So, what? she asked, did they start bringing their women up there?
He looked at her in silence. Her lips were magnificent. He recalled the full, chiseled lips of Egyptian women depicted in ancient papyrus paintings he had adored in his childhood.
Maybe it’s Lebanese women from Baalbek, she suggested.
You should’ve been an analyst, he smiled.
You think I would’ve been good at it? her eyes lit up.
I think so, why not… he floundered. She must have interpreted that as hesitation on his part, as the spark in her eye dimmed at once. He wanted to keep that spark alive, that verdant flicker, dancing over the heavy muddy lake water. If they’re bringing their women with them, he said, they wouldn’t ask for just one female set, and if these were Lebanese women they were fooling around with, they certainly wouldn’t ask their headquarters in al-Mazra‘a for hygiene products for them. No, this has to be something else.
What could it be? she asked.
Maybe, he said, there’s a woman up there.
Of course there’s a woman up there! She reproved, disappointed.
No, I mean a woman that’s part of the unit itself.
Like a secretary, or a quartermaster, or a cleaner?
Maybe… he said. And maybe… maybe someone operational.
What?! You mean like a combatant? With them??
Why not?
She deliberated a bit. The whole idea seemed to make her uncomfortable. It doesn’t make sense, she finally determined.
Why?
Well, you know, Arabs…
You know, he said, these organizations, Habash’s Popular Front, Hawatmeh’s Democratic Front, they’re all secular organizations. It’s part of their ideology. They talk about a secular democratic state, sometimes even a Marxist state. They loathe the conservatism of traditional Arab societies and want to found something completely new. Even Jibril’s organization— which is more pragmatic, loyal to the Syrians and less ideological— is secular and opposes conservatism.
That’s exactly your problem, she muttered in what sounded to Tamir like suppressed anger.
What problem? Whose?
You guys, the intelligence analysts. You use all these fancy words to talk about these organizations—Marxist, pragmatic— but you don’t realize that behind all these slogans, they’re still Arabs. You think you know all about Arabs, but you don’t know anything.
You mean, that they’re conservative? Traditional?
Yes.
Tamir walked away, his mind racing.
On Sunday morning, he used the encrypted red phone, the amethyst, to call the head of the Jibril unit in Department 195 at headquarters, and told him about the dispatch. He wanted to consult the unit head about the annotations he needed to make on the matter, and to hear his opinion in general. The unit head, a guy named Eli Nissenbaum, said it’s hard to say, and that he would need to see it pop up a couple of more times before he could determine with any kind of certainty if the organization added a woman to the unit. Even if they did, he said, chances are she’s not an actual pilot, because it’s unlikely they would so quickly promote a woman to such a sensitive role in what is considered the organization’s elite unit. We should keep tabs on it, he added, but either way it’s nothing more than a nice little storm in a tea-pot, since this unit hasn’t done a single thing since it was established. A storm in a pot of sweet, Arab tea, he added, delighting in his pun.
His assessment made more sense than some fantasy about a woman-combatant appearing out of thin air. Still, Tamir asked Nissenbaum if he knew of any female operative in the organization that fitted the profile.
You’re asking the right questions, Nissenbaum expressed his appreciation. Perhaps you should replace me here. I’ve kind of grown sick of them, and I’ll be discharging soon… I can’t think of anyone right off the top of my head, but I’ll think about it. Anyway, if I were you, I wouldn’t bother too much over such trifles. You have more important things to do, don’t you? I hear there’s an attack on an outpost in your sector almost every night… Honestly? Doesn’t sound like fun. Sounds exhausting.
The next few days went by uneventfully. Tamir used them to catch up on his reading. At the start of his apprenticeship period, Harel had told Tamir that he needed to get up to speed as quickly as possible. ‘Up to speed’, in this sense, mainly meant reading everything that was directed to them by the unit’s internal computer system, which was linked to the Military Intelligence Directorate Research Department (MID-RD)7 and several other units and institutions, including the Mossad, the Shin-Beit,8 and Unit 5049 operating in South Lebanon. There were quite a lot of dispatches forwarded to them, and he never got around to reading them all. Now that he had a few quiet days, Tamir did not even consider spending them leisurely walking around the parameter of the base, or reading the book he had brought with him from home which lay forsaken in the bottom of his bag, a sad monument to the life he had left behind, or the life he could have been leading. Instead, he sat at his small desk and read incoming communications. He read Shin-Beit summaries, research evaluations of the Syrian branch of the Military Intelligence Directorate, source-interrogation summaries by Unit 504, Foreign Ministry reports, and endless reports by the Mossad about information delivered by their sources in Lebanon and around the world, which pertained in one way or another to the Lebanese arena.
Almost all of these sources were low-grade, untrustworthy sources. Harel instructed Tamir not waste his time reading those, and simply skip them. It was good advice, but Tamir always found himself reading these materials not through the lens of an incisive and focused intelligence analyst trying to extract the most value out of the raw materials, but rather as one reads a story— a story not limited merely to the competing factions, false heroes, and endless bloodletting of the Lebanese scene, but one
