At Close Quarters

6

While his friend poured the coffee, the station officer peered down at the photograph.

His friend was Zvi Dan. The photograph from the magazine page had been enlarged and the scar was clear to the naked eye.

"You've done me damn well. A name for Chummy and a date and a place."

"But we have nothing much else with which to link him apart from the Beirut picture. Anything further can only be supposition."

Zvi Dan's career as an infantry officer had been cut short 15 years before when an exploding artillery shell on the Golan Heights had neatly severed his left leg immediately below the knee, and only two days before the cease-fire had wound up the battles of Yom Kippur.

He had faced the prospect of civilian life or of finding military work that could be conducted away from the operational area. He had made major, Military Intelligence. He specialised in the study of Palestinian groups who were known to have firm links abroad, and whose operations against Israel were often far from his country's frontiers.

"I think that in London they are pretty concerned with this one. I think they'll take all the supposition they can get."

"Then we should begin to play the jigsaw."

Zvi Dan worked from an office in the Ministry of Defence. His quarters were apart from the main complex of buildings that stretched the length of Kaplan. His base was surrounded by a coiled fence of barbed wire and with additional armed guards on the gate. He had access to Mossad files and to Shin Bet interrogations of captured Palestinians. He read voraciously. In the small circle where his name was known he was credited with supplying the information that had led to the arrest of a Jordanian who intended to carry on board a Swiss airliner two hand grenades for a hijacking attempt on the Cyprus-Jordan leg of the flight. He had supplied the lead that enabled the Belgian police to raid a video arcade in a small town in the north of the country and arrest two Palestinians and a Belgian couple, and uncover 40 lbs of plastic explosive. His warnings had led to the interception at sea of two yachts being used by Palestinian infiltrators, the Casselardit and the Ganda. If he regarded these as little victories Major Zvi Dan could – and did – count as catastrophic defeats the assault on the synagogue in Istanbul, 22

Turkish Jews killed; the slaughter at Rome's Fiumicino airport, 86 killed and wounded; the massacre at Vienna's Schwechtat airport, 49 killed and wounded.

The station officer said, "I'll put my pieces on the board. The British ambassador in Moscow insults a Syrian diplomat, practically with a loud hailer, the entire diplomatic community looking on, right in the Syrian's master's sitting room. Claims of Syrian innocence in the El Al bomb laughed to scorn in public. Total humiliation of Syrians. Two: our man in Moscow is assassinated oblique stroke mugged in the Crimea, close to a military school where Palestinians are trained.

Three: same evening a Syrian Air Force plane lands at the airport next door to the school and flies on to Damascus, en route sending a message saying in effect Mission Achieved. Four: our eyewitness at the shooting gets a clear view of Chummy and from that we follow through to the evacuation from Beirut in '82 and a member of the PFLP contingent. The last piece I can put on the board is what I'll call the Dresden photograph, that puts Chummy at a camp outside Damascus possibly seven, eight days ago. Those are my pieces."

"You want this Abu Hamid?"

"We want him, even if we have to go to Damascus to get him."

Zvi Dan laughed, a quiet croak in his throat, and the laugh brought on the hacking cough of the persistent smoker.

"Damascus would be easy. Damascus pretends it is an international city. There are businessmen travelling to Damascus, and there are academics, and there are archaeologists. It is a city of millions of people. In a city you can come shoulder to shoulder with a man. You can use the knife or the silenced pistol or the explosive under the car he drives. If it were Damascus then I would already offer you my felicitations, even my congratulations… the scar is only an inch across so you have to be close to identify the man you want."

"The girl who was killed, she was one of ours," the station officer said quietly. "Don't worry about getting close. We'll walk onto the bridge of his nose if we have to. That's the sense of the messages I am being sent from London."

The coughing was stifled. Zvi Dan beat his own chest.

There was the rustle of the packet, the flash of the lighter, the curl of the smoke. The end of the nicotined finger stubbed at the Dresden photograph.

"Look at them. Other than the man you want they are all raw recruits. They are children who have joined the Popular Front and here they are participating in the first ceremony of induction. There will have been a parade, and there will have been a speech by a big man from the government. It is what always happens They will have been in Damascus for a few days only.

