The Glory Boys Read online

  'When will they reach the blocking point, on their present route?' He spoke to his aide.

  'Four to five minutes, sir. Not longer. Just the far side of Fauquembergues, at the cross-roads. Where the petrol station and the cafe are.'

  'Two men?'

  'Two, sir. Roben and Miniux. We're in touch with them.

  They are alerted and have been told they have only to hold the fedayeen a few minutes. The larger force is already heading toward the point.'

  'Tell them to go carefully,' he said, adding as an aside -

  because he too was now consumed with concern — 'it was not intended only two should make the interception.'

  It was the driver who spotted the red light in the centre of the road.

  It was being waved slowly up and down, the international sign to halt. As he closed the distance the gendarme's fluorescent arm-band gleamed back at him above the brightness of the torch. He shouted to the others.

  'There in the front. A police check. They're waving us down.'

  It was the moment for one of the three to take control.

  The man in the back was the first to react, perhaps because it was he who clasped the only firearm in the car. Someone had to lead. There had been too much indecision in the previous few minutes, too many voices raised, his own among them. He leaned forward, head and shoulders pressing over the top of the front seat. His voice was shrill, but clear and commanding.

  'Burst right past him. Don't hesitate, don't slow at all.

  Go to his left and speed faster as we go by. He'll be armed, so keep your bodies low as you can . . . right down. Don't hesitate .. . and when you get very close, put down the front lights, then on again.'

  The car hurtled towards the lone policeman, bearing down on him at some twenty-seven metres a second. The driver could see the whiteness of his face above the dark of the uniform and rain cape, could see the shape of the torch, beam now agitated, and the movement of the illuminated arm wrestling with the webbing strap across the right shoulder. The driver could see the fear fill the face, the eyes grow large. His feet were rooted to the ground, rabbit-like, transfixed.

  'Kill the lights!'

  The command was barked from the back of the car, and the driver instinctively carried out the instruction. Too much initiative had been heaped on his shoulders before; now he was just able to obey, to react. Fifty metres in front of him the policeman disappeared into the blackness.

  Almost immediately came the next order.

  'On again, the lights.'

  The driver shrieked with horror. Ten paces beyond the front of the car was the policeman, directly in their path, his sub-machine-gun close to his hip, pointed directly at the windscreen. He never fired.

  The radiator of the car smashed into his upper thighs.

  His body jack-knifed into the air. The car recoiled from the impact, then shuddered again as the policeman clipped the roof before spiralling over the top of the car. The driver swerved across to the right, late and with effort, just avoiding the blue patrol car parked at an angle and filling the road. The man beside him felt the nausea rising deep in his intestines and into the constricted pipe of his throat.

  The third man had closed his eyes just before the fragile, toy-like figure was brushed aside, trying to shut out the vision of the gaping, incredulous mouth of the policeman.

  As Roben hit the road surface, shattering his vertebrae, and destroying what faint source of life was left to him, Miniux opened fire.

  From the car they saw the policeman who crouched back from the road and close to the ditch. At his shoulder was the steel-framed butt of the squat MAT 49. There were thirty-two nine-millimetre rounds in the magazine, and he fired them all at the car, moving his finger from the trigger only when the hammering kick of the weapon subsided. The bullets ploughed their way first into the engine of the car, then worked their pattern back toward the interior. The first to die was the front passenger, four shells hitting him in the chest. The driver too was struck, feeling the pain spreading from his left arm and then into the torn wounds in his side. But the man behind, protected by the bodywork and the seats of the car, survived the low velocity spray.

  The car veered first to the left, then wove a way down the centre of the road as the driver fought to maintain a direction against the contradictions of the damaged steering system. His head went down once, but he jerked it upward, taking in again the contours of road, hedges and fields. A few more metres, perhaps, but not a journey. He was incapable of that, he knew. Strong enough only to get clear of the awfulness of the noise of the bullets, and the smell that they brought, and the terror that followed the collapse of the windscreen and the side windows.

  He managed another three hundred metres down the road, then with great effort dragged his foot across to the brake. It took so much force to bring the car to a stop.

  Vermilion blood, his own blood, billowed and spilled across his knees, and ran to a pool on the rubber mat under his feet. That was death, he could recognize that.

  There was no way to staunch that life-flow. He looked at it, abstracted, the desire to rest supreme. The rear door opened and he saw a face at his window and then his own door gaping open. He felt himself sliding out, the rough earth coming to meet him. A hand arrested his fall and held him upright. A voice - familiar, but he could not put a name to it — was close to his ear.

  'Dani, Dani, can you hear me? We have to run from here. Bouchi is dead, he has to be - he's so still. The siren is closing. But I can help you . . . '

  The driver shook his head, very slowly, very deliberately.

  'You go alone.' He paused, seeming to suck in air that his carved lungs could not accept. 'For Palestine, for a free Palestine. You'll remember that when you meet with him.

  Remember Palestine, and remember me, when you meet with the Mushroom Man.'

  His eyes blinked. There was not enough strength to laugh any more, just enough to move the delicate, soft, brown eyelids, and he died.

