(2013) Collateral Damage (22 page)

'Right?
Necessary?
Terrorism can never be right. Anyway, I thought your organisation didn't believe
in terrorism?'

The Palestinian remembered who he was supposed to be working
for. 'It doesn't believe in terrorism against Zionist targets abroad or plane hijacking
or that sort of shit any more. It believes it's a legitimate weapon in our homeland
- like the French Resistance.'

'The French Resistance was different- their country was occupied.'

'So's ours.'

'The Israelis say it's their country.'

'Yeah.
Well they shouldn't have waited
two thousand years to come back. Of course, when they did come back they were no
slouches at terrorism themselves. Vasting a whole village at Deir Yassin in '48-the
Red Cross saw that.
Blowin' up the King David's hotel, hangin'
British sergeants, inventin' the letter bomb.
Shit, they weren't bad.
Weren't bad at all for people who won't talk to terrorists.'

'They had to come back. The Nazis-'

'We're not responsible for European anti-semitism or Cossack
pogroms. What right did the British have in 1917, before they'd even taken the country
from the goddamn Turks, to make a declaration saying that the Jews could have a
homeland in Palestine?'

Some of the history of the place came back to Dove. 'If I remember
rightly the Balfour Declaration promised a homeland not a state. It was very specific
about the rights of the indigenous people not being-'

'Sure, sure.
That was the crack in the
dam, wasn't
it.
Forty-one years later it burst and you
got Israel.'

'God, it's difficult, isn't it?'

'No, man.
It's easy. We're right.'

Dove shook his head. 'I think you're both as stubborn as mules
- the Palestinians and the Israelis.'

'Yeah,' said George. 'If we ever get together the world better
look out. OK. Let's drop the polemic. You've got your own war to fight, and I'm
not questioning your morality.'

'For Christ's sake.
I've got every right-'

'You've got a reason - your own survival.'

'What's that supposed to mean?'

'Killing Koller is the only thing that keeps you alive, makes
life worth living. That's what you told me.
Right, man?'

Dove walked away, angrily ramming the magazine into the Walther
with the heel of his left hand as he did so.

'Hey, man,' George called after him. 'I told you before not to
do that. You'll crimp the top of the magazine and get a jam.'

Dove waved his broad left hand in acknowledgement without looking
back.

'Asshole,' murmured George. 'Goddamn asshole.' But there was
a sad, almost affectionate smile on his face. Then he went back to where the others
were threading the big, brass 12.7mm rounds for the Dushka into new ammunition belts
and began talking to them in his bad Arabic.

8. Before They've Finished Dying

The planes from the south came in the late afternoon when the
fedayeen had almost given them up. For a full minute before they saw them they could
hear their engines humming in the clouds gathering for dusk.

They first appeared as two glittering silver darts falling to
earth, one slightly behind the other, before banking into a tight turn, their triangular
shape clearly silhouetted against the sinking sun. Dove, seated in a shallow trench
near the Dushka, felt his stomach turn cold and the ice begin to form around his
groin.
George, squatting beside him with his binoculars, said,
'Phantoms'.

For a moment it seemed that the aircraft were heading straight
for them. 'Surely,' thought Dove, 'they can't know we're in these trees?' He watched
as the Dushka crew and the fedayeen on the multi-barrelled Czech gun frantically
swivelled their weapons on them through the gaps in the trees. He studied the gunners'
hands as they tightened over the trigger mechanisms. George had told him that the
Czech gun was capable of hitting, without the aid of radar, an aircraft travelling
at the speed of sound. 'If the crews have had the right training,' he had added.

'And have they?'

'Only live targets.'

He stared at these mostly teenage gunners now, silently begging
them to hold their fire, not to draw attention to themselves. Then George was standing
up in the trench, his right hand raised.

