Retribution (13 page)

Naim shrugged. “As you say. It’s not worth the risk.”

He was afraid to insist on his leadership over Hasan in a matter where he was clearly wrong, although he would have liked
to. Too often Hasan seemed to be going along with his instructions in a kind of half-amused way, like an older man approving
à younger one’s progress. But Naim knew that Hasan was too dangerous to bully—one mistake and he would make Naim pay for it
as painfully as he could. Besides, Naim needed his support, not his opposition. He gave in gracefully. They would drive.

Having cleared their things out of the Montparnasse flat into a rented Peugeot, they toured the Left Bank looking for a likely
spot. The Café Arizona on the Place St. Michel looked right. Naim left the car and walked past twice to make sure. The Café
Arizona was at the hub of the student and tourist sector, its sidewalk tables presenting its customers with a privileged view
of the passing world. Affluent students and foreign visitors
formed the clientele—the sky-high prices kept everyone else away. It was trendy, all chrome and glass and natural wood. The
people were talking about clothes, films, rock stars, outrageous new restaurants, themselves.

Naim smiled to himself and walked toward the Peugeot a little distance away. Hasan had the two grenades in the car, two American
M26s. The thin sheet metal of the M26 contained 155 grams of Composition B, a TNT-based mixture, wrapped in a prefragmented
spirally wound steel coil. Hasan was being ultracautious, which decided Naim on taking a risk. He knew Hasan expected them
to hire or steal another car so they could use it for the attack and change from it to the Peugeot at another location.

“Give me the two grenades,” he said in the car window to Hasan. “Pull over onto Boulevard St. Michel beneath those trees.
I’ll do it on foot.”

Hasan looked at him for a moment in silence, then reached under the seat and handed him the grenades.

“If things go wrong, you take off,” Naim said.

Hasan’s sardonic smile made it clear that this was exactly what he intended to do.

Naim wasn’t worried. He held the two grenades inside the car for Hasan to pull the safety pins. Once the pressure of his palm
on the spring-loaded side lever was released, the charge would go off in four or five seconds. The M26 had a casualty zone
with a diameter of about a hundred feet, which Naim estimated at about thirty meters. He withdrew his hands from inside the
car and pushed them into his raincoat pockets. After
carefully looking around to make sure he had not been seen, he nodded to Hasan to move the car and he began his stroll along
the sidewalk toward the Café Arizona.

He passed other cafés on the way, all crowded but none quite so expensive-looking and trendy as the Arizona. Naim felt like
some kind of god walking along with so much death clutched in his hands. If he chose, he could change his mind at any time
and kill these people here instead of those over there. He was deciding. He was choosing. He… He…

Naim was enjoying himself so much that he thought about walking around for a while. He abandoned this notion when he saw two
policemen with submachine guns slung on their right shoulders pass along the far side of the square toward the river. Also,
Hasan might have to move the car because he had pulled in where parking was forbidden. Better get it over and done with.

With his right hand he lobbed the first grenade into the interior of the café. Before it exploded he had already tossed the
second grenade from his left hand among the sidewalk tables. He ran for the Peugeot on the Boul’ Mich.

Pieces of sheet metal casing and hundreds of hot steel barbs tore through skin and flesh at supersonic speeds. Shards of flying
glass speared people, plaster dropped from the ceiling onto them, metal table tops smashed bones, and the force of the two
blasts themselves hit the nearest bodies with the impact of a speeding car.

Smoke filled the interior. Those who could run ran, some of them trampling the injured in their blind panic to escape. Bodies
lay everywhere, some of them cut almost in two and leaking their lifeblood in ghastly quantities all over the floor and on
the sidewalk.

One student, apparently otherwise unhurt, sat on the roadside curb looking in disbelief at his right arm. His hand was gone.

Twenty-five miles east of Beirut and twelve miles from the Syrian border, Abu Jeddah had established his headquarters inside
a walled compound. The house had been a wealthy merchant’s who had fled abroad with his family. It was not far from the mostly
Christian town of Taanayel, in the eastern Bekaa region, which was largely Shiite Moslem and controlled by the Syrian army.

Two guards with Kalashnikovs sat on hard-backed chairs outside the locked wooden gate of the compound. On the flat roof of
the house, a third guard with binoculars and a .50-caliber machine gun lay beneath the shade of an earth-colored nylon sheet
tied between the roof’s radio aerials. Coils of blade ribbon ran along the top of the compound walls. Angled floodlights were
fixed at each corner.

Abu Jeddah wore sandals and an open bathrobe over his swimming trunks. His thick body was covered with curly black hairs.
It was not long after dawn, and
he sat in the warm early morning sunshine, sipping the first of the many black coffees laced with whiskey that he drank every
day. He read the overnight radio messages and reports brought in by hand. A heavy roll of European newspapers purchased in
Beirut lay beside his chair.

At last he had a message from Naim Shabaan. Naim had lost one man and wanted him replaced by one or two more. In the meanwhile
he would proceed as planned. Abu Jeddah had known that much by following the international news from Europe. He was pleased
that Naim, on taking his first setback, had not radioed urgently for assistance or advice but had persevered to demonstrate
to all concerned that the loss of one man in no way weakened the resolve of the others.

The attacks at the cemetery and at the Café Arizona had shown the governments how weak their defenses were. At last count
the Arizona death toll was fourteen, with thirty-eight other casualties. The June 4–New Arab Social Front could not be stopped.

