State of Attack (29 page)
Authors: Gary Haynes
The bright artificial light reflected off the white paint of the cinderblock walls. The cell smelled of a mixture of disinfectant and the body odour of the other countless unknown inmates. There was a 06:00 wakeup call, and lights went out at 21:00 sharp. No books were allowed, no TV, no conversations with fellow inmates at any time. It was an oddly monastic existence.
A guard appeared at the cell door. He was enormous, at least six-five. His hands, in particular, appeared outsized, each one looking as if they were able to span a pillow. The Somali guessed he’d had his navy blue prison officer’s uniform made especially for him.
“You got a visitor,” he said.
“I don’t get visitors,” the Somali replied, still lying on the cell bed.
“You got a visitor. He’s waiting.”
He threw his legs around onto the concrete floor.
“Get dressed.”
The prisoner put on his regulation orange jumpsuit before bending down to slip on a pair of canvas shoes, smiling inanely as he did so. “Why do I have to wear this?”
“Now let me guess,” the guard said. “If you escaped, which you won’t, but if you did, who do you think is going to pick up a fool like you and give you a ride to Mexico?”
The guard looked impassive as he waited for the cell door to open, via the secure remote control station. After the Somali exited the cell they walked to the special visitor’s room, through the blue cinderblock hallways, decorated only with signs warning inmates not to put their hands in their pockets. He wondered who his visitor might be. And then he remembered the man at the bungalow, the overweight guy who he guessed was CIA.
And if it was him, he had an agenda of his own to fulfil when the time was right.
“Abdul Lincoln Harrah,” Crane said, riding his chair. “Did your parents have a sense of humour?”
“How’s that?” Harrah asked.
“Lincoln. As in the president, who fought against racism and slavery.”
The Somali smirked. “You are not even close. My father drove a 1977 Lincoln Continental around Mogadishu. Loved it.”
“Sure he did,” Crane said.
The interview room was shabby. There were no windows, except for one in the door. It had reinforced glass, crisscrossed with wire, and looked as if it hadn’t been cleaned for weeks.
They were sitting on metal chairs at a metal table that was bolted to the floor. Perched above them on the wall was a single CCTV camera. The harsh fluorescent tube lighting flickered now and then. Two large, black prison guards were standing outside the door.
Crane had settled himself as best he could, but given his experience in Lebanon, he hated being in a prison. It was the sounds that did it, the clunking of heavy doors, the indecipherable shouts and barked orders, the high-pitched screams of those driven to the edge.
He’d already decided en route that he’d taunt Harrah a little more.
“Your mother still living the Somali dream?”
Instantly, Harrah stood up and leaned over the table towards Crane, resting his clenched fists on the metal. The guards had advised that he’d be shackled, both hands and feet. But Crane had insisted that he be unfettered. Due to his credentials, they’d relented.
“You keep my mother out of this,” he said, quietly. “Or they’ll come for you.”
His face was so close to Crane’s that he felt his breath. It was surprisingly fresh and smelled of mint.
The two prison guards rushed through the door and were on him in an instant, one arm each. They pulled him back down into the hard seat. Crane raised his hand, keeping calm. They retreated to the door. He leaned back again, forcing the chair onto its two back legs, and rocked back and forth.
“Now, my mother, God rest her soul, told me not to ride a chair. She said I’d break my neck one day,” he said. “But I never did take to people telling me how it would be.” He glared at the Somali. “And who’ll come for me, you skinny ghost?”
Harrah looked a little subdued.
“The freakin’ bogeyman?” Crane said. “I don’t need evidence to keep you here, boy. I don’t need nothing. At the very best, by the time you get out, you won’t even be able to take a leak without staining your pants. So start doing yourself some favours. You can’t wriggle out of stuff like this. It sticks to you like a goddamned leech.”
Crane took out a cellphone, with a green case, and put it on the table between them. He saw the flicker of recognition from the Somali. It was his, after all.
“Now you gotta big mouth, son. But I’d still have trouble shoving that chair you’re sat in down it, so cut the crap before I get real irritable. Just think compliant and we’ll get along. So here’s how it’s gonna be. When the time’s right you’ll make a call with your phone.”
“Who to?”
