(2013) Collateral Damage (20 page)

Dove was not above flattery; the indignation began to subside.
'When do we start?'

'Tomorrow,' said the lawyer, playing with his beads. 'And by
that I mean a Palestinian tomorrow, not an Egyptian or even a Lebanese tomorrow.
I mean that in exactly twenty-four hours time you will be learning to do things
you did not think possible.'

'Now this is the Colt Cobra,' the instructor was saying. 'It's
an evil little motherfucker.
Cops in the States carry'em as a
backup gun.
Five rounds, soft nose .38 shells, two-and-a-half-inch barrel.
You can wear it in an ankle-holster, a shoulder-holster or just a quick draw-sheath
on your bel: and nobody sees you're carrying.' He twirled the snub-nosed revolver
in his fingers like a Western gunfighter and started shooting at three Coca Cola
cans he had placed on a little mound of earth about four metres away. All five rounds
were delivered in rapid succession and the cans jigged about in a suitably gratifying
fashion.

Dove stood there with his hands in his trouser pockets doing
his best to look nonchalant, but he blinked and bit his lip slightly at every shot.
It was some time since his father-in-law had given him the demonstration with the
Webley and he had forgotten how noisy pistols could be. 'Of course, that's just
fairground stuff,' said the long-haired Palestinian with the missing ear who had
led the schoolteacher's kidnapper. 'We're gonna teach you how to handle these things
properly.'

He looked like most of the other fedayeen at the training camp,
with a black and white chequered keffiyeh knotted around the shoulders of his drab
olive green shirt like a Jewish prayer shawl. Yet he was one of the most American
Americans Dove had ever met. Now that he was a mentor he was more amenable to questions
than he had been at their first meeting, and soon explained his background.

His name was George and he told Dove that he had served a hitch
with the US Marines in Vietnam, which he called 'Nam' in the proper fashion. Afterwards
he had gone to Berkeley on the GI Bill and studied politics. His upbringing had
been entirely in the States and Dove noted that the Arabic he spoke to his comrades
sometimes appeared halting. He had, he explained, been taken to California as a
child, his parents being among the few Palestinian refugees allowed to emigrate
there.

The lawyer had been as good as his word, better in fact, for
Dove had arrived at the camp the previous evening. They had taken him south by Land
Rover towards the Israeli frontier, turning off the coastal road shortly after the
village of Adlun then following the mountain route through the market town of Nabatiye,
where he noted that the chipped old stone houses had weathered Israeli explosives
better than the holed and sagging modern villas. At dusk they had bounced along
a dirt-track that skirted the stone revetments and glacis slopes of Beaufort Castle,
the old Templar bastion brought out of retirement by a garrison of fedayeen. Finally
they came to a coppice of pines overlooking the broad green sweep of the Litani
River valley.

Here were half a dozen tents almost invisible until you walked
into them for, besides being pitched among the conifers, they were also heavily
camouflaged with cut branches. Alongside the tents were several deep-slit trenches.
Dove assumed these were a precaution against Israeli air raids. Positioned in a
small clearing nearby there was a quadruple-barrelled Czech anti-aircraft gun plus
a Russian Dushka heavy machine-gun on a stand bolted to the back of a pick-up truck,
like the one Dove had dodged between when he made his dash from the villa.

The schoolteacher rightly suspected that the camp was not a permanent
training establishment. From conversations with George he concluded that it was
one of the many changing positions held by the various Palestinian Freikorps who
wandered the Fatahland area south of the Litani
river
.
It was the sort of place where a man could be quietly trained to do a certain job
without being over-exposed to people or things they would rather he did not see.
Yet the tents were pitched less than five miles from Israel.

The lawyer's promise proved something of an exaggeration. They
were anxious to get Dove to his target and, however dedicated, nobody can be transmuted
into a martial superman in just over a week. This being the case, George wisely
decided to concentrate on weapon-training.

Dove learned to load and fire the Kalashnikov on single-shot
or automatic, the mysteries of the cocking-handle at last explained, but the emphasis
was on pistols. In the end, it was decided that the Colt Cobra was unsuitable because,
for travelling purposes, the weapon had to be flat enough to conceal in the false
panel of a suitcase. Instead, George selected a Walther PPK modified to fire a soft-nosed
9-mm bullet in order to give it greater stopping power. 'It's been throated,' he
explained to the schoolteacher when he showed him the automatic. 'The feed ramp
from the magazine has been altered to take the dum-dum. You could knock over a goddamn
elephant with this.'

