At Close Quarters

12

His eyes ached, his forehead hurt.

Crane had the maps in front of him, and the aerial photographs. An Intelligence officer took Crane through the photographs.

It was the close work that pained him, caused him to blink, but this close work was inescapable, critical. The pilotless drone had flown the previous day. The Delilah drone had flown from inside Israel, and taken a route north from Metulla and over Marjayoun in the security zone. The drone had clipped the edge of the NORBAT sector and flown on at a height of 15,000 feet towards Yohmor. By the time that it cleared Lake Qaraaoun at the southern end of the Beqa'a valley, the camera set in the belly of the Delilah was picturing the ground beneath. The drone's flight path had taken it along the western side of the valley, over small villages, over goat herds and the boys who minded them, over women hoeing the weeds out of the stony fields in preparation for the planting of corn crops, over the steep sloping tiled roofs of Shi'a villages, over Syrian army positions, over the main road running north east from Khirbet Qanafar to Qabb Elias, over the small vineyards from which would come in the autumn the delectable bottles of Cabernet Sauvignon and Pinot Noir, over the Syrian headquarters garrison at Chtaura across the Beirut to Damascus road, and then east, and then south along the Bar Elias to Ghazze road. And, of course, Delilah, a speck in a clear midday sky, had passed over a tented camp that was surrounded by a fence of coiled barbed wire and a bulldozed ditch. The drone had been seen by many people. It had been seen by the boys with the goats, and by the farming women, and by the men sitting outside their village coffee houses, and by bored Syrian soldiers, and by Abu Hamid as he lectured his class in the workings of the DShKM heavy anti-aircraft machine gun, and by Fawzi as he negotiated a transaction with a headman, and by a merchant who drove an old Mercedes car. Seen by many people, but unremarkable to all of them. The drone flew twice a week, it was accepted.

The photographs had been taken especially for the benefit of Sergeant Crane.

He studied each one with the help of a stereoscope.

It was the stereoscope that killed his eyes, brought the throb to the deep recess where his retina was diseased.

Had to use the stereoscope, because that was the instrument that threw the flat vision of the photographs into a three dimensional reality.

Crane spoke only rarely to the youngster. He thought of him as the "youngster". He believed that he was not a nursemaid, and his experience of handling novice troops had taught him that to talk too frequently was to confuse. He expected that Holt should listen, and above all that he should watch. Noah Crane did little by chance. He demanded that Holt should concentrate, watch everything, react on it, remember it.

Most times his conversation was with the Intelligence officer. He trusted the man. The planning of the route required trust, and the man had served him well. Most recently this gawky, spider-like Intelligence officer had carried out the detail of the planning for the sniping of a Hezbollah unit commander. His care had earned the trust of Noah Crane. They talked in the Hebrew tongue.

Crane had two maps on the table in front of him. The one he marked, bold lines for the route, decisive crosses for the stop positions, the other he left clean.

The Intelligence officer gathered up the photographs.

Noah Crane folded the map that was not marked. He spoke from the side of his mouth to Holt, staccato, as if it were obvious.

"See the way I fold it. The way I fold it doesn't show which section interests me, it concertinas out. And I never put my fingers on it. When we're out there, when we're using it, we will always use a pointer, like a stick, to indicate. We never leave marks on the map, finger marks."

"So that if we are captured they don't know what our target was?"

Crane said, matter of fact, "We don't talk about capture. Capture is not thinkable. It is in case we lose the map."

He saw the youngster look away.

He led Holt to the kit room, the room beside his own.

He was a loner. For years, as a sniper, he had taken responsibility for himself, for his own skin. Noah Crane had never gone after promotion, he had shunned taking novice soldiers under his wing. He didn't bloody well know how to raise the spirits of the youngster, didn't bloody know. He could see the youngster was scared witless, standing close to him, walking c lose to him, but he didn't bloody well know how to breathe confidence into the youngster. And it worried him. He needed the youngster to begin well .. and how? How to get the youngster doing it right. That was an agony to Noah Crane, a second agony to the pain behind the tiredness of his shooting eye.

