by By Jon Land
The duty officer watched Team Bravo’s approach to the city and reached for his own coffee, which had gone lukewarm. He nearly spilled the cup and took his eyes off the screen for the moment it took to right it.
When he looked back, the twelve flashing lights were gone. The duty officer waited a few seconds to make sure it wasn’t a glitch before changing modes and enhancing detail on the chance that Team Bravo had entered some sort of dead zone; ground depressions and mineral deposits caused them sometimes, though not often. When this failed, he decided to break radio to silence.
”Team Bravo, this is CentCom. Please acknowledge.”
No response.
“Team Bravo, this is CentCom. Repeat, please acknowledge.”
Nothing.
“Team Bravo, this is CentCom, requesting status update.”
By this time a number of those new to the command center had clustered around the duty officer’s screen, sensing something was wrong and finding confirmation of just that fact in the empty screen before him.
Team Bravo had disappeared.
“I’m sorry,” the secretary of state said. “Poor choice of words on my part.”
“Understood, sir.”
“All the same, walking away won’t bring him back.”
“I’m not expecting it to.”
“So your resignation . . .’
“Has nothing to do with my son, sir. That’s correct.”
The secretary of state rose and walked out from behind his desk. “Then tell me why, Franklin. We’ve been friends a long time. You owe me that much.”
“I have my reasons, sir.”
“I’d like to hear them.”
“I’m afraid they don’t concern you.”
“Don’t concern me? When I lose the best man I’ve got, you can be damn well sure it concerns me.”
Winters started for the door, his gait rigid and heavy. “I’ll have my personal papers and files transferred, sir.”
“I hope you know what you’re doing, Franklin,” the secretary said, shaking his head. “I sincerely do.”
Winters looked back at him one last time. “So do I, sir.”
* * * *
Chapter 11
T
he girl’s name was Raifa Assir. She was eleven years old, attending the equivalent of American fifth grade. Hers was the eighth door Colonel al-Asi had knocked on, but the only one at which the parent claimed her child wasn’t home.
“This won’t take long,” al-Asi promised, brushing lightly past the woman into a well-kept home surprisingly cramped with furniture. All the upholstered pieces were wrapped in throw covers, though, evidence of their age and desperate need of repair. The wooden chairs and tables were scratched and marred by divots, discolored in irregular patches by the unforgiving sunlight. The stench of burned bread hung in the air, mixing with the scent of a fresh loaf baking in the oven.
He found Raifa Assir in the cramped bedroom she shared with two sisters and one cousin. She had squeezed herself between the room’s one small bed and the wall. The colonel emerged from the room guiding the little girl before him.
“I have a daughter her same age,” the colonel said to Raifa’s mother as much in apology as reassurance. The door opened again and Israeli officials barged their way in until Danielle blocked their path. “Let us do our job,” she told them forcefully.
“Our orders are that you’re not allowed to conduct interviews outside of our presence,” one of the men said, clearly flustered.
“My orders are to investigate this massacre, through any means at my disposal.”
“I’ll keep them company,” Colonel al-Asi offered, stepping outside to join the Israelis. He closed the door behind him, after stealing one last look at Danielle and leaving her with a smile.
“We don’t want trouble,” the young girl’s mother said when the four were seated around the tiny kitchen table. “My daughter didn’t see anything. Why are you here?”
“Stop it, Mamma! I want to tell them!”
The mother covered Raifa’s mouth with her hand. “She saw nothing, I’m telling you. Now get out of here, get out of my house!”
“It’s too late for that now,” Danielle told her.
“It will only be too late if my daughter speaks a word. That’s why we lied when the Israeli soldiers came. If they ever found out we lied . . .”
“They won’t,” Danielle promised.
“Yes, they will,” the woman said grimly, “once they find out what really happened.”
Ben slid his chair closer to the woman’s. “You’re frightened.”
“Of the Israelis, yes.”
“And the U.N.?”
The woman shrugged. “They try, do what they can.”
“We represent the U.N. and you have my word the U.N. will protect you,” Ben assured.
“The U.N. cannot even protect their own people. Two dead for daring to teach Palestinian children. Such a waste.”
“Then let your daughter help us punish those responsible.”
The mother looked to her daughter and nodded reluctantly. Raifa Assir sipped from a cup of lukewarm mint tea. Her hands trembled as she raised it to her lips, then replaced it on the table.
