Retribution (5 page)

Ali Khalef did not bother to look out the train window at the passing countryside. It didn’t interest him. Neither did the
people around him. He spoke good French and good English, as well as his native Arabic, but he had not learned these languages
out of any interest in foreign countries or people. Growing up on the streets of Beirut, selling smuggled merchandise from
an early age, he had learned the hard way. Being able to read the information in Western-style characters on smuggled containers
was an essential part of his trade. He could do it at twelve. For him English and French were associated with hair dryers,
transistor radios, and cigarettes, not London and Paris.

His father worked in the oil fields of Saudi Arabia, and they saw him for a few weeks once a year. He sent money to his large
family, but it was never enough. All
the boys found ways of, raising money in the streets. Ali had been the most successful of them.

He was proud to be a Palestinian, although he had never been there and, the way things were going, probably never would. The
Burj al Brajneh quarter of Beirut, where he was born and grew up, was heavily Palestinian. The Palestinians were accused of
acting superior in Lebanon and were never popular. This had been no problem when Yasir Arafat was in control. After he and
many of his men had been driven out by the Israelis, things were not so easy.

But Ali had never for a moment expected that life would be easy. In his late teens he got his hands on a battered yellow Dodge
taxi with reinforced truck axles, which he used to run goods from the coast inland to Damascus in Syria. Prices were higher
in Syria, and he could sell just about anything in the city’s big Hammadiya souk. From that he moved on to wholesaling smuggled
goods in Shtaura, in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley and much closer to Damascus than Beirut. Before he turned twenty-one, he was making
more money than he knew what to do with and keeping his family in such comfort that their neighbors stared at them in open
envy.

The Syrian government spoiled everything. Soldiers mounted serious campaigns to stop smugglers and were harder to bribe. Police
examined goods in the Hammadiya souk. It was only a matter of time before Ali Khalef fell into the socialist government’s
net.

Ali had one brother unlike himself and the others in the family. He was a dedicated freedom fighter?
what the rest of the world called a terrorist. When he heard of Ali’s arrest and the beatings he was getting in jail, he went
to Abu Jeddah. Abu Jeddah had turned against Arafat and was pro-Syrian. When Ali volunteered to join his fighting group, charges
which might have resulted in a twenty-five-year sentence for the smuggler were dropped and he was released from jail into
a paramilitary training camp.

Abu Jeddah was pleased with Ali, who was much more worldly and effective than his fiery dedicated brother. He sent Ali alone
to Europe, supplied him generously with money and told him to tour around. Ali hoped that this might last forever—but he knew
he was being fattened for the kill.

His brother was killed by the Israelis in an air raid outside Sidon. Ali wished they had got Abu Jeddah instead of him. But
since Ali wished to go on living with his testicles still attached to him, he naturally did not express this opinion.

After six months Ali was told to report to Naim Shabaan in Munich. Ali was twenty-three and was surprised to find himself
obeying someone only a year older than him. He got over that quickly, because he was afraid of Naim and never questioned his
leadership. Ali feared him instinctively. He had seen many crazy, violent men. Abu Jeddah was one kind. Naim Shabaan was another.

“Good morning, General!,” the junior officer said to Gerrit van Gilder when he arrived at his office in
The Hague. “Those photographs were beautiful, sir.”

Van Gilder would hardly describe aerial photos of a freshly bombed building and some half-cooked corpses as beautiful, but
he knew what the young officer meant. The Israelis knew their stuff. Colonel Yitzhak Bikel had delivered. The general’s mission
had been a success. At the same time, of course, it was a failure. The terrorists had retaliated with a massacre on the sight-seeing
boat in Amsterdam. There was no doubt about who had the last word.

Would they go to England now that the television and newspapers claimed Maggie Thatcher was about to announce her willingness
to sign the Ostend Concordance? He very sincerely hoped so. He didn’t wish any harm on the English—he only wanted these mad
dogs out of Holland.

He said to the junior officer, “Get me Group-Captain Bradshaw on a secure line.”

While he waited, he pondered Bradshaw’s rank. He was not too familiar with the R.A.F.’s system, but he supposed that a Dutch
army general would be about equivalent to a British air force air marshal or air commodore. A group-captain was definitely
below that, although he was superior to a wing-commander. Van Gilder decided to treat Bradshaw as he would a colonel. Bradshaw
had been designated as his British contact in the new antiterrorist cooperation, as Bikel had been his Israeli counterpart.
The Dutch general was more than a bit disturbed to find himself equated with men holding a
lesser rank than his. Really, his own government should be more sensitive about such tnatters.

Hasan Shawa was pleased to be rid of Naim and Ali for a day. They had left it for him to clean up the apartment after them,
which of course meant only removing all traces of alcohol and drug consumption so as not to provide ammunition to critics
who might find their dedication to Islam weak. Hasan had no complaints about Naim and Ali. He had served with a lot worse.

Son of a hilltop citrus grove farmer on the West Bank, Hasan might have been tending the family trees today if Jewish settlers
nearby had not sunk so many deep wells for irrigation that they lowered the water table and made a desert of the hilltop.
In the middle of the growing season the fruit and leaves on the trees shriveled and fell off. The only authority they could
complain to was the Israeli army, and their attitude to Arab farmers was well known. An officer did drive by to inspect their
grove of dying trees above the prospering Jewish farms. He recommended that the family sell out and move across the river
to Jordan. In the end this was what they had to do.

Hasan stayed in school and joined every anti-Zionist organization he could find to help ease his simmering rage. He did well
at his studies and won a scholarship to Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow. The tightly regulated life in the Soviet capital
did not suit him, and his wild ways did not appeal to the
Russians. He was expelled from the university after four months for making fun of Communist Party leaders at a vodka binge.

