Sharett sold himself to his masters as the man who’d simultaneously saved the life of their ambassador to the United States and provided them with the long-sought excuse to invade their northern neighbor; when the going got tough he simply did a Raful and kept on doing it until the opposition cracked. And the greater the flak coming out of Washington, the more that opposition dwindled.
Colin Raleigh was interrogated by innumerable men, some genial, some less so, some identified, some anonymous, one with a lie detector. He struggled to keep Robbie out of it, with partial success. In the course of these various “interviews,” as they were euphemistically termed, he acquired odd snippets of knowledge: Leila and Halib had gotten away from the United States, a news blackout shrouded the events at the Katzes’ house, various propaganda machines were working around the clock to make the world believe that relations between the United States and Israel were at an all-time high. Once he’d managed to overcome the initial skepticism, Colin found that his story was not only given credence, it even achieved a certain measure of respect. Whatever Sharett might be telling them back home, it seemed obvious to the U.S. State Department that Colin Raleigh had saved the Israeli ambassador’s life. He’d recognized a code that would have meant nothing to an outsider and kept his head long enough to lead the police to the Katz sendah. For which he ought to be receiving credit in Tel Aviv—and would have done, had not Sharett been fighting his own corner so well.
No matter how many questions Robbie asked, Colin could not bring himself to talk about Leila. The authorities helped him there. No splashy headlines, no profile of terrorists on 60 Minutes; simply a prolonged, soothing silence that enabled him to sell Leila’s absence as desertion by an errant mother. “She’s gone away, son,” he said bitterly. “She wanted to go away. Let’s not talk about her.”
And after a while Robbie did stop talking about Leila. He became silent, withdrawing into a world of his own where he would not let Colin enter. So his father did not know of Robbie’s constant, anguished search through his memory for that moment when he’d broken up his parents’ marriage with a tantrum or an ill-considered word.
The unreality endured until the night they returned to their old house at Oxford. On the hall table Colin found mail neatly graded according to size of envelope, with the largest at the bottom; his mother must have been in to tidy up. After they’d unpacked and Robbie had gone to bed, Colin, dog-tired though he was, skimmed through the pile. Nothing caught his attention until he came to the very last item: a cheap brown envelope without a stamp but bearing his name. The handwriting was familiar. Leila.
Inside was a single sheet of paper, and here the hand-writing lost its character. Capitals, childlike in their ugliness, had been scrawled with a leaky ballpoint pen; this, he thought, is what a poison-pen letter must be like.
The message was short but abundantly clear. I’LL GET HIM BACK.
Colin went down to the kitchen and poured himself a scotch. He sat at the table for a long time, deciding in what order to do things, how to explain the situation to the local police, whether he ought to involve his college or his mother at this stage, before the rumor mill cranked up.
But what kept intruding was the memory of Sharett’s words.
Someday, you’ll believe. And on that day, there’ll be no one to help you protect your son except me, Raful Sharett. That’s my name. Remember it.
24 JULY: NIGHT/DAWN:
AL MAHRA, SOUTH YEMEN
I don’t like it,” Shlomo Stern whispered.
“Why?”
Shlomo wanted to reply, It’s too quiet, but that way he’d have sounded like some gook out of the movies working from a lousy script, and then his deputy, Captain Uri Vered, would have him by the balls forever after, so he improvised. “No lights; how can they guard the passengers without lights?”
Stern and Vered lay up behind a small hill a thousand meters or so from NQ 033, sharing the night scope. On a moonless night like this the scope could identify a camel as a camel two thousand yards away, and both Israeli Defense Force officers were convinced that the plane’s auxiliary power unit must have failed.
“Out of fuel, Shlomo.” Vered was, of course, aware that Stern held the rank of lieutenant colonel, but these men were strictly on first-name terms. “Airline predicted that.”
“No torches? Power packs?”
