Aim True, My Brothers

by William F. Brown

  “Has he said anything?”

  “No. He just stares up at the sky. We did get his name, though. It’s Ahmed, but he won’t tell us anything else.”

  “No surprise there.”

  “No. We had to show him the bandages a couple of times before he would even let us touch him, and we had to hold him down to give him the morphine. I guess he thought we were trying to kill him. After what they did to that bus, I wouldn’t have minded, but the orders were clear on that point.”

  “We don’t get a live one very often,” Ullman answered with a knowing smile, and then walked around to where the young Palestinian lay. She stared down at him until Ahmed looked up at her. He was little more than a boy, she realized as she lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply. Finally, she knelt down next to him and began talking to him in perfect Arabic. “Ahmed, I want you to listen very carefully to what I am about to tell you,” she said in a soft, calm voice. “Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  The Arab gave a slight, mechanical nod, but his eyes were wary.

  “Good, that is good. It is getting late now, and we are all cold and tired. The fighting is over now — your fighting is over now — it is finished and you are finished.” The young man glared up at her, but made no reply. He turned his head to look back at the road. “So, I shall give you a choice. You can give me some straight answers, or you can continue to lie there and say nothing. Those are your choices, and I really do not give a damn which you make.”

  Ullman paused to take another deep drag on the cigarette. “I want you to tell me where you came from, how many men came with you, and how many attacked the bus. You will not be telling me anything I do not already know. We picked a few of your friends out of the sea and they have already sung like little birds. So, if you tell me the same thing, it will mean you are all telling the truth. You will actually be doing them a big favor, and it will go easier on all of you. Do you understand? To give you something in return, I will even spread the word that they were the ones who talked, not you. They can take all the heat back home.”

  The young Palestinian’s eyes remained sullen and defiant.

  “Then, we can call one of our doctors over here and ask him to patch you up and send you to the hospital. Eventually, you will go to jail, of course, but I will see to it that the sentence is a lot shorter and you can go back home in a couple of years. So it is entirely up to you, Ahmed. It makes no difference to me, but it will make a big difference to you. And I promise you that no one else will ever know.”

  Ullman stopped to gauge the effect of her words, but she could see she had not softened the boy’s defiant stare one bit.

  “Or, you can continue to lie there and say nothing. If that is your choice,” she said as she looked into his eyes. “You will be of no further use to us, so there’s no reason we should pay to keep you in jail for the rest of your life. You might as well die right here, eh? After I took all the time and trouble to come here and talk to you, it will give me great pleasure to rip your bandages off your wounds one by one and watch you slowly bleed to death.”

  “You whore!” Ahmed’s eyes flashed with hate, but that was all he said.

  “Have it your way,” Ullman sighed. “After you are dead, I will tell the others that you were the coward who sang like a little bird. We will say you messed your pants before you died and that we buried you that way — a stinking, unclean coward. They will all curse your name and spit on your mother’s grave back home.”

  She put the cigarette in her mouth, squinting out of one eye from the curling smoke as she reached down and ripped the bandage off the young Palestinian’s thigh. Ahmed’s head shot up in disbelief. Looking down at his leg, he saw the wound open and blood begin to flow again onto the ground. His head slowly sank back to the ground. He looked up at the sky in pathetic resignation, and his lips began to mumble a prayer, “Allahu Akbar. Subhanna…”

  Rachel Ullman didn’t wait. Her eyes grew even harder and colder as she reached down again and yanked the bandage off his stomach.

  “No… stop,” came his immediate response. “There… there were thirty of us. No, forty, I think, in ten boats…”

  “Don’t take me for a fool, Ahmed. We both know that is a lie.”

  “Our five boats came from Ras Ain…”

  “Another lie. We were watching Ras Ain, and nothing went in or out last night. We sank two boats and we found yours in shallow water near the beach. Now, tell me the truth. Who else came ashore, and where are they?” Ullman asked, knowing it would all flow now.

  “There were four boats… from Ras Awwali. We lost sight of the others and I do not know what happened to them. Maybe they got through, I don’t know.”

  “That old bus wasn’t your target. Where were you really going?”

