‘Wait a minute.’ A voice came from behind the officer. A rugged, tough-looking man in grubby civilian clothing whose face had not seen a razor in weeks stepped from an alleyway with a similar-looking partner who remained in the shadows while the first man, holding a notepad, came over to the group.
The officer lowered his gun and looked at the intruder with guarded contempt. He knew these men were Mossad and although he did not like them, he had no choice but to tolerate them. They called the shots on operations like this one. What the officer resented was the way they made him feel like a lackey of Mossad. His family had spent five generations in Israel having moved to the land before the Second World War. They had fought in just about every battle of survival since then and his father had been an officer during the Yom Kippur war and commanded a company under Sharon during the invasion of Lebanon, taking part as an observer in the infamous massacre by Phalangist militia of hundreds of Palestinian men, women and children in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. He was an army man through and through and proud of it, and resented these spooks lording it over him.
‘What’s his name?’ the Mossad agent asked the officer.
‘I don’t know and I don’t care.’
The agent looked at him, guarding his own contemptuous feelings about the officer, which were not very different from the officer’s perceptions.
‘What’s your name?’ the agent said to Abed.
Abed hesitated, still in shock from his near-death experience and suffering from the torture of knowing it was only a temporary reprieve.
‘I asked you your name,’ the agent said without any malevolence.
‘Abed Abu Omar.’
The agent checked his notepad and then looked at Abed as if with a fresh pair of eyes.
‘Let him go,’ the agent said.
The officer’s mouth opened like that of a fish.‘This has nothing to do with you.’
‘I said let him go,’ the agent repeated calmly. The officer knew he was stepping into a fight he would not win. Mossad had the last word in virtually everything and if he disobeyed, he would pay a severe price. His career would be over for one, and that alone was enough to keep him in check. He lowered his gun and relaxed his shoulders in reluctant deference.
Another burst of gunfire came from a couple of streets away.The agent let his eyes linger on the officer’s long enough to hammer the message home that he was in charge, then disappeared up an alleyway with his partner.
The officer spat on the ground in the direction of the agents and mumbled an obscenity before returning his attention to Abed. ‘Why did they spare you?’ he asked.
Abed was even more surprised than the officer, and was feeling almost high with relief.‘I don’t know,’ he said.
‘You think I give a shit what he said?’
Abed’s relief went screaming into reverse.
‘This isn’t over,’ he said. ‘I’m going to save you for another time, make you sweat a little.’
The officer removed the magazine from his M16, cocked the weapon and caught the bullet that ejected from the breech. ‘You see this,’ he said holding the bullet up to Abed’s face. ‘This is yours . . . Kiss it.’ He pushed it against Abed’s bloody lips, grinding it into his mouth, cutting his gums.
‘There, it has your kiss. Now, listen carefully. This is what I’m going to do with it. I’m going to give it to one of my snipers - he’s the best in Israel - and I’m going to tell him to give it back to you one day. Maybe in a week, maybe in a month, but one day, you’ll get it back. Right through your head. Or perhaps I’ll just do it myself.’
The officer let the threat sink in, stepped back and placed the bullet in a breast pocket. He pushed the magazine back into its housing on the weapon, pulled the cocking arm until it was all the way back, then released it on its spring to load a new bullet into the breech with a slam.
‘Take him away,’ he said. The soldier yanked Abed down the street and around the corner to a waiting truck where a dozen other men from the camp were pressed inside, some of them bloody, all looking frightened.Abed’s hands were bound behind his back and he was pushed up and into the truck. Two soldiers climbed in, shoving their prisoners further along, the tailgate was slammed shut and the truck drove away.
Abed was kept in a holding cell for a week along with several other prisoners before he was removed for interrogation. He was questioned for an hour after which he was returned to the cell. Two days later he was unceremoniously released, wearing the shirt and jeans from a Palestinian prisoner who apparently would never need them again.
When he opened his front door, he stopped in the doorway. Strewn about the hallway and small yard was their household furniture and belongings, or what was left of them. Anything that could be broken had been. A pile of clothes in a corner had been defecated on. Filled with immediate concern for his mother he hurried down the hallway to the entrance of the main room where he saw her huddled in a corner wrapped in a blanket. When she looked up and saw him, he could feel the relief gush from her as she leapt to her feet and ran into his arms, sobbing uncontrollably. He held her close, stroked her and kissed her head. ‘It’s okay, Mother. I’m all right.’
She would not let go of him and after a minute or so he gently pushed her away to look at her. ‘Are you okay? Did they hurt you?’ he asked.
She shook her head and tried to smile as the tears ran down her face, then took hold of him again as if he were a dream which might disappear any moment. ‘It’s okay,’ he assured her. ‘It’s all okay now.’
But he was wrong. The officer was true to his word and made sure Abed did not forget there was a bullet with his name on it.The first reminder came a couple of weeks after the incursion as he stood in the street outside his front door drinking a bottle of Coke and taking a moment to feel the sun on his face. The bottle shattered in his hand as a single shot rang out from no-man’s-land on the Gaza-Egypt border a hundred yards away. He dived back into his house, his hand bleeding from a cut caused by the shattering glass and wrapped a cloth around it to stem the flow. The sniper had missed him, but Abed knew it was not through lack of skill.The IDF snipers were far too good to miss someone standing still from that range.They had plenty of practice.The shot had been a reminder, a message that Abed had not been forgotten and his day would soon come.
A week later he was open for business in his new metal shop situated on the corner of a block near the marketplace only a few hundred metres from home. After finishing welding a metal framework for a door he turned off the acetylene torch and accidentally knocked a tool off the bench. As he bent down to pick it up a shot slammed into the wall behind him where his head had been a second before and ricocheted off several metal sheets in various parts of the shop before lodging itself in the ceiling. People in the street outside scattered with practised alarm and Abed flung himself to the floor behind his bench just as another shot slammed into one of the metal table legs in front of his face, splattering him with flakes of rust and dirt. The adrenaline soared through his veins as he realised the day of his execution had come and the sniper had so far been unlucky. He could not stay where he was and crawled as fast as he could across the floor, heading for a corner out of view from the street. Another shot rang out but no bullet entered his shop. It sounded different, louder, as if fired from close by. Abed remained tight in the corner unable to see out of the shop, which hopefully meant the sniper could not see inside.