Blood Diamonds - [Kamal and Barnea 05]

by By Jon Land

  “Hey,” he noted, “looks like a science lab.”

  “We have to keep it as clean as possible.”

  Black looked up at the walls. “Nice security cameras. Bet they set you back a shit load.”

  “Yes, they did.”

  “I did some security once for the Israeli Diamond Exchange in Ramat Gan. They got maybe a thousand cameras and more metal detectors than an old whore’s got crabs. Fortified doors, too. Take a tank to blow through them.”

  “I’ve been there,” Katz said, trying hard not to sound condescending. “The exchange attracts twenty thousand visitors a day.”

  The cowboy walked past him. “The guys who do the finishing for you, they sit at these funny desks?”

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t look too comfortable.”

  “They get used to it.”

  Jim Black looked back at Katz. “Guess a man can get used to just about anything. So how’s it work, the process I mean?”

  “With very fine tools, manufactured specifically to be used on diamonds.”

  The cowboy pulled an object that looked like an electric toothbrush from a slot tailored for it on one of the desks. He pressed a button on the handle and a tiny polishing wheel began to turn with a mechanical whir. He pressed harder on the button and the wheel spun faster, its tiny engine whining now.

  The cowboy mocked a sweeping motion near his mouth. “Got any paste? I could use a polish.”

  “That thing would cut through to the pulp in a second. It’s a polishing tool we use to bring the diamond’s color out. Last stage of the process.”

  “Thing’s that sharp?”

  “Yes.”

  “Let me see.”

  The cowboy’s free hand shot out in a blur of motion and captured Katz by the throat. The next thing Katz knew he was bent backwards over the worktable and the cowboy was lowering the churning finishing wheel toward his face.

  “Don’t worry,” he said, “I’m not going to mess up your teeth.”

  Jim Black aimed the tool for Katz’s cheek and started it downward.

  * * * *

  Chapter 34

  A

  s expected, the papers Colonel al-Asi had provided eased their passage through the Eres checkpoint, and Ben continued on to Gaza City. Once there, he passed Palestine Square and the airport on the way to Gaza Port. He had spent little time in Gaza since his return and hadn’t realized how the contrasts of life in Palestine were even more striking here than in the West Bank. The degradation of the refugee camps had grown worse as the closing of Israel’s borders forced more and more residents into poverty. Social services had clearly broken down, evidenced by the huge volume of trash left to steam and stink beneath the hot sun.

  And yet the square, Midan Filisteen, bustled with activity and hope, as credit was extended and goods were bartered. Even more striking was the perfectly kept, grassy, flowered walkway that formed the median between the lanes of Sharia Omar al-Mukhtar Street. Locals walked upon it as if headed for somewhere better, ambling past robed women who tended the gardens with makeshift watering cans and rakes.

  The last stretch of the drive was made along the coastal road called Al-Rasheed. The beach rimmed its entire length to the west, the restaurants and hotels overlooking the coastline all looking lonely and desolate. It was easy for Ben to close his eyes and visualize what might have been in a world of peace. But the smells of raw sewage rising off the Mediterranean and rank garbage strewn about the shoreline quickly destroyed the illusion.

  “We’re almost there,” Danielle said to Anatolyevich, who was still feigning sleep in the backseat.

  The Russian left his arms crossed and eyes closed. “I know.” Anatolyevich’s eyes emerged through narrow slits. “I was hoping to overhear more of your pleasant conversation.”

  “The port is just up ahead,” Ben announced. “What now?”

  “We find a boat.”

  With less demand for their catch at the markets, there were many small fishing craft to choose from at the dilapidated and nearly abandoned port. Israeli shekels remained the currency of choice in Gaza, as opposed to Arab dinars, and Danielle had more than enough to rent a thirty-six-foot trawler that looked as if it hadn’t been scraped or cleaned for a decade. The deck was marred by splinters and rough gouges cut from the wood, many of the screws holding the railing in place long stripped.

  Once the three were on board, Danielle took the wheel and edged the trawler at a creeping pace through the harbor, keeping her speed down even in the open waters of the Mediterranean until she familiarized herself with the boat’s sluggish controls. The one time she tried to open it up, the engine clanked and sputtered, belching dark oily smoke through the exhaust baffles, which had forced her to ease back on the throttle.

  “I need a course, a heading!” she shouted down to Anatolyevich above the grinding rattle.

  “You’re doing fine. Just keep going straight.” The Russian turned and winked at Ben. “I tell you too much too soon, maybe you just shoot me and dump my body overboard.”

  “You know we won’t do that,” Ben said in Russian.

  Anatolyevich looked shocked. “You speak my language, comrade.”

  “I learned it before I learned English. My father taught me.”