They will be moved on. They will go to a field training camp where they will be taught, not well, the art of small-unit operations. Your man, the man you want, the older man amongst them, he will travel with the children as their instructor. Possibly it is a reward for what he achieved in Yalta. They will go to a training camp with their instructor for perhaps half a year."

"Where would the camp be?"

"Where it is impossible for you to be close, shoulder to shoulder." For a moment the face of Zvi Dan was lost in a haze of smoke. "In the Beqa'a Valley."

"Oh, that's grand," said the station officer. "The 19 bus goes right through the Beqa'a Valley."

The valley is a fault, it is a legacy of rock strata tur-bulence of many millennia ago.

The valley floor is some 45 miles in length, and never more than ten miles in width. It is a slash between the mountains that dominate the Mediterranean city of Beirut, and the mountains that overlook the hinterland city of Damascus. It is bordered in the north by the ancient Roman and Phoenician city of Baalbeck, and in the south by the dammed Lake Quaroon.

The sides of the valley, deep cut with winter water gullies, are bare and rock strewn, good only for goats and hardy sheep. The sides cannot be cultivated. But the valley floor has the richest crop-growing fields in all Lebanon. The Litani river, rising close to Baalbeck, bisects the valley running south to Lake Quaroon. The valley floor is a trellis of irrigation canals, not modern, not efficient, but able to offer life blood to the fields.

The best vines of Lebanon, the best fruit, the best vegetables, all come from the Beqa'a, and the best hashish.

The history of the Beqa'a is one of murder, conspiracy, feuding and smuggling. The people of the region whether they be Christian or Druze or Shi'a Muslim, have a reputation for lawlessness and independence. Government authority has always taken second place in the minds of the feudal landlords and the peasant villagers.

Times, of course, have not stood still in the Beqa'a.

The villagers are better armed, each community now possesses RPG-7 grenade launchers, heavy D S h K M machine guns, enough Kalashnikovs to dish them out to the kids.

The villagers are well off by the standards of torn, divided Lebanon, because when all else fails the hashish market bails them out. The trade is across the rifts of politics and religion. Druze sells to Shi'a who sells to Christian who sells to Syrian.

The Beqa'a now is a valley of pass papers and checkpoints. Shi'a checkpoints on the approaches to their villages. Druze checkpoints, Syrian army checkpoints on the main road from Damascus to Beirut, and more on the side roads that lead to their barracks, Palestinian checkpoints on the approaches to their training camps.

They had reached the high spot. Behind them were the customs buildings and the missile site. Ahead of them the ground, dun and grey, shelved away into the valley.

The recruits were in two military lorries, while Abu Hamid sat in the jeep driven by Fawzi, his liaison officer.

Fawzi drove with enthusiasm, exhilarated in his role as middle man between the Popular Front training camp and the officers of Air Force Intelligence. Abu Hamid had thought that any man would be sick in his gut at such a job, but all the man cared for, all that he talked about on the climb to the mountain pass and the descent beyond, was the new-found opportunity for trade.

"Trade" he called it. Televisions and video cassette players and electric refrigerators would come to the Beqa'a from Beirut, freshly grown hashish would come from the valley, and Fawzi could take back to the old souq in Damascus as much as would cram into the covered back of his jeep. To Abu Hamid, the man was disgusting, the man was a criminal. He wondered how it was that Major Said Hazan would permit such a man to play a part in the Palestinian revolution.

But he had hardly listened to Fawzi. Yes, he had the babble from the man, from his thick spittle-lined lips, but after a while he had paid him no attention, thought only of Margarethe.

Abu Hamid did not know how long it would be until he next saw Margarethe. He had not been told. He fancied that if he put his hand under the vest below his tunic, and rubbed his hand hard against the skin, and that if he then put his hand against his nose, then he would smell the sweet scent of his Margarethe. With other women shyness made him brutal. It was so the first time with Margarethe, but she had slapped his face, right cheek and then left cheek… then come to him, rolled him onto his back, and loved him. He did not know where a woman had learned to love with such wild beauty. From that first time Margarethe made him love her with all the lights switched on; each time she stripped him, each time she straddled him. He could not comprehend why Margarethe Schultz worshipped the body of Abu Hamid, who did not have the money for shoes. He did not understand her dedication to the cause of a Palestinian homeland, did not understand the Red Army Faction of which she claimed to be a member.

