Once the building had been a hotel; until that morning the building had been the sleeping quarters of a unit of the Popular Struggle Front. They had been amongst many, digging at the rubble, gently pulling out the bodies. There had been squads of the army with heavy lifting equipment, there had been the local people, there had been men of the Democratic Front and the Abu Moussa faction and from Sai'iqa. Those from the Democratic Front and the Abu Moussa faction and Sai'iqa had been trucked in as much to help in the recovery of the casualties as to witness the damage done by the air strike of the enemy.
When they had finished, when the light was failing, Abu Hamid had called his own recruits together. Force-fully lectured them on the barbarity of the Zionist oppressors, told them that their time would come when they would be privileged to strike back.
He was heading for his tent, he was shouting for the cook to bring him warm water, he was intent on dragging off his clothes. He rounded one of the bell tents.
He saw Fawzi sitting in front of the flaps of his own lent.
Abu Hamid said, "From what I saw you could have been sleeping in the bunker and you would not have been saved."
Fawzi said, "Tonight I sleep in our tent, the Zionist gesture has been made."
"It was horrific. Pieces of people… "
"We are lucky that our comrades martyred themselves, or it would have been us."
Abu Hamid said, "We are the more determined, we will never give up our struggle. Tell that to them in Damascus."
"Tell them yourself, hero, there is transport coming for you in the morning."
Inside his tent, Abu Hamid stripped off his filthy clothes. He stood naked. The galvanised bucket of warm water was brought into his tent. He thought of the orphan children. He thought of the mutilated bodies. He could not believe that he had ever hesitated through fear. He thought of his grandfather's home. He thought of the blood that would gush from a bayonet wound.
"I don't have any feelings for him," Holt said.
"For who?" Crane helped him to ease the weight of the Bergen high onto his shoulders.
"For Abu Hamid. I don't loathe him, and I don't feel pity for him."
"Better that way."
"If I'm going to help to kill him, then I should feel something."
"Feelings get in the way of efficiency," Crane said.
They moved out.
There was a faint light from the stars to guide them It was the boast of the technicians who worked in the small fortified listening post astride the top of the third highest peak of the Hermon range that they could eavesdrop the telephone call by the President of Syria from his office in Damascus to his mother, telling her when he would call to take a cup of lemon-scented tea with her.
The listening post of prefabricated cabins and heavy stone fort circles was 7,500 feet above sea level. In the Yom Kippur it had been captured. The girl technicians had been raped, slaughtered. The boy technicians had been mutilated, tortured, murdered. On the last day of the fighting, after a battle of intense ferocity, the listening post had been recaptured. The listening post was of immense strategic and tactical value to the military machine of Israel. Beneath its antennae was the most sophisticated electronic Intelligence gathering and signals equipment manufactured in the United States of America and in the state's own factories. The listening post was situated some 35 miles from Damascus, and some 40 miles from Chtaura on the western side of the Beqa'a alley.
The Hermon range marked the north eastern extremity of Israelite conquests under the leadership of Moses and Joshua. The eyes of Moses, the ears of Joshua, that was how the present-day technicians regarded their steepling antennae towers concreted into the bed rock of the mountain top.
The problem lay not with the interception of telephone and radio messages from Damascus to military headquarters at Chtaura, more in the analysis and evaluation, carried on far behind the lines inside the state of Israel, of the mass two-way traffic.
In full flow, untreated data swarmed from Damascus and the Beqa'a to the radials of the antennae before the computers of the Defence Ministry on Kaplan attempted to make sense from the jargon of coded radio messages, scrambled telephone conversations.
Some communications received by the eyes of Moses and the ears of Joshua were more complicated in their deciphering than others. A telephone call from Damascus to Chtaura via a scrambled link offered small scope for interpretation. But radio messages fanning out from Chtaura to battalion-sized commando units stationed at Rachaiya and Qaraaoun and Aitanit gave easier work to the computers.
The orders coming from Chtaura to Rachaiya and Qaraaoun and Aitanit made plain to the local commanders that their origin was Damascus. The orders were acted upon.
That night, patrols were intensified, road blocks were strengthened.
It had been the intention of Major Zvi Dan to work late in his office, to delve into the small hillock of paper that had built up on his desk while he had been in Kiryat Shmona.
Behind him was a wasted day. He had failed to beat off the lethargy that had clamped down on him after the tension of his early morning battle to have the airstrike diverted. He was slow with his work, but he would work through the night, and then return to Kiryat Shmona in the morning. The girl, Rebecca, had gone home.
Sometimes when she was gone he felt as crippled by her absence as he was crippled by the loss of his leg. He read for the third time the evaluation by the Central Intelligence Agency, newly arrived, of a preliminary debrief of a Palestinian captured in northern Italy. Israel for so long had stood alone in the front line of the war against international terrorism that it amused him to notice how the Western nations were now queuing to demonstrate their virility.
He could remember the carping response of those same nations when the IAF had intercepted a Libyan registered Gulfstream executive jet en route from Tripoli to Damascus. Intelligence had believed Abu Nidal to be aboard. The previous month the jackals of Abu Nidal had killed and wounded 135 civilians at the check-in counters at the airports of Rome and Vienna.
Those Western countries had issued their sanc-timonious disapproval because the intelligence had been ill founded. He could recall numerous instances of public criticism from the government of the United Kingdom for Israeli retaliatory strikes, yet now they had men slogging into the Beqa'a… Of course it had been bluff. He would never have resigned. Of course he would just have gone back to his desk and started to work again, had the jets hit the tent camp. He knew no life other than the life of defending his country – had he been a Christian – and he had many friends who were Christians – then he would have said that that was the cross he had to bear.
He wondered if the Americans had the guts to stand in the front line. He thought of the thousands, tens of thousands, of American citizens living abroad who would be placed at risk when a Palestinian went on trial in Washington, went to death row, went to interminable lawyers' conferences, went to the electric chair.
There was a light knock on his door.
He started. He had been far away.
He was handed a folded single sheet of teleprinter paper.
The door closed.
He read the paper.
He felt it like a blow to his stomach, like the blast that had carried away his leg.
He reached for his telephone, he dialled.
"Hello, This is Zvi. You should come to my office straightaway.."
He heard the station officer wavering, there were people for dinner, could it wait until tomorrow.
"It is not a matter for the telephone, and you should come here immediately."
Men from the Shin Bet watched the Norwegian leave his company headquarters. He was clearly visible to them through the 'scope of the night sight. They saw that he had changed from his uniform fatigues into civilian dress. In a white T-shirt and pale yellow slacks, the young man showed up well in the green wash of the lens. They watched him, with three others, climb into a UNIFIL-marked jeep and head south towards the Israeli border.