(2013) Collateral Damage (21 page)

'Jesus Christ,' said George, 'by the time you finish telling
Koller that he'll have barbecued your ass and served it with three kinds of mustard.
Go and show me what you'd do to Koller on one of those targets over there.'

Dove took out the Walther and approached three life-size cardboard
silhouettes of charging figures with sub-machineguns, presumably the Zionist horde,
which George had planted before an earth bank. He got to within about thirty metres
and using a double-handed grip, discharged all eight rounds in the magazine. He
hit one figure in his cardboard knee.

'That's what happens when you're mad,' said George.

'You've gotta be cool. Keep the madness buried deep inside.'
He banged his heart with his right hand and smiled. Suddenly Dove realised George
wasn't all bad.

Dove didn't know how long the course was going to last. 'As long
as it takes,' George said when he asked him.

'You mean until you find Koller for me.'

'Maybe.'

'How will you find him?'

'I don't know, man. Not my scene.'

By about the fifth day Dove was enjoying his training. The stiffness
had gone when he crawled out of his sleeping-bag at daybreak before the flies reveilled.
His stomach was becoming accustomed to the diet, and he was acquiring a grimy tan.
He told himself he was hardening up; even his beer paunch was deflating. This new
sense of well-being persuaded him to join the fedayeen in their daily regimen of
jogging and exercises. Even so, he was in nothing like as good physical shape as
the others; several times he was halted by the need to cough up bloody phlegm or
was doubled up by an agonizing stitch that left him feeling nauseous and very cross
with himself. Surely he couldn't be that unfit? He still played rugby.

Otherwise, he earned a certain admiration from the fedayeen because
of the speed with which he acquired new skills. He had learned how to take the pin
out of a grenade and could throw one further than any of them. He found it helped
to imagine slowbowling them down a sticky wicket. He would never be an Olympic
pistol-shot, but at fifty metres he could now put an average of six or seven rounds
in a six-inch group across a cardboard chest.

George also taught him a little about street-fighting. He took
him to the ruins of a lonely villa which he said had been wrecked in an Israeli
air raid - only the grey ferro-concrete walls had survived. Here he showed him how
you flattened yourself to the side of a door - they had to imagine the door - immediately
after knocking, because no modern door could stop anything heavier than a pea-shooter
and you could be shot through it while you were wondering if anybody was at home.
He told him things over and over again until the schoolteacher could never remember
a time when he didn't know them. He told him never to enter a darkened room with
the light behind him; he told him if you had to enter a room where you were expected,
you charged in and threw yourself down immediately, to the left or right, but you
must keep looking because you had to know where your adversary was before he had
time to squeeze off his second bullet. If you could afford the noise and you had
one with you it was better, of course, to roll a grenade in first.

And he told him about the trick called 'ballooning', designed
to put off a sniper attempting a head-shot. You imagined your head was a balloon
on a string bobbing about in a gentle breeze and kept it moving like that on a swaying
neck so that a sniper was rarely given the chance to settle his sights on your cranium.
'Remember, for the guy with the rifle six hundred yards away, three inches of movement
can be as wide as three miles.'

'But how long are you supposed to keep it up for?'

'Until you can get behind a foot of concrete,
dummy!'

One afternoon George took Dove down the valley to the nearest
village 'for the groceries'. They went there in the pick-up with one of the young
fedayeen in a flat leather cap hanging onto the Dushka on the back in the upright
manner that had caused the Beirut wits to call these machine-gunners 'the water-skiers'.
It was a crisp, clear day. Behind him Dove could see the snowcovered peak of Mount
Hermon and then the grey slopes of the foothills of the Chuf range, lightly furred
with stunted trees like the hairs on a man's chest.

The village they went to was not occupied by Palestinian refugees,
but a tobacco-farming community of Lebanese Shia Moslems. Dove saw that they lived
in substantial, flat-roofed, concrete houses with open-sided ground-floor storerooms
made of breeze block in which they stored tobacco leaf. Most homes had a car or
tractor parked outside.

