The Blood of Lambs: A Former Terrorist's Memoir of Death and Redemption (10 page)

A DShK round had blown off the back of his head.

Horror knotted my gut and I vomited, making a small brown pool in the dirt. Terror buzzed through my veins, and I burst into tears. But I had to crawl forward again because of the live fire. The
fedayeen
must not have seen Yahya die because they kept shouting and firing. I squeezed shut my eyes and dragged myself past his body, holding my breath to block out the coppery stench of his blood.

When I was a man’s length beyond Yahya, underneath the rattle of automatic fire, I heard someone behind me wretch. Still we had to keep moving. The finish line seemed a continent away, and I belly crawled at double speed, straining to reach the end as a sleeper strains to wake from a nightmare. Finally, I saw the end of the course, an escape hatch from the hellfire and the horror that was Yahya’s corpse.

As I crawled the last few meters, I scrubbed my face against my sleeves, not wanting anyone to see that I had cried. One by one, the trainees behind me reached the end, and when the last boy emerged from beneath the wire net, we ran together and told the leader about Yahya. When they pulled him out, his head was almost completely gone.

It was nearly full dark. Some
fedayeen
whisked Yahya’s body away, and the rest of us gathered around a campfire that someone had built near the edge of the woods. Even in its circle of warmth, I shivered as my friend’s death replayed itself in my mind over and over again.

Within a few minutes, a middle-aged man I had not seen before materialized to address us. He was wearing a suit and seemed to be some sort of doctor, yet without warmth. “You all are alive because you did the right thing,” he said matter-of-factly. “You did not take shortcuts. You found the mines and dug them up. On the other hand, Yahya did not do it correctly. He crawled over a mine. If you make the same mistake in the field, you will end up the same way.” Then the man in the suit turned and walked away.

4

Yahya’s death shocked me, but never once did I think of leaving Fatah. Perhaps this was because Abu Yousef and others mothered me for the next couple of weeks, praising my performance in the invasion training and telling me I was a warrior prodigy.

“You proved your worth that night, Kamal,” Abu Yousef said. “You have proven you deserve to be here, fighting for Palestine and for the glory of Allah.”

A false spring crept in, melting the edges of winter. My training at Sabra continued, but now when I drilled with rifles or climbed the ropes course, I heard rumblings among the
fedayeen.
Something about striking Israel. Always in these times, I overheard the word “Syria.”

One day in the hangar, I asked Abu Yousef about it. Leaning against the tripod for a crew-served machine gun, he touched the end of a cigarette with his lighter flame. “We are planning a mission into Palestine,” he said. Abu Yousef never called Israel “Israel.” To him it was Palestine, occupied by thieving dogs. “We must provide aid to our Palestinian brothers there so they can throw off the yoke of the Zionists.”

A mission!
It was the first time Abu Yousef had told me about a mission.

He pulled his cigarette from his lips and gazed down at it, rolling the filter tip between his forefinger and thumb. “Arafat is sending weapons into Palestine, and he wants us to help.” Then Abu Yousef looked up at me for a long moment as though weighing whether he should go on. At last he spoke. “I was thinking of asking you if you would like to go on this mission.”

My heart leapt.
I now know how to shoot! I know how to fight!
This was what I’d been waiting for. “Yes, Abu Yousef!” I said instantly. “I will do anything you ask me to do for Allah!”

Looking back on it, I wonder at the horror of a grown man asking a seven-year-old to run guns into a foreign country. But at that moment, I was completely on fire, overjoyed at my good fortune and my high place of honor. It turned out I was not the only boy selected for such a high honor. Early one morning a few days later, I reported to the hangar at Sabra to find about ten boys just like me, but I still felt happy to be included.

I was disappointed to learn that Abu Yousef would not be going with us. Instead, the mission would be led by a loudmouth named Abu Ali, a convert from Shia to Sunni whose fatigues drooped on his slight frame and whose hair wrapped itself around the sides of his prematurely bald head like a bird’s nest.

In the hangar, Abu Ali commanded us to fall into ranks, then paced back and forth in front of us with his chest puffed out. “I am in charge of this mission,” he proclaimed. “You will listen to me carefully and do exactly what I say at all times.”

