Prince of fire ga-5

by Daniel Silva

  “Khaled is a rumor. Khaled is a ghost story.”

  “I believe in Khaled,” she said. “Khaled keeps me awake at night.”

  “You have a hunch?”

  “A theory,” she said, “and some interesting evidence to support it. Would you like to hear it?”

  6

  TEL AVIV: MARCH 20

  They reconvened at ten that evening. The mood, Gabriel would recall later, was that of a university study group, too exhausted for serious enterprise but too anxious to part company. Dina, in order to add credence to her hypothesis, stood behind a small tabletop lectern. Yossi sat cross-legged on the floor, surrounded by his precious files from Research. Rimona, the only one in uniform, propped her sandaled feet on the back of Yossi’s empty chair. Yaakov sat next to Gabriel, his body still as granite.

  Dina switched off the lights and placed a photograph on the overhead projector. It showed a child, a young boy, with a beret on his head and a kaffiyeh draped over his shoulders. The boy was seated on the lap of a distraught older man: Yasir Arafat.

  “This is the last confirmed photograph of Khaled al-Khalifa,” Dina said. “The setting is Beirut, the year is 1979. The occasion is the funeral of his father, Sabri al-Khalifa. Within days of the funeral, Khaled vanished. He has never been seen again.”

  Yaakov stirred in the darkness. “I thought we were going to deal with reality,” he grumbled.

  “Let her finish,” snapped Rimona.

  Yaakov appealed his case to Gabriel, but Gabriel’s gaze was locked on the accusatory eyes of the child.

  “Let her finish,” he murmured.

  Dina removed the photograph of the child and dropped a new one in its place. Black and white and slightly out of focus, it showed a man on horseback with bandoliers across his chest. A pair of dark defiant eyes, barely visible through the small opening in his kaffiyeh, stared directly into the camera lens.

  “To understand Khaled,” Dina said, “one must first know his celebrated lineage. This man is Asad al-Khalifa, Khaled’s grandfather, and the story begins with him.”

  TURKISH-RULED PALESTINE: OCTOBER 1910

  He was born in the village of Beit Sayeed to a desperately poor fellah who had been cursed with seven daughters. He named his only son Asad: Lion. Doted on by his mother and sisters, cherished by his weak and aging father, Asad al-Khalifa was a lazy child who never learned to read or write and refused his father’s demand to memorize the Koran. Occasionally, when he wanted a bit of spending money, he would walk up the rutted track that led to the Jewish settlement of Petah Tikvah and work all day for a few piasters. The Jewish foreman was named Zev. “It’s Hebrew for wolf,” he told Asad. Zev spoke Arabic with a strange accent and always asked Asad questions about life in Beit Sayeed. Asad hated the Jews, as did everyone in Beit Sayeed, but the work wasn’t backbreaking, and he was happy to take Zev’s money.

  Petah Tikvah made an impression on the young Asad. How was it that the Zionists, newcomers to this land, had made so much progress when most of the Arabs were still living in squalor? After seeing the stone villas and clean streets of the Jewish settlement, Asad felt ashamed when he returned to Beit Sayeed. He wanted to live well, but he knew he would never become a rich and powerful man working for the Jew named Wolf. He stopped going to Petah Tikvah and devoted his time to thinking about a new career.

  One evening, while playing dice in the village coffeehouse, he heard an older man make a lewd remark about his sister. He walked over to the man’s table and calmly asked if he had heard the remark correctly. “You did indeed,” the man said. “And what’s more, the unfortunate girl has the face of a donkey.” With that the coffeehouse erupted into laughter. Asad, without another word, walked back to his table and resumed his game of dice. The next morning, the man who had insulted his sister was found in a nearby orchard with his throat slit and a shoe stuffed into his mouth, the ultimate Arab insult. A week later, when the man’s brother publicly vowed to avenge the death, he too was found in the orchard in the same state. After that, no one dared insult young Asad.

