Authors: Gary Haynes
“The tunnel entrance is there,” Husani said, keeping the lamp aloft and motioning behind the goats, although it was shielded by view for now by sacks of firewood.
Then he explained to Ibrahim that he used the barkless dogs because other breeds would wake the dead with all the comings and goings. But they alerted him to visitors just the same. The tunnel, he went on, was at a depth of a hundred and ten feet, one of the deepest, and was eight hundred yards long. He had entered into an agreement with the tunnel builders and earned a living from getting a small percentage of the profits. In turn, the tunnel owners paid Hamas for the privilege of operating the tunnels into the Gaza Strip. Good business, he said. How long it would last now that his fellow Egyptians had decided they didn’t care much for fellow Arabs, only Allah knew.
The majority of the tunnels were dug by otherwise unemployable Palestinian men under the Philadephi Corridor, a narrow strip of land which literally split the town of Rafah between Gaza and Egypt. The average build cost of a tunnel was one hundred thousand US dollars, and if Ibrahim’s Hamas brothers hadn’t ordered his free passage, he would have had to pay three thousand dollars for the privilege of being scared out of his wits.
Once the herder had removed the sacks of firewood, it was clear that the entrance was in fact the head of what looked like a vertical tube, roughly twelve foot in diameter that plunged almost beyond eyeshot. A steel ladder was jutting out about two foot from the side, affixed to the wall by semi-circular brackets that doubled up as safety barriers for the descent and looked stable enough.
The goats would be lowered via ropes, which the herder said they were used to and accepted, like dogs owned by Western people, who washed them in the same baths as they used for their children. Something he said he found disturbing on every level and shook his head in disbelief.
Ibrahim thanked Husani and followed behind the herder as he descended into the shaft, ensuring he didn’t step on the man’s small, dirt-stained hands. When he reached the bottom, he was surprised that the tunnel proper was nothing like he had imagined. In contrast to the basement, which Husani had said he kept dark due to the increase in army patrols, the tunnel had lights in wire cradles and lengths of electricity cables in rubber casing. It was well ventilated and even had intercoms and a metal track to ease the transportation of heavy ordnance and white goods via small hand-pushed carts.
The goats had congregated in an unnerving huddle to the right, as if, Ibrahim thought, they were peculiar harbingers of doom. The herder hitched up his dusty jacket and took out a Glock 9mm handgun.
“From Hamas,” he said. “If you get caught, they said you will know what to do.”
If the IDF caught him the odds were they would make him talk, Ibrahim knew, even if he wasn’t tortured, at least in the conventional sense. Now that the Americans had outlawed waterboarding in CIA-run black sites, the Israelis could hand him over to the Lebanese Christians, who’d tube feed him a cocktail of drugs, which would loosen his tongue, before relieving him of his manhood and throwing him off the top of a building. He would have to shoot himself to prevent an involuntary outburst, even if it meant another taking his place.
As the herder handed him the Glock, Ibrahim nodded.
Tom had left the room where his father lay in a coma and walked now through the lobby. He asked the receptionist sitting behind a semicircular aspen desk where he could find Doctor Asani. The woman, who looked middle-aged and wore tortoiseshell eyeglasses, pointed to a glass-fronted office about six yards to her left.
Tom knocked and waited until he was asked to enter. He pushed open the glass door and walked into the spacious but windowless office. The doctor was sitting behind a pine table on a leather swivel chair. Apart from a laptop and landline, there was a large mauve orchid in a little ceramic pot on the table. To the right, a piece of abstract art hung on the white wall, which immediately took his eye.
“You like it?” she asked in English.
“I do, ma’am. Ronald Davis. It’s called
Red-Black Quarters
. May I?” he said, pointing to the chair in front of her desk.
She gestured to it with her hand. “Then you will know it is a print.”
“Yeah,” he said, sitting down. “Now I’d like you to tell me about my father. I’d be obliged if you didn’t pull any punches.”
“I would not do that, Mr Dupree. Your father is very ill. In medical terms, a coma is a state of unconsciousness that lasts more than six hours, which it has, of course. It comes from the Greek, meaning deep sleep. But while in a coma a person cannot respond to external stimuli, not even something painful, such as a prick from a needle. They cannot voluntarily open their eyes. In your father’s case it was brought on by cardiac arrest, as is the case with approximately a quarter of all coma patients. It is far too early to say how long it will last.”
