44. On the Road to Ashqelon, Israel
Steve drove a rental car with his father on Route 35 after turning west at Hebron.
“Any news from Kella?” Marshall asked.
“Her cell doesn’t answer. I’ve left several messages. I also called her parents’ house, the ambassador’s residence, but I haven’t been able to get through whoever is answering the phone. Anyway, I left my name and number but she hasn’t returned my call. She can’t be home, otherwise she would have called.”
“Well, I’m sure she’s okay. She may have been needed at some ‘command performance’ event, something important her father said she needed to attend. I knew an ambassador once whose daughter was the hostess for all of her father’s official functions. The wife was not interested—too busy having an affair with the chauffeur who was a major in that country’s security service.”
“You’re probably right. But, after we’re done in Ashqelon, I’d like to drive up to Tel Aviv and find out what’s going on. So, what’s the plan? What are we going to do in Ashqelon?” Steve asked.
“Here’s the Israeli checkpoint to leave the West Bank into Israel. There’s a line. Let’s get the Ashqelon map out.”
He took it of his bag on the floor between his feet.
“I think we should split up. You keep the car and I’ll find a taxi, pretend to be a tourist and have him drive me around. You focus on the Old City and I’ll focus on the New City.”
As he spoke, he pointed to the old and new cities with his finger.
“We’ll divide up the town. You have the best chance of spotting al Khalil if he’s given up his monk disguise. We’ll meet at the bus terminal at 5:00 p.m. Here,” and he again pointed, “If one of us gets lucky, he should call the other. We’ll meet and sort out what we’ve got. We’ll have to decide whether to get the information directly to the Israelis or to go through the ambassador, or the local CIA chief of station.”
On the way, he added, “Did you know that Ashqelon is one of the oldest urban settlements, about five-thousand years old? It’s where Samson and Delilah had their famous barbershop scene. During the Crusades, because the city was the gateway to Egypt to the southwest and Jerusalem to the northeast, it became the scene of several key battles. It changed hands three or four times, was destroyed and rebuilt almost every time, once by Richard the Lion Hearted and another by Salahdin, the Kurd who eventually defeated the Crusaders.”
An Israeli soldier walked up to their car and motioned for them to lower the window.
“Passports, please,” he said, keeping his Galil rifle loosely pointed at them. He glanced at their American passports and said, “That line on the left.” Then he moved on to the next car.
Steve pulled out of the line and got into a shorter one where they were asked to get out and the car was thoroughly searched. Eventually, they were allowed through.
“If you’re a Palestinian, you could be here a long time,” Steve said. “Working on one side of the line and living on the other must be difficult.”
“It’s impossible,” Marshall agreed.
“Now that I’m a knight, I feel personally involved in the history of the place.”
“The Knights Hospitaller fought at Ashqelon, and you can still see the ruins of the Tower of Blood, also called Hospitaller Tower. Now the area around the Crusader Castle is a national park. There are probably campers, young Western tourists, in the park. And there is a Club Mediterranée right next to the Park by the Northern Wall, not far from the Jaffa Gate.”
Once they reached the town and went over the map of the city again, they separated and began their search. Steve kept the car and drove south on Hatayasim past the Painted Tomb, made a left toward the Town Hall and parked near the Histadrut Building in the old city. From there he started walking. He knew there was only a slim probability of finding al Khalil but it was their only chance.
While he was looking around, he thought about where Kella might be. Could she possibly still be in Paris, held up by work? But why wouldn’t she have alerted him? If she was in Israel, she couldn’t be that busy that she would have forgotten. Or maybe they had miscommunicated about the date? That also seemed improbable.
He walked past old buildings containing restaurants, offices, small hotels, smaller apartments and town houses. As he approached the railroad station, he saw a van pull up to a two-storey house. Two people came out to help the driver carry what appeared to be food, dishes and glasses for a lot of people. Steve assumed the van belonged to a caterer. However, the men who came from the building didn’t seem to be dressed for a holiday or a celebration. They looked to be in their twenties and fit. Steve noticed they wore combat boots. But in a world where teenage girls often wore combat boots as a fashion statement, Steve didn’t think twice about the caterer van and kept walking.