In fact, the first fire came from some positions above them near
Beaufort Castle. George let his hand drop just as the Phantoms, their engine noise
practically drowning out the gunfire, had passed them and
were
beginning their dive into the valley. For seven or eight seconds, as the planes
flew across their line of vision, his crews had the chance to get them in their
sights. In that time the five barrels under George's command discharged just over
four hundred rounds. The noise was appalling. It sounded to Dove as if someone was
turning an enormous coffeegrinder inside his head. There was also the burned smell
that lingers when a lot of ammunition has been fired. Yet not one of those rounds,
with a muzzle velocity of over three thousand miles per hour, found a target and
nor did any of the other antiaircraft guns on the hillside, let alone the rifles
fired as uselessly as the one in Tamima's picture.

The Phantoms were better. Their bombs kicked up great brown clouds
around the village of the Shia tobacco farmers. Because they were about two miles
away Dove and the rest experienced the peculiar delayed action effect of actually
seeing the smoke and the climbing silver arrows before the noise of the explosion
had rippled up the valley towards them. The aircraft made one other pass at the
village and the fedayeen fired their guns with the same effect. The second
time there were
not several large explosions, but hundreds of
spurts of earth in the fields near the houses, followed by a firecracker noise without
the rhythm of machine-gun fire.

'CBU's,' said George.
'Cluster Bomb Units.
We had them in Nam. They drop something that looks like a wing-tank and half-way
down it splits open like a fucking pea-pod and throws nice little exploding balls
about the place.
Another good American toy.
Jesus Christ.'

George left the trench and walked to where the trees thinned
out and he could get a good look at the valley through his fieldglasses. Overhead
the planes were circling again. Dove followed him to where he was crouching beside
a tree, resting on his haunches. The Palestinian grunted, adjusted his focus, and
held the binoculars on one spot for about thirty seconds. He handed the glasses
to the big Englishman. 'Look at the houses,' he said, 'then come back about two
hundred yards into the field and go to three o'clock. Got it?'

At first Dove could not understand what the Palestinian wanted
him to see. There was still a lot of dust and smoke swirling about the houses. As
far as he could tell the ones he was focused on were still intact. He saw a smallish
vehicle, a Land Rover or a pick-up, move off at great speed. He came to the spot
in the field, but he saw nothing at first except young tobacco plants and bits of
old farm machinery. He went back to the machinery again, a long, oval device painted
green, which listed in the soft spring soil like a neglected tombstone.

'You got it?' asked George.

'I think so - that metal thing in the field.'

'Yeah.
That's one half of the CBU canister.
See if you can find the other one.'

He was looking for this when the planes, almost forgotten, swooped
down on the positions around the Crusader castle - short bursts of machine cannon,
the pilots coming in so low it seemed as if they were following the very contours
of the land. George was taken by surprise too and they both threw themselves to
the ground, uncertain as to who was under attack, fearful it might be
themselves
. It was a parting gesture. The Phantoms soared south,
impervious to the furious, frightened chatter of the guns below them. The schoolteacher
was reminded of flies on a television screen, untouched by the picture.

There was a rush to get down to the village. George led, with
Dove sitting alongside him in the front seat of the pick-up, the man on the Dushka
kicking spent cases out of the back as they went.

On the outskirts the first thing they heard was a dog howling.

It was a terrible, ear-splitting sound and Dove, dreading it
was human, was almost relieved to see the animal on the roadside, tottering about
on three legs, holding up its shattered front paw. George stopped the noise with
a long burst from his Kalashnikov.

In the village, the women were wailing around three shattered
houses, one of them the house of Tamima and her grandfather. Beside it was a crater,
about twenty feet across, made by the bomb whose blast had brought the house and
its neighbour
down.
The roof of grey stressed concrete
was almost intact, but no more than six inches off the ground in places because
the walls had collapsed.
Nearby a car lay on its roof like a stranded
beetle.

