst, a second flailing flight of tracer. Holt could no longer see Crane's face, could see only the heaving shake of his back as he ran, away from Holt, ran for his life. Holt saw the puff pecks of the bullets striking rock and scree and stone.
Crane sagged. He stumbled, he fell. He rose again.
Out aloud, Abu Hamid shouted his triumph.
Three, four round bursts of 12.7 mm ammunition.
Aimed bursts from a tripod. Muzzle velocity nine hundred yards a second. He had seen his target go down, rise again, collapse, rise again. He had his hit.
Holt saw Crane go forward.
He seemed to hobble. He was ducking and weaving as he went, but slower, each step deeper into pain. He understood. The vixen's loyalty to her cub. A scarred, world weary, bitchy old vixen giving life to a wet-behind the-ears cub. The gunfire had stopped. No more shooting. Holt could see that the pursuers were now too close to Crane to make it either safe or necessary to fire again.
The pursuers bounded over the diminishing ground, hunted down their man. He heard Crane shout again, make another pretence at a warning to phantom men in a position ahead of him.
Holt saw the cave mouth.
Holt saw the first head, shoulders, appear at the mouth of the cave. The mouth of the cave was a hundred yards ahead of Crane's line. It was the edge of Holt's vision. It was the place that was half masked from him.
Four men came out of the cave's mouth. One man wore only the grey whiteness of underpants upon the pink whiteness of his body. Chaos on the hillside, chaos for Crane who was wounded, chaos for three men of the Hezbollah who were discovered and flushed out, chaos for a hostage prisoner. The three men ran. The hostage prisoner stood alone. The gap between Crane and his pursuers narrowed.
Holt watched. Crane was engulfed.
He let the binoculars fall from his eyes.
His head drooped, down into the dirt floor of the rock overhang.
The tears misted his eyes, ran bitter to his lips.
Crane was dragged down the hillside. The hostage prisoner was escorted after him.
A moment when the lights seemed to go out, when hope was lost.
The argument was ferocious.
"I wounded him, my shooting. My boys captured him. I should take him."
"You've work here."
Abu Hamid and Lieutenant Fawzi face to face.
"It was us who caught him . . . "
"Me who will take the Jew . . . "
"You want to take the credit from us."
"You have men to choose, you have a mission to perform. You will stay."
"So that you will take the credit."
"So that you can prepare your mission."
In the hand of Fawzi was the dog tag ripped from the neck of the prisoner, kept safe in Fawzi's hand just as the prisoner would be safe in Fawzi's possession.
"I should take him to Damascus."
"I order you to stay here. You will perform your duty."
Fawzi walked away. He went to the knot of recruits that had gathered round the prisoner. He shouldered aside the man kicking the prisoner. He thought that by now they would all have had their turn with the boot.
He saw the blood seeping from the knee of the prisoner.
He saw the mouth twisted to stifle an agony. He told the recruits that the prisoner should not again be kicked.
He went to his tent. He knew enough of the English language that was common between them to receive the garbled thanks of the hostage prisoner.
He sat at the table that was set between his bed and the bed used by Abu Hamid. He switched on the battery power for the radio. He waited. When the lights glowed, when he had transmission power, he broadcast his success to Damascus.
Holt watched.
The body of the cook was carried down the hillside on a stretcher made of rifle slings and the wood he had been collecting, and along with the body was the Armalite rifle that Crane had carried. A second search party had scoured the cave and brought down to the camp boxes of food and weapons and bedding.
Holt saw all that. He was undisturbed. The recruits of the Popular Front had no interest in that part of the hillside where Holt lay under the rock overhang and the screen of scrim netting.
Holt watched the camp. He could see Crane lying prone on the earth, he could see the blood on his legs.
He could see the rifles that covered Crane's every pain spasm.
They had not found Crane's belt. The belt lay amongst the rocks, deep amongst them, at the place where Crane had begun his decoy flight. Holt tried to memorise the place, tried to recall each detail of Crane's movement so that he could remember that exact place where Crane had crouched to conceal his belt.
