Legends (14 page)
“When one of our own turns her back on faith,” the imam murmured he appeared to be talking to himself “it is a mortal sin, punishable by execution.”
By midnight the cold gusts that swept down from the Golan Heights most nights of the year had picked up, drowning out the sound of the helicopters coming in high and fast and plummeting toward the ground like shot birds to land at strategic points around the Hezbollah camp. The roadblock at the spot where the Beirut highway curved up hill to the village and the camp was overrun without a shot being fired. The fedayeen noticed that the men coming toward them were wearing kafiyyahs and made the fatal mistake of taking them for Arabs. “Assalamu aleikum,” one of the men in kafiyyahs called out; a sentry at the roadblock called back, ” Wa aleikum salam.” It was the last word he uttered. In the bunker on top of the hill above the quarry, the fedayeen started firing their heavy machine gun into the darkness when they caught sight of figures sprinting up the slope; the attackers, equipped with night vision goggles, didn’t return fire until they were close enough to lob stun grenades over the bunker’s sandbags. Other teams from the helicopters, their faces blackened with charcoal, raced through the village to attack the two low buildings that served as the camp’s dormitory. Most of the apprentice bombers, as well as the staffers and the visiting fedayeen, were gunned down as they tried to flee through the doors and the windows. Explosive charges planted against the small brick building blew away the Hezbollah flag on the roof and set off a string of smaller explosions as the wooden boxes filled with ammunition caught fire.
Dante, crouching inside the door of his room, heard the two guards outside hollering into a walkie-talkie for instructions. When there was no response they both raced off in the direction of the imam’s house behind the mosque, only to be killed by one of the Israeli teams blocking the narrow streets. The first casualties for the raiders came when several of them burst through the back door into Dr. al-Karim’s office: One of the imam’s personal guards walked toward them with his hands raised over his head and then blew himself up, killing two of the attackers and wounding two more. The other raiders, streaming through doors and windows, stormed through the house, killing the bodyguards and servants and one of the imam’s wives and two of his teenage sons as they dashed from room to room. They found Dr. al-Karim hiding in an armoir on the top floor as his second wife and two other children cowered in a nearby bathroom fitted with gold-plated faucets on the sink and the bathtub. The imam was handcuffed and blindfolded and hauled through the streets toward one of the waiting helicopters.
When the sound of gunfire subsided, Dante knotted Djamillah’s white silk bandanna around his neck and darted from the house in the direction of the water well between the village and the Hezbollah camp. Turning the corner of a narrow street, he was suddenly caught in a cross fire between some fedayeen who had taken cover on the ground floor of the school and the attackers crouching behind a low wall across the street. Dante dove behind a pickup truck as the fedayeen started firing rifle grenades. One of them exploded next to the pickup and Dante felt the tingling prick of hot shrapnel in his lower back. The sound of gunfire seemed to grow more distant as he lay on the road, staring up at the dull white stain stretching across the night sky while he waited for the pain that always trailed after the tearing of skin. Slightly delirious, he was trying to focus on the Milky Way in order to identify the star that represented the deified soul of the Alawite prostitute, Djamillah, when it finally arrived: a searing stitch of pain shot up his spinal column and he blacked out.
Dante woke to the blinding whiteness of a hospital room. Sunlight streamed through two windows and he felt its warmth on his shoulders above the bandages. He turned his head away from the sunlight and discovered Crystal Quest sitting on the next bed, munching crushed ice as she worked on a crossword puzzle. Benny Sapir, the Mossad spymaster who had briefed him in Washington, watched from the foot of the bed.
“Where the hell am I, Fred?” Dante asked weakly.
“He’s come back to life,” Benny observed.
“About time,” Quest growled; she didn’t want Dante to take her presence there as a manifestation of softness. “I have other things to do in life besides holding his hand. Hey, Dante, being Irish, you ought to know this one: Joyce’s “Silence, exile, and…” Seven letters, starts with a ‘c.””
“Cunning. That was Stephen Dedalus’s strategy for survival in Portrait of an Artist.”
“Cunning. Ha! It fits perfectly.” Fred peered over the top of the newspaper, her bloodshot eyes focusing on the wounded agent. “You’re in Haifa, Dante, in an Israeli hospital. The doctors had to pry some metal out of your lower back. The bad news is you’ll wind up with a disagreeable cavity and a gimpy left leg, the result of a compressed nerve. The good news is there will be no major infirmities, and you’ll be able to tuck a pistol behind your back without it producing a bulge in your clothing.”