  The sirens came no closer. Must have stopped at the block, the survivor thought, as he reached inside the back of the car and pulled clear the grip. The Luger was now in his pocket. He ran to the back of the car, unscrewed the petrol tank guard, and thrust his hand into his trousers for a packet of cigarettes. He crumpled the carton, enough for it to fit comfortably into the petrol aperture. With his matches he lit the thickened paper, dropped it into the hole, and sprinted for the comfort of the darkness. He heard the explosion behind him, but didn't turn.

  An official black car brought the Israeli secret service officer to the cross-roads. Roben still lay in the road, a policeman's coat draped over his face, and the car skirted him at crawling pace. Further up was the parked patrol car with a knot of uniformed men round it. They were feeding Miniux with brandy from a flask. A long way beyond that, difficult to see clearly, was the smoking skeleton of the burned-out vehicle.

  'How many have we found here . . . of them?' The Israeli pointed down the road.

  'We found the two men. They are still inside - unrecognizable, of course. There will be problems of identification.

  The car reached that far, the policeman who fired on it says after it stopped it caught fire. That could be expected: it took many bullets.'

  The Israeli looked back at the detective who had spoken, then started out into the short horizon that would soon be broken in the first pencil-line of dawn. He said, 'It's very strange. Just two of them. The information that we gave in Paris was that there were three travelling. Perhaps we have lost one. Mislaid him somewhere on the way.'

  TWO

  The young Arab's sole preoccupation was to put distance between himself and his pursuers. He had sprinted the first few hundred metres till the sodden fields and the churned mud of the farm animals had taken their toll of his strength. His feet sunk into the softened ground, causing him to heave and pull to withdraw them. Soon he had swiched to a more gentle trot - not to safeguard his strength, but simply because he was not capable of f
aster movement. He punched his way through thick hedges, tore his coat on a strand of wire, fell once when trying to keep up his momentum and clear a dried-out ditch. But all the time he kept on his way.

  He reasoned that if he were fortunate there would be no search in daylight, and that the gendarmes would be satisfied with the debris of the car. They would poke about among the charred bodies, and find little justification in launching a manhunt for him. That was if he was lucky. If they were coming after him now it meant that the following car had spotted the three of them when the lights swept the inside the second before they ducked down to avoid the brightness and the recognition.

  Or the one who had fired from the side of the road, the one they had never seen, what if he had seen them in silhouette as they sped past him? If he had counted three, then they would now be massing with their dogs, and their cordons, and their large-scale maps. The bag that dragged him down with its weight - that would be his salvation.

  Here was the vital change of clothes, the travel documents, the mould back into society when he arrived at the ferry port.

  Once, when he slipped past a darkened farmhouse, old, rectangular and alien, there was barking, but otherwise his journey was a silent one. There would be no help for him in this wet and clammy countryside. He must keep going, however much the pain in his stomach, from the violent exertion without food, slowed him down. It would be difficult to move once the sun rose away behind him -

  where the car was, where Bouchi and Dani lay — but till then he must continue to run.

  This was what the training had all been for. This was why they had urged and pummelled the recruits up the soft shale hills of Fatahland, why they had screamed and kicked them to the point beyond exhaustion, toed them into activity when they collapsed, and then, when they could move no more, left them to find their own slow path back to the tented camps. And the next morning it had been the same, and the next. .. and the n e x t . . . They had gone on driving the young men till their stomach sinews had hardened, their lungs were cavernous, and their thigh muscles rippled and rolled in use. After that, and only then, they taught them weapon drills, the craft of being in open country. Then had come the sophistications of disguise and concealment.

  When he had first arrived at his camp, he had been a raw, attractive and intelligent young man, but they had spotted the bitterness, and turned his hatred of Israel into an obsession. It had not taken them long: seven weeks of the intensive course had been enough. The product was then ready for use. The determination sharpened, the viciousness honed: the mark of the killer. That was the role they had fashioned for Abdel-El-Famy. They were pleased with what they saw, and confident of success when they gave him his orders.

  The man who now struggled and heaved his way over the fields of northern France, hugging the hedgerows for protection from the eyes of the country people who would soon be rising from their beds, was a very small pawn in the complex power-game of the Middle East. Individually he was insignificant, unexceptional. Under his given name he featured on one of the tens of thousands of personal files maintained by the Israelis and Western European intelligence services.

  Back in Nablus, the sprawling valley town on the Israeli-occupied West Bank of the Jordan river, he had flung stones at the Israeli soldiers who every afternoon a little before one o'clock massed close to the school gates. There was nothing particular about that. All the High School children did it, all were at some stage caught in the pincer nets of sprinting Jewish soldiers, thwacked on the head and shoulders by the billy sticks, and taken off in lorries to the barbed-wire compound and left to cool their heels for a few hours. He'd been through the process, known that when the officer and the 'political adviser' came to interview them it was not the time for insolence. He'd bided his silence then, and been sent home - with an army boot in the seat of his jeans to help him on his way.

  Nobody filled in papers about boys like that; it would have tied up the bureaucracy for a lifetime.