  “Haifa. Some big new shopping complex.”

  “International Center?” Ullman asked, knowing it would make a horrifying and perfect choice for them.

  “We had plastique, a lot of plastique… but we ran into your patrol boats.”

  “How many of you attacked the bus?”

  “Just us three.”

  “Three?” Ullman’s eyes flashed, knowing they had only caught two of the terrorists.

  “Yes, me, Haidar, and my brother Ibrahim. It was all his big idea.”

  “Is this Ibrahim the one lying in the road?”

  “No, that is my friend, Haidar.”

  “And you don’t know where Ibrahim went? What is his last name?”

  “Al-Bari,” Ahmed hissed. “He… he ran away and left me… the coward.”

  She stared down at the young man for a few more moments, thinking, as the name Al-Bari began to set off some distant alarm bells in the back of her head. Perhaps an old report? A story she heard? She would soon put the computers to work on that one.

  “Very good, Ahmed, very good,” she finally said as she slowly rose, took another long drag on her cigarette, and walked back to where the three MPs stood watching her.

  Avner finally had the nerve to ask, “Did that match what the others told you?”

  She looked up at him with deathly cold eyes. “There were no others. He’s the only one we caught.” Throwing her cigarette down and grinding it into the soft ground beneath the heel of her running shoe, she added, “It looks like one of them got away, probably their leader.”

  The other two MPs passed a glance at each other and stood a little straighter.

  “By the way, Corporal, were you up on the road when you shot him?”

  “Uh… yes Ma’am, we had just topped the hill.”

  “And you didn’t see anyone else running away?”

  “No, but it was still pretty dark and we were focused on him.”

  “Understood. But that was damn good shooting, anyway.” Turning to the other two, she added, “You did well today, all of you. I’ll make sure your CO hears that.”

  They smiled broadly at each other after Ullman turned and began to walk away.

  Avner suddenly took a few steps after her and asked, “Uh, Ma’am, what do you want us to do now? Bandage him up again and call the medics?”

  “Him,” she stopped walking, but did not turn around. Her eyes were fixed on the carnage up on the road, and what might have been in Haifa. “He is of no further use to me. Let the little bastard lie there and bleed to death. After all, he has his ninety-nine virgins waiting for him, and we wouldn’t want him to be late for that, now would we?”

  A chill ran down Avner’s back as he watched her walk back to the helicopter.

  “That is one cold bitch, man,” his driver quipped as the helicopter blades began to turn and she climbed inside.

  “You got that right,” Avner answered.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The Coast of Lebanon, Thursday, September 26, 6:10 p.m.

  Six days later, another beautiful sunset over the Mediterranean cast a warm, gold-and-magenta glow over Ras Awwali. The evening air was damp and heavy, joined by the wisps of smoke from dozens of
chimneys. Around the harbor, tired sentries filed back into the village from their guard posts. For six days and nights, they watched and waited for the Israelis to come, but the sea and the sky remained empty. At the far end of the long stone breakwater, the last man rose from his sandbagged gun emplacement. Shouldering his Kalashnikov rifle and backpack, he gingerly picked his way over the rocks and headed in. The smell of salt water, dead fish, and seaweed was strong on the damp evening air. Halfway back, he heard the panicked screech of sea gulls and glanced out to sea, where he saw other dark specks in the sky. More birds, he wondered. No, these were higher and much farther away, and moving far too fast to be seagulls. Worse, they were coming straight at him, faster and faster, and in formation.

  In DC’s Hog Heaven sports bar, Lennie the bartender stood over a small brushed-aluminum sink, washing the last of the glassware from the previous night. It was just after 11:20 a.m. in the District. The Government early lunch crowd would soon be packing the place, belting them down for another hour or two before they went scurrying back to their little office cubicles for an afternoon nap. He had one eye on the sink and the other on the Hi-Def, flat-screen, color TV high above the bottles of bourbon and vodka behind him. He was well into his favorite soap opera when the network suddenly cut away and a big red, white, and blue banner that said “Breaking News” filled the screen.

