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T. Cuyler young
Donald G. Cameron
They went further than seemed possible
Table of Contents
Cover Page
Title Page
Excerpt
Prologue
Part One
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
Part Two
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
Part Three
18
19
20
Coda
About The Author
Other Books By
Praise
Copyright
About the Publisher
Prologue
The Kosovo-Albania Border, 1997
The late afternoon rain sent the Albanian soldiers into the cover of the trees. Dukas thought the move was probably for the best. What he had seen of the Albanians scared him, and he was glad when they walked off up the road to the stand of oak trees, shouting at each other and carrying their rifles across their necks like ox yokes.
The rain beat on the windshield of Dukas’s borrowed Land Rover and the wipers droned back and forth, harmonizing with the heater and the raindrops on the roof, washing away some of the mud accumulated in a nine-hour drive across “the former Yugoslavia.” There was mud from Bosnia and mud from Croatia and a little mud from Kosovo, all washing off into the ruined tarmac of a road in Albania.
“Have a little faith, okay,” muttered the Mossad guy in the back seat. Actually, there were two Mossad guys in the back seat, but one of them was so obviously a bureaucratic functionary that Dukas ignored him. Dukas tried to adjust his body language so that he was not telegraphing his views on the afternoon quite so blatantly. He looked back.
“When do you want to call this off?” he asked.
“Give the man another hour.”
His name was Shlomo, he had said. Dukas thought the name was funny, but the man himself was serious. Now, he moved his hand slightly to indicate that, no, he didn’t expect their quarry to appear either, and that, yes, they were going to wait an hour because he, Shlomo, was under the scrutiny of someone who had sent a bureaucrat to watch him.
Dukas liked Shlomo. And he didn’t mind helping the Israelis, as long as his own investigations into Bosnian Muslim war crimes benefited from helping them. He pulled a headset up over his ears and keyed his radio.
“Roger, Squid, I copy you,” the voice on the other end said. The Canadians he had picked up as an ops team thought it was hilarious that Dukas was attached to the US Navy, and they called him Squid at every opportunity.
“Give it another six zero minutes.”
“Roger, copy.” The Canadians were in cover along the Albanian side of the border. Dukas had looked for them a few times and failed, but they answered radio calls and they had stayed in their positions all day; now they would all be drenched in addition to tired. By contrast, the Albanians had a roaring fire going in the tree line; at dusk, both the smoke and the fire must have shown for miles. But Dukas would not have been allowed here without the “support” of the Albanians.
A column of headlights showed across the ridge to the south in Kosovo. Dukas and Shlomo had their binoculars up in an instant and then back in their laps. They both sighed on much the same note.
“He’ll come in this lot,” the bureaucrat said.
Dukas shook his head. Shlomo said, “No, David. It’s just local militia crossing the border to buy weapons.”
“Why can’t he be in among them? He could be with them.” The Mossad bureaucrat, who had introduced himself as David, sounded as if he believed that he could make his assertions true by repeating them. He had the makings of a politician, Dukas thought.
“He doesn’t have that kind of contact.”
“You don’t know that.” David sounded petulant.
Dukas listened to them and wondered what made their target, a Lebanese, so important that David would get his penny loafers dirty coming to collect him, especially as it was Dukas who would have to do the work and who would do the interrogation. As was almost always the case when he was working with foreign intelligence people, Dukas suspected that he was being used. He was a cynic. But he was usually right.
He cleared his throat. The two men in the back fell silent. “How is it that a Muslim Lebanese doesn’t have contacts in Kosovo?” he asked.
“He’s a city boy,” Shlomo said.
“You guys said he was an arms dealer.” Dukas turned to look into the back seat. It was dusk, and Shlomo’s face was almost invisible. David was leaning forward into the last sunlight. He seemed excited.
“I said his efforts helped to put guns in the hands of the Muslims in Bosnia,” Shlomo said.
The convoy of headlights over in Kosovo had descended the ridge and made it to the checkpoint at the Albanian border.
Dukas kept going. “Why does he sell arms to Bosnians and not Kosovans?”