About half-an-hour later, Steve was walking on a quiet street with no vehicular traffic and very few pedestrians. The van he had seen before stopped about ten feet in front of him, pulling up to the curb. He assumed it was making another delivery, even though it wasn’t parking in front of a doorway. Two men emerged from the back and two from the cab. As he drew abreast of the van, they seized him and, before he could even try to free himself, he was hustled into the back of the van, where his hands were tied with plastic handcuffs, and he was blindfolded and gagged with duct tape. As the van started moving, the men threw a large duffle bag over him.
The van moved quickly. He felt they had gone only a short distance before stopping. Still in the duffle bag, he was carried out. When they extracted him, they tied him to a chair, still blindfolded.
Steve assumed that although he was looking for al Khalil, clearly the man had found him first. He expected the worst. There was no reason he could think of why his life would be spared. Why hadn’t they just killed him in the street? Perhaps his captors thought that their chances of getting away were greater if they killed him in more controlled circumstances? Suddenly he feared for his father. Would they track him down too? They might surveil the car to see who came back to it. He thought of the keys in his pocket, with a tag that provided the license plate number of the rental car.
His more immediate thought was to escape. He wasn’t sure if anyone was in the room with him but he thought not. He stayed very still but couldn’t detect movement, breathing, or scraping of a shoe on the floor. By peering down, he had a minute window through which he could see his knees and, if he moved his head, a small patch of floor.
He couldn’t see his bonds. He tried to loosen his hands tied behind his back but only succeeded in cutting the skin to the point of bleeding. He tried to move his feet as well but to no avail.
Since he couldn’t get away, what could he say to improve his situation, assuming he had the opportunity to say anything? He would stick to his tourist cover. He had no brilliant idea. Talking was probably not in his captors’ plan. He wondered if al Khalil would question him or if he would leave it to someone else. Would al Khalil know who he was? Or recognize him? Was this still about the Quranic document? After what seemed to Steve to be at least an hour but was probably much less, he heard someone come in the room and walk toward him. Then the tape was ripped off his mouth and blindfold was removed. Tariq al Khalil stood before him and dismissed the two men who were with him.
Al Khalil seemed taller somehow. His gray eyes were laser-like Steve now understood what Kella had meant about his eyes—like a snake hypnotizing its prey, she had said. He stood about three feet from Steve, his arms crossed, dressed in black slacks and a dark blue long sleeve shirt. He noticed that al Khalil’s beard, shaven when dressed as a monk, was now starting to grow back. He understood all too well that this was a dangerous man.
“Marhaba,” Tariq said mock-graciously. “I know you, Steve Church. Do you believe in fate? Is it fate that you keep cropping into my life? Why are you here? I saw you in Jerusalem wearing a costume. Was that a Christian cross, a crusader cross, perhaps? We know that you are all crusaders, wanting
to take our lands, you Americans and the Jews. You’re the ones who want to go back in time, not us. Or are you still doing research to prove that the Quran is a false document?”
“I know you too. Tying me up like a sausage is a strange welcome. This isn’t the Arab hospitality that I’ve heard about,” Steve replied.
Al Khalil’s lips compressed into a thin, unfriendly line.
“This will add to your extensive experience with Arabs. I don’t have a lot of time to spend on you. Tell me why you are in Ashqelon.”
“Do I need a reason? I’ve never been to Israel before and, since I was here for a ceremony in Jerusalem, I’m trying to see some of the country.”
Al Khalil waved his hand dismissively.
“That’s not good enough. You seem to turn up wherever I go. I learned that you were in Timbuktu. What in the world does the CIA want in Timbuktu? Yes, I know you’re with the CIA. You didn’t take a lot of precautions to hide it when you were in Morocco.”
