THE WAVE: A John Decker Thriller

by J. G. Sandom

  “I’m sorry,” Swenson said. “Dr. White, I didn’t know you were coming in.” She began to gather up her papers. “I’ll get out of your hair.”

  “Don’t be silly,” Dr. White said. “I’ll only be a minute, Emily. I’m the one who’s barging in.” He glanced over at Swenson for an instant, then turned and averted her gaze. “And as I recall,” he added, “I gave you permission to use my office any time you wanted to. Especially when you’re working on a paper. Believe me, I know the value of solitude, and its curse.”

  Dr. White seemed harried and distracted. He looked exhausted. He stuffed a dozen files into a bulging leather briefcase. Swenson chalked it up to his wife’s illness.

  “I enjoyed your lecture, Emily,” White said, after a moment. “You’ve come so far.”

  Swenson was surprised. She hadn’t seen Dr. White in the audience. Normally, when he showed up, he came down to the front when it was over, mixing in with the well-wishers.

  “You’ve become a great asset to the field,” continued Dr. White. “There is nothing particularly revolutionary, nothing new about your findings, Emily, but you express them in a revolutionary way, and I guess that’s what science needs today. Especially oceanography.” He shook his head. “Despite the tsunami last year, our work is still under-funded compared to other fields. People have always underestimated the power of the sea. Their ships litter the sea floor. But now that we can fly – like demigods, like Angel apes – we think we’re above it all. We’ve become too arrogant. We whip the waves like Darius. The sea gods are not so easily dismissed. You’ll see, Emily. The whole world will see.” He sailed across the room, stood immediately before her, reached out and brushed a strand of golden hair behind one ear. “I may not have made much in this world – at least not financially – but I’ve left you a legacy of learning. I’ve always loved you like my daughter, you know that, Emily.” He kissed her on the cheek and she suddenly realized that he’d been drinking. “Don’t ever forget that.”

  “Don’t talk that way, James,” she said, stepping back. “You’re acting like I’m never going to see you again.”

  “I’m putting Doris in a hospice,” he continued. “She needs twenty-four hour care and I just can’t provide that for her. After all, I can’t stay on leave forever. This job may be rewarding in many ways – on an intellectual plain – but it’s never made me rich. Frankly, Emily, I just don’t have the money. Doris was never one to stick to a budget. She wasn’t raised that way. And her inheritance is gone.”

  Swenson thought about her lecture. You could take all kinds of measurements of deep water, get to know something pretty well, across multiple dimensions, only to discover that you didn’t know it at all. You miscalculated the inundation, the currents of the heart. “What are you going to do?” asked Swenson. Having lost her mother to cancer, she was all too familiar with the hardships of the caretaker.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Let this be a lesson to you. Academia is a political cesspool, with no financial return. I should have left and gone to work for some oil company years ago. Now it’s too late. Look at me. I’ve got nothing left. I’m as dead as Doris.” His voice broke. “But you,” he continued, clutching at his scuffed brown leather case, “you still have a chance to get away. Get away, Emily,” he stammered, leaning close to her, his brown eyes bulging, a drop of spittle on his lips, his breath unbearable.

  Just then, there was a soft knock on the door. White and Swenson both looked up. The door swung open with a creak, revealing a small, Middle Eastern-looking man in the doorway. “Dr. White,” he said in English as he glanced about the hall. “It is getting late.”

  Dr. White brushed past the desk and headed for the door. His dark companion had already disappeared. As he pressed his briefcase to his chest, White turned and said, “Don’t forget what I told you. Please, Emily. Don’t wait. Get away. Get away before it’s too late.”

  SECTION II

  Jami

  Chapter 5

  Friday, January 28 – 4:05 AM

  Tel Aviv, Israel

  Seiden sat in his office at Mossad headquarters, re-reviewing El Aqrab’s file. After a preliminary study, no one could come up with a plausible explanation as to why the infamous terrorist had come back to Israel to kill this particular family. According to neighbors, Ariel Miller managed a furniture store. His wife was a secretary in an advertising agency. Miller was a drunk, fat and unfaithful. Harmless, really. Except for a brief stint, years before – when he’d served as a guard at Ansar II prison in Gaza, during his compulsory conscription – Miller had never done anything that would remotely connect him to Islamist terrorists. And El Aqrab had never been in prison, not even as a boy.

