THE WAVE: A John Decker Thriller

by J. G. Sandom

  Tel Aviv, Israel

  El Aqrab sat absolutely still. Everything had been upside down after the massacres at Sabra and Shatila. Everything had been washed away . . . in a river of blood.

  He had slipped home and changed and gone over to his friend Ibrahim ben Saad’s house for his older brother’s graduation from the Arab University. But after it was all over, but a few days hence, Ibrahim was revealed to have conspired with his wealthy father to hand over information about Syrian and Amal defense positions to the Zionists prior to the invasion, in exchange for assurances that ben Saad’s real estate investments would be spared. As a result of this betrayal, the rich entrepreneur, his wife and Ibrahim had been incinerated by Amal in a car bombing. And El Aqrab had been ordered to assassinate Jamal, Ibrahim’s older brother.

  Jamal ben Saad had been arrested by the Israelis, and then released after only a few days. A few days! He was clearly an Israeli sympathizer too. So El Aqrab had arranged to meet him in Beirut, where he had stabbed and killed the frightened academic for his family’s treachery. It had not been difficult to draw him out. Jamal had always been enamored with El Aqrab, with his reputation as a soldier, and more than a little jealous of his brother’s friendship with the freedom fighter.

  Throughout it all, El Aqrab remembered, Jamal had proclaimed his innocence. He’d cried and cried, invoking the name of his mother, Rabi’a, whom he had claimed was drowned by his own father. As the life drained out of him, Jamal had slipped back to his youth, describing in detail how his father had plied his mother with sleeping pills and wine, how he’d towed her out into the open water beyond the Coral Beach Hotel, until the tidal currents weakened her, and she had slipped beneath the waves. El Aqrab found it odd the kinds of things condemned men liked to talk about. Odd, but fascinating. With a spasm, Jamal had pleaded for his mother, had shrieked for her, and – looking up, his eyes clear now – had smiled and quoted the Qur’an: “‘My Lord has spread the earth out like a bed for me, and heaven like a canopy.’”

  * * *

  “When it got too hot for you to stay in Beirut,” said Seiden, “you went to Kazakhstan, to the camp of Gulzhan Baqrah. Curious that you didn’t go to Afghanistan or somewhere closer. This was before the 2001 invasion. Didn’t Al-Qa’ida trust you? Didn’t the Taliban?”

  El Aqrab did not respond.

  “You studied weaponry and explosives, battlefield tactics. According to our informants, you excelled in the use of explosives. Must have made Gulzhan Baqrah proud.”

  Once again, El Aqrab remained impassive.

  “Meanwhile,” Seiden continued, “the Multinational Force returned after Lebanese President Gemayel was assassinated. In 1983, Amal’s bastard offspring, Hezbollah, bombed the U.S. Marine barracks in south Beirut, killing two hundred and forty-one U.S. servicemen.”

  Seiden reached out and pressed a button on the DVD deck. “Here,” he said. “I want to show you something.” After a few seconds, an image appeared on the TV. At first, it was grainy and unclear, the picture shaking as if the person filming it had been in motion. Then the destruction of the Marine barracks was revealed.

  A truck appeared at the bottom of the screen. It barreled down the narrow street, headed directly through the barricades and up into the lobby. There was a huge flash of white light as the truck exploded, sending glass and stone and body parts into the sky. The air was sucked back through the widening cavity, as if the film were being rewound. The floors began to pancake down on top of one another. The building imploded. Seiden pressed a button and the clip slipped into slow motion. A tongue of flame licked out from the shattered walls; it was the word Allah, in Arabic script.

  “All of these . . . these . . . ” He searched for the word. “ . . . atrocities astonished most of the Knesset, not to mention our U.S. allies,” said Seiden, “because, until this time, you Shiites were considered the most docile, the most agreeable people in Lebanon, if not the entire Middle East. I suppose you were emboldened by the fall of the Shah in Iran. I suppose things changed forever after Sabra and Shatila.” He waited for a response but El Aqrab still stared at the flickering TV screen. “The man who engineered these suicide bombings must have been a genius,” he continued. “Look at the precision. Look at the perfection in planning.”

  El Aqrab bounced his right leg up and down. Seiden examined him. The terrorist’s eyes glazed over as he slipped into another memory. “You were involved in all of these attacks,” said Seiden. “Weren’t you?”

