by E. M. DAVEY
It was dawn and they were standing by a breezeblock hut outside Sderot, southern Israel. The landscape was flat and surprisingly grassy, dotted with tiny yellow flowers that seemed muted in the half-light. Jake was reminded of Oklahoma.
“The man this side, we bribe him.” Mo pulled hard on a cigarette. “The man other side of wall, he is cousin of me. But if Hamas meeting us in tunnel?” He grimaced, drew his thumb across his neck.
“Never mind the histrionics,” said Jenny. “Let’s just get it over with and we’ll leave you in peace.”
Mo had been Jenny’s first break as a handler: a Hamas fighter she’d recruited for a £45,000 retainer. He was unaware she no longer worked for MI6 – and now Jenny was coming to collect.
“This is a bad life,” he lamented.
Mo’s eyes were fissures in a desiccated face as he regarded the Israel-Gaza barrier, a fingernail of grey sprouting from the earth. On the eastern horizon a godlier vision arose as red and orange and yellow leached like watercolour paints into a sky still weighted with darkest blue: the rainbow emergence of a new day.
“Come,” said Mo. “We go.”
A family of six lived in the hut. The mother and father were awake, but their brood filled the single bed with slumber.
“Baksheesh,” said the father.
There followed a flow of Arabic too fast for Jenny to follow.
Mo pointed at both of them in turn. “One thousand, one thousand.”
“Dollars?” Her eyes were like gunshot. “Mohammed, need I remind you that you’re on our payroll?”
“Money is not for me. Is for this man. I say you are good journalists, wanting to help Palestinian people. But still, you have to pay. Not normal, for you use these tunnel. Maybe the Mujahideen killing us if they meeting us. Quickly, quickly.”
“One thousand for both of us.”
The father acquiesced and dragged the family’s brazier to one side – it stood on a paving slab in the cement floor, almost invisible with the ash impacted between the cracks. He eased this out with a poker and hauled it aside.
Rungs disappeared into blackness.
The tunnel had been bored to infiltrate Hamas militants into Israel. It ran for two miles, passing under the barrier to emerge in the Palestinian Territories. Once through, Jake and Jenny had to cross the Gaza Strip, from where a second tunnel entered Egypt. After that, only the jihadi head choppers of Sinai stood between them and Cairo.
Mo went first, descending thirty feet before wriggling into a horizontal shaft. Jake bent double to get in, shoulders scraping both sides of the tunnel. The air tasted noxious with cement and it was pitch black; he felt a flutter of claustrophobia. Yet the workmanship was undeniable. Concrete arches linked overhead like tongue and groove planking, a bespoke fit for this deadly artery. He noted the exquisite smoothness of the concrete. What a thing: to touch the innards of a Hamas attack tunnel.
“One metre digging, is taking one day,” Mo enthused. “Construction is taking two years. Cost, two million dollars.” His teeth gleamed in the torchlight. “And cement is coming from Israel.”
The further they went the hotter it became and Jake strained his ears for Arabic. He couldn’t turn around in this space; a backwards evacuation at speed was too nightmarish to contemplate.
Just keep going. Just keep going.
His heartbeat hammered out each step.
They had to be under the Palestinian Territories by now. Would he rather be in the hands of Hamas or MI6? Hard to say. Nobody spoke, each of them wrestling with their own fears. It was silent as a pharaonic burial shaft.
Mo halted. He turned, beaming again. One arm rested on a steel rung. It was a ladder. They were through.
“Is good tunnel, yes?” said Mo.
They emerged into a foxhole. Camouflage netting was slung across it and a mortar was angled towards Israel. Mo lit a cigarette, kissed his cousin on both cheeks and murmured a prayer of thanks.
He turned to Jake and spread his arms. “Welcome to Palestine.”
37
Mo’s Datsun had the appearance of a car that had been rolled down a hill sideways. The clock had stopped at 365,000 kilometres, the seats were torn to ribbons and the windscreen looked as if it someone had sprayed it with a double-barrelled shotgun. Ahead lay the most disputed strip of land on earth.
