by Colin Smith
'What?' asked Dove, trying to recover his composure. 'Katyushas. Rockets. They're firing them at the Israelis.'
'Who's firing them?'
'Those guys down there.'
He handed Dove a pair of binoculars and pointed down the valley. When he had focused the glasses Dove could make out a moving truck with four grey steel pipes on the back. The pipes were angled over the roof of the cab as if they were two huge double-barrelled shotguns, one under the other.
'That's the launcher,' explained George. 'Now they're bugging out. Real hit and run stuff.
Just like Charlie Cong.'
'But what were they firing at?'
'Settlements. Probably near the place the Jews call Kiryat Shmoneh. I don't know exactly. They're not my team. I didn't know it was going to happen.'
'Civilian targets?'
'Civilian targets my ass. They're fortified settlements. They're crawling with Israeli army.'
'But civilians live there? Women and children?'
'Listen man, civilians live here too. Like Tamima's family.'
'Tamima?'
'The little girl who tried to pull what's left of my ear off.'
'But what good does it do?'
'It shows the bastards that we'll never give in. That there'll never be any peace until they make a settlement with us. Look, take your piece off and spend a few rounds. I'd better help the others. I think we might have a busy day.'
'Why? What's going to happen?'
'Well, they might wait until tomorrow, but the chances are the Israelis will either start shelling around here or send a couple of Phantoms over and bomb the shit outta some poor farmers. They never get the guys who pulled the job. Then they'll claim they've made a retaliatory raid against Palestinian terrorists. Motherfuckers. They're the terrorists, the dudes flying those computers upstairs - some bright mother's son who was good at Maths and passed out of the Air Force Academy in a big parade and got laid in a Texas whore-house doing his advance training. Oh, and I bet his Ma polishes his picture every day and writes him letters telling him how proud they all are and don't forget to say his prayers, and take his baths, and dry between his toes. Then he's grim reaper in his shiny all-American toy, twenty minutes of sudden death over southern Lebanon, fifty women and children wasted and he's back at base, pinching the ass off the Moroccan briefing-room chick, before they've finished dying. And so clean. All he did was push the button when the computer told him to and watch some smoke come up. I wish, I really wish I could get one of those motherfuckers down here and show him what his bunch of tricks does - before I cut his balls off.'
'But those rockets - what do they do?'
'Shit, man. Those rockets - they're like pissing on an elephant's foot. So, before you ask, are the bombs that go off in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv planted by people who look the dudes they're gonna kill in the eye before they walk away because they know it's right, know it's necessary.' George was spitting his words out like an American television evangelist.
'Right? Necessary? Terrorism can never be right. Anyway, I thought your organisation didn't believe in terrorism?'
The Palestinian remembered who he was supposed to be working for. 'It doesn't believe in terrorism against Zionist targets abroad or plane hijacking or that sort of shit any more. It believes it's a legitimate weapon in our homeland - like the French Resistance.'
'The French Resistance was different- their country was occupied.'
'So's ours.'
'The Israelis say it's their country.'
'Yeah. Well they shouldn't have waited two thousand years to come back. Of course, when they did come back they were no slouches at terrorism themselves. Vasting a whole village at Deir Yassin in '48-the Red Cross saw that. Blowin' up the King David's hotel, hangin' British sergeants, inventin' the letter bomb. Shit, they weren't bad. Weren't bad at all for people who won't talk to terrorists.'
'They had to come back. The Nazis-'
'We're not responsible for European anti-semitism or Cossack pogroms. What right did the British have in 1917, before they'd even taken the country from the goddamn Turks, to make a declaration saying that the Jews could have a homeland in Palestine?'
Some of the history of the place came back to Dove. 'If I remember rightly the Balfour Declaration promised a homeland not a state. It was very specific about the rights of the indigenous people not being-'
'Sure, sure. That was the crack in the dam, wasn't it. Forty-one years later it burst and you got Israel.'
'God, it's difficult, isn't it?'