  “Interesting he should do so, don’t you think? Perhaps it was because he was dealing with my countrymen long before he left for America. Because we were the ones bringing in food and supplies when the Israelis left you with practically nothing. He must have known your future lay with us.”

  “Did you use the same routes for the food and supplies that you intended to use for the guns?”

  “You see a difference?”

  “Don’t you?”

  “It was a question of survival in both cases. Your father knew that, too.”

  “What changed?”

  “He left. It is never the same when you come back.” Anatolyevich paused. “Is it, comrade?”

  “This isn’t about me,” Ben responded in Russian.

  “Your father taught you Russian because he thought one day you would take his place, fill the role that he had once filled. You, a people of no chances, cast your lot with us.”

  “My father?”

  “Most of all. Before he left for America.”

  “The other leaders didn’t give him a choice, did they? They wanted him out before the Six-Day War.”

  “He was making waves.”

  “And then they begged him to return.”

  Anatolyevich looked surprised. “Is that what you think?”

  “It’s what my mother told me—the only thing.”

  “It’s what he wanted all of you to think.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it was easier to accept than the truth.”

  “What is the truth?”

  “What do you think, comrade? You think leaving when he did, so soon before the Six-Day War, was just a coincidence?”

  “He knew it was coming?”

  The Russian nodded. “A small number of Palestinians were informed in the hope they would join the attack from within.”

  “But my father refused to lead the guerilla war in Israel,” Ben picked up, realizing. “That’s why he was forced to leave Palestine. That’s why he moved us to America. But why didn’t anyone else take his place?”

  “There was no one else who was able to lead, comrade. Oh, a few tried. Omar Shaath, for example.”

  “The man who assassinated him.”

  “Your father knew what he was walking into when he came back. He was relying on the mistaken assumption he could make a difference, just as you did.” Anatolyevich started to fish through his pants pocket. “Speaking of which, I have something to show you.”

  His hand emerged finally with a crinkled black-and-white snapshot. He smoothed it out as best he could before handing it to Ben. Pictured was a boy serving tea from a tray to an intense-looking man who appeared to be declining the offer of a cup.

  �
��You look quite a bit like him,” Anatolyevich noted.

  Ben felt his chest tighten as he studied the photograph. “You took this?”

  The Russian nodded. “That night during the meeting of the Palestinian council. My superiors always insisted upon documentation. Tiny, hidden cameras were usually unreliable in those days, but I got lucky.”

  Ben continued to stare at the picture, realizing with a strange sense of melancholy that it was likely the last one taken before his father was murdered just a few days later. In 1967 Vasily Anatolyevich had come to the West Bank, representing the KGB, with an offer to bring truck-loads of guns for the Palestinians to use against the Israelis. The offer had been accepted, Jafir Kamal the lone dissenting voice. A few days later his father was dead and the guns, by all accounts, never arrived. Anatolyevich was likely the last person left who could tell Ben why.

  Then again, there might be another person, Ben thought, shifting his gaze from Jafir Kamal to the boy holding a tray of tea at his side. The room’s ambient light was just enough to show a thin, frail figure, his face dipped downward submissively and thus bathed in shadows.

  “Who was the boy?” Ben asked Anatolyevich.

  “Funny,” the Russian said, “I never thought to ask. I assumed he was the son of one of the council members. I thought it might have been you when your Colonel al-Asi gave it to me.”

  Ben looked up from the picture. It was the kind of grainy shot Ben recalled from the old Polaroid cameras he’d had as a boy that spat out unformed worlds that stank of bitter chemicals long after they took black-and-white shape.

  “Al-Asi gave this to you?”

  The Russian nodded. “Apparently it fell into his possession after he took over your Protective Security Service; many of our old files did. We enjoyed a close relationship with your people for many years.” Anatolyevich looked as if he suddenly found something funny. “Interesting how I found myself procuring arms for the Palestinians once again, with considerably more success, I might add.”

  “Until Tuesday.”

  “Thanks to you.”

  “Considerably different circumstances, too.”

  “Yes, profit instead of politics. I much prefer profit. We have something else in common, you know.”

  “I wasn’t aware we had anything at all in common.”

  “How old were you when your father left to come back here?”

  “Seven.”

  “About the same age I was when my father left for World War II. I never saw him again either. It is a terrible thing to lose a father that way.”

  Anatolyevich waited, perhaps expecting Ben to respond. When he didn’t, the Russian gestured to the picture still held in Ben’s outstretched hand. “Keep it if you wish. I have no use for it.”

  “Colonel al-Asi must have thought you did.”

  “I believe he just wanted me to understand the scope of his reach. That he had the measure of me.”

  “The colonel is like that.”

  “A good friend to have, comrade. He made it very plain what would happen if I did not act in good faith on our little journey.”

  Ben looked at the snapshot again and then eased it into his pocket, trying to keep it smooth. “What happened to my father, Anatolyevich? Why was he killed?”

