For whom, exactly, am I praying? he thought. Gulzhan turned the prisoner around, at the same time removing a resplendent blade from behind his belt, and as he spun him, as he readied to cut the body down, the face came into view, into the light, and it was Uhud’s face — his former young lieutenant. His eyes were leaching tears of blood. His erection was grotesque, unnaturally bloated, huge. Gulzhan heard a man scream. It was his own scream issued somewhere far away, as if by someone else. He screamed and screamed until the darkness fell upon him like a cloak, and Gulzhan woke inside his tent, on his own cot, his shirt soaked through with sweat, winded and paralyzed with fear.
A full minute passed before the narcotic of terror released him. Then Gulzhan swung his legs up, up and over, sat bolt upright and rubbed his salt-and-pepper beard. They were getting worse, he thought — the nightmares. He shuffled over to a writing desk at the far end of the tent. The letter was already complete. All he had to do was fold it and give it away. He looked down at the piece of paper on his desk. It read with cold, uncompromising clarity: We demand that you release El Aqrab within twelve hours, or the Brotherhood of the Crimson Scimitar will detonate a one kiloton nuclear device in Israel.
Chapter 24
Specialist Gal Baror stumbled as he wound his way through the tunnel. Captain Rifkin could hear him. The boy was breathing heavily behind him, touching the stone wall with his fingertips to steady himself in the dark. It was his fourth mission with the Beersheba Bomb Disposal Unit (BBDU), and his first with Rifkin alone. Gal had only just graduated. Rifkin still remembered the moody brown eyes of his fiancée, Tor, and the solemn, studied way she had danced with her future husband at his graduation party a week earlier. Rifkin generally avoided such affairs; he didn’t like to get too close to his men, at least not in the beginning. But Gal was his nephew, his sister’s son, and there had been no ducking it. “Keep still,” he said. “Don’t touch the walls, Gal. They may be booby-trapped.”
And why did everyone bestow upon their children such insipid, sexless name these days? It was as if they yearned to give their kids neutrality, or a false sense of equality between the sexes, with monikers designed to be pronounceable for international consumption. Inoculated. Pasteurized. Stripped of the burden of history. Hebrew, without being Jewish. Shir, Din, Ben, Gal, Tal, Bar. Such noncommittal monosyllables.
“Yes, Captain.”
“How many times do I have to tell you? Call me David, Gal. We don’t stand on ceremony in the BBDU. I don’t want a sniper’s bullet in my spine just because you have a compulsion to salute.”
“Yes… David.”
They came to a bend in the tunnel and Rifkin pointed his flashlight at the map in his left hand. The light illuminated his face. He was a short man in his late thirties, with a heavy frame and the sloping shoulders of a wrestler. His eyes were small, of the darkest malachite green, his eyebrows linked together at the top by a tuft of wiry brown hair. He sported a close-cropped ginger beard.
“Do you think it’s true?” said Gal.
Rifkin didn’t look up. He studied the map. The left branch of the tunnel connected to the well at the heart of the old tel. The right branch ran for another hundred meters or so and linked up with a series of P-style PVC sewage pipes approximately 630 millimeters in diameter.
“David?”
“What is it?” Rifkin answered tartly. He looked over at his nephew. Young Gal was corpulent and slow, clumsy on his feet. But he had a pair of the steadiest hands that Rifkin had ever seen. Of course, the boy had yet to see a friend blown up into a hundred pieces right in front of him. Not everyone got used to that.
“About the agreement. I hear they’re freeing a senior member of the Brotherhood. Perhaps El Aqrab himself.”
“Do you really believe Garron would ever agree to such a thing? Always with the rumors, Gal.” Rifkin turned left, down toward the ancient well.
“Well, that’s what they’re saying.”
Rifkin moved through the semi-darkness without bothering to counter. It had always been Israel’s most stringent policy never to negotiate with terrorists, especially those with blood on their hands, like Gulzhan Baqrah and El Aqrab. Once you started down that path, there was no turning back. And yet, thought Rifkin, if the choice were either nuclear annihilation or letting El Aqrab go free… He could not let the concept linger in his head. He corralled it and drove it away. Thankfully, these were not the kinds of decisions that he was forced to make. His was a world of instantaneous results, where if you made the wrong decision, you knew it right away: either you proceeded to the next step in the process, or you were already dead. Rifkin stepped out of the tunnel and down into a circular room at the heart of the old tel.
“What now?” said Gal.
“We do as we were told. We wait.”
Decker didn’t hear about the bomb until he’d returned to the Bureau’s headquarters in Manhattan from Cape Cod. By then, it was old news. Apparently, Prime Minister Garron had agreed to an exchange — two Israeli businessmen and the remains of some sixteen IDF soldiers for more than 125 Palestinian detainees, including senior members of the PLO and other terrorist organizations. While this was the public story, according to Warhaftig, the Company had it on good authority that only one prisoner was being released — none other than El Aqrab himself. The Israelis were being blackmailed. The Brotherhood of the Crimson Scimitar had placed a nuclear device within the water system of the old town of Beersheba. Exactly where, the Israelis would find out — once El Aqrab was transported safely to the Lebanese border. Only after he had been freed would he provide them with the bomb’s disarming sequence. Otherwise…
Decker was stupefied. It seemed incredible that Garron would let a terrorist like El Aqrab go free. It just didn’t make sense. Johnson disagreed. “What else can he do? Garron has to negotiate, if only to buy time,” he said. “Can you imagine what an atom bomb going off in that region of the world would do? Garron has no choice. And don’t forget: It isn’t simply Israel at stake here. When those desert winds blow, the fallout will run right into Saudi and Iraq. I doubt we want our boys in Baghdad dying, or the Saudi oil fields contaminated just because the Prime Minister of Israel refused to let a single prisoner go free.”
They debated the issue back and forth. “Perhaps he should negotiate,” said Decker. “But I still can’t see him doing it. He’d be sacrificing his conservative base. It’s just not like Garron. And who knows if there really is a bomb?”
“Well, we’ll find out soon enough,” Warhaftig said. “The deadline is six AM.”
“Tomorrow?”
“Six AM in Israel,” said Johnson, cutting in. “Try and keep up, Decker. They’re seven hours ahead of us. We have until eleven PM tonight.” He glanced at his watch. “Less than half an hour now.”
“Oh,” Decker said. But he was already thinking of something else. He’d forgotten about the time difference. Unconsciously, almost despite his active focus on the conversation, he found his mind besieged by numbers: 540,000; 205,200; 334,800; 5,580; and 93.
If the hijacking of the train in Kazakhstan corresponds with the number 540,000; and if the second wallpaper features the number 205,200; the difference is 334,800. And 334,800 seconds from the moment of the hijacking is 5,580 minutes, or 93 hours, or six AM in Israel.
“Wait a minute,” he said. “Perhaps the second wallpaper is linked to Beersheba.” He explained his theory.