Prince of Fire Read online

  Arafat’s fighters were no match for the Bedouin. Thousands were massacred, and once more the Palestinianswere scattered, this time to camps in Lebanon and Syria. Arafat wanted revenge against the Jordanian monarch and against all those who had betrayed the Palestinian people. He wanted to carry out bloody and spectacular acts of terrorism on the world stage—acts that would place the plight of the Palestinians before a global audience and quench the Palestinian thirst for revenge. The attacks would be carried out by a secret unit so the PLO could maintain the charade that it was a respectable revolutionary army fighting for the liberation of an oppressed people. Abu Iyad, Arafat’s number two, was given overall command, but the operational mastermindwould be the son of the great Palestinian warlord from Beit Sayeed, Sabri al-Khalifa. The unit would be called Black September to honor the Palestinian dead in Jordan.

  Sabri recruited a small elite force from the best units of Fatah. In the tradition of his father, he selected men like himself—Palestinians from notable families who had seen more of the world than the refugee camps. Next he set out for Europe, where he assembled a networkof educated Palestinian exiles. He also established links with leftist European terror groups and intelligenceservices behind the Iron Curtain. By November 1971, Black September was ready to emerge from the shadows. At the top of Sabri’s hit list was King Hussein’s Jordan.

  The blood flowed first in the city where Sabri had served his apprenticeship. The Jordanian prime minister,on a visit to Cairo, was gunned down in the lobby of the Sheraton Hotel. More attacks followed in quick succession. The car of the Jordanian ambassador was ambushed in London. Jordanian aircraft were hijacked and Jordanian airline offices were firebombed. In Bonn, five Jordanian intelligence officers were butcheredin the cellar of a house.

  After settling the score with Jordan, Sabri turned his attention to the true enemies of the Palestinian people, the Zionists of Israel. In May 1972, Black September hijacked a Sabena airlines jet and forced it to land at Israel’s Lod airport. A few days later, terrorists from the Japanese Red Army, acting on Black September’s behalf, attacked passengers in the arrival hall at Lod with machine-gun fire and hand grenades, killing twenty-sevenpeople. Letter bombs were mailed to Israeli diplomatsand prominent Jews across Europe.

  But Sabri’s greatest terrorist triumph was still to come. Early on the morning of September 5, 1972, two years after the expulsion from Jordan, six Palestinianterrorists scaled the fence at the Olympic Village in Munich, Germany, and entered the apartment building at Connollystrasse 31, which housed members of the IsraeliOlympic team. Two Israelis were killed in the initial assault. Nine others were rounded up and taken hostage. For the next twenty hours, with 900 million people around the world watching on television, the German government negotiated with the terrorists for the release of the Israeli hostages. Deadlines came and went, until finally, at ten-ten p.m., the terrorists and the hostages boarded two helicopters and took off for Fürstenfeldbrück airfield. Shortly after arriving, West German forces launched an ill-conceived and poorly planned rescue operation.All nine of the hostages were massacred by the Black Septembrists.

  Jubilation swept the Arab world. Sabri al-Khalifa, who had monitored the operation from a safe flat in East Berlin, was greeted as a conquering hero upon his return to Beirut. “You are my son!” Arafat said as he threw his arms around Sabri. “You are my son.”

  In Tel Aviv, Prime Minister Golda Meir ordered her intelligence chiefs to avenge the Munich eleven by huntingdown and killing the members of Black September. Code-named Wrath of God, the operation would be led by Ari Shamron, the same man who had been given the task of ending Sheikh Asad’s bloody reign of terror in 1948. For the second time in twenty-five years, Shamron was ordered to kill a man named al-Khalifa.

  Dina left the room in darkness and told the rest of the story as though Gabriel were not seated ten feet away from her, at the opposite end of the table.

  “One by one, the members of Black September were methodically hunted down and killed by Shamron’s Wrath of God teams. In all, twelve members were killed by Office assassins, but Sabri al-Khalifa, the one Shamronwanted most, remained beyond his reach. Sabri fought back. He killed an Office agent in Madrid. He attacked the Israeli embassy in Bangkok and murdered the American ambassador to Sudan. His attacks became more erratic, as did his behavior. Arafat was no longer able to maintain the fiction that he had no connection to Black September, and condemnation rained down upon him, even from quarters sympathetic to his cause. Sabri had brought disgrace to the movement, but Arafat still doted on him like a son.”