Shlomo handed over the scope and rolled onto his back, suddenly aware of hunger and fatigue. A mouthful of chocolate solved the first of these problems, but four years in Lebanon had worn the edges off his stamina. Too much had happened since he’d lifted the phone earlier that afternoon and found himself talking to Avshalom Gazit. First, hours spent waiting for independent confirmation that Sharett was on the plane; then, after it had come, apparently from a source in Bahrain, more hours in the air, a parachute drop into the Gulf of Aden—they’d had to go into the sea, to avoid Yemeni air defenses—a long swim followed by a longer spell on the inflatables … these things left their mark even on the fittest. There were thirty of them in all: five groups of six, five Masada long-range desert units seconded from the Paratroop Brigade, and they were the fittest troops in the IDF, but Operation Landmark, as the storming of NQ 033 was to be known, represented one long quintessential strain.
There were no lights aboard the aircraft and it was too quiet and Shlomo wanted to think. So he closed his eyes, letting every muscle in his body relax, while in the darkness around him and Vered, twenty-eight young men silently prepared for the fray.
The plane was blacked out. They had foreseen it might be, they’d foreseen every damn thing, and the order was specific: no lights on NQ 033 equals no attack before dawn. Storm a darkened plane and watch the body count rocket. Each man carried photographs of the flight crew and of the Mossad men aboard, but much use those would be in dead of night.
So. Take up positions, stand by thirty minutes before sunrise, sprint across the sands through half-light, diversions one and two and in, just at the moment when targets would begin to show up. Difficult. Hellish.
Stern’s meditation was interrupted by a finger prodding into his neck: Vered’s signature. The senior officer rolled over onto his stomach.
“Movement,” Vered said softly. “Cockpit.”
Shlomo groped for his radio, put it on whisper. “Gabriel, to me.”
Fifteen seconds later a third shadow joined the two on the knoll overlooking the plane. He carried a long-barreled version of the British L4A1 sniper rifle mounted with a Trilux night sight.
“Cockpit,” Shlomo murmured. “Human. Assess.”
Gabriel took a long, careful look through the night sight. “Negative.”
Shlomo let silence do the work; Gabriel heard the question Why? as clearly as if his commander had shouted it.
“TriStar windscreen’s one point five inches thick. Laminated glass interfaced with plastic. Good for an impact of fifty tons. At this range standard seven-point-six-two-mm ammo won’t drill it. Star it, maybe.”
“Shit.”
“Round’s too light, Shlomo. Muzzle velocity seventeen seventy-two mph dropping to less than twelve hundred by target. No go.”
“Right. Reposition.”
Gabriel withdrew as silently as he’d come. Shlomo took the scope from Vered and studied the cockpit. Someone definitely was moving in there.
After ten minutes during which nothing else happened he put down the scope and rubbed his eyes. Bad timing, he thought glumly. He and his men had been rushed from deep in the Negev. They’d been exercising around Israel’s top secret Jericho missile bunkers. Not planned; just their turn, just lucky, that’s all: they were the ones on standby this month, at maximum fitness, drilled in the latest antiterrorist techniques. But they were also at the end of their tour and due for leave. Luck, he reminded himself bitterly. Shlomo was forty-one. His wife, Rebecca, the same. The day before Southern Command brought them to Condition One, she’d entered the Hadassah Medical Center. She went in whole; next week she’d come
out minus one breast. If she came out at all.
No conspiracy. Just luck.
The same probing finger touched his neck.
“Door,” Vered hissed.
Shlomo snatched the night scope from his captain. What he saw made him forget to breathe. A figure stood at the top of the slide extending down from the forward door. Its face and hands glowed white in the lens. Without lowering the scope, Shlomo reached for his radio.
“Gabriel,” he breathed.
A red light on the handset flickered twice in acknowledgment.
“Target,” Shlomo said. And then: “All units stand by.”
24 JULY: DAWN:
AL MAHRA, SOUTH YEMEN
Colin’s foot dislodged a stone, but Robbie didn’t look up. He continued to sit on the boulder with his chin resting in his hands, staring at the limestone wall. He did not turn even when his father put a hand on his shoulder and said, “Did you sleep?”