He went on to explain the plan: We would ride in trucks into Syria where we would be given knapsacks and
dish-dashes,
the robes worn by Bedouins, in order to disguise ourselves as shepherd boys. The knapsacks would be loaded with weapons, some disassembled, magazines, TNT blocks, and hand grenades. Guided by Syrian collaborators, we would infiltrate Israel through tunnels dug under the Golan Heights, rendezvous with Palestinians also dressed as shepherds, and hand over the knapsacks.

When Abu Ali finished his explanation, he drew himself up impor
tantly. “We are going to deliver destruction to the Jews, to fight for the liberation of Palestine and the glory of Allah!”

“Allahu akbar!”
we shouted as one. “
Allahu akbar!”

Abu Ali marched us out of the hangar into the cool sun toward a pair of vegetable trucks, each with high sides of welded metal bars, lined with plywood to form a bed. When I saw Abu Ali climb into the cab of the truck on the right, I climbed into the back of the truck on the left. He reminded me of a drum, full of noise and air. I did not enjoy being around him.

A light furry mold lined the truck bed, the residue of a thousand loads of cucumbers, and it immediately coated my pants with ick. Slowly, we rumbled out of Sabra, southeast toward Syria. At the border, the highway ended abruptly, with only desert beyond. Guardhouses, flanked by military encampments, stood on both sides of the blunted road. The trucks slowed briefly, and I could see through cracks in the wooden sides when the Syrian border guards waved us through.

I could smell mountain air as we trundled slowly up into the Golan Heights. We rolled through barren desert, a vast, ascending hard-pack strewn with boulders, gravel, and sand, as if time existed only to grind the land down into its smallest parts. We chattered among ourselves, snacked on food we had brought with us, and listened to transistor radios that a couple of the boys had. The mood was light and cheerful, as though we were only on our way to camp.

I thought of the trip as my first chance to make my mark for Allah. To make Abdul Rahman and Abu Yousef proud of me. And maybe even my father.

Morning passed into afternoon, and finally, the trucks gurgled to a stop at the top of a shallow valley. Abu Ali appeared at the rear of our truck, his head covered in a black
keffiyeh,
and began pitching bundles at us. The
dish-dashes
.

“
Ya-ela! Ya-ela!
” he said, urging us to hurry and change. Abu Ali was always urging someone to hurry.

One by one, we jumped down from the vegetable trucks dressed as Bedouin boys. The air was crisp, the sky a hard blue. I stopped and looked out across the valley to the Israeli side. Excitement rippled
through my fingertips. I couldn’t see them now, but I knew our
fedayeen
brothers waited for us on the other side.

“
Ya-ela!
” Abu Ali snapped. Shuffling forward with the other boys, I began walking down the shallow slope. Soon a group of five men appeared, walking up toward us from the valley floor. Syrian Baathists. They all wore civilian clothes, their faces shielded with
keffiyeh
. Each man carried a pair of knapsacks made from thick, cream-colored canvas with strangely long straps that hung all the way to the ground.

Abu Ali walked briskly ahead, meeting the men a few yards ahead of us. Introducing himself, he told them officiously, “Here are the boys for the mission. I am in charge. You cannot do anything without my approval.”

One man, who seemed to be the leader of the Baathists, regarded Abu Ali with black eyes that appeared somewhat amused at his posturing. “Thank you for bringing the boys,” he said. “We will let you know when we need your instructions.”

Abu Ali was suddenly quiet. The Baathist leader pushed past him and stood before us, eyes twinkling. “I am Mezin,” he said. “You must be the brave young warriors Abu Yousef has been telling me about.”

Pride welled up in my chest.
“Allahu akbar!”
I said, and Mezin laughed.

I looked longingly at the knapsacks which I knew to be our cargo. Seeming to read my mind, Mezin motioned for the other Syrians to pass the knapsacks out to us. I took a moment to peek into mine. Inside were two handguns—one 9 mm and one 7 mm—a couple of TNT blocks already fused, and several AK–47 magazines. I cinched the sack closed and turned so that another boy could help me strap it on. The strange, long straps hung down into the dirt behind me.

“Ya-ela!” Abu Ali said. “Ya—”

Mezin silenced him with a look.