'No, man. It's easy. We're right.'
Dove shook his head. 'I think you're both as stubborn as mules - the Palestinians and the Israelis.'
'Yeah,' said George. 'If we ever get together the world better look out. OK. Let's drop the polemic. You've got your own war to fight, and I'm not questioning your morality.'
'For Christ's sake. I've got every right-'
'You've got a reason - your own survival.'
'What's that supposed to mean?'
'Killing Koller is the only thing that keeps you alive, makes life worth living. That's what you told me. Right, man?'
Dove walked away, angrily ramming the magazine into the Walther with the heel of his left hand as he did so.
'Hey, man,' George called after him. 'I told you before not to do that. You'll crimp the top of the magazine and get a jam.'
Dove waved his broad left hand in acknowledgement without looking back.
'Asshole,' murmured George. 'Goddamn asshole.' But there was a sad, almost affectionate smile on his face. Then he went back to where the others were threading the big, brass 12.7mm rounds for the Dushka into new ammunition belts and began talking to them in his bad Arabic.
8. Before They've Finished Dying
The planes from the south came in the late afternoon when the fedayeen had almost given them up. For a full minute before they saw them they could hear their engines humming in the clouds gathering for dusk.
They first appeared as two glittering silver darts falling to earth, one slightly behind the other, before banking into a tight turn, their triangular shape clearly silhouetted against the sinking sun. Dove, seated in a shallow trench near the Dushka, felt his stomach turn cold and the ice begin to form around his groin. George, squatting beside him with his binoculars, said, 'Phantoms'.
For a moment it seemed that the aircraft were heading straight for them. 'Surely,' thought Dove, 'they can't know we're in these trees?' He watched as the Dushka crew and the fedayeen on the multi-barrelled Czech gun frantically swivelled their weapons on them through the gaps in the trees. He studied the gunners' hands as they tightened over the trigger mechanisms. George had told him that the Czech gun was capable of hitting, without the aid of radar, an aircraft travelling at the speed of sound. 'If the crews have had the right training,' he had added.
'And have they?'
'Only live targets.'
He stared at these mostly teenage gunners now, silently begging them to hold their fire, not to draw attention to themselves. Then George was standing up in the trench, his right hand raised.
In fact, the first fire came from some positions above them near Beaufort Castle. George let his hand drop just as the Phantoms, their engine noise practically drowning out the gunfire, had passed them and were beginning their dive into the valley. For seven or eight seconds, as the planes flew across their line of vision, his crews had the chance to get them in their sights. In that time the five barrels under George's command discharged just over four hundred rounds. The noise was appalling. It sounded to Dove as if someone was turning an enormous coffeegrinder inside his head. There was also the burned smell that lingers when a lot of ammunition has been fired. Yet not one of those rounds, with a muzzle velocity of over three thousand miles per hour, found a target and nor did any of the other antiaircraft guns on the hillside, let alone the rifles fired as uselessly as the one in Tamima's picture.
The Phantoms were better. Their bombs kic
ked up great brown clouds around the village of the Shia tobacco farmers. Because they were about two miles away Dove and the rest experienced the peculiar delayed action effect of actually seeing the smoke and the climbing silver arrows before the noise of the explosion had rippled up the valley towards them. The aircraft made one other pass at the village and the fedayeen fired their guns with the same effect. The second time there were not several large explosions, but hundreds of spurts of earth in the fields near the houses, followed by a firecracker noise without the rhythm of machine-gun fire.
'CBU's,' said George. 'Cluster Bomb Units. We had them in Nam. They drop something that looks like a wing-tank and half-way down it splits open like a fucking pea-pod and throws nice little exploding balls about the place. Another good American toy. Jesus Christ.'
George left the trench and walked to where the trees thinned out and he could get a good look at the valley through his fieldglasses. Overhead the planes were circling again. Dove followed him to where he was crouching beside a tree, resting on his haunches. The Palestinian grunted, adjusted his focus, and held the binoculars on one spot for about thirty seconds. He handed the glasses to the big Englishman. 'Look at the houses,' he said, 'then come back about two hundred yards into the field and go to three o'clock. Got it?'
