(2013) Collateral Damage

by Colin Smith

  The number in the flat they had in the Greek Cypriot part of Nicosia continued to ring. He was about to put the receiver down when the woman answered. She had a young voice. 'Is that Rebecca?' he asked in English. 'It's Benjamin here.'

  The Jewish code-names were one of the Front's little jokes. You could never accuse the Palestinians of lacking a sense of humour. Briefly, and in a lightly coded way, he told 'Rebecca' what had happened. When he had finished he said: 'Tell them I'm going to Athens. OK?'

  'Yes, wait. I have a message.' The woman's voice betrayed none of the dismay she felt as he told her about who had been running their main European cell for the last three months. He might have been reciting a grocery list.

  He could hear her moving about the phone, obviously looking for her memo. 'Do you know an Englishman called Stephen Dove? Big man. Big shoulders.'

  'No. Why?'

  'I don't know. I was asked to ask you if you called - that's all.'

  Her voice sounded slightly reproachful; he should have known better than to ask unnecessary questions. 'OK. Bye.'

  'Bye, bye.'

  He went to the counter to pay for his call. The dandruffed operator was filling out some forms and kept him waiting. Standing there he became uncomfortably aware of the rolled newspaper carrying his picture; he sought reassurance by allowing the hand holding it to brush down the side of his jacket so he could feel the weapon tucked into the waistband of his trousers. 'My call,' he said. 'How much?'

  'Your call to where?'

  Koller thought: has this idiot recognized me? Is he playing for time before the police arrive?

  'The call to Cyprus. Cabin five.'

  'Ah yes, forty francs, Monsieur.'

  The German guessed he was overcharging him by a couple of francs, but he wanted to get away. He counted out four tens. The operator took them without a word and went back to filling in his forms.

  A few minutes later, walking along S tGermain looking for a taxi to take him across the river, it occurred to Koller that he had heard the name Dove somewhere. He couldn't for the life of him think where.

  4. Beirut

  'What do you think he is?' the reporter asked his drinking companion when Dove had gone to the lavatory.

  'Some sort of bob-a-job spook I suppose. This place is full of them. The espionage centre of the Middle East and all that.'

  'He says he's a schoolteacher on holiday.'

  'Well he can't be a spook then. A spook would have a better cover than that. Jesus Christ. What an asshole. A schoolteacher on holiday. He's probably running away from his wife or something. Your turn, I believe.'

  'Ah, yes. Jusef. Two whisky-and-waters and a beer for our absent friend. Put it on his bill.'

  From the other side of the city carne the sound, like a heavenly drum roll, of a single salvo of twenty-four 107-millimetre Syrian rockets landing one after the other on East Beirut. The noise inspired the bar's grey parrot to do his famous whistling impersonation of an artillery shell about to explode in your ear. Neither the real thing nor the imitation attracted much attention since the rockets were falling two miles away and, unlike during the civil war, the Christian militias usually restricted their own artillery to counter-battery work rather than random firing on Moslem West Beirut.

  Syrian tactics, the reporters had explained to Dove, were brutally simple. They refused to get involved in costly street fighting in the lanes of Ashrafiyeh. When their soldiers were fired on they simply bombarded the Christian suburbs until they considered they had been sufficiently punished. Lately, the ceasefires were getting shorter, the bombardments longer, and the press corps larger.

  Every night this boisterous tribe gathered around the Circle bar in the Admiral Hotel, perpetually celebrating reunions with colleagues last encountered in similar bars in South-East Asia or Africa. They drank a great deal and communicated in their own jargon, a mostly English dialect that seemed to be understood by several nationalities. They tended, Dove noticed, to dress alike too, favouring shirts or bush-jackets with lots of pockets into which they crammed wallets, notebooks, film, identity cards, hip-flasks, cigarettes, Swiss army clasp-knives, amphetamines, and even paperback volumes on Middle-East politics.