  Dina paused and looked at Gabriel. His face, lit by the glow of Sabri al-Khalifa’s image on the projection screen, showed no emotion. His gaze was downward toward his hands, which were folded neatly on the tabletop.

  “Would you care to finish the story?” she asked.

  Gabriel spent a moment contemplating his hands before taking up Dina’s invitation to speak.

  “Shamron learned through an informant that Sabri kept a girl in Paris, a left-wing journalist named Denise who believed he was a Palestinian poet and freedom fighter. Sabri had neglected to tell Denise that he was a married man with a child. Shamron briefly considered trying to enroll her but gave up on the idea. It seemed the poor girl was truly in love with Sabri. So we sent the teams to Paris and put a watch on her instead. A month later, Sabri came to town to see her.”

  He paused and looked up at the screen.

  “He arrived at her apartment in the middle of the night. It was too dark to confirm his identity, so Shamrondecided to take a chance and wait until we could get a better look at him. They stayed in the apartment makinglove until the late afternoon; then they went to lunch in a café on the Boulevard St-Germain. That’s when we snapped that photo. After lunch they walked back to her apartment. It was still light, but Shamron gave the order to take him down.”

  Gabriel lapsed into silence, and once more his gaze turned down, toward his hands. He closed his eyes briefly.

  “I followed them on foot. He had his left arm around the girl’s waist and his hand was shoved into the back pocket of her jeans. His right hand was in his jacket pocket. That’s where he always kept his gun. He turned and looked at me once, but kept walking. He and the girl had drunk two bottles of wine over lunch—I suppose his senses weren’t terribly sharp at the time.”

  Another silence; then, after a glance at Sabri’s face, another meditation over his hands. His voice, when he spoke again, had an air of detachment, as if he were describingthe exploits of another man.

  “They paused at the entrance. Denise was drunk and laughing. She was looking down, into her purse, looking for the key. Sabri was telling her to hurry up. He wanted to get her clothes off again. I could have done it there, but there were too many people on the street, so I slowed down and waited for her to find the damned key. I passed by them as she slid it into the lock. Sabri looked at me again, and I looked back. They stepped into the passageway.I turned and caught the door before it could close. Sabri and the girl were in the middle of the courtyard by now. He heard my footfall and turned around. His hand was coming out of his coat pocket and I could see the butt. Sabri carried a Stechkin. It was a gift from a friend in the KGB. I hadn’t drawn my gun yet. Shamron’s rule, we called it. ‘We do not walk around in the street like gangsters with our guns drawn,’ Shamron always said. ‘One second, Gabriel. That’s all you’ll have. One second. Only a man with truly gifted hands can get his gun off his hip and into firing position in one second.’ ”

  Gabriel looked around the room and held the gaze of each team member briefly before resuming.

  “The Beretta had an eight-shot magazine, but I discoveredthat if I packed the rounds in tightly, I could squeeze in ten. Sabri never got his gun into position. He was turning to face me as I fired. His target profile was reduced—I think my first and second shots hit him in the left arm. I moved forward and put him on the ground. The girl was screaming, hitting me across the back wit
h her handbag. I put ten shots in him, then released the magazine and rammed my backup into the butt. It had only one round, the eleventh. One round for every Jew Sabri murdered at Munich. I put the barrel into his ear and fired. The girl collapsed over his body and called me a murderer. I went back through the passageway,out into the street. A motorcycle pulled up. I climbed on the back.”

  Only Yaakov, who had seen his share of killing operations in the Occupied Territories, dared break the silence that had descended over the room. “What do Asad al-Khalifa and his boy Sabri have to do with Rome?”

  Gabriel looked at Dina, and with his eyes posed the same question. Dina removed the photograph of Sabri and replaced it with the one showing Khaled at his father’s funeral.

  “When Sabri’s wife, Rima, heard that he’d been killed in Paris, she walked into the bathroom of her apartment in Beirut and slit her wrists. Khaled found his mother lying on the floor in a pool of her own blood. He was now an orphan, his parents dead, his clan scattered to the four winds. Arafat adopted the boy, and after the funeral, Khaled disappeared.”