Holt was young enough to be Noah Crane's son, and he had never fathered a son, never brought up a son.

'Course he didn't know how to communicate with the youngster.

He had laid the kit out in the same way he always did.

Two Bergen packs nearest the door, the kit stretching away.

"You'll know him, won't you?"

"I'll know him."

"I'd skin you, if we went that far and at the end you didn't know him."

"Mr Crane, I see him just about every hour of my waking life. I see his face, I see his movement, I see him running. There's no chance, if he's there, that I won't know him."

"Not personal, I just had to be sure."

"Mr Crane, has it ever crossed your mind that I might not be sure of you?"

"You cheeky brat, you know about nothing."

"I know about plenty. About the things normal people know. I'm just weak about going into other folks' back yards and killing people They don't do degree courses in that."

"Everything I do you copy. You do everything I say, and we'll make it back."

"I hear you, Mr Crane, and is there something I can say?"

"What is it?"

"It would be great to see you smile, and to hear you laugh would be quite marvellous."

Crane scowled.

"We're taking more than we had on the warm up hike. We're taking what I can carry, which means you have to manage with the same. We are taking five days' water, which is 50 lbs weight. We are taking rations for five days. We will have first aid and survival gear. We will have a sniper rifle with day vision and night vision sights, and we will have an Armalite rifle with six magazines. Watch the way I pack your kit, I won't pack it for you again It's not easy for me, you know, having a green arse."

"I'll do my best, Mr Crane."

"Too right you will, 'cos I kick hard."

When the Bergens were packed, and the weapons had been cleaned one more time, Crane dressed in olive green military trousers and shirt..He saw that Holt watched the way he pulled the sleeves down and buttoned them, hid the forearm skin. He saw the way Holt copied him as he threaded the hessian lengths of brown and yellow and black material into the rubber straps sewn into the uniform, to break down the body's outlines. He saw that Holt imitated him as he smeared the insect repellent cream on his face and throat, but not on his forehead. He could have explained that creams were never put on the forehead, because the sweat would carry it into the eyes, but he saw no point in explaining. The youngster just had to watch, copy, imitate. When Holt was dressed, he hoisted the Bergen pack onto Holt's shoulders, told him to walk around, told him to get the feel of the pack that was half as heavy again as the one that Holt had struggled with in the Occupied Territories. Six times round the room, and then the adjustments that were necessary on the straps.

More adjustments for the waist belt. And adjustments lor the sling strap of the Armalite.

Holt said, "Why haven't you given me a practice with the Armalite?"

"Because if our lives depend on you with the Armalite, then they're not worth much."

"I have to be able to fire it."

"If it has to be fired then it'll be me that's firing it.

You're just there to carry it."

Crane reached out. He took the wrist watch off Holt's arm. For a moment he read the inscription on the back.

"Our dearest son, 21st birthday, Mum and Dad". He felt a vandal. He tore off the strap. He looped a length of parachute cord through the slots, knotted the ends.

With adhesive tape he fastened two morphine ampoules to the cord, one each side of the watch. He hooked the cord over Holt's neck, saw the watch sink with the ampoules down under Holt's shirt front.

Like he was dressing a kid for a party, he tied a dull green netted cloth around Holt's forehead. He stood back, he looked Holt up and down.

"You won't get any better," Crane said. He punched Holt in the shoulder, he made a rueful grin.

"If they ever audition for the lead in the Great Communicator, you'd be a certainty, Mr Crane. You might even end with an Oscar."

"Let's move."

He thought the youngster was great, and he did not know how to tell him. He thought that he was not alone.

He had seen the way Percy Martins looked at Holt, when Holt didn't see him. He thought they were both trying to reach the youngster, and both failing, both too bloody old.