The population crush recalled India. People walking five deep on both sides of the road; a preponderance of men; children wearing grubby pyjama bottoms. Tenements teetered on the verge of collapse and steel rods protruded from the breezeblocks like straws from a scarecrow’s sleeves. Each storey had to be tenanted before landlords could afford to add a new one, and the effect was of too many shoeboxes piled on top of each other.
Jake engrossed himself in Sir Neil. The book reproduced the soldier’s orders from his Foreign Secretary, Lord Castlereagh.
You have been selected, on the part of the British Government, to attend the late Chief of the French Government to the island of Elba. You will be accompanied by an Austrian, a Prussian, and a Russian officer of rank; you will conduct yourself with every proper respect to Napoleon, to whose secure asylum in that island it is the wish of his Royal Highness the Prince Regent to afford every protection.
Sir Neil’s memoir continued:
Soon afterwards the Allied Commissioners assembled together. It was then that I was first made aware of the exact particulars of the treaty between Napoleon and the Allied Powers.
“What treaty would that be?” asked Jenny.
“The Treaty of Fontainebleau, in which Napoleon agreed to abdicate in return for the throne of Elba and his family’s safety.”
Jake read on.
The reason of my ignorance appeared to be that the treaty had not as yet been signed by Lord Castlereagh on the part of England, on account of certain objections; and I therefore, as British Commissioner, had received no official intimation of its existence.
Certain objections.
The exact particulars of the treaty.
Yet even as Jake puzzled this, the words blurred before his eyes. The motion and the heat; the cyclical ticking of the engine; the dawn start. All conspired to sledgehammer him, and his eyelids slid downward irresistibly so that his recollections of the journey were forever woozy. The sun beat through the roof, mingling with the woodiness of Mo’s cigarettes and the thickness of his slumber to form dreams of sudden vividness. These were obliterated with each jolt, whereupon he would awake with a gasp at small sounds which were unexpectedly loud. Then Jenny nodded off too and her cheek drifted onto his shoulder.
Jake was instantly awake and he watched Gaza slip over her crown with a gentlemanly crick of the neck.
At noon they reached Rafah, on the Egyptian border. The car stopped in what resembled a haphazard archaeological dig: dozens of quarries set into the earth and shrouded with tarpaulins. These were the smuggling tunnels, built by entrepreneurs to service the needs of the blockaded territories. A steady stream of Arabs emerged bearing suitcases and microwaves.
Mo pointed at Jake and Jenny in turn. “Fifty dollars, fifty dollars.”
There was no time to argue – it wasn’t unknown for Israeli warplanes to bomb the tunnels, cutting these conveyor belts through the blockade. The entrance was manned by a lad in his twenties called Abdul. Muscular and boyish, a pudding basin haircut; a pleasing gap between his front teeth.
He touched his heart. “Salaam alaikum.”
The tunnel was a void in the earth up which a rope jerked as an electric motor rattled and whined. A boy with a sheep arose from the ground like a conjuror’s illusion and they replaced him on the platform. When Abdul whistled the machine went into reverse, passing them into the underworld.
“Sometimes, there is power cut!” said Mo cheerily. “And then …”
“I don’t want to know,” cut in Jenny.
“Welcome in Lower Gaza,” said Abdul when they reached the bottom. “I making this place.”
This tunnel was larger and
cruder than the last, left to private enterprise rather than the centralised clout of a would-be state. The sides were of rock and earth, the ceiling composed of wooden joists and ill-fitting slabs of cement. These tunnels collapsed frequently, even without the help of Israeli ordnance. Abdul led them past orange lights fed by bird’s nests of cables strung along the way. Palestinians passed with a curt nod, laden under foodstuffs and domestic appliances.
Abdul paused and held a hand to his ear. There was noise to Jake’s left.
“Drilling!” he said.
Abdul smiled.
“A regular rabbit warren,” murmured Jenny.
All the lights went off.
Five seconds passed in which all they could hear was breathing and the clank of far-off drills. The lights came back on with a ping.
“Power cut?” Jake began.
