Blow the House Down (17 page)

CHAPTER 24

Gaza City, Gaza

O
NE
P
ALESTINIAN REFUGEE CAMP
looks pretty much like another: unfinished cinder-block houses intersected by dirt roads, mounds of rotting trash, posters of suicide bombers pasted on the walls. But the Gaza Strip's Beach Camp is different—narrower streets, more rubble, more menacing. Although the Israelis regularly hit the place with drones and F-16's, Israeli assassination teams stayed clear of it. It was too dangerous.

I walked up and down the Beach Camp's main street, looking for the Port Video, but it wasn't where it was supposed to be. Either it never existed or it was long gone. Back on the coast road, I found a man in his sixties, manning a vegetable cart. He thought about it, rubbing his chin, and then pointed at an abandoned building three houses back along the road I'd just come down. “Maybe it was there, I think,” he said. “It closed a long time ago.”

I went back up and had a look, but there was nothing to show it had ever been a video store or anything else. Rebars stuck out of the unfinished third floor, waiting for an addition that there would never be enough money for. I kept having the feeling I'd wandered onto a Becket stage set.

Across the street, I noticed a gaunt kid in a ripped Che Guevara T-shirt and military fatigue pants, maybe all of fourteen, toothpick arms folded across his chest. He was leaning against a wall, watching me.

I walked over to him. “Do you know where I can find Nabil Shahadah?”

Instead of answering, the kid pushed himself off the wall, sauntered a few steps down the pitted mud road, and disappeared into the interior of the camp. I waited ten minutes but he never came back.

Saleh had lied to me so I'd go away, I figured. It was that simple: a video store that wasn't a video store for the journalist who wasn't a journalist. But maybe it was more than that. Maybe I was being set up. The obvious next move was to head back to my hotel and get back into Israel as fast as I could. Instead, I decided to make another attempt to find Nabil in the morning.

 

It was too humid to sleep. The electricity was off. There was no breeze. Only the mosquitos were stirring. For company, I had a late wedding party outside my window. Around one in the morning I gave up on sleep altogether and went out for a walk, south along the road toward Gaza's fishing port. I was nearly out the door before I remembered to grab my pad and photos. Never, ever leave anything in a hotel room.

It was better walking along the beach. There was a puff of a breeze off the water. Thousands of lights twinkled offshore—fishing boats—none of them more than two miles out because of the Israeli blockade. I was a hundred yards down from the hotel when I noticed someone following me. I crossed the street diagonally and caught a glimpse of him: the kid with the toothpick arms from that afternoon. He followed me across the street, gaining on me.

“Come,” he said in English.

He turned away from the beach road into a poor neighborhood. I followed him through a maze of cardboard shacks, sheet-metal lean-tos, and more rough cinder-block houses with open sewers running beside them. We came to a trash dump watched by two Fedayeen in fatigues, sitting in the back of a Toyota pickup with a .30-caliber, belt-fed machine gun cradled between their knees.

The kid left me there, just turned and seemed to disappear through one of the cinder-block walls that ran alongside the dump. The humidity and stench had my stomach roiling. Happily, I'd eaten almost nothing that day.

One of the Fedayeen motioned me to an old Toyota Land Cruiser, indicating I was to get into the backseat. The other Fedayeen got in with me, forced me on the floor, and threw a blanket over me.

We drove around for a full hour, cutting through back streets, onto an open highway, and then across a washboard dirt road. At one point, the Toyota bottomed out over what felt like a trench, slamming me hard against the floor.

When we eventually stopped, someone pulled me roughly out of the back, pushed me against the side of the car, and yanked the eight-by-eleven pad and photos out of my hand. Two new Fedayeen, faces covered with kafiyahs, walked up to us. The taller was carrying a stubby AK with a grenade launcher under the barrel. The short one grabbed me by the arm and led me down a couple of narrowing alleys and through the ground floors of two plywood houses until we came to a house that had been used as an abattoir, and not long ago. Dried blood covered the walls and ran across the floor into the alley. There were no windows. The minute the Fedayeen closed the door behind me, I was cast into pitch black.

I stood there I don't know how long—I was afraid to even sit down—until a grinding noise started up outside, as if something large were chewing on the corner of our bunker-building. With that, the taller of the two most recent Palestinian escorts came through the door with a hand metal detector. He waved it over me, looking for a beacon or transponder. Satisfied, he signaled for me to follow him.