Crane said, "You won't have noticed, Holt, but there is no magazine on the Model PM Long Range. It's one shot only. You don't get a chance to reload. You have one chance, one shot. I have to get into a five-inch circle at, around a thousand yards with a first shot, an only shot ''

He saw the sincerity in Holt's eyes. "That's why they had to dig out the best man, Mr Crane. Thank God they found him."

They went through the door.

Holt's own clothes and Crane's were left folded in separate plastic bags, each with a name-tag.

Loaded down by the Bergens they walked down the j corridor, out to the transport.

Percy Martins was talking to him, pacing alongside Holt. He was following Crane out into the sunshine and towards the mine-proofed Safari truck.

"I'll be here, Holt, I'll be at Kiryat Shmona, and via Tel Aviv I'll have secure communications with London.

Everything that I can humanly do for you will be done, rest assured on that… "

He saw the girl standing on the verandah of the officers' canteen. She wore scarlet this morning. He would like to have gone to her, kissed her his thanks for what she had given to him. She looked straight through him, as though he were a stranger.

"You're going to help to make the world a better and a safer place for decent folk, young Holt. Go in after that bastard and blow him away. Let them know that there are no safe havens, no bolt holes, that we can see them and reach them even when they're the other side of the hill. I'll be waiting for you."

"Great, Mr Martins."

He followed Crane into the back of the Safari, the major gave him a hand up, pulled him over the tail board.

"God speed… "

Holt didn't hear any more. The Safari lurched forward. Martins stood in the road, shouting silently, waving as if it were important, with the white plastic nose shield set as a bullseye in the centre of his sun red head, and the light catching the watch chain across his waistcoat. When he looked to the verandah the girl was sitting and her head was in her book.

He felt the sharp finger tap on his arm.

Crane said, "Forget it, right now you've more to think of than some doe-eyed fanny."

He didn't think any woman had ever loved Noah Crane. He thought Noah Crane was in pain because of the way that his face was screwed up, and his forehead was cut with lines. The back of the Safari was covered with a canvas roof and sides, and the three of them sat as close as was possible to the driver's cab. To other cars, to people walking on the road, they were unseen.

Their own vision was through the open back. The major and Noah Crane sat on the slatted seats, facing inwards, and Holt was down on the floor between them and sitting on sandbags. The sandbags covered the whole of the floor of the back of the Safari. Holt understood they were there to cushion a mine explosion. He smiled to himself, did not show his black amusement to the others.

He had once read of a man who was shipwrecked and alone in a rubber dinghy, and the man had said that the worst aspect of his 100-day drift before rescue was when the sharks came under the dinghy and prodded the thin rubber base with their snouts. He wondered which would be worst, the snout of a tiger shark under his backside, or the blast of a land mine – great choice, beautiful options.

He held the Armalite rifle upright between his knees, and he didn't even know how to maintain it, how to strip it, how to clean it. He was young Holt. He was a young diplomat of Third Secretary grade. All so wretchedly unreal.

They went through the village of Metulla, and through the back of the Safari Holt saw that almost immediately they drove past a border checkpoint and through a wide cut gap in a high wire fence. Crane reached out, no preliminaries, took the Armalite and with fast hand movements cocked it. Holt heard the clatter as the escort sitting in front beside the driver armed his weapon.

"Welcome to our security zone, Holt." The major seemed to smile, and he creaked his leg as he shifted to take more easily a Service pistol from the leather holster at his waist. "It is our buffer or protection strip. At the fence we have our last line of defence to keep the swine out of our country. At the fence we have the electronic beams, body heat sensors, TV camera fields, mined areas. But that is the last line. We try to halt them, the infiltrators, here in the security zone. You know we have around ninety attempts each month to get through the security zone but they don't get through. The security zone is of the greatest importance to us. We are indeed lucky, Holt, that we have in the security zone several thousand armed men of the South Lebanese Army, they are Christians who were isolated down here when Lebanon fragmented. We pay them hugely, much more than we pay our own soldiers, and because they have to light for their own survival they protect us well. The security zone, Holt, is a place of enclaves. Apart from the Christian enclaves, there are groupings of Shi'a Muslim, and Islamic Fundamentalist Muslim, and Hezbollah Muslim. The Shi'as and the Fundamentalists and the Hezbollah have in common a hatred of everything Jewish and everything Christian.