  But the regular afternoon rock-throwing, and the sprint back to the safety of the labyrinth of alleys and deep shops in the casbah, affected young people in a different way.

  Some grew beyond it, learned to control their dislike of the occupying force, and as age and responsibilities increased were able to co-exist with the new order. A few, a very few, were left scarred by the experience. Abdel-El-Famy was one of those, and tilted, half-consciously, away from passive acceptance. At eighteen he had left Nablus, had taken the bus that wound into the Jordan valley and crawled for fourteen hours across the Jordanian and Syrian plains before dropping down through the winding Lebanese hills to Beirut. There were always places in the Palestinian-orientated universities for those from the Occupied West Bank. Those who had lived under Israeli rule, and rejected it to come out, were traditionally lionized. He enrolled for a course in English studies, was a good student, but throughout was brushing against a quite new science, one that away in Nablus the military governor had effectively stamped out: the science of revolutionary politics.

  Through the long, hot afternoons after classes, the students sat at the cafe on the Corniche disputing the road to the recovery of Palestine. Choking them from the exhausts were the huge Fords and Cadillacs that paraded the tourists and visitors through the city. A few hundred yards down the road was the looming bulk of the United States of America's embassy complex, complete with heavily-armed personnel carriers manned by Lebanese troops.

  The open jeeps of the Squad I6 militia, with their angled, crimson berets and toy-like Armalite rifles, would cruise past the young people, eyeing them, letting them have no doubt that they were in a foreign country, without rights and without privileges. They were strangers; tolerated, but not welcomed. They could only afford the thin, upright bottles of Pepsi-Cola, which they had to drink with patience and restraint to make last. And while they sat and watched the affluence and arrogance of another country, they argued and bickered over the way to regain their own State. In the old days it had been clear that the answer lay in violence, and they had clubbed together their piastres to buy the papers — Arabic, French language and in English —that carried the long and detailed reports of the activities of Black September and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Two bottles had lasted all day in the roadside cafe where they had settled with their papers and a transistor radio to hear the news of the assault on the Olympic Village in Germany. Fifth September, 1972.: it had been a drawn-out and heroic day. They had wor-shipped the fedayeen who died on the airport apron at Furstenfeldbruck, reviled what they called the 'treachery'

  of the German police in ambushing them, rejoiced at the death of eleven Israeli sportsmen.

  But out of the violence of Munich was born a respect-ability for the Palestine cause; and the leaders, so the young people in the cafes said, were beginning to anticipate the leathered seats around the conference tables, the scent of the huge black official cars that would carry them there, were wanting to finger the gold-cased pens that signed and initialled treaties. The arguments in the bright heat, with the sea shimmering up to the beach front, became more bitter, more divided. There were some who said any Palestinian State was better than nothing, however small, however much an exercise in diplomatic geometry, wherever the lines were drawn. There were others who saw only the complete return to their former lands as being sufficient, the argument of no compromise. This was the view of Abdel-El-Famy. He understood that the table-based arguments would only sap his resolve and desire for revenge. His presence at the cafes became less and less frequent, as he sought out the men untainted by weakness who were prepared to fight on regardless of any moves by the leadership of the Palestinian refugee community towards a half-peace.

  He joined the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine General Command, a small but deadly organ in the so-called 'Rejection Front'. He became one of fifty-five young men, aged between seventeen and twenty-five, who had taken a solemn oath of initiation, who knew they would be sent on missions with
little prospect of return or survival. It was as he had wanted it.

  Just eight days ago he had been called forward from morning parade and instructed to present himself at the tent of the General Command's leader. There were three others inside when he opened the flap door, their faces all in shadow from the diffused light that passed through the grey canvas roofing. Apart from the man who directed the General Command's operations, the only figures he knew were those of 'Bouchi' and 'Dani' - new arrivals, placed with different training sections, and therefore virtual strangers. They were told they would be travelling to London, that their mission was regarded as of the utmost importance to the whole Arab movement. They were given a code-name, and an operational plan to work to, and a target to seek out. Abdel-El-Famy was no longer a penni-less refugee, from a bare bungalow in the hill above the market place of Nablus. His existence had taken on a new purpose, and, like a stoat hungry for rabbit's blood, he was not to be easily deflected. His threat to the uneasy peace of the Middle East was enormous, and if he succeeded the reverberations of his action would be felt by millions throughout the Western world.

  Famy lay high up among the bales in the roof of the barn.

  It was past eight, and he had been resting there for more than twenty minutes, yet still the breath came hard for him, and the sweat rolled in great rivers from the shiny, dank hair down across his face and on to his shoulders.

  He had stripped off his clothes, except his yellow underpants, and lay prone on the hard, irritating surface of the packed straw. He estimated he had travelled twenty-five kilometres. Four hours. One more such effort and he would be in Boulogne and ready for the ferry. He had decided it was better to arrive a day late in England by roughing it across country to the ferry port rather than risking all in the hope of finding a bus and a lift on the roads in the immediate aftermath of the interception. He would stay in the barn all day, emerging only as darkness fell again over the fields.