David said, “Why don’t you do your job and let us do ours?” His words hung there for a few seconds. Shlomo’s hand twitched, as if he was going to try and withdraw the words his partner had said.
Dukas looked at his watch and turned to face the back seat again, bunching the skirts of his raincoat in his fist. “My job is to aid the UN and the War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague in the apprehension of war criminals.”
He turned and met David’s eyes, but the younger man returned his look with indifference. Dukas continued, “If the guy we’re after isn’t of interest to me, my job will include dropping you guys at an airport and driving back the nine hours it took me to get here. With nothing. And unless it suits me, my job has nothing to do with helping you do yours.”
David held his gaze, and then his eyes flicked away as he seemed to lose interest. He shrugged.
Shlomo shook his head.
Dukas was considering a further lecture on the subject when he heard a radio tone in his headset.
“Yeah?”
“Palm Two has movement on the hillside.”
Dukas looked over his shoulder through the rain-streaked glass reflexively; in fact, he couldn’t see anything except a yellow smudge where the Albanians had their fire. “Just Albanians,” he said.
“Palm Two says it’s a sniper with high-res optics and a ghillie suit,” reported the voice in his ear.
Dukas’s head snapped up.
“What’s happened?” Shlomo asked from the back seat.
The windshield wipers cycled. Fifty meters below them, at the checkpoint, an ancient white Zil was being searched thoroughly while its former occupants stood and smoked. One man had a briefcase. This drew Dukas’s eye.
Surprise, surprise.
“That’s our guy.” Dukas waved. He was out of the car and moving. He stopped to clutch his headset to his ear. “The guy at three o’clock in the car being searched now. No, not in the car. Next to the car. Yeah! Briefcase. Take him!” He started down the rocky hillside, paused to draw a heavy revolver from his shoulder holster.
Shlomo caught up with him and they ran down the hill together, raincoats flapping like ungainly wings.
Boom.
The shot sounded like a cannon. Two Canadian soldiers, halfway out of their concealment, froze and looked around for the source.
In his headset, the Canadian voice said, “Sniper!” and then, “Palm Two, do you have a shot?”
Pop, pop.
Dukas was now a bystander, lying full length in the wet bracken between two stones with Shlomo wedged in next to him.
Pop, pop.
“Hawk One, this is Palm Two. He’s gone. No hits.”
“Is it safe to move?” Dukas asked. He was soaked; runoff from the hillside was going right down his pants.
“Wait one.”
It took the Canadians ten minutes to clear the hillside. They found a small patch of dark khaki polyester and a one-inch square of flannel.
“That’s off his ghillie suit,” a black Nova Scotian sergeant said. He presented them to Dukas and Shlomo. “That flannel he used to wipe the optics on his rifle.” He sounded as if he was from Boston.
Dukas knelt by the body. It was impossible to establish whether this was, in fact, the man they’d come for; a fiftycaliber sniper round had removed most of his head. Dukas began to search the corpse. The man had a wallet with American dollars and several forms of ID. His clothes were all international—a Gap sweatshirt with a hood, blue jeans. The briefcase was locked to his wrist; the keys were in his jeans.
Shlomo leaned in to see what was in the case and Dukas rotated it so that he could see everything.
“This guy was an arms dealer?” Dukas said.
Shlomo shrugged. “We make mistakes, too.” Shlomo didn’t seem surprised by the contents.
Dukas pointed with a booted toe at the remnants of the jawline and lack of a head. “Was that a mistake?” he asked.
Shlomo raised his hands. “I don’t like what you’re suggesting.”
“You going to tell me that the Albanians shot him?” Dukas exhaled sharply. “With a fifty-cal?”
Shlomo glanced up the hill at the Land Rover. “It wasn’t right, what David said, but he is political and thinks he rules the world, okay?”
Dukas knelt again by the briefcase and began to inventory the contents. He pulled plastic freezer bags from the zippered liner of his raincoat, assigned a chain-of-custody code to each item, placed it in the freezer bag, and stuck the number on the outside. Most of the items in the briefcase were Roman coins. He did the inventory carefully, because he was angry and he didn’t want to do something stupid. Shlomo watched him for a while and then walked over to the car the dead man had arrived in and began to question the three other occupants in English and then in Turkish. Then Arabic.