  El Aqrab watched, tremulous and excited, almost orgasmic as the building tumbled to the ground. Then he stiffened, turned and said, “You’re running out of time. You’d better hurry up if you want to ask me something.”

  “What’s the hurry? You’re not going anywhere.”

  “No,” said El Aqrab. Then he grinned and added, “You are.”

  * * *

  The UH-60L Black Hawk transport helicopter flew westward toward the sea, glistening in the morning light. It descended as it neared the coast. The engine slowed, the chopper dipped. The lights of Tel Aviv glowed like a string of pearls along the neckline of the Mediterranean. The chopper skirted the city, descended, and then hovered for a few more seconds before landing outside Mossad headquarters. The rotors slowed. The engine died. Two figures jumped out and made their way into the fortified building, careful to keep their heads down from the spinning blades.

  * * *

  “1990 was a tough year, wasn’t it?” said Seiden with a bouquet of compassion. “The Soviet Union collapsed, bequeathing a new wave of refugees to Israel. Iraq invaded Kuwait, and was driven out. Once again, you backed the wrong horse, didn’t you? Then came the intifadah.”

  El Aqrab found it curious, this word – intifadah. Intifadah meant “spasm” or “frisson” in Arabic, a rather innocuous way of describing an event that ultimately proved so deadly. They should have named the Palestinian uprising a thawrah, or an inqilab – a revolution or upheaval. But then, of course, it had been the PLO who had first coined the phrase. Caught off guard by the riots, the PLO leaders had tended to downplay them. The Palestinian community, they said, was going through a kind of convulsion, like a tremor in the earth, a small earthquake, instead of what it really was: the rising of a volcano. One day the Palestinians would finally tire of their corrupt, self-serving leadership and throw the bastards out. But who would take their place? Hamas? El-Fatah? The Brotherhood of the Crimson Scimitar? El Aqrab smiled.

  “During the first Gulf war, you were involved in blowing up Kuwaiti oil wells,” Seiden said. He displayed a grainy black-and-white photograph. El Aqrab was clearly visible, standing by a jeep beside a blazing oil well. “Then you vanished once again, through 1993. I presume you were back in Kazakhstan, at the camp of Gulzhan Baqrah.” He threw another photograph on the table. It featured El Aqrab and Gulzhan Baqrah standing side by side. The portly Gulzhan – with a shocking white grin slitting his black beard – had his arm around El Aqrab, who was looking away, somewhat distracted.

  “In July, 1993, we launched Operation Accountability, a week-long air, artillery and naval blitz. It was frighteningly effective. Indeed, with thousands either dead or wounded, with hundreds of thousands displaced, Prime Minister Rabin believed the Lebanese would resist, would literally rise up if Hezbollah tried to execute another operation. But only a few days after Operation Accountability, Hezbollah planted that booby trap at Shiheen.

  “We all remember the booby trap at Shiheen,” said Seiden. “In the entire history of the revolt, no booby trap had ever killed as many as twelve Israeli soldiers at one time. ‘Hezbollah has beaten us,’ Prime Minister Rabin was quoted as saying later. And the U.S. brokered an unwritten agreement between Israel and Hezbollah – the 1993 ‘Understandings,’ prohibiting future attacks on civilians.”

  Seiden pressed the button on the DVD player. A moment later, the image of a small square filled with a dozen Israeli soldiers came into view. At first it appeared like a still. Then the soldiers began to move. They we
re smoking cigarettes and chatting. Other people could be seen standing around, alone or in small groups: a woman with a basket of fruit and what appeared to be a loaf of bread; a pair of men in Arab headdress; a small Palestinian girl with a checkered keffiyeh, no more than seven or eight, in mid-skip through the foreground. Each moved fitfully, in slow motion.

  “It was you,” said Seiden, “who was responsible for the booby trap at Shiheen, wasn’t it?” And then the bomb exploded. “Who else would send this to us?” The flash was intense, a brilliant wave of light. Most of the soldiers simply disappeared. Two on the edge of the cluster were broken in half. The Arab men, the woman with the basket of fruit and bread, the little girl – each was picked up and blown back like a pile of autumn leaves, thrown out of frame. The calligraphy, the arabesque designs were much more intricate this time, more detailed in intensity and color. “You had come into your own,” Seiden continued. “Then, once again, you vanished.” He turned the image off and stared back at the papers on his desk.

