At Close Quarters

** •

As the morning sun, brilliant bright, hugged the rim of the valley, the jeep pulled away from the camp.

No heat yet in the air, and Abu Hamid was cold in the passenger seat. He did not know for how long he would be in Damascus, he had not been told. He knew only that he was escaping from the camp and the firing range in the wadi cut into the hillside, and that, along with the possibility that he would have the chance to be with Margarethe, was sufficient to lift his spirits.

While they still crawled over the ruts and stone chips of the unsurfaced road he saw the cluster of dogs.

He knew at once. He should have stood over them when they dug the grave. Slowly they passed the dogs.

There were six, seven, of them, perhaps more. There was no window on the side of the jeep. He heard the snarling, selfish anger of the dogs. The dogs were pulling, snapping, tugging at the dark-stained bundle.

Beside him the driver grinned. They drove on. The fighting dogs were left in the dust thrown up by the wheels of the jeep.

They crossed the valley. They were waved through the checkpoints. They reached the fast, tarmacadamed road to Damascus.

What the wandering Lawrence called a pearl in the morning sun is a vast archaeological treasure ground. It is also the oldest continually inhabited city in the world.

The present population, numbering 7,000,000, are the successors of those who first settled south of the Jebel esh Sharoi, east of the Jebel Khachine, five thousand years ago. Damascus has seen the worship of pagan gods, and of the Roman Jupiter. Damascus was the settling place of St Paul and the budding spirit of Christianity, it was the centre of the world of Islam, it was a great city of the Ottoman despots, it was a fiefdom of European France. Now it is a bastard mixture of cultures. On the broad French-style boulevards of Damascus walk the covert fundamentalists of the Moslem faith, discreet and quiet-living Jews, Sunnis, ruling Alawites from the northern coastline, Soviets from the east, eye-catching prostitutes aping what they believe is the Western way of provocation. The regime, which is bankrupt and sustained by loans from the oil rich Gulf, is headed by a man whose Air Force career was undistinguished, who had levered himself to Defence Minister in time for the catastrophic defeat at the hands of Israel in 1967, who had then climbed to President in time for the greater military disaster of Yom Kippur. The regime lives on a foundation of terror and repression. There are eight separate organisations responsible for internal and external security. The security men are the new masters of modern Damascus; they and their regime are without mercy. Orders are issued for public hangings on the portable gallows in Semiramis Square. Orders for 200 supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood to be brought by the lorry load to the centre of Aleppo and executed by firing squad.

Orders for 300 Islamic fundamentalists to be taken from the Tadmor prison in Palmyra to a trench dug by bulldozers, and there to be buried alive. Orders sent to Hama, after the suppression of revolt, for the killing of 15,000 males over the age of ten. Orders for torture, orders for murder. Mercy is a stranger in Damascus today; perhaps it was always so.

He knew enough of the geography of Damascus to know that they had entered the southern district of Abu Rum-maneh.

He was being taken to the Air Ministry complex.

They were approaching the Avenue El Mahdy. The driver said nothing. Abu Hamid was familiar enough with men such as his driver. A Palestinian learned in Damascus that he could expect no warmth from a Syrian, not unless he had favours to offer.

He had never before been to the Air Ministry complex, sprawling, five storeys high, he had had no reason to.

Close to the Air Ministry, Abu Hamid saw the secur ity presence on the pavements. Young men in street clothes lounged under the trees, leant on the lamp posts, sauntered beside the road. All the young men carried Kalashnikov rifles. When he had first lived in Damascus he had heard the rumours. Even out at the Yarmouq camp he had heard the explosions in the night of roadside bombs detonated against six army lorries in different locations and, so the rumours said, 60 had been killed; a car bomb in the city centre, and 40 killed. He understood why the security men lounged on the street corners, leant against the lamp posts, sauntered on the pavements.

There was a concrete chicane pass inside the gates of the Air Ministry. Abu Hamid was dropped off in front of the gate. He still had his leg in the jeep when the driver gunned the engine. Bastard… He hopped clear.

He endured the suspicion of the sentries, shining helmets, immaculate uniforms. He felt unclean from the dust of the Beqa'a. He could smile as he was body-searched. If there were a car bomb at the Air Ministry then it would be the supercilious sentries at the gate that would catch the flying axles and radiator and gear housing.

He was escorted inside. It had taken twenty-five minutes to establish that he was expected.

A new experience for Abu Hamid, walking the scrubbed, airy, painted corridors and staircases of the Air Ministry. The first time he had ever stepped inside such a place. A new world to him. At the end of a long corridor was a gate of steel bars, guarded. The gate was opened, he was taken through, the gate clanged shut behind him. Into an inner sanctum.

He could shiver, he could wonder what was wanted of him.

A door subserviently knocked by his escort. A uniformed clerk greeted Abu Hamid, ushered him inside, crossed to a door beyond a huge desk, knocked. A shout.

The space of the room emerged in front of him.

In all the years of his young life Abu Hamid had never seen such luxury. He stared around him. His eyes roved from the whispering hush of the air conditioning machine in the wall to the heavyweight softness of the leather sofa to the teak table to the sparkle of the decanter and glasses to the fitted pile carpet to the hi-fi cabinet to the dull true silver of the photograph frames

… could not help himself, a child in a glittering treasure land.

