Vicious Circle (33 page)

The satellite phone in the
katsa
’s pocket purred from time to time as the barefoot contessa checked in with more no-joy reports. Hebron had been swept from
one end to the other at eighteen minutes to and eighteen minutes past the hour. All told, four transmission cycles had been
covered without detecting a squeak on the appropriate ultra high frequency.

The atmosphere of cranky irritability in Baruch’s office must have been contagious. Staffers strolling past in the corridor
talked in the muted undertones reserved for hospitals and cemeteries. Somewhere on the floor a telephone shrilled and a voice
could be heard bellowing, in English with a heavy Israeli accent, “This is
not
the Jewish gay rights league, this is
Mishteret Yisra’el
, the national police.” A woman cried out in Hebrew: “
Sheket
—quiet.” Oblivious to everything, Baruch read and reread the most recent batch of sightings. He talked on a scrambled phone
line with a field coordinator in Hebron, then swiveled to stare out the window. The sky had turned raw and a cold rain squall
had begun to pelt the city. He watched the buses and cars crawling soundlessly through the downtown streets. Focusing on the
drops trickling like tears across the dirty window pane, he decided that the weather fitted the mood in Israel perfectly:
everyone he knew was depressed. With or without a peace treaty, Israelis had grave doubts about the Palestinian Authority’s
ability to police its own fundamentalists, and were ready to settle for something as simple and as invigorating as spring,
though even that seemed a world away. The memory of the acacias bursting golden, the wild anemones bleeding red seemed to
belong to a Jerusalem on another planet, and not the city in which they waited out the waning of winter and the advent of
the ominous Ramadan deadline.

Just before midnight, the night-shift secretary came in with a single sighting hot off the teletype. Baruch actually groaned
as he read it. “Ali Abdel Issa, the Hamas organizer from Hebron who specialized in booby traps, was rounded up by the Authority’s
cops after the bus bombings last year—he’s been in one of Sa’adat’s Jericho cells for the past eight months. That eliminates
him.”

Dror said, “There’s still that blind doctor—”

“Al-Shaath.”

“—who disappeared in the back streets of the Old City early this afternoon.”

Elihu waved his pipe. “The last place they’d stash a hostage is under our noses in the Old City.”

“The last place is often the best place,” Baruch noted, but he wasn’t able to muster much conviction in his voice.

Dror shrugged. Technically speaking, the prospect of launching a surprise raid on short notice in the narrow labyrinthine
streets of the Old City didn’t appeal to him; getting the troops into position without attracting the attention of the kidnappers
seemed almost impossible.

At twenty-two minutes after two, the satellite phone in Elihu’s pocket purred. The
katsa
lifted the receiver to his ear. Dror was dozing on a couch. Baruch raised his head off the desk. He could hear the sharp
buzz of the barefoot contessa’s nasal whine coming through the telephone, but he couldn’t make out what she was saying. Suddenly
Elihu’s lidded eyes flicked open. He plucked the stem of the dead pipe out of his mouth. “Tell them to triangulate,” he ordered
very quietly. Then he killed the connection. “I owe you one,” he told Baruch. “They picked up the signal at eighteen past
the hour—a single two-hundred-meter vector. It was coming from the maze of buildings north of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate
Road and east of the Hospice on Casa Nova.”

“It fits!” Baruch exclaimed. “From the top floor of one of those buildings, Yussuf Abu Saleh could have seen the green shirt
hoisted by the lame shoemaker across from the El Khanqa Mosque.” He melted back into his chair, drained of everything except
hope, and let his eyes roam over a map of the Old City. “Finding the Rabbi was the easy part,” he muttered.

A
T THE MOVIE THEATER IN THE GERMAN QUARTER, DROR conferred once again with his second in command and the officer in charge
of planning, then hefted himself onto the stage and gazed out at the intent faces of the young soldiers who would soon be
going into combat. They had stacked their array of assault rifles and sniper rifles and submachine guns, along with the cartons
filled with all manner of grenades and plastic explosives, against a wall, and settled onto the old folding wooden seats in
the front rows. The officers among them had pistols fitted with silencers tucked into webbed shoulder holsters. All forty-five
members of the General Staff commando unit were battle-hardened veterans, and had undergone paratrooper and special forces
training. Within the Israeli Army, they were the elite of the elite.