In the inner pocket, Dukas found a red leather calendar book. Once, its edges had been gold-leafed, but it had been used for too many years. The calendar date was 1987. He flipped it open to the back—penciled addresses and phone numbers in Arabic and in roman script, in cities throughout the Mediterranean.
David thrust out a hand. “I’ll take that.”
Dukas hadn’t seen him come down the hill, but it looked as if he had taken the longer and drier route on the tarmac.
Dukas didn’t reply. He placed the calendar in a plastic bag, put a sticker on it, and wrote a number. He tossed the bag on the pile.
David stepped around him and bent over the pile. Dukas stood up suddenly, his hip grazing the younger man and sending him sprawling.
“Sorry,” Dukas said, offering his hand. “I’m clumsy.”
David crab-walked away and rose to his feet. His jaw worked as if he was chewing, and his face was red, but he kept his distance.
Shlomo came back from the car.
“He attacked me,” David said.
Dukas shook his head. “A misunderstanding.”
“He attacked me,” David said, his anger causing his voice to rise. “He is interfering.”
Dukas talked over David. “Get this guy out of here.”
David began to use his hands. He wasn’t speaking English now, but Hebrew, and he was speaking only to Shlomo.
Shlomo didn’t move. David went on talking. Shlomo ignored him and looked at the briefcase and then at Dukas, his head bent slightly to one side as if he were asking a question. Dukas locked the locks on the briefcase and put the keys in the pocket of his raincoat. The Canadian sergeant was standing by the Zil, watching the three terrified Kosovans and smoking. From time to time he glanced at the two Israelis.
David wiped his hands on his coat, turned away from Shlomo in obvious disgust and faced Dukas. “Give me that briefcase.”
“Don’t tempt me to start this as a homicide investigation.” David raised his hand and pointed at Dukas. “You don’t even understand what you are interfering with. Give me the briefcase.”
Dukas walked past the younger man and started up the hill, then turned. Instead of anger, he found only fatigue and boredom, as if he had played this scene too many times. “This is evidence in a war-crimes-tribunal investigation. You never mentioned a briefcase in our memorandum of understanding. You told me that this guy was some kind of terrorist heavy hitter. I don’t know why you wanted him dead, but he’s dead. Now—”
“We wanted him dead? The Albanians shot him!” David shouted, turning to Shlomo for support. Shlomo said nothing. His attention had switched from Dukas to David. He eyed him with distaste, the way tourists look at panhandlers.
Dukas shook his head, looked away, glanced back at a flicker of movement. The younger man had taken a long sliding step forward and his hand hit Dukas’s elbow hard, numbing it. Dukas dropped the briefcase but managed to pivot, block the follow-on blow, and stand over the case. Dukas had plenty of time to see that the Canadians were too far away to do anything. He risked a glance at Shlomo, who hadn’t moved.
David crouched, a relaxed martial arts position. He looked confident. “Give us the fucking briefcase.”
Dukas shook his head. He didn’t think the briefcase was worth a crap to him or any of the cases he was making, but this was too stupid a point to concede. He picked it up and held it to him like a schoolgirl holding her books and hoped that the heavy case would deflect a blow.
Shlomo stepped up behind his partner and elbowed him in the head so that he sat abruptly on the wet road. Again.
The Canadian ordered all three Kosovans to the ground and started bellowing into his radio for backup.
“It would be better if you gave us the briefcase,” Shlomo said. He sounded as tired as Dukas felt.
“Put in a request through channels.”
David moaned.
“That guy’s dangerous,” Dukas said.
“More dangerous than you know, my friend.” Shlomo wiped the rain from his eyes. “I think you’d better get out of here.”
1
Tel Aviv, Israel, January, 2002
Abe Peretz told the old joke about the Polish immigrant woman and the boy on the bus. It was practically archaic, he said, from the early days of Israel, but still funny: A mother and her little boy are riding on a bus in Jerusalem. The boy speaks Hebrew but the mother keeps speaking Yiddish. A man sitting across the aisle leans over and says, “Lady, the little boy speaks wonderful Hebrew; why do you keep talking to him in this wretched Yiddish?” “Because,” she says, “I don’t want him to forget he’s a Jew.”