  “The de facto cease-fire finally broke down. There had been too many violations, too many civilian deaths. But, in reality, as you and I both know, the terms of the ‘Understandings’ drafted after Shiheen, drafted because of Shiheen, were simply . . . unenforceable.”

  Seiden got up for the first time. Casually, almost in slow motion – like the images on the DVD – he walked over and stood beside El Aqrab. He brought his mouth close to the terrorist’s left ear. “This was the beginning of the end for Israel in Lebanon,” he said. “You saw to that, didn’t you? Shiheen pushed us over the edge. You knew it would. You planned it that way. You knew the conservative elements in the Knesset – the Likud and other parties – would never let it go unpunished. And so we mounted Operation Grapes of Wrath.” He grasped El Aqrab by the nape of the neck with his right hand. He pulled his head back gently. “But without the ability to strike the civilian regions where you hid like little brown rats, and fearful now of world opinion, the ‘Understandings’ emasculated the IDF. You cut off our fucking balls.” He let the Arab go and walked back to the desk. He sat down. He shuffled the papers in his hands. “We pulled out of Lebanon completely in May 2000. We had more pressing problems now, in Gaza and the West Bank. The new intifadah, the suicide bombings dwarfed whatever was happening in Lebanon.” He laughed. It was a brittle sound, like pieces of a shattered light bulb underfoot.

  “My son was nineteen the day we launched Operation Grapes of Wrath,” said Seiden. “He was a radio operator in the Third Armored Division. He had soft brown eyes and long narrow fingers, like his mother. There was a small, chocolate-colored birthmark on his left thigh, shaped like a heart. Right here,” he added, touching himself gently. “I saw it when they brought him back. It’s what I used to identify him. His face was . . . gone.”

  El Aqrab turned his body slowly and stared at his interrogator. Seiden looked up and their eyes locked. El Aqrab was impassive. They examined each other for several seconds. Suddenly, the Arab collapsed, his body straining at the chains, his full weight now on his wrists. The sheer edge of the metal manacles cut into his skin. He continued to stare at Seiden, a strange smile playing on his lips.

  “Shiheen was your finest hour, Mohammed. But since then,” Seiden said, “what have you done?” His voice was light now, almost jocular. “You were involved in some collaborator assassinations in Lebanon once the IDF pulled out. Small jobs. For the money, no doubt. Bits and pieces. It must have been difficult for you to have watched the World Trade Towers collapse on Nine Eleven, when you had nothing to do with it. Now that was a monumental achievement, a true work of art.”

  El Aqrab pulled himself to his feet. He turned away. Thin rivulets of blood ran down his forearms from his wrists.

  “But where were you,” Seiden asked, “when the Cole was attacked in Yemen? Why doesn’t bin Laden trust you?”

  El Aqrab said nothing.

  “You kept your head down during the 2002 invasion of Afghanistan. And then, most curious of all, your own people, your so-called ‘friends and allies’ at Hamas and Hezbollah sold you out to the Americans in exchange for a dozen mid-level mujahadeen. I suppose, even in the world of Islamist extremists, there is always someone at the far end of the spectrum. Even they found your brand of mayhem . . . unacceptable. Embarrassing. You were just too unpredictable, too independent, too much a force unto yourself. We destroyed the house where you were living with a rocket strike. We thought you were dead. We thought we had finally killed you. But you weren’t dead, were you? You went underground. Was it because there were no more Marine barracks left to blow up in Beirut? Surely a suicide bomber killing a dozen civilians here, a half dozen there, cannot compare. Soft targets can’t be as challenging. I wonder at that phrase,” Seiden said off-handedly. “Don’t you? Soft targets.” Then he tapped the table gently. “Night clubs in Bali. Hotels in Kenya. Markets in Baghdad. So many Improvised Explosive Devices, and such few casualties – in the scheme of things. In fact, what I don’t understand is, why did you bother to come back at all? And for Miller! He was a nobody. And even if he had been important, why kill him personally? Why take the risk? It seems to me that you just wanted to get caught, as if you’ve had enough. God knows, sometimes I think I have. Soft targets,” he repeated with a sigh. “Like the skin of those children you flayed with your knife and set afire. What do those Arabic messages mean, anyway?”

  “Ah,” said El Aqrab. “At last! Be quick now, you have lost much time.”