It makes for an interesting zone. But we have cut our funerals. The funerals of our soldiers were destroying our nation. The SLA now die on our behalf, hand-somely rewarded for their sacrifice. Our men are more precious to us than shekels, we can pay the price."

They drove on. Over the lowered tail gate Holt saw that they were climbing through a dry and barren landscape. He saw road blocks that they sped through without checking. He saw a Subaru saloon, with no identifying number plates, parked on the hard shoulder, and there were two men in civilian clothes sitting on the bonnet and one cradled a sub-machine gun on his lap and the other had a Galil rifle slung from his shoulder.

The car was low on its suspension. He presumed they were Shin Bet, that the car was armour plated. They passed the turning to Khiam, and Holt saw the fences and watch towers of what seemed a prison camp. They passed the turning to Marjayoun, which Holt knew was the principal Christian town in the zone.

They climbed.

The major and Crane talked fast now, in Hebrew.

They talked over the top of Holt, as if he were not there, and twice the major leaned over Holt and tapped energetically with his finger at a piece of equipment on Crane's belt harness. It was the one piece of equipment that was not duplicated on his own belt harness.

The truck was slowing, changing down through the gears. There was the rocking motion of the vehicle as it pulled off the road, and headed up to a steep incline on a rough track.

They lurched to a halt.

"Where you walk from, Holt," the major said.

Crane disarmed the Armalite, cleared it, then handed it to Holt. He carried his Bergen and his Model PM to the tail board, jumped down. The major clumsily followed him. Holt lugged his Bergen the length of the Safari and swung himself off the end. All three ran the few yards into a concrete and stone built observation post. It was early afternoon. It was sickeningly warm in the observation post, as though the reinforced walls held the heat.

He sensed the tension immediately.

There were two soldiers and an officer. There was a radio squawking with bursts of static, and one of the soldiers sat by the radio with his earphones clamped on his head and held tight by his hands. The other soldier and the officer raked with binoculars the ground ahead of their split vision port holes.

He saw the major speak to the officer, saw the officer shake his head, resume his watch.

Holt came forward. He placed himself at the officer's shoulder. He stared out.

The checkpoint was about a hundred yards down the road, a chicane of concrete blocks positioned so that a vehicle must slow and zigzag to pass through. The road stretched away, winding and falling towards the green strip of the Litani river bed. The observation post was, Holt estimated, a hundred feet above the road. A great emptiness. A silence stretching up the road that led north. Down at the checkpoint he could see that the soldiers all peered up the road, some through binoculars, some holding their hands flat against their foreheads to protect their eyes from the sun.

"When do we go?" Holt asked, irritated because he was ignored.

"When it is dark," the major said, all the time gazing up the road.

"So why are we here so early?"

"Because the transport has to be back before it is dark."

"So what do we do now?"

"You wait, because I have other things to consider."

Holt flared, "Why can't someone tell me…?"

"Leave it," Crane snapped.

He felt like stamping his foot, furious and apparently powerless. The officer had turned away from the vision slit he watched through, and had gone with quick, nervy movements to the table where the radio operator worked. The officer pulled a cigarette from a packet beside the set, lit it, puffed energetically on it, then offered a cigarette to him. Crane was looking at him.

Sulkily he shook his head. Cigarettes were banned.

Toothpaste was banned. Soap was banned… Crane had said that cigarettes and toothpaste and soap were all banned because they left a smell signature. What the hell was a smell signature? What sort of language was that? Smell signature. He looked up, it was on the end of his tongue to argue what difference it would make if he had one cigarette.