George bought bread, cheese, yogurt, radishes, cucumbers, tomatoes
and meat - some of it ready diced for kebabs - eggs, coffee, and a couple of live
chickens. The Shi'ites seemed cordial enough and in all the houses they visited
they were offered coffee and cigarettes and, in the less devout households, glasses
of arak, which ignited the throat. On seven occasions payment was refused which,
to Dove's amazement, annoyed the Palestinian. 'Basically, the dumb shits don't like
us,' he explained as they trudged away from their latest hand-out. 'They want to
be able to say we extorted the food from them.'

'Why don't they like you?'

'Because the cocksuckers blame us for the Israeli
air raids.
They don't want to understand that Palestine is every Arab's fight.
They're like the goddamn Swiss. They just want to be left to their pastures and
their farming. Sometimes I don't think they'd give a shit if the goddamn Israelis
walked right in here just as long as the sun came up and went down at the right
time and they could sell their lousy tobacco. It doesn't matter to them that my
people are starving and living in camps. They're just fuckin' peasants. They don't
care what happens to other people as long as they make money.
Motherfuckers.'

After this outburst Dove was surprised when, at their next call,
an elderly farmer in pin-stripe trousers and a black rollneck sweater gave the
long-haired Palestinian what appeared to be a particularly warm welcome. He soon
saw why. They were drinking their third Turkish coffee of the afternoon when into
the house came a little girl aged about eight or nine. She was quite classically
pretty, her face framed in straight, jet-black hair, and dominated by huge, sensitive
brown eyes which seemed to light up when they registered George.

 
She ran over to him and
he bent down and picked her up, kissed her on both cheeks, threw her up in the air,
caught her, kissed her again, and then fished in the top pocket of his fatigues
until he came out with a new packet of coloured pencils in a plastic wallet. Throughout
it all the little girl, although obviously ecstatic, was strangely silent. 'She's
dumb,' the Palestinian explained.
'Hysterical dumbness.
Her parents were blown away by an Israeli bomb and she was standing right next to
them. Miracle she survived. I was the first to find her. The old guy is her grandfather.'

George's new role as the concerned warrior suddenly reminded
Dove of the generous, gum-chewing Yanks around his home town as a boy, battling
the Cold War ennui by thumping teddyboys and generally much admired by himself
and his small friends.

The little girl ran off and returned holding a picture which
she presented to George and then stood solemnly by while he examined it with great
seriousness. 'It's always the same one,' he said, passing it to Dove.

The picture showed two planes, children's planes with impossible
vertical wings, dropping a stick of bombs on two houses. The bombs were not landing
on the houses, but were marked in vivid red and yellow 'V's' as landing all around.
In the foreground, surrounded by these 'V's', two figures with matchstick limbs
were lying on the ground. To the left of the picture was a tree underneath which
stood a little girl - a triangle with a ball on top sprouting black string hair
- shedding torrents of tears marked in much the same way as the falling bombs. Left
again of the tree, at the edge of the picture, was the figure of a man in a keffiyeh,
holding what was obviously supposed to be a Kalashnikov because the child had equipped
his rifle with the distinctive banana-shaped magazine. The rifle was spitting red
fire at one of the planes, but unlike most children's war pictures he wasn't hitting
it. The red dashes merely went hopelessly on, between the two planes, until they
left the picture. There was something else peculiar about it. Dove looked again.
The sun was crying.

'The dude doing the shooting is new,' said George. 'I think it's
supposed to be me. Obviously she doesn't think I can hit a barn door.'

The Palestinian carefully rolled the picture up and tucked it
into his shirt. 'I've tried to get her to do something else, but she's a stubborn
little monkey. This is all she wants to draw. At least I get a walk-on part this
week.'

When they had to depart there was a repeat performance of the
Palestinian's arrival. But this time the child knocked his hair aside, revealing
the shrivelled, stunted cartilage that was all that remained of his right ear. 'Hey!
Leave my wound alone, young lady,' he ordered, but the girl continued to pull at
the gristle until he gently removed her hand. Dove found it difficult to take his
eyes off it.

