The Blood of Lambs: A Former Terrorist's Memoir of Death and Redemption (12 page)

Soon we came to a clump of dry bushes that looked like any other in the thirsty land. The Syrians quickly swept them aside to reveal a mouth in the earth, a dark hole surrounded by gray rocks that reminded me of teeth. A bright yellow rope, staked at the tunnel entrance, led away into blackness.

Abu Yousef now appeared before us, and a hush descended over the young brothers. “This is what separates man from child,” he said. “What you do for Islam. What you do for your homeland. Today, you become men. Go with courage and for the glory of Allah!”

“Allahu akbar!”

Ahmed and Qaffin were to serve as our scouts and guides. They stepped into the tunnel first and I followed next. Holding the rope with my left hand, I reached out and touched the tunnel wall with my right. It felt cool, almost wet. The smell of dank soil filled my nose.

“Mohammed!” I whispered over my shoulder. “Do not let go of the rope!”

“I won’t,” he said.

“If you have to let go of the rope, find my bootlace and hang on to me,” I said. “If you stay with me, you will be safe.”

“Okay,” he said, sounding uncertain.

I looked back at the Syrians, at Abu Yousef and the other
fedayeen.
They would not be coming with us.

The first mission was simple,
I told myself.
We do not need Abu Yousef.

Still, disquiet bit at my insides. I could not define it because my child’s mind did not have words for what my belly knew. Later, though, I understood. Later, I saw that the adult
fedayeen
taught us a theory they themselves were not willing to practice. They wanted to liberate Palestine, but they did not want to die doing it, even for paradise, even for the seventy-two. They had jobs and children, lives, and much to lose. We were someone else’s children. Abu Yousef and his men poured their hate into our hearts in hopes we would do the work they could not fulfill.

11

We plunged into the tunnel, the sound of our footsteps swallowed up by the mud in the walls. Meter by meter, we edged away from the entrance, moving from gloom into blackness. We were able to walk upright for a time, but in some places had to lie down against the cool earth and wriggle forward through tight passages as if through the belly of a snake.

It seemed we had been crawling forever when I felt damp air blow across the back of my neck like the breath of a phantom. Chills quivered down my arms and a sensation of space opened up on my left. I switched on my flashlight and aimed it. Utter darkness yawned out of this new hole, beating back the weak beam. Mountain lions lived in these caves, didn’t they? My mind conjured a giant, fanged cat roaring out of the new passage and biting off my head. I stopped crawling and squeezed shut my eyes. My heart thudded against the tunnel floor. Now I knew the rope was my lifeline and I gripped it in my fist like treasure.

“Kamal!”

At Mohammed’s frantic whisper, I forced myself to swallow my terror. “Yes?”

“Are we almost there?”

“Yes, my brother. I think I see light up ahead.”

I did not see light. The tunnel seemed to me an eternal nightmare, but I did not want Mohammed to be as afraid as I was. I began to inch forward again, trying hard to focus on the best things that ever happened to me, the happiest things. The days that my father taught me special tricks for bending and squaring the metals in his shop. Playing seven stones with Eli. Breathing in my mother’s perfume when she hugged me. But those things seemed far away now, as if they had happened to someone else.

At last, I saw a tiny beam of daylight, and within a few more minutes we were climbing out of the tunnel, shimmying up its vertical ending using a second yellow rope. Squinting against the light, I emerged into a land of sandy soil and scrub. Qaffin stood alone at the top of a shallow gully, a slope that led gently down before rising again to a crest about a kilometer away.

“Ahmed has gone ahead with his compass,” Qaffin said. “We will wait for the others.”

A moment later, Mohammed appeared beside me, and I laughed. He was as dirty from the tunnel as a real Bedouin boy. One by one, all the young brothers climbed out and soon we were underway again, walking downhill, quiet now that we had crossed into enemy territory.

When we had gone half the distance through the gully, a strange buzzing seemed to tickle the edges of my hearing, almost as if I were imagining it.

“There, up ahead,” Qaffin said. “The rendezvous.”

Following his gaze, I could see a small flock of sheep about 50 meters away, all of them lying down at rest. But I did not see any of the
fedayeen
“shepherds” we were to meet. As we advanced, the buzzing grew louder, like a thousand electrical voices. And now I smelled a peculiar smell, one I knew but could not name.

