by Colin Smith
“You idiot,” he screamed at Lang, wiping his hands on the dry parts of the keffiyeh. “You blockhead! I thought Jews were supposed to be clever. There were things we needed to know.”
“We know all we need to know,” said Lang. He was quite calm and the little automatic was still in his hand. “We know the British are aware that at least one parachute has landed here. They probably learned about the other one as well. Where else would it have gone? Perhaps they saw our signal fires. They may even have spotted us coming up here. We have to go and we couldn’t take him with us. Nor could we have him running to the nearest police station with our descriptions.”
“Why would he have gone to the police?” said the Templer, lighting up a Players from a packet which he rammed back into the open pocket of his khaki bush shirt. “He thought we were the police. As you say, he was probably heading for Damascus. And if this place is under any kind of close observation they are certainly going to come running now they have heard your shot.”
“So we had better go,” said Lang.
They had taken a circuitous route down, avoiding made tracks and the skyline where they could, at one point even pushing through a stand of bamboo. Once they were close to the Ford they lay behind some carob trees and stared longingly at the vehicle and then at all the spots around it which might conceal a man with a rifle.
“I’ll go,” said Lang and, before the Templer could stop him, he had been up and walking towards it. The German waited for the engine to start and then, almost hoping in his anger that ambushers would spring from their holes and teach the Jew the value of patience, got up and joined him.
They had not talked much during the drive back to Haifa. His first opportunity to reassert his authority had been the rejection of the uniforms Lang’s tailoring friend had made.
“But these aren’t bad,” the Jew had protested, fingering the cloth. “I’ve seen British officers who dress so badly they look like they should be begging in the souk.”
“And I’ve seen plenty who do not,” he had snapped. “These look like they were cut with a pair of garden shears.” And back they had gone.
But this waiting was worrying. Was he was about to pay a terrible price for his vanity? Lang was well over an hour late and all he could do was pace and cough and scratch his bandages. The Jew had left the apartment wearing a formidable disguise but the Templer found it all too easy to imagine him netted in some casual roundup, the near certainty that his papers would not be in order and the discovery of the uniforms he was carrying.
Not that he doubted his courage. First Lang had come to them, truly a Daniel in the Lion’s Den, with the astonishing offer he had delivered to the German consul in then Vichy Beirut: a full scale Jewish uprising in return for a promise from Berlin that a Zionist state would be established in Palestine to which all Jews would have the right of return. In short, an end to the Jewish problem. Not long before the British ended Maréchal Pétain’s rule in Lebanon and installed the Free French, Lang had been flown from Beirut to Athens where he had been trained to take on a liaison role with the Wehrmacht and be returned to Palestine as secretly as he had left it.
To the consternation of some SS comrades Lang had confounded their Der Stürmer stereotype of the cringing Jew by excelling in all the military skills they had taught him. His composure during his first parachute jump had been much remarked on. More important, he possessed what his signals instructor, a Wehrmacht corporal from the Frankfurt radio school, called “a natural fist”: an ability to tap out accurate Morse with consistent speed.
In the end, despite his training it was decided not to return Lang to Palestine by parachute. The Templer had argued that since there was no way of warning his people he was coming back Lang would be much safer doing it on his feet than making a blind drop. They used the “Alexandretta Gate”, called Iskenderun by the neutral Turks and once the main Mediterranean port for Ottoman Syria. During the last gasps of peace the French, determined to make Turkey an ally, had returned this part of their 1918 spoils to its wrongful owners which was not much of a sacrifice. Beirut and Tripoli were quite enough for them. It had not got them very far. Ataturk had pocketed the bribe then sold his chrome to both sides and awaited developments.
Since it had become obvious that they not going to be allowed anywhere near the operation, the Abwehr began to argue that Lang was most likely a double-agent. Would a Jew who had served under Wingate, lately responsible for creating havoc in Italian East Africa with his Abyssinian guerrillas, really be capable of such an about turn? Was this not simply a bold attempt by one of the British secret services to infiltrate German intelligence? Of course, if their roles had been reversed the Sicherheitsdienst would have done exactly the same to the Abwehr and yet the Templer was surprised how angry these suggestions made him.
