Web of Spies

by Colin Smith

  ‘Until you can get behind a foot of concrete, dummy!’

  One afternoon George took Dove down the valley to the nearest village ‘for the groceries’. They went there in the pick-up with one of the young fedayeen in a flat leather cap hanging onto the Dushka on the back in the upright manner that had caused the Beirut wits to call these machine-gunners ‘the water-skiers’. It was a crisp, clear day. Behind him Dove could see the snowcovered peak of Mount Hermon and then the grey slopes of the foothills of the Chuf range, lightly furred with stunted trees like the hairs on a man’s chest.

  The village they went to was not occupied by Palestinian refugees, but a tobacco-farming community of Lebanese Shia Moslems. Dove saw that they lived in substantial, flat-roofed, concrete houses with open-sided ground-floor storerooms made of breeze block in which they stored tobacco leaf. Most homes had a car or tractor parked outside.

  George bought bread, cheese, yogurt, radishes, cucumbers, tomatoes and meat - some of it ready diced for kebabs - eggs, coffee, and a couple of live chickens. The Shi’ites seemed cordial enough and in all the houses they visited they were offered coffee and cigarettes and, in the less devout households, glasses of arak, which ignited the throat. On seven occasions payment was refused which, to Dove’s amazement, annoyed the Palestinian. ‘Basically, the dumb shits don’t like us,’ he explained as they trudged away from their latest hand-out. ‘They want to be able to say we extorted the food from them.’

  ‘Why don’t they like you?’

  ‘Because the cocksuckers blame us for the Israeli air raids. They don’t want to understand that Palestine is every Arab’s fight. They’re like the goddamn Swiss. They just want to be left to their pastures and their farming. Sometimes I don’t think they’d give a shit if the goddamn Israelis walked right in here just as long as the sun came up and went down at the right time and they could sell their lousy tobacco. It doesn’t matter to them that my people are starving and living in camps. They’re just fuckin’ peasants. They don’t care what happens to other people as long as they make money. Motherfuckers.’

  After this outburst Dove was surprised when, at their next call, an elderly farmer in pin-stripe trousers and a black rollneck sweater gave the long-haired Palestinian what appeared to be a particularly warm welcome. He soon saw why. They were drinking their third Turkish coffee of the afternoon when into the house came a little girl aged about eight or nine. She was quite classically pretty, her face framed in straight, jet-black hair, and dominated by huge, sensitive brown eyes which seemed to light up when they registered George.

  She ran over to him and he bent down and picked her up, kissed her on both cheeks, threw her up in the air, caught her, kissed her again, and then fished in the top pocket of his fatigues until he came out with a new packet of coloured pencils in a plastic wallet. Throughout it all the little girl, although obviously ecstatic, was strangely silent. ‘She’s dumb,’ the Palestinian explained. ‘Hysterical dumbness. Her parents were blown away by an Israeli bomb and she was standing right next to them. Miracle she survived. I was the first to find her. The old guy is her grandfather.’

  George’s new role as the concerned warrior suddenly reminded Dove of the generous, gum-chewing Yanks around his home town as a boy, battling the Cold War ennui by thumping teddyboys and generally much admired by himself and his small friends.

  The little girl ran off and returned holding a picture which she presented to George and then stood solemnly by while he examined it with great seriousness. ‘It’s always the same one,’ he said, passing it to Dove.

  The picture showed two planes, children’s planes with impossible vertical wings, dropping a stick of bombs on two houses. The bombs were not landing on the houses, but were marked in vivid red and yellow ‘V’s’ as landing all around. In the foreground, surrounded by these ‘V’s’, two figures with matchstick limbs were lying on the ground. To the left of the picture was a tree underneath which stood a little girl - a triangle with a ball on top sprouting black string hair - shedding torrents of tears marked in much the same way as the falling bombs. Left again of the tree, at the edge of the picture, was the figure of a man in a keffiyeh, holding what was obviously supposed to be a Kalashnikov because the child had equipped his rifle with the distinctive banana-shaped magazine. The rifle was spitting red fire at one of the planes, but unlike most children’s war pictures he wasn’t hitting it. The red dashes merely went hopelessly on, between the two planes, until they left the picture. There was something else peculiar about it. Dove looked again. The sun was crying.