Outside, the night was coming down like a lavender curtain, darker to the east behind them but brightening into orange on the undersides of the clouds out over the Mediterranean. The apartment was high above Ben Yehuda but the sounds of the street came up; and the smell of evening, a swirl of salt sea and car exhaust and cooking food, rose with them.
“They say that if you breathe really deep, you can smell the desert,” Abe Peretz said.
“Only if you’re a Jew,” his wife said with a smile. “You, you’d have trouble.”
The Peretzes lived in Tel Aviv but had been there only a few months; the Craiks were old friends passing through. The two men had served on a ship together fifteen years before, when one had been new to the Navy and the other had been in too long; now Peretz was the FBI’s deputy legal attaché at the US embassy, and Alan Craik, long ago that young newbie, was the Fifth Fleet intel officer in Bahrain.
Peretz grinned at the two guests. “Bea thinks I’m not Jewish enough. Funny, because I don’t look Jewish.” He winked at his wife; she overdid rolling her eyes and laughed and said to Rose Craik, who was visibly pregnant, “This one had better be a girl. Two boys are enough.”
“Well, I’m concentrating really hard.”
“Two girls are enough, too,” Peretz said. His own two had just come in, still out of sight but noisy at the apartment’s front door. “The quietest voice they know is the scream. If you think Italians are noisy, wait until you’ve lived in a—”
The two girls erupted through the glass doors to the terrace, both in T-shirts with slogans across their breasts that were meaningless to the adults, one in Hebrew, one in English. There was a lot of kissing and flouncing and shouting; the greetings to Rose were enthusiastic but forced, because Rose Craik had been a great favorite when they had been children but now they were grown up—in their own eyes, at least; and after a lot of shouting, in which Bea took a major part, they whirled out again and the terrace seemed astonishingly quiet.
“As I was saying before I was interrupted,” Abe Peretz said. He grinned again. He grinned a lot, his way of saying that nothing he said was quite serious, or at least not quite as it sounded.
“As you were saying,” Bea Peretz erupted, “it’s time I started cooking if we’re ever going to eat.” She got up and gestured toward Rose. “Come help me.” She was a big woman, getting a little heavy, but she had beautiful eyes and still-black hair that lay tight against her skull and then cascaded down her back. “You guys tell each other war stories so we don’t have to listen over dinner.”
Alan Craik smiled at his wife, who had as many war stories as either of the men—chopper pilot, ex-squadron CO, currently deputy naval attaché, Bahrain—and who now gave a little shrug and let herself be led away.
That was the day that the latest fragile truce between the Israelis and the Palestinians had self-destructed when a Palestinian militant was killed by a car bomb in the West Bank. The al-Aksa Martyrs Brigade declared that the cease-fire was finished. Before the day was over, two soldiers had been killed at a settlement, and the Martyrs Brigade took credit.
That was also the last day of a man named Salem Qatib, who, like the cease-fire, was a victim of both sides: first the Palestinians tortured him, and then the Israelis tortured him, and then he died.
“Bea’s kind of bossy,” Abe said. He looked at the fingertips of one hand, sniffed them—an old habit. “We talk too much about being Jewish, don’t we.”
Embarrassed, Craik mumbled something vague.
“No, we do. Since we moved here, Bea and the girls have got like the Republican Party—a steady move to the right.” He gave a snort, certainly meant to show disgust. “Bea has a new bosom buddy named Esther Himmelfarb. I mean, it’s good that she’s found a friend; Bea doesn’t usually get close to people. And the woman helps her a lot—she knows where everything is, knows who to see, what to say, but—” He waved a hand. “We keep kosher—that’s new. The girls want to go live on a kibbutz, even though the kibbutzes are all turning into corporations and the days of boys-and-girls-togethertaming-the-desert are long gone. It’s a romance. All three of them have fallen in love.” He sniffed his fingers.
“You don’t like it here?”
“I’m not enchanted by living on land that the former owners gave up because they had a gun at their head. And now they’re sitting out there in refugee camps, watching me eat their dinner.”