Mo silenced him with a hiss. The lights went off for another five seconds. Then on again. All drilling had ceased. As they were plunged into darkness for the third time the meaning dawned on Jake.
“This is meaning Israeli plane,” whispered Abdul. “When lights come on again, we running.”
Fear dissolved Jake’s stomach and energy squirmed in his calves.
The lights came on.
*
Running for one’s life is a surreal experience. The feeling your shins are about to fly off your knees. The detached appreciation that you must continue sprinting at full pelt for an indeterminate time. The thought this is actually happening. Jake stumbled on loose rock, ducked beneath a fallen beam, swerved around bundles of clothes and gas cylinders abandoned in the rush. Abdul was in the lead, followed by Jenny; Mo brought up the rear and he hacked and swore. He halted and spat out something black, leaning on the wall.
“Come on mate,” Jake panted. “Nearly there.”
Jenny and Abdul were diminishing ahead of them.
“Go,” Mo wheezed. “I follow.”
“I’m not leaving until you do.”
The space around them could cease to exist.
“Ok, ok.” Respect in Mo’s eyes for the first time. “I coming.”
Pain lanced through Jake’s abdomen as they ran and his stomach quivered with the threat of vomit.
Just keep going. Just keep going.
Nearing them fast: Abdul and Jenny, waiting on another platform and willing them on. Jake’s foot hit the metal and it lurched off the ground, swaying and bouncing up the shaft; drawn towards the daylight.
Jake stumbled into an identikit crater. Arabs were strewn across the ground like battle-weary soldiers. Temples were clasped; chests heaved. Cigarettes were lit. An open air market embraced the earthworks. Livestock and sacks of rice, toys and DVDs, soft drinks piled high. Refrigerators wrapped in cellophane formed a wall in the sand. High above them an Israeli fighter plane completed the final swoop of its reconnaissance and banked away north.
Hello, Egypt.
38
There were things in the pit that made Serval shudder. The rings of filth and salt on his skin, sordid and sticky to the touch. The effluent, which rose visibly at the height of the day. The trilobite-like creatures with transparent exoskeletons that wriggled into the mud when he trod on one. Meals consisted of a bucket of fermenting rice with a chunk of fruit bat to be picked over if they were lucky. Hundreds had defecated through the grille.
Serval had befriended the child at last – though he shied away from contact, it was possible to make him laugh. Bracknell was stoic, counting down the days until the SAS swooped; Suleiman awaited events with the unsurpassable patience of the Sierra Leonean people.
On the fourth day the bamboo opened.
“Cam si di.” Flat Cap lowered a rope. “A sho yu di chif.”
Come here. I will take you to the chief.
Serval took the line and sank his other hand into the side of the pit to claw himself up. The texture was slimy, fine as liver. There were shouts in the jungle – a half-naked woman was being dragged into the foliage by two men. One carried a mop, the other a baseball bat.
“What are they doing with her?” said Serval dangerously.
“Mekin dohn was?” said Flat Cap, his upper lip riding above his teeth in a filthy smile.
“Making her do washing,” Suleiman translated.
Serval managed an irritated smile. “I would respectfully ask that you to order your men not to hurt her.”
Flat Cap yelled something in Mende and their hoots of laughter echoed about the trees.
*
Jason Bourne squatted on a tatty armchair, a bullfrog on its throne. He still wore the rabbit hat – one ear had wilted – and what light penetrated the canopy pooled on his cheekbones, like moonlight reflected in water. A phalanx of juju warriors was arrayed around him, the wonky court of this despotic jungle fiefdom.
“Aw it di kaka yonder?” the warlord enquired politely.
The courtiers stifled giggles.
“How is it eating shit over there?” translated Suleiman.
Serval did not smile. “That child is going to die soon.”
Bourne nodded. “Smohl smohl.”
Little by little.
The explorer drew a single tapering breath. “Hell’s teeth, man, he’s a little boy. Keep us prisoner if you must. But set the child free.”
The warlord’s voice was scornful. “Una de tohk tumas.”
The man with no ears tittered nervously.
“You talk too much,” said Suleiman.