The commando unit’s former XO, who owned the theater, sat beside Elihu and Baruch in the first row of the balcony, his large
hands folded pensively on the low brass rail in front of him, his unshaven chin on his hands. He was still fit from daily
stints of bicycle riding and would have traded the deed to the theater, not to mention his soul, for a chance to take part
in the raid, but he knew better than to ask. Behind him and to the left sat two lean lieutenant generals from the General
Staff and the paunchy civilian in charge of Shin Bet field operations. Peering down from the last row in the balcony was Zalman
Cohen, the director of the Prime Minister’s military affairs committee, with his famous arid smile draped across his round
lecherous face.

Dror tapped a finger nail on a microphone to make sure it was alive. “Gentlemen,” he said. The word “gentlemen” echoed back
from two enormous wall speakers. Dror fiddled with the gain knob, then tried again. “We’ll be going into the Old City as soon
as it is dark, so we have twelve hours to prepare this raid down to the last minute detail.” He cleared his throat; public
speaking was not his cup of tea. “We’ll begin with an overview of the operation. Then we will take it apart and examine it
piece by piece and put it back together again. We’ll take it apart a second time, and a third. We’ll keep taking it apart
until the components are as familiar to us as the thirty-seven bits of metal in an assault rifle. Then we’ll load our weapons
and go out and get the job done.”

Dror nodded at a corporal sitting behind the slide projector set up on a table. The first slide, an aerial view of the Old
City, appeared on the overhead screen. “We have reason to believe that Abu Bakr, almost certainly accompanied by several terrorists,
we’d be asses to think otherwise, is holed up in a safe house here,” Dror said, tapping the screen with a long pointer. “We
have no way of knowing for sure, but we expect—we hope to God—that the hostage, I. Apfulbaum, will be there, too. We know
for sure that the American journalist Sweeney is in this building. Okay. The target building, which is forty meters off Greek
Orthodox Patriarchate Road, is situated in a maze of alleyways and courtyards and passages, some of them on ground level,
some of them over rooftops.”

The livid shrapnel scar across Dror’s cheek burned like a neon sign. The soldiers hung on his words. Many of them had been
on raids with him before; along the Litani River, to the Bekaa valley, to Iqlim el Tuffah in southern Lebanon. The others
knew him by reputation; it was said he’d been the second in command on the
katsa’s
fabled swansong raid into Nablus at the time of the second
intifada
. “Abu Bakr and the people with him are hardcore fundamentalists and terrorists,” Dror continued. “They slaughtered four Jews
when they ambushed the Rabbi’s convoy, they murdered the Rabbi’s secretary in cold blood when the first deadline expired.
So I don’t need to tell you this will be bloody. The purpose of this briefing is to make sure any blood shed comes from their
bodies, and not ours. If you’ll give me
the second slide … the target is the large building in the center of this cluster of buildings. It is an Arab bathhouse that
was abandoned when we occupied the Old City after the Sixty-seven war. In this old photograph, you can make out the back door
and the loading port. I’ll take the next slide. Okay. What we have here is a rough sketch of the building based on a description
of it in a nineteen-fifties guide book, as well as the recollection of one of the officers whose unit secured the area in
Sixty-seven. As you can see, there are four floors. The ground floor is a warren of corridors and changing rooms, along with
the reception room and an inner office. These spaces are likely to be deserted. There are two staircases—I should say there
were two staircases the last time anybody looked—leading to the tiled baths on the second floor. In the back of the building,
there used to be a narrow flight of stairs leading to the third floor and several furnished two-room apartments which were
used by important Arabs visiting Jerusalem. We’re going on guesswork now, but we believe that Abu Bakr will have barricaded
himself into one of the apartments on the third floor, mainly because the only toilets, aside from the ones in the changing
rooms on the ground floor, are there, and he will have to use a toilet from time to time.” This drew a nervous laugh. “There
is a crawl space above these offices and apartments which can be reached only by a ladder leading to a trap door. We have
no idea what’s up there, but we will assign two men to cover the trap door, and three others to secure the crawl space once
the raid has gone public, not a moment before.”