Surprised at the accusation, Steve countered, “I recognize the symptom, common in the Third World. It’s called CIA Fixation—the CIA is everywhere-and-they’re-after-me-syndrome. But speaking of Jerusalem, wasn’t that you dressed as a monk in front of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher? When did you convert to Christianity?”
“You must have been dreaming. Unlike your Pope’s declaration that Islam acts against reason and therefore against Allah, I am trying to reason with you. Islam is not violent unless forced to be. Tell me what you are doing here.”
Now that he could see, Steve reviewed what he knew about his captors. There were at least the four who had snatched him off the street, plus al Khalil and a couple of other men he had heard when being brought up the stairs. Did they have weapons? Al Khalil appeared unarmed.
Steve guessed he was on the second floor. The bedroom had a window. He was thinking that he could probably overpower al Khalil and let himself out the window and down to the street. Whatever he did had to be quiet, though, and it had to be quick to succeed. However, nothing was possible until he was untied.
“Why don’t you untie me and show me that Islam is still the faith of the civilized, not of the barbarians.”
Al Khalil moved to the back of his chair and undid the handcuffs, but Steve’s legs remained tied. He smirked and said, “Maybe you can talk better now that your hands are free. Why are you in Ashqelon? Why did the CIA send you here?”
Steve now sensed his best tactic would be to throw al Khalil off track.
“And you’re going to put me to the sword if my answer doesn’t make you happy? The same way Islam spread the faith, by the force of arms—the bully of the Mediterranean world? Isn’t your theological rationale for violence, your excuse, that Allah is beyond reason? That makes all thoughts of human restraint irrelevant. It gives your armies and thugs the right to do anything at all, including the use of suicide bombers and the mass killing of civilians, in order to bring the rest of us to submit to Islam?”
At first al Khalil’s smile had made an effort to resurface. He even appeared mildly amused that Steve would dare to go toe-to-toe with him on the subject of religion. He answered by walking up to him and slapping him with an open hand.
“You, as an unbeliever, cannot use Allah’s name without risking your life. You forget that Islam modernized the Western world. Our thinkers, Averroes, Avicennes, Ibn Khaldun, brought the Europeans out of their Dark Age. You’re showing your ignorance by looking down on Islam.”
Steve tested his ropes by trying to force his legs apart whenever he thought al Khalil was looking away but had no luck.
“All the men you named were rational, or rationalists, in spite of Islam. One was Persian and the other two, born in Andalusia, were a product of the mixed Arab-European culture. I wonder what any of them would say about today’s Muslim violence and intolerance. When the West complains about Muslim violence and intolerance, what is the Muslim reaction? Its leaders send crowds into the street to destroy and kill, making the West’s point. And if Islam has any intention of fitting into the current century, Muslim leaders need to understand that they have to recognize basic rights, such as practicing whatever religion you choose, or none at all.”
Al Khalil now paced in front of Steve. He moved his hands from behind his back to point a finger at Steve each time he asked a question or rebutted a comment.
“Hypocrite! You Christians murdered and pillaged our towns during the Crusades. Wasn’t that violence? And what about the civilians you killed in Afghanistan, in Iraq?”
“You’re right about the Crusades. But that was a thousand years ago. When you kill non-combatants it’s by design. When we do, it’s unavoidable because your people have this habit of hiding your soldiers and your artillery in schools and hospitals and mosques.”
Al Khalil sneered in fury.
“There are no civilians, no non-combatants in the West. You are all guilty. Either you voted for the leaders who do war against us, or you are all in armed forces in one way or another, or you pay taxes for your war machine.”
Steve was pleased that al Khalil was no longer focused on the reason for his presence in Ashqelon. He continued.
“We moved on, we progressed, we had a reformation. You didn’t. Your theology and your way of life are still locked into the twelfth or thirteenth century. The Quran was probably useful and even progressive a thousand years ago. But it has forced Muslims to stay behind the rest of the world. Am I not right?”