It was not that he was not blind to Lang’s faults. He had known months ago, soon after he had first set eyes on him, that he was dealing with a fanatic and if anyone had told him that it took one to know he would have been outraged. But he had not realised that the Jew could be impulsive as well as ruthless and it worried him. Lang’s attempt to give a rational explanation for the killing of the Arab youth was pathetic. It had not been necessary and the boy had died before he could give them any idea how much the enemy knew. The best they could hope was that British would think that his death was due to some sort of quarrel over the parachutes, thieves falling out.
Even when Lang was undergoing training there were colleagues, people the Templer respected, who said it was too risky and he should be quietly eliminated. Some were more honest and said that even if he was genuine they believed any kind of joint venture with a Jew might be corrupting. But the Templer told them he knew his birthplace. If they handled him properly, Lang was a rare gift, pure gold.
So, code named Albert, off he went on a nice long train ride across Turkey to Alexandretta. His luggage was two small leather suitcases, one much heavier than the other for beneath its shallow false bottom was a Siemens forty-watt transmitter/ receiver. With a decent aerial, the Siemens set had a range of at least one thousand kilometres. The lighter case contained some clothes and various pills and powders. These were his samples. For once in Syria, Albert had become the representative of a Tel Aviv pharmaceutical wholesalers returning to Palestine after a not particularly successful attempt - though his order book showed a couple of sales - to exploit the commercial vacuum left by the British expulsion of the Vichy administration and the end of Syria’s trade with France.
This had all worked well and once he had reached his friends Lang had shed his cover like an old shoe. Whether a small gang of Zionist terrorists, with far less support among the Palestine’s Jews than they pretended to have, could come up with a feasible answer to the Jewish Problem was, of course, another matter. Yet if the war ended this year in a German victory, and it was looking more likely than ever despite America’s entry, then why not? Taxed emigration of Jews from within the Reich had been official policy before September 1939. After all, it was by supervising the almost bloodless flushing of Austria that Eichmann had climbed the Party ladder. And ever since Hitler came to power, Zionists of different hues had been willing to talk to the Nazis.
Meanwhile, Lang’s people were about to demonstrate their willingness to co-operate with Germany by providing the wherewithal for a suitable riposte for the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich. He didn’t think Heydrich, from his seat in Valhalla, would mind Jewish involvement in avenging his death. Above all the Obergruppenfuhrer, the founder of the Sicherheitsdienst, was a practical man. And it would come at a time when just such an action would cause considerable alarm and despondency behind the crumbling British front lines. That was if Lang ever returned from his errand at the tailor’s.
In an attempt to take his mind off this he picked up a pair of pre-war Dienstglasse, the lightweight field glasses every officer in the British 8th Army wanted to take home with him along with a Leica and a Luger Parabellum. The binoculars
were lying next to his pistol on a low side table just inside the open doors to the balcony through which he now stepped.
Below him was the broad sweep of Haifa bay where the number of warships at anchor had grown considerably during his three days in the flat. Rommel’s panzers were now within 60 miles of Alexandria and the Royal Navy felt more secure in Palestine’s northern port. He trained his glasses on the latest arrival, an anti-aircraft cruiser bristling with pom-poms and Swiss designed Oerlikon heavy machine-guns. Sailors in white shorts and grey painted soup-plate helmets were clambering about rotating gun platforms. The sky they were watching for enemy aircraft was as blue and cloudless as only a Levantine midsummer can provide, the horizon the faintest seam between sea and sky.
