That night, patrols were intensified, road blocks were strengthened.
It had been the intention of Major Zvi Dan to work late in his office, to delve into the small hillock of paper that had built up on his desk while he had been in Kiryat Shmona.
Behind him was a wasted day. He had failed to beat off the lethargy that had clamped down on him after the tension of his early morning battle to have the airstrike diverted. He was slow with his work, but he would work through the night, and then return to Kiryat Shmona in the morning. The girl, Rebecca, had gone home.
Sometimes when she was gone he felt as crippled by her absence as he was crippled by the loss of his leg. He read for the third time the evaluation by the Central Intelligence Agency, newly arrived, of a preliminary debrief of a Palestinian captured in northern Italy. Israel for so long had stood alone in the front line of the war against international terrorism that it amused him to notice how the Western nations were now queuing to demonstrate their virility.
He could remember the carping response of those same nations when the IAF had intercepted a Libyan registered Gulfstream executive jet en route from Tripoli to Damascus. Intelligence had believed Abu Nidal to be aboard. The previous month the jackals of Abu Nidal had killed and wounded 135 civilians at the check-in counters at the airports of Rome and Vienna.
Those Western countries had issued their sanc-timonious disapproval because the intelligence had been ill founded. He could recall numerous instances of public criticism from the government of the United Kingdom for Israeli retaliatory strikes, yet now they had men slogging into the Beqa'a… Of course it had been bluff. He would never have resigned. Of course he would just have gone back to his desk and started to work again, had the jets hit the tent camp. He knew no life other than the life of defending his country – had he been a Christian – and he had many friends who were Christians – then he would have said that that was the cross he had to bear.
He wondered if the Americans had the guts to stand in the front line. He thought of the thousands, tens of thousands, of American citizens living abroad who would be placed at risk when a Palestinian went on trial in Washington, went to death row, went to interminable lawyers' conferences, went to the electric chair.
There was a light knock on his door.
He started. He had been far away.
He was handed a folded single sheet of teleprinter paper.
The door closed.
He read the paper.
He felt it like a blow to his stomach, like the blast that had carried away his leg.
He reached for his telephone, he dialled.
'Hello, This is Zvi. You should come to my office straightaway..'
He heard the station officer wavering, there were people for dinner, could it wait until tomorrow.
'It is not a matter for the telephone, and you should come here immediately.'
Men from the Shin Bet watched the Norwegian leave his company headquarters. He was clearly visible to them through the 'scope of the night sight. They saw that he had changed from his uniform fatigues into civilian dress. In a white T-shirt and pale yellow slacks, the young man showed up well in the green wash of the lens. They watched him, with three others, climb into a UNIFIL-marked jeep and head south towards the Israeli border.
The car took side lanes to skirt Syrian army road blocks on the highway leaving Beirut. From a post that was jammed sturdily through the top gap in the front window flew the flag of Hezbollah. On a white cloth had been painted the word 'Allah', but the second '1' had been transformed to the shape of a Kalashnikov rifle.
The car used a rutted, deserted road and climbed, twisted, towards the mountains to the east.
The station officer read the teleprinter sheet. At home the local wine had been flowing free. His suit jacket was on the back of the chair. He took off his tie, loosened his collar.
' S h i t… '
He did not concern himself with the demand for
'especial vigilance' for a spy in the Beqa'a. He read over and over the order for 'maximum attention is to be given to the interception of this group'.
'… So bloody soon.'
'For Crane it would be natural to assume that the enemy is alert.' Major Zvi Dan hesitated. 'But he has Holt.'
'And the boy's green. I shall have to tell them in Century… '
'Tell them also that there is nothing you can do, nothing we can do.'
It would be two hours before the station officer returned, sobered, to his guests.
His message, sent in code from his embassy office, reported the probability, based on intercepted Syrian army transmissions, that the mission of Noah Crane and Holt was compromised.
He thought that he had made a fool of himself at the fish pond.
The first fish was exciting, the second fish was interesting, the following 34 fish were simply boring. If he had not pulled out the pellet-fattened trout then they would have used a net for the job.
But time had been killed, and it had been made plain to him that he was denied access to the Intelligence section at the Kiryat Shmona base, and that news – whatever it might be – would reach Tel Aviv first.
He had taken a bath. He had put on a clean shirt and retrieved his trousers, pressed, from under the mattress of his bed. Percy Martins had smoothed his hair with his pair of brushes.
Dinner in the dining room. Trout, of course. A half a bottle of white Avdat to rinse away the tang of the artificially fed rainbow.
Before dinner and after dinner he had tried to ring the station officer. No answer from his direct line at the embassy. No help from the switchboard. Inconceivable to him that the station officer would not have left a contact number at the embassy's switchboard, but the operator denied there was such a number. He walked to the bar. He could read the conspiracy, those bastards at Century in league with that supercilious creep, Tork, a mile off. They had shut him out. Actually it was criminal, the way that a man of his dedication to the Service and his experience was treated. The Service was changing, the recruitment of creatures like Fenner and Anstruther, and their promotion over him, that showed how much the Service had veered off course.
Good work he had put in over the long years of his time in the Service. He had had his coups, and damn all recognition. He reckoned that his coups, their full extent, had been kept from the Director General… if the Director General only knew the half of it, Percy Martins would have been running the Middle East Desk long since, sitting in Anstruther's chair, kicking the arse off Fenner. He would have bet half of his pension that the Director General had never been told that he had crowned his Amman posting with, as near as dammit, a prediction that the Popular Front were about to launch a hijack fiesta. In his three years in Cyprus he had actually gone to his opposite number at the American shop, warned him of the personal danger to the ambassador, all there in his report – he bet the Director General had never been told, certainly never been reminded when the ambassador had been shot dead. First categ-oric and specific news of the Israeli nuke programme out of Dimona, that had been his climax on a Tel Aviv tour – he hadn't had the credit, the credit had gone to the Yanks. God, and he had made sacrifices for the Service. Sacrifices that started with his marriage, followed with his son. He hadn't complained, not when he was given his postings, not when his wife had said she wasn't going Married Accompanied, not when his son had grown up treating him like an unwanted stranger.
A record of total disappointment at home, and he had never once let it show, hadn't let his work suffer.
Holt and Crane into the Beqa'a, Percy Martins's last big one, by Jesus, he would not let the last big one go unnoticed on the nineteenth floor of Century.
He had a good record, nothing to be ashamed of, and less recognition for it than the man who sat behind the reception desk at Century. Meanwhile he was stuck in a kibbutz, where there was no fishing, where there was no access to a damn good mission going into Lebanon, Of course, he should have insisted that there was proper preparation of the ground rules before he ever left London. And no damned support from the station officer. The station officer's balls would be a decent enough target when he made it back to Century…
He had signed his bill, should have had a full bottle of Avdat but he had never gone over the top with expenses, he had strolled to the bar.
Percy Martins had never been able to understand why so many hotels dictated that drinking should be carried out in semi-darkness and to the accompaniment of loudspeaker music. There were Americans in the shadows, from the air-conditioned bus that had arrived in the afternoon. He preferred solitude to them. Blue rinse, check trousers and damn loud voices for both sexes.