“A heart attack?”
“Yes, very likely brought on by the shock of the…” She paused. “But his heart does not show any indications of serious damage.”
“Is it safe to move him?” Tom asked.
“With the right equipment and care, yes.”
Tom figured Crane would have only sent the best. “I don’t need to know any more,” he said, standing up and holding out his hand.
She did likewise before they shook hands.
“Thank for all you’ve done, ma’am.”
“My pleasure, Mr Dupree.”
He left the room, thinking first that he desperately wanted his father to wake up and live, and second that he was going to find those responsible however long it took. And if that meant putting Crane’s crazy plan into effect, so be it.
The tunnel had puddles of muddy water, the sides and ceiling shored up with planks of wood. At intervals, metal posts acted as added support. Ibrahim had had to stoop for the duration, sweating badly due to both the heat and the fear of confined spaces.
But now, past the herder and the hapless goats, he could see the far end of the tunnel. Even from a distance of forty foot, it was clear that it rose upwards to what the herder had said was another basement. The light was a muted yellow there, rather than luminous, although he could smell faint wafts of the sea, clear and piquant. He thought of his Hamas bothers and started to feel a little more human.
The herder had only spoken to Ibrahim once since handing him the Glock. He stated that just last week it had been his honour to have guided in a batch of Russian Katyusha rockets, which could reach Israeli cities, and Stinger missiles, which could shoot down their military aircraft. They had, he’d stated, been paid for by Qatari sympathisers and had been bought via the Eastern European black market. As a result, the Israelis had bulldozed many Palestinian buildings in Rafah camp, although Hamas were re-housing those affected at the nearby camp of Tel al-Sultan. But the Palestinians, a poor and persecuted lot, he’d concluded, were also fearless and ingenious, and God was Great, so the Israelis would not win in the long run.
Ibrahim knew that Hamas had thousands of rockets, even after so many had been destroyed in the prolonged incursion by the IDF in 2014, but the Israelis had an effective missile defence system, paid for by the Americans, known as Iron Dome. He knew the herder knew this, too, but there’d been no point in spoiling the moment, he’d thought.
As Ibrahim moved closer, he saw a few sand grains here and there where they’d been blown in by the warm onshore winds. He felt his fear subside. He was coming home; his spiritual home, at least. The walls of the last five yards of the tunnel, together with the exit proper, were shored up by bricks fashioned from white stone, and he ran his hand along them as he shuffled along. The camp above was but part of the Palestinian city of Rafah, although almost all the city’s population were refugees. Once he got out, it was only eighteen miles to Gaza City.
As the herder tethered the goats so that they didn’t gorge upon the straw from a filthy bale on the floor in preparation for their trek back, Ibrahim changed out of the old suit and keffiyeh headdress into the jeans and T-shirt that he’d carried in his plastic bag. Soon, he could begin a journey that would end in triumph. He had no sense of claustrophobia now, no sense that some kind of tremor could cause a cave-in; nothing but a growing sense of elation.
But then the sound of small-arms discharges broke the silence. The cracks and pings as rounds ricocheted against lintels and exposed metal in the remnants of the house above, he imagined. Men began shouting and orders were barked, albeit the sound coming down the tunnel was muted. Sensing danger the goats bucked and strained against their rope tethers, and the herder looked as if he was about to have a panic attack.
Two seconds later tear gas hit the floor and rolled about five feet from the end of the tunnel, quickly followed by stun grenades. The flashes and sounds were exacerbated by the confined space and seemed to reverberate down its whole length. The herder and the goats, taking the full force of the shockwave, were knocked clean off their feet and began moaning, the man’s head lolling before he became clearly unconscious.
Shaken, but still upright, Ibrahim’s hands made claws. It took him all of his willpower to prevent himself from rubbing his eyes, from scratching them. He’d been attacked by teargas before and he knew that the best thing to do was to let the damn stuff take its course unless there were other immediate options. But he didn’t have any water or other options. If he used the filthy water beneath his feet, he knew he’d likely get an infection, and he couldn’t afford for that to happen, given the nature of his task.