“I should have hidden under the desks, like the others, as we were told by our teacher,” Ben translated, after the young girl began to speak, “before he was taken outside.”
“Before who was taken outside?”
“Our teacher, our new teacher.”
“Who took him?” Danielle asked and waited for Ben to repeat the question in Arabic.
“The soldiers.”
“Israeli soldiers?”
Before Ben could repeat the question this time, Raifa Assir nodded. “They came in trucks like the ones in the street now. We all saw them from the windows. We weren’t really scared at first, until they began going into all the buildings and dragging people out with them.”
“When did they come to the school?”
“I don’t know what you mean. ...”
Ben reformed the words in his head. “How many people from the village were already in the square when they came inside the school?”
“A lot. More than a hundred. As soon as the soldiers came near the building, our teacher ordered us under the desks. Told us to stay there no matter what happened.” Raifa looked down into her tea. Her voice began to tremble, break. “I wish I had listened. I didn’t.”
“What did you see, Raifa?” Ben posed as gently as he could.
The little girl swallowed hard. For the first time, Ben noticed a handmade rope bracelet she was wearing and thought of his own daughter, long dead now, making one for herself at summer camp.
“What did you see?” he repeated.
“The teachers were brought out to join the others in the square. The soldiers poked at them with the barrels of their machine guns. One teacher argued with them and they poked at him harder.”
“You saw all this?” Danielle said, mustering her best Arabic.
“Yes,” Raifa Assir said, and cleared her throat. “The other children stayed under their desks, hands covering their heads. Outside the soldiers were demanding to know where someone was—I couldn’t hear the exact name. They went up and down through the lines of people, asking each one. Their voices got louder. There was a lot of shouting. Then I heard the firecrackers.”
“Gunfire . . .”
“I didn’t know that then,” Raifa said, not waiting for Ben to translate. Her voice grew soft, sank lower. “I didn’t know it until the first bodies began to fall.”
The woman took her daughter’s hand, sobbing softly to herself.
“But you saw where it came from,” Danielle said, and waited for Ben’s translation.
“Yes.”
“Where?”
“The soldiers. The same machine guns they had used to poke the teachers. The barrels were still smoking when people screamed and tried to flee. Then there was more smoke, and fire, coming out of the barrel
s. I saw the bodies falling, stains spreading beneath them. And I looked for my mother among those running. I looked for my mother...” Sobbing uncontrollably, Raifa collapsed in her mother’s arms.
Danielle reached out and grabbed Ben’s elbow. “Ask her if she remembers anything else about the soldiers. Markings on their uniforms or vehicles, even names.”
“She would have told us if she did.”
“Ask her,” Danielle insisted.
Ben posed the question softly, then waited for Raifa Assir to complete her thought before translating. “They returned to their trucks when the people ran. A few tripped over the bodies before running away.”
“They let the survivors go, made no effort to pursue them?”
The little girl nodded. “Just went back to the trucks,” she said, speaking in English for the first time.
“You speak English well,” Danielle said. “How did you learn?”
“My teacher at the school, the new one. Mr. Lister. He made us practice every day.” She looked down and muttered something.
“One of the two relief workers who was killed,” Ben elaborated.
“Did the soldiers run?” Danielle asked.
This time Raifa answered in Arabic, Ben translating as soon as she was finished.
“They hurried.”
“None stayed behind?”
“No.”
“No prisoners were taken?”
Raifa shook her head, said something so softly Ben had to lean forward to make it out.
“They just left the same way they came. Very fast. One of their trucks ran over a goat. That’s when I reached up and stopped the camera.”
“Camera?” Danielle repeated.
Ben leaned forward to better hear Raifa’s next response. “A tape,” he said. “She says she has a tape.”
* * * *
Chapter 12
H
ow could she have made it?” Danielle asked.
“She didn’t,” Ben answered. “Her teacher, this David Lister, was filming the class. When the soldiers arrived, he turned the camera to face the square through the window. Raifa only removed the film from the camera.” He stroked the little girl’s hair, drawing the slightest of smiles amidst her trembling. “She’s been hiding it here ever since.”
Ben and Danielle accompanied Raifa into her bedroom and watched her retrieve the tape from beneath the mattress. She seemed only too happy to give it up, handing it to Ben. He tucked it into his jacket pocket and moved back through the house to the front door. Danielle opened it ahead of him and found their path blocked by an even larger complement of Israeli soldiers nestled around Colonel al-Asi.