  As far as the schoolteacher could see their days followed a rhythmic, peasant simplicity. Despite their late nights they tended to get up early to go out and look at the 'bang bang'. They reappeared in mid-afternoon, dirty and sweaty, and either went straight to their rooms to write their despatches or left their precious film in the hands of avaricious taxi-drivers who took it the fifty miles or so to the Jordanian satellite transmitting station in Amman. In the early evening they fought each other to get their reports on the telex, chain-smoked and appeared to be on the verge of nervous breakdowns when the line went down.

  Dinner was usually devoted to the destruction of a small grape harvest, bottles delivered to the command, 'Think we could damage another one of those.' Afterwards, the survivors struggled to the bar and delivered themselves of the coup de grace. One young man wore a bullet dug out of him on a chain around his neck. But when they talked of 'bang bang', Dove noticed that it was considered bad form to be anything other than a craven coward who had strayed into the action through poor navigation. TV cameramen sometimes affected not to know what country they were in.

  Since his arrival the schoolteacher had been able to contact only one of the names the Palestinian publisher had given him and that man, a lecturer in law at one of the city's universities, had proved quite useless. Because of this he fell on the journalists as his last hope of finding the German whom he was convinced had scuttled back to Beirut after killing Emma, like a rat to his hole. Dove was by no means a stupid man, but he never really understood that the majority of these reporters were visitors to Beirut and some, like himself, for the first time. They could hardly find their way to the local Reuter's office let alone, as Dove fondly hoped, list half a dozen places where a German terrorist might be lifting his stein. Moreover, although they were polite enough, it was plain that they were uninterested in those outside the tribe, and surrounded by the authentic version Dove no longer felt it wise to pose as a reporter. When he confessed his alien background their eyes would glaze over and, although they might buy him a drink, they were less than generous with their conversation. He was usually in bed long before they were, dreaming of Koller.

  Once he realised the address Ruth had given him was phoney Dove had explored Beirut with an optimism only true obsession can generate. He saw Koller everywhere. He saw him in the gloomy little afternoon bars in the side-streets, where acned hostesses from Newcastle pushed bad champagne and generally failed to recapture the port's pre-civil-war reputation of being the best whore-house in the Middle East. And when he came out, furious and belching, squinting into the sunlight, h,e wandered down Hamra, where chic young Lebanese window-shopped among French-stocked boutiques, sniffing air perfumed with freshlymade popcorn and roasted corn-cobs, until he spotted him again at a table in one of the glass-fronted cafes there.

  But once he was inside, Koller always transmogrified into a uniformed private in the Norwegian contingent of the United Nations, his automatic rifle leaning casually against the formica table-top, or a family man treating two sticky-faced children to chocolate ice-cream. Then Dove would retreat back into the throng outside, stepping over beggars displaying stumps and sores or worse - once he passed a handsome, three-foot young man whose body had been reduced to arms and a torso which met the pavement just below his heart. Dove, obsessed by white faces, was quite oblivious to all this. When he was involved with collisions with people on the pavement, as he frequently was, he mumbled his apologies to a blur of clones. Twice he collided with the same slim young man in jeans and a sports shirt, but Dove saw only that he wasn't Koller.

  Most of all he saw the German visiting the scruffy administrative offices of the Palestine Liberation Organisation near the Arab University - where twelve-year-old sentries delighted to remove the magazines from thei
r Kalashnikovs to show visitors they were loaded. He would wait for him to come out and follow him back through the crowded, garbage-filled streets, skirting the hovels of one of the smaller Palestinian refugee camps, corrugated roofs held down with old tyres, ignoring the street-vendors with their pyramids of Marlboro cigarettes or whisky. Yet when he brushed alongside him, said 'excuse me' and asked for directions or a light for a cigarette it wasn't Koller after all, or at least it wasn't the Koller he knew from the newspaper photographs.

  Then in the evening, when the Christian militiamen stopped sniping at the untidy Syrian infantry patrols and the bandits who crept out of the ruined port area kept honest folk indoors, he saw him again, talking to an American journalist at the bar of the Admiral Hotel. But when he elbowed a place next to him and eavesdropped on the conversation, he turned out to be a Finnish television producer saying: 'You were here in the war? It must have been horrible.'