At first Dove could not understand what the Palestinian wanted him to see. There was still a lot of dust and smoke swirling about the houses. As far as he could tell the ones he was focused on were still intact. He saw a smallish vehicle, a Land Rover or a pick-up, move off at great speed. He came to the spot in the field, but he saw nothing at first except young tobacco plants and bits of old farm machinery. He went back to the machinery again, a long, oval device painted green, which listed in the soft spring soil like a neglected tombstone.
'You got it?' asked George.
'I think so - that metal thing in the field.'
'Yeah. That's one half of the CBU canister. See if you can find the other one.'
He was looking for this when the planes, almost forgotten, swooped down on the positions around the Crusader castle - short bursts of machine cannon, the pilots coming in so low it seemed as if they were following the very contours of the land. George was taken by surprise too and they both threw themselves to the ground, uncertain as to who was under attack, fearful it might be themselves. It was a parting gesture. The Phantoms soared south, impervious to the furious, frightened chatter of the guns below them. The schoolteacher was reminded of flies on a television screen, untouched by the picture.
There was a rush to get down to the village. George led, with Dove sitting alongside him in the front seat of the pick-up, the man on the Dushka kicking spent cases out of the back as they went.
On the outskirts the first thing they heard was a dog howling.
It was a terrible, ear-splitting sound and Dove, dreading it was human, was almost relieved to see the animal on the roadside, tottering about on three legs, holding up its shattered front paw. George stopped the noise with a long burst from his Kalashnikov.
In the village, the women were wailing around three shattered houses, one of them the house of Tamima and her grandfather. Beside it was a crater, about twenty feet across, made by the bomb whose blast had brought the house and its neighbour down. The roof of grey stressed concrete was almost intact, but no more than six inches off the ground in places because the walls had collapsed. Nearby a car lay on its roof like a stranded beetle.
George and Dove joined the people clambering about the shattered masonry, peering under slabs into horrible little caverns of crushed furniture, tugging tentatively at clothes which proved empty, hoping they would not find what they were looking for. At one point the Palestinian groaned and emerged from one of these burrowing places clutching the wallet of coloured pencils he had given the child. They could not get under the main weight of the roof, but they tore at the rubble around the edges for over half an hour before all but George, his Kalashnikov slung across his back, gave up. Dove, exhausted by his own efforts, watched his frantic clawing, his fingers bruised and cut, saw him even trying to lift the roof single-handed.
Then somebody told them that, after the first bombs, many people had run to the fields 'where the little bombs had fallen'. They raced to the spot, and sure enough, a group of sobbing women were standing in a semi-circle facing the dark green of an orange grove. At their feet lay Tamima's grandfather, bleeding and making convulsive little shudders. Dove ran up to him with the vague intention of stopping his wounds, but he was bleeding from so many places he didn't know where to start. He had been caught running for the cover of the orange grove when the CBU's bomblets hailed down. George bent down beside the dying old man and began to shout in his ear; the old man murmured something, and George ran off into the orange grove pursued by Dove. 'Watch where you put your feet,' yelled the Palestinian after him.
Dove saw her first. She was standing under one of the trees, almost lost beneath the foliage, examining a green, unripened fruit.
George called, 'Tamima', and started running towards her.
Then suddenly he froze, and when he started moving again approached very slowly on the balls of his feet, whispering to her in the guttural Lebanese Arabic. Without turning to Dove, still looking at the child, he said in a calm voice pitched almost to a monotone: 'Watch your feet man, watch your feet. She's playing with a fucking bomb.'
The schoolteacher looked again at the orange. He saw that its texture was smooth, metallic; it was not oval, but crimped into a hexagon shape and had a ridge running around its middle even more uncommon to oranges. He stopped and searched the long grass around his feet. About a metre from where he stood was another of these strange green fruit and nearby, the sunlight that filtered through the grove glinted on the bronze interior of a half-sphere that had split from its metal shell.