To his right was a road which switch-backed down the hill and on which he was hoping, any second now, Lang might reappear on his bicycle. Nearer the port, their red pantiled roof tops shimmering in and out of focus, were the solid, sandstone houses with wide Gothic windows and covered patios built by the Templers when the Turks welcomed them to Palestine almost a century before. Since the internment of their owners most of these houses had been requisitioned by British officers or colonial civil servants and their families. Among them was the house built by his paternal grandfather that, when he was a small boy, had briefly been his parents’ home before they moved down to the Wilhelmina settlement near Jaffa. The Templer tried to make out which one it was. One rooftop looked very much like another but in the end he narrowed down two as likely candidates.
***
He went back inside and slumped into an armchair by the low table where his Walther rested. Another reason Lang’s lateness was damn annoying was that he was waiting for him to bring in today’s Palestine Post. He consoled himself by looking again at yesterday’s paper and the desert fighting viewed through the prism of British military censorship.
“Eighth Army placed to exploit Rocky Terrain of El Alamein,” announced one madly optimistic headline accompanied by a crude little map showing that this was a reference to an Egyptian railway halt near the coast a couple of hours drive west of Alexandria. Apparently, Rommel’s last hurdle before he entered the Nile Delta was to be along a line that ran thirty miles due south of Alamein to the Qattara Depression, a sand swamp said to be impassable to wheeled vehicles. And General Auchinleck, who had at last got round to sacking Ritchie and taking charge, appeared to think that this was a very good thing. “The enemy is much reduced in strength and a long way from his supply bases,” he was quoted as telling those of his troops who had been fast enough to avoid capture. “The situation now calls for a supreme effort on the part of us all. We are fighting the Battle of Egypt.”
Did Auchinleck really imagine he could rally the army that had just meekly laid down its arms in Tobruk? Elsewhere in the paper there was ample evidence that at least one important person considered the battle for Egypt was already as good as over and the battle for Palestine about to begin. In Jerusalem High Commissioner McMichael was calling for calm. But in the same breath he was also asking for recruits to the newly raised Palestinian Home Guard, women volunteers to work as auxiliary nurses in the military hospitals and even in the fire brigade. How on earth had all that got through the censor?
The Templer was beginning to wonder if he and Lang might be too late. If Rommel took Egypt and Palestine perhaps England would sue for peace and the entire war would come to an end. As would opportunities for revenge, for glory - a Knight’s Cross presented by the man himself and a little chat afterwards and he knew he wouldn’t care about not being able to smoke.
For at least the third time that day he scrutinised every page to see if he had somehow overlooked a mention of the body he and Lang had left on the Hattin but there was nothing there. Presumably he was still lying up there undiscovered, more bloated and stinking by the minute and feed for the birds.
Lang had told him that the police would almost certainly assume the young goatherd had been killed in a blood feud. It might, he suggested, even start one. “These clans will start killing each other over much less than an unexplained killing,” he said, evidently relishing the prospect of more dead Arabs.
He thought he was going to be disappointed. The boy had probably told his sister he had found the parachute on the Hattin. Even if he hadn’t, it would not take even the most dim witted detective long to find out where he normally grazed his goats and where he was most likely to have found it. Once they had assured themselves there were no outstanding blood debts the police, his relatives and any other interested parties would surely conclude that the murder had something to do with the parachute.
After a while, tiring of this dismal prognosis, the Templer let the languor of the July afternoon begin to overtake him. It was still a good four hours to dusk and no cooler in than outside the open balcony doors. An electric propeller fan whirred on the ceiling, something of a novelty for only the wealthy could afford them in the Palestine of his boyhood. All it seemed to do was push the warm air about.
Lang had tacked the aerial for his Siemens set up round the hub of the fan in concentric squares so that the casual observer might imagine it was an integral part of its wiring. The wire then ran to the edge of the ceiling and down a corner to the skirting board where it lay neatly coiled behind an armchair. The suitcase containing the radio was in Lang’s room beneath his bed. They had not been time to find a better hiding place and, anyway, they did not expect to be in the apartment long.
An aircraft was up again, its insistent engine filling his ears. Gently the Templer scratched his right side and in doing so glanced at his watch. All his worst fears returned. Lang was now the best part of ninety minutes late.