Sent back to Jordan in disgrace, he reacted by joining the PLO and going to a training camp in Lebanon. Here he met Soviet
instructors again, and this time he got on better with them. The training course was divided into three parts—leftist political
orientatíon, weapons and field craft, then hijacking and hostage holding. He had no interest in the politics. He did well
at tactics and map reading, and become skilled with weapons. The Kalashnikov AK-47, and its light ened modified AKM version,
was the weapon of his choice. This Soviet-designed assault rifle was manufac tured in several communist countries and available
on the arms market everywhere. Hasan also trained with a still lighter Czech version called the vz58, which had a fiberglass
stock, and also the drawback of climbing during automatic bursts.

As a promising marksman he learned to use the Soviet Dragunov sniper’s rifle, a very heavy weapon with a telescopic sight
and a cheek-piece on the butt, which could nail a man at nine hundred meters.

Hasan was also trained to use pistols the Soviet way. Marksmanship and target practice were regarded as a waste of time. If
a target was any distance away, you sprayed him with automatic rifle or submachine gun fire. A pistol was only for close-in
fighting and was to be used almost like a knife, for body or head shots at almost point-blank range. They were taught not
how to
stand, hold and aim a pistol, but how to get in close to the unsuspecting target before ever drawing the weapon.

They were also trained to use Israeli weapons, particularly the Uzi. This came in handy when they wanted to make the Zionists
look responsible for an incident, especially when they hit a fellow-Arab for something. Also the Russians became embarrassed
by the constant use of communist-bloc arms and wanted to see Western weapons used once in a while.

From Lebanon Hasan went to Cuba for advanced training. He took part in numerous harassments of Israel from southern Lebanon.
He fought the Israeli forces when they invaded Lebanon and was driven back by their onslaught. He was in Tripoli when the
break within the PLO occurred, and his group aligned itself with Syria against Yasir Arafat.

When Abu Jeddah was called on to form a fighting unit, he brought in Hasan, whom he had seen combat with and known for some
time. According to custom the fighting unit became a splinter group with a lot of independence and its own name, the June
4—New Arab Social Front. That way its actions could not so easily be pinned to the parent organization. This was good news
to Hasan. The only fighting he had seen in the past few years had been against Lebanese Arab Christians and fellow-Moslem
Amal militiamen.

Although his English and French were good, Hasan was surprised to be sent to Europe. He was more accustomed to living ín sandbagged
bunkers than in hotels, and to eating out of cans with a combat knife
than to using cutlery and a tablecloth. But he was used to obeying orders and he learned. Abu Jeddah spoke to him personally
over the phone at the Syrian embassy in Rome when asking him to report to Naim Shabaan. Hasan was twenty-eight and a battle-hardened
veteran, but he was not a leader and he knew it. Naim was four years younger than him and untried in combat. Yet, after his
talk with Abu Jeddah and after meeting Naim, Hasan recognized him as leader willingly enough.

“Even if what they say about Maggie Thatcher is untrue,” Herbert Malleson argued, “even if she’s not about to announce her
intention to sign the concordance, the terrorists will see this as a good time to strike. Their movements in Holland must
be pretty restricted by now. If I was them, I’d have hightailed out of there long ago. My bet is that they have. They may
already be in England. Certainly the customs and immigration people will be on the watch for them. But Great Britain is no
longer an island fortress. It’s almost impossible to closely monitor movement in from the Common Market countries without
causing all sorts of delays and raising a major political flap. That’s the last thing they want to do. They seem intent on
keeping everything under wraps and making an early arrest of the key terrorists.”

“The international airlines don’t share their optimism,” Charley Woodgate observed.

“I don’t either,” Malleson answered. “I think Richard should leave tomorrow for London and waft there for developments.”

Dartley nodded. “That makes sense. Even if they do hit again in Holland, I’ll be closer to them in London than here.”

“They’ll strike in Britain,” Malleson said adamantly.

“You leaving for someplace tomorrow?” Sylvia Marton asked Dartley.

“Why do you ask?”

“You usually give me a call just about then.”

“I’m heading for London,” Dartley admitted. Sylvia had long known what he did for a living. He had not been able to fool her.
In order to bind her to silence, Dartley had included her as a driver on a few jobs. He later learned she was a crack shot.
“It seems I’m becoming predictable.”

“I find all men predictable,” Sylvia said, lighting a cigarette and taking a sip of champagne.

Dartley knew she did not believe him when he said he no longer missed cigarettes and alcohol. Sylvia liked to search a man
for his weak points. She would empty both the cigarette pack and the bottle in an amused taunt of his health regimen.

He replied, “All you’re really saying is that we all have a similar reaction to you—most of us, anyway.”

“How boring.”

“You didn’t seem so bored when you sent me that postcard from Rio while you were there with that banker.”

“That was supposed to make you jealous,” she said.

Dartley and she both realized that if they ever tried living together, they would be at each other’s throats before long.
They saw one other continually for years now, but always irregularly. Dartley was alarmed when he realized he had developed
a pattern in seeing her. Try as he might to break them, patterns and habits kept being re-formed in his daily activities.
He was always the last one to notice them. This was why, on his operations, Dartley followed guerrilla training procedures
of deliberately making random changes in even the simplest activities. Some little predictable habit of his that he may have
missed, his enemy wouldn’t.

Sylvia was a blue-eyed blonde, a naturalized American citizen from Yugoslavia. She had been in a number of second-rate films
in her early twenties. She’d won no Oscars or rave reviews, but the movies had been kind to her bank account even if the critics
hadn’t been kind to her. She still got occasional small roles. She didn’t need them except as an ego boost, because Sylvia
was an old-fashioned girl, the kind who believes that a man should hold the door open for her and pay the bill.