After a while Colin took the hand away. Of course Robbie wouldn’t have slept: too hot, too humid, with nowhere to lie down except the bone-hard desert floor. And what grisly thoughts must have been powering his brain though the dark hours?
“Yesterday, you said you knew,” he said. “About Mother.”
Robbie’s shoulders shook, but he did not speak. “How?”
“Worked it out.”
“You … can you explain that?” A pause. “Please?”
Robbie slowly turned around, though still he did not look at his father. “Mum disappeared in New York,” he said, kicking a stone. “We went home. I thought about things. Nobody said anything. You never said anything.”
“So how did you know? The papers didn’t get hold of it.”
Colin simply couldn’t understand how his son might have found out: Sharett and his kind, desperate to keep their failures a secret, had ensured total news censorship.
“I … you never seemed to have any contact with her,” Robbie said. “No ‘access,’ isn’t that what they call it? Normally there’s access. … She didn’t want that, I thought. Then I began to think, Maybe she can’t have it.” He shrugged.
“I see. Look … I’m sorry I didn’t say anything sooner, but—”
“Me too. I hated you for lying. I ran away once, did you know that?” “I never—”
“No, of course you didn’t!” Robbie’s voice began as a shout and trailed off as he realized other ears would hear. “If only you’d paid more attention. You let me think she was just another cow, gone off with some man, didn’t you? You were happy to have me believe that. Or sometimes I thought… perhaps she’d stolen something and had to run away. But Christ! I didn’t think she was a terrorist! Until on the plane, when they did what she wanted, those gunmen; they seemed to care about her more than the rest of us. … Oh, shit!”
He rocked to and fro for a moment, then suddenly threw himself into his father’s arms, oblivious of the wounds on his back. Colin screamed … but inside. He clutched the boy to him, stroking his hair, and he said, “I am so sorry. I am so very sorry. I love you, Robbie. And because I always loved you, I was afraid you might turn out to be like Feisal and Halib; perhaps something in their blood would find its way through to you.” He swallowed, scarcely able to go on. “Just as when I first met them,” he choked out, “I was afraid that one day … one day, Leila might turn out to be like them too.”
“Dad. …” Robbie muttered the word into Colin’s chest. He drew back his head and repeated, “Dad?”
Colin got a grip on himself. “Yes?”
“I’m going to ask you something. I want you to tell me the absolute, utter truth, okay?”
Colin nodded.
“Did you love her?”
Looking down into the boy’s eyes, filled with anguish and yearning, Colin found it easy to answer. The truth slipped out of him in simple words.
“I loved her more than I loved myself. My one and only true love.”
“Do you love her now?”
Joy and simplicity dissolved into chaos. Yes: sitting there in first class beside her, smelling her body smell, he had wanted her and he had remembered what it meant to love her. He had loathed Leila, but still he loved her.
“When someone’s been very great …” His voice tripped over the words. He had not tasted water for many hours, his throat was parched, yet he knew he had to find a way of talking to Robbie, talking until he dried out and fell down dead. “When someone’s been as great, as beautiful, as Leila … you don’t just stop loving her, like turning off the TV. Things get… muddy.”
He’d meant to say “muddled,” but “muddy” did the work much better.
“Colin.”
He wheeled around to discover that Sharett had crept up on them and was regarding Robbie thoughtfully, like a scientist preparing to do an experiment on an animal in his laboratory. Robbie had no independent existence for Sharett.
“Is the boy all right?” he asked Colin.
“Damn you, he’s a person.” Colin could scarcely speak for rage. “Treat him like a human being, you hear me? Now ask him: ‘Are you all right?'”
But Sharett merely did a Raful and turned away.
It was nearly light now, or would have been but for the thin mist that had come up overnight. Colin found his thoughts straying to the plane, and his heartbeat quickened. Would she blow up the aircraft and everyone aboard, as she’d threatened? “Watch the sky tomorrow at first light"; that’s what the man with the bullhorn had said.
“Rouse up,” Sharett called. Not that it was necessary; none of them had slept. “We are in bad shape.” No preliminaries, no words wasted on the desert air. “But we must move if we are to survive.”