What the hell was he doing? Emptying his pockets onto the scrubbed desk of an interrogating room? Trying to stick to his cover story while his interrogators examined again the uniforms he was carrying and asked their sarcastic questions without troubling to listen to the replies. Which yeshiva was it you said you were teaching at? Do remind us. Was it the Second Circumcised Cavalry or the First Skinback Fusiliers? And the gun? How about the gun? Was it to smite down the unbeliever? We always thought it was the Pope who had the biggest battalions? You see, we don’t believe you are who you say you are. We believe you are Josef Lang, a schoolteacher who, much to the distress of his dear old Mum, disappeared from this city some fourteen months ago. And we would like to know where you’ve been Mister Lang? And what you’ve been doing there? And how long you have been back here? And whom you brought back with you?
He yawned, long and deep and closed his eyes. Pull yourself together man. What was it the Tommies used to sing in the last war, his war? Pack all your troubles in your old kit bag? That was it. And smile boys smile...And being the catnapping old soldier that he was, the Templer closed his eyes until the distant drone of the aircraft, the insistent buzz of the wasps and flies around the balcony’s bougainvillaea and the clunky turning of the useless propeller fan exceeded all expectations by lifting him off towards that invisible seam between sea and sky.
7 - The Djinn on the Hattin
Scared off by a couple of pistol shots the crows had found a thermal and were making ever slower circuits while they calmed their mean hearts.
Calderwell had decided not to attempt to move the boy’s body himself. Instead, he had sent the constable with the bad teeth down to Tiberias with a note to the officer in charge there telling him what he had found and asking for a mule, tarpaulins and if possible a photographer. He also gave instructions for a vehicle, preferably an ambulance, to meet them on the main Tiberias - Nazareth Road. This was the proper procedure and he was glad of it. He had no desire to try and carry a crumbling corpse down to the plain on the back of a horse that might well be spooked by the smell.
“The boy must have come after the patrol found the second parachute,” said Calderwell, reloading his revolver and, in his neat way, dropping the two spent cases in the left pocket of his bush shirt. “What brought him here? The chance o
f more silk or the missing goat?”
“Perhaps both,” said the Palestinian sergeant. “Then for some reason they also returned. Once he had seen them they had to kill him. It was his fate. He was a lazy, greedy boy.”
“You knew him?”
“Yes, a little. He was from Lubia. He was my wife’s cousin.”
This did not unduly surprise Calderwell. Cousin was often a rather vague term among Palestinian Arabs. Cousins could be very distant relatives, hardly more than in the same clan. But it was interesting he was from Lubia. The Lubians were for the Mufti to a man.
“I wonder if he confessed to taking the first parachute and told them the police were after him,” he mused. “That would have made him even more unpopular. Was there any chance he had heard the second parachute had been found?”
“We told your office. No-one else.”
So far Calderwell only had a very sketchy idea about the events surrounding the discovery of the second parachute. He had left Jerusalem the previous afternoon and arrived in Nazareth long after the officers’ mess had finished serving dinner, tired after a long drive through Nablus and Jenin. Arrangement had been made to take him by car to Tiberias at five the next morning where a horse and escort were awaiting him. All he knew was that it was the horsemen of the Mounted Police Striking Force who had found it.
“There were reports of lights being seen at night Effendi,” said the sergeant. “Sometimes more than lights. Fires glowing in the dark. Shepherds could see them from below.”
“Couldn’t it have been other shepherds?”
“No. Not here. People don’t come here at night. It’s a bad place.”
“Djinn?”
The sergeant made that gesture where the palms go upwards and the head is jerked back often used among his people to explain the unexplainable. In the sergeant’s experience it was particularly useful in cases such as this for, though the Ingliz usually pretended not to believe in Djinn, it was quite obvious that they did. “Long ago there was a battle here,” he said. “Many people were killed. Mussulmen and Frankish people.”