He had written to her on the last day of each month that he had been in Simferopol. And when she was naked she was beautiful to him. ..

What was wonderful was that she had waited for him, waited for six months for his return.

They were coming down into the valley.

He could hear the protests of the brakes of the lorries behind him.

"It is the hashish that gets the best price. I buy it here, I pay the major forty per cent of what I have paid.

I double the cost of my outgoings and that is the price I will get in Damascus. I don't know what charge is made by the man who sells it on from Damascus. When it gets to Europe the price is fantastic. It amazes me that people in Europe will pay… "

They passed through two checkpoints manned by Syrian commandos. They crossed the floor of the valley.

The road took them alongside a small village, and there were women out in the fields hoeing the damp ground between the first early summer wheat crop. They bumped off the road and followed a stone track for four or five miles. Much for Abu Hamid to see. There were old bomb craters still with the scorched blackness that years of rain had not discoloured. There was a tank regiment, hull down, in defensive position. There was a network of slit trenches, newly dug and lined with the brightness of corrugated iron. There were areas that were marked by a single strand of barbed wire and the skull and crossbones sign designating minefields. They crossed two army engineers' bridges over irrigation ducts, and then traversed a rolling plank bridge over the main flow of the Litani river. They skirted a formation of camouflage-painted pillboxes. They were close to the far wall of the Beqa'a valley.

He saw the small tent camp ahead. A dozen tents.

The camp nestled under the rising ground beyond. He winced. There was nowhere else that they could be heading.

"Is that the camp?" The disgust was rich in Abu Hamid's voice.

"You want orange groves and villas? You should go and fight in the Zionist state. You will find all the orange groves and all the villas that you could wish for there."

When darkness had fallen over the Yarmouq camp, when the perimeter floodlights were reduced to small cones of light, a car drove through the gates and to the administration building. A runner was sent from the administration building to the hut where the commander had his quarters. The commander was seen by the runner to talk briefly to the men in the car, and then to get into the back seat. Two hours later the commander was dead, shot once in the head, and he was buried in a shallow grave beside the Quneitra road, beyond the airport, beyond the headquarters of Air Force Intelligence. When questioned by senior officials of the Popular Front investigating the commander's disappearance, the runner would be able to say in truth that the darkness prevented him from seeing the men inside the car, that they did not identify themselves.

For Major Said Hazan, the commander had outlived his usefulness. And he was a dangerous witness to a conspiracy, and he knew the author of that conspiracy.

Of Abu Hamid, Major Said Hazan had no doubt.

Martins had come to the nineteenth floor.

He sat in an armchair with his papers on his lap. He sat uncomfortably upright. It was a strange habit of the Director General that he conducted his meetings from soft seating, never used the polished table and the straight chairs that were at the far end of the room. On the rare occasions that he was summoned to the Director General's office, Percy Martins was never at ease. The Director General seemed not to notice. Percy Martins read rapidly through the brief received from Graham Tork, station officer in Tel Aviv.

"So, it is his conclusion that Abu Hamid has by now either travelled to the Beqa'a, or is about to."

"Which makes it awkward for us."

"In Tork's opinion – rather an eccentric one, in my view – Damascus would be tolerably straightforward, the Beqa'a quite impossible."

"The Service doesn't believe in 'impossible', Percy."

Martins sucked at his teeth. "With respect, sir, the Beqa'a is virtually an armed camp. It is home for the Syrian army, at least one division of armour, regiments of artillery, units of commando forces. It's also home for a violently anti-Western Shi'a Muslim population in the villages. And for the Hezbollah Party of God fanatics, also for the units of Islamic Jihad who, although small, are strong enough to blast the Americans out of Beirut. And for half a dozen or more extreme Palestinian groupings… "

The Director General played with his pipe. "You're not addressing schoolchildren and you're missing the point, Percy. You're providing me only with problems, but let me quote Sir Winston Churchill to you, 'Grass never grows under a gallows tree'. Hit the terrorist in his safe haven and you destroy not only him, but you do a greater damage to the morale of his comrades. Have we the location of this training camp?"

"Not yet, sir. Tork reckons his locals should be able to give it to him within a couple of weeks."

"We need that location, we need a target area."

