Retribution (16 page)

Unlike the other three male recruits, Mosbah and Mousa did not help themselves to the Jordanian’s brandy, infidel women, and
unclean food. They did not interfere with anyone else’s enjoyment and made no remarks. This caused the Jordanian to mistake
their quietness for shyness and rustic backwardness. They laughed politely when he played the jovial host trying to force
worldly pleasures on them. They took everything in good fun until he made a remark about their fundamentalist outlook. Without
warning, Mousa seized him from behind, gripping him just above the elbows. Mosbah beat him slowly and mercilessly until he
lost consciousness.

The Jordanian treated them with wary respect after
that. He was basically a weak, self-indulgent man, between wives, who was dabbling in revolution to add spice to the tedium
of his life. He found that although it was easy to manipulate these ignorant young terrorists, they tended to make dangerous
pets.

Naim stayed at the Avenida Palace and Hasan at the Hotel Diplomatic, both in the center of Barcelona. Hasan found cheap rooms
for the recruits in the Gothic Quarter, off the Ramblas. Hasan met them at the railroad station and took them where they would
stay. He gave each of them pocket English—Spanish and French—Spanish dictionaries, since he knew that none spoke Spanish but
had a smattering of the other languages. He forbade them to possess anything written in Arabic or to speak it unless they
were sure they were out of earshot of strangers. He went through the possessions of each to make sure all identifying labels
had been cut out. Their papers identified them as Turks. He refused to tell them where the others were staying, warning them
to keep away from each other. Each was supplied with money, told to learn the layout of the city and some basic Spanish, and
given a curfew of midnight to 8:00
A.M
. When needed they would be contacted during those hours. He refused to say where they could contact him or when they would
meet the leader of the commandos, whom they knew only as Naim, as they knew Hasan only by his first name.

Hasan met Naim for dinner that night in a restaurant on the Paseo de Gracia. “It’s been a long, hard
day,” he grumbled, ordering a double Scotch whiskey before eating.

Naim smiled. “I telephoned our Marbella contact, a Jordanian, for his assessment. The girl tried to cut his dick off with
a knife, and the two called Mousa and Mosbah beat the shit out of him when he spoke insultingly of the Ayatollah Khomeni.”

“Dumb kids. What the fuck are we supposed to do with them, Naim?”

“Shake Europe to its foundations.”

Hasan didn’t often laugh, but he thought this remark of Naim’s was funny. He ordered another Scotch. This time Naim joined
him.

“What’s the girl like?” Naim asked.

“Good looking, very friendly. But I could see her reaching for her knife. I don’t understand these real young Arab girls today.”

“Any problems with the guys?”

“Yes. I could have told you which two beat the Jordanian even if you hadn’t told me their names. They just can’t wait to join
Allah in Paradise, real going-to-meet-my-Maker types. It scares the shit out of me to have cannon fodder like that around.
Is that all Abu Jeddah thinks of us two? You know what those two maniacs have? Eight heavy instant-detonation grenades. One
each for the six of them, and one each for us.”

Hasan was pleased by the look of consternation on Naim’s face at this news. He didn’t have to explain its significance. When
the two Palestinians barricaded themselves into Istanbul’s Neve Shalom synagogue in September
1986, along with the worshipers, they intended that no one would escape alive, including themselves. But they did not want
to leave their bodies for possible identification by the Turkish authorities and through this, possible discovery of the group
responsible. After they machinegunned the Jews in the temple, they released the grenades close to their bodies so that the
force of the blasts splattered pieces of their flesh all over the synagogue’s freshly stuccoed and painted walls. Naim had
read later that one had held the grenade next to his head, which was found embedded in the ceiling forty feet overhead. The
other clutched the grenade to his stomach, and the only recognizable parts of him left were his two legs below the knees.

“Abu Jeddah knows I won’t do suicide runs,” Naim said firmly.

Hasan nodded slowly. “No need to remind him of it. I think we’ve just got the scrapings of the barrel here.”

“You think that Israeli report on bombing the camp was true?”

