THE WAVE: A John Decker Thriller (7 page)

* * *

El Aqrab remembered the day that he had taken on the street name El Aqrab – the little creature of the spider, the scorpion. An Israeli commando unit had infiltrated across the Green Line to kill a particular Harakat al-Mahrumin commander. It was a sunny morning and, typical of the arrogant Zionists, they’d mounted their mission in broad daylight. After assassinating the commander in his bed, the 101 commando team was traveling back by jeep, east of the Green Line, just past the Military Hospital near the Arab University, when, without warning, they came upon two teenagers wandering across the road – Ibrahim and Jamal ben Saad. Ibrahim saw the jeep barreling down on them and pushed his older brother to the side. Just then, a rocket-propelled grenade exploded underneath the vehicle. The jeep tipped over, spilling the commandos onto the street. Two of the five Zionists were killed immediately, their bodies crushed and torn to pieces. The other three wormed their way along the street, taking heavy fire from an adjacent building and a vacant lot. Ibrahim and Jamal ben Saad were both caught in the crossfire. They threw themselves to the ground, uncertain of which way to turn. They watched as yet another of the commandos took a bullet in his chest. He somersaulted backwards, opening like a pomegranate. Then, as if from nowhere, out of a cloud of smoke, Mohammed Hussein appeared.

He walked along the smoke-filled street nonchalantly, as if he were out to buy the morning paper, his Kalashnikov stuttering in his hands. Another commando burst apart and Hussein went down, his weapon spinning like a top across the street.

Ibrahim and Jamal couldn’t stand it any longer. The noise. The blood. The concussion of explosions. They leapt to their feet, completely terrified, and fled. The remaining Zionist rolled to one knee, took aim, and was about to shoot them in the back when Hussein sprang up, like a scorpion, and shot three rounds – before anyone could even breathe – into the last commando’s chest. The commando looked down at his shirtfront. He pulled at the material, revealing the broken bloody ribcage underneath. A stream of blood began to fountain from his mouth. Hussein walked up to him and kicked him in the face, and he went flying backwards into the blazing jeep. His hair and clothes caught fire. He wriggled for a moment longer as he burned, and then was still.

The firefight was over. It had taken less than ninety seconds from the initial blast. Ibrahim and Jamal ben Saad stood speechless. They looked about each other at the carnage, the shattered corpses of the 101 commando unit, at the bloody smiling face of Mohammed Hussein, and began to laugh hysterically. Hussein stepped up and ushered them away. It didn’t pay to linger after a firefight. You never knew.

In the shadows, outside a tiny electronics store, as Hussein cleaned and reloaded his Kalashnikov, they introduced themselves to one another. Hussein had heard of the ben Saads. Everyone knew the wealthy business mogul, Hanid ben Saad. He was a legend in Beirut. And within half an hour they had made their way to the ben Saad villa not far from the Palais de Justice.

Hussein was overwhelmed by what he saw. He lived in the ‘Ayn ar Rummanah neighborhood with three other Harakat al-Mahrumin guerrillas. His entire apartment could have fit inside the foyer of the ben Saad villa. Although it wasn’t situated on the gold coast where most of Beirut’s largest mansions loomed, it was impressive nonetheless. The two boys told him to sit down and wait, and then rushed off to find their father. He was in his study, just down the hall.

Still pulsing with adrenaline, Hussein was unable to sit down. Instead, he paced about the room, examining the hand-made European furniture, the Turkish carpets, the paintings of distant pastoral scenes, wheat fields and orchards, seascapes spattered with sails. After a few minutes, his curiosity got the better of him and he wandered down the hall. He passed a giant mirror on the wall, set in an ornate gilded wooden frame, and stopped to examine himself. In his ragged jeans and blood-soaked shirt, in his tattered veil, he had never felt so out of place. Not even his trusty Kalashnikov could make him feel at ease or secure in these strange opulent surroundings. He took another step and peeked between the doorframe and the door where the boys had disappeared.

Inside, he could see the boy named Ibrahim with an old man dressed in a Western suit. The old man stood behind a desk. His back was to the door. He was reaching into what appeared to be a wall safe, peeling off bills from a large stack of paper money.