“The Palestinians don’t exactly have the cleanest hands in the world.”
“They’re absolute shits. Just like a lot of Israelis. But overall, Israel gives me a royal pain in the butt because they’re the occupying power and that puts a special responsibility on you to behave better than the other guy—and they won’t face up to reality.” He shot Craik a look to see if he knew which reality he meant. “You can’t say ‘No right of return, no reparations’ and be a moral entity.” He rested his arms on the terrace railing and put his chin on them. “That’s why Bea says I’m a bad Jew. Because I won’t join in the national romance.”
Craik slumped lower until his spine was almost ready to fall off the seat, his long legs thrust out toward the edge of the terrace. He had his own doubts about Israel, but he had to shut up and do his job: in two days, he was supposed to meet with Shin Bet, Israel’s military intelligence, to get their input on an operation in Afghanistan.
Fifty miles south in Gaza, three men were beating the Palestinian named Salem Qatib. Two would hold the victim while the third hit him, and then they would slam him against a stone wall and shout, “What else? What else?” They were Palestinian, too.
“Your husband looks like hell, if I’m allowed to say that, Rose,” Bea Peretz was saying.
“He’s stressed out, is all.”
“What’s he doing in Israel?”
“Oh—Navy stuff. You know.” She hesitated, added, “He got a couple of extra days on his orders to try to sort of run down.”
“Israel’s a great place! Really. Even Abe thinks so.” She was pounding dough down on a board, making it thin. “I wish you could meet my friend Esther. She makes you understand how you can love this country. We all want to stay for good.”
“The Bureau’ll go along with that?”
“There’s other jobs, Rose. Some things are more important than what you do for a living.” The way she said it, Rose felt as if Bea had said it before, maybe many times—the detritus of an old argument, washed up on this woman-to-woman beach. Rose sampled a bit of something made with chopped olives and murmured, “We are what we do for a living, to some extent.”
“And we can change!” Bea hit the dough a tremendous whack! “You were going to be an astronaut once. You didn’t make it. You didn’t die.”
Only where nobody but me can see, Rose thought. She said, “Anyway, maybe Abe’s not so invested in it as I was.”
“Oh—Abe!” Bea cut the dough into squares with great slashes of a knife. “Abe could sell bread from a pushcart and be happy! He lives in such a fog—”
“How’s Rose coping with not being an astronaut?” Peretz said to Alan Craik. They were still on the terrace, new drinks in their hands, the sky almost blue-black.
“I think it almost killed her, but—you know Rose. Get on with life.” He sipped at his weak gin and tonic. “She’s going to be deep-select for captain.”
Peretz looked out at the sky for a long time, and when he spoke it was clear that he’d hardly listened to the answer to his own question. “If I get a transfer, I don’t think Bea’ll go with me. Or the girls.”
“Well, if they’re in school—”
Peretz bounced a knuckle against his upper lip. “It’s a hell of a thing, to watch a family go in the tank because of—” He sighed. “It’s never just one thing, is it. Bea and I have always had a—You know, the relationship has always been noisy. But suddenly—It’s this damned place. Jesus.” He stared at his fingers. “Religion’s soaked into the goddam soil here. Like Love Canal.”
Salem Qatib, who had been beaten, lay in one rut of a Gaza road. By and by somebody would have driven along the road and run over him, but a Palestinian who knew about the torture and who was a Mossad informer got on a cell phone and alerted his control.
Over dinner—candles, no kids, Israeli wine, lamb and grains in a recipe that was millennia old—the Craiks tried to talk about old friends and old days and things that didn’t have to do with Israel or being Jewish. But as more wine was poured, Bea didn’t want to talk about anything else, as if they had a scab that she wanted to scratch and watch bleed. She cited her friend Esther often—“Esther says.” Even Nine-Eleven, the topic of conversation everywhere in those days, brought her back to Israel. “Now you know what it’s like!” she cried. “Now you know what the Arabs are!” She gestured at Abe with a fork. “You’ll say next that we should be more understanding, because al-Qaida blew up the World Trade Center because they’re misunderstood!”