  “Ah, Goddamnit!” Lennie cursed and threw his towel in the sink. “This better be freakin’ good.” On the screen, he saw the plastic smiles of Louise Taylor and Jeff Wang sitting behind the TV-6 news desk.

  “And in our continuing story from the Middle East,” Jeff announced, as he leaned forward and looked directly into the camera with his ‘serious anchorman’ expression, “emotions continue to run high in Israel following last Thursday’s terrorist attack on a commuter bus on the coast north of Haifa, which has now claimed the lives of seven Israelis, fourteen guest workers, and at least five terrorists.”

  “Yes,” Louise chimed in on cue. “With the funerals carried live on Israeli state television last week, and Hamas headquarters in Lebanon now claiming credit, network sources in Jerusalem say some retaliatory action will undoubtedly be ordered.”

  High over the calm, blue-green waters of the Mediterranean, Major David Lehrmann put his lead Israeli F-16I fighter-bomber into a banking right turn toward the Lebanese coast, and the rest of his eight-plane element followed in two tight formations. The F-16I, called the Soufa or ‘Storm’ by the Israeli Air Force, was a specially modified version of the two-seat American jet built for the IAF by General Dynamics. This morning, hanging from the pylons under the wings of each jet were four high-explosive thousand-pound ‘dumb’ bombs. As Lehrmann and the mission planners in Tel Aviv well knew, the bombs did not need to be very ‘smart’ when the target was the brick and mortar of an old Lebanese fishing village.

  Encased in his helmet, visor, pressurized flight suit, and gloves, he resembled a machine within a machine, his eyes constantly sweeping the dials and gauges on the console and the colors and bright lines on the heads-up display inside his helmet. While he could not yet see the target through the late-evening haze, he knew his formation pointed straight at the small fishing village of Ras Awwali, now less than thirty seconds away. Intelligence had determined it was the base from which the Hamas commandos launched their vicious attack on the commuter bus six days before, and they were about to be repaid in Biblical proportions.

  To his left, Lehrmann saw the white contrails of a squadron of larger F-15s flying high cover above them. Like the F-16I, both American fighters had been adapted with Israeli electronics and weaponry that made them even better. Not that it mattered; the Israeli Air Force had ruled the skies of the Mideast for decades, allowing Lehrmann to concentrate on the tasks at hand without being disturbed. It should be a milk run. There were no longer any Arab planes or pilots capable of challenging them. Boring? That was fine with him. Precision bombing with a heavily loaded jet took years of practice and all of a man’s concentration. With one eye on the instruments, one eye on the target as it rushed up toward him, and one eye on the alignment of the other planes around him, who needed trouble, he thought.

  They had the setting sun directly behind them and the coast was coming at him fast now through the late evening mist. Squinting, he could see a thin white line where the water met the land. He dropped the nose a few more degrees. In seconds, the shoreline stretched across the canopy. He ignored the coastal plain with its scattered farms and orchards, the hills, and the distant purple mountains beyond. He focused on the small fishing village of Ras Awwali as it emerged from the haze, its small harbor, the curved stone breakwater, and the red-roofed buildings. Finally, he could even make out movement, as people began running and looking up, mouths open, understanding, and terrified.

  Inside the cockpit, there was no tension or nervousness, because the electronics had taken over. His weapons officer had ‘painted’ the target and the rest was almost automatic. His hand tightened ever so slowly on the bomb release as he kept the crosshairs in his heads-up display fixed on the target. His thumb rested on the red button of the bomb release… slowly, slowly pressing.

  “Have a nice day,” Lehrmann whispered as a green light came on.

  The live shot on the TV switched back to Jeff Wang behind the news desk, who continued, “Network sources in Washington have revealed that even President Wagner's personal appeals to the Israeli Prime Minister aren’t likely to have much effect this time.”

  “No,” Louise added, “a variety of Middle-East experts say it is only a matter of time before the Israelis strike back, as this tit-for-tat cycle of violence continues on.”

  “Yes,” Jeff quickly agreed as he looked up into the lens. “And Louise and I will be here to bring you further updates as they occur.”