“Did you capture the imam?”
“We collared the guy who was masquerading as an imam. A direct descendant of the Prophet my ass! I suppose it won’t hurt if you fill him in,” she told Benny.
“Izzat Al-Karim was a pseudonym. Your imam’s real name was Aown Kikodze; he was the only son of an Afghan father and his third wife, a teenage Kazakh girl who won a local beauty contest in Alma-Ata. Kikodze studied dentistry in Alma-Ata and was working as a dentist’s assistant there in the early 1980s when he made hegira to Mecca, where he was discovered by Iranian talent scouts and recruited into Hezbollah. We first noticed him when he opened a mosque above a warehouse in southern Lebanon and began preaching some malarkey about the near enemy and the far enemy nobody could make heads or tails out of what he was saying, but it came across like the Islamic version of what you Americans call fire and brimstone and he made a name for himself. Next thing you know he was sporting the black turban of a sayyid and running a Hezbollah training base. Even as we speak, my colleagues are trying to talk him into helping them with their inquiries into Hezbollah activities in the Bekaa.”
“I suspect they’ll succeed,” Fred said. “The Israelis are at war, Dante, so they don’t have weak-kneed civil libertarians breathing down their necks the way we do. If he’s still compos mentis when they finish with him, we get to get sloppy seconds.”
Dante turned on Benny. “Why didn’t you tell me all this when you briefed me in Washington?”
“If you’d been caught, you’d have talked. We didn’t want the putative imam to know we knew he was putative.”
“Yeah, well, we lost Djamillah,” Dante said bitterly.
Crystal Quest slid off the bed and approached Dante. “The Levant is full of girls named Djamillah. Which one are you talking about?”
“The Djamillah in Beirut, for God’s sake, the Alawite who was posing as a prostitute. They executed her six hours before the helicopters arrived. I’ll lay odds you don’t want to hear how.”
Fred snorted. “Oh, that Djamillah! Jesus, Dante, for someone in your line of work you can be awfully naive. “Djamillah’ was a legend. Her real name was Zineb. She wasn’t posing as a prostitute; she was working as a prostitute in Dubai when she was recruited. And she wasn’t an Alawite, she was an Iraqi Sunni. Thanks to some fancy footwork on our part, she believed she would be working for Saddam Hussein’s Mukhabarat. There was an elegant logic to this false flag pitch, if I do say so myself: Saddam detests the Shiites and their Iranian mentors, and by extension, he loathes Hezbollah, which is a Shiite client of the Iranian mullahs.”
| Dante could hear Djamillah’s voice in his ear. You are one lousy lover, Irish. “Whoever she was, she tried to save me when she could have used what she knew to save herself.” He noticed the square of white silk hanging from a hook on the back of the door. “Do me a favor, bring me the bandanna, Fred.”
Crystal Quest retrieved the square of silk and folded it into Dante’s hand. “It’s a hell of a memento,” Benny said from the end of the bed. “You owe your life to that bandanna. When you didn’t turn up at the well, our raiding party decided to write you off. One of the teams taking a last look around the camp reported seeing a man lying next to a pickup wearing a white bandanna. It saved your life.”
“My Dante Pippen cover must be blown.”
“That’s the least of our problems,” Fred said with a titter. “One thing we have an endless supply of in Langley is legends. We’ll work up a brand new one for you when you’re back on your feet.”
Benny said, “Thanks to you, Dante, the operation was a great success.”
“It was a crying shame,” Dante said with sudden vehemence, and he meant it literally.
1997: MARTIN ODUM DISCOVERS THAT UiMtt IS A YIDDISH WORD
LULLED BY THE DRONE OF THE JET ENGINES, MARTIN HIS RIGHT leg jutting into the aisle, his left knee jammed into the back of the seat in front of him had dozed off halfway through the flight and had missed the sight of the coastal shoal of Israel unrolling like a fulgent carpet under the wing of the plane. The wheels grinding out of their bays woke him with a start. He glanced at Stella, who was sound asleep in the seat next him.
He touched her shoulder. “We’re almost there.”
