shadows, and the stink of the shallow latrine pits lay across the camp.
The recruits had been standing on parade in the growing heat for a little more than an hour because the guests from Damascus were late and there was no explanation for the delay, and no one dared to stand the men down. They had come from the refugee centres in West Beirut, from Sidon and Tyre, and from camps in Jordan and South Yemen. They were aged between 17 and 19. They had joined the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, because they believed that that organisation would give them the greatest chance to hurt the Zionist state. Some wore uniforms and boots that were Syrian army surplus, some wore jeans and T-shirts and pullovers. Some had already shaved their heads, some wore their hair to their shoulders. All held their unloaded rifles as if it were second nature to them.
They were children suckled on conflict.
The commander was at the gate, fretting with his watch.
Abu Hamid stood in front of the squad of eighty recruits. His uniform fitted him well. He wore the tunic and top, camouflaged in pink and green and yellow, of a Syrian commando. He carried, loosely over the crook of his arm, a Kalashnikov assault rifle. Occasionally he barked an order at the recruits, ordered them to straighten up. He felt a new degree of authority. No one at the camp other than the commander knew his part in what had happened in Yalta, but there were other signs of the favour that had fallen into the path of Abu Hamid.
Two days later than the others who had flown back from the Soviet Union, Abu Hamid had reached Yarmouq and when he had rejoined his colleagues he had been driven to the camp in a Mercedes Benz car by a chauffeur who wore Air Force uniform. Three times since then he had been off camp, and back late in the evening with the smell of imported whisky on his breath, and his girl had been allowed to the camp, and he had been promoted, which was why he now stood in front of the recruits.
The cars, when they arrived, billowed a dust storm.
Abu Hamid yelled for his men to stand still, he aped the instructors at Simferopol. He saw the commander fawning a greeting to an officer who wore the insignia of a brigadier general.
The breath came in a sharp gasp from Abu Hamid's throat. He thought that every recruit behind him gawped at the officer who now climbed from the official car that had followed that of the brigadier general into the camp. The officer strode forward. He carried his cap in his left hand.
The officer's walk was normal. His torso was ordinary. He had no fingers on his right hand, a stump at the knuckle. It was his head that captured attention.
There was nothing sharp in the definition of his features.
The skin across his cheeks and his nose and his upper lip and his chin seemed fragile and tightly drawn, the opaque skin of a butterfly's or a moth's wings. The skin had a lifeless quality, dead skin that had somehow been reprocessed for further use, and stretched over the bones of the face and the muscles by a human hand and not by nature. The nose of the officer seemed a squashed bauble, and his mouth was a parched slit. The earlobes were gone. The eyebrows were gone. What hair there was seemed to have been planted behind a line drawn vertically down from the scalp's crown to the deformed ears. The hair was bleached pale.
A soft, small voice. A voice that he recognised. A voice with the lilt of a persuasive song.
'Good morning to you, Hamid.'
He swallowed hard. 'Good morning, Major Said Hazan.'
He stared blatantly into the broken face. He saw the cracked, amused smile that rose in the expanse of skin.
He saw the medal ribbons on the chest of the uniform tunic.
' Major Said Hazan waved Abu Hamid forward. The commander was ignored as the major introduced Abu Hamid to the brigadier general. The ranking officer knew what Abu Hamid had achieved, it was there in his eyes for Abu Hamid to see, a shared secret.
Abu Hamid escorted the brigadier general and Major Said Hazan along the four rows of recruits. Only one cloud in Abu Hamid's mind that morning. Of course, he had expected that military security would check all the weapons issued to the recruits to ascertain that no live rounds would be carried on parade.
He had not expected that his own AK-47 would be scrutinised, that he would have to clear the breach and show that his magazine was empty. One small cloud…
After the inspection the brigadier general called for the recruits to come close to him.
'… In today's world no man can be neutral. A man is either with the oppressed or he is with the oppressors. We have to fight to our last breath. It is better to die with honour than to live with humiliation… '
When he was cheered, when the fists of the recruits were aloft, the brigadier general smiled his satisfaction.
Abu Hamid clapped his hands, waved three of the recruits towards the administration building.
His remaining recruits formed a circle, facing inwards. A photographer edged forward, stretching on tiptoe to see into the circle. A European photographer.
Abu Hamid saw the brigadier general gesture to the photographer to push harder. A dozen live chickens were brought to the circle, thrust into the ring. Abu Hamid shouted, 'Death to all enemies of the Palestinian Revolution.'
The circle closed. The chickens were caught, torn apart, wing from breast, leg from body, head from neck.
Hands groping into a bedlam of movement. The raw meat of the chickens, the warm flesh of the chickens was eaten, the blood drunk. Young faces frothing pink meat, spewing red blood.
It was a tradition of the Popular Front, designed as the first measure in the breaking down of the human inhibition against killing. For the first ritual a live chicken sufficed to play the part of an enemy of the revolution.
The photographer was on assignment from a news magazine in the German Democratic Republic. He took a roll of film on each of two cameras. Among his images was the man who wore a khaffiyeh headdress across his face, and who chewed at a chicken wing.
The brigadier general congratulated Abu Hamid on the dedication of his recruits, and Major Said Hazan clasped his shoulder in farewell. Abu Hamid was bathed in pleasure.
The Prime Minister's cars swept into Downing Street.
There were a few older men and women on the head of government's staff who could remember when a prime minister travelled with only a single detective and the chauffeur for company.
But over the wreckage of a seaside hotel from which a Cabinet had been pulled by firemen or dragged by police minders, a spokesman of Irish liberation had declaimed, 'You have to be lucky every time, we have to be lucky once'.
The Prime Minister detested the paraphernalia of the bodyguards, and the closed circuit cameras, and the alarm systems in Downing Street.
The Director General, who waited in the outer office, knew well the Prime Minister's impatience with security.
He saw the Prime Minister, hemmed in by Branch men, in the brief moment between the car and the doorway as he gazed down from the window above the street. The flash of the face that was reddened from the sunshine of the Asian tour and the jetlag. The Director General had the automatic right of access. He reported directly to the Prime Minister.
'It was a pretty dreadful funeral,' the Prime Minister said, and shrugged off an overcoat. 'Lady Armitage was first class, could have been welcoming us to a cocktail party, but there was a granddaughter there who cried her eyes out, noisily, rather spoiled things. What a thing to get back to, fourteen hours in the air and straight to church…'
The Director General knew the form. He allowed the talking to go on. Neither of the previous Prime Ministers he had served had exactly rushed to allow him to throw into the fray whatever hand grenade he was waiting to communicate.
'… Do you know the Soviet ambassador read the second lesson, and read it pretty well. I thought that was a very spirited gesture. .. '
'He was badly overdue a spirited gesture, Prime Minister,' the Director General murmured.
'I don't follow you.'
'The deaths of Sylvester Armitage and Miss Canning are a considerable embarrassment to the Soviets. The
