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 faster 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.