At about 25 meters away, a flood of images came into focus at once:

Ahmed lying on the ground, the dirt under his head dark with blood.

Beyond him, the sheep. Not resting, but slaughtered. Blood from gaping round holes in their bellies drenched their wool.

Among the sheep, dead men torn nearly in half. Bleeding from wounds made with large-caliber weapons.

And green flies. Clouds and clouds of them, gorging on a feast of blood.

Qaffin whirled to face us, his face a mask of panic. “Retreat!” he screamed. “Go back! Go back!”

But it was too late.

From behind us came a high screaming whistle. Instantly, my brain turned to ice. My air passage shut down, and I stood rooted in place. A rocket slammed into the upslope of the gully and my world erupted into a gray storm of earth, smoke, and shrapnel. The blast wave blew my mouth open. Gravel flew at shrapnel velocity, embedding in my face and hands.

My legs dissolved into jelly and my knees knocked together. My bladder let go.

Now I was seeing in slow motion, frame by frame. A squadron of spinning shrapnel, black steel coils with teeth like a saw, screamed past my head and—
Phhhht! Phhhht! Phhhht!
—sliced into three boys behind me. They fell dead.

Terror tore through my chest. “Mama! Mama! Mama!” I cried, and my bowels let loose.

Behind me, children screamed and ran in wild circles like fleeing lambs. Concussive
booms
split the air as shells thundered down on our position. More shrapnel spun through the air like bedsprings. Smoke swirled around me.

“Mama! Mama!” I screamed.

I could not run. I could not even move. All around me, the lambs fled and I realized many were also crying for their mothers. In the stampede, Mohammed and I locked eyes.

“Kamal!” he cried, running to me, his face twisted in fear.

“Here, Mohammed! Come here!” I stretched out my arms to my friend, and he ran up to me and stopped. Then his shirt exploded. Some great force lifted him up and back, nearly folding him in half. His eyes snapped back and his mouth flew open, but he did not scream. Mohammed fell backward at the speed of the shrapnel and bounced once off the dirt.

“Mohammed!” I screamed. “I promised!”

In that moment, terror released its grip. My legs worked again, and I bent over my friend, hoisting him up over my shoulder, the way we had learned in camp to carry our wounded.

Mohammed. I’ve got to save Mohammed.

Shells exploded around me, sending up dirt volcanoes. Struggling under Mohammed’s weight, I stumbled through the firestorm back in the direction of the tunnel.

Suddenly, the shelling stopped. Now only bullets whistled past. Behind me, I heard the trammel of boots.

Israeli foot troops. Chasing us!

Ahead of me, a boy blew apart as a round pierced the TNT in his pack, turning him into a human bomb. Chunks of his body rained down around me. Mohammed’s legs bounced against my chest. His torso hung down my back, soaking my Bedouin disguise with blood.

A crackle of gunfire.
Pffft! Pffft! Pffft!
Israeli bullets meant for me pierced Mohammed’s body. Fresh terror peeled my eyes open wide as I searched frantically for the tunnel entrance. But I could not find it. My heart pounded in my ears. The boots were louder now. I could hear the soldiers calling out to each other in Hebrew.

I gave up on the tunnel and ran toward some mountains I knew to be on the Syrian side. Then I saw two rockets blaze over me from the west, toward Israel. The Syrians were engaging! The rifle fire behind me stopped, and I could hear the Israeli boots running in the other direction.

“Mohammed, hold on,” I whispered to my friend as I stumbled through the desert scrub. “I will take you home to your mother.”

Mohammed did not answer.

The instant I set foot in Syria, I spun my friend off my back and laid him on the ground. He felt as flat and limp as a doll made of rags. His face was grey, his
dish-dash
a shredded, scarlet mess.

“Mohammed, wake up!” I yelled into his face, my own tears streaming. “Wake up! I promised Salma!”

Mohammed only lay there, the whites of his eyes pointed up at the Syrian sky.

I thought that if I talked to Mohammed, he would somehow be jarred from his sleep. He would stand up and brush off his clothes and we would march home to tell the harrowing tale of how he had almost been killed by the Jews.