She nodded gloomily; the closer she got to Israel, the less sure she was about tracking down her sister’s runaway husband. What if she caught up with him? What then?
As a matter of simple tradecraft, they had come to Israel using different routes: She had taken a flight to London and gone by train to Paris and then flown on to Athens to catch the 2 A.M. flight to Tel Aviv: He had flown New York-Rome and spent several hours getting lost in crowds around the Colosseum before boarding a train to Venice and an overnight car ferry to Patras, where he caught a bus to Athens airport and then the plane to Israel. Martin, queuing behind Stella, had winked at the woman behind the counter and asked for a seat next to the good looking girl who had just checked in.
“Do you know her?” the woman had asked.
“No, but I’d like to,” he’d replied.
The woman had laughed. “You guys never give up, do you?”
Landing at Ben-Gurion Airport in a light drizzle, the plane taxied to the holding area and the captain, speaking in English over the inter com, ordered the passengers to remain seated for security reasons. Two lean young men, their shirttails hanging loose to hide the handguns tucked into their belts, strolled down the aisle, checking identity photos in passports against faces. One of the young men, wearing opaque sunglasses, reached Martin’s row.
“Passports,” he snapped.
Stella produced hers from the side pocket of the hand bag under the seat. Martin pulled his from the breast pocket inside his vest and handed both of them to the security agent. He riffled through the pages with his thumb. Returning to the page with Martin’s photograph, he looked over the top of the passport at Martin. “Are you traveling together?”
They both said “No” at the same time.
The young man pocketed the two passports. “Come with me,” he ordered. He stepped aside so that Martin could retrieve his valise from the overhead rack. Then he shepherded Stella and Martin down the aisle ahead of him. The other passengers gaped at the man and woman being hustled from the plane, trying to figure out whether they were celebrities or terrorists.
An olive-green Suzuki with a thick plastic partition between the front and rear seats was waiting on the damp tarmac at the bottom of the portable stairs and Martin and Stella were motioned into the backseat. Martin could hear the locks in the back doors click shut as he settled down for what turned out to be a short ride. Stella started to say something but he cut her off with a twitch of his finger, indicating that the automobile could be bugged. Seeing her nervousness, he offered her a smile of encouragement.
The first shadows of first light were starting to graze the tarmac and fields to the east of the airport as the car made its way to a distant hangar on the far side of the main runway and parked next to a metal staircase that led to a green door high in the hangar. The locks on the back doors of the Suzuki clicked open and the driver pointed with his chin toward the staircase.
“I suppose they mean for us to go up there,” Stella ventured.
“Uh-huh,” Martin agreed.
Favoring his game leg, he led the way up the long flight of steps. At the top he tugged open the heavy gunmetal door and, holding it for Stella, followed her into an immense loft with a remarkably low ceiling. Sitting at desks scattered around the loft were twenty or so people working at computer terminals; despite the “Positively No Admittance” sign on the outside of the door, none of them looked up when the two visitors appeared. Female soldiers in khaki shirts and khaki miniskirts steered carts through the room, picking up and distributing computer disks. A man with a gray crew cut appeared from behind a heavy curtain that served to partition off a corner of the loft. He was dressed in a suit and tie (rare for an Israeli) and wore a government-issue smile on his very tanned face.
“Look what the cat dragged in. If it isn’t Dante Pippin in the flesh.”
“Didn’t know that Shabak mandarins got up before the sun,” Martin ventured.
The smile vanished from the Israelis face. “Shabak mandarins never sleep, Dante. That’s something you used to know.” He glanced at Stella, who was peeling away the rubber bands on the braid dangling down her spine so that her hair, damp from the light rain, would dry without curling. “Step out of character,” the Shabak mandarin said to Martin, all the while taking in his companion’s thin figure in tailored trousers and running shoes, “be a gentleman and introduce us.”
“His name used to be Asher,” Martin informed Stella. “Chances are he’s recycled himself by now. When our paths crossed he was a gumshoe for the Shabak, which is short for Sherut ha-Bitachon ha-K’lali. Is my pronunciation in the ball park, Asher? The Shabak is the nearest thing Israel has to an FBI.” Martin grinned at the Israeli. “I haven’t the foggiest idea who she is.”
The Israeli spread his hands wide. “I didn’t come down with the first snowfall, Dante.”