At once, by the look of fury on al Khalil’s face, Steve realized he’d gone too far.
“Blasphemer!” His voice was rich with fury. “To call the word of Allah, may He have mercy on us, ‘useful’! Dog! If I didn’t have a better use for you, you would be dead.”
He went to the door and called out, and the kidnappers returned. At al Khalil’s orders, they put the handcuffs back on Steve’s wrists, in front of him this time, and led him out of the room. Al Khalil personally replaced Steve’s blindfold, tightly.
As they moved him down the stairs, a somewhat calmer al Khalil said, “When these houses were built, they all had to include a bomb shelter. Most are made of reinforced concrete with no windows, always under the house. You can reflect in there. Oh, I almost forgot. You’ll find someone you know in there as well.”
Although he couldn’t see him, Steve turned around quickly toward al Khalil on the stairs above him waiting for him to reveal the name of his other prisoner. Could it be possible that al Khalil had also captured his father? He didn’t want to ask, afraid to give him more information.
***
That night, al Khalil sent Hussein and four of his men in two vans to the national park on the coast. In the dark, they entered through the central Jerusalem Gate, lifting the barrier to allow the vans through. They turned left at the main parking lot and right toward the water. Another left and they were in a small parking area on the south side near the ancient citadel close to the beach. There, they met two more of their comrades whose cover was that of vacationers at the Club Mediterranée next door to the park.
“Izem,” Hussein asked, “are all ten of you at the club?”
“Yes, Alhamdu’llah. We are ready. We had no trouble when we arrived at the airport. And the Club Mediterranée bus was there to meet us. Taqiyyah is good.”
He smiled suggesting that wine and women were sacrifices he was willing to make for Islam. Hussein was not amused. He motioned toward the Club Med to the north.
“Your men should all be here. We brought another van to bring them with us. Tariq wants us all together tonight so we don’t waste time assembling in the morning. Go get them while we put the weapons in the van.”
Mahmoud, the Hamas military chief, and several of his foot soldiers had been waiting for them in the parking lot.
“The weapons cache is nearby,” Mahmoud told Hussein. “We have to walk toward the jetty, on the beach.”
***
When Steve didn’t show up at 5:00, Marshall waited a half-hour then s
tarted walking east toward the old city. He was soon in front of the Histadrut House, where he found the rental car, parked and empty. Unfortunately, Steve had the key.
He walked the old city for an hour before returning to the car. It was still there and still locked. He had seen no sign of Steve. He had tried to call him and left several messages, but Steve had not returned them. Knowing Steve was eager to get up to Tel Aviv to check on Kella, Marshall was surprised at his son’s disappearance. Could he have been arrested? Hurt in an accident? He tried to find out about hospitals but not enough people spoke English, and getting telephone information was impossible. He found a hotel and rented a room. It was clear they were there for the night.
After dinner, Marshall went out walking again. The car was still there. After about thirty minutes, he knew from the sound of the waves and the salt air that he was close to the sea. It was now dark but he kept walking and looking. He made a left on Hatayasim and saw signs for the Club Mediterranée on the right. He continued past the CLOSED sign at the Jaffa Gate entrance to the national park. He turned right into the main parking lot and went toward the beach.
Not knowing exactly what instinct was leading him, he turned left at the old rampart wall. As he walked he heard men talking in muted voices somewhere in front of him. The language sounded Arabic. He continued to walk toward the sound but he moved more carefully.
The voices came from a small parking lot. There were several vehicles but none had its lights on. The sound of Arabic told him these were not tourists camping in the park, and he was puzzled that they were there at night. He stopped and then retraced his steps to take the stone stairs down to the beach. Now he could see the outlines of several men going down the steps toward what he remembered to be the southern limit of the park, where the ruins of the Hospitaller Tower were located. After the last man in the group had reached the beach and turned left, Marshall advanced, wary of being caught between the men and the steps from the parking lot, in case there were more people coming.
The Caliphate Page 28