  Perhaps it was just a random act of violence, just as the words El Aqrab burned into his victims’ flesh were random snippets from the Qur’an. Or some kind of killing for hire, or for a friend who had been in prison. Seiden was mystified. One thing was clear though: El Aqrab had positioned his victims in a particular way. Miller had been facing north-northwest, directly away from Mecca, as if in a kind of anti-prayer. And the boys perpendicular to him, at right angles to the Muslim holy city.

  Seiden stood up, picked up the file, and headed out the door, down the long green corridor toward the holding cells.

  “Hello. My name is Saul Weinstein,” he said, as he entered Interrogation Room B. It was a small cell, barely five meters long, and three and a half meters wide, with a mirror running the entire length of one wall, and a small desk by the door. In the far corner, the prisoner stood chained to the ceiling by his wrists, facing the other way. “This won’t take long, perhaps an hour or two,” Seiden continued. “I need to update your file. Your . . . interrogator has been delayed.”

  He took a DVD from the folder under his arm and slipped it into a player on the desk connected to a nearby television set. Seiden turned the screen so that it was visible to both himself and El Aqrab. Then he dropped the folder onto the desk, sat down and flipped it open. “It says here you were born Mohammed Hussein, on February Third, 1963,” he began in an off-hand kind of way. “In a town called Rihane in Jezzine. It’s your birthday soon. Congratulations.”

  El Aqrab did not respond.

  “The son of Jusef and Fatima Hussein,” Seiden continued. “Your father was a . . . ” He glanced down at the file, although – of course – he already knew the information intimately. “ . . . part-time electrician and handyman who moved north to Beirut to work in the various stores and office buildings owned by wealthy business mogul Hanid ben Saad.” He looked up at El Aqrab but the terrorist remained impassive. He did not even turn around.

  “You began to work with your father,” Seiden continued, “in one of Hanid ben Saad’s many properties when you were just eleven. Your parents were killed by the Israeli Army in Rihane in March of ‘78, when we attacked PLO positions in south Lebanon. This was in retaliation for the murders of some thirty bus riders by Palestinian guerrillas. They were not alone, your parents. I believe fifteen hundred Lebanese were killed in that engagement.

  “After your parents’ death,” Seiden continued, “you joined Imam Musa Sadr’s Movement of the Deprived, Harakat al-Mahrumin, the precursor of Amal and Hezbollah. That was the same year that Musa Sadr ‘disappeared’ in Libya, no doubt at the hands of Colonel Khadaffi. It was around this time that you acquired the street name El Aqrab. How did you get that name?” Seiden asked. “I’m curious. You look very little like a scorpion, Mohammed.”

  El Aqrab turned around for the first time. He was a slight man with narrow shoulders and even narrower hips. His face was thin, almost haggard in its appearance, with high cheekbones framing a beak-like nose. He had a wispy black beard, thin as an adolescent’s. In fact, he looked much younger than his forty-two years. Were it not for his eyes, large and deeply set, obsidian and glassy, he could have passed for thirty.

  The terrorist grinned, lending his face a lupine quality; his canines were unnaturally large. Then he spoke for
the first time. “I know you,” he said in Arabic. “You were at the apartment. Your name isn’t Saul Weinstein. It’s Seiden. Acting Chief Seiden. What time is it?” It was a pleasant voice that served to mollify his predatory gaze.

  Seiden looked at his watch. “Why?”

  El Aqrab did not respond. He simply stared at Seiden.

  “Almost five,” said Seiden.

  The terrorist nodded, smiled and turned away.

