Authors: Gary Haynes
Crane stopped riding the chair. At last, he thought. “Budget?”
“Five million.”
“Make it ten and I’ll scour every shithole in Gaza City.”
She massaged her temples. “Okay, but not a dime more.”
“You got it.”
“And, Dan,” she said, sliding out the chair and getting up from behind the desk. “Not on my watch. No on anyone’s watch. Never again. Goddamnit.”
Crane had gotten up as she’d started move. “Yes, ma’am.”
Tom had watched as the medics had wheeled his father out of the hospital on a gurney, his body hooked up to the equipment that was keeping him functioning via emergency supplies of electricity. He’d be put aboard the helicopter that had flown in from the Turkish Military Academy in Ankara. He’d be transported to the base where the CIA jet had been left. He’d be cared for by state-of-the-art machinery used for US operatives being evacuated from warzones. And yet Tom had felt wretched.
Gabriel had given Tom a temporary secure satphone on Crane’s orders and, standing now in the hospital lobby, he took a call. Unsurprisingly, he thought, it was Crane again.
“Any change?” said Crane, referring to the general.
“No. He’s en route now,” Tom said.
“That’s good. But what ain’t good is the news about that Mossad operative in Hamas I mentioned. Remember?” Crane said.
“The guy in deep cover, yeah?”
“He ain’t calling in like he should. This is getting heavy, so be sure to pick up your package. It’s waiting for you at the US embassy in Ankara.”
“What’s going on, Crane?” Tom said, watching Doctor Asani walk past.
She seemed engrossed in conversation with the male doc she’d been with earlier, staring at some medical records, he imagined. But she stopped, flipped a page, turned in his direction and cracked enough of a smile for him to know that if he hung around and under very different circumstances they’d be sharing a meze dinner.
“Just get to the embassy,” Crane said. “You wanna link up with some people, be my guest. Uncle Sam’s picking up the bill.”
“You said the budget was tight.”
“Yeah, it was. Like the ass of a Vegas showgirl. But it ain’t no more, though you’re still alone in Turkey. All our resources are being targeted elsewhere, and don’t ask where. And, Tom, watch yourself over there. The Turks make out they’re civilized now, but they still like to pull the wings off insects, you get my drift.”
Tom sighed. If Crane ever decided to become a diplomat the US would be fighting five wars a year. That said, he realized he’d need help, and the kind of help he’d need meant one man fitted the bill, his ex-Marine buddy, Lester Wilson. Besides, Tom knew, Lester would have sympathy with the victim of a terrorist bomb attack, as his father now was. As he disconnected the call, his mind went back.
It had been 10:30 local time on August 7th 1998 at the US Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, Tom’s first short-term overseas posting when he was barely more than a rookie. He was filling a plastic cup from a water cooler. He had a headache, and held a couple aspirin in his free hand. The weather was in the late nineties and humid. He’d thought he might go to the local swimming pool after his shift had ended and exercise the pain away if the aspirin didn’t relieve it before getting some dinner and having an early night.
The blast had been enormous, sending out shockwaves for hundreds of yards, the explosion heard ten miles away. Even the embassy’s bomb-proof doors had been ripped from their hinges.
Tom had learned later that the truck-bomb attack had been one of two carried out on East African US embassies simultaneously. They killed hundreds of people and injured thousands, and were said to be in revenge for America’s part in the rendition of four Egyptian jihadists, who were hiding out in Albania. The master-terrorist, bin Laden, had played his part, his real motive, some had claimed, was to lure the US into an invasion of Afghanistan, the place he’d referred to as “The Graveyard of Empires”.
In Nairobi, the bomb had been five hundred sticks of TNT. It demolished the adjacent building, a five-storey office block, sending tons of blocks of cement and steel girders onto the near end of the embassy, as if an outsized dump truck had unloaded it from above. Tom was at the opposite end and was been knocked off his feet, landing badly onto the tiled floor. He felt the building lurch, as if an earthquake had struck. Plaster and brick dust covered him, and he was temporarily stunned. As he’d scrambled up, the sprinkler system had gone off, soaking him.
He’d heard screams and those embassy staff that hadn’t been rendered unconscious or otherwise disabled had begun to panic, running for the stairwells, jumping over fallen metal file cabinets and strewn tables and chairs. Guessing that it was either a gas explosion or something worse, he thought he’d better see the extent of the damage and link up with his fellow agents before deciding how best to help out. He’d picked up a young woman in his arms, who’d been hit by a large glass vase, and had exited the building.
