Matt Rees - A grave in Gaza

Omar Yussef gave a low growl of frustration. These were hopeless thoughts-if Wallender wasn’t at Salah’s house, he wasn’t going to find him at all. His colleague would remain at the mercy of whichever of the different gangs might be holding him. The Saladin Brigades would reclaim their missile, have it copied, shoot it over the border fence into Israel, and draw down a new war on the people of Gaza. At least someone will be happy, he thought. He clenched his fists behind his back.

Heavy footsteps approached fast from the rear of the apartment. In the darkness around the far sofa, the orange tip of Sami’s cigarette dipped toward the coffee table and was crushed out. He was standing next to Omar Yussef when Attiah Odwan came to the door. Across his strong, rounded chest, he braced a Carl Gustav sub-machinegun. He had eight grenades clipped to his belt and his vest was bulky with spare magazines for the gun. He gestured with his head for them to follow.

At the foot of the stairs, three jeeps idled with their headlights off. The men inside had wrapped their keffiyehs around their faces against the dust. Omar Yussef never wore this checkered scarf, but he wished he had one now, even though it was a mark of rustic simplicity. He couldn’t tell if he was cold because he wore only a shirt or because the tension in his muscles cut off his blood. He coughed and sat beside Sami in the first jeep. Abu Jamal came quickly down the stairs. He put on a green forage cap and took his place in the front seat. Attiah Odwan jogged to the corner of the main street and glanced quickly along it before gesturing to the convoy to move. He slid into the back seat beside Omar Yussef.

As he edged across the seat to make room, Omar Yussef struck his head on something metal. The blow reignited the bruises from Wallender’s kidnapping and he grunted with the pain. He turned to glare at one of the gunmen in the luggage space at the back of the jeep, who was withdrawing the thick tube of a shoulder-launched missile like the one Omar Yussef had seen used against General Husseini’s home that morning. The gunman put the missile next to another which he held upright between his legs. The gunman tapped his knuckle against the missile launcher where it had hit Omar Yussef’s head and shrugged, his apologetic eyes showing between the folds of his keffiyeh.

“Be careful,” Omar Yussef said. “One bullet will be enough to blow my head off. Don’t waste your missile.”

Abu Jamal glanced to the rear of the jeep and spoke to the man with the LAW anti-tank missiles. “When we get there, stay close to me.”

The jeeps went fast down the main street. If it had been quiet in the early evening, now it was ghostly and empty. The nights in Rafah belonged to the gunmen, the smugglers and, sometimes, the Israeli undercover squads.

Sami lit a cigarette and handed the pack to the grateful gunmen in the back. Attiah Odwan declined the smokes.

“What do you intend to do at Salah’s house?” Omar Yussef asked Abu Jamal.

Abu Jamal’s head and shoulders rocked with the jolting of the jeep over the rough road. He was loose and relaxed. “We will achieve revenge for Attiah’s brother,” he said.

Omar Yussef knew there would be more deaths tonight. In the quiet jeep, he wondered if his reasoning about Yasser Salah was correct. What if he was bringing down this merciless, heavily armed force on an innocent family? A low hint of panic pulsed through him. He thought perhaps he should slow the gunmen down, while he ran through his logic again. “You might need Yasser Salah alive,” he said. “To guide you to where the missile is hidden.”

“Someone in the family will remain alive to show us,” Abu Jamal said. “I don’t expect it will be Yasser. He isn’t the type.”

“Yasser knows the truth,” Attiah said, quietly.

Omar Yussef turned to the burly man squeezed onto the back seat next to him. “The truth, Attiah?”

“The Salah family demanded the death of my brother Bassam, because they said he killed their son,” Attiah said, staring into the dusty darkness beyond the window. “Their demand was correct under our traditions of blood vengeance. But it wasn’t true that Bassam was the killer. Now, under those same traditions, I will take revenge. My revenge is true.”

Omar Yussef thought about that for a while. “Do you expect the Salahs to put up much of a fight, Abu Jamal?”

Abu Jamal lifted his hands before him in a shrug. “Those who die for the resistance go to Heaven,” he said. “Those whom we kill go to Hell.”

I don’t believe in Heaven, Omar Yussef thought. He looked into the murky night. They were in the half-demolished section of Rafah, where the walls were pocked with bullet holes, framed by jagged, blasted edges ripped by tank shells. And Hell is right here.

The first jeep slowed and rounded the corner of the alley that led to the Salah family home. It crept toward the sandy lot where James Cree had parked the UN Suburban a day and a half earlier. Omar Yussef frowned. It seemed so long ago, almost as if Cree had been dead as many years as his namesake in the British War Cemetery. How old would that make me? he thought. I’ve lived lifetimes today.

The second jeep came alongside it and the last one rolled around to the west of the house. The gunmen climbed quietly from their jeeps. Omar Yussef stepped stiffly onto the sand, rolling his shoulders after being squeezed between Sami and Attiah.

The house was dark. Through the swirling dust, Omar Yussef could see the black canvas of the mourning tent flapping in the wind and hear its low, steady resonance. The olive trees rustled above the perimeter wall. He took a few steps down the lane and looked toward the garage at the back of the house, which he and Cree had passed as they left the day before. His eyes strained into the darkness. A faint rim of light glowed around the door between the garage and the garden. The wind gusted and Omar Yussef blinked against the dust. When he opened his eyes, the light in the garage was out. Someone knew they were there.

The gunmen scuttled across the sand toward the perimeter wall. Omar Yussef went after them. He picked out Abu Jamal by the peak of his forage cap and whispered his name. He wanted to tell him about the light in the garage. Abu Jamal turned.

A sudden burst of thick, popping gunfire spat from the house. Its baritone harmonized with the bass of the slow, flapping canvas tent. Abu Jamal dropped to his knees. He lifted his Kalashnikov and returned fire toward an upstairs window of the Salah house. His men took cover behind the wall ringing the olive grove. Abu Jamal followed them quickly, still shooting.

Omar Yussef crouched in the middle of the sandy lot, just where he had been when the firing began. He saw the orange muzzle-flashes of the gun upstairs in the Salah home, but when he looked around him in the dark, everything was black. Someone grabbed his waist and trotted him toward the cover of the wall. He fell forward, but he kept going, scrambling on all fours across the sand. He dropped to the ground at the wall and pushed his glasses back into place. He turned, panting. Sami smiled and patted his arm.

The gunmen gathered on either side of the gate, preparing to charge the house. A flash ripped out of the darkness and part of the wall disintegrated. The explosion lifted two of the gunmen and dropped them in the sand a few yards from the gate. Omar Yussef felt the explosion as a wave of deeper heat in the humid night. Yasser booby-trapped the entrance, he thought. One of the men on the sand cried out in pain. Another volley chattered from the machinegun in the upstairs window and both of the fallen gunmen were still. Attiah stood and fired toward the window.

Abu Jamal signaled to the man with the two LAW missiles strapped to his back. The man nodded, readied one of the missiles and edged toward the gate. His shoulders lifted as he took a deep breath. He stepped into the open and fired toward the top of the house. The shell streaked bright blue and red through the window where the gunshots had originated. It struck the cement inside with a sound like the falling of a tall tree and filled the room with light.