The Blood of Lambs: A Former Terrorist's Memoir of Death and Redemption (15 page)

But the Israelis, our leaders decided, had never seen us deploy a woman. To that point, the IDF had no reason to search beneath a woman’s
abbayah,
and would have been committing a gross and unpardonable violation of a Muslim woman if they had. So we began to train a few women to smuggle weapons and wear the martyr’s bomb. But privately, Abu Yousef let it be known that a woman was not a man’s equal. Though research had shown they could withstand mental pressure more steadfastly than men, their tolerance for physical pain was much lower.

“The woman, if she is captured by the Jews and tortured, will quickly confess,” Abu Yousef told me. And so, the game plan was that if we were captured and there was a woman in our unit, she was supposed to blow herself up. If she did not, our instructions were to shoot her in the head. Make her a martyr by murder.

Since the bus on the Coastal Road erased the evidence, it is impossible to say which was the case with Dalal Mughrabi. But I can say that the mission was not the first Fatah attempt to assault Israel by sea. In 1971, I was part of a two-boat assault team that targeted the Israeli port city of Haifa.

To qualify for the mission,
fedayeen
had to be good swimmers, and I
was one of the best. I had also trained on every weapon in the PLO arsenal. I volunteered to go. It had been seven years since my failed mission into Israel, and still I wanted to redeem myself by returning to the belly of the beast.

I did not meet Nizhar, our mission leader, until a month before the operation. I had just turned fourteen years old, my face still a boy’s face, a narrow strip of fuzz where a warrior’s moustache should have been. A tall man with a full mouth and dark eyes strangely flecked with crimson, Nizhar was not a Palestinian, but Lebanese like me. I noted with satisfaction that he had seen battle: one of his ears looked like it had been carved with a meat cleaver.

The plan was to board a fishing boat at the Lebanese city of Sidon, a busy merchant seaport. There were cities much closer to the Israeli border, but we had learned of two networks of spies, Shia and Christian, who lived on the border and profited by spilling secrets to the Jews. So we would begin farther north and sail south until we reached the Israeli coast. In addition to secrecy, the plan boasted boldness: no one would suspect an invasion originating at Sidon, a city too far north of the target to be a practical launching pad. Yet, there was nothing impractical about the haven of international waters. From well off the coast of Israel, we would launch from fishing boats in a pair of Zodiac rafts and motor by night into the Bay of Haifa.

It was near the end of summer. At Sabra, a dozen of us climbed into a convoy of trucks and Mercedes sedans. I sat in the right rear seat of a Mercedes, the motor idling, heat baking into the seats. Abu Yousef was there to say goodbye. Standing beside the car, he looked at me, his eyes a strange brew of sadness and pride. An odd look, the way I now imagine I will look when I send my own children away to college. Except that Abu Yousef was sending me away to die.

The chance that I might not come back from this mission was something like 95 percent. Nizhar had maps and telephone numbers, contacts in Israel in case we were trapped and needed refuge. But the greater likelihood was that we would be cornered in a shootout with the Israeli army, the police, or their intelligence force, the Mossad. For that possibility, each of us carried explosives on our belts.

Abu Yousef leaned close to the car window, wafting the scent of tobacco smoke. “Don’t trust anyone,” he said. “Stick to what you have learned. And if you are captured, use that thing on your belt.”

My heart wrestled with the fact that I might never see him again. Saying goodbye to him was much more difficult than saying goodbye to my real father the night before. I was forbidden from breathing a word about the mission, but I had told my family goodbye as if it would be the last time I would ever see them.

I was the youngest fighter on the mission. During the hour-long ride down narrow coastal roads, I talked with two of the other
fedayeen
who would ride in my Zodiac: Haroon, a handsome half-Palestinian and half-Lebanese with deep-set eyes that seemed always to simmer in anger, and Tahsein, a stout, bow-legged man who ran faster than anyone I had ever seen. Of the dozen
fedayeen
headed for Haifa, these two were the only men I knew well.