Although barely visible in the half-light, they could see how straight he stood, with Neeman at his shoulder: two pillars of rock rising sheer from a barren landscape. These men were leaders. Yet Sharett’s voice twanged in strange fashion. Earlier, Colin had watched him restlessly patrol their resting place and at one point heard him retch.
Sharett was ill.
“We are in a wadi,” Sharett continued. “Here it is broad and shallow. My guess is that as we go north it will deepen and become narrower. A trap, in other words: a bottleneck. But if we climb to higher ground and hug the top of what may become a cliff, we shall be visible for miles. And remember: she wants the boy. She’ll come after him, take him, and kill the rest of us.”
He paused to let them consider the implications. Robbie was shivering. By now there was enough light to let Colin see how his son’s white face throbbed with patches of color.
“We have one hope,” Sharett continued. “That the hijack will soon end. Now that the terrorists have no helicopter to bring supplies, the world will act. Leila Hanif is isolated. They’ll pursue her. If we can stay ahead of her, we’ve won. In order to do that, we must hide. Which means we will follow this dried-up water-course, where there may be caves, boulders, even trees. Up on the desert floor, we are dead; while we stay here, below it, we have a chance. There is another reason. Here, we may find water.” He pounded a fist into his palm. “That is our first and only priority: water. Food, we have only this.”
He held up a small cardboard container.
“Nuts, cocktail snacks, taken from the plane. I have one tub, Neeman has another. It doesn’t matter: in the desert, a man can live a long time without food. But water he must find, or he will die!”
“So how do we find it?” Colin asked roughly. He resented the way that the Israeli had calmly assumed autocratic leadership of the group.
“You see this mist?” Sharett waved his hand. “Moisture. You can feel it in the air. There is monsoon in this part of the world. There may be rain today; even if there is not, moisture surrounds you. Dew. Condensation. Look for the stones with dew and suck them.”
Robbie was gazing at him incredulously. “This is the desert. There’s no water.”
“What do you think a desert is, then? Sand? Palm trees? Look around you and tell me what you see.”
>
Thin yellow light permeated the mist, showing them a ridged and uneven gravel floor, boulders, a limestone wall that here was about twice the height of a man, some dusty scrub.
“Keep your eyes open for date palms,” Sharett went on. “Dates contain both water and sugar, the best thing we could hope for. Look for signs of habitation, but be wary—we don’t know who’s in these parts, whether there are tribesmen, and, if so, whether they’re friendly. We will move only for one hour at a time, then rest. If you lose sight of the others and become separated, seek the horizon: you’ll see a blue tinge in one place and that will be where the sea is; walk in the opposite direction, north. We shall all keep going north; you’ll be able to find us that way.”
He looked at each person in turn, judging his resistance, facing him down.
“It’s past dawn,” he said at last. “She will be starting out, and we don’t have much lead time. You will notice that, despite her man’s promise last night, we’ve heard no explosion. It was bluff.”
Without another word he turned on his heel and stalked away, willing them to follow, knowing they would. Even so, Neeman brought up the rear, for Sharett would take no chances.
By the time they’d been going for half an hour, the sun was up and they could see the worst.
This wadi was about a quarter of a mile wide, its gray-black floor scattered with boulders and trenches where water had flushed through in past years. Scrub-coated hollows alternated with stretches of gravel. They hugged the eastern wall, anxious for any patch of shade; even this early in the day the sun was roasting hot. But the wall posed its own problems, for there scree lay thick on the ground and they had to pick their way carefully for fear of turning an ankle.
Here and there, single fan-shaped trees sprouted from the flatter places, their feathery, dust-covered foliage moving listlessly in a foul breeze that siphoned up from the coast with its burden of sand. Colin examined one of these trees and found dark seed pods but did not dare taste them. Sharett, already far ahead, showed no interest, and when Neeman urged him back into line Colin obeyed with a shrug. For now, what mattered was staying together and ensuring that no one harmed Robbie.
Blood Rules Page 39