They had their backs to him. He stared at the backs of the officer, and the soldier, and the major, and Crane.

Hunched backs, heads pressed against the wood surrounds of the vision slits.

He could see over Crane's shoulder.

In the bright light of the afternoon he had to blink to make anything from the sunswept rocky ground and the narrow grey pencil line of the road.

The radio operator was scribbling, then tearing the Paper off his pad, holding his arm outstretched for the officer to take the message.

He could see a girl leading a donkey.

The soldiers at the road block were running to take cover behind the blocks of the chicane, and two men were crouched in the cover of their car back from the r o a d block.

Unbelievable to Holt. The soldiers had taken cover because there was a girl a thousand yards down the road leading a donkey. A girl and a beige brown donkey, and this Man's Army was flat on its face. A girl and a donkey, something out of a Sunday School lesson when he was still in short trousers. A small boy's idea of the Holy Land – bright and sunny, and yellow rock, and a girl with a donkey.

The major spoke to Crane. Crane shrugged, nodded.

The major spoke to the officer. The officer went to the radio, took the earphones from the operator, spoke briefly into the microphone.

A girl coming up the road and leading a donkey. The only movement Holt could see through the vision slit.

Crane had gone to the back of the observation post, was rooting in his kit. Holt saw two of the soldiers who had been behind the cement blocks were now scurrying, bent low, to get further back. All unbelievable. Crane pushed Holt aside, wanted the whole of the vision slit to himself, and he was jutting the barrel of the Model PM through the slit.

"For God's sake, Mr Crane, it's a girl."

"Don't distract him," the major said quietly.

"So what in God's name is he doing?"

"Be quiet, please."

A girl with a donkey, something sweet, something pastoral.

Crane slid a bullet into the loading port forward of the bolt arm, settled the rifle into his shoulder.

"What in bloody hell gives? It's a girl. Are you sighting your rifle? Can't you see it's just a girl? Is this your Idea of a test shot?.."

"Quiet," the major hissed. Crane oblivious, still.

"It's a bloody person, it's not just a target…"

Crane fired.

There was the rip echo of the report singing around the inside of the observation post. Holt's eyes were closed involuntarily. He heard the clatter of the ejected cartridge case landing.

He looked through the vision slit.

The donkey stood at the the side of the road beside the small rag bundle that was the girl.

Holt looked at them, looked from one to the other.

"Bloody well done, so you've got your rifle sighted.

Only an Arab girl, good target for sighting a rifle. First class shooting."

Crane reloaded.

The donkey had moved a pace away from the girl's body, it was chewing grass at the side of the road.

"I didn't know it, Crane, I didn't know you were a fucking animal."

Crane breathed in hard. Holt saw his chest swell.

The rifle was vice steady. Crane breathed out, checked.

Holt watched the first squeeze on the trigger, saw the finger whitening with the pressure of the second squeeze.

Again the crash of the shot echoed in the confines of the observation post. Crane spurted out his remaining breath.

Holt saw the orange flame.

Holt saw the flame ball where the donkey had been.

There was a thunder rumbling. There was a wind scorching his face at the vision slit.

The donkey had gone. The girl had gone. There was a crater in the road into which a big car could have fallen. Holt stared. God, and he felt so frightened. He was naked because he knew nothing.

Crane ejected the cartridge case. His voice was a whisper, a tide turn over shingle, a light wind in an autumn copse. "Did you watch me?"

"I'm just sorry for what I said."

"As long as you watched me, saw everything I did."

He had seen that Crane's head never moved. He had seen the breathing pattern. He had seen the way Crane's eyebrow and cheek bone merged into the tube of the telescopic sight. He had seen the two stage squeeze on the trigger.

"I saw everything that you did."

The major said, "You are in Lebanon here, Holt, nothing is as it seems."

They were given tea.

Crane cleaned the rifle, unfastened the bolt mechanism to pull the cloth through the barrel.