  ‘The dude doing the shooting is new,’ said George. ‘I think it’s supposed to be me. Obviously she doesn’t think I can hit a barn door.’

  The Palestinian carefully rolled the picture up and tucked it into his shirt. ‘I’ve tried to get her to do something else, but she’s a stubborn little monkey. This is all she wants to draw. At least I get a walk-on part this week.’

  When they had to depart there was a repeat performance of the Palestinian’s arrival. But this time the child knocked his hair aside, revealing the shrivelled, stunted cartilage that was all that remained of his right ear. ‘Hey! Leave my wound alone, young lady,’ he ordered, but the girl continued to pull at the gristle until he gently removed her hand. Dove found it difficult to take his eyes off it.

  Afterwards, in the pick-up, George told the schoolteacher how it happened. ‘I was captured by some assholes during the civil war. They sliced it off to prove to my team that they had me. Had to pay a lot of bread for old Abu George, but we got it all back.’

  ‘Who were they? Christians?’

  ‘Shit, no. They would have killed me unless we had one of their top honchos and they wanted to trade. No, these were real banditos. Kurds.’

  ‘How did you get the money back?’

  ‘How do you think? The street scene is small in West Beirut. It took us twenty-four hours to find out who and where they were. Then we went in and zapped them. I got the bastard who did the slicing myself. He was a very surprised guy.’

  ‘Why surprised?’

  ‘He was on the john.’

  ‘Christ!’

  ‘Scared the shit outta him,’ laughed George. ‘Gave him another asshole.’ At intervals he laughed about this most of the way back to the camp.

  The training came to an end quite suddenly on the ninth day. It started with a swooshing sound, similar to the noise a fast express might make, that startled Dove and made him duck as if he had come under fire. He had just begun to straighten himself up when it happened again, to be rapidly followed by two more. Every time it happened he crouched a little lower as if he was being beaten into the ground by an invisible mallet.

  He looked up to find George grinning at him, cradling his Kalashnikov. ‘Grads,’ he said.

  ‘What?’ asked Dove, trying to recover his composure. ‘Katyushas. Rockets. They’re firing them at the Israelis.’

  ‘Who’s firing them?’

  ‘Those guys down there.’

  He handed Dove a pair of binoculars and pointed down the valley. When he had focused the glasses Dove could make out a moving truck with four grey steel pipes on the back. The pipes were angled over the roof of the cab as if they were two huge double-barrelled shotguns, one under the other.

  ‘That’s the launcher,’ explained George. ‘Now they’re bugging out. Real hit and run stuff.

  Just like Charlie Cong.’

  ‘But what were they firing at?’

  ‘Settlements. Probably near the place the Jews call Kiryat Shmoneh. I don’t know exactly. They’re not my team. I didn’t know it was going to happen.’

  ‘Civilian targets?’

  ‘Civilian targets my ass. They’re fortified settlements. They’re crawling with Israeli army.’

  ‘But civilians live there? Women and children?’

  ‘Listen man, civilians live here too. Like Tamima’s family.’

  ‘Tamima?’

  ‘The little girl who tried t
o pull what’s left of my ear off.’

  ‘But what good does it do?’

  ‘It shows the bastards that we’ll never give in. That there’ll never be any peace until they make a settlement with us. Look, take your piece off and spend a few rounds. I’d better help the others. I think we might have a busy day.’

  ‘Why? What’s going to happen?’