  * * *

  El Aqrab remembered the day that he had taken on the street name El Aqrab – the little creature of the spider, the scorpion. An Israeli commando unit had infiltrated across the Green Line to kill a particular Harakat al-Mahrumin commander. It was a sunny morning and, typical of the arrogant Zionists, they’d mounted their mission in broad daylight. After assassinating the commander in his bed, the 101 commando team was traveling back by jeep, east of the Green Line, just past the Military Hospital near the Arab University, when, without warning, they came upon two teenagers wandering across the road – Ibrahim and Jamal ben Saad. Ibrahim saw the jeep barreling down on them and pushed his older brother to the side. Just then, a rocket-propelled grenade exploded underneath the vehicle. The jeep tipped over, spilling the commandos onto the street. Two of the five Zionists were killed immediately, their bodies crushed and torn to pieces. The other three wormed their way along the street, taking heavy fire from an adjacent building and a vacant lot. Ibrahim and Jamal ben Saad were both caught in the crossfire. They threw themselves to the ground, uncertain of which way to turn. They watched as yet another of the commandos took a bullet in his chest. He somersaulted backwards, opening like a pomegranate. Then, as if from nowhere, out of a cloud of smoke, Mohammed Hussein appeared.

  He walked along the smoke-filled street nonchalantly, as if he were out to buy the morning paper, his Kalashnikov stuttering in his hands. Another commando burst apart and Hussein went down, his weapon spinning like a top across the street.

  Ibrahim and Jamal couldn’t stand it any longer. The noise. The blood. The concussion of explosions. They leapt to their feet, completely terrified, and fled. The remaining Zionist rolled to one knee, took aim, and was about to shoot them in the back when Hussein sprang up, like a scorpion, and shot three rounds – before anyone could even breathe – into the last commando’s chest. The commando looked down at his shirtfront. He pulled at the material, revealing the broken bloody ribcage underneath. A stream of blood began to fountain from his mouth. Hussein walked up to him and kicked him in the face, and he went flying backwards into the blazing jeep. His hair and clothes caught fire. He wriggled for a moment longer as he burned, and then was still.

  The firefight was over. It had taken less than ninety seconds from the initial blast. Ibrahim and Jamal ben Saad stood speechless. They looked about each other at the carnage, the shattered corpses of the 101 commando unit, at the bloody smiling face of Mohammed Hussein, and began to laugh hysterically. Hussein stepped up and ushered them away. It didn’t pay to linger after a firefight. You never knew.

  In the shadows, outside a tiny electronics store, as Hussein cleaned and reloaded his Kalashnikov, they introduced themselves to one another. Hussein had heard of the ben Saads. Everyone knew the wealthy business mogul, Hanid ben Saad. He was a legend in Beirut. And within half an hour they had made their way to the ben Saad villa not far from the Palais de Justice.

  Hussein was overwhelmed by what he saw. He lived in the ‘Ayn ar Rummanah neighborhood with three other Harakat al-Mahrumin guerrillas. His entire apartment could have fit inside the foyer of the ben Saad villa. Although it wasn’t situated on the gold coast where most of Beirut’s largest mansions loomed, it was impressive nonetheless. The two boys told him to sit down and wait, and then rushed off to find their father. He was in his study, just down the hall.

  Still pulsing with adrenaline, Hussein was unable to sit down. Instead, he paced about the room, examining the hand-made European furniture, the Turkish carpets, the paintings of distant pastoral scenes, wheat fields and orchards, seascapes spattered with sails. After a few minutes, his curiosity got the better of him and he wandered down the hall. He passed a giant mirror on the wall, set in an ornate gilded wooden frame, and stopped to examine himself. In his ragged jeans and blood-soaked shirt, in his tattered veil, he had never felt so out of place. Not even his trusty Kalashnikov could make him feel at ease or secure in these strange opulent surroundings. He took another step and peeked between the doorframe and the door where the boys had disappeared.

  Inside, he could see the boy named Ibrahim with an old man dressed in a Western suit. The old man stood behind a desk. His back was to the door. He was reaching into what appeared to be a wall safe, peeling off bills from a large stack of paper money.

  “Found what you’re looking for?”

  Hussein spun about, ducked and trained his gun on the figure of Jamal ben Saad.

  “You’ve heard the stories, haven’t you?” continued Jamal.

  “What stories?” asked Hussein.

  “About the great fortune locked up in my father’s safe. Just in case we have to flee.”

  Hussein smiled and lowered his weapon. “Are they true?”

  Jamal did not respond.

  “You should be glad you have such parents,” Hussein continued with a laugh.

  Jamal’s face grew dark. “She is not my mother.” Just then, Ibrahim returned with the reward.