Major Zvi Dan crouched beside Holt.

"I don't think, and this is not criticism, that you know anything of the military world."

"I'm not sorry."

"If you had been born an Israeli you would have been in the army."

"Not my quarrel."

"You may not think it your quarrel, but when you walk from here, when you walk away from our protection, then every man and woman and child in the villages and towns of the Beqa'a would hate you if they knew of you. Would you believe me if I told you, Holt, that in the Beqa'a they do not acknowledge the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of prisoners…?"

Holt grimaced, he liked the man. "I believe you."

"I am so very serious. It is a place without conventions. There would be no officers to safeguard you. Your life would be worthless after the sport of torturing you."

Holt said softly, "I'm scared enough, no need to make it worse."

"I do not try to frighten you, I try only to stress that you should follow Noah, exactly follow him. Noah is a marksman, he is a sniper. Do you know that in your own army for many years sniping was frowned on? It was not quite right, it was even dirty. Examine the job of the sniper. He shoots first against an officer. When does he shoot the officer? He kills the officer when he goes for his morning defecation. The officer is dead, his men are leaderless, and they dare not leave their trench for the call of nature. They make their mess in their trench, which is not good, Holt, for their morale. The sniper is hated by his enemy, he is prized by his own forces who are behind him. Often they are far behind him, where they cannot be of assistance to him. It is a peculiar and particular man who fights far beyond help.

Your Mr Crane, who has never accepted a medal, is peculiar and particular. Follow him."

Holt sat on his backside as far as he could be from the vision slits. For as long as he could avoid it, he wanted to see no more of a battlefield where the enemy was a young girl, and her arsenal was a donkey.

The aircraft was late.

The aircraft was at the end of its flying life. At every stopover it required comprehensive maintenance testing. The aircraft was elderly because that way the premiums paid to Lloyds of London by Middle East Airlines for comprehensive insurance cover could be kept to a reasonable figure.

The aircraft landed from Paris in the middle of the afternoon. It had come in over the sea, the view of Beirut had been minimal in the heat haze.

He was Heinrich Gunter, the passenger who was eager to be free of the passport queue in the bullet-pocked airport terminal.

He was 45 years old, and this was the thirty-ninth visit he had made to Beirut since the shooting and shelling had started in 1976.

He was a middle-management employee of the Credit Bank of Zurich, and he was personally responsible for the administration of many millions of United States dollars invested with his bank by wealthy, quiet-living Lebanese entrepreneurs.

He was married, with three children, and he had told his wife that morning that Beirut was fine if you had the right contacts, made the correct arrangements.

He was expecting to be met. He was not to know that the airport road had been closed for three hours, that a rising of tension between men of the Druze militia and of the Shi'a Amal militia had prevented his agent from getting to the airport to meet him.

He hurried away from the passport control. He col- 1 lected his one suitcase that was adequate for a two day stay, maximum. He moved through the frequently j repaired glass doors at the airport's main entrance. He j could not see his agent.

After waiting for 25 minutes, Heinrich Gunter agreed j with a persistent taxi driver that he would pay the fare asked, in hard currency. He was told that the driver knew a safe way, avoiding the area of tension, to the hotel into which he was booked. It was already a long day. A row with his wife over his breakfast because he was going to Beirut, an argument at Zurich airport because the Swissair flight was overbooked and he was a late arrival, drinks in the airport bar at Charles de Gaulle because Middle East Airlines was leaving late, more drinks on the flight because he was going to Beirut.

It had been a long day, and he had been drinking, and he took the taxi.

Heinrich Gunter never really saw what happened. In the back seat of the taxi Heinrich Gunter lolled back, the whisky miniatures of the Paris airport and the Middle East Airlines first class cabin had taken a gentle and gradual toll.

By the time that his eyes opened, the taxi had been waved down to the side of the road, the back door had been wrenched open, a hand had grabbed for the sleeve of his jacket. The first thing he clearly saw was the barrel of a rifle half a dozen inches from his chest. The first thing he felt was himself being propelled out of the car.

