The exchange between the Coparellf and Moscow was picked up and recorded by a U.S. Naval Intelligence listening station. Since it was in standard KGB code, they were able to decipher it. But all it told them was that someone aboard a ship-they did not know which ship-was checking his secondary transmitter, and somebody called Rostov-the name was not on any of their files-wanted him to keep his head down. Nobody could make any sense of it, so they opened a file titled "Rostov" and put the signal in the Me and forgot about it.
Chapter Twelve
When he had finished his interim debriefing in Cairo, Hassan asked permission to go to Syria to visit his parents in the refugee camp. He was given, four days. He took a plane to Damascus and a taxi to the camp. He did not visit his parents. He made certain inquiries at the camp, and one of the refugees took him, by means of a series of buns, to Dara, across the Jordanian border, and all the way to Amman. From there another man took him on another bus to the Jordan River. On the night of the second day he crossed the river, guided by two men who carried submachine guns. By now Hassan was wearing Amb robes and a headdress like them, but he did not ask for a gun. They were young men, their soft adolescent faces just taking on lines of weariness and cruelty, like recruits in a new army. They moved across the Jordan valley in confident silence, directing Hassan with a touch or a whisper: they seemed to have made the journey many times. At one point all thm of them lay flat behind a stand of cactus while lights and soldiers! voices passed a quarter of a mile away. Hassan felt helpless-and something more. At first he thought that the feeling was due to his being so completely in the hands of these boys, his life dependent on their knowledge and coumge. But later, when they had left him and he was alone on a country road trying to get a lift, he realized that this. journey was a kind of regression. For years now he had been a European banker, living in Luxembourg with his car and his refrigerator and his television set. Now, suddenly, he was walking in sandals along the dusty PalestIft roads of his youth: no car, no jet; an Arab again, a peasant, a second-class citizen in the country of his birth. None of his reflexes would work here-it was not possible to solve a problem by picking up a phone or pulling out a credit card or calling a cab. He felt like a child, a pauper and a fugitive all at the same time. He walked five miles without seeing a vehicle, then a fruit truck passed him, its engine coughing unhealthily and pouring smoke, and pulled up a few yards ahead. Hassan ran after it. "ro Nablus?" he shouted. "imp iet The driver was a heavy man whose forearms bulged with muscle as he heaved the truck around bends at top speed. He smoked 0 the time. He must have been certain there would not be anoffier vehicle in the way all night, driving as he did on the crown of the road and never using the brake. Hassan could have used some sleep, but the driver wanted to talk. He told Hassan that the Jews were good rulers, business had prospered since they occupied Jordan, but of course the land must be free one day. Half of what he said was insincere, no doubt; but Hassan could not tell which half. They entered Nablus in the cool Samaritan dawn, with a red sim rising behind the hillside and the town still asleep. The track roared into the market square and stopped. Hassan said goodbye to the driver. He walked slowly through the empty streets as the sun began to take away the chill of the night. He savored the clean air and the low white buildings, enjoying every detail, basking in the glow of nostalgia for his boyhood: he was in Palestine, he was home. He had precise directions to a house with no number in a street with no name. It was in a poor quarter, where the little stone houses were crowded too close together and nobody swept the streets. A goat was tethered outside, and he wondered briefly what it ate, for there was no grass. The door was unlocked. He hesitated a moment outside, fighting down the excitement in his belly. He had been away too long-now he was back in the Land. He had waited too many years for this opportunity to strike a blow in revenge for what they had done to his father. He had suffered exile, he had endured with patience, he bad nursed his hatred enough, perhaps too much. He went in.
There were four or five people asleep on the floor. One of them, a woman, opened her eyes, saw him and sat up instantly, her hand under the pillow reaching for what might have been a gun. "What do you want?" Hassan spoke the name of the man who commanded the Fedayeen.
Mahmoud had lived not far from Yasif Hassan when they were both boys in the late Thirties, but they had never met, or if they had neither remembered it. After the European war, when Yasif went to England to, study, Mahmoud tended sheep with his brothers, his father, his uncles and his grandfather. Their lives would have continued to go in quite different directions but for the 1948 war. Mahmoud's father, like Yasif's, made the decision to pack up and flee. The two sons--Yasif was a few years older than Mahmoud-met at the refugee camp. Mahmoud's reaction to the ceasefire was even stronger than Yasif's, which was paradoxical, for Yasif had lost more. But Mahmoud was possessed by a great rage that would allow him to do nothing other than fight for the liberation of his homeland. Until then he had been oblivious of politics, thinking it had nothing to do with shepherds; now he set out to understand it. Before be could do that, he had to teach himself to read. They met again in the Fifties, in Gaza. By then Mahmoud bad blossomed, if that was the right word for something so fierce, He had read Clausewitz on war and Plato's Republic, Das Kaphal and Mein Kwnpf, Keynes and Mao and Galbraith and Gandhi, history and biography, classical novels and modem plays. He spoke good English and bad Russian and a smattering of Cantonese. He was directing a small cadre of terrorists on forays into Israel, bombing and shooting and stealing and then returning to disappear into the Gaza camps like rats into a garbage dump. The terrorists were getting money, weapons and intelligence from Cairo: Hassan was, briefly, part of the intelligence backup, and when they met again Yasif told Mahmoud where his ultimate loyalty lay~not with Cairo, not even with the pan-Arab cause, but with Palestine. Yasif had been ready to abandon everything there and then-his job at the bank, his home in Luxembourg, his role in Egyptian Intelligence--and join the freedom fighters. But Mahmoud had said no, and the habit of command was already fitting him like a tailored coat In a few years, he said-for he took a long view-they would have all the guerrillas they wanted, but they would still need friends in high PlacM European connections, and secret intelligence. They had met once more, in Cairo, and set up lines of communication which bypassed the Egyptians. With the Intelligence Establishment Hamm had cultivated a deceptive image: he pretended to be a little less perceptive than he was. At first Yasif sent over much the same kind of stuff he was giving to Cairo, Principally the names of loyal Arabs who were stashing away fortunes in Europe and could therefore be touched for fundL Recently he had been of more immediate practical value as the Palestinian movement began to operate in Europe. He had booked hotels and flights, rented cars and houses, stockpiled weapons and transferred funds. He was not the kind of man to use a gun. He knew this and was faintly ashamed of it, so he was all the more proud to be so useful in other, nonviolent but nonetheless practical, ways. , The results of his work had begun to explode in Rome that year. Yasif believed in Mahmoud's program of European terrorism He was convinced that the Arab armies, even with Russian support, could never defeat the Jews, for this allowed the Yews to think of themselves as a beleaguered people defending their homes against foreign soldiers, and that gave them strength. The truth was, in Yasifs view, that the Palestine Arabs were defending their home against invading Zionists. There were still more Arab Palestinians than Jewish Israelis, counting the exiles in the camps; and it was they, not a rabble of soldiers from Cairo and Damascus, who would liberate the homeland. But first they had to believe in the Fedayeen. Acts such as the Rome airport affair would convince them that the Fedayeen had international resources. And when the people believed in the Fedayeen, the people would be the Fedayeen, and then they would be unstoppable. The Rome airport affair was trivial, a peccadillo, by comparison with what Hassan had in mind. It 'Was an outrageous, mind-boggling scheme that would put the Fedayeen on the front pages of the world's newspapers for weeks and prove that they were a powerful international force, not a bunch of ragged refugees. Hassan hoped desperately that Malimoud would accept it. Yasif Hassan had come to propose that the Fedayeen should hijack a holocaust