  Seiden pressed a button on the DVD deck. The recording of the murders in Tel Aviv began to play. One of the images – one of the boys on fire – was clearer than the rest. Seiden could just make out the words “Pregnant she-camels” and “Hell” in Arabic flaming on his flesh. The sound was deafening – the screams of the young boys and their helpless father, tied to his chair with his back to them, unable to even see his children as they cried out in desperate agony. It was so loud and distracting that Seiden almost missed the word El Aqrab whispered as he watched, as if the murders were a fireworks display. It was almost drowned out. Almost.

  “Beautiful!”

  Chapter 8

  Friday, January 28 – 6:58 AM

  Kazakhstan

  Gulzhan Baqrah stood on the naked bluff, a thousand feet above the darkling plain. The morning sky still swirled with stars. It was teeth-chatteringly cold. Gulzhan listened patiently to the tinny voice at the other end of the satellite phone pressed against his ear. It was exactly as he’d feared. There was no doubt about it now. His most odious suspicions were confirmed.

  He turned off the phone, slipped it into his vest, and wept. A rather portly man, with a low forehead, sloping shoulders and stubby legs, Gulzhan had a wide round face almost entirely covered by a thick black beard – spotted with gray – and bristling mustaches. He wiped his eyes, brushing the tears away. He had no time for tears. And then, as if on cue, a cold wind billowed across the bluff, born on the snowfields of the mountains of Kazakhstan, and blew the tears away. A young man approached from below.

  “What is it?” Gulzhan said.

  “Salaam,” the young lieutenant answered. “It is time.”

  “Uhud has arrived?”

  “He is just here.”

  Gulzhan turned his face, pitching his sorrow away. It was unseemly to appear so weak in front of his men. He was getting old, he thought. “Tell them I come.”

  “Yes, Gulzhan.” With that, the young lieutenant disappeared.

  Gulzhan stared out across the plain, now streaked with sunbeams from the gathering dawn. Uhud had finally returned. He could see him in his mind’s eye. He could visualize the tall lean figure riding through the valley on his cinder stallion, hear the signal as the sentries fired off a round, feel their jubilation as they recognized the rider – slung to the side to avoid the bullet wound that still troubled his left thigh – as they recognized his handsome face. Uhud was late but this only generated more anticipation. Uhud was popular with the men. Too popular. He had com
e along too fast, too soon. Just back from Iraq, where he’d assisted in the bombing of the Great Mosque of Samarra in an effort to stir up sectarian violence, he would become more popular still. And now this latest news. Gulzhan was heavy with despair, weighed down by what he knew he had to do.

  He looked across the bluff to the east. There was no time to tarry. They still had a long way to drive before dying.

  Gulzhan Baqrah was an Islamist fundamentalist. He had been fighting the Soviet-style autocrat – President Sergey Nazanov – for more years than he cared to remember, since the fall of the USSR. President Nazanov ruled the Newly Independent State with an iron fist, killing and maiming his political enemies through his ruthless Aristan secret police, hunting down so-called radicals, the Muslim warriors who believe in the Ummah, the transnational empire of Islam. Ironically, Gulzhan Baqrah had once assisted President Nazanov by kidnapping, torturing and – in some cases – killing over a dozen well-known journalists who’d spoken out against the Nazanov regime. It was alleged the Nazanov family had amassed a fortune in excess of one billion dollars squirreled away in some Swiss bank account, much of it earned by selling off bits of the country piece by piece, including vast armories of former Soviet weaponry left behind after the collapse of the Empire. Some said Nazanov had even helped facilitate the sale of nuclear technologies by his top military advisors, members of the Kazakh National Security Committee and the former KGB, renamed – inventively – the KNB: from designs and prototypes of explosive devices; to all manner of machinery, such as centrifuges used in the refinement of plutonium and uranium.

  As a rule, the President’s henchmen afforded Baqrah a precarious sanctuary in the desolate mountains of southeastern Kazakhstan. But whenever an opportunity arose, the government wasted little time in harassing the villagers under the guerrilla leader’s care, throwing up roadblocks and tolls, taxing capriciously, mercilessly. Prominent citizens were always being fined for crimes which remained obscure even after they’d been found guilty and sentenced. Or worse, they simply disappeared, kidnapped and murdered by the Aristan police.