  “Ben!” Danielle called from the bridge before the Russian could respond. “Off the port side, look!”

  * * * *

  Chapter 35

  T

  he freighter listed atop the sea, bobbing gently in the waves. Even from this distance, her weathered exterior gave her the appearance of a ghost ship adrift through time and water. An ancient and rusted medium-range haul relic, no more than two hundred feet in length, abandoned to her own demise.

  “Your ten-million-dollar shipment’s on that?” Ben posed.

  “There’s something wrong,” Anatolyevich said softly, when they drew to within a few hundred yards. He lowered a pair of binoculars salvaged from the trawler’s supply closet from his eyes. They trembled in his hands. “There are no guards on deck.”

  “Guards?”

  “We should turn around now, go back to Gaza.”

  “We’re not going anywhere until we’ve seen what’s on board.”

  “Didn’t you hear what I said? There’s no one on deck. It might not be safe.”

  Ben took a step closer to the Russian, strangely unmoved. “What’s on board, Anatolyevich?”

  “Turn this boat around, I beg you, before it is too late!”

  Ben eased his hand to the pistol he’d kept hidden in the car through the drive to Gaza from the safe house, suddenly wishing for something with more firepower.

  “It looks abandoned,” Danielle called down to them from the bridge. “Anchored astern, but, he’s right, I don’t see anyone on board or inside the tower.”

  “Her gunwale’s only thirty feet above the surface,” Ben said back to her. “I saw a grappling hook and rope in the supply box we could use to reach the deck.”

  Anatolyevich grabbed hold of Ben’s arm. “Please, comrade, I beg you. You don’t understand!”

  “Make me.”

  “The guns in Beit Jala, where do you think they came from?”

  “You told me: Russia. Army surplus.”

  “In the Russian army, everything is surplus, because there is no Russian army to speak of these days. But the guns still exist. As merchandise now, to be sold to the highest bidder; sometimes, any bidder. But not just guns.” Anatolyevich paused. “Other things.”

  “What kinds of things?”

  “Just because we lost the Cold War, comrade, does not mean we didn’t fight. Our scientists were as busy as yours figuring out how to win. But missile shields and space-based ray guns were beyond our capabilities,” the former KGB man said, the derision clear in his voice. “We needed to find other means to defeat you. And once we lost, all those means would have been wasted.

  “Until we discovered a market for them,” Anatolyevich finished.

  “Palestinians?”

  “Among many others.”

  “Not many others can afford to pay ten million dollars.”

  “Unless they are in possession of considerable resources.”

  “The diamonds...”

  “Rough diamonds lifted from African mines and passed to middlemen, delivery boys who bring them to Israel to exchange for armaments.”

  “But you’re saying there’s more than just guns and bullets on that freighter.”

  “Considerably more, comrade. That’s why you must tellCommissar Barnea up there to turn this boat around!”

  Ben’s features flared. “What’s on board? Is it nuclear weapons? Biological? Chemical?”

  “You don’t want to know, believe me,” Anatolyevich said and cast his gaze over the bow, as Danielle edged their boat ever closer to the looming steel hull of the freighter. “Tell her to stop. Before it’s too late.”

  “Answer my question first.”

  “Not nuclear, not biological, not chemical! No, what’s on that freighter came from a secret program I oversaw in Dubna while I was with KGB and later when I served briefly with the Federal Security Service. Kept active until the very last days of the Soviet Union by leaving them in the dark about the extent of our progress. Looking toward the future, you understand,” Anatolyevich added with a touch of irony. “Already planning for it.”

  “Preparing to sell the results of your program, in other words.”

  “Waiting for the right time, the right offer, the right party.”

  “To sell what?”

  Anatolyevich’s eyes were furious, emblazoned with desperation. “I can make calls. I know people! We must arrange for the freighter to be blown up. Before it is too late.”

  Now it was Ben who latched on to Anatolyevich, shoving him backward against the cabin. “Not until we see what’s on board.”

  * * * *

  Chapter 36

  U

  p close, Cyrillic letters scrawled in fading, peeling pain
t identified the freighter as thePeter the Great.Danielle eased their trawler close to its side and dropped anchor.

  Ben threaded the grappling hook through the accompanying rope and hurled it skyward. Remarkably, it locked on to the gunwale on the first try and he began to climb instantly. He needed both hands to manage the effort, leaving the pistol provided by Colonel al-Asi stuck uselessly in his belt. He could feel the muscles in his arms twist into lean cords flared with veins and ridges, more glad than ever he’d been religious about staying in shape since his return to Palestine. Police headquarters in Jericho had a small gym in the basement, but mostly his exercise regimen came down to push-ups in his apartment living room, sometimes with his feet propped up on the couch’s thin fabric.