Crane took out a piece of paper with the cellphone number written on it, the number that Tom had taken from the Somali in Paris. Crane just hoped the Somali Tom had shot hadn’t been aware of the fact that Tom had taken a digital of it. Better still, the Somali would be a stiff in a Paris morgue. He slid the paper over to the Somali in front of him.
“You recognize that number?”
“I might.”
“Say you do or you’ll never see me again. Say it.”
“I do.”
“You say you’ve gone to ground because it’s getting heavy over here. You want to come back to Somalia. You want to meet up. You want to go on jihad again. Or maybe something else. I ain’t decided yet.”
“And if I don’t?”
“You can forget about ever getting intimate with ladies from Sierra Leone again. You can forget about getting intimate with anyone.”
But Crane hadn’t been honest with the Somali and for now he’d just keep him on ice. If and when he had to visit him again, the ground work had already been done, he figured.
“We will see,” Harrah said.
Crane stared at the Somali now. The man looked drawn and tired and ill. But he didn’t look scared, and that meant he knew something that he could trade. And that gave Crane just a flicker of hope.
Back at his office at Langley, Crane was in communication with a Mossad chief via a secure video link. It was Esther’s boss, David Steinman, who had annoyed her at the underground facility. Crane knew the man quite well and there was a degree of mutual respect and trust between them. He said that Esther had fresh intel. Ibrahim had come home, getting the Sunni jihadists very excited. Crane said that the man they’d discussed would be sent to Tel Aviv. He was now the only man in the Western intelligence community who could recognize Ibrahim.
He rang Tom next, who had just been to see his father in Quantico. But he’d only been allowed in for a few minutes and he’d been unconscious throughout, he said. Crane said that he wanted Tom to go to Tel Aviv and then on to Gaza to meet up with a Mossad operative there. He knew Tom knew why. It was a long shot, but he would be a potential spotter for an Israeli air strike and ground assault. That was the only option left open to them, given the slipperiness of the terrorist.
“If you want me to go, I’ll go,” Tom said.
“Okay, Tom.”
But Crane knew that in reality it might take years to find him, and by then it would be too late. They still hadn’t been able to take out the master bomb maker in Yemen, who was training a new breed of suicide bombers, and they’d been after him for five years or more.
It was agreed that Lester couldn’t go with Tom. There was no way he could blend in over there and he didn’t speak Arabic, which meant he’d be a danger to himself and the mission. Tom would fly on the private jet to Tel Aviv in the next hour.
Three hours later, Crane got a call that he’d been expecting but had not wanted to hear. It was from Quantico, a surgeon commander.
“It’s bad news, I’m afraid.”
“ Let’s have it.”
“General Dupont died twenty minutes ago. Cardiac arrest. I’m sorry. Do you know his son’s number?”
“I do. Thanks, doc. I’ll tell him.”
“We did all we could.”
Crane sat back in his chair, riding it. It was a helluva blow. The man who’d saved his life had died, and he’d been deprived of seeing his son one last time before he had. He rubbed his eyes, felt nauseous. He should ring Tom, but that could cause a psychological shock to his system that would leave him even more vulnerable than he already was. But he had a right to know. There was no getting away from that.
He knew Tom was already being flown over the Atlantic. He clenched his jaw and dialled the number of the secure satphone.
“Tom, there’s no easy way of saying this nicely. Your father died of a heart attack some minutes ago.”
He heard Tom make a noise that sounded like a mixture of a sigh and a moan. Then he said, “Right.”
“You okay to continue?”
“Yeah.”
“And if you can, get that sonofabitch. You hear me?” Crane said.
“I hear ya.”
Crane felt numb. He’d wanted to say more, but he couldn’t find the words. What did you say to a man you liked and respected, whose father had just died and who you’d ordered on a near hopeless and highly dangerous mission to a place he’d never been before? he thought.
Tom had arrived in Tel Aviv after a fourteen-hour flight. He’d spent the time reading information on Gaza in the CIA World Factbook on a tablet, and other informative notes that Crane had arranged to be emailed to him. He’d decided that he would have to grieve for his father when he returned to the States. He’d felt empty, but had managed to find strength in that emptiness, a form of single mindedness and stoicism that had verged on an obsession: see Ibrahim killed.