  ‘Well, they might wait until tomorrow, but the chances are the Israelis will either start shelling around here or send a couple of Phantoms over and bomb the shit outta some poor farmers. They never get the guys who pulled the job. Then they’ll claim they’ve made a retaliatory raid against Palestinian terrorists. Motherfuckers. They’re the terrorists, the dudes flying those computers upstairs - some bright mother’s son who was good at Maths and passed out of the Air Force Academy in a big parade and got laid in a Texas whore-house doing his advance training. Oh, and I bet his Ma polishes his picture every day and writes him letters telling him how proud they all are and don’t forget to say his prayers, and take his baths, and dry between his toes. Then he’s grim reaper in his shiny all-American toy, twenty minutes of sudden death over southern Lebanon, fifty women and children wasted and he’s back at base, pinching the ass off the Moroccan briefing-room chick, before they’ve finished dying. And so clean. All he did was push the button when the computer told him to and watch some smoke come up. I wish, I really wish I could get one of those motherfuckers down here and show him what his bunch of tricks does - before I cut his balls off.’

  ‘But those rockets - what do they do?’

  ‘Shit, man. Those rockets - they’re like pissing on an elephant’s foot. So, before you ask, are the bombs that go off in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv planted by people who look the dudes they’re gonna kill in the eye before they walk away because they know it’s right, know it’s necessary.’ George was spitting his words out like an American television evangelist.

  ‘Right? Necessary? Terrorism can never be right. Anyway, I thought your organisation didn’t believe in terrorism?’

  The Palestinian remembered who he was supposed to be working for. ‘It doesn’t believe in terrorism against Zionist targets abroad or plane hijacking or that sort of shit any more. It believes it’s a legitimate weapon in our homeland - like the French Resistance.’

  ‘The French Resistance was different- their country was occupied.’

  ‘So is ours.’

  ‘The Israelis say it’s their country.’

  ‘Yeah. Well they shouldn’t have waited two thousand years to come back. Of course, when they did come back they were no slouches at terrorism themselves. Wasting a whole village at Deir Yassin in ‘48-the Red Cross saw that. Blowin’ up the King David’s hotel, hangin’ British sergeants, inventin’ the letter bomb. Shit, they weren’t bad. Weren’t bad at all for people who won’t talk to terrorists.’

  ‘They had to come back. The Nazis-’

  ‘We’re not responsible for European anti-Semitism or Cossack pogroms. What right did the British have in 1917, before they’d even taken the country from the goddamn Turks, to make a declaration saying that the Jews could have a homeland in Palestine?’

  Some of the history of the place came back to Dove. ‘If I remember rightly the Balfour Declaration promised a homeland not a state. It was very specific about the rights of the indigenous people not being…’

  ‘Sure, sure. That was the crack in the dam, wasn’t it. Thirty-one years later it burst and you got Israel.’

  ‘God, it’s difficult, isn’t it?’

  ‘No, man. It’s easy. We’re right.’

  Dove shook his head. ‘I think you’re both as stubborn as mules - the Palestinians and the Israelis.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said George. ‘If we ever get together the world better look out. OK. Let’s drop the polemic. You’ve got your own war to fight, and I’m not questioning your morality.’

  ‘For Christ’s sake. I’ve got every right-’

  ‘You’ve got a reason - your own survival.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘Killing Koller is the only thing that keeps you alive, makes life worth living. That’s what you told me. Right, man?’

  Dove walked away, angrily ramming the magazine into the Walther with the heel of his left hand as he did so.

  ‘Hey, man,’ George called after him. ‘I told you before not to do that. You’ll crimp the top of the magazine and get a jam.’

  Dove waved his broad left hand in acknowledgement without looking back.

  ‘Asshole,’ murmured George. ‘Goddamn asshole.’ But there was a sad, almost affectionate smile on his face. Then he went back to where the others were threading the big, brass 12.7mm rounds for the Dushka into new ammunition belts and began talking to them in his bad Arabic.

  8. Before They’ve Finished Dying

  The planes from the south came in the late afternoon when the fedayeen had almost given them up. For a full minute before they saw them they could hear their engines humming in the clouds gathering for dusk.

  They first appeared as two glittering silver darts falling to earth, one slightly behind the other, before banking into a tight turn, their triangular shape clearly silhouetted against the sinking sun. Dove, seated in a shallow trench near the Dushka, felt his stomach turn cold and the ice begin to form around his groin. George, squatting beside him with his binoculars, said, ‘Phantoms’.