George and Dove joined the people clambering about the shattered
masonry, peering under slabs into horrible little caverns of crushed furniture,
tugging tentatively at clothes which proved empty, hoping they would not find what
they were looking for. At one point the Palestinian groaned and emerged from one
of these burrowing places clutching the wallet of coloured pencils he had given
the child. They could not get under the main weight of the roof, but they tore at
the rubble around the edges for over half an hour before all but George, his Kalashnikov
slung across his back, gave up. Dove, exhausted by his own efforts, watched his
frantic clawing, his fingers bruised and cut, saw him even trying to lift the roof
single-handed.

Then somebody told them that, after the first bombs, many people
had run to the fields 'where the little bombs had fallen'. They raced to the spot,
and sure enough, a group of sobbing women were standing in a semi-circle facing
the dark green of an orange grove. At their feet lay Tamima's grandfather, bleeding
and making convulsive little shudders. Dove ran up to him with the vague intention
of stopping his wounds, but he was bleeding from so many places he didn't know where
to start. He had been caught running for the cover of the orange grove when the
CBU's bomblets hailed down. George bent down beside the dying old man and began
to shout in his ear; the old man murmured something, and George ran off into the
orange grove pursued by Dove. 'Watch where you put your feet,' yelled the Palestinian
after him.

Dove saw her first. She was standing under one of the trees,
almost lost beneath the foliage, examining a green, unripened fruit.

George called, 'Tamima', and started running towards her.

Then suddenly he froze, and when he started moving again approached
very slowly on the balls of his feet, whispering to her in the guttural Lebanese
Arabic. Without turning to Dove, still looking at the child, he said in a calm voice
pitched almost to a monotone: 'Watch your feet man, watch your feet. She's playing
with a fucking bomb.'

The schoolteacher looked again at the orange. He saw that its
texture was smooth, metallic; it was not oval, but crimped into a hexagon shape
and had a ridge running around its middle even more uncommon to oranges. He stopped
and searched the long grass around his feet. About a metre from where he stood was
another of these strange green fruit and nearby, the sunlight that filtered through
the grove glinted on the bronze interior of a half-sphere that had split from its
metal shell.

Tamima smiled when she saw the Palestinian and threw the bomblet
from one hand to the other, moving her head from side to side like a juggler warming
up. The Palestinian continued to whisper to the girl and in the same quiet voice
told Dove to sit down - carefully. This was a mistake because the child became alarmed
at these strange adult antics. She held her new plaything in both hands, sensed
that this was the cause of alarm and threw it from her in a startled little two-handed
gesture.

Dove had been squatting. Now he flung himself down on his belly,
his fear of an immediate explosion overcoming the notion that he might be prostrating
himself on more unexploded bomblets. He lay there for several seconds, his nose
in the grass, dimly aware of the insect life buzzing around him. Nothing happened.
He looked up. The Palestinian was standing with his arm around the little girl,
the bomblet he had caught in his free hand. Dove scrambled to his feet expecting
some scathing comment. Instead the Palestinian said, 'Sweet student, you're learning.
These things are supposed to go off on impact. Sometimes, if they land on soft ground,
they don't, but it makes them about as touchy as a scorpion. You don't even want
to sneeze near them.' Dove carried the girl on his shoulders while the Palestinian
picked a route for them out of the grove. On the way he bent down and picked up
the bronze half-sphere Dove had noticed shining in the grass. When they got back
to the field he scooped out with his fingers what remained of the white explosive,
fully revealing the bronze interior. It was pre-cut in half-centimetre squares,
like a waffle iron, to make for easier fragmentation.

'Now tell me who the terrorists are,' he said.

But Dove was not listening. He was watching the road, where a
Mercedes had just drawn up with an escort of fedayeen in Land Rovers, front and
rear. Out of the car stopped the lawyer; he waved them over. 'Maybe you're in business,'
said George. He took the little girl off the Englishman's shoulders.

Dove walked up to the Mercedes.
'That's
a problem,' said the lawyer. 'We know where Koller is, but there's a Scotland Yard
man in town looking for you.'