He’d been driven in a civilian SUV by two young men wearing jeans and aviator shades to a military installation imbedded into a rocky hill overlooking the coastal city in central-western Israel. He’d been taken by the Mossad to a secure briefing room. It was forty foot square, with steel-lined walls, and doglegged to a short concrete corridor and the entrance.
He’d been shown a photo of Esther, who’d only been referred to by her Arabic name of Sanaa, dressed in her hijab, and had been told he could carry a weapon in Gaza. When he’d been asked what he’d preferred, he’d said a SIG Sauer P229 chambered in 9mm. He’d been shown maps of the Gaza Strip and relevant satellite imagery. He’d been told it was just twenty-five miles long and seven and a half miles at its widest point. Nearly two million Palestinians lived there, which made it one of the most densely populated areas on earth. For a Westerner, it was also one of the most dangerous places on earth.
He’d asked how he would contact Sanaa and had been told that she’d contact him. Israel’s border with Gaza was over thirty-one miles long, controlled by the Israelis, and the problem, he’d been told, wouldn’t be getting in, but getting out.
Ten hours later, after three further briefings, he’d been transported in a white helicopter, without IDF markings, fifty miles down the Mediterranean shoreline to just beyond the northern edge of the Gaza Strip. From there an SUV had driven him west and then south to the semi-desert region of the Negev, whereupon he’d waited until dark and had passed over into the Gaza Strip via an unlocked gate at an entry point for Israel tanks along the patrolled fence. He’d been met on the other side by a Palestinian asset of the Mossad and they had trekked through sandy scrubland the short distance to the western outskirts of Gaza City.
Now, in a dark street, flanked by makeshift carports and closed retail stores, the asset pointed to a red Toyota saloon car, with rusted wheel arches and a dusty rear windshield.
With two days’ dark growth on his face, a black T-shirt on his back and sneakers on his feet, Tom walked over to the car, seeing the outline of a woman in a hijab in the driver’s seat. Sanaa, he knew.
As he got to it he opened the front passenger door. She didn’t flinch in the dome light and he guessed she’d seen him coming up from behind in the rearview. He sat in but she didn’t turn to face him. Instead, she fired up the car and drove off.
He could see even in profile that her photograph didn’t do her justice. Her skin was flawless, the corners of her eyes as white as alabaster, her nose exquisitely aquiline, her mouth full. He smelt a faint waft of coconut which he guessed came from a cream she used for her skin, or a shampoo for her hair.
After twenty seconds or so, she began to speak in Arabic, testing him, he knew. She asked him about the district of Nasser in the north-west, and he said it was built in the 1950s and named after a former Egyptian president, Gamal Abdel Nasser. She asked him what district was to the north of the Old City, and he said Sheikh Radwan, whose tomb was located within the district. Along the southern coast of the city is the neighbourhood of Sheikh Ijli, he added, without being asked. She said that his Arabic was good, but his accent would mark him out instantly, so it would be best if he was ever asked about it, he should say that he’d left Gaza twenty years ago to work in Cairo, but had returned before the Rafah Crossing had been sealed off.
Ten minutes later Sanaa stopped outside a two-storey sandstone house on a street without lighting. As she turned off the engine, she said, “I’ll cook you a meal.”
But to Tom it sounded like an invitation to a last supper.
Esther, now only to be known as Sanaa, had cooked Tom a meal called
zibdiyit gambari
, which meant “shrimps in a clay pot”, with a dessert of pomegranates and sour plums. They’d eaten it at a small table in her kitchen, which had pots hanging on nails driven into the blue walls, and a copy of the Holy Qur’an on a wooden shelf. Afterwards she’d made him coffee.
“So you are the only man alive not close to the jihadist who can identify him?”
“I guess,” Tom said.
He couldn’t help himself from looking into her eyes, which were deep and brown and intoxicating. The artificial light, coming from two gas lamps, brought flecks of gold to the corners of her eyes, and he couldn’t remember seeing a woman as physically beautiful as her.
“He will have taken on a new disguise now,” she said, “thanks to the incompetence of the French.”
She asked Tom to describe the man he’d seen and he did so.