The smell assaulted his nostrils, a noxious, sulphur-like odour that, together with the ammonia from the gas, made him gag. He realized he had a nosebleed. But he was just glad that fragmentation grenades hadn’t been thrown. With that, quick bursts of automatic fire shattered the brief silence. Ibrahim saw the remnants of the muzzle flashes even through the haze in his streaming eyes.
He searched around for the chequered keffiyeh and yanked it up. He wrapped it around his nose and mouth before pulling out the Glock from his waist belt and chambering a round. The small-arms fire intensified, peppered with the cries of the wounded and dying. An explosion erupted, probably the result of an RPG, he thought, as the heat and the stench of cordite became almost unbearable. The shockwave didn’t travel down the cylinder cut into the soil and sandstone that housed the vertical aluminium step ladder and that was good. Most people, Ibrahim knew, were unaware of such an invisible killer.
Then there were voices close by, agitated and speaking Hebrew. Jewish voices, he knew. The IDF.
Move, he thought.
He shuffled backwards just as the entrance to the tunnel suddenly became engulfed in billows of orange flame from a fireball, the roar and hiss unmistakable to an active jihadist. He shielded his face and, masked by the sound of the ongoing explosion, shot out three of the lights so that he was shrouded in relative darkness.
As the flames retreated back up towards the unseen source, he didn’t know if the discharged ordnance had been fired by the IDF or Hamas fighters. He caught a waft of burning flesh, hair and fur, knowing that the goats and the herder had been all but incinerated. The man and beasts had been incapable of moving, he thought, and the straw had been ignited to add to the conflagration.
He raised the Glock and waited. He feared God. He feared the tunnel. But he did not fear men.
The IDF appeared like giant subterranean insects, their gasmasks great compound eyes. Ibrahim had seen their brown calf-length boots first, followed by the bodies clad in khaki battledress and Kevlar helmets. Their flashlights were attached to IMI Galil assault rifles and Mossberg 500 pump-action shotguns. The beams scoured the tunnel for any sign of life – for the dead.
Shrinking up against the wall and lying flat, a thought struck him, even in the midst of the chaos. They didn’t use fragmentation grenades or other explosives because they didn’t want to weaken the tunnel and risk being buried alive themselves. But that also meant that they were looking for prisoners, because he knew the Jews were more partial to killing Arabs by burying them in tunnels, rather than caging them. Perhaps they were looking for people to interrogate as to the whereabouts of other top-notch tunnels, he thought. A shiver went through him, even though his body was slick with sweat. Perhaps they’re looking for me. Perhaps they know something.
Hearing footsteps behind him, Ibrahim knew the Egyptian military wouldn’t stray onto Israeli soil, not unless it was a joint operation. Trapped then, he thought, as he raised the Glock to his temple. If he turned and saw commandoes racing down the tunnel from the rear, he would not hesitate to shoot himself, he decided.
With that, bursts of automatic fire pinged over his head in rapid succession. Fifty rounds in a few seconds; more, even, he estimated. And it was aimed at the Israelis.
Only four IDF troops had made it down into the tunnel. They’d clambered over the smoking corpse and carcasses and had inched along about two yards, conscious, maybe, that the intel, if there’d been any, had been wrong, and they’d just killed an innocent man and his goats.
Their flashlights were supposed to be an advantage. They wouldn’t have known that the tunnel had been relatively well-lit, unless a Palestinian in the know had wanted to make enough money to get out of Gaza, even if that meant being a traitor. But what was meant to be an advantage was now a curse, a target.
Their legs had been targeted, just in case they were wearing ballistic plates as chest protection, Ibrahim knew. They’d sunk down, blood and bone splattering up the walls like an abstract painting by a madman. There’d been only muffled cries, their gasmasks remaining intact.
With the beams from the Jews’ flashlights pointing in three different directions, their weapons silent, heavy, mud-splattered boots pounded past him, but not a word was said. A few feet from the IDF a shot rang out, which sounded to him like the discharge from a handgun, probably an Israeli BUL Storm semi-auto, a 9mm cartridge. It hit the edge of a steel joist, causing a flash of sparks. A last ditch attempt at defence, or a gesture of defiance from a flailing arm. It didn’t matter. The wounded soldiers were breathing their last breaths.