 
'Where did you learn so
much about guns, George?' Dove once asked him as they came off the makeshift range.
They were out of the conifers, lying in the long grass on a gentle slope looking
down towards the Israeli border, having a lunch-break of flat Arab bread, tomatoes
and goat's cheese. There was a Flanders of poppies growing in the long grass and
it was warm, but not yet the baking heat of high summer. Other men might have found
the atmosphere restful.

George lit a cigarette and toyed with the Kalashnikov he was
carrying as well as a pistol. 'Nam mostly, I guess,' he said.

'What, pistols as well?'

'Sure. Some outfits were encouraged to buy their own as a backup.
You could either get 'em in Saigon or send away for them mail-order. I remember
we had this sergeant, big black motherfucker, got himself a .44 calibre Derringer,
you know, the little two-shot piece the cardsharps in the Wild West had. He used
to carry it around in his sock. What an asshole. He got into a fight in some girlie
bar in Da Nang and wasted half his foot. After that, word came that Derringers were
out. Only proper cannon allowed. I used to carry a .357
Magnum
,
Smith and Wesson. Then I got wounded, mortar frags in the legs, and some motherfucking
medic stole it off me on the medivac chopper.'

'Didn't it worry you, what you were doing in Vietnam? I mean'
- Dove searched for the right words - 'now you're part of the world revolutionary
movement and all that?'

'Look, man. Don't give me any of this world revolutionary movement
shit. I'm a Palestinian. I fight for Palestine. If the Russians were occupying my
land I'd fight them.' Dove blushed. 'Sorry, I mean ...'

'Sure, I regret it now, but I was twenty years old when I got
to Nam, I was just a dumb fucking kid. I'd been brought up on John Wayne movies.
I really wanted to prove I was as good an American as the next guy. Get my quota
of gooks. Shit, I volunteered, remember. I wasn't drafted or anything.'

'And did you get them?'

'Get what?'

'Your quota.
Your
quota of gooks?'

'Sure, I got some. I greased a lot of Charlie. I was a mean bastard.
Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil
for I'm the meanest bastard in the valley. Lot of guys had that tattooed on them.
Crazy fuckers.
Course, now I'm not so happy about what
I did because Charlie was our brother. It was just that I was such a goddamn dumb
asshole then I couldn't see it. When I got back to the States, back to what we called
The World, I began to realise a few things; began to think maybe I should have fragged
a few fucking gung-ho officers instead of setting fire to people's hooches and wasting
farmers fighting for their country. I did a year at Berkeley then the Jordanians
started butchering our people in Amman, Black September Seventy, so I quit and came
out here.'

'You've never been back?'

'Once.
A few years
ago - to see my folks.'

'How do they feel about what you're doing?'

'Shit, man. You ask the dumbest questions. How do you think?
They're proud that their son is fighting for their country instead of guzzling Budweiser
and chasing tail.'

'But aren't they worried?'

'No. They know if I die it couldn't be for a better cause. I'd
be a martyr.'

'Don't you miss America?'

'Sure, I miss it. Like a hole in the head. Ever been there?'

'No.'

'Well, I haven't been to England either so I don't know, but
the States is the most racist fucking society in the world. At least the South Africans
are honest about it, which is more than you can say for those motherfuckers. Do
you know what they called me in the Marines? Do you know what those comrades-in-arms
called me? I'll tell you - they called me Sandy. Know what that's short for? It's
short for Sand Nigger.
Bastards.
Ever since I was big enough
to talk I've had to explain who and what I was to a bunch of dumbfucks who don't
know whether to wind their ass or scratch their watch. I almost got lynched by a
bunch of red necks in a bar in Southern California once because they thought I
was a Chicano.'

'A what?'

'Chicano, Wetback - Mexican. Man. Don't you know anything?'

'We don't have them in England,' said Dove rather primly. 'Oh,
I say, we don't hev them,' said George in a travesty of an English accent. 'What
do you hev? I know you hev the Queen. Tell me about the Queen.'

'Let's leave her out of it.'

 
'Why? What are you motherfuckers
doing
anyway.
Isn't it a bit goddamn backward to have a
Queen in the second half of the twentieth century? Why don't you shoot her?'