  “Where did he go?” asked Yossi.

  “Arafat saw the child as a potent symbol of the revolutionand wanted him protected at all costs. We think he shipped him off to Europe under an assumed name to live with a wealthy Palestinian exile family. What we do know is this: In twenty-five years, Khaled al-Khalifa has never resurfaced. Two years ago I asked Lev for permissionto start a quiet search for him. I can’t find him. It’s as if he vanished into thin air after the funeral. It’s as if he’s dead, too.”

  “And your theory?”

  “I believe Arafat prepared him to follow in the foot-stepsof his famous father and grandfather. I believe he’s been activated.”

  “Why?”

  “Because Arafat is trying to make himself relevant again, and he’s doing it the only way he knows how, with violence and terrorism. He’s using Khaled as his weapon.”

  “You have no proof,” said Yaakov. “There’s a terrorist cell in Europe preparing to hit us again. We can’t afford to waste time looking for a phantom.”

  Dina placed a new photograph on the overhead projector.It showed the wreckage of a building.

  “Buenos Aires, 1994. A truck bomb flattens the JewishCommunity Center during a Shabbat meal. Eighty-sevendead. No claim of responsibility.”

  A new slide, more wreckage.

  “Istanbul, 2003. Two car bombs explode simultaneouslyoutside the city’s main synagogue. Twenty-eight dead. No claim of responsibility.”

  Dina turned to Yossi and asked him to turn on the lights.

  “You told me you had evidence linking Khaled to Rome,” Gabriel said, squinting in the sudden brightness. “But thus far, you’ve given me nothing but conjecture.”

  “Oh, but I do have evidence, Gabriel.”

  “So what’s the connection?”

  “Beit Sayeed.”

  They set out from King Saul Boulevard in an Office transit van a few minutes before dawn. The windows of the van were tinted and bulletproof, and so inside it remained dark long after the sky began to grow light. By the time they reached Petah Tikvah, the sun was peeking over the ridgeline of the Judean Hills. It was a modern suburb of Tel Aviv now, with large homes and green lawns, but Gabriel, as he peered out the tinted windows, pictured the original stone cottages and Russian settlers huddled against yet another pogrom, this one led by Sheikh Asad and his holy warriors.

  Beyond Petah Tikvah lay a broad plain of open farmland.Dina directed the driver onto a two-lane road that ran along the edge of a new superhighway. They followedthe road for a few miles, then turned in to a dirt track bordering a newly planted orchard.

  “Here,” she said suddenly. “Stop here.”

  The van rolled to a stop. Dina climbed down and hastened into the trees. Gabriel came next, Yossi and Rimona at his shoulder, Yaakov trailing a few paces behind.They came to the end of the orchard. Fifty yards in the distance lay a field of row crops. Between the orchard and field was a wasteland overgrown with green winter grass. Dina stopped and turned to face the others.

  “Welcome to Beit Sayeed,” she said.

  She beckoned them forward. It soon became apparentthey were walking amid the remains of the village. Its footprint was clearly visible in the gray earth: the cottages and the stone walls, the little square and the circularwellhead. Gabriel had seen villages like it in the JezreelValley and the Galilee. No matter how hard the new owners of the land tried to erase the Arab villages, the footprint remained, like the memory of a dead child.

  Dina stopped next to the wellhead and the others gathered round her. “On April 18, 1948, at approximatelyseven o’clock in the evening, a Palmach brigade surrounded Beit Sayeed. After a brief firefight the Arab militiamen fled, leaving the village undefended. Wholesalepanic ensued. And why not? Three days earlier, more than a hundred residents of Deir Yassin had been killed by members of the Irgun and Stern Gang. Needless to say, the Arabs of Beit Sayeed weren’t anxious to meet a similar fate. It probably didn’t take much encouragement to get them to pack their bags and flee. When the village was deserted, the Palmach men dynamited the houses.”

  “What’s the connection with Rome?” Yaakov asked impatiently.

  “Daoud Hadawi.”

  “By the time Hadawi was born this place had been wiped from the face of the earth.”

  “That’s true,” Dina said. “Hadawi was born in the Jenin refugee camp, but his clan came from here. His grandmother, his father, and various aunts, uncles, and cousins fled Beit Sayeed the night of April 18, 1948.”