He saw the welcome smile of Major Said Hazan. The major was far back in a tilted chair, his polished shoes on the polished desk top. The major was waving him inside, waving with his stumped fist for him to cross the carpet pile in his dust-laden boots. Abu Hamid knew the man who sprawled in the depths of the sofa. He knew the man only by a given code name. He knew that the man was designated as the head of the military wing of the Popular Front. He knew that the man was believed to be at least number three and possibly number two in the command ranking of the Popular Front. He knew that the man had once himself opened a package sent from Stockholm to the offices of the Popular Front in Beirut… that was many years before, but many years did not restore a right arm taken off at the elbow, nor three fingers amputated from the left fist, nor smooth away the wounds of the shrapnel in his neck and jaw.

"Of course you know our Brother. You are welcome, Hamid. I hear good things of what you are achieving with the young fighters. I hear only good things of you… "

He stared at them both, in turn, these veterans of the war against the state of Israel, and the scars of their war.

A ruined face, a lost arm and a lost grip of fingers. Was that how he would end? A face that his Margarethe would shrink from, hands that could not caress the white smooth skin of his Margarethe…

"Come, Hamid, sit down."

The door was closed behind him. He sat on the edge of the sofa, he felt the leather sink under him.

"I have sad news for you, Hamid. Your commander in Simferopol has gone to a martyr's resting place, but he died in his uniform, his life was lost in the service of Palestine… A car accident… most sad. We all grieve for his passing."

No expression was possible on the unlined skin of the major's face. Abu Hamid saw no change in the eyes or at the mouth of the Brother. The understanding came as a fast shaft. The commander and Abu Hamid and Major Said Hazan had been the only persons directly involved in the shooting at Yalta. Three persons, now two persons.

"I want two men, Hamid. I want two of your best recruits."

Abu Hamid looked across the width of the sofa to the Brother. Their eyes did not meet. Again he understood.

They were the proxies, the Palestinians. He was learning, sharply, quickly.

"What skills would the two men have?" Abu Hamid's recruits were raw, not yet expert in weapons or explosives.

"Courage, commitment. They will join others. You will go back to the Beqa'a this morning. You will choose the two men. You will take them to the Yarmouq tomorrow… What is it, Hamid? I can see your impatience.

Anger, is it? Or passion, is it? Tomorrow, Hamid, you will have the time to attend to your lady. Today the revolution has need of you

… your best men, remember."

"It will be done, Major."

Holt had a sore head. He walked half a pace behind Martins and Crane. It was a part of the airport that was new to him. He hadn't been to Israel before, nor had he been to South Africa, so he had never come this way.

It was the airport high-security corridor, quarantined from "ordinary" flight passengers, reserved for the two flights thought to be most greatly at risk from terrorist attack. He had seen it on television, of course, but the sight of the police and the dogs and the Heckler and Koch machine pistols still startled him. Policemen patrolling and parading in front of him with attack dogs on short leashes, with machine pistols held in readiness across their chests. He wondered how long they would have, how many fragments of seconds in which to beat off an attack. He wondered how long it would take them to snap out of the Musak swimming calm of the corridor, how long to get the safety to Off, to get the finger from the guard to the trigger. He wondered how they slept at night, how they rested, relaxed with their kids. And if he found the man in the Beqa'a, and Crane shot him, would that make their lives easier?

They settled into the chairs of the departure lounge, the same departure lounge in which, months before, an alert El Al security man carrying out the final personal baggage checks had been suspicious of a bag carried by a 32-year-old Irishwoman, Anne Murphy. When the security man emptied the bag he believed it still too heavy. When he stripped up the bottom of the bag he found underneath three pounds of oily soft orange-coloured plastic explosive, manufactured in Czecho-slovakia. The potential of the explosive was equivalent to the simultaneous detonation of 30 hand-grenades.

The explosive, the timer, and the detonator had been supplied to a plump-faced Jordanian called Nezar Hindawi by senior officers of Syrian Air Force Intelligence. It was intended that the pregnant Miss Murphy would be blown out of the sky along with all the passengers and crew, that the disintegrating aircraft would crash in the mountains of Austria, that all evidence of guilt should be destroyed.

Holt's mind was dead to his surroundings. His head ached from the excess of alcohol that he had consumed the night before. But sitting in that same departure lounge should have made him think of those events. In reprisal the government of the United Kingdom had broken diplomatic relations with the Syrian Arab Republic. Sir Sylvester Armitage had gone into the folklore of Foreign and Commonwealth with his booming "Bloody Nonsense". Sir Sylvester Armitage had been targeted, and Miss Jane Canning had walked in front of him onto the steps of the Oreanda Hotel in Yalta. The beginning of this story was in this departure lounge, leading to Gate 23 of Terminal One, months before. Holt sat with his chin on his chest and the throb in his temples. Crane sat and slept. Percy Martins sat and pondered the final elusive clues of the day's crossword.

A little before 5.00 a.m., in a deep grey dawn haze, a British Airways Tristar slammed down onto the tyre-scarred runway of the international airport east of Tel Aviv.

It was just 29 days since a trio of British diplomats had boarded an aircraft at Moscow's Vnukovo airport for a flight to the Crimea.