The scale of the destruction had been devastating. An entire side of the embassy was destroyed, and people were hanging from the gaping holes where the wall had been. A fire was blazing next to a thirty-foot-high pile of rubble. At this time, no fire crews or ambulances had reached the embassy. There’d just been small groups of stunned and bloodied people hanging around, their faces lacerated and edged with shock. Tom’s natural reaction had been to look for survivors.
He’d run at the stack and had begun scrambling over it on his hands and knees. After maybe thirty seconds, he saw a hand jutting out from a tangle of debris. It was a black man’s hand. He wasn’t sure if he was dead already, so he took the pulse. It was faint, but the man was still breathing. Tom began removing the shattered concrete. He dug frantically, seeing a tattoo on the man’s exposed forearm. It was a bulldog wearing a camouflage helmet, a favourite of jarheads. It took him three hours to dig Lester’s body from the rubble, his breathing allowed only by an air hole that was a miracle in itself. Lester had had fifteen broken bones, including both arms and his pelvis.
Later that day, after Tom had been ordered to stop and get something to eat and drink, he’d visited Lester in hospital. His whole upper body appeared to be cocooned in a plaster cast, his head bandaged. Linked up to a morphine drip, he was drowsy at first. Tom gave him a drink of water from a straw and filled him in on details of the ongoing rescue, after he’d asked what was happening. Lester said that it wasn’t that he’d dug his sorry ass outta there that he was thankful for. It was what Tom had said to him every single minute he was digging. Tom had saved his life because he’d given him hope. A man’s gotta have hope, Lester had said. If he didn’t, he didn’t know where he was at.
Tom walked out of the lobby now and felt the intense heat of the day on his forehead. He’d made the call and Lester had said that he’d meet him in Ankara as soon as he could, although it was a distance of over five and a half thousand miles and would take over eleven hours once he’d boarded. Tom figured that it could be the best part of a day before Lester arrived. He decided to go to the US Embassy and pick up the package that Crane had said was there and wait for Lester once he’d checked into a hotel. Once he’d landed, Lester could get a cab.
Wiping sweat from his dark eyes, he wondered what manner of violence lay ahead him.
Ibrahim had been driven in a beat-up Mercedes for eighteen miles to Gaza City. After leaving the abandoned house where the tunnel had been situated the surrounding streets in Rafah had reminded him of war-torn Syrian and Iraqi cities. It had been a desolate, bombed-out wasteland, the smattering of young men wearing vacant expressions, the pensioners hunched and the children waif-like.
There’d been an all-pervasive stench of sewerage and rotting garbage, the infrastructure reduced to uneven piles of bricks, interspersed with pools of oily water from burst pipes and burnt-out vehicles. The remnants of a place, the buildings flattened or hollow, the facades bullet-ridden. A fractured place, he’d thought, with a fractured people.
Gaza City had had its fair share of desolation, but it had its undisturbed areas, too, with bustling squares and palm-tree lined highways. Inhabited since the fifteenth century BC, seventy-five per cent of its now half a million population were under twenty-five. There was nowhere in the Arab world that held so many potential jihadists, a Hamas brother had once told him. Due to the ingrained hatred towards what they saw as their neighbouring oppressors, the Jews had become Hamas’s greatest enemy and their greatest recruitment ally.
Ibrahim had been taken to the Old City that’d been built by the Ottomans on a low-lying hill, the northern Daraj Quarter, just off Omar Muckhtar Street to be precise, which ran from Palestine Square past the Golden Market to the port. The modern city was built on the plain below, the uninspired concrete suburbs stretching out to within two miles of the coast.
After a light meal of grilled fish stuffed with garlic and cumin, he’d been shown to the first-floor room of a three-storey, sandstone house. The room was empty save for a floor mattress, a closet, a kilim prayer rug and a green Hamas flag with a white
Shahada
, the Islamic creed, nailed to the wall opposite the windows. Dressed in a long white dishdasha he was standing still now with his hands across his chest as he quoted allowed verses from the Qur’an.
