Gerald Seymour - At Close Quarters

"I'd want him killed."

They were at the seventh rally point of the night.

It was where Crane had told him they would spend the few minutes of rest. An exact man was Crane, each rally point reached on time, the perfect instrument of vengeance.

Holt huddled against Crane. The wind caught at the sweat running on his body and chilled him.

"Can I talk?"

"Whisper, youngster."

"Where are they?"

"Ahead, perhaps a quarter of a mile."

"And it's a hostage?"

"What I reckon."

Holt swallowed hard. He caught at the sleeve of Crane's tunic shirt.

"He's more valuable."

"Riddles, youngster."

' 'A hostage is more valuable than sniping Abu Hamid."

"You know what you're saying?"

"There is more value in bringing back a hostage alive than in leaving Abu Hamid dead behind us."

"I didn't hear that." Crane tugged his sleeve clear.

"To bring back a hostage alive, that is a genuine act of mercy."

"Then you're forgetting something, youngster."

"I am not forgetting a fellow human being in danger."

"Forgetting something big."

"What is bigger than rescuing a man from that sort of hell?"

"Your promise, that's what you're forgetting."

"A hostage is alive, a hostage is an innocent…"

Crane turned away, his voice was soft and cut the edge of the night wind. "I gave my word, youngster. I don't play skittles with a promise."

"A hostage is worth saving. Is Abu Hamid worth killing?"

"I gave my promise. Pity you don't see that that's important."

"They aren't worth it, the people who've got your promise."

"Time to move."

"A hostage's freedom is worth more than your promise."

"I said it was time to move."

Holt stood.

"If I ever get out of this I'll hate you, Mr Crane, for abandoning a hostage."

"If you ever get out of this, youngster, it'll be because of my promise… Just stop pissing in the wind."

Crane searched the ground ahead with the pocket night sight. They moved off. The gap between them materialised. Holt could hear the distant sounds ahead of the progress of a hostage and his captors. To the east of them, below them, was the village town of Khirbet Qanafar. They went quiet, traversing the slope side of the valley wall. When they next stopped they would be at the lying up position overlooking the tent camp.

In the village town of Khirbet Qanafar the merchant lay on a rope bed and snored away the night hours.

Many years before, when he had first forsaken his lecture classes at Beer Sheba and moved into his clandestine life in Lebanon, he had found sleep hard to come by, he had felt the persistent fear of discovery. No longer; he slept well covered by a blanket that he fancied had come from the headman's own bed.

Beside the chair on which were laid his outer clothes, the merchant had spread out two plastic bags of the sort that were used to carry agricultural fertiliser. On these empty bags he had laid all the working parts of the pump engine that brought up water from one of Khirbet Qanafar's three irrigation wells. He had dismantled the pump engine during the late afternoon and early evening, then he had eaten with the headman and the headman's sons. In the morning, after he had woken and washed and fed, he would begin to reassemble the pump engine. He knew the reassembly would take him many hours, perhaps most of the day. He knew that in the dusk of the following day he would still be at Khirbet Q a n a f a r. It was all as he had planned it. Crane would snipe at dusk. He slept easily, he was in position, as he had been told to be.

But how much longer, how many more years, could a university lecturer play the part of a merchant in spare parts for electrical engines and sleep in the bed of an enemy?

When he felt the softness of her body turn to cold, Abu Hamid rose to his feet.

The candle had gone, but the electricity supply was restored and light was thrown into the room from the alley way.

She lay at his feet. Only an awkwardness about the tilt of her throat and the lie of her head.

He went to the window. He edged the thin curtains aside. He saw the jeep parked at the end of the alley.

There was the auburn glow of the driver's cigarette.

He had been briefed on the plan for the attack against the Defence Ministry on Kaplan. They asked him for his life, and for the lives of the men who would travel with him. Of course, they would watch over him.

He lay on her bed. He smelled the perfume of the sheets and the pillows. He remembered the small, groping hands of the boy child she had placed with gentleness on his shoulder.

Heinrich Gunter was pushed down onto his hands and his knees. As he propelled himself forward over the rough rock floor he sensed the damp mustiness of the cave.

All according to Crane's bible. They moved through the lying up position then doubled back to circle it.

They settled. Away below them were the lights of the camp, and the chugging drive of the generator carried up to their high ground.

Flooding it with gold light, the dawn slipped over the rim of the far valley wall.

It was as if the valley exploded in brilliance, with the low beams of the sun's thrust catching the lines and colours of the Beqa'a. At dawn, at a few minutes before »tx o'clock, the valley was a place of quiet beauty. The sun caught the clean geometric lines of the irrigation channels, it flowed over the delicate green shades of the early growth of barley and wheat, it bathed the rough strength of the grey yellow rock outcrops, it glinted on the red tile roofs of Khirbet Qanafar, it shone on the corrugated iron roofs of a commando camp. The sun laced onto the windscreen of a travelling car. The sun pushed down long shadows from the bodies of a flock of sheep driven by a child towards the uplands of the valley to the plateau where it would be cooler when the sun was high. The sun burnished the scrubbed whiteness of a flag that carried in its centre an outline of the Zionist state that was overpainted with crossed rifles with fixed bayonets.

And the sun, striking out, gave a shape to the conical tents of the camp.

The camp was no surprise, it was familiar from the aerial photographs.

There was the wire perimeter. There was the anti-tank ditch. There was the cluster of large sleeping tents.

There was the latrine screen. There were the holes in the ground of the air raid pits, and of the armoury.

There was the tent of the commander, set aside. There was the roof above the cooking area.

The generator had been switched off at the first surge of daylight, as if light were only needed as a protection against the dangers of the night. A complete silence at the tent camp. The only movement was the turn and wheel and casual stamp of the sentry at the entrance to the camp, and the hustling of the cook as he revived the fire after the night, and the drift towards the sun orb of the wavering smoke column, and the flag fluttering out the emblem of the Popular Front.

Above the camp, at a place where the steeper sides of the valley wall flattened out to offer a more gentle slope to the floor of the Beqa'a, the ancient ice age movements had left a gouged-out overhang of rock. The space under the lip of the protruding rock was shallow, not more than three feet deep, but the overhang ran some ten feet in length. The overhang was unremarkable. In the half mile or so to either side of this particular formation there were another nine similar devastations of the general line of the ground fall.

The overhang of rock was the place chosen by Crane for the final lying up position.

Crane asleep.

Holt on watch.

The sun lifted clear of the Jabal Aarbi on the east side of the Beqa'a. It was extraordinary for Holt how fast the cleanness of the light began to diffuse into haze. The sun was climbing. He tugged his watch out from under his tunic top, checked the time. Crane was sleeping well, like he needed to sleep. He would liked to have left Crane to sleep longer, to have the chance to rest the eye and to bring back strength into his muscles and calm into his mind. The watch was the taskmaster. He would be chewed out if he allowed Crane to sleep beyond his allotted time. He touched Crane's shoulder. Since they had reached the lying up position he had slept for an hour, and Crane had slept for an hour. But the sun was now up, and the camp was stirring. He could not think when they would next sleep.