'Leave it, Holt.' Close to a snarl.
Holt shook his head, didn't believe it. According to Crane's bible there should be no movement by daylight.
According to Crane's text not even an idiot tried to move across open ground after dawn, before dusk.
According to Crane's chapter the team never split.
According to Crane's verse a thousand yards was best for the sniper. He couldn't argue. He stared at Crane.
It was as if his fear, wide eyed, softened Crane.
'I'm not gone long, an hour, may be a little more. In an hour you start to use the glasses… They're all shit down there, they can't see their assholes right now. On my own, just myself, a buzzard overhead won't see me.
I find the place at 600 yards, and I'm back. You spot the bastard for me, we mark him, we follow him, we get to know him. Late afternoon, sun's going down, sun's behind us, sun's into them, that's when I move again.
One shot at 600. I stay put, you stay put, till it's dark.
I come back for you, and we move out… Got it, youngster?'
'Got it, Mr Crane.' There was a reed in Holt's voice, like he was a child, afraid to be alone.
The scrim netting was slowly lifted, and then Crane was gone.*
There was a crag boulder to the right of the overhang, and Holt saw the shape of Crane, his outline broken by the camouflage tabs, reach the boulder.
He did not see him afterwards.
Holt screwed his eyes tight. He peered down onto the desolate and featureless ground between himself and the tent camp and he could not find a movement. He could not credit that Noah Crane, on that landscape, had vanished.
Fawzi blinked in the sunlight. He stretched, he yawned, he pulled his trouser belt tighter.
He had slept well, heavily. The smile came to his face.
He had much to be cheerful about. He was casting aside the sleep, he was basking in the sunlight and the memory of the previous evening. Last year's harvest, well stored and well dried leaves, and well packed. Much to smile about, because there were five packages in the locked rear of his jeep and each package weighed 10 kilos, and each kilo was top quality.
The posting in the valley as liaison officer to the recruits' camp had this one salvation, constant access to the old and new marijuana crop. He had done well in the weeks that he had spent setting up the camp and then introducing it to these boys of the Popular Front.
His money was in dollars. Cash dollars, bank notes. For dollars an understanding could be negotiated with the customs officials at the airport. His dollars in cash, less the price of the understanding, could be carried in his hip pocket and in his wallet, to the cities of Rome and Paris and Athens. They were the holy cities he would make his pilgrimage to, when the creep Hamid had gone with the chosen ten to Damascus for the final preparation before the flight to Cyprus and the sea journey to the shoreline of Israel.
Much to be cheerful about, and the most cheering matter for Lieutenant Fawzi was that this would be his last day and his last night in the suffocating tedium of the Beqa'a.
There was a queue of recruits waiting to be served by the cook. He ordered an omelette, three eggs. He said that he wanted coffee. He went back to his tent, pulled out a chair from inside, waited for his food to be brought to him.
The smoke, pungent from the dew damp wood, played across his nostrils.
He held the binoculars as Crane had taught him. His thumb and his forefinger gripped the far end of each lens, and the outstretched palms of his hands shielded the polished glass from the sun.
Holt had stopped looking for Crane. He lay on his stomach, quite still, only allowing his head to move fractionally as he raked over the faces of the magnified figures moving lethargically between the tents.
He had covered the line in front of the cooking area, and the line in front of the latrine screen. He had followed the men as they emerged from their tents, until they ducked back into them.
He could not believe that he had looked with the power of the binoculars into the face of Abu Hamid and had not known him. He had seen no man with a crow's foot scar on his cheek. He had seen no man walk with the rolling gait of Abu Hamid crossing the street in front of the Oreanda Hotel. He could remember the long sitting wait on the hard bench in the corridor leading to the cell block of the police station in Tel Aviv.
He could remember the beating given freely to the bomber. What if the man had lied… What if the man had lied to save his skin from the fists and the boots…
The doubts crawled in him.
What if he had travelled to the Beqa'a and Abu Hamid was not at the camp? What if he had travelled to the Beqa'a and could not recognise Abu Hamid?
For the fourth time he started his search at the southern perimeter wire of the camp, and traversed north, searching for the face, and doubting.
He had laid her body on the bed.
He covered her body with the sheet and then the bed cover. He pulled the sheet high enough to obscure the bruising at her throat.
He had taken a flower from the vase by the window, a rose. He laid the flower on the bed cover across her breast.
He closed the door behind him. He walked down the steep steps and out into the noise and crush of the alley.
He walked very straight, he walked with the purpose of a young commander who had accepted a mission of leading an assault squad against the Defence Ministry on Kaplan.
Abu Hamid climbed into the passenger seat of the jeep.
Holt set the binoculars down on the rock dirt beside his hands. The valley shimmered in the heat below him.
The sun burned a whiteness from the tent tops, and flickered at those strands of the wire that were not rusted. Nothing wrong with the binoculars, he had seen the dart of the rats at the bottom of the wire. He was learning the life of the camp. The men were sitting in a half circle, swatting off the flies, watching a hugely fat young man demonstrate the stripping down and the reassembling of a machine gun. He could not see all of their faces, not at this moment, but he had checked each of the faces before they had sat down, and he had checked the face of the uniformed instructor. It had been a desperation to see if there was a crow's foot scar on the left upper cheek of the instructor, a last throw.
The cook was on his knees blowing at the fire. Only the cook and a sentry at the entrance to the camp and a man asleep in a chair by his tent were not involved in the class session. He had come so far with Crane, three nights' march, a squashed-in lifetime, and Abu Hamid was not there. His head and his body ached and his whole heart sank in despair.
Major Zvi Dan went into the hushed badly-lit room that housed the communications centre.
He closed the door gently behind him.
It was a world where no voice was raised, where none of the men or women in uniform moved other than at a studied pace. The room was an empire of electronics.
There was the purr of the teleprinters and the greenwash screens of the visual display units and the faint whisper of the recording equipment. Because of the nature of events, because Crane and Holt had walked into the Beqa'a, transmissions from the Syrian military that were intercepted by the antennae of Hermon would be relayed to the communications centre at Kiryat Shmona.
In a lowered voice he asked the communications captain if there was any information he should have.
There was nothing.
Major Zvi Dan tore a sheet from the small notepad that he carried in his tunic breast pocket. On the paper was written the figures identifying an ultra high frequency radio channel. He asked that from the middle of the day that frequency should be continuously monitored.
Still he watched the camp. He played through in his mind what Crane would say to him, how he would reply.
Definitely he's not there… Maybe he's a bit changed