When we arrived in Sidon, the wharf teemed with people. Old men mending nets, selling block ice, selling bait and provisions. Young men painting boats, scraping hulls, muscling cargo up the gangplanks. Gulls wheeled over the water and dove for scraps. Over the whole scene, the smell of cut fish lay like a thick, unpleasant cloud. But behind the boats, I saw salvation: the azure sky melted seamlessly into the cobalt sea, which seemed to wink and smile at me. I looked forward to venturing out into the ocean’s embrace, beyond sight of land. The land was a place of pain and rejection, factions and friendship lost. But as it had since my father taught me to swim, the deep sea meant freedom.

Two hours later, we had rendezvoused with Lebanese fishermen who were sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, had boarded our boat, the
Tabarea
, and were headed out to sea. As the fishermen busied themselves on the deck, I stood at the bow and thrilled to the crisp salt scent and feathery fingers of ocean breeze playing through my hair. We had been underway only for about fifteen minutes when I saw a pod of porpoises begin to pace our path off to starboard. There were at least a dozen of them, and they leapt through the water, piercing it with their pointed snouts and popping up into the air again as if sewing stitches in the surface of the sea. Ahead and to our right, a broad shaft of sunlight cut down into the water like a blade, forming a window into the indigo
deep. In it, I saw a school of fish dart from our course in a flash of silver.

I laughed out loud and praised Allah. “Great are your works! See what you have made!”

Farther and farther, we cut through the open water, leaving the porpoises behind. The swells loomed larger, pitching the boat up and down like a carnival ride. By degrees, my joy faded as I felt the first hints of creeping nausea. I rushed to the port rail, sucked in a great gulp of cool air, and promptly vomited over the side. Behind me, I heard some of the fishermen yelp with laughter.

Night came. My stomach had surrendered all it had to offer, leaving me feeling woozy and green. I stayed on the deck. From below, I could hear Nizhar’s booming voice and the other men’s laughter at some battle story he was telling. I sat at the stern now, and as the air grew cooler, my nausea subsided enough for me to look around again. It was the time of the new moon, and the sky appeared as though a messenger of Allah had flung handfuls of jewels against black silk.

Another day passed. As the fishermen flung nets draped round with balls of cork to keep them afloat, Nizhar came to me on the deck, carrying two black duffels.

“Come, Kamal, let’s check our weapons,” he said. “After night falls, there will not be time.

He thrust a duffel into my arms. I unzipped it and pulled out a Russian 9 mm. Beside me, Haroon did the same. I could not help noticing the way his weapon lay in his thick hand, his hairy and thickly roped forearm disappearing into his sleeve. I was big and well-muscled for my age, but still retained the smooth, coltish limbs of a teenager. At that moment, a voice inside me whispered a hated reminder:
You are still only a boy.

5

The
Tabarea
arced south through international waters, motoring toward the fishing beds and ultimately our target. On the second evening, as I watched the red disk of the sun slip over the edge of the sea, nerves began needling my belly. The
fedayeen
didn’t talk much, but only slipped into our mission gear, hooded black wetsuits specialized for increased buoyancy.

As the horizon sucked the last light from the sky, Haroon and Tahsein found me at the bow again. “Kamal, help us with the rafts,” Tahsein said.

Many kilometers before, the captain had killed every light on the fishing vessel. In the gathering night, I followed the other men and found Nizhar at the stern where the fishermen had already begun inflating a pair of Zodiacs using gray-green air cylinders. When each raft was inflated, they pressed a skeleton of flat plastic into the bottom to make it rigid. We then lowered the rafts over the side with ropes. By the time all that was complete, the sky had dimmed to a gunmetal sheet, and a scatter of early stars glinted like glass.

I leaned on the port rail, looking back at the Zodiacs trailing in our wake. Soon Nizhar appeared at my side in his wetsuit, a dark shape against the sky. He stood awhile smoking in the silence. At intervals, the tip of his cigarette lit up like a comet.

“Do you know what to do when we reach the shore?” he said finally.

I knew we were to invade the Bay of Haifa. I knew that each of us carried an AK–47, two handguns, one 7 mm and one 9 mm, plus grenades and knives. Each boat carried a
doctoryov
, and each man on the team carried a unique weapon of his own, capable of greater destruction. Mine was a special type of launcher that lobbed 10 mm mortars.