  On the breakwater, the sentry looked up in terror as the first F-16Is roared over him. In that instant, his eyes went wide in fearful recognition of what was about to happen. Walking backward, he stumbled, turned, and began running down the breakwater toward the village, screaming and waving his arms, trying to warn them. Several other men in battle fatigues looked at him, smiled, and waved back, because he was too far out to be understood, not that it mattered. There was no time to run or hide. The jets flashed overhead, sending a string of deafening sonic booms into the tightly packed village. Then, dozens of heads turned and looked upward, because they all understood what was coming.

  Gravity brought the thousand-pound bombs to earth in graceful, descending arcs that ended in the center of the village. They punched easily through the red tile roofs and down through the second floors before exploding on the solid ground below. In those small, enclosed spaces, the heavy explosive charges sent shock waves upward and outward in all directions. Like too much air forced into a small balloon, the fierce pressure expanded and found the weakest points of the buildings. Sections of the roofs blew upward and the thick, seemingly impregnable outer walls began to crack. Unable to contain the force of the explosions, the supporting wooden beams strained and warped until the walls themselves toppled outward into the street. Without support, the upper floors and roofs folded inward, collapsing the buildings upon themselves.

  The multiple impacts of sixteen such bombs on the small cluster of buildings, followed by sixteen more, turned the cobblestone streets and squares into killing zones as tons of loose stone, walls, wood, glass, dust, and razor-sharp shards of shattered roof tiles smashed, sliced, cut, crushed, and buried everything and everyone in the village.

  The next day, a grim-faced PLO work party continued to sift through the rubble. They no longer hoped to find survivors, but there might be weapons or other equipment that could be salvaged. A handful of fighters had survived the onslaught by stumbling away or digging themselves out of the rubble. Of the rest, the fortunate ones had been blown apart or crushed during the attack. Many more died slowly in the wreckage, calling in vain for help, but the precise death toll would never be known.

>   On the afternoon of the third day, the exhausted workers uncovered the body of a young woman who lay crushed beneath a wall. Her corpse was soon lowered into the mass grave that had been dug in a nearby field. They identified her as Kadri Al-Bari, sister of Ibrahim, Jamil, and Ahmed, who were missing and presumed martyrs in a heroic but failed attack on the Israeli occupiers of their Palestinian homeland the week before. Her name was added to the long list of known dead.

  On the TV above the bar in The Hog, Louise Taylor looked directly into the camera with her best network smile and said, “That’s it from the TV-6 News Desk. Regular network programming will resume after this brief message.”

  “And about damn time!” Lennie the bartender growled.

  PART THREE

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  SEPTEMBER 27

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Washington, D.C., Friday, September 27, 3:07 p.m.

  The heat and humidity of a muggy summer in the nation’s capital can hang on well past Labor Day like a heavy wet cape, but by the end of September, autumn was almost there. Dry, clear, and sunny, the heat and humidity of summer were finally gone, and you could actually walk outside without needing to change your shirt every ten minutes. The dogwoods were beginning to turn a rich crimson — the first sign that another spectacular October in the Blue Ridge Mountains was on the way. The silly NFL exhibition season was over, and real games were now in full swing. Congress was back in session too, all feisty and eager to do nothing, with hordes of lobbyists and flesh-eating reporters wallowing in their wake. It became ‘busy’ weather, when homeowners cram in all those outdoor chores they would never touch in late summer.

  Autumn might be a happy time almost everywhere else in town, but inside the imposing, neo-medieval J. Edgar Hoover FBI Headquarters Building at Ninth and Pennsylvania Avenue, things are rarely happy. Maybe it is the unrelenting, can’t-ever-lose pressure of the FBI’s mission, or simply the grumpy heritage of the building’s namesake, but the FBI never smiles and can have a powerful frown. When it decides to frown on one of its own, it exiles the offending party to the crowded interior corridors of the fifth floor. These are the bowels of the building, where windows are only a rumor and you need a 24-hour clock to tell whether it is day or night. When the offense is even worse, it sends them to the even smaller cubicles sandwiched between the women’s restroom and the mailroom. That is about as close as the Bureau can get to banishing agents to Great Falls, Bogalusa, or Cleveland, without actually sending them there.