“Mohammed, speak to me!” I yelled into his face. “Wake up! I promised!”

The echo of rockets and machine guns subsided until the only thing I could hear was my own wails. Dimly, I became aware of Syrian soldiers gathering around me, reaching down to pull me away.

“He’s dead,” one of them said. “You cannot bring him back.”

“No! No!” I screamed, fighting off their hands.

He could not be dead. My worst nightmare could not be true: That the friend I was supposed to save had saved me instead, shielding my body with his own as I fled like a coward. I thought that maybe that was how hell would be: a black chaos that echoed with screams and a beast feeding on children who could not run fast enough.

Our band of
fedayeen
made the bloody trip home, and it was dark when we arrived back in Beirut. The news had traveled faster than we had, and women lined the streets, their screams of grief echoing off the buildings.

Mohammed’s body rode in a cart, along with other children who had been killed but not blown apart. I walked beside this cart all the way to Mohammed’s house. His mother stood on the street, waiting for me.

She looked down at me, the dark night a frame around her head, the moonlight picking out tears on her cheeks. “You promised,” she said.

My stomach rolled with shame, but I did not look away. “Yes, I promised.”

“He is in a better place,” she said. “He is before the throne of Allah.”

Then she put her fingers in her mouth and began screaming. Not a scream of grief, but of celebration. That her boy Mohammed had died a hero’s death, a martyr’s death, the death of
al-shaheed.
Her son was in paradise. Little by little, other mothers joined her screaming until the streets echoed with a chorus of keening, celebrating grief.

None of the mothers knew that we “brave” soldiers had dissolved
into little boys, crying for our mothers. They did not know that Qaffin ran for his life, leaving the children, slow and many carrying heavy packs, to be mowed down by the bloodthirsty Jews. Mohammed’s mother did not know that I had stood locked in place, peeing myself while her boy took the shrapnel.

No one knew of my cowardice. They saw me as a hero, rescuing my wounded friend, risking my own life to carry him back to his own country.

But I knew.

Kamal, the warrior prodigy, the future of Islam, had not even had the courage to pull a gun from my knapsack and shoot one bullet back. I loathed myself. Shame tore at my soul. I thought of hell again, the darkness, the screams. I did not know why the beast of the desert had taken my friend and left me. Maybe his belly was full.

12

For kilometers along the Mediterranean shore, the cliffs of Beirut kiss the sapphire sea. Before Golan, I went there often, sitting atop the cliffs looking out at my blue friend, my refuge, my freedom. After Golan, I sat up on those rocks many times thinking,
Why didn’t I die? Why did I live when Mohammed did not?

I gazed out at the sea where my father had taught me to swim, the sea that embraced me when my father would not. It would take only a running leap to balance the scales again.

This cliff is high enough to kill me,
I thought.
What would stop me from throwing myself off?

But I knew that would be a sin against Allah. Also, the imams had been filling my ears with a different song.

“Allah saved you!” they said to me in the mosque and in the camps. “You are chosen! He is saving you for a specific time to do glorious things!”

Slowly, the anguish of losing Mohammed hardened into anger, and the seed of hatred planted in me now bloomed into a dark vine, its flowers the color of blood. Over the next year, I went on to higher and more glorious training, learning weapons and tactics that would help me fight against specific enemies—the Russians, Germans, Israelis, and Americans. I yearned to fight again, half my heart committed to proving myself, the other half still hoping to die, as I should have there on the Syrian border.

Over and over, my mind replayed the moment when the shrapnel cut down Mohammed. His mouth snapping open, the burst of blood from his chest, the rag-doll way his body hit the ground. I could not put the image out of my brain. I could not escape the fantasy of flinging myself off the cliffs that ran between the city and the foamy rocks. Would not Allah’s plans succeed more perfectly without me?

Spring came, turning Beirut into a swirl of enchanting scents. The high sweetness of orange and lemon blossoms. The smooth cream of jasmine. Sharp notes of gardenia—my favorite because it was my mother’s favorite and reminded me of her. Sarri Habbal had gotten me a new job, this one at a
cadeau
, or gift shop. Sarri was a gigolo who wore tight pants, silky shirts (unbuttoned to show his hairy chest), and enough cologne to suffocate a tribe.