'Look,' said Dove, knowing as he did so that he was about to
sound ridiculously pompous, 'I would rather we didn't discuss this.'

'Rather we didn't discuss it! Jesus Christ! You're a fucking
limey royalist.'

'No, I'm not. I'm nothing. It's just - it would be rather like
me criticizing Palestine. We can criticize her, but you can't.'

'How can you compare a whole country with a fucking Queen?'

'I suppose it's something to do with patriotism,' said Dove,
in a faintly surprised tone because he had only just identified the force behind
his growing anger. 'You and the bloody Irish don't have a monopoly on it, you know.'

'Jesus Christ. Rule Britannia,' said George. But after that he
dropped the subject.

On another occasion they talked about Koller. 'What's he like?'
asked Dove. 'Have you ever met him?'

'Heard about him,' said George evasively. 'What sort of things?'

'He's a meeeeen son-of-a-bitch, that motherfucker.'

Dove was getting a little weary of George's monotonous soldierly
obscenities. 'What exactly is that supposed to mean?'

'Like I said.
He's a real mean dude.
Cool. You're gonna have to be good for him.' The Palestinian suddenly seemed to
recall that it was not his role to discourage Dove. 'You'll be all right, man,'
he said weakly. 'You can take him.' He sounded like a trainer with a fading boxer
on his hands.

But the schoolteacher was insistent. 'What makes him so special?'

George sighed. Perhaps the Englishman ought to know what he was
up against. 'He's got nerve. Of course, a lot of guys got nerve, but he's in a league
of his own. Listen, I'll tell you a story. Once in Germany someplace, Koller was
cornered by the cops in an apartment block. I think he'd just stuck up a bank or
something and got separated from the others when they split. Anyway, the pigs had
this block surrounded and it looked like he was either going to come out with his
hands up or feet first. So what happened? Suddenly this character comes running
down the stairs into the lobby wearing an old overcoat, his face streaming with
blood, screaming, "There's a crazy bastard upstairs with a gun. He punched
me." The pigs all gathered round.
"Where?
Where?" they say.
'"Third floor, apartment five,"
he said. Most of the pigs all rush upstairs. This character says, "I'm going
to see my wife - she's at a friend's around the corner. No, I don't need a doctor
- I need a drink."

'Before anybody can say anything he's out of the door and away.
A few seconds later the cops come tearing down from apartment five. Koller had been
there all right. Just long enough to stick up the tenant, take his overcoat, smear
his own face with tomato ketchup and tell the tenant that if he as much as poked
his head out of the goddamn door he was liable to get it blown off - which, incidentally,
almost happened when the pigs came storming in.

'You see, what Koller was betting on was that hardly any of the
cops charging around there would have any real idea of what he looked like. Sure,
they'd all seen his mug-shot on the wanted sheet from time to time - so who looks
like their passport picture? There aren't many dudes around who would think that
fast, have the nerve to walk straight into the cops. Most guys would have gone for
grabbing a hostage and trying to bullshit their way out. Koller has class.'

'His sort of class belongs in the gutter,' said Dove in one of
his rare displays of emotion. 'He's a murdering bastard.'

'OK. So he killed your old lady. But it was an accident. Why
do you want him so badly? If she'd been wasted in some automobile smash with a drunk
driver would you want to kill that guy too?'

'Yes, for a while,' said Dove, 'then I suppose the feeling would
subside because society would probably punish the driver and anyway, however irresponsible
he was, he hadn't come to the conclusion that he had the right to kill.

'But Koller's different. I want to kill him for all the little
people who don't matter to people like him, the eggs sacrificed for his rotten little
egotistical revolutionary omelette. For all the happy, decent people with so much
to offer who get killed because they happen to be in the wrong place when some clumsy,
righteous bastard decides that he's got the G - given right to kill someone. And
if I get the chance, before he dies, before I put a bullet in him with the excellent
pistol you've given me, I'm going to tell him who's killing him and why. I'm going
to tell him just for the pleasure of seeing the surprise on the bastard's face.
The surprise when he realises that one of those little people whose life he blundered
into was so ruined, so shattered, that when he had picked up the fragments of himself
and glued them back, more or less, in working order the only thing he had left to
live for was tracking him down like a wild animal.'