He lurched to the pavement. He was grabbed under each arm and rushed down an alley way. He had seen a flash of two slimly built young men, each wearing a cotton imitation of a balaclava face mask, each carrying a rifle. In the alley a length of cloth was wrapped around his lace, covering his eyes. He was kicked hard in the leg, the back of his head was cudgelled with the butt of a rifle.

There was no fight in Heinrich Gunter as he was dragged away.

He knew what had happened to him. He was sobbing as his shoes scuffed the surface of the alley way. He had not even shouted for help. He knew he was beyond help.

Fawzi showed his papers to the NORBAT sentry. The papers identified him as a Lebanese dentist.

He drove out of the U N I F I L sector. The checking by the sentry of his car had not been thorough. A thorough check would have discovered the dirtied overalls in which he had lain on the hillside a mile and a half from the road block. It would also have discovered a powerful pair of East German binoculars. Had the car been stripped to its panels, then the sentry would have unearthed the radio controlled command detonator that would have fired the explosives in the pannier bags slung against the donkey's sides.

He went fast, angrily.

He had seen weeks of manipulation destroyed by a long range marksman.

He had failure to report to Major Said Hazan.

He had seen the girl as a gem, and her long triumphant journey had been ended several hundred yards short of her target. Fawzi could taste the humiliation.

Percy Martins wrote his occupation as "government servant", and the reason for his visit as "vacation", when he filled in the registration form at the guest house.

He had not been asked where he wanted to stay. He had been driven from the army camp at Kiryat Shmona to the Kibbutz Kfar Giladi. He was not that disappointed. He was greeted at the reception desk as a VI P.

His bag was carried. He was treated with respect. The guest house, six stories high, set in flowering gardens, appealed to him.

He was given his key.

"I was wondering," he said to the raven haired, raven eyebrowed, receptionist, "would there be any fishing in these parts? Would one be able to hire a rod?"

Percy Martins was nothing if not a pragmatist. He understood that his marriage was in terminal collapse, that his relationship with his son was as good as finished.

He could look clear-headed at his career, twice passed over for promotion to Deputy or In Charge of the Middle East desk. But he was no longer wounded by setbacks. He could cope with his home life. He could live with what to other men would have been humiliation in the office. He could endure the taciturn Holt and the imperious Israelis. That is what he told himself. He said to himself, Sod the lot of them. He would bloody well go fishing.

"I would have thought there would be some trout in those nice little streams running down from Mount Hermon. Now trout isn't what I usually go for – I'm a pike man actually. I don't suppose you know about pike. If you're into trout then you would regard pike as something akin to vermin. You'll see what you can find out for me, of course you will. You're very kind."

With his key in his hand he trudged up the stairs to his second floor room. He imagined himself ushering young Holt into the Director General's office, and of standing quietly at the back of the room. Very well done indeed, Percy. We are all proud of you.

He sat down on the bed. He unbuttoned the front of his waistcoat. He loosened his tie. Sod the lot of them.

He held his head in his hands. Unseen, alone, close to tears.

There was a crushed ball of paper on the pile carpet beside the chair of Major Said Hazan. It was the clean sheet of paper he had crumpled with all the strength of his fist when the telephone call had informed him that the girl and her bomb had not reached target.

He had given his instructions. On the evening television news broadcast, transmitted by the Syrian state station, a statement would be made by the girl. She would talk of her commitment to a Lebanon free of Israeli terror, and of her commitment to the Syrian cause and the Palestine revolution. And then the news reader would give factual information of the heavy casualties inflicted on the IDF and their surrogate SLA by the sacrificial heroism of the girl.