Major Said Hazan swivelled his chair so that his back was to the traveller, so that he faced the wall map. He studied the two red-headed pins that he had set into his map. It was Major Said Hazan's style to repeat each piece of information given him so that there should be no possible error, no missed inflection, no false interpretation.
"And the information came from an Englishman?"
"An Englishman of middle years, staying at the guest house of the Kibbutz Kfar Giladi, and he said, 'How did you know about the infiltration last night?' That is what he said."
"And that 'last night', that was the night that Olaffson said the Israelis had fired flares to blind the night equipment?"
"That is correct, Major."
He spoke to himself, he ignored the traveller. He stared at the red-headed pin that marked the unsub-stantiated interception.
"Why are the British going into the Beqa'a?"
The traveller shrugged. Fragments of walnut tumbled from his clothes to the white pile of the carpet.
"A wretch such as I, Major, how could I know?"
He needed to think. He required moments of contemplation. Major Said Hazan was denied the moments.
A sharp tap at the door. A bustling entrance from his clerk, a sheet of paper handed to him. He studied it. He seemed no longer to see the traveller. He reached for a telephone. He demanded that the Jew prisoner be brought to Damascus by Air Force helicopter. He demanded that the Jew prisoner be brought to the custody of Air Force Intelligence. To win his demands he invoked the authority, and the fear of that authority, of that building in which he worked.
Major Zvi Dan rocked on his feet. He stood in the middle of the communications centre. He held loose in his hand the report of the intercepted traffic. For the third time he read the message, as if in the frequency of the reading he might find a straw. No comfort, nothing to cling to.
"INTERCEPT.
TRANSMISSION TIME:
1 0 - 4 7 HOURS LOCAL.
TRAFFIC ORIGINATED:
PFLP TRAINING CAMP, NR
KHIRBET QANAFAR,
BEQA'A.
TRAFFIC DESTINATION:
AFI HQ, DAMASCUS.
CODE:
2 N D SERIES, AFI.
MESSAGE:
> ISRAELI SERVICEMAN CAR-
RYING IDENTIFICATION OF
NOAH CRANE, REL: J E W , I / D
NO: 478391, CAPTURED
WHILE ON SURVEILLANCE
OF CAMP, WOUNDED. IN
SAME OPERATION, LINK
UNCERTAIN, FRG
NATIONAL HEINRICH
GUNTER, HOSTAGE, FREED,
UNHURT. SEARCH OF AREA
INTO WHICH CRANE
FLEEING FAILED TO FIND
REMAINDER OF I N F I L -
TRATION PARTY. REQUEST
EYE BRING TO DAMASCUS.
SIGNED, FAWZI ( L T ) .
No comfort, no straw, each reading worse than the last. The communications officer came quietly to his side. He asked, "The frequency we are to monitor - we are still to monitor it?"
"Yes," Major Zvi Dan said.
He went outside. He went into the bright sunlight.
Midday and the sun swirling off the dust of the parade area, and off the tin roofing of the huts, and off the armour plate of the personnel carriers. From the troops'
quarters he heard the cheerful playing of music from the Forces' station. He passed beside the verandah outside the canteen. He knew that Rebecca watched him, but he could not bring himself to speak to her. His face would have told her.
He was familiar with disaster. His work often travelled in tandem with catastrophe. Many times he had known the pain and the catastrophe of losing a field agent. The hurt was never more manageable for being familiar.
He went into the building block. He walked to the sentry who lolled in his chair outside the door. He gestured for the door to be opened. Percy Martins sat on the bed. Major Zvi Dan saw the dulled scowl of Martins's welcome. He passed the sheet of paper to the Englishman. He let the Englishman hold the sheet of paper, as if for authenticity, then he translated line by line from the Hebrew.
"God . . . "
"You had the right to know."
"Holt, what about Holt?"
"He is alone."
"What can we do for him?"
"He is beyond our reach."
"He's just a boy."
"Then he should never have been sent."
"Can he not be helped?"
At Close Quarters Page 34