  A long, long time ago, thought El Aqrab. But even then there had been only three types of terrorists: first and foremost, the local street kid found in Palestine and throughout the ghettos of the Middle East, like El Aqrab himself; second, those who were radicalized by an Imam abroad, in Europe or America, who were committed to the jihad in a very personal way; and third, the indolent guilt-ridden rich, the bored, the younger brothers and cousins of the wealthy and the upper middle class – the jinn, who considered themselves distinct from, and above the ordinary run of people, and who reinforced their eminence through the passion of their faith.

  That’s what Ibrahim had been, and his older brother, Jamal. Ironically, despite their obvious differences, Jamal ben Saad and El Aqrab looked strangely alike, and this always disturbed Jamal. He was a student of architecture, it turned out. An academic. Weak and afraid. A fool. El Aqrab feared no one, and yet he was no bigger and no stronger than Jamal.

  * * *

  “You appeared to have vanished after the invasion,” Seiden continued. “Was that when you first went to Kazakhstan? Perhaps you shouldn’t have attacked our Ambassador in London.”

  El Aqrab smiled. It was an old saw. In July, 1982, the Zionists invaded Lebanon with the declared aim of routing Palestinian guerrillas. They cited as justification an attack that wounded their ambassador in London. Operation Peace for Galilee’s ostensible goal was to push the Palestinians forty kilometers or so from the Lebanese border in order to prevent them from shelling nearby Israeli settlements. Yuri Garron headed the incursion, the same Garron, who – as Housing Minister – later reshaped the country’s settlement policy, and who was now Prime Minister. At the time, he’d been Minister of Defense, under the Likud. But Garron had had a hidden agenda. He sought not only to push the Palestinians from the border, but to alienate Lebanon from rest of the Arab states.

  To accomplish his goal, Garron attempted to exploit the hatred the dominant Maronite Christians harbored against the Palestinians, whom they wanted to see driven out of Lebanon. In Garron’s mind, the Maronites were natural allies. The Zionists would underpin the Maronite position; in return, the Maronites would take Lebanon out of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

  But the plan failed, El Aqrab remembered with a smile. The Syrians considered Lebanon part of their sphere of influence and – once they realized what Garron was up to – they mobilized to thwart the invasion.

  Garron’s forces soon found themselves outside Beirut facing the Syrians and a mishmash of guerrilla factions: the pro-X Palestinians – pro-Iraq, pro-Syria, pro-Saudi, pro-Libya, etc., depen
ding on their sponsors; the profiteering PLO; the Druze irregulars; the Morabitum; PFL; Amal; and a hundred other freelance forces. Most did not seem too serious about the struggle, more interested in holding on to their few square blocks of West Beirut than in fighting the Israelis. As soon as the Israelis broke for lunch, they would revert to killing one another instead of the Israeli Defense Forces, or slip off for a bite to eat while watching the latest World Cup soccer match.

  Since the IDF didn’t want to engage the Arab forces hand-to-hand inside the ghettos of the city, and since the Maronite Christians refused to do this for them, the Zionists turned to the United States. Then-President Reagan agreed to dispatch U.S. troops as part of a Multi-National Force, and by the time Operation Peace for Galilee was over – after the bombardments, the shelling and the air raids – more than 20,000 people lay dead.

  “Of course, you never wanted a peaceful solution,” Seiden said. “If you had, you wouldn’t have assassinated President Gemayel.”

  “And, in exchange, you gave us Sabra and Shatila.” El Aqrab turned and looked at Seiden. “Gemayel was an Israeli puppet. It was the Zionists who let the Christians slaughter all those people. It was Garron,” he spat.

  El Aqrab remembered the incident as if it had happened only yesterday. The blood. The silence and the flies. The vacant eyes.

  Before Sabra and Shatila, the war had been a farce, the blackest of comedies, despite the carnage. The Zionists stationed a few tanks in the Baabda hills, which pounded the city regularly. The Israeli air force didn’t start their bombing runs until well past 4:00 PM. Then they returned to base for dinner before the night shift took their place. In fact, it was a war waged mostly for the foreign press. Skirmishes not rooted in personal vendetta were fought distractedly until the cameras arrived. Then everyone took on a Rambo sensibility, posturing for the lenses, taking unprecedented risks to show off to the world. This was Phoenicia, after all. Most Lebanese were much more interested in trade, in makeshift monetary exchanges, than in political agendas.