Jamal’s face grew dark. “
She
is not my mother.” Just then, Ibrahim returned with the reward.

A long, long time ago, thought El Aqrab. But even then there had been only three types of terrorists: first and foremost, the local street kid found in Palestine and throughout the ghettos of the Middle East, like El Aqrab himself; second, those who were radicalized by an Imam abroad, in Europe or America, who were committed to the jihad in a very personal way; and third, the indolent guilt-ridden rich, the bored, the younger brothers and cousins of the wealthy and the upper middle class – the
jinn
, who considered themselves distinct from, and above the ordinary run of people, and who reinforced their eminence through the passion of their faith.

That’s what Ibrahim had been, and his older brother, Jamal. Ironically, despite their obvious differences, Jamal ben Saad and El Aqrab looked strangely alike, and this always disturbed Jamal. He was a student of architecture, it turned out. An academic. Weak and afraid. A fool. El Aqrab feared no one, and yet he was no bigger and no stronger than Jamal.

* * *

“You appeared to have vanished after the invasion,” Seiden continued. “Was that when you first went to Kazakhstan? Perhaps you shouldn’t have attacked our Ambassador in London.”

El Aqrab smiled. It was an old saw. In July, 1982, the Zionists invaded Lebanon with the declared aim of routing Palestinian guerrillas. They cited as justification an attack that wounded their ambassador in London.
Operation
Peace for Galilee’s
ostensible goal was to push the Palestinians forty kilometers or so from the Lebanese border in order to prevent them from shelling nearby Israeli settlements. Yuri Garron headed the incursion, the same Garron, who – as Housing Minister – later reshaped the country’s settlement policy, and who was now Prime Minister. At the time, he’d been Minister of Defense, under the Likud. But Garron had had a hidden agenda. He sought not only to push the Palestinians from the border, but to alienate Lebanon from rest of the Arab states.

To accomplish his goal, Garron attempted to exploit the hatred the dominant Maronite Christians harbored against the Palestinians, whom they wanted to see driven out of Lebanon. In Garron’s mind, the Maronites were natural allies. The Zionists would underpin the Maronite position; in return, the Maronites would take Lebanon out of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

But the plan failed, El Aqrab remembered with a smile. The Syrians considered Lebanon part of their sphere of influence and – once they realized what Garron was up to – they mobilized to thwart the invasion.

Garron’s forces soon found themselves outside Beirut facing the Syrians and a mishmash of guerrilla factions: the pro-X Palestinians – pro-Iraq, pro-Syria, pro-Saudi, pro-Libya, etc., depending on their sponsors; the profiteering PLO; the Druze irregulars; the Morabitum; PFL; Amal; and a hundred other freelance forces. Most did not seem too serious about the struggle, more interested in holding on to their few square blocks of West Beirut than in fighting the Israelis. As soon as the Israelis broke for lunch, they would revert to killing one another instead of the Israeli Defense Forces, or slip off for a bite to eat while watching the latest World Cup soccer match.

Since the IDF didn’t want to engage the Arab forces hand-to-hand inside the ghettos of the city, and since the Maronite Christians refused to do this for them, the Zionists turned to the United States. Then-President Reagan agreed to dispatch U.S. troops as part of a Multi-National Force, and by the time
Operation
Peace for Galilee
was over – after the bombardments, the shelling and the air raids – more than 20,000 people lay dead.

“Of course, you never wanted a peaceful solution,” Seiden said. “If you had, you wouldn’t have assassinated President Gemayel.”

“And, in exchange, you gave us Sabra and Shatila.” El Aqrab turned and looked at Seiden. “Gemayel was an Israeli puppet. It was the Zionists who let the Christians slaughter all those people. It was Garron,” he spat.

El Aqrab remembered the incident as if it had happened only yesterday. The blood. The silence and the flies. The vacant eyes.