The truth, and this was clearly recognised by Major Said Hazan, was an irrelevance. The northern boundary of the security zone was a closed area, there would be no independent witnesses. More of the Arab world would believe the claim of the Syrian state station than would believe the denial put out by the Israeli Broadcasting Corporation. The message would go on the air-waves that a young Muslim girl of exemplary purity had given her life in the struggle against the Zionist brutes – she had been photographed with care by the camera, her pregnancy would not be seen. It was the estimate of Major Said Hazan that a car bomb or a donkey bomb had more effect on the anxious sheiks and emirs and sultans of the oil wealthy Gulf than any other lever for the extraction of funds. Great truth in the ancient Arab proverb, The enemy of my friend is my enemy, the enemy of my enemy is my friend. His country needed the funds of the Gulf. The route to those funds was through constant, daring attacks against Israel carried out by the young vanguard of the Arab peoples.

The truth might be an irrelevance, but he hated to know that the bomb had been stopped short of its target. The crushed, crumpled paper lay beside his feet.

He reached for the telephone. There were some who came to his office who marvelled to find four telephones on the table beside his desk. A joke had once been made that he had only two ears, two hands. A poor joke, because his ears had been burned away, leaving only stumps, and the fingers of his right hand had been amputated. One telephone gave him access by direct line to the desk of the brigadier general commanding Air Force Intelligence. A second telephone gave him scrambled communication with military headquarters at Chtaura in the Beqa'a valley. A third telephone gave him an outside line, the fourth put him into the exchange system of Air Force Intelligence. He lifted the third telephone.

He dialled.

He spoke with silk. "Is it you?… A thousand apologies, I have been away, and since I have been back just meetings, more meetings. Too long away from you…

How was he, my pet?… How was his spirit? How was his resolution?… My pet, you would lift the organ of the dead… Excellent. I will see you, my pet, as soon as I can turn away this cursed load of work. Goodbye, my pet."

There had been the knock at his door which caused him to ring off. He loved to hear her guttural foreign voice. He loved to linger with his thoughts on the smooth clean curves of her flesh…

He called for his visitor to enter.

Major Said Hazan stretched out his left hand in greeting.

"My Brother, you are most welcome… "

For an hour he talked with this military commander of the Popular Front over the plans for an attack on the Defence Ministry complex in Tel Aviv. That section which housed the rooms of the Military Intelligence wing was ringed in red ink. They discussed the method of infiltration, and leaned towards a seaborne landing, and they pondered over the sort of man who might have the elan, the resolution, to lead such a mission.

After an hour Major Said Hazan had quite overcome his sharp fury at the failure of the girl and her bomb at the checkpoint in the security zone.

Far behind them, far from sight, came the dulled reports of the artillery, and far ahead of them there was the brilliance of the flares bursting and then falling to spread their white light against the darkness.

Holt tugged at the Bergen's straps, wriggled for greater comfort. They were outside the observation post.

Crane said, "I told you not to look at them."

Crane had his back to the flares.

"And you haven't told me what they're for."

"I'm not a bloody tourist guide."

"Why are they firing flares, Mr Crane?"

"Because you're looking at the flares you're losing the ability to see in darkness. We have to pass through a chunk of NORBAT ground, so we are putting flares up for illumination between NORBAT positions and where we're walking, we're burning out their night vision equipment. Got it?"

"Would have helped if you had told me in the first place."

"Piss off, youngster."

"Let's get this show on the road, then."

They hugged each other. A brief moment. Arms around each other, and the belt kit sticking into the other's stomach, and the weapons digging at each other's rib cages, and the weight of the Bergen packs swaying them.

They were two shadows.

The stars were just up. The moon would be over them at midnight, an old moon in the last quarter.

They crossed the road beneath the observation post.

They headed into the darkness, away from the road, away from the slow falling flares.

They were gone from the safety of the security zone.

Nothing in his mind except concentration on his fool fall and the faint shape walking in front of him. Nothing of Jane who had been his love through his life before, nor of the girl who had been his comfort the night before, nor of the leaders and the generals, nor of his country. Only the care of where he laid his boot, and his watch on Noah Crane ahead.