“First time I’ve heard that one,” said Serval. “What is it that you want, Mr Bourne? What’s your cause? Are you fighting for socialism? Your religion?”
“Noto buk wo dis.” A dismissive tone.
Not a book war, this.
“Do a deal with me,” said Serval. “Whatever the Americans are giving you, we’ll double it. All we ask is that you go back to Liberia. And stop other war-bands from coming into our country.”
Our country?
“Du yaa no wes me tehm,” said Bourne.
“Please don’t waste my time,” Suleiman translated.
“We’ll supply you with weapons too,” said Serval. “Your SBUs are armed with bows and arrows. Hardly befitting, is it? For a man of your reputation.”
Bourne’s lower lip glistened.
“We’ll train your men too,” Serval added. “You’ll be the most powerful boss-man in Liberia.”
Bourne looked thoughtful as he whispered into the non-ear of his underling.
“Supplies by air every month,” Serval pressed. “Ammunition and food. Coca Cola, American cigarettes. And as a show of good faith, two hundred thousand dollars. It’s on the other side of the river in new hundred dollar bills.”
“Yu sabi tokh to pohsin,” Bourne admitted.
“You know how to talk to a person,” said Suleiman.
“But yu go gi me bunya.”
But you must give me extra.
“An go an kam, an go an kam.”
You help me and I’ll help you.
Serval’s mind whizzed. “Good whisky from Scotland. Suits from London for yourself and your lieutenants.”
“Yu go ebul bruk mi klos?”
There was another stirring of laughter.
Will you also be able to launder my clothes?
Now Serval did smile. They were getting on, this was actually working.
“Oo, oo,” chuckled Bourne. “Bad no de.”
“Ok, ok. Not bad.”
“Only know this.” Serval’s back was very straight. “If you double-cross us, we’ll bomb you off the face of the earth.”
The warlord laughed again, a booming resonance taken up by his entourage.
“An go an kam,” he said.
You help me, I’ll help you.
“I do have a final condition,” said Serval.
Everything went quiet.
“The boy. Let him go.”
The response was startling. Bourne’s face changed from levity to dark and deadly anger and he ejected a stream of gu
ttural Mende. The clearing echoed with the snicket of Kalashnikovs being released from safety mode and a hubbub spread out through the camp like ripples in a pond.
“They say the boy is a witch,” whispered Suleiman.
“Seht yu moth!” Spittle on Bourne’s chin. “Lehf mi.”
Shut your mouth, leave me.
Serval’s audience was terminated and he was dragged off through the forest. He was half way back to the latrine when he saw the woman.
Her head had been bashed in.
It happened again: a visible pulse of anger, exploding in his vision like a solar bomb. And the next thing he was fighting. An elbow to No Ears’ jaw with a crack that felled him at once. Fingers into someone’s eyeballs, raking down, provoking a scream that filled Serval with the lust for more. A fist into a temple, a knee to the groin. Suddenly his hand was around Flat Cap’s neck, and he thrilled to the feel of it as he squeezed, constricting the vertebrae: he felt the grain of the bones as they ground in his grip. Kicks and punches assailed Serval, but the rage was in him and he wouldn’t release that soft throat, only crushing and compressing until he heard a satisfying click …
The fury subsided.
He had gone over the edge, like a man pushed beyond endurance by sexual pleasure. Resignation flooded through him and he let go of No Ears, sinking into oblivion as the Kalashnikov butts came cascading down.
When Serval awoke he was back in the latrine. Bracknell wound strips of shirt around his temple; Suleiman’s face was a series of marshmallows, puffy and engorged. The child looked on uncomprehendingly.
“They say …” Bracknell peered into Serval’s eyes, as if trying to spy the homunculus within.
“They say what, damn it?”
“They say that you killed a man.”
Jacob Serval digested this information. And he felt – nothing.
39
Tellingly, nobody would rent them a car to cross Sinai, so they were forced to buy one. It wasn’t long before Jenny spied a 2004 Mercedes C-Class – and after colourful negotiations the trader agreed to sell it for $3,000.