Before Sabra and Shatila, the war had been a farce, the blackest of comedies, despite the carnage. The Zionists stationed a few tanks in the Baabda hills, which pounded the city regularly. The Israeli air force didn’t start their bombing runs until well past 4:00 PM. Then they returned to base for dinner before the night shift took their place. In fact, it was a war waged mostly for the foreign press. Skirmishes not rooted in personal vendetta were fought distractedly until the cameras arrived. Then everyone took on a Rambo sensibility, posturing for the lenses, taking unprecedented risks to show off to the world. This was Phoenicia, after all. Most Lebanese were much more interested in trade, in makeshift monetary exchanges, than in political agendas.

Then, after Gemayel’s assassination, Israeli troops – ringing the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila – had allowed revenge-seeking Maronite militiamen into the shantytowns. More than 1,500 refugees were slaughtered, including hundreds of women and children. Including babies, El Aqrab remembered. The narrow muddy lanes were choked with broken bodies, splattered with blood. Israel was widely condemned and, later, Yuri Garron was found to be “indirectly responsible” for the carnage. Indirectly responsible! “You are running out of time,” said El Aqrab.

“Why? Are you planning to go somewhere?” asked Seiden. “You have an appointment, perhaps?”

“You could say that.”

* * *

The UH-60L Black Hawk transport helicopter emblazoned with the Knesset seal prepared to take off in Jerusalem. More than fifteen meters in length, with a speed of 360 kilometers per hour, the Black Hawk was powered by two 1,500 horse power General Electric T700 engines that sputtered and caught as the rotors started to spin.

“What’s going on?” inquired the co-pilot.

“No idea,” the pilot said. “Must be urgent to get these guys up at this hour.”

Just then, a door burst open in the adjacent building. Three figures huddled together for a moment by the door. Then they dashed across the tarmac and ducked inside the helicopter. The ship rose steadily. She slid across the tarmac, reached transitional lift, and lifted herself into the air at 450 feet per minute.

Thursday, January 27 – 5:38 PM

Queens, New York

They had been watching the apartment in Long Island City for just shy of a week now, from a squat across the street – John Decker, Jr., recently transferred to the Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) in New York, and his partner Anthony Bartolo; plus a second team made up of Special Agents Williams and Kazinski, who kept an eye on the three suspects as they commuted to and from their jobs each day. On this particular Thursday night, the second team was back at the office for a lecture on criminal financial networks by an Intel specialist named Otto Warhaftig, attached to the JTTF from the Central Intelligence Agency as part of a new, interagency Homeland Security initiative.

They knew the routines of the suspects intimately. Well . . . at least two of them. A Saudi Arabian by birth, the first was Mohammed bin Basra, a student, wanted for questioning by the FBI since the spring of 2002. The second, Ali Singh, was originally from Pakistan and worked for a local cab company. They had both been arrested once – for disorderly conduct at a mosque in Queens – but acquitted for lack of evidence.

The third suspect remained unidentified, despite many attempts to follow him over the past few days. The agents had nicknamed him “Mecca” because he always seemed to be praying, facing Mecca.

As they watched the apartment across the way, Bartolo kept up a running commentary about his fiancée, Angelina. He’d been trying to set Decker up with one of Angelina’s girlfriends for the past two weeks, to no avail. A blustery Italian kid from Hell’s Kitchen, Tony Bartolo was inconsolable. He was convinced that Decker needed to get laid, and Angelina’s high school girlfriend, Lissy, a Boricua, was just the thing: dark and voluptuous, with a dirty reputation that Bartolo knew was well deserved. “The best blowjobs in Hell’s Kitchen,” he repeated. Decker just ignored him. He liked his new partner but his infinite cajoling was beginning to wear thin.

As Bartolo rambled on, he took his jacket off, his handgun and his phone, and began his endless regimen of sit-ups, push-ups and crunches. He was obsessed with his physique, vainer than any girl Decker had ever known. Yet his vanity was endearing. Bartolo was completely genuine. Indeed, he made a fetish of his self-absorption, displaying it for all to see. He was a handsome man: six feet three inches tall; thick, dark brown hair; broad-shouldered, with an iron stomach, in sharp contrast to his feminine red lips.