Soon enough, all the boys were ready and we began our descent, a single file line of “shepherd boys” carrying enough weapons to wipe out a village. We followed the Syrians as they led us down to a cluster of bushes, taller than men, that seemed to grow more closely together than others in the terrain. Like a magician, Mezin plucked one straight
out of the ground and set it aside. It was only camouflage, concealing the entrance to a tunnel.

Mezin turned to us. “You are doing a great service to occupied Palestine,” he announced. “When you return to Lebanon, you will be hailed as heroes.”

With that, the Syrians produced Russian military flashlights and handed one to each boy. Then, with two armed Syrians before us and two behind, we plunged into the long hole in the earth.

5

The tunnel felt wet and cold. The ground was smooth, as though the boots of many armies had passed through before. For most of the journey, we could stand upright and walk, but in some places, we had to hunch over like old men. Once, we had to get down and crawl with barely enough space for our knapsacks to squeeze through. Twice, I had to stop when my legs became tangled in the long straps.

We had only been underground for about fifteen minutes when I saw, up ahead, light streaming down and the dangling end of a knotted yellow rope. One by one, we climbed out, blinking like moles against the Israeli sun.

“This way,” one of the Syrians said, pointing down a gentle slope. Ahead, I saw grazing land and could smell dung, evidence that Bedouin herds had come through. We began walking, shuffling along through the weeds in our
dish-dashes
, the knapsack straps trailing the ground behind us. A cool headwind blew, and I caught the scent of earth, animals, and once, I thought, tobacco.

After about one kilometer, I started hearing sheep, and soon after that I saw a small group of Bedouin shepherds. As we drew closer, I counted five men standing with a large flock. One of them was the ugliest man I had ever seen.

He was tall with dark skin tinged with the reddish hue of burnt brick. His eyebrows ran across his forehead like black carpets. His nose was the size of a pyramid, and in the crevice between it and his face sat a fuzzy black mole.

“Welcome, young brothers,” he said around the cigarette that dangled from his mouth. As I stared at the man’s mole, he greeted the Syrians and exchanged a few words. Then he motioned for us boys to turn around so that he and the other shepherds could remove our knapsacks.

Now the reason for the long straps became apparent: Working quickly, the shepherds tied the knapsacks underneath the bellies of the sheep, then worked the animals’ long wool around with their fingers to conceal both the knapsacks and the canvas straps. Then, without another word, the shepherds began to shoo their flock west. They did not look back.

The return trip through the tunnel was uneventful, but when we arrived back on the Syrian side, Mezin greeted us with kisses as our Syrian guides fired their rifles in the air. “You are the children who will change the future!” he said.

That night, we slept in a Syrian military camp. News of our conquest sped ahead of us to Beirut so that when we arrived at Sabra, we were greeted as heroes. As the vegetable trucks rolled through the neighborhood toward the Fatah compound, a Palestinian woman stepped onto her front stoop, put her hands to her mouth, and sent up a victory yodel. As we drove past, I saw another woman step out and join her, and then another and another, until the street rang with a celebration of the kind I had only heard at a wedding.

My heart soared! I had done it. I had completed a mission. That day, I felt like James Bond. And that night, when my father heard what I had done, he pulled down from a closet a sword with our family crest on it, and danced in the streets.

6

Often, I knelt next to Abu Yousef during
al ashat
, the last evening prayer at the mosque. One night, after we said
amin
, he turned to me and it seemed I could see a new intensity in his eyes, a fiercer brightness. “Do you remember our victory before, on your first mission? Now we have a new mission, and it is coming very soon,” he said. “We need all the young brothers to meet at Sabra. This mission will last two days. Three if we have any issues.”

Across Beirut, the Muslim Brotherhood was organized into cells, with the young boys placed in cells in our own neighborhoods so that we would not have to travel far to meet. The leader of my cell was a man named Abu Ibrahim, a Palestinian
fida’i
who had set himself up in my neighborhood as a civilian. I remember that he seemed very old to me—in his forties, at least. Part of Abu Ibrahim’s job was to rally the young brothers, to get them fired up, as they say in America. Many times, I would help him by gathering the children to meet at his home for a dinner of mixed nuts and
shiska.