Fawzi beamed. He walked to Abu Hamid.
"She is to go through all the villages between here and the security zone. It has a great effect on the villagers, just as she has made a great impression on your men. When she has made her attack, a film of her will be shown on the television, it is already made."
"Is she…?"
"Drugged? You surprise me, Abu Hamid… She is a fighter, she is like yourself."
Fawzi drove away in his jeep. He caught up the girl and her donkey before they reached the tarmac road.
When he strained his eyes, Abu Hamid could see them. A girl and a donkey, and just behind them the jeep of the Syrian army.
They worked hard at their training that morning. No back-chat, only studied concentration. They worked at the lesson of the platoon in attack on a hillside against a defended position, with the support of. 50 calibre machine guns and RPG-7 launchers.
That morning Abu Hamid did not find the need to repeat any part of his teaching.
Holt drank his water. It was a new discipline to him, to ration himself. He must have looked with obvious longing at his water bottle, because he was aware of the smear of amusement at Noah Crane's mouth.
The merchant braked, slowed his Mercedes.
Ahead of him, down the straight road running from north to south under the east slope of the Beqa'a valley, was a column of Syrian army trucks. The trucks, more than a dozen of them, he estimated, had pulled across onto the hard shoulder of the road. He came forward slowly. Always his way to pass a military convoy slowly, so that he could see what the convoy carried. And always better to go slowly past the Syrian military, with the window wound down the better to hear any shouted instructions – they would only shout once, they would shout and if their shout was ignored they would shoot.
There was a jeep stopped at the head of the convoy, and he saw a very fat young lieutenant talking, arm waving, to another officer. Heh, who was he, Menachem, to laugh at the grossness of a young soldier?
The merchant weighed on the scales some nineteen stone… He saw a young girl leading a donkey.
The girl and her donkey were at the far end of the convoy, coming past it. He drove onto the same hard shoulder, he switched off his engine. No one looked at him. He listened but there was no shouted instruction.
The canvas roofing of the lorries had been rolled down.
He saw that they carried troops. A dozen lorries could carry two companies of infantry, the mental arithmetic was second nature to the merchant. The troops crowded to the sides of the lorry and watched the girl and her donkey come alongside them, move forward. Faintly, he could hear the shouting voice of the gross young lieutenant who had gone from the side of the officer and now offered explanation to the soldiers. As the girl led her donkey past each truck, so the soldiers cheered her.
Deep in his mind where the truth of his existence was hidden, the merchant swore. He recognised the signs, and it would be two days before he was again in a position to make a drop. A long time ago he had been offered a radio. He had declined, he had said he would not be able to learn how to use it, and anyway he had known that a signal sent to Israel was a signal sent also to the men of Syrian Intelligence. He preferred the dead letter.
The bomber would be paraded through the Beqa'a.
The bomber would be used to jolt the commitment of the young. He could see that the bomber was herself scarcely more than a child.
The merchant, Menachem, saw his controller, Major Zvi Dan, rarely. Never more than twice a year. The last time, smuggled by the IDF through the night across the border, he had talked to Zvi Dan about the bombers.
The bomber was just a slip of a girl. He could piece together what Zvi Dan had told him, late and over whisky, about the bombers.
"You know, Menny, the IRISHBAT found a car bomb in their sector, abandoned. They made it safe, and then they looked to see why it was abandoned. You know why, Menny? It was abandoned because it had run out of petrol… " The merchant could remember how they had laughed, hurting their stomachs laughing.
"They are not all suicide people, we had one who came up to the checkpoint and surrendered, and said that the girl who was with him had already run away. Do you know with another, Menny, the bastard Syrians gave him a flak jacket to wear and they told him that way he would survive the explosion of his own car, and in the car was more than 150 kilos of explosive. More recently, they have taken to a remote firing. The bomber goes to the checkpoint, but the detonation is remote, from a command signal, from a man who is hidden perhaps a kilometre away. That is because they know that not every recruit wishes to hurry to martyrdom. We have learned, Menny, that the bombers are not so much fanatics, as simple disturbed kids. There was one who was with child and did not dare face her father, there was a boy who had quarrelled with his father and run away, there was one whose father was accused by the Syrian military of crimes and who volunteered to save his father from gaol. Believe me, Menny, they are not all Khomeini fanatics. Most are sick kids. We know, we have captured eleven of the last sixteen sent to the security zone. I tell you what is the saddest thing. They make a film of the kids, and they show it on the television, and they make great heroes of the kids. There is a village in the security zone where live the parents of a boy who drove the car for one of the big Beirut bombs, and now it is like his home is a tourist attraction, and his father is a celebrity, and the kid's picture is everywhere on the walls. Heh, Menny, what sort of cretin takes a holiday in south Lebanon? Only a Jew, if the discount is good." More laughter, more whisky. A conversation of many months back.
There were times, in the loneliness of his subterfuge life, that the merchant doubted his own sanity. There were times when his mind ached for a return to the buoyant, carefree students on the campus in the Negev desert. He saw the girl leading the donkey. Zvi Dan had told him that the men of Syrian Intelligence scoured the villages of the Beqa'a for kids who would drive a car bomb, for kids who would lead a donkey bomb. He thought that the girl and the donkey and the heavy bags slung on the rib cage of the beast were an abomination.
One day he would go back to his students… on a day when there were no more donkey bombs, no more car bombs, Menachem would go back to his lecture room.
Whatever he saw, whatever its importance, he would not break his routine. It would be two days before he could report the coming threat to a road block leading into the security zone.
She had passed the parked lorries. He could hear the shuffle of her feet, the clip of the donkey's hooves. He saw the sweating lieutenant amble towards his jeep. For the soldiers the parade was over.
He saw the face of the girl, devoid of expression.
He shouted through his opened window.
"God is great."
They were high above the village. Crane had pointed to it on his map, 'Aqraba. Holt watched through binoculars as the kids launched their rocks and Molotovs at the troops. It was like something he had seen on the television from Northern Ireland. From their vantage point, Holt not daring to move for fear of Crane's criticism, they watched a day-long battle between the kids and the soldiers, fought in a village square that was wreathed in tear smoke, and in the alleys behind the mosque. Sometimes, when the fight went against the soldiers, Holt heard Crane's chuckle. Sometimes, when the soldiers caught a youth and battered him with their rifle butts, Holt ground his teeth.
He heard the voice in the corridor, and the clatter of feet.
Martins tidied the newspaper. He had been through yesterday's Times, and the Herald Tribune, and that day's Jerusalem Post. Read them all from cover to cover, right down to the cost of a ten-year lease on a two bedroomed flat in West Kensington, to the discounts available in a jewellery store's winding up sale in Paris, to the price of a second hand Subaru car in Beer Sheba.