Retribution (18 page)

“That’s enough,” the militia men’s leader shouted. “If you char him too much, you won’t know him.”

The men swarmed over the wall, ready to deliver bursts from their rifles at any opposition. They caught a swimmer before he
managed to climb out of the pool. The house was a blazing inferno, and he seemed the only survivor in the compound. A militia
man tied the man’s wrists behind his back, while another went out to the ambulance. By listening to them joke, the man learned
that they were Christian Falangist militia men. He recognized the accent of the man they brought from the ambulance as that
of an Israeli. The Israeli carried a radio transmitter.

They circulated photographs among themselves and looked at him. “You’ve put on weight, Abu Jeddah,” they taunted.

They knew who he was. He would not give them
the pleasure of trying to deny it. He would die like a man, proud of who and what he had been.

The Israeli was no longer paying attention to him, instead fiddling with the transmitter on the ground beside the pool. They
were all sweating from the heat of the burning house. A militia man tied a rope several times around an ornamental garden
rock. Then he tied the other end around Abu Jeddah’s neck, with a total length of maybe four feet of rope left, so that Abu
Jeddah had to stoop.

The militia man picked up the heavy garden rock so that Abu Jeddah could stand upright once more. Then he pitched the rock
into the swimming pool. Caught off balance, Abu Jeddah was yanked by the neck into the deep end after the rock.

They watched him beneath the water pass his bound wrists beneath his feet so they were now in front of his body. He swam down
to the bottom, scooped up the rock and tried to swim to the surface. However the rock outweighed his body’s buoyancy.

Abu Jeddah dropped the rock and used his teeth to tear savagely at the rope which boùnd his wrists. Then his fingers tried
desperately to untie the knot at his neck. He was just about out of air. His feet thrashed at the water’s surface as his head,
anchored to the bottom by the short length of rope, could resist no longer and drew in long, cool drafts of chlorinated water
into his parched lungs.

By this time the Israeli had got the transmitter
working. Using the agreed wavelength, he repeatedly sent out the code word:
Har HaTzofim.

There were nearly twenty thousand Arabs living in the grimy Kreuzberg district hard by the Berlin Wall, and this wasn’t counting
Turks, Armenians, and Iranians, who were also plentiful in the neighborhood.

“It’s a bit of a comedown from our accustomed style of living,” Naim observed humorously as he sat on a lumpy bed with torn
sheets and a dirty blanket. “But at least we’re safe here.”

He received a fierce look from Hasan, who despite his proletarian politics had a strong distaste for poverty.

“This place is riddled with informers,” Hasan claimed. “If the Germans offer a reward, we are done for. We can’t move here.
We can’t operate. They have us pinned down, just like they want us.”

Naim smiled and nodded. “That’s when they are most vulnerable and we are most dangerous.”

“You can’t be thinking of mounting an operation here,” Hasan told him. “Let us slip back one by one into East Berlin and fly
somewhere from there.”

“That’s what they want us to do,” Naim said scornfully. “Run away without striking at them. They can boast they have won this
round and say we are seriously weakened, need not be reckoned with. Hasan, you are a patient man and I understand you do not
always agree with me. We will run back to East Berlin, because, as you say, we must. But not without drawing
blood first. Then the victory will be ours. Even Barcelona was a victory for us.”

“An expensive one.”

“Those were raw recruits who should never have been sent,” Naim said.

“Where are Leila and Mohammed?”

“I sent her to a nice suburb, after first sending her to buy some European clothes and visit a hairdresser. You’ll hardly
know her.”

Hasan looked interested but said nothing.

“Mohammed is buying dynamite, detonators, and time fuses, as well as finding us a couple of cars. I told him to steal one
of those ivory-colored Mercedes taxis.”

“You think it’s safe to buy dynamite from that Turk?” Hasan asked accusingly.

“No. But if things go wrong, Mohammed doesn’t know where to find me and he can’t tell the authorities much at this point that
they don’t already know about us.”

“That’s true, I suppose,” Hasan conceded. “All right, if we’re to strike, let’s do it without delay and get the hell out of
here as soon as possible.”

Naim slapped him on the shoulder. “Let’s do that and take a rest. We’ll have ourselves some good times again.”

Richard Dartley was still in Barcelona when the West German government announced that the East Germans had allowed four Palestinian
terrorists to infiltrate into West Berlin. No other information was forthcoming,
and in Spain a collective sigh of relief took place. Let the Germans deal with them for a while now.

Dartley flew to Frankfurt and changed planes there for Tegel Airport in West Berlin. He stayed at the Kempinski and arranged
to have dinner with a senior civil servant in the West German administration, a man he could trust. He told Dartley the news
that Abu Jeddah was dead, which was being kept secret for the moment in case it triggered the terrorists into more violence.
He also said that the first names of the four were known to their informer: Naim, Hasan, Mohammed, and Leila. They had limitless
funds and no shortage of new sponsors in the Middle East.

The four were expected to try to return separately to East Berlin at busy times on the U-Bahn—the subway operated by West
Berlin—or the elevated S-Bahn, run by East Berlin. Both transport systems operated throughout the city, although some West
Berliners refused to take the communist-run elevated out of principle. The authorities would be watching these trains, and
Dartley should stay away in case he got into trouble.

That was all the information anyone had.

Mohammed drove the Mercedes taxi with Naim and Hasan in the backseat. Leila was waiting at the appointed place.

“There is a nice house for sale,” she told Naim.

“Good, I think I would like to buy a house. Show Mohammed the way, Leila, and then come in with me. Hasan, if I send her out
alone, it’s on. If we both come
out together, pick us up and we will try somewhere else.”