Abu Jeddah was pleased that Naim had kept communications to a minimum because of a new development—or rather the recurrence
of an old problem. All radio messages in the Middle East were routinely monitored by the Zionists for use by their imperialist
friends and also by the British, through a Royal Signals unit based on Cyprus. High-speed, large memory computers processed
the coded messages, looking for repetitions and patterns to enable cryptographers to break the codes used. Their success rate
had become
frighteningly high. The only sure way to beat the airwave code-breakers was to use a new page from an Arabic book as the basis
for the code for each message, with the page order predetermined in some way. In essence this provided a new code for each
message and worked well between two established and safe points of communication. However, if the Arabic book fell into enemy
hands, as it so easily could in mobile combat situations, it could provide the enemy with a dangerous tool for disinformation
as well as information. In fact, sending false messages to the Palestinians might be more valuable to the enemy than decoding
Palestinian messages.

Abu Jeddah always trained his men not to send stuff to him in code that he could read in the next day’s newspapers. Naim had
obeyed, mentioning only that Ali Khalef had been killed by an American agent whom they later tried to kill in a Paris hotel.
Ali was actually dead, that had been confirmed. The attack on an American tourist in a small hotel in the rue de Rennes left
an African hotel employee dead. The American was last seen running out of the hotel and jumping into a taxi. The newspapers
assumed he jumped on the first available plane home. Abu Jeddah knew better.

This American was the most dangerous type of CIA agent. He might appear to be solitary but he was not—a vast network of imperialist
spies lay everywhere to help him. Somehow through their sophisticated technology, they were already able to detect a pattern
behind Naim’s moves and to place this field man in
position to strike against him. Naim and Hasan had proved their courage, but they did not have the intellectual endowments
to fight something like this. No matter where they went or what they did, this CIA agent would use his mysterious edge to
move in and destroy them.

Abu Jeddah could see that it would only be a matter of time before yet another brave Palestinian comrade for freedom petered
out in utter futility, with scores of lives wasted and the Ostend Concordance signed. His reputation depended on preventing
that treaty. If it was signed, he would be nothing. Everyone would say that Abu Jeddah had failed. There would be no more
honors, no more financial generosity, no more blind obedience to him… The heavy man in the bathrobe agitatedly jumped out
of his chair and paced up and down between the swimming pool and the sandbagged entrance to the underground bomb shelter.

Abu Jeddah had a vision of the future. The Arabs had been skilled mathematicians and astronomers when the Europeans were wearing
wolfskins and chasing each other with bronze axes. Later they had followed Mohammed and Islam had brought them greatness.
Abu Jeddah saw Karl Marx as the new Prophet, a man whose teachings would bring a new dawn to the Arab world. The imperialists
would be broken, the Zionists would be driven from his homeland, and leftist Moslems, Jews, and Christians would live peaceably
side by side, sharing the collective wealth. Many of the Palestinian guerrillas had laughed at this as a dream, but Abu
Jeddah carefully explained to them his definition of the difference between a dream and a vision. A dream was only make-believe,
not real, while a vision was something men died for.

The day was getting hot already. He shucked off his bathrobe and sandals, plunged into the pool, and swam several lengths
in an awkward dog paddle. Emerging cool and refreshed, he went inside the house to take care of more paperwork and make some
decisions before inspecting the recruits undergoing intensive training in his nearby camp. They would finish their maneuvers
well before the midday heat set in.

The walls of his office were lined with maps, each covered with clear plastic so they could be marked with a felt-tip pen
and erased. The maps were all new except one, which was yellowed and ragged, showing the Middle East with Palestine still
intact and with the old Arab town names instead of the new Hebrew ones.

Abu Jeddah turned on the electric ceiling fan and sat for a while watching the sheets of papers flutter on his desk from the
draft. He had twenty-one men and three women in training. Some spoke a little English and a little French. None were fluent.
None had ever been outside the Arab world. The oldest was twenty. His problem was to decide the best time to unleash them
on the Common Market countries.

None had the skills to last long, like Naim and Hasan. They would go down quickly but in a blaze of glory, taking down many
times their own number with them in spectacular butcheries across Europe. He wanted
to soften up and further batter the. Europeans before releasing them as his final coup. The Europeans would not realize that
of course. They would think there was still worse ahead unless they announced their intention not to sign the concordance.
Greece had done so already. France was showing signs of weakening. Was it too early to unleash them? Should he let Naim and
Hasan prepare the ground some more?

“Someone who is determined to die and take some of his enemies with him generally will find a way to succeed,” Colonel Yitzhak
Bikel told his two lunch guests in the high-rise apartment building at the edge of Jerusalem. “As soon as we come up with
one way to stop them, they come up with another to do it. The assassin has been a tradition here in the Middle East for at
least nine hundred years. He’s not about to stop now.”

“Yes, of course, my dear fellow,” Group-Captain Godfrey Bradshaw told him, “but these chaps we’re talking about now are not
whirling dervishes and so forth. Some of them live better than you and I do. In fact, I’ve heard them called Gucci terrorists
because of their fondness for quality goods—though I must state frankly that I find these Italian designs far too flashy in
comparison to sensible British goods.”

“The Italians do make good wines,” General Gerrit van Gilder observed, pointedly taking a very sparing sip of the Israeli
red wine the colonel had served with lunch.

Bikel ignored the implied criticism of the wine. “These assassins today are not so far removed from the whirling dervishes
that you mentioned. Marco Polo reported that assassins-to-be were kept in beautiful gardens and supplied with affectionate
women so that they could have a foretaste of the paradise which would be their reward after martyrdom. Today some of them
settle for what seems to them to be paradise on earth—money, Western luxury, women, drugs, alcohol. They don’t believe they’re
going to have an afterlife, and so they buy into life with what they have to offer—youth, courage, skill. From their own experience
they know nothing good lasts very long.”