When he’d finished he wrapped up the prayer rug and placed it beside the mattress. He changed out of his robe, hanging it in the single closet, and put on a pair of loose-fitting pants and a collarless shirt. He moved to the open window in his bare feet, hearing the two birds singing from the balcony below, as if in fact they weren’t confined in bamboo cages barely wide enough for them to spread their wings. And he had been caged for years, too, caged by his childhood, by his youth.
He drank in the warm air, scented by nearby lemon trees. The faint call to prayer from an imam at the Great Mosque of Gaza floated over the flat rooftops like an echo from the past. He could see its minaret above the buildings. If it hadn’t been for his faith, he would be alone in the world. Rejected, he had found another family, brothers who had nurtured him in mind and soul. His faith had shown him how to live, the very meaning of life itself, he believed, and he had found a noble purpose, jihad and martyrdom.
He saw a small girl on the flat roof opposite, the house constructed in the ablaq style, with alternate layers of red and white masonry, the colours dulled by age and the sun. Her hair was a splendid cascade of thick waves, blue-black like a rook’s breast. She was running between the TV aerials, under the awnings and through the drying laundry, chasing a piece of coloured paper that was being blown about by the balmy wind, resembling a butterfly. A man could forget that he was at war here, he thought, forget that his days upon the earth were to be counted in days rather than years.
And yet if Ibrahim had a home now it was in East Africa, a place he intended to travel to before he began the Silent Jihad, no matter what. For there his wife, a Somali, waited patiently for him, childless and possessing great beauty. He would bid her marry again, and ask her forgiveness for his long absences and for what he must do.
Sensing movement behind him, he said, “What is it, brother?”
“I am sorry to disturb you, Ibrahim, but your present awaits you.”
He turned. The young man was a Saudi and had a lean face and hair that flowed to his slim shoulders. He came, Ibrahim knew, from a respected and wealthy family, just as bin Laden had done. He wore a keffiyeh headdress in such a manner that it resembled a turban, the lengths of the cloth rolled up and tucked into the headband, in the Kurdish fashion.
He seemed out of place here among the battle-hardened jihadists and seasoned warriors of Hamas, and Ibrahim made a mental note to remember him in his prayers. He’d pray that Allah gave the boy strength to avenge those who abused the Sunni Muslim faith: the Jews, the Shias and the Crusaders; to die a holy martyr of the faith.
He’s holding my sword, Ibrahim thought. He had almost forgotten it had existed, here among the people of faith, this oasis of belonging. He’d bought the sword, a talwar, in Afghanistan from a tribal leader. The single-handed talwar had a curved blade, the pommel a short spike projecting from its centre, pierced so that the cord could secure the sword to the wrist. The iron hilt was a plain cross-guard, with a slim knucklebow attached. The Afghan had said he’d killed forty men with it, and Ibrahim had added another twenty-five to that gruesome total. He remembered now that he’d given it to a Palestinian fighter in Syria for safekeeping after he’d been forced to flee the country. It would have been twenty-six if hadn’t let the Christian dog survive in the town they’d destroyed.
“Where is the man I gave my sword to in El Sham?” Ibrahim said, using the ancient name for Syria.
“He died with the Islamic State in Iraq. He martyred himself at a Baghdad checkpoint. He is in Paradise.”
“Peace be upon him.”
“They are waiting, Ibrahim,” the Saudi said, holding out the sword as if it held a sacred quality.
“When I leave, the sword shall be yours,” Ibrahim said, taking it from the Saudi.
“Thank you, brother. Now for
your
present.”
The American Embassy was situated at 110 Atatürk Blvd. in the Kavaklıdere neighbourhood of Ankara. It was surrounded by security bollards, concrete blocks the size of minivans, and a black metal fence topped with razor wire. Just beyond the fence evergreen trees broke up the frontal view of the embassy building, which was a sturdy-looking grey structure, with panelled windows. On the flat roof numerous aerials and a huge satellite dish were visible, together with the Stars and Stripes, hanging limp in the dry air.
On February 1st 2013, a suicide bomber had detonated thirteen pounds of TNT and a hand grenade at a side entrance, murdering a Turkish security guard. As a result the visible security had been ratcheted up more than a few notches, with a specialized detail from the DS onsite and more frequent external police patrols. Tom also knew that a new CCTV system had been installed, together with infrared and vibration detectors, the floors inside the minor entry points covered by portable pressure mats.