The traveller shrugged. Fragments of walnut tumbled from his clothes to the white pile of the carpet.
'A wretch such as I, Major, how could I know?'
He needed to think. He required moments of contemplation. Major Said Hazan was denied the moments.
A sharp tap at the door. A bustling entrance from his clerk, a sheet of paper handed to him. He studied it. He seemed no longer to see the traveller. He reached for a telephone. He demanded that the Jew prisoner be brought to Damascus by Air Force helicopter. He demanded that the Jew prisoner be brought to the custody of Air Force Intelligence. To win his demands he invoked the authority, and the fear of that authority, of that building in which he worked.
Major Zvi Dan rocked on his feet. He stood in the middle of the communications centre. He held loose in his hand the report of the intercepted traffic. For the third time he read the message, as if in the frequency of the reading he might find a straw. No comfort, nothing to cling to.
'INTERCEPT.
TRANSMISSION TIME:
1 0 – 4 7 HOURS LOCAL.
TRAFFIC ORIGINATED:
PFLP TRAINING CAMP, NR KHIRBET QANAFAR, BEQA'A.
TRAFFIC DESTINATION:
AFI HQ, DAMASCUS.
CODE:
2 N D SERIES, AFI.
MESSAGE:
ISRAELI SERVICEMAN CAR RYING IDENTIFICATION OF NOAH CRANE, REL: J E W, I / D NO: 478391, CAPTURED WHILE ON SURVEILLANCE OF CAMP, WOUNDED. IN SAME OPERATION, LINK UNCERTAIN, FRG NATIONAL HEINRICH GUNTER, HOSTAGE, FREED, UNHURT. SEARCH OF AREA INTO WHICH CRANE FLEEING FAILED TO FIND REMAINDER OF I N F I L TRATION PARTY. REQUEST EYE BRING TO DAMASCUS. SIGNED, FAWZI (L T).
No comfort, no straw, each reading worse than the last. The communications officer came quietly to his side. He asked, 'The frequency we are to monitor – we are still to monitor it?'
'Yes,' Major Zvi Dan said.
He went outside. He went into the bright sunlight.
Midday and the sun swirling off the dust of the parade area, and off the tin roofing of the huts, and off the armour plate of the personnel carriers. From the troops' quarters he heard the cheerful playing of music from the Forces' station. He passed beside the verandah outside the canteen. He knew that Rebecca watched him, but he could not bring himself to speak to her. His face would have told her.
He was familiar with disaster. His work often travelled in tandem with catastrophe. Many times he had known the pain and the catastrophe of losing a field agent. The hurt was never more manageable for being familiar.
He went into the building block. He walked to the sentry who lolled in his chair outside the door. He gestured for the door to be opened. Percy Martins sat on the bed. Major Zvi Dan saw the dulled scowl of Martins's welcome. He passed the sheet of paper to the Englishman. He let the Englishman hold the sheet of paper, as if for authenticity, then he translated line by line from the Hebrew.
'God… '
'You had the right to know.'
'Holt, what about Holt?'
'He is alone.'
'What can we do for him?'
'He is beyond our reach.'
'He's just a boy.'
'Then he should never have been sent.'
'Can he not be helped?'
'If it were Crane who were free, if it were Holt who was taken, then there is perhaps something we could do for Crane, something; but he would have to do much for himself. I doubt if it works on the other side of the coin.'
Percy Martins's hands covered his face. His voice was muffled through the thickness of his fingers.
'Is it because of what I did?'
'I have no means of knowing.'
'What will they do to Crane?'
'Torture him.'
'Will he talk?'
'How would you respond to torture, skilled torture, Mr Martins? Put on your shoes, please.'
'Where are you taking me?'
There was a cold, rueful smile on Major Zvi Dan's face. 'London will want to know what has happened.
They will want to set in train whatever machinery they can to minimise the damage.'
He took Martins to an office with a secure telephone.
He dialled for him the number of the station officer at the embassy in Tel Aviv.
In a dust storm the helicopter of the Syrian Air Force took off from beside the camp. The power of the rotors, thrashing for lift, buffeted the tents, scattered the refuse that clung to the coiled wire on the perimeter.
Heinrich Gunter now wore the tunic and trousers of a recruit of the Popular Front. Clothes he had been given, explanations none. He could not comprehend how his escape from his captors had come about. He thought his freedom had been gained by the man who lay on the floor of the helicopter. The man was dressed in military clothes that were indented with camouflage tabs, and his leg was badly wounded and no-one had attempted to dress the wound, and he was handcuffed to the bulkhead and he was covered by the handgun of the Syrian officer who had boarded the helicopter at the camp. He saw that the man he believed had brought about his freedom bit hard at his bottom lip as though he were suffused in pain, as if he would not show his captor his pain, as if he refused to cry out, gasp.
Through the portholes of the Gazelle helicopter, Gunter saw laid out beneath him the bright and tranquil breadth of the Beqa'a valley.
They clapped, the men and the boys, and the women from behind their face scarves trilled their appreciation.
There was the drone of the working generator, there was the splash of water lifted from great depths and now free to run in the dug channels.
The merchant grinned and bowed to receive the congratulations.
The merchant was asked by the headman of Khirbet Qanafar to take food at his table, to share the midday meal. He was pleased to accept. He fancied he could smell the cooking of partridge. He was pleased to accept because it suited him to stay at the village town of Khirbet Qanafar until last light.
The merchant had heard the shooting perhaps two miles north up the valley. News came that a Jew had been captured, that a hostage prisoner had been freed.
Only one man captured… In his long years in Lebanon he was practised in deceit, he could guard his emotions.
He would be honoured to take food with the headman, and with the headman's sons.
He had done it as he thought Crane would have done it.
When the sun was behind him at last Holt crawled out of the fragile cover of the net and down the hillside.
He thought that he had been moving for a little more than an hour. Flat on his stomach, stomach ground against the earth and sun-scorched rock, he had gone the four hundred yards from the lying up position to the place where Crane had killed the cook.
The blood was there. The blood reinforced the truth.
The truth was the capture and the throwing through the hatch door of the military helicopter of Noah Crane.