Signaling for the next slide, Dror took a sip of water as it was being focused on the screen. “You will all be issued briefing
books containing printouts of these slides when we get around to discussing actual squad assignments. For the moment we want
to give you the structure of the raid. We propose to set up blocking squads on the alleyways here, here, here and here. Also
at the three doors and the loading ramp of the bathhouse. Also on the roofs here, here and here. We’ll post the sniper unit
here on the roof of the Hospice Casa Nova, where they’ll have a good line of sight on the target building. Once the escape
routes have been blocked off and the snipers are in position, the assault party will come in over the roofs from the northwest.
To avoid friendly fire casualties, everyone participating in the raid will be issued a arm band, to be worn above the elbow
on the left arm. These red arrows on the slide mark the route the assault party will take up from the street level and over
the roofs. There will be sixteen troopers in the assault party, which I will lead. My second will bring up the rear and instantly
take over command if I am put out of action. My third will follow twenty meters behind, with the medical unit, and take over
if the second is put out of action. The first squad in will be equipped with night vision glasses and secure the stairway.
In operations of this nature, everything—
everything
—depends on achieving surprise. Our only chance to attain surprise, which is essential if we are to free the Rabbi, is to
break into the safe house without firing a shot. If the first squad encounters anybody, and by that I mean
any body
”—this elicited another titter—“you will eliminate him or her with silenced pistols or knives, depending on your distance
from the body in question. We will not, I repeat,
not
take prisoners at this stage—or any stage—of the operation. The second squad coming up behind will be armed with explosives.
In all of our past raids on terrorists hideaways, there have been doors, often reinforced with steel plating, to break through.
The explosive experts will tape their plastic, fitted with radio-detonated fuses, to the door—an operation that should take
no longer than two minutes—at which point they will fall back and let the actual assault squad though. They’ll blow away the
door and storm into the hideaway. Okay. Any questions so far?”

“Will there be any windows in the apartment through which light can enter or terrorists can escape?”

“The original cassette the terrorists mailed to us after the kidnapping showed the Rabbi and his secretary sitting in front
of a bricked-in window. Again, we’re guessing, but we think they will have bricked in the windows so that nobody outside would
notice signs of life in the apartment, such as an electric light at night.” Dror made a tick on a file card, and looked up.
“That brings us to whom we can expect to find in this safe house.” A full-face and profile of Rabbi Apfulbaum filled the screen.
“Study these faces closely. You’ll each get copies. Look at them all day. Memorize them. Get to know
them better than you know the faces of your father or brother. Make allowances for the fact that Apfulbaum will have been
subjected to a lengthy inquisition. He is fifty-three years of age, five foot nine, extremely thin—around one hundred and
thirty pounds—stoop shouldered, with oversized ears and a prominent nose. He will probably be unshaven and disheveled. Without
his eyeglasses, which were found at the scene of the kidnapping, he is practically blind, so there’s a good chance he will
be squinting. He speaks English and Yiddish and Hebrew and Arabic.”

Sweeney’s image materialized on the screen, full-face and profile. “This is the American journalist. His name is Max Sweeney.
He is forty-three years of age, tall, lean, with curly hair and a high forehead and prominent cheek bones. He has a way of
listening with his head tilted to one side because he is deaf in his left ear. He speaks English and understands a few words
of Hebrew, but not enough to carry on a conversation. The assault squad will accordingly consist entirely of soldiers fluent
in English. In the confusion of combat you may want to order the Rabbi and Sweeney to hit the deck. All such instructions
will be given in English.”

“Is the American being held hostage along with the Rabbi? Will the terrorists kill him if they get the chance?”

Dror avoided looking at Baruch and Elihu in the balcony. “We don’t know the answer to that one.” He nodded for the next slide.
“This is the only known photograph of Abu Bakr, the leader of the so-called Islamic Abu Bakr Brigade. His real name is Ishmael
al-Shaath. The police mug shot was taken when he was arrested for attempted murder twenty-three years ago. He was twenty-three
years of age at the time, which makes him forty-six today. He is a medical doctor who runs a free clinic in the Old City.
He is short and heavy-set. He may be dressed in a western style suit jacket over a long Arab robe. He wears thick eyeglasses,
but even with them he is said to suffer from acute tunnel vision that renders him functionally blind. Don’t be deceived by
the fact that he is nearly blind—he spent twelve years in prison for attempted murder. We now know that after his release
he executed, with his own hand, twenty-four collaborators by shooting them at point-blank range in the brain. He personally
executed
the driver of the Rabbi’s automobile following the kidnapping, as well as the Rabbi’s secretary. He will in all likelihood
be armed with a .22-caliber pistol, but he can only use it accurately at very close ranges.” Dror paused. “Abu Bakr is to
be shot on sight, along with any Palestinians found in the hideaway.”