The room I was led into was darkened, except for a television. In the glow of the screen, I could see a man sitting in a plastic lawn chair. He was alone.

A video was playing—jerky, grainy footage taken by a handheld camera. I could hear the cameraman talk to someone behind him, telling him to be patient. “He will be here soon,” he said. It looked like Gaza, with the fence and the guard tower of a settlement in one corner of the frame.

A bus appeared out of the lower left of the picture, bumping along a gravel road, throwing up plumes of dust. A couple seconds behind it came a Pajero, gaining on the bus. The camera panned left, following the bus to what was now clearly a Jewish settlement surrounded by razor wire. The Pajero inexplicably slowed, and the bus passed through the gates of the settlement.

“This is where he loses his faith,” the man sitting in the chair said. “But not for long. Watch.”

The Pajero swung around to the main road, turned right, and picked up speed fast. Just for a moment, you could see the face of the driver—a boy, his head barely above the window. You couldn't see where he was headed until the cameraman panned right and picked up an Israeli military jeep, mesh over the windows, a long whip antenna. The jeep suddenly stopped, the doors flew open, and two Israeli soldiers started to sprint away from the jeep. The Pajero was maybe ten yards away from the jeep when it exploded, sending plumes of dust and rocks in all directions. Seconds later the two Israeli soldiers ran out of the cloud of debris, sandblasted but alive.

The man switched off the TV and turned on the table light next to him. It was Nabil Shahadah. A dozen years older, but I recognized him from the Peshawar photo.

Nabil was a small man, still rail thin with unruly hair and a great hedge of a mustache that looked to be dyed jet-black. His body, though, couldn't hide the hard years on the run. A wound or maybe arthritis had taken over his knees. He grunted, pushed himself to his feet, and walked stiff-legged over to the hot plate in the corner to turn on the gas burner to make coffee. He worked silently until the coffee was ready, then carried a cup over to me and settled down again with his own.

“The target was the bus, wasn't it?” I asked.

Nabil nodded.

“It looked like there were children on it.”

“There were,” he said, bristling. “Do Israeli F-16's differentiate between children and our martyrs?”

I knew I had to let it go. That's not what I'd come for. Still, I was curious. During the Iran-Iraq war, the Iranian suicide bombers hit only military targets. In Lebanon in the eighties, it was the same thing—military targets only. Then Nabil and Hamas changed the rules when they started targeting buses. It was now slaughter for slaughter's sake, a pornography of violence.

“Why did you want to see me?” he asked. “The Israelis couldn't have sent you. They're not that dumb.”

“Give me back my stuff. I want to show you something.”

Nabil yelled at the darkened doorway. When one of the Fedayeen came in, Nabil whispered in his ear and sent him off. The Fedayeen was back in two minutes. I handed Nabil the photo of his parents and the letter.

“I saw your parents two days ago. I took their picture. But I'm not going to lie to you that I came here for that. I need you to help me find someone.”

I probably imagined it, but Nabil looked as if he was softening, holding the picture of his mother and father.

“What is it you want?” he asked, turning back to me.

I pulled out the Peshawar photo and handed it to him. He looked surprised. I could tell he'd never seen it before, probably even forgotten he'd been photographed that day. For Nabil, Peshawar must have been a lifetime ago.

“You're standing on the far right,” I said. “The man I am looking for is on the far left. The slight guy with the fine features. I'm pretty sure he's Iranian. Maybe a Pasdaran officer.”

“He was. But I don't remember his name. On the other hand, it doesn't matter.”

“Why?”

“He's dead.”

CHAPTER 25

W
E SAT ON A BLANKET
on the bare cement floor and picked at a plate of flatbread, olives, and yogurt, and drank tea. Blackout curtains covered the window, but I could tell it was turning light.

“The Iranian.” I said. “Frankly, I find it hard to believe he's dead.”

It wasn't going to help to tell Nabil about my history with the photo. But if Mousavi really was dead, I was more confused than ever as to why Millis had dragged it along with him to the Breezeway Motel. Or why anyone wanted to grab it from me now.

“Whatever this man means to you, he's dead. I'm sure.”

