"God speed… "
Holt didn't hear any more. The Safari lurched forward. Martins stood in the road, shouting silently, waving as if it were important, with the white plastic nose shield set as a bullseye in the centre of his sun red head, and the light catching the watch chain across his waistcoat. When he looked to the verandah the girl was sitting and her head was in her book.
He felt the sharp finger tap on his arm.
Crane said, "Forget it, right now you've more to think of than some doe-eyed fanny."
He didn't think any woman had ever loved Noah Crane. He thought Noah Crane was in pain because of the way that his face was screwed up, and his forehead was cut with lines. The back of the Safari was covered with a canvas roof and sides, and the three of them sat as close as was possible to the driver's cab. To other cars, to people walking on the road, they were unseen.
Their own vision was through the open back. The major and Noah Crane sat on the slatted seats, facing inwards, and Holt was down on the floor between them and sitting on sandbags. The sandbags covered the whole of the floor of the back of the Safari. Holt understood they were there to cushion a mine explosion. He smiled to himself, did not show his black amusement to the others.
He had once read of a man who was shipwrecked and alone in a rubber dinghy, and the man had said that the worst aspect of his 100-day drift before rescue was when the sharks came under the dinghy and prodded the thin rubber base with their snouts. He wondered which would be worst, the snout of a tiger shark under his backside, or the blast of a land mine – great choice, beautiful options.
He held the Armalite rifle upright between his knees, and he didn't even know how to maintain it, how to strip it, how to clean it. He was young Holt. He was a young diplomat of Third Secretary grade. All so wretchedly unreal.
They went through the village of Metulla, and through the back of the Safari Holt saw that almost immediately they drove past a border checkpoint and through a wide cut gap in a high wire fence. Crane reached out, no preliminaries, took the Armalite and with fast hand movements cocked it. Holt heard the clatter as the escort sitting in front beside the driver armed his weapon.
"Welcome to our security zone, Holt." The major seemed to smile, and he creaked his leg as he shifted to take more easily a Service pistol from the leather holster at his waist. "It is our buffer or protection strip. At the fence we have our last line of defence to keep the swine out of our country. At the fence we have the electronic beams, body heat sensors, TV camera fields, mined areas. But that is the last line. We try to halt them, the infiltrators, here in the security zone. You know we have around ninety attempts each month to get through the security zone but they don't get through. The security zone is of the greatest importance to us. We are indeed lucky, Holt, that we have in the security zone several thousand armed men of the South Lebanese Army, they are Christians who were isolated down here when Lebanon fragmented. We pay them hugely, much more than we pay our own soldiers, and because they have to light for their own survival they protect us well. The security zone, Holt, is a place of enclaves. Apart from the Christian enclaves, there are groupings of Shi'a Muslim, and Islamic Fundamentalist Muslim, and Hezbollah Muslim. The Shi'as and the Fundamentalists and the Hezbollah have in common a hatred of everything Jewish and everything Christian.
It makes for an interesting zone. But we have cut our funerals. The funerals of our soldiers were destroying our nation. The SLA now die on our behalf, hand-somely rewarded for their sacrifice. Our men are more precious to us than shekels, we can pay the price."
They drove on. Over the lowered tail gate Holt saw that they were climbing through a dry and barren landscape. He saw road blocks that they sped through without checking. He saw a Subaru saloon, with no identifying number plates, parked on the hard shoulder, and there were two men in civilian clothes sitting on the bonnet and one cradled a sub-machine gun on his lap and the other had a Galil rifle slung from his shoulder.
The car was low on its suspension. He presumed they were Shin Bet, that the car was armour plated. They passed the turning to Khiam, and Holt saw the fences and watch towers of what seemed a prison camp. They passed the turning to Marjayoun, which Holt knew was the principal Christian town in the zone.
They climbed.
The major and Crane talked fast now, in Hebrew.
They talked over the top of Holt, as if he were not there, and twice the major leaned over Holt and tapped energetically with his finger at a piece of equipment on Crane's belt harness. It was the one piece of equipment that was not duplicated on his own belt harness.
The truck was slowing, changing down through the gears. There was the rocking motion of the vehicle as it pulled off the road, and headed up to a steep incline on a rough track.
They lurched to a halt.
"Where you walk from, Holt," the major said.
Crane disarmed the Armalite, cleared it, then handed it to Holt. He carried his Bergen and his Model PM to the tail board, jumped down. The major clumsily followed him. Holt lugged his Bergen the length of the Safari and swung himself off the end. All three ran the few yards into a concrete and stone built observation post. It was early afternoon. It was sickeningly warm in the observation post, as though the reinforced walls held the heat.
He sensed the tension immediately.
There were two soldiers and an officer. There was a radio squawking with bursts of static, and one of the soldiers sat by the radio with his earphones clamped on his head and held tight by his hands. The other soldier and the officer raked with binoculars the ground ahead of their split vision port holes.
He saw the major speak to the officer, saw the officer shake his head, resume his watch.
Holt came forward. He placed himself at the officer's shoulder. He stared out.
The checkpoint was about a hundred yards down the road, a chicane of concrete blocks positioned so that a vehicle must slow and zigzag to pass through. The road stretched away, winding and falling towards the green strip of the Litani river bed. The observation post was, Holt estimated, a hundred feet above the road. A great emptiness. A silence stretching up the road that led north. Down at the checkpoint he could see that the soldiers all peered up the road, some through binoculars, some holding their hands flat against their foreheads to protect their eyes from the sun.
"When do we go?" Holt asked, irritated because he was ignored.
"When it is dark," the major said, all the time gazing up the road.
"So why are we here so early?"
"Because the transport has to be back before it is dark."
"So what do we do now?"
"You wait, because I have other things to consider."
Holt flared, "Why can't someone tell me…?"
"Leave it," Crane snapped.
He felt like stamping his foot, furious and apparently powerless. The officer had turned away from the vision slit he watched through, and had gone with quick, nervy movements to the table where the radio operator worked. The officer pulled a cigarette from a packet beside the set, lit it, puffed energetically on it, then offered a cigarette to him. Crane was looking at him.
Sulkily he shook his head. Cigarettes were banned.
Toothpaste was banned. Soap was banned… Crane had said that cigarettes and toothpaste and soap were all banned because they left a smell signature. What the hell was a smell signature? What sort of language was that? Smell signature. He looked up, it was on the end of his tongue to argue what difference it would make if he had one cigarette.
They had their backs to him. He stared at the backs of the officer, and the soldier, and the major, and Crane.
Hunched backs, heads pressed against the wood surrounds of the vision slits.