  Yet events since his departure from London had gone well enough at first and Dove had derived a certain amount of satisfaction from the coolness of his behaviour. He had left the Cortina in the car-park for the Number Three terminal at Heathrow and then switched to Number One terminal for his flight to Paris. He had felt a slight twinge about leaving the car, his last link with a life that had been worth living. 'A sensible car for a sensible person,' Emma used to say.

  'No. A poor car for a poor person,' and they had laughed about that, but she was right because even if he had had the money it would never have been a Porsche.

  The subterfuge with the car was something he made himself do as an extra little precaution: in fact, he felt there was little chance of the police connecting him with the attack on the cabinet minister's daughter. His main problem had been travelling with the Webley. Since people like Koller had ensured that even grannies were subject to the indignity of a body search, the only answer was to put it in his main suitcase, the one that went into the aircraft's hold, and hope Customs accepted his 'nothing to declare'.

  This had worked going in and out of Paris, but he had worried about Lebanon with its cowboy reputation. He decided if he was caught to pose as the naive schoolteacher who thought everybody was allowed to carry one.

  He had been worrying about the gun when he first sighted Lebanon, a hazy coastline viewed from the window-seat of a Caravelle apparently about to crash land on a turquoise Mediterranean. Then, as the landing gear shuddered down, the approach over a deserted harbour, still dosed although, officially, the civil war was over. Next the aircraft was skimming the cream-coloured apartment blocks of Moslem West Beirut, the occasional terra cotta bungalow roof a clue to the style before the concrete flood, followed by the almost comical greenery of the city golf-course neighbouring the runway rushing up to meet them. From above it looked quite tame, and the schoolteacher felt oddly cheated.

  The gun problem was resolved when a fat and cheerful customs officer, having given the flight-bag he was carrying as hand baggage a cursory inspection, chalked his unopened case and waved him through. The khaki-uniformed policemen with their huge pistols in open holsters did not spare him a second glance. As Fitchett had rightly suspected, the Lebanese gendarmerie were indifferent to fugitive British schoolteachers accused of beating up cabinet ministers' daughters. The embassy were aware of this too: they asked the Foreign Ministry if they would mind, when they weren't too busy, having a word with the Justice Ministry about the matter - with no conviction that anything would be achieved by doing so.

  The Admiral Hotel, just off Hamra, was recommended to Dove by a taxi-driver who must have been under the impression that he was another journalist. 'All your friends there,' he had said enigmatically, as he charged him three times the going rate from the airport. As soon as he got to his room Dove had taken the pistol out and carried it in his waistband ever since. He worked on the assumption that he might only find Koller once and he wanted to be prepared. His concept of the future extended no further than his meeting.

  About a week after his arrival L'Orient Le Jour published an Agence France Presse report about the hunt for Koller in Paris. At first, Dove was cross that he had been in the same city and missed him. He imagined himself rubbing shoulders with the terrorist at Charles de Gaulle, too obsessed with getting to Beirut to notice the looks of the blond man he had just pushed past on the escalator. Then, lying in bed at night listening to the Christian sector getting another pasting, he reasoned that the German would have to get out of Paris and that Beirut was his most likely bolt-hole. Some of the journalists must know where he was likely to hang out, he reasoned. It was just a matter of interrupting their endless shop-talk long enough to get them to concentrate their minds on the subject. In the meantime, the children with the Kalashnikovs, as well as the odd chrome-plated automatic glimpsed in a taxi-driver's glove compartment, had convinced him that he really ought to do something about getting a better gun. He was quite unaware that his incessant questions about terrorists in general, and Koller in particular, plus his manic peregrinations about the city, were beginning to attract attention.

  5. Peace Talks

  'Rebecca', the young woman in Cyprus who took Koller's message, returned to Beirut the day after she received it - on the first available flight. She arrived at Khaldeh airport clutching a demi-john of cheap Cypriot brandy, ignored the small boys touting for taxis, and was picked up by a new black Buick with darkened windows. In the back of the Buick sat a middle-aged Arab with steel-rimmed spectacles, a cuddly, roly-poly figure wearing a black leather jacket over a white polo-necked sweater. This was Koller's boss, Abu Kamal. He wasn't normally disposed to meet people at airport and, partial to Cypriot brandy though he was, Rebecca was going to be in a lot of trouble if Koller's message was not as important as she said it was.