"Are you considering requesting the Israelis to mount an airstrike?"

"Waste of time." The Director General waved his hand dismissively. He had that habit. He was only two years older than Martins. The habit had the effect of making the number three on the Middle East Desk seem half-witted. "An airstrike tells the Syrians nothing. I want the man who tasked this Abu Hamid for his killing mission to know that we'll go to the ends of the earth to exact a specific revenge."

Martins read the familiar signs. The more he pointed out the objections the more annoyance he would cause.

On the other hand, the less he objected the less cover he gave himself in the event of a foul-up.

"You'd actually consider sending a team into the Beqa'a?" Martins sometimes wondered whether the Service activities were planned on a Christmas present pencil sharpener globe. "For all the reasons I have suggested, that Tork has set out, that is quite impossible… "

"Perhaps you didn't hear me the first time. That's not a word I care for. Get yourself down to Hereford, Percy."

Without invitation, Percy Martins heaved himself up from the low armchair. He strode round the room.

Speak now, or for ever hold thy peace. He heard his own voice, raised.

"So I go and talk to the Ministry and then to Special Air Service, and what's the first thing they'll say?

They'll say the scar on Abu Hamid's face is an inch across, they'll say how close do they have to get to identify a man with a one-inch scar on his face?"

"We've a witness, and I dare say we've got a pair of binoculars."

Martins hesitated. "Our witness is a diplomat, not a soldier, sir."

"In the words of your report when you met this young man: 'I'd want him killed' – it seems to me that he would be prepared to learn to be a soldier. A further point. The witness not only saw the scar, the witness saw Abu Hamid, saw his stance, how he moved, saw him run."

"To take a young man, untrained, into the Beqa'a, on a covert operation Sir, are you quite serious?"

"When we had Leila Khaled, Popular Front hijacker, in Ealing Police station I argued against swapping her for our airline passengers held hostage in Amman – I was overruled. When it was planned to fly a gang of Provisional IRA death merchants by Royal Air Force plane to London for a cosy chat with government, I argued against it – I was overruled. I was overruled then because I didn't have enough authority. Now I do, and the masters are going to learn how long and how ruthless our arm can be, and quite frankly, I hope they shit themselves in the knowledge."

Martins said, "I'll go and talk to Hereford."

"You'll do more than that. You'll get our witness down to Albury, dust the place out, get him up to the mark. No misunderstandings, Percy, this is going to happen."

They hadn't told her how long she had to make the rooms ready, nor how many people would be coming.

She did not know whether they would be there in a day or a week.

She had her old vacuum cleaner, and a bucket of warm water with Jeyes fluid and a mop, and three ragged dusters, and a window cleaner aerosol spray. She had four sets of sheets ranged out in the frame in front of the Aga stove in the kitchen. It would be seven months since the house in the woods outside the Surrey village of Albury had been used. She had been afraid that if the house were not used then it would be sold off and she and George would be moved on.

There was no time for George's lunch that day. She had ordered him to fill each and every one of the coal hobs, light each and every fire on the ground floor, to split more logs, to find the fault in the hot water boiler, to go into Guildford with her shopping list, and to keep his brute of a dog off the floors she had washed.

Agnes Ferguson had seen it all. What a book she could have written. She had been housekeeper for the Service safe house at Albury for nineteen years. They had given it into her care in lieu of a widow's pension.

She had kept the safe house for Eastern bloc defectors, for agents returning from imprisonment abroad while they were debriefed, for the preparation of men going into covert action overseas. It had been a long and anxious winter, and George not much company. The telephone call had seemed to breathe new life, new hope, into her that her future was assured.

"It's preposterous, no other word for it."

"It has the sanction of the Director General,"

Martins said grimly.

"It makes no difference whose sanction it has. It just isn't on," the brigadier said.

"Too dangerous, is that it?"

"It's not our way to duck a challenge, but nor is it our way to volunteer ourselves for a mission that has no chance of success. Understand me, no chance."

In the mist outside the brick bungalow, Percy Martins's car was parked beside the broad base of the clock tower. When he had locked the door he had noted the names inscribed on the stone plaque under the clock face, the fatal casualties amongst the men of the 22nd Regiment, Special Air Service. Had he not been under orders he would most probably have agreed with the brigadier.

"No chance of success, I'll report that back."

