bending and brushing it. It was a time that he loathed and detested, a time when he was helpless and unable to hit back. Four men dead, burned beyond recognition, life cut short as they had screamed. And the technology of his enemy, his speed and his knowledge, took him far away from the puny retaliation possible to the men on the ground.
Nothing, only the oaths and obscenities shouted into the dirt as they had lain in the fragile cover between the rocks and waited for the echoing noise to pass. And the men who had died, buried already, not deep down — the parched ground prevented that — but hurried into shallow pits at dusk.
His subordinates, recognizing the signs that he wished to be alone, had left him when he had retired to the tent.
Others would care for the morale of the young men who had filed past the bodies, would take care that the sight fanned their hatred of the enemy across the border. There was a solitary piece of paper on his table brought by the journalist from Beirut, who had visited and left before the arrival of the jets. He had read it over and over again, keeping the information even from his closest colleagues, savouring among the disaster and horror of the day the news that it carried. The one they called Saleh Mohammed was there, on target and meeting his rendezvous contact.
The best boy that he had, the one he had willed to survive.
It would devastate them, he knew that. A plan of such detail and skill that he had hugged and kissed the shy bespectacled recruit who had worked on its conception, not a youth who could go himself across the border, the right claw foot controlled that, but one with brains and with foresight and who had talked not just of the operation but of its consequences, its wounding potential to the state of Israel. It would hurt them, twist behind the nation's rib cage…
The old man who acted as his bodyguard came noise-lessly into the tent.
'Some food for you, Ahmed. It is time to eat. One cannot sit and starve and grieve.' He was the only one in the camp who would call the leader by his given name. It went back a long time, eight years. They had held the house together at Karameh when the Israelis had swarmed in brigade strength into the refugee village beside the river Jordan ten months after the Six Day War. It should have been so easy for them, but for the first time the Palestinians had stood and fought. The cynics said it was because they had been left no escape route. There was truth in that, but for once the fedayeen had not thrown down their guns and surrendered. There had been mourning in Israel when the casualty figures were announced, more than twenty dead, more than seventy wounded. There had been dancing in Amman as the captured Centurion armour was driven in triumph through the ancient, winding hill-streets, and among the Palestinians there had been much to remember and heady praise and the start of resistance. The hours in the wrecked building, hammered by the tanks and hitting back with the rocket launchers and the Kalashnikovs, had forged the bond between the two men, one a leader and the other a follower. The relationship had not changed. It was acceptable, and the old man knew when he was required.
He put the plate in front of the leader. A mess of beans and rice and sauce with lamb's meat cut in small squares.
'They have had their day, the Israelis. We will have ours.
There is no sudden way to victory,' said the old man.
'What they have accomplished against us is a mere nothing to the blow that awaits them.' The old man was rarely taken into the leader's inner confidence. He said nothing and arranged a spoon and fork alongside the plate in front of the sitting man. 'Within the next hours, perhaps as long as two days,' the leader went on, 'we shall hit them so that they yelp like dogs.'
'Across the border? With a burden of sadness. He knew the risks, had cleared too many bundles of the possessions left behind by the suicide squads.
'Across many borders. Far from here. Bouchi, Dani and the third one, you remember? They went to Europe.
Bouchi and Dani are dead, the other alone has gone through. He is on course, on target. Today or tomorrow he will move, and then the world will know of him.' He spoke the words hurriedly, interspersing them with pauses as he scooped up the food from the plate, cramming it without finesse into his mouth. He did not look at the man that stood behind him. When the plate was cleared he sat back in his chair and addressed himself to the empty screen of canvas to his front.
'His target is David Sokarev. Of the utmost importance to them, but a man of whom you will never have heard.
He is from the world of science, of the very fundamentals of science. He concerns himself with the structure of the atom, and with the breaking of the atom, and with the release of its energies. They are jealous of their anonymity, these men, they do not seek to be answerable to their fellow species. They hide themselves away like slugs underneath wet rocks. It is rare for them to emerge into the open light, but Sokarev has come out. To London. That is where we will meet him, and will kill him.'
The old man watched as the leader turned toward him.
He saw the excitement in the eyes, deep and brown and shadowed in their sockets. Not since they had waited for news of the raid into Kiryat Shmona when the orders had been to eliminate as many of the enemy as were within range of the guns, men or women or children, had the old man seen a similar look — the fanatic awaiting his fulfilment.
'Eight bombs they have, perhaps nine by now,' the leader went on staring into the other's face, the voice quavering on the verge of self-control. 'Not big — the size of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In a city they would kill ninety thousand, up to one hundred thousand. Suck the air from their lungs, burn the bodies of our people, blind them, maim them, infect them so that those that live from their breeding would produce grotesque mutations. They would not make what their American allies call the 'clean bomb'. They will not waste effort and expense on such refinements. It will be a weapon of filth and of poison, and it is their ultimate defence. They hide behind it in the knowledge that the very mystery of its existence gives them strength. The man that we will shoot is the man who has created this bomb, loved it, succoured it, spent his working life refining the effectiveness of its yield.'
'And when he is dead, what will have changed?' said the old man. it will take the elimination of Sokarev to awake the world to the Israeli power. When he is dead and the news has been carried from continent to continent the world will wonder why the Palestinian people have chosen to exact retribution on one who seemed so mild, so harmless.
And we will tell them why he was chosen, we will tell them of Dimona, of the plutonium schemes, of the reactors there. And with their knowledge so too will come their fears. Fears of a mushroom cloud settling the 'Middle East problem', as they call it, fears of an annihilation more ghastly than the world has experienced since its cleverer men developed this horror. All the world will be talking about the bomb of the Israelis, not just the peasant peoples but in the embassies and the chancellories and the senates and the palaces. There will be demands for inspections and controls — the Americans will want that if only to silence their critics. If their bomb is muzzled their ultimate defence is taken from them, and then they are weak, then they can be beaten. All their men are replaceable. Dayan was replaceable, and Sharon of the Canal, and Rabin, and Eban, and Peres, all have others who wait to take their places. Sokarev, too. Other scientists can move behind his desk, but nothing can replace the bomb. It is final, the complete answer to their defensive strategy when future war goes against them. If it happens as we believe it will, if the governments of the world demand to know of this weapon, exercise control over it, then ultimately Israel will lose and go down stripped of her last and most powerful weapon of defence. That is why we will kill Sokarev.'
The old man ran his fingernails across the bristle of his chin, pondered, his brows lined with deep confusion.
The leader smiled like a man who has outlined to his friends his plans for the conquest of a woman they all consider beyond reach. The older man had not heard him talk in that way before. it is strange,' he said quietly, 'how the death of a man can move the world more than the life he has so long striven to perfect.'
He let himself out of the tent, taking the plate with him, and was gone, moving his way with familiarity across the sand, bypassing the ropes that held the tents. The night was very clear, a slight moon and the endless abyss of stars.
The leader snuffed out the candle with his thumb and forefinger, and stripped off his denim coat and trousers.
He felt his way across to the narrow canvas bed and edged his body under the single blanket that he allowed