“We are going to hit what the Americans call ‘targets of opportunity,’” Nizhar said. “That means that after we land, if we come upon a bus, we will attack it. If any passengers survive the initial assault, we may kill them or we may hold them hostage. You have to be ready to change and move at any time. You have to be flexible.”

I nodded my understanding. At Sabra, we had begun to learn more
about the value of threatening and killing civilians. I burned with envy when I heard of the victories of an elite group of
fedayeen
, Black September. Only a few months earlier, in September 1970, the group had hijacked three civilian airliners and held the passengers hostage for a week in Amman. Then the
fedayeen
set bombs on the jets, destroying them before the whole world. At Sabra, we celebrated madly, regretting only that the passengers had been removed before the explosions.

If we were to hijack a bus in Haifa, it would be for the specific purpose of killing civilians. We had seen the fear inspired by Black September and other terrorist groups in Germany. When you struck fear into the hearts of civilians, it turned out, they started screaming at the government to meet your demands. Do what they want! Make peace! Give them their land!

Hijacking a bus would not be as spectacular as taking airliners. But killing a couple of
Jewish
bus riders would be far superior in the currency of
jihad
.

I turned my face up into the briny wind and listened as the
Tabarea
sliced through the black water below. A thin curl of smoke from Nizhar’s cigarette slipped under my nose, then a great cloud as he exhaled. He flicked the glowing butt over the rail, and the wind snatched it away.

“What if we attack a bus and there are children riding on it?” he said, peering out into the cottony dark. “Would you be able to take care of them?”

Instantly, my mind was a movie screen filled with images of fleeing Muslim boys, terrified and screaming, of small limbs raining from the sky, of my friend’s rag doll form and lifeless eyes. Hatred like liquid fire surged up into my throat, pushing tears into my eyes so that the stars sprouted rays like tiny suns. I was glad for the darkness, glad Nizhar was not looking at me.

“Yes,” I said. The word was a gavel.

“Good. If you kill any of the offspring of the Jews, remember to tell the mother, ‘You have killed our children for generations and now you occupy our land. Today you are paying for what you have done.’ Also, if you kill children, try to let at least one mother live so that she can run screaming home to her village with the fear of Allah in her heart.”

“I will remember,” I said.

Nizhar then told me that if we made it past the coast, we would head inland and attack the police station. If that was successful, we would kidnap Haifa’s top official.

Now he turned to me with what seemed to be his final words: “You know this is a one-way mission?”

I paused for a moment, considering the sky. Off the port side of the fishing boat, night had taken hold and the stars had brightened, perhaps the last I would ever see.

“Yes,” I said.

The
Tabarea
captain choked off the boat’s engines, and we drifted to a stop. Minutes later, Zodiacs, loaded with six men each, sped east. In my raft, Nizhar sat at the bow with two other men behind him. I sat at the stern, with Tahsein to my right and Haroon to my left. The water was cool. The height of the swells surprised me, rising and falling like great oily beasts that dwarfed our tiny boat. I was also plunged into a new definition of darkness. I could not see the top of each swell; we had only flashlights fitted with blue bulbs, and we all took turns training slim beams on the water just ahead of the boat. But I knew we were scaling great walls of water because when we slid up one side, my back tipped and I was looking up at the stars. When we crested the top, the bow of the Zodiac pitched forward sharply and we slid down into what seemed to be a deep trough.

“Paddle! Paddle! Paddle!” Nizhar shouted above the crash of the water. “Keep the bow pointed straight east.”

Which way is east?
I thought frantically.

Cold seawater rolled up into the boat, sloshing into my lap, and suddenly—inexplicably—fear snatched my heart like talons. All at once, I was certain I was returning to the scene of a fatal accident, that this would be like the Golan Heights, and the Israelis would win again, killing everyone, including me. The imams were wrong; I was not a chosen warrior. My chance for redemption would drown in this ravenous sea, and my name would vanish like a breath.

Up and down we pitched. My nausea returned, and now with a fierce, swooning dizziness. I wished fervently that I could see the way ahead. Nizhar had told all of us to watch out for Israeli navy ships guarding the
coast. But how were we to watch for anything when we could not see past the monstrous waves that tossed the Zodiac like a toy?