"Don't play clever games with me," the brigadier said. A hard man, piercing grey-blue eyes. "We have no experience of theBeqa's valley. No man in the SAS has ever set foot in the Beqa'a valley. It is, and always has been, outside our theatre of operation. We are not talking about the Radfan mountain ops of the sixties, nor about Oman in the seventies. For both of those we had first hand experience to draw upon, and we had a wilderness area to work through. In the Beqa'a we have no experience and we have no wilderness. It would take us months of reconnaissance and preparation before we could walk in there with any reasonable prospect of survival."

"I'll convey your message."

"They keep their hostages in the Beqa'a. The reason they are there is that their captors believe it the most secure area in Lebanon. For strangers, the Beqa'a is a dangerous, closed valley. The stranger won't last long enough to pick his nose. To be frank, and it gives me no satisfaction to say so, we wouldn't stand a prayer."

"I'll report that you cannot be of help."

"But I can be of help," the brigadier said. "I can tell you who will get you into the Beqa'a, who might quite possibly even get you out."

Percy Martins felt the surge of excitement. A name was given He wrote the name in his notebook, and then he asked for permission to use a secure telephone.

The last light of the afternoon.

The sun was an orange orb away to his left and sliding.

It was a good time for him because the ground ahead was cooling, and the haze that had distorted his vision was gone, and his barrel was no longer warm.

His right eye, peering into the 'scope, ached. That pain behind his eye stabbed at him. The pain was nothing new to him, but it was more frequent and more acute, and that worried him.

The target was six hundred metres away. Of course he had not measured the ground. In two days and one night he had not moved in his hide except to raise his hips the few inches that enabled him to urinate into a plastic bag. He was good at measuring distance. Without his expertise at gauging a distance ahead of him then all his work would be useless. The chart in his mind told him the rate of the drop in flight of a fired bullet. He knew the figures by heart. The difference in a drop between 500 metres and 600 metres was 1.53 metres.

The difference in a drop between 500 metres and 600 metres was the height of a grown man. But he knew the distance to his target, his experience had made the calculation, and he had adjusted his 'scope sight for that distance. Beyond the target, away to the target's right, was a small fire that had been lit by a shepherd. He had watched the shepherd all day, hoping that the shepherd would keep his flock close to the stream and far from the rock slope on which he had made his hide. He was grateful to the shepherd for lighting the fire. The fire smoked right to left. The movement of the smoke enabled him to gauge the wind speed that would deflect his bullet. Another graph. His estimate of the wind speed was five miles per hour. His estimate of the deflection was eleven inches, for a target that was six hundred metres away.

It amused him, the way that sometimes the figures in his head were metric, and sometimes they were yards and feet and inches, and sometimes the thoughts in his mind were Hebrew, and sometimes they were English.

He reckoned that he was close now to the optimum moment, and so the throb of the pain behind his right eye was relegated in importance. He was old for work as a sniper. He was 48 years old, and the balance was delicately poised between his expertise at gauging the distance to the target and the wind speed, against the ache of a tired eye. On a range he could shoot well inside a melon-sized group at 600 metres. A man's head was wider than a melon. That he was not on a range made little difference to him. If he had been young, perhaps he would have been knotted in tension and he would have cramp in his leg muscles. He was not young, he was quite relaxed, and he had learned long ago to rotate his toes in his boots to beat the cramp. He was not looking for a head shot. His 'scope showed him, where the hair lines crossed, the upper arm of the target who was in profile to him. He waited for the target to turn, to face him, he waited for the hair lines to cross on the upper torso of the target.

Steady hands on the rifle. No shake in the elbow that supported the rifle. The target faced him, was gesturing.

There was no caution from the target. The target had no need for caution. The target was standing on open ground that was four clear miles from the edge of the security zone, four clear miles beyond the stop point of Israeli patrols. He knew that the target, the man with the flowing beard and the old camouflage battledress, was a commander of a unit of the Hezbollah. He knew no more about him. He did not know why the man had been targeted. That concerned him not at all. He received his orders, he carried them out. He was only thankful that he still belonged, was still wanted, as a regular.

His finger slid slowly from against the trigger guard to curl around the curve of the trigger. The hair lines were full on the chest of the target, they wavered around the flash of a small gold pendant. He knew the men of the Hezbollah talked at length of the glory of martyrdom.