Afterwards, in the pick-up, George told the schoolteacher how
it happened. 'I was captured by some assholes during the civil war. They sliced
it off to prove to my team that they had me. Had to pay a lot of bread for old Abu
George, but we got it all back.'

'Who were they? Christians?'

'Shit, no. They would have killed me unless we had one of their
top honchos and they wanted to trade. No, these were real banditos.
Kurds.'

'How did you get the money back?'

'How do you think? The street scene is small in West Beirut.
It took us twenty-four hours to find out who and where they were. Then we went in
and zapped them. I got the bastard who did the slicing
myself
.
He was a very surprised guy.'

'Why surprised?'

'He was on the john.'

'Christ!'

'Scared the shit outta him,' laughed George.
'Gave him another asshole.'
At intervals he laughed about this
most of the way back to the camp.

The training came to an end quite suddenly on the ninth day.
It started with a swooshing sound, similar to the noise a fast express might make,
that startled Dove and made him duck as if he had come under fire. He had just begun
to straighten himself up when it happened again, to be rapidly followed by two more.
Every time it happened he crouched a little lower as if he was being beaten into
the ground by an invisible mallet.

He looked up to find George grinning at him, cradling his Kalashnikov.
'Grads,' he said.

 
'What?' asked Dove, trying
to recover his
composure.
'Katyushas.
Rockets.
They're firing them at the Israelis.'

'Who's firing them?'

'Those guys down there.'

He handed Dove a pair of binoculars and pointed down the valley.
When he had focused the glasses Dove could make out a moving truck with four grey
steel pipes on the back. The pipes were angled over the roof of the cab as if they
were two huge double-barrelled shotguns, one under the other.

'That's the launcher,' explained George. 'Now they're bugging
out. Real hit and run stuff.

Just like Charlie Cong.'

  
'But what were they firing at?'

'Settlements.
Probably near the place
the Jews call Kiryat Shmoneh. I don't know exactly. They're not my team. I didn't
know it was going to happen.'

'Civilian targets?'

'Civilian targets my ass. They're fortified settlements. They're
crawling with Israeli army.'

'But civilians live there?
Women and children?'

'Listen man, civilians live here too. Like Tamima's family.'

'Tamima?'

'The little girl who tried to pull what's left
of my ear off.'

'But what good does it do?'

'It shows the bastards that we'll never give in.
That there'll never be any peace until they make a settlement with us.
Look, take your piece off and spend a few rounds. I'd better help the others. I
think we might have a busy day.'

'Why? What's going to happen?'

'Well, they might wait until tomorrow, but the chances are the
Israelis will either start shelling around here or send a couple of Phantoms over
and bomb the shit outta some poor farmers. They never get the guys who pulled the
job. Then they'll claim they've made a retaliatory raid against Palestinian terrorists.
Motherfuckers.
They're the terrorists, the dudes flying
those computers upstairs - some bright mother's son who was good at Maths and passed
out of the Air Force Academy in a big parade and got laid in a Texas whore-house
doing his advance training. Oh, and I bet his Ma polishes his picture every day
and writes him letters telling him how proud they all are and don't forget to say
his prayers, and take his baths, and dry between his toes. Then he's grim reaper
in his shiny all-American toy, twenty minutes of sudden death over southern Lebanon,
fifty women and children wasted and he's back at base, pinching the ass off the
Moroccan briefing-room chick, before they've finished dying.
And
so clean.
All he did was push the button when the computer told him to and
watch some smoke come up. I wish, I really wish I could get one of those motherfuckers
down here and show him what his bunch of tricks does - before I cut his balls off.'

'But those rockets - what do they do?'

'Shit, man. Those rockets - they're like pissing on an elephant's
foot. So, before you ask, are the bombs that go off in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv planted
by people who look the dudes they're gonna kill in the eye before they walk away
because they know it's right, know it's necessary.' George was spitting his words
out like an American television evangelist.