“Commander Barnea,” a captain said, after offering a stiff salute, “you are wanted in Jerusalem.”
“Inform whoever wants me that his request must go through United Nations channels.”
“It has, Commander. I am authorized to tell you that you are wanted in Jerusalem on U.N. business.”
Danielle looked toward Ben.
“My orders are to escort you and you alone, Commander,” the captain said without even eyeing him.
“Go ahead,” Ben said, twisting away so as not to reveal the bulge the videotape was making in his pocket. “I’ll catch up with you at the hotel.”
Danielle nodded and walked off with the captain.
Watching Jerusalem sharpen in the shrinking distance felt almost surreal to her. Danielle had been born in the city’s Hadassah Hospital and for the first thirty-two years of her life never went more than a day, it seemed, without seeing it again. There were numerous assignments carried out for Sayaret Matkal that meant longer stretches of a life led in utter secrecy, as well as extended periods of training at bases in Israel few knew existed. Even then, though, Jerusalem seemed close, if not in mind, at least in heart.
Joining National Police as the youngest woman ever to be named pakad, chief inspector, gave her an office with a view of the Old City from her window. After a brief stretch working for a private security firm in the United States, she returned to Jerusalem as commander of National Police with the promise of becoming Rav Nitzav, commissioner, within the year. But desperate circumstances had conspired to end her tenure prematurely. Publicly, Danielle was lauded in her absence; privately, it was made clear she was not welcome in Israel ever again.
Being recruited almost immediately, along with Ben, to join the Safety and Security Service of the United Nations helped ease the pain of that somewhat. The work was emotionless and procedural, each day vanishing in the vapor stream of the last. But she embraced that work as a welcome alternative to the conflicted and vindictive world of Israeli politics she had bought into until it finally sold her out.
Still, she missed Jerusalem—the sights and sounds, but mostly the smells. Of fresh produce and grilling meat, and the sticky brown dust that follows the wind. Danielle watched Jerusalem grow before her from the back of a Humvee seated next to the captain who had escorted her from the village of Bureij. Her heart pounded. Eleven months away and she felt like a stranger in her own land.
She expected the Humvee to take her to the nest of government buildings that rimmed the Knesset, an audience with someone of influence with a mind to intimidate her. Danielle knew how the game was played. It was just strange being on the other side.
But the Humvee bypassed the government complex and proceeded instead to the four-story limestone headquarters of National Police. There, the captain brought her to a private entrance she had used countless times herself and, into an elevator that opened directly to the suite of offices operated by the innermost cadre, including the commissioner she never became.
The captain remained inside the compartment when the doors slid open. Danielle stepped out into a reception area that served the trio of offices contained in this wing.
“Welcome back,” said David Vordi from the doorway of the commissioner’s office.
“Aren’t you going to congratulate me on my new position?” he asked, eyes wide with an ironic glare.
As deputy minister of justice, Vordi had brought Danielle back to Israel as commander of National Police nearly two years before. Not surprisingly, her fall from grace must have led to an equally precipitous drop for him.
“I never knew you held an affinity for law enforcement,” Danielle told him.
“I don’t. But I’m going to have plenty of time to develop one now.”
Danielle swallowed hard, realized her mouth had gone bone dry. She gazed past Vordi into the office beyond, occupied by her mentor, Herschel Giott, until his death a half dozen years before. Things had seemed so simple then, though equally sad.
“That should have been mine,” she said, as much to herself as Vordi. His hair was shorter and thinner, making his face look gaunt. His midsection had gone to flab, although Danielle remembered him as a man compulsive about fitness ever since he had served as one of her trainers in Special Ops. Vordi must have been approaching forty-five years old now. He looked as if he had aged a decade in the months since she had last seen him.
“I guess you could say both of us have you to thank for where we are now.”
“I don’t have any regrets.”
“I do,” Vordi said. “For trusting you to do this job to begin with.”
“You brought me back here to destroy me.”
“No, Danielle,” he said quite calmly, taking a single step toward her. “I brought you back here because I thought both of us could prove the others who wanted to destroy you wrong.” Vordi looked around him, as if seeing his surroundings for the first time. “As you can see, I’ve paid a price for that misjudgment, too.”
Danielle looked into his eyes and saw that the attraction she had once sparked in him was gone. In its place was a narrowed gaze and lingering sneer that fixed upon her hatefully.
“U.N. officials know nothing of this meeting, do they?”
“You’re clever as ever, I see, Danielle.”