  For a moment it seemed that the aircraft were heading straight for them. ‘Surely,’ thought Dove, ‘they can’t know we’re in these trees?’ He watched as the Dushka crew and the fedayeen on the multi-barrelled Czech gun frantically swivelled their weapons on them through the gaps in the trees. He studied the gunners’ hands as they tightened over the trigger mechanisms. George had told him that the Czech gun was capable of hitting, without the aid of radar, an aircraft travelling at the speed of sound. ‘If the crews have had the right training,’ he had added.

  ‘And have they?’

  ‘Only live targets.’

  He stared at these mostly teenage gunners now, silently begging them to hold their fire, not to draw attention to themselves. Then George was standing up in the trench, his right hand raised.

  In fact, the first fire came from some positions above them near Beaufort Castle. George let his hand drop just as the Phantoms, their engine noise practically drowning out the gunfire, had passed them and were beginning their dive into the valley. For seven or eight seconds, as the planes flew across their line of vision, his crews had the chance to get them in their sights. In that time the five barrels under George’s command discharged just over four hundred rounds. The noise was appalling. It sounded to Dove as if someone was turning an enormous coffeegrinder inside his head. There was also the burned smell that lingers when a lot of ammunition has been fired. Yet not one of those rounds, with a muzzle velocity of over three thousand miles per hour, found a target and nor did any of the other antiaircraft guns on the hillside, let alone the rifles fired as uselessly as the one in Tamima’s picture.

  The Phantoms were better. Their bombs kicked up great brown clouds around the village of the Shia tobacco farmers. Because they were about two miles away Dove and the rest experienced the peculiar delayed action effect of actually seeing the smoke and the climbing silver arrows before the noise of the explosion had rippled up the valley towards them. The aircraft made one other pass at the village and the fedayeen fired their guns with the same effect. The second time there were not several large explosions, but hundreds of spurts of earth in the fields near the houses, followed by a firecracker noise without the rhythm of machine-gun fire.

  ‘CBU’s,’ said George. ‘Cluster Bomb Units. We had them in Nam. They drop something that looks like a wing-tank and half-way down it splits open like a fucking pea-pod and throws nice little exploding balls about the place. Another good American toy. Jesus Christ.’

  George left the trench and walked to where the trees thinned out and he could get a good look at the
valley through his fieldglasses. Overhead the planes were circling again. Dove followed him to where he was crouching beside a tree, resting on his haunches. The Palestinian grunted, adjusted his focus, and held the binoculars on one spot for about thirty seconds. He handed the glasses to the big Englishman. ‘Look at the houses,’ he said, ‘then come back about two hundred yards into the field and go to three o’clock. Got it?’

  At first Dove could not understand what the Palestinian wanted him to see. There was still a lot of dust and smoke swirling about the houses. As far as he could tell the ones he was focused on were still intact. He saw a smallish vehicle, a Land Rover or a pick-up, move off at great speed. He came to the spot in the field, but he saw nothing at first except young tobacco plants and bits of old farm machinery. He went back to the machinery again, a long, oval device painted green, which listed in the soft spring soil like a neglected tombstone.

  ‘You got it?’ asked George.

  ‘I think so - that metal thing in the field.’

  ‘Yeah. That’s one half of the CBU canister. See if you can find the other one.’

  He was looking for this when the planes, almost forgotten, swooped down on the positions around the Crusader castle - short bursts of machine cannon, the pilots coming in so low it seemed as if they were following the very contours of the land. George was taken by surprise too and they both threw themselves to the ground, uncertain as to who was under attack, fearful it might be themselves. It was a parting gesture. The Phantoms soared south, impervious to the furious, frightened chatter of the guns below them. The schoolteacher was reminded of flies on a television screen, untouched by the picture.

  There was a rush to get down to the village. George led, with Dove sitting alongside him in the front seat of the pick-up, the man on the Dushka kicking spent cases out of the back as they went.

  On the outskirts the first thing they heard was a dog howling.

  It was a terrible, ear-splitting sound and Dove, dreading it was human, was almost relieved to see the animal on the roadside, tottering about on three legs, holding up its shattered front paw. George stopped the noise with a long burst from his Kalashnikov.