“Someone misinformed you maybe.”

“My people were there. A bombardment in Lebanon, two years ago. A 155-round landed on the house he was sleeping in.”

It was all a waste of time coming here, I thought. I was out of questions, frustrated, not sure where to go next. And yet a minute later, I don't know what it was—training, twenty-five years of running informants, curiosity—but I realized I'd come too far to stop asking questions now.

“Tell me about the day the photo was taken.”

Nabil said he was coming back from Karachi and stopped by to see bin Laden. Bin Laden had guests. They were closeted in a back bedroom when he arrived.

“First to come out was bin Laden. Then an old man, a foreigner. He was wearing a salwar chemise.”

Nabil picked up the picture and pointed at the man with the missing head.

“I think it was him. He had a cane, but you can't see it in the photo.”

“A foreigner?”

“An American. He spoke to me in English. He had an American accent.”

That surprised me. Even during the Afghan war when bin Laden was nominally allied with the United States, he was a strict Wahhabi and avoided Americans. Europeans, too. Nabil must have been mistaken. Maybe it was a foreigner who spoke American English.

“Who was he?”

“I don't know.”

“Why was he there?”

“He couldn't stand for very long. Bin Laden was worried about his health. But the man seemed perfectly at ease, like he'd known bin Laden for a long time. I wondered if he was one of those Americans who seem happy only when they're away from home. I have no idea why he was there.”

“He spoke English with bin Laden?”

“No. He spoke to bin Laden in Arabic. And later he spoke to me in Arabic. Fluent, classical Arabic.”

That was even stranger.

“Then I heard him and the Iranian speaking in Farsi. They spoke very fast. It sounded to me like the American's Farsi was fluent, too.”

“Wait. The American knew the Iranian?”

Now it was getting really interesting. For a start, only a handful of Westerners speak both fluent Arabic and Farsi. But throw in the fact that he knew the man who may have kidnapped and killed Bill Buckley, and I was starting to understand why someone had cut this man's head out of the photo. Who in the hell was he? I still wasn't convinced he was American.

“Did the Iranian have red hair?” I asked.

“Maybe. I can't remember. There are a lot of Iranians with red hair.”

“His eyes?”

“I don't remember. It was a long time ago.”

This wasn't going anywhere, and my interest shifted back to the American. The easy answer was he was a journalist. The war was hot. Bin Laden was a scoop. But then again I'd never heard of an American journalist speaking fluent Arabic and Farsi. And they certainly don't make friends with Iranian Pasdaran officers. Something about that day was critically important. I just couldn't nail it down.

“Wait a minute,” I said. “Who took the picture?”

“Khalid.”

“Khalid who?”

“I never knew his surname even though he was always at bin Laden's house. He was a Kuwaiti. And like the Iranian, the American knew Khalid. He kept putting his hand on Khalid's shoulder. The American had a camera with him. He asked Khalid to take the picture. ‘To memorialize the passing of the torch,' he said. I remember because I didn't know what he meant. Khalid drove away that day in the same car with the American and the Iranian.”

“Don't you find this all very strange?”

“I don't have an answer. You need to talk to the other person who was there that day. A Kuwaiti. A prince of the Al Sabah.” He pointed to the young man, almost a boy, immediately to bin Laden's right.

I'd forgotten the Gulf prince. Neither Millis nor I could place him, and I'd just assumed he was some inconsequential hanger-on.

“The prince knows Khalid. And he has this very strange story, which I know only part of.”

“Where is he now?” I said.

“In Lebanon. The Biqa' Valley.”

Lebanon wasn't my first choice of places to go—hell, it wasn't my second or third choice, either. The Pasdaran still had free range of the country, and if they thought I was back looking for Buckley's kidnapper, they might try to put an end to my hunt for good. But now with this new piece of information that there was an American—or whoever he was—in touch with both bin Laden and a Pasdaran officer, there was no way I wasn't going to go see Prince Al Sabah and ask him what he knew about it.

One of the Fedayeen was waiting outside to lead me back to my hotel. When I turned to say good-bye to Nabil, he was still sitting in his plastic lawn chair, looking at the picture of his mother and father. In a way, we weren't that different, both of us shoved in a corner, our room for maneuvering narrowing by the day, both hanging on to a photo.