“If this is all Abu Jeddah can send us, it’s beginning to look like it,” Hasan answered.

“My messages deny it,” Naim said, self-importantly emphasizing that he received information which Hasan did not.

“Don’t you start believing everything you’re told, Naim, or we’re all done for.”

His pride deflated, Naim humbly asked the older and more experienced man, “What do we do?”

“Put those two cowboys, Mosbah and Mousa, out in the front lines so they can show us how good they are.”

Naim laughed and signaled to the waiter for more Scotches.

Mosbah drove. “You meet Naim?”

“For a few minutes,” Mousa said.

“What did you think of him?”

“Like Hasan. Like the Jordanian in Marbella. He’s been in the West too long.”

Mosbah said, “They talked to me like we weren’t the same—like they were high-class Europeans and I was a low-class Arab. But
they haven’t gone soft. You can see that.”

“You think they’ve been carrying out all the raids here in Europe?”

“Some of them, not all. Abu Jeddah has operatives all over the world. He can pick and choose who, where, and when. We’re all
part of a huge army of freedom fighters.”

Mousa asked, “What did Naim tell you to do?”

“He told me to steal a car and pick you up.”

“You know your way around?”

“Well enough in the central part,” Mosbah said. “What did he tell you to do?”

“Bring along the antitank launcher and one projectile. Hasan kind of sneered at me and said make it big. I thought you’d know
all the details.”

Mosbah shook his head and made a turn. “I think
they’re testing us, seeing what we’re capable of when left to our own initiative. One thing I don’t want to do is much more
driving around. It’s two in the morning. We’re liable to be stopped any time when things get really quiet.”

Barcelona was a late-night city but people and traffic were fast beginning to thin out in the streets.

“Look for a target,” Mousa said. “Something big.”

They thought about firing the rocket into one of the big hotels, like the Ritz, Avenida Palace, or Hotel Diplomatic and abandoned
this only when Mosbah had a better idea. The car needed gas. He filled the tank at an all-night station near several tourist
hotels, made a round of the block, and came to a stop about a hundred meters from the pumps.

Mousa poked the shoulder-held launcher out one rear side window, sighted on a gas pump, and pressed the release button. The
30 mm projectile streaked from the launching tube. The rocket’s nose slammed squarely into the midsection of the pump, and
this impact set off the high explosives carried in the missile’s cylinder.

The blast ripped open the fuel lines to the storage tank beneath and ignited the contents. The liquid fuel and fumes enclosed
in the tank exploded and in turn set off blasts in the five other tanks.

The two recruits stared delightedly at the great ball of flame fifty meters high and listened to the majestic roar of destruction
and tinkling of plate glass windows.

When a chunk of concrete the size of a basketball
sailed through the air and tore off the trunk door, Mosbah drove away.

The police said it was an accident, but a gas station attendant, before he died of burns at the hospital, told a nurse he
had seen a man fire a rocket from a car and the nurse told a newspaper reporter. Two died, eight were badly hurt, the damage
outside the gas station was mostly restricted to broken glass.

Staying at the Avenida Palace, four floors above Naim Shabaan, Richard Dartley was awoken by the blast. He hurriedly dressed
and went outside. Two hours later he returned with no evidence that it had been anything other than an accident. The only
reason he had for being in Barcelona was that rail ticket that had fallen from Claudine’s purse. Still, it was a bit of a
coincidence… When he saw in one of the next day’s evening newspapers what the nurse said, he at last knew for sure he was
on the right track.

Mosbah and Mousa rented a room in a rundown hotel near the docks. The place had a side entrance to a badly lit street. No
one would live there. This would be their meeting place for this series of attacks only. The two recruits ordered four-inch-diameter
steel pipe cut into three-foot lengths at a plumber’s supply store. At a construction site they paid workers to steal them
cinder blocks and bags of cement.

