The second jeep came alongside it and the last one rolled around to the west of the house. The gunmen climbed quietly from their jeeps. Omar Yussef stepped stiffly onto the sand, rolling his shoulders after being squeezed between Sami and Attiah.
The house was dark. Through the swirling dust, Omar Yussef could see the black canvas of the mourning tent flapping in the wind and hear its low, steady resonance. The olive trees rustled above the perimeter wall. He took a few steps down the lane and looked toward the garage at the back of the house, which he and Cree had passed as they left the day before. His eyes strained into the darkness. A faint rim of light glowed around the door between the garage and the garden. The wind gusted and Omar Yussef blinked against the dust. When he opened his eyes, the light in the garage was out. Someone knew they were there.
The gunmen scuttled across the sand toward the perimeter wall. Omar Yussef went after them. He picked out Abu Jamal by the peak of his forage cap and whispered his name. He wanted to tell him about the light in the garage. Abu Jamal turned.
A sudden burst of thick, popping gunfire spat from the house. Its baritone harmonized with the bass of the slow, flapping canvas tent. Abu Jamal dropped to his knees. He lifted his Kalashnikov and returned fire toward an upstairs window of the Salah house. His men took cover behind the wall ringing the olive grove. Abu Jamal followed them quickly, still shooting.
Omar Yussef crouched in the middle of the sandy lot, just where he had been when the firing began. He saw the orange muzzle-flashes of the gun upstairs in the Salah home, but when he looked around him in the dark, everything was black. Someone grabbed his waist and trotted him toward the cover of the wall. He fell forward, but he kept going, scrambling on all fours across the sand. He dropped to the ground at the wall and pushed his glasses back into place. He turned, panting. Sami smiled and patted his arm.
The gunmen gathered on either side of the gate, preparing to charge the house. A flash ripped out of the darkness and part of the wall disintegrated. The explosion lifted two of the gunmen and dropped them in the sand a few yards from the gate. Omar Yussef felt the explosion as a wave of deeper heat in the humid night. Yasser booby-trapped the entrance, he thought. One of the men on the sand cried out in pain. Another volley chattered from the machinegun in the upstairs window and both of the fallen gunmen were still. Attiah stood and fired toward the window.
Abu Jamal signaled to the man with the two LAW missiles strapped to his back. The man nodded, readied one of the missiles and edged toward the gate. His shoulders lifted as he took a deep breath. He stepped into the open and fired toward the top of the house. The shell streaked bright blue and red through the window where the gunshots had originated. It struck the cement inside with a sound like the falling of a tall tree and filled the room with light.
The gunmen lifted their heads and watched the glare turn to a smoky billow of darkness. The man with the missile turned to Abu Jamal, nodding excitedly. A rattle of shots came from another upstairs window and he fell. He dropped the spent missile-launcher and clutched his stomach. Abu Jamal dragged him out of the line of fire. He rolled the moaning gunman onto his side, pulled the remaining anti-tank launcher from his back and set it against the wall. He tore the man’s T-shirt to examine the wound.
Attiah leaned against the broken end of the wall, returning fire. The smoke from the room where the missile had struck was thicker now, obscuring the top floor almost completely. The fire had spread to the other rooms. Amid the gunfire, Omar Yussef heard a woman scream. Attiah rounded the wall and, keeping low, charged toward the front door of the house.
Omar Yussef grabbed Sami’s shoulder. “There’s a garage at the back. I saw a light in there before the shooting started.”
Sami nodded. They crept behind the wall, passing the side of the house.
“Lift me over into the garden,” Omar Yussef said. “You’re fit enough to follow me on your own.”
The wall was seven feet high. Omar Yussef put his foot in Sami’s linked fingers and the younger man shoved him until he could get his knee over the wall. Broken glass lined the top and Omar Yussef felt it slice his hands and leg. Bellowing through clenched teeth, he pushed himself quickly over and fell to the ground hard on his back. He rolled onto his front, keeping his bloody hands out of the sand. He came to his knees and gripped the front of his shirt tightly to stanch the bleeding from his palms. “Sami, there’s glass on the wall. Be careful.”
“Okay.”
At least two guns seemed to be firing inside the house. As Omar Yussef grimaced with the pain in his hands, a man in a white T-shirt rushed out of the back door and down the steps. He fired a few rounds into the house and fled across the garden. Only when the man was close to Omar Yussef did he see that it was Yasser Salah.
An olive tree splintered with the impact of a volley fired from inside the house, and Yasser Salah dropped to one knee. Attiah Odwan rushed out of the back door, spraying gunfire around the garden. Omar Yussef went down flat. Yasser took quick aim and fired. He pulled the trigger for the briefest moment, but it was long enough to hit Attiah with six shots. The burly man went down, dead. Omar Yussef gasped.
Yasser halted. He looked in Omar Yussef’s direction, peering into the darkness between the olive trees. Omar Yussef held still on the sand.
Above him, he heard a grunt and Sami came up onto the wall. Yasser lifted his rifle and fired. Sami dropped silently back from the wall. Yasser hurried to the garage, pulled open the door and shut it behind him.
“Sami?” Omar Yussef said.
“I’m okay, Abu Ramiz. I’ll be with you in a minute.”
“Are you hit?”
“Not really.”
“What does that mean?”
“Just a graze on the shoulder. Give me a second, okay?”
Omar Yussef stared at the door to the ramshackle garage. He heard shots inside the house and more than one woman screaming now. He went low across the sandy garden to the garage. As quietly as he could, Omar Yussef opened the door and entered.
A small storm lantern stood on a workbench in the corner. It swung as Yasser Salah picked it up, casting a warm penumbra around him, but its light didn’t reveal Omar Yussef’s entry. With his other hand, Salah reached out and pulled a man toward him. The man’s hands were bound in front of him and his mouth was covered with black duct tape. His wavy, grayish blonde hair was dry and unkempt.
Omar Yussef resisted the temptation to call out to Magnus Wallender. He edged through the shadows toward the illuminated corner of the room.
Salah pulled a paraffin heater away from the wall. Below was a trapdoor. His smuggling tunnel, Omar Yussef thought. Salah lifted the trapdoor. The entrance was only three feet square and lined with wood. He cut the twine around Wallender’s hands and ripped away the tape on his face. Wallender bawled in pain, with his hand to his mouth. He bled through his stubbly beard and over his shirt. Salah stepped onto a ladder inside the shaft to the tunnel, holding the storm lantern. He pulled a pistol from the back of his pants and held it on Wallender. “Follow me down here,” he said. Wallender nodded, exaggeratedly compliant. His feet were on the top rungs.
Omar Yussef opened his mouth to call to Wallender. Instead his words were swallowed by the roaring blast of another shoulder-launched missile. It struck the side of the garage, knocking him to the ground and bringing down part of the wall behind him.
He forced himself onto his knees and scrambled toward the entrance of the tunnel. The flimsy garage creaked with the missile’s impact and he knew it was about to collapse. As he lowered himself into the tunnel, the wooden roof of the garage dropped. He looked down. At the foot of the shaft, twelve feet below, the glow of the lantern lit Magnus’s upper body. The Swede’s legs angled into the narrow tunnel that must have led under the border. Omar Yussef saw no sign of Salah. His hands bloodied the rungs of the ladder as he descended.