  The incident in the coffeehouse helped Asad find his calling. He used his newfound notoriety to recruit an army of bandits. He chose only men from his tribe and clan, knowing that they would never betray him. He wanted the ability to strike far from Beit Sayeed, so he stole a stable full of horses from the new rulers of Palestine, the British army. He wanted the ability to intimidate rivals, so he stole guns from the British as well. When his raids began they were like nothing Palestine had seen for generations. He and his band struck towns and villages from the Coastal Plain to the Galilee to the hills of Samaria and then vanished without a trace. His victims were mostly other Arabs, but occasionally he would raid a poorly defended Jewish settlement-and sometimes, if he was in the mood for Jewish blood, he would kidnap a Zionist and kill him with his long, curved knife.

  Asad al-Khalifa soon became a wealthy man. Unlike other successful Arab criminals, he did not draw attention to himself by flaunting his newfound riches. He wore the galabia and kaffiyeh of an ordinary fellah and spent most nights in his family’s mud-and-straw hut. To ensure his protection he spread money and loot among his clan. To the world outside Beit Sayeed, he appeared to be just an ordinary peasant, but inside the village he was now called Sheikh Asad.

  He would not remain a mere bandit and highwayman for long. Palestine was changing-and from the vantage point of the Arabs, not for the better. By the mid-1930s, the Yishuv, the Jewish population of Palestine, had reached nearly a half million, compared with approximately a million Arabs. The official emigration rate was sixty thousand per year, but Sheikh Asad had heard the actual rate was far higher than that. Even a poor boy with no formal schooling could see that the Arabs would be a minority in their own country. Palestine was like a tinder-dry forest. A single spark might set it ablaze.

  The spark occurred on April 15, 1936, when a gang of Arabs shot three Jews on the road east of Tulkarm. Members of the Jewish Irgun Bet retaliated by killing two Arabs not far from Beit Sayeed. Events spiraled rapidly out of control, culminating with an Arab rampage through the streets of Jaffa that left nine Jews dead. The Arab Revolt had begun.

  There had been periods of unrest in Palestine, times when Arab frustration would boil over into rioting and killing, but never had there been anything like the coordinated violence and unrest that swept the land that spring and summer of 1936. Jews all across Palestine became targets of Arab rage. Shops were looted, orchards uprooted, homes and settlements burned. Jews were murdered on buses and in cafes, even inside their own homes. In Jerusalem, the Arab leaders convened and demanded an end to all Jewish immigration and the immediate installation of an Arab-majority government.

  Sheikh Asad, though a thief, considered himself first and foremost a shabab, a young nationalist, and he saw the Arab Revolt as a chance to destroy the Jews once and for all. He immediately ceased all his criminal activities and transformed his gang of bandits into a jihaddiyya, a secret holy war fighting cell. He then unleashed a series of deadly attacks against Jewish and British targets in the Lydda district of central Palestine, using the same tactics of stealth and surprise he’d employed as a thief. He attacked the Jewish settlement of Petah Tikvah, where he’d worked as a boy, and killed Zev, his old boss, with a gunshot to the head. He also targeted the men he viewed as the worst traitors to the Arab cause, the effendis who had sold large tracts of land to the Zionists. Three such men he killed himself with his long, curved knife.

  Despite the secrecy surrounding his operations, the name Asad al-Khalifa was soon known to the men of the Arab Higher Council in Jerusalem. Haj Amin al-Husseini, the grand mufti and chairman of the council, wanted to meet this cunning Arab warrior who had shed so much Jewish blood in the Lydda district. Sheikh Asad traveled to Jerusalem disguised as a woman and met the red-bearded mufti in an apartment in the Old City, not far from the Al-Aksa mosque.

  “You are a great warrior, Sheikh Asad. Allah has given you great courage-the co
urage of a lion.”

  “I fight to serve God,” Sheikh Asad said, then quickly added: “And you, of course, Haj Amin.”

  Haj Amin smiled and stroked his neat red beard. “The Jews are united. That is their strength. We Arabs have never known unity. Family, clan, tribe-that is the Arab way. Many of our warlords, like you, Sheikh Asad, are former criminals, and I’m afraid many of them are using the Revolt as a means of enriching themselves. They’re raiding Arab villages and extorting tribute from the elders.”

  Sheikh Asad nodded. He had heard of such things. To ensure that he maintained the loyalty of the Arabs in the Lydda district, he had forbidden his men to steal. He’d gone so far as to lop off the hand of one of his own men for the crime of taking a chicken.