With Naim’s permission, they enlisted two of the other recruits and explained the plan to them in the
hotel room. The other two were so grateful to meet their comrades and talk Arabic again, they would have agreed to anything.
They met with four stolen cars with deep trunks at a quiet area on the edge of Montjuich Park. One carried sand in a two-gallon
plastic bucket from a nearby playground, another brought buckets of water from a fountain. In each car trunk they cemented
the bases of five lengths of three-foot-long steel pipe in cinder blocks, propping the pipes up at a forty-degree angle with
other cinder blocks. The pipes were aimed rearward, and they carefully measured the clearance from the mouth of the side-by-side
pipes over the rear wall of the trunk. They closed the trunks and left the cars parked until the quick-drying cement had set.

Richard Dartley was back to wandering city streets, hoping he might chance upon something. But Barcelona was many times the
size of Nice, with many more tourist sights and museums, and this time he had no clear objective in mind like Claudine in
Nice. He bought himself a radio with earphones so he could listen to newscasts from time to time, although Europeans seemed
generally uninterested in having hourly news or up-to-the-minute information on world events. As it happened, he didn’t need
a radio to direct him to the scene of the next attack—he heard it plainly with his own ears. Five explosions, slightly and
irregularly apart, any single one in itself nothing very startling, in this series meant only one thing to Dartley’s ears—rockets.

He waved to a taxi, but the driver had heard the explosives also and didn’t want to go in that direction.

“Yo soy un medico,”
Dartley explained and handed the man a large bill, which melted his heart.

The rockets had hit buildings at various levels on a block on the south side of Avenida Primo de Rivera. Dartley guessed that
the Tourist Information Center had been the target, although its offices had not been hit. One projectile had hit the sidewalk,
punching a small hole in the asphalt and downing about a dozen pedestrians. Another had left a huge black burn mark on the
side wall of a building. Three others seemed to have entered windows, and fires were burning inside.

Dartley moved away quickly. His job was not to help victims but to catch the perpetrators. He needed to see how these rockets
had been launched. He found the car on the opposite side of the Avenida, its trunk angled out from the sidewalk. Smoke was
still rising from the row of five pipes angled upward in the trunk. A crowd was beginning to gather round the car. Dartley
pressed in close enough to examine the trunk latch. A timing device had been attached to automatically open it. He had seen
all he needed to see and hurried away.

As he walked he took a tourist map of the city from his pocket and glanced at it from time to time. The chief points of interest
for tourists were clearly marked. The cathedral and Gaudi’s church of La Sagrada Familia—but so far they had avoided churches.
The fantasy architect Gaudi’s park was too far from the city center. The Picasso Museum, which was less than a
mile from where he stood, would be a good choice if the terrorists had more rockets to spare. He hailed a cab.

They had been in motion less than a minute when they heard another five explosions up ahead. The driver braked, shook his
head, and said he was going home.

It was too late now for Dartley to go to the Picasso Museum just to see another abandoned car with five smoking tubes in the
trunk. He fished the map from his pocket and said, “Take me to the Gran Teatro del Liceo.”

Since this was in a different direction, the driver agreed. The opera house was on the western side of the Ramblas, near the
Plaza Real. He found himself a café on the eastern side at a safe distance from the Gran Teatro. No performance seemed to
be in progress there this afternoon, but this would probably not affect the terrorists’ choice of target. He ordered a coffee
and a pastry at a sidewalk table and waited. Nobody here seemed to have heard anything about rocket attacks elsewhere in the
city.

Before his order arrived, he noticed a Ford being left by a young man, who could be an Arab, with its trunk angled out into
the street in the general direction of the opera house.

Dartley watched him get out of the car, which was being left in an illegal parking space, lock the door behind him, and walk
north along the Ramblas. Dartley was ready to sound the alarm and then follow him, when he saw the young man settle himself
down at a
café table farther along. Feeling a bit of a paranoid fool, Dartley subsided in his chair again. His coffee and pastry arrived.

He almost groaned as he saw the Ford’s trunk pop open. A couple of seconds later the first rocket screamed out, then another,
another, five in all. Aghast, people watched them slamming into the front of the opera house, without being quite able to
connect what had happened in the car trunk with what was happening down the wide street on the far side. People stood. They
shouted, ran in different directions, screamed. Dartley nearly lost contact with the young man in the panic.