lit by helicopter flares. Four infiltrators dead, one captured. Link with Popular Front.
Late in the night, while the prison slept, two army interrogators drove into the floodlit courtyard of the Ramla gaol. A convicted prisoner was roused from his cot, taken to a room where no prison warder was permitted to be present.
The prisoner was shown the photograph. He knew the man. He remembered his name.
Four days later an East German news magazine appeared. The eighteenth page of the magazine showed a scrum of Palestinian recruits struggling for the privilege of ripping a chicken to pieces. One man in the photograph wore a khaffiyeh scarf around his throat, where it had slipped when he bit into the feathered wing of the chicken.
The face was in tight focus.
6
While his friend poured the coffee, the station officer peered down at the photograph.
His friend was Zvi Dan. The photograph from the magazine page had been enlarged and the scar was clear to the naked eye.
'You've done me damn well. A name for Chummy and a date and a place.'
'But we have nothing much else with which to link him apart from the Beirut picture. Anything further can only be supposition.'
Zvi Dan's career as an infantry officer had been cut short 15 years before when an exploding artillery shell on the Golan Heights had neatly severed his left leg immediately below the knee, and only two days before the cease- fire had wound up the battles of Yom Kippur.
He had faced the prospect of civilian life or of finding military work that could be conducted away from the operational area. He had made major, Military Intelligence. He specialised in the study of Palestinian groups who were known to have firm links abroad, and whose operations against Israel were often far from his country's frontiers.
'I think that in London they are pretty concerned with this one. I think they'll take all the supposition they can get.'
'Then we should begin to play the jigsaw.'
Zvi Dan worked from an office in the Ministry of Defence. His quarters were apart from the main complex of buildings that stretched the length of Kaplan. His base was surrounded by a coiled fence of barbed wire and with additional armed guards on the gate. He had access to Mossad files and to Shin Bet interrogations of captured Palestinians. He read voraciously. In the small circle where his name was known he was credited with supplying the information that had led to the arrest of a Jordanian who intended to carry on board a Swiss airliner two hand grenades for a hijacking attempt on the Cyprus-Jordan leg of the flight. He had supplied the lead that enabled the Belgian police to raid a video arcade in a small town in the north of the country and arrest two Palestinians and a Belgian couple, and uncover 40 lbs of plastic explosive. His warnings had led to the interception at sea of two yachts being used by Palestinian infiltrators, the Casselardit and the Ganda. If he regarded these as little victories Major Zvi Dan could – and did – count as catastrophic defeats the assault on the synagogue in Istanbul, 22
Turkish Jews killed; the slaughter at Rome's Fiumicino airport, 86 killed and wounded; the massacre at Vienna's Schwechtat airport, 49 killed and wounded.
The station officer said, 'I'll put my pieces on the board. The British ambassador in Moscow insults a Syrian diplomat, practically with a loud hailer, the entire diplomatic community looking on, right in the Syrian's master's sitting room. Claims of Syrian innocence in the El Al bomb laughed to scorn in public. Total humiliation of Syrians. Two: our man in Moscow is assassinated oblique stroke mugged in the Crimea, close to a military school where Palestinians are trained.
Three: same evening a Syrian Air Force plane lands at the airport next door to the school and flies on to Damascus, en route sending a message saying in effect Mission Achieved. Four: our eyewitness at the shooting gets a clear view of Chummy and from that we follow through to the evacuation from Beirut in '82 and a member of the PFLP contingent. The last piece I can put on the board is what I'll call the Dresden photograph, that puts Chummy at a camp outside Damascus possibly seven, eight days ago. Those are my pieces.'
'You want this Abu Hamid?'
'We want him, even if we have to go to Damascus to get him.'
Zvi Dan laughed, a quiet croak in his throat, and the laugh brought on the hacking cough of the persistent smoker.
'Damascus would be easy. Damascus pretends it is an international city. There are businessmen travelling to Damascus, and there are academics, and there are archaeologists. It is a city of millions of people. In a city you can come shoulder to shoulder with a man. You can use the knife or the silenced pistol or the explosive under the car he drives. If it were Damascus then I would already offer you my felicitations, even my congratulations… the scar is only an inch across so you have to be close to identify the man you want.'
'The girl who was killed, she was one of ours,' the station officer said quietly. 'Don't worry about getting close. We'll walk onto the bridge of his nose if we have to. That's the sense of the messages I am being sent from London.'
The coughing was stifled. Zvi Dan beat his own chest.
There was the rustle of the packet, the flash of the lighter, the curl of the smoke. The end of the nicotined finger stubbed at the Dresden photograph.
'Look at them. Other than the man you want they are all raw recruits. They are children who have joined the Popular Front and here they are participating in the first ceremony of induction. There will have been a parade, and there will have been a speech by a big man from the government. It is what always happens They will have been in Damascus for a few days only.
They will be moved on. They will go to a field training camp where they will be taught, not well, the art of small-unit operations. Your man, the man you want, the older man amongst them, he will travel with the children as their instructor. Possibly it is a reward for what he achieved in Yalta. They will go to a training camp with their instructor for perhaps half a year.'
'Where would the camp be?'
'Where it is impossible for you to be close, shoulder to shoulder.' For a moment the face of Zvi Dan was lost in a haze of smoke. 'In the Beqa'a Valley.'
'Oh, that's grand,' said the station officer. 'The 19 bus goes right through the Beqa'a Valley.'
The valley is a fault, it is a legacy of rock strata tur-bulence of many millennia ago.
The valley floor is some 45 miles in length, and never more than ten miles in width. It is a slash between the mountains that dominate the Mediterranean city of Beirut, and the mountains that overlook the hinterland city of Damascus. It is bordered in the north by the ancient Roman and Phoenician city of Baalbeck, and in the south by the dammed Lake Quaroon.
The sides of the valley, deep cut with winter water gullies, are bare and rock strewn, good only for goats and hardy sheep. The sides cannot be cultivated. But the valley floor has the richest crop-growing fields in all Lebanon. The Litani river, rising close to Baalbeck, bisects the valley running south to Lake Quaroon. The valley floor is a trellis of irrigation canals, not modern, not efficient, but able to offer life blood to the fields.
The best vines of Lebanon, the best fruit, the best vegetables, all come from the Beqa'a, and the best hashish.
The history of the Beqa'a is one of murder, conspiracy, feuding and smuggling. The people of the region whether they be Christian or Druze or Shi'a Muslim, have a reputation for lawlessness and independence. Government authority has always taken second place in the minds of the feudal landlords and the peasant villagers.
Times, of course, have not stood still in the Beqa'a.
The villagers are better armed, each community now possesses RPG-7 grenade launchers, heavy D S h K M machine guns, enough Kalashnikovs to dish them out to the kids.
The villagers are well off by the standards of torn, divided Lebanon, because when all else fails the hashish