  “I fear that as the Revolt wears on,” Haj Amin continued, “our old divisions will begin to tear us apart. If our warlords act on their own, they will be mere arrows against the stone wall of the British army and the Jewish Haganah. But together”-Haj Amin joined his hands-“we can knock down their walls and liberate this sacred land from the infidels.”

  “What is it you want me to do, Haj Amin?”

  The grand mufti supplied Sheikh Asad with a list of targets in the Lydda district, and the sheikh’s men attacked them with ruthless efficiency: Jewish settlements, bridges and power lines, police outposts. Sheikh Asad soon became Haj Amin’s favorite warlord, and just as the grand mufti had predicted, other warlords grew envious of the accolades being heaped on the man from Beit Sayeed. One of them, a brigand from Nablus called Abu Fareed, decided to lay a trap. He dispatched an emissary to meet with a Jew from the Haganah. The emissary told the Jew that Sheikh Asad and his men would attack the Zionist settlement of Hadera in three nights’ time. As Sheikh Asad and his men approached Hadera that night, they were ambushed by Haganah and British forces and torn to pieces in a murderous cross fire.

  Sheikh Asad, badly wounded, managed to make his way on horseback across the border into Syria. He recuperated in a village on the Golan Heights and pieced together what had gone wrong at Hadera. Obviously, he had been betrayed by someone within the Arab camp, someone who had known when and where he was going to strike. He had two choices, to remain in Syria or return to the battlefield. He had no men and no weapons, and someone close to Haj Amin wanted him dead. Returning to Palestine to fight on was the courageous thing to do, but hardly the wise course of action. He remained in the Golan for a week longer, then he went to Damascus.

  The Arab Revolt was soon in tatters, torn from within, just as Haj Amin had predicted, by feuding and clan rivalries. By 1938 more Arabs were dying at the hands of the rebels than Jews, and by 1939 the situation had disintegrated into a tribal war for power and prestige among the warlords themselves. By May 1939, three years after it had begun, the great Arab Revolt was over.

  Wanted by the British and Haganah, Sheikh Asad decided to remain in Damascus. He bought a large apartment in the city center and married the daughter of another Palestinian exile. She bore him a son, whom he named Sabri. She became barren after that and gave him no more children. He considered divorcing her or taking another wife, but by 1947 his thoughts were occupied by things other than women and children.

  Once again Sheikh Asad was summoned by his old friend, Haj Amin. He too was living in exile. During the Second World War the mufti had thrown in his lot with Adolf Hitler. From his lavish palace in Berlin, the Islamic religious leader had served as a valuable Nazi propaganda tool, exhorting the Arab masses to support Nazi Germany and calling for the destruction of the Jews. An acquaintance of Adolf Eichmann, the architect of the Holocaust, the mufti had even planned to construct a gas chamber and crematoria in Palestine to exterminate the Jews there. As Berlin was falling, he boarded a Luftwaffe plane and flew to Switzerland. Refused entry, he went next to France. The French realized that he could be a valuable ally in the Middle East and granted him sanctuary, but by 1946, with pressure mounting to put the mufti on trial for war crimes, he was permitted to “escape” to Cairo. By the summer of 1947 the mufti was living in Alayh, a resort in the mountains of Lebanon, and it was there that he met his trusted warlord, Sheikh Asad.

  “You’ve heard the news from America?”

  Sheikh Asad nodded. The special session of the new world body called the United Nations had convened to take up the issue of the future of Palestine.

  “Clearly,” said the mufti, “we are going to be made to suffer for the crimes of Hitler. Our strategy for dealing with the United Nations will be a complete boycott of the proceedings. But if they decide to award one square inch of Palestine to the Jews, we must be prepared to fight. Which is why I need you, Sheikh Asad.”

  Sheikh Asad asked Haj Amin the same question he’d put to him eleven years earlier in Jerusalem. “What do you want me to do?”

  “Return to Palestine and prepare for the war that is surely coming. Raise your fighting force, draw up your battle plans. My cousin, Abdel-Kader, will be responsible for the Ramallah area and the hills east of Jerusalem. You will be in command of the central district: the Coastal Plain, Tel Aviv and Jaffa, and the Jerusalem Corridor.”

  “I’ll do it,” Sheikh Asad said, then he quickly added: “On one condition.”

  The grand mufti was taken aback. He knew that Sheikh Asad was a fierce and proud man, but no Arab ever dared to speak to him like that, especially a former fellah. Still, he smiled and asked the warlord to name his price.