There was a wry, cold smile on his dirt-smeared face.

Crane fired.

The crack of a bullet. The collapse of a man. The scream of the crows taking flight. The bleat of stam peding sheep. The yelling of the men who had been with the target And the great silence.

The sun slipped. The dusk gathered. A grey blanket sliding over the valleys and water courses and rock outcrops and jebels of south Lebanon. Shadows merging, features losing substance.

There would be no search, that was the advantage of firing in the late afternoon. There could be no search in darkness, and where to search? None of the men who had stood with the commander of a unit of the Hezbollah could have pointed out the source of the single shot.

In the black night, canopied by stars, Crane walked with his rifle and his backpack homewards towards the security zone. Each time he fired, each time he scored, he believed that he prolonged his life as a regular, he put off the day when life would mean little more than a seat at a pavement cafe on Dizengoff. In the darkness his strained right eye no longer throbbed, the stabbing pain was gone.

At the edge of the security zone an armoured personnel carrier waited for him. From a distance he shouted a password, and when the response was yelled back at him, he came forward.

The crew of the carrier were all youngsters, all conscripts. They stared in awe as Crane slept in the back of the lurching, pitching vehicle. Each one of the conscripts knew his name, his reputation. They saw the worn filthy boots, and the torn trousers, and the muddied camouflage tunic, and the smeared face, and the woollen cap into which had been inserted sprigs of thorn bush. He was a legend to them.

At the camp, on high ground outside the town of Kiryat Shmona, two miles inside the border of the state of Israel, Crane jumped easily from the tail board of the carrier. No backward glance, no thanks, no small talk.

He was told that a helicopter was standing by to take him to Tel Aviv.

"You've done well."

"I'll confess, sir, I had doubts at first. I'm losing them."

"That's what I like to hear, Percy. I am tired of the rubbishing of the Service by every newspaper in London. I'm looking for a result we can be proud of."

The Director General shrugged into his overcoat. His briefcase was on the desk, filled with the evening's reading. His detective waited by the door.

"I'd like to be in charge, sir." Martins stuck his jaw forward.

"You'd what?"

"I'd like to run this show, sir-here and in Tel Aviv."

He saw the Director General pause, take stock, then jerk the coat into place.

"I was thinking of Fenner."

"Hasn't my experience, sir. I'd give it my best shot, sir. You could depend on me."

"Bit old, aren't you, for running in the field?"

"It's my show, sir, and I want it, I want it badly."

The Director General wrapped his scarf across his throat. He pulled on his gloves.

"What would I tell Fenner?"

"That life doesn't end at fifty, sir."

The Director General laughed. "Bloody good… It's yours, Percy. Get it in place."

Young Holt had been all day on the moor.

He came down the long straight road towards the village. All the time he was coming down the hill he could see the front garden and the front door of the house that doubled as his parents' home and his father's surgery. There was a car parked outside by the front gate. It had been there for as long as he could see the house.

He had caught every shower of the day, and the winds from the west had spurred him along. He had seen deer and he had seen a dog fox, and he fancied that he might have found the holt of an otter. And he had decided that he would return to London, end his indefinite compassionate leave. The decision made the wet and the cold worthwhile. Impossible to have made the decision at home, under his mother's watching eye.

He was coming fast down the hill, looking for a bath, looking for a mug of hot sugared tea. He could see her face, he could feel her arms round his neck, he could hear her voice. In the rain on the moor he had cried to her, in the wind he had shouted to her.

He saw the front door open. He saw his father come out, and look up the road and discover him and wave to him.

The front garden was a picture. Daffodils and crocuses, and the leaves sprouting on the shrub bushes, and the path cleanly swept. He reached the gate. He saw his father's wheelbarrow piled with winter debris and the fork and the secateurs and the broom leaning against the wheelbarrow, as if the work had been disturbed.

"Been waiting ages for you, Holt. There's a chap here who's driven down from London to collect you. A Mr Martins. Percy Martins, I think he said."

It was as if ropes tightened on his wrists.

He saw her face, felt her body, heard her voice.

"Don't be childish, Holt."

"Decent-seeming sort of chap," his father said. "Just a trifle impatient. Your mother's given him tea."