Tamima smiled when she saw the Palestinian and threw the bomblet from one hand to the other, moving her head from side to side like a juggler warming up. The Palestinian continued to whisper to the girl and in the same quiet voice told Dove to sit down - carefully. This was a mistake because the child became alarmed at these strange adult antics. She held her new plaything in both hands, sensed that this was the cause of alarm and threw it from her in a startled little two-handed gesture.
Dove had been squatting. Now he flung himself down on his belly, his fear of an immediate explosion overcoming the notion that he might be prostrating himself on more unexploded bomblets. He lay there for several seconds, his nose in the grass, dimly aware of the insect life buzzing around him. Nothing happened. He looked up. The Palestinian was standing with his arm around the little girl, the bomblet he had caught in his free hand. Dove scrambled to his feet expecting some scathing comment. Instead the Palestinian said, 'Sweet student, you're learning. These things are supposed to go off on impact. Sometimes, if they land on soft ground, they don't, but it makes them about as touchy as a scorpion. You don't even want to sneeze near them.' Dove carried the girl on his shoulders while the Palestinian picked a route for them out of the grove. On the way he bent down and picked up the bronze half-sphere Dove had noticed shining in the grass. When they got back to the field he scooped out with his fingers what remained of the white explosive, fully revealing the bronze interior. It was pre-cut in half-centimetre squares, like a waffle iron, to make for easier fragmentation.
'Now tell me who the terrorists are,' he said.
But Dove was not listening. He was watching the road, where a Mercedes had just drawn up with an escort of fedayeen in Land Rovers, front and rear. Out of the car stopped the lawyer; he waved them over. 'Maybe you're in business,' said George. He took the little girl off the Englishman's shoulders.
Dove walked up to the Mercedes. 'That's a problem,' said the lawyer. 'We know where Koller is, but there's a Scotland Yard man in town looking for you.'
9. Fitchett and the Funny
'Stephen Dove?' said the gaunt Lebanese detective with iron grey in his hair. He declined
one of Fitchett's Senior Service with a slap of his chest and a wan smile - a local gesture that could mean anything from indigestion to lung cancer. 'I don't recall the case. Our Interpol messages often get lost nowadays. It's the events, you know - telex links are not what they were.'
Fitchett didn't mind the evasion. He could not imagine the Yard exactly jumping through hoops of fire over a Lebanese request for assistance, either. 'These things happen,' he said.
This time the Lebanese smiled his best smile, rang a little bell on his desk and asked the Englishman if he preferred tea or coffee.
'Tea,' said the Special Branch man gruffly, apparently about to incinerate his cigarette with a blazing torch. On closer inspection the Lebanese saw that it was an old-fashioned petrol lighter.
'According to some British reporters in town,' said Fitchett, 'he first disappeared from his hotel, then, a couple of days later, so did some of his things.'
'He didn't pay the bill and he - he did a bunk,' said the Lebanese triumphantly, proud of his idiom. It had taken about ten seconds to establish that Fitchett's French barely covered a menu and, of course, Arabic was too much to expect from an English policeman.
'Not exactly,' said Fitchett, 'his things were taken after he disappeared. It looks like somebody grabbed him then went back for his belongings.'
'And the journalists told your embassy?'
'Yes.'
'You say he's wanted for, what is it, grieving bodies?'
'Grievous bodily harm. He beat up a girl - badly.'
'I see,' said the Lebanese, who plainly didn't. He brought out a tipped cigarette, screwed it into a long holder, and lit it with a Dunhill. 'A crime of passion?'
'No, but she was a cabinet minister's daughter - a big man in our government,' added Fitchett, just in case he had missed the point. Fitchett believed all foreigners were stupid, some more than others.
'Ah,' said the Lebanese. It was a friendly, knowing, Levantine 'aah', which said that politicians were the same the world over and a policeman's lot was not a happy one. 'Now I see why you're here.'