  “Tell me the name of the man who betrayed me in Hadera.”

  Haj Amin hesitated, then answered truthfully. Sheikh Asad was more valuable to his cause than Abu Fareed.

  “Where is he?”

  That night Sheikh Asad traveled to Beirut and slit the throat of Abu Fareed. Then he returned to Damascus to bid farewell to his wife and son and see to their financial needs. A week later he was back in his old straw-and-mud cottage in Beit Sayeed.

  He spent the remaining months of 1947 raising his force and planning his strategy for the coming conflict. Frontal assaults against heavily defended Jewish population centers would prove futile, he concluded. Instead, he would strike the Jews where they were most vulnerable. Jewish settlements were scattered around Palestine and dependent on the roads for supplies. In many cases, such as the vital Jerusalem Corridor, those roads were dominated by Arab towns and villages. Sheikh Asad immediately understood the opportunity before him. He could strike soft targets with complete tactical surprise; then, when the engagement was over, his forces could melt into the sanctuaries of the villages. The settlements would slowly whither, and so too would the Jewish will to remain in Palestine.

  On November 29, the United Nations declared that British rule in Palestine would soon end. There were to be two states in Palestine, one Arab, the other Jewish. For the Jews, it was a night of celebration. The two-thousand-year-old dream of a state in the ancient home of the Jews had come true. For the Arabs, it was a night of bitter tears. Half of their ancestral home was to be given to the Jews. Sheikh Asad al-Khalifa spent that night planning his first strike. The following morning, his men attacked a bus as it made its way from Netanya to Jerusalem, killing five people. The battle for Palestine had begun.

  Throughout the winter of 1948, Sheikh Asad and the other Arab commanders turned the roads of central Palestine into a Jewish graveyard. Buses, taxis, and supply trucks were attacked, drivers and passengers massacred without mercy. As winter turned to spring, Haganah losses in men and materiel mounted at an alarming rate. During a two-week span in late March, Arab forces killed hundreds of the Haganah’s best fighters and destroyed the bulk of its fleet of armored vehicles. By the end of the month, the settlements of the Negev were cut off. More importantly, so too were the hundred thousand Jews of West Jerusalem. For the Jews, the situation was growing desperate. The Arabs had seized the initiative-and Sheikh Asad was almost single-handedly winning the war for Palestine.

  On the night of March 31, 1948, David Ben-Gurion, leader of the Yishuv, met in Tel Aviv with senior officers
of the Haganah and the elite Palmach strike force and ordered them to go on the offensive. The days of trying to protect vulnerable convoys against overwhelming odds were over, Ben-Gurion said. The entire Zionist enterprise faced imminent collapse unless the battle of the roads was won and the interior of the country secured. In order to achieve that goal, the conflict had to be taken to a new level of violence. The Arab villages that Sheikh Asad and the other warlords used as bases for their operations had to be conquered and destroyed-and if there was no other option, the inhabitants had to be expelled. The Haganah had already drawn up a master plan for just such an operation. It was called Tochnit Dalet: Plan D. Ben-Gurion ordered it to begin in two days with Operation Nachshon, an assault on the villages lining the besieged Jerusalem Corridor. “And one more thing,” he said to his commanders as the meeting adjourned. “Find Sheikh Asad as quickly as possible-and kill him.”

  The man chosen to hunt down Sheikh Asad, a young Palmach intelligence officer named Ari Shamron, knew that Sheikh Asad would not be easy to find. The warlord maintained no fixed military headquarters and was rumored to sleep in a different house each night. Shamron, though he had immigrated to Palestine from Poland in 1935, knew the Arab mind well. He knew that, to the Arabs, some things were more important than an independent Palestine. Somewhere during his rise to power, Sheikh Asad had surely made an enemy-and somewhere in Palestine was an Arab thirsting for revenge.

  It took Shamron ten days to find him, a man from Beit Sayeed who, many years earlier, had lost two of his brothers to Sheikh Asad over an insult in the village coffeehouse. Shamron offered the Arab a hundred Palestinian pounds if he would betray the whereabouts of the warlord. A week later, on a hillside near Beit Sayeed, they met for a second time. The Arab told Shamron where their common enemy could be found.