The suburban house had pine trees along one side and privacy behind tall hedges and bushes. Naim and Leila got out of the
taxi at the gate and walked to the door. A woman anxiously opened it before they reached the doorstep.

Naim spoke in his slow, careful German. “Your house is advertised for sale. May my wife and I look it over for a moment? We
won’t take long. Our taxi is waiting. You see we are in a hurry for a house, and we will pay generously in cash for something
suitable.”

The woman practically dragged them inside, introduced her husband and two young children, and told them she had a feeling
they would be very happy here.

“Tell the taxi not to wait,” Naim told Leila. He said apologetically to the others, “She doesn’t speak any German yet, but
she is a fast learner. I think she will enjoy it.”

“Are you newlyweds?” the woman wanted to know.

“We’ve been married for more than a year,” Naim said. He was enjoying himself.

Leila returned and looked at him puzzled when he carefully translated information to her about the washing machine and the
central heating on their tour of the house. It wasn’t until Hasan drove the black Saab alongside the pine trees that Naim
took his gun out. He was still very polite and had them sit on armchairs, under guard by Leila, while he and Hasan worked
on
the Saab’s trunk. When it was ready, Naim came into the room and beckoned the husband. He showed him the many sticks of dynamite
bound together. Connected cables led to embedded detonators from two car batteries linked parallel. He explained the timing
device and how it would be linked to the trunk door to explode instantly if it was opened.

Mohammed arrived in the taxi. “Thirty-five minutes,” he said. “No more.”

Since he was the only one who spoke German, Naim had to translate all the remarks for the husband. “When you leave in this
car,” he explained, “for the Egyptian Museum, which is at 70 Schlossstrasse, opposite the Charlottenburg Palace, I will set
the timer for thirty-five minutes. My comrade estimates it shouldn’t take you any longer than that to get there. He will follow
you in his taxi to make sure you obey instructions, which are to drive this Saab as close as you can to the main entrance
of the museum and run for your life. When you have done this, my comrade will telephone here and I will leave. Your wife and
children will be unharmed. If he does not telephone within forty-five minutes or if he does to say you have not followed instructions,
then I must remind you of our recent exploits and let you guess what I will do to your family.”

The husband said quietly, “I know who you are now. But why us?”

“By chance.”

“Why the Egyptian Museum?”

“My sense of humor,” Naim replied in a friendly way. “And perhaps a small message to people in that part of the world.”

The husband looked from Naim’s oily smile to Hasan’s lowering scowl. He said, “I’ll do it.”

“Of course you will,” Naim said, as if there had never been any other possibility. “Now come with me into your living room
and explain it exactly as I’ve told you to your wife and children. It’s just so they’ll understand what’s happening to them
if you fail to obey my instructions.”

Was he justified in murdering other people in order to save his own family? Maybe not, but they could criticize his actions
in detail later to their heart’s content when his family was safe. He had to follow instructions to save his wife and children
from certain slaughter. The people at the museum would have to take their chances. If he could figure something out to save
them, he would. But that young creep was hanging in behind him with the taxi to make sure things went as planned. The taxi
had stopped to drop the girl off at a parked car, probably to drive back and pick the others up. They didn’t seem to give
a damn about him seeing their faces.

The Arab pair had fooled him totally at first. His wife too, and she was hard to fool. They had both had visions of unloading
the house on the Saudi pair at an outrageous price in hard cash. Their greed had not allowed them to see that all this was
too good to be
true—especially after all they had seen on television and read in the papers about these terrorists sneaking into West Berlin.
But they hadn’t expected them to come out to the suburbs!

He would do his best, that was all. He’d save his family by putting the Saab at the museum entrance, and he’d do what he could
from there on. No matter what people were going to say, this was what he would do.

As he neared the museum, the taxi slowed behind him and pulled over to a public phone. He would just have to go ahead and
do it. He was surprised to discover he had not been glancing at his watch every minute, counting down till doom. He looked
now and saw that he had eleven minutes. He lost seven of those minutes in getting through traffic to the museum entrance.
When he jumped out, there were four minutes to go.

He shouted to people outside the museum, “Arab bomb in that Saab!”

The sort of people who would ordinarily ignore such an outburst took themselves off in a dignified hurry. Inside the museum
he managed to clear people from the desk and away from the doors and windows. He did a lot of shouting and running. With half
a minute to go, all was clear.

“We got one of them,” the civil servant told Dartley over the phone. “The kid named Mohammed. On the U-Bahn. While they were
taking him in, he
managed to slash his wrists in the police van. He’s dead.”

“Shit!”

“I know. Everyone’s very upset. We think the others are gone now, so there’s relief over that. They didn’t harm the man’s
family and no one was even scratched at the Egyptian Museum.”

“I’ll stay on here,” Dartley said. “I need your input desperately. I never even had a crack at them in Berlin. Where would
you head?”

“Maybe Greece, except they say they won’t sign. Maybe back home now that Abu Jeddah is dead.”

“How about Yugoslavia?” Dartley asked. “It’s communist, so it would be nothing to go there from East Germany. Then they could
easily slip into Italy from there.”

There was a long pause at the other end of the line. “I think you might have something there.”

When they met Leila she was in tears. Her purse had been snatched. An ordinary woman would have been upset at losing her cosmetics,
her money, a love letter. Leila had lost an automatic pistol, a false Turkish passport, a pocket dictionary. She was already
hopelessly confused among the languages she had been skipping through. Hasan tried to put his arm around her and she shrank
away. He knew that she liked Naim and that Naim paid very little attention to her.