Legends

Dante was taken to his living quarters, a room in the back of one of the low brick houses with flat roofs at the edge of the village beyond the perimeter of the Hezbollah camp. At sunup an elderly woman with a veil over the lower part of her face appeared with what passed for breakfast: a steaming pot of green tea to wash down the chalk-dry biscuits covered with an oily paste made from crushed olives. Dante’s bodyguard, who trailed after him everywhere, including to the outhouse, led him down the dirt path to the lip of the quarry. Several young boys in dusty striped robes were already tossing stones at a troop of goats to steer them away from the perimeter fence and up a nearby slope. A yellow Hezbollah flag decorated with a hand holding aloft a rifle flapped from the pole atop the brick building where the explosives and the fuses were stored. High overhead the contrails of Israeli jets on their dawn patrols crisscrossed the sky. Dante’s students, nineteen fedayeen, all in their late teens or early twenties and wearing identical baggy khaki trousers and blouses and thick web belts under their robes, waited at the bottom of the quarry. An older man with an orange and white kaffiyah draped over his shoulders squatted on the rocky ground, setting out cartons filled with pentaerythritol tetranitrate, commonly known as PETN, along with latex, coils of electric wire and plungers powered by automobile batteries. “I, Abdullah, will translate for you,” the man informed Dante when he reached the floor of the quarry. “Please to speak slow in consideration of my English, which is curdled like last week’s goat milk.”

Dante inspected the cartons, then kicked at the coils of wire and the plungers. “We will need modern detonators that can be tripped by radio-controlled devices from distant locations,” he informed Abdullah.

“How far will be the distance to these locations?” Abdullah inquired.

Dante pointed to the goats disappearing over the top of the slope. “We will mix the PETN and the latex in a manner that I will demonstrate,” he said, “and conceal the charges here in the quarry. Then we will climb to the top of that hill and detonate the explosives from there.” Dante pointed to the hill and imitated the boom of the explosion. Abdullah translated for the fedayeen and they all turned to stare at the hill. They talked excitedly among themselves, then looked at their instructor, nodding respectfully at his expertise.

During the first several sessions, Dante concentrated on the PETN and the latex, showing the Hezbollah fighters how to mix the two and then mold the clay-like explosive to fit any receptacle. He filled a portable radio with explosives one day, then turned it on to demonstrate that it still functioned, which was important if you wanted to get the radio past military checkpoints or airport security. Another time he packed the plastique into one of those newfangled satellite telephones and explained, with Abdullah translating, the advantages: If it was done correctly, you could actually telephone the target and identify his voice before setting off the charge and decapitating him.

In the beginning, the young men were afraid to touch the explosive charges until they saw Dante juggling a clump of it from one hand to the other to demonstrate how stable it was. Abdullah, meanwhile, took Dante’s hand-written list to Dr. al-Karim and then set off for Beirut in the Ford with a purse-full of the imam’s precious American dollars to purchase the battery-operated transmitters and receivers that would go into the construction of remote detonators.

The first afternoon that Dante turned up in Dr. al-Karim’s study, he found the imam seated well back from a table, leaning over his abundant stomach and typing away with two fingers on an IBM electric typewriter. From behind the building came the low hum of the gasoline-powered generator. “Assalamu aleikum—Peace be upon you. I would offer you a cigarette if you smoked cigarettes,” the imam said, swiveling to face his visitor, waving him toward a wooden kitchen chair. “Can I assume you do not mind if I light up?”

“Be my guest.”

The imam appeared to be puzzled. “How is it possible for me to be your guest in my house?”

“It was a meaningless figure of speech,” Dante conceded.

“I have observed that Americans often come up with meaningless cliches when they do not know what to say.”

“I won’t make the same mistake twice.”