  “And his grandfather?” asked Gabriel.

  “He’d been killed a few days earlier, near Lydda. You see, Daoud Hadawi’s grandfather was one of Sheikh Asad’s most trusted men. He was guarding the sheikh the night Shamron killed him. He was the one Shamron stabbed before entering the cottage.”

  “That’s all?” asked Yaakov.

  Dina shook her head. “The bombings in Buenos Aires and Istanbul both took place on April eighteenth at seven o’clock.”

  “My God,” murmured Rimona.

  “There’s one more thing,” Dina said, turning to Gabriel. “The date you killed Sabri in Paris? Do you remember it?”

  “It was early March,” he said, “but I can’t remember the date.”

  “It was March fourth,” Dina said.

  “The same day as Rome,” said Rimona.

  “That’s right.” Dina looked around at the remnants of the old village. “It started right here in Beit Sayeed more than fifty years ago. It was Khaled who master-mindedRome, and he’s going to hit us again in twenty-eightdays.”

  PART TWO

  THE COLLABORATOR

  8

  NEAR AIX-EN-PROVENCE, FRANCE

  “I think we may have found another one, Professor.”

  Paul Martineau, crouched on all fours in the deep shadows of the excavation pit, twisted his head slowly round and searched for the origin of the voice that had disturbed his work. It fell upon the familiar form of Yvette Debré, a young graduate student who had volunteered for the dig. Lit from behind by the sharp midmorning Provençal sun, she was a mere silhouette. Martineau had always considered her something of a well-concealed artifact. Her short dark hair and square features left the impression of an adolescent boy. Only when his eye traveled down her body—across the ample breasts, the slender waist, the rounded hips—was her remarkable beauty fully revealed. He had probed her body with his skilled hands, sifted the soil of its secret corners, and found hidden delights and the pain of ancient wounds. No one else on the dig suspected their relationship was anything more than professor and pupil. Paul Martineau was very good at keeping secrets.

  “Where is it?”

  “Behind the meeting house.”

  “Real or stone?”

  “Stone.”

  “The attitude?”

  “Face up.”

  Martineau stood. Then he placed his palms on either side of the narrow pit and, wit
h a powerful thrust of his shoulders, pushed himself back up to the surface. He patted the reddish Provençal earth from his palms and smiled at Yvette. He was dressed, as usual, in faded denim jeans and suede boots that were cut a bit more stylishly than those favored by lesser archaeologists. His woolen pullover was charcoal gray, and a crimson handkerchiefwas knotted rakishly at his throat. His hair was dark and curly; his eyes were large and deep brown. A colleague had once remarked that in Paul Martineau’s face one could see traces of all the peoples who had once held sway in Provence—the Celts and the Gauls, the Greeks and the Romans, the Visigoths and the Teutons, the Franks and the Arabs. He was undeniably handsome. Yvette Debré had not been the first admiring graduate student to be seduced by him.

  Officially, Martineau was an adjunct professor of archaeologyat the prestigious University of Aix-Marseilles III, though he spent most of his time in the field and served as an adviser to more than a dozen local archaeologicalmuseums scattered across the south of France. He was an expert on the pre-Roman history of Provence, and although only thirty-five, was regarded as one of the finest French archaeologists of his generation. His last paper, a treatise on the demise of Ligurian hegemony in Provence, had been declared the standard academic work on the subject. Currently he was in negotiation with a French publisher for a mass-market work on the ancient history of the region.

  His success, his women, and rumors of wealth had made him the source of considerable professional resentmentand gossip. Martineau, though hardly talkative about his personal life, had never made a secret of his provenance. His late father, Henri Martineau, had dabbledin business and diplomacy and failed spectacularly at both. Martineau, upon the death of his mother, had sold the family’s large home in Avignon, along with a second property in the rural Vaucluse. He had been living comfortablyon the proceeds ever since. He had a large flat near the university in Aix, a comfortable villa in the Lubéron village of Lacoste, and a small pied-à-terre in Montmartre in Paris. When asked why he had chosen archaeology, he would reply that he was fascinated by the question of why civilizations came and went and what brought about their demise. Others sensed in him a certain restiveness, a quiet fury that seemed to be calmed, at least temporarily, by physically plunging his hands into the past.