  'Hello, my dear,' he said as she slid in besides him. 'Come whisper your sibylline secrets.'

  As she talked the car sped south towards the old Phoenician port of Sidon, passing the places where scruffy Syrian soldiers were manning anti-aircraft guns dug in alongside the road, their muzzles pointing east over the Mediterranean. When she had finished Abu Kamal said that she had been right to come and asked if she was certain that Koller had said he did not know Dove. She said that she was.

  Shortly afterwards they arrived at a small, whitewashed villa, its walls trailing bougainvillea. It stood, facing the sea, about half a mile away from the nearest Palestinian refugee camp and was surrounded by a wire mesh fence, around the top of which ran three strands of barbed wire. As they approached the gate in this fence two lean and fit-looking young men in olive green uniforms and red chequered keffiyeh headscarves sprang out of a hole in the ground. They were carrying the paratroopers' version of the Kalashnikov, the sort with the folding stock.

  The Buick stopped. The sentries peered into the vehicle and then sprang back into an approximation of 'attention' before opening the gate. As they went into the villa Abu Kamal lit his third cigarette in thirty minutes. He had difficulty in believing Koller's story himself; now he had to make other people believe it.

  In the main reception room five men were seated around a low table, smoking and dropping lumps of sugar into glasses of strong tea. There was a full ash-tray on the table and although it was not yet dusk the curtains were drawn and the electric light was on. Posters covered the walls, among them a large coloured photograph of four long-haired young men with white even teeth standing chest high in a cornfield and gazing moodily between the stalks. They might have been a pop group, but their instruments were Kalashnikovs and a rocket-propelled grenade-launcher. Three of the men around the table belonged to the Realists, the movement the Palestinian publisher was connected with, and they had come to parley.

  A man who had been sitting in the front of the Buick next to the driver went into the room first, followed by Abu Kamal. The woman did not go in. As Abu Kamal entered, the men around the table rose and one by one went up to him, embraced, and kissed him on both cheeks. While they did this they were carefully watched by th
e other man from the car, a tall, handsome Palestinian in his mid-thirties who stood by the door with his arms clasped loosely together so that his right hand disappeared under the flap of his jacket. Like the youths in the poster, all killed in an attack on an Israeli settlement in Galilee, he wore his hair long - only in his case it was because during the events, as the civil war was called, somebody had removed most of his right ear.

  When Abu Kamal had taken his seat, sipped his tea, lit another cigarette, and a certain amount of small talk had been exchanged, he repeated most of what the woman from Cyprus had told him in the car. It was noticeable that he directed his story at a man of about his own age who sat opposite him across the table. He was wearing a well-cut suit with an Yves St Laurent tie, and with his greying sideboards and gold-rimmed glasses looked like the successful lawyer he had been until Saudi funds made politics of a sort a feasible career. Unlike the others he did not smoke, but constantly ran a string of worry beads through his right hand. After Abu Kamal had finished this man, who was a very senior member of the Realists, asked: 'Do you believe this story? Do you believe what Koller is saying?' His tone implied that he, for one, did not.

  'I see no reason why not to?' said Abu Kamal quietly.

  The long-haired Palestinian at the door stared impassively at the man with the worry beads, never moving.

  'It seems to me,' said the lawyer, 'that this is just why these people do our cause more harm than good...'

  Abu Kamal let out a barely audible sigh, lit another cigarette and braced himself for the lecture to come.

  'They have no real motivation,' the lawyer continued. 'They are anarchists, nihilists. They will work for anyone who gives them money and a gun and when they are caught they tell everything they know. How do we know he is telling the truth? Who's ever heard of these old fascists he talks about doing anything that mattered a damn? How do we know who he is really working for? He is not Palestinian, he is not...', he was going to say 'Moslem', but changed it to '…one of us.' Abu Kamal and his friends considered themselves to be Marxist; and, besides, there were many Christian Palestinians in both factions.