Legends

Dante authorized the double with a nod when the bartender looked at him for confirmation, then turned to scrutinize the woman the way he’d been taught to look at people he might one day have to pick out of a counterintelligence scrapbook. As usual he had difficulty figuring out her age. She was Arab, that much was evident despite the thick eyeliner and the splash of bright red on her lips, and probably in her forties, but exactly where he didn’t know. It occurred to him that she must be Christian, since Muslims would kill their women before they’d let them work as prostitutes.

“So what would be your name, darling?” Dante asked.

She absently combed the fingers of one hand through her hair, brushing it away from her face; two large silver hoop earrings caught the light and shimmered. “I am Djamillah,” she announced. “What is your name?”

Dante took a long swig of beer. “You can call me Irish.”

“From the look of you, you have been at sea for a while.”

“What makes you think that?”

“You’re dying of thirst, I can see that from the way you gulped down that disgusting Bulgarian beer. What else are you dying of, Irish?”

Dante glanced at the bartender, rinsing glasses in a sink just out of earshot. “Well, now, Djamillah, to tell you the God awful truth, I haven’t been laid in a month of Sundays. Is that a predicament you could remedy?”

The Portuguese purser, sitting with his back to Dante, could be heard snickering under his breath. Djamillah was unfazed. “You are a direct man,” she said. “The answer to your question, Irish, is: I could.”

“How much would it set me back?”

“Fifty dollars U.S. or the equivalent in a European currency. I don’t deal in local money.”

“Bottoms up,” Dante said. He clicked glasses with her and downed what was left in the mug, grabbed the half-empty bottle of beer by the throat (in case he needed a weapon) and followed her across the room to the stairs. At the top of the stairs she pushed open a wooden door and led Dante into what must have once been the head office of the mercantile company. There was a large desk covered in glass with photographs of children flattened under it near the boarded-over oval windows, and an enormous leather couch under a torn painting depicting Napoleon’s defeat at Acre. A dozen sealed cartons without markings were stacked against one wall. Locking the door behind them, Djamillah settled onto the couch and, reaching through a torn seam into the cushion, produced a folder filled with eight-by-ten aerial photographs. Dante, settling down alongside her, used his handkerchief to grip the photographs and examined them one by one. “These must have been taken from high altitude,” he remarked. “The resolution is excellent. They’ll do nicely.”

The woman offered Dante a felt-tipped pen and he began to draw arrows to various buildings in the camp and label them. “The recruits, nineteen fedayeen in all, live in these two low buildings inside the perimeter fence,” he said. “Explosives and fuses are stored in this small brick building with the Hezbollah flag on the roof. Dr. al-Karim lives and works in the house behind the mosque. It is easily the largest in the village so your people won’t have a problem identifying it. I don’t know where he sleeps but his office looks out at the mosque so it must be—” he drew another arrow and labelled it “K’s office”—“here. I bunk in with a family in this house in the village.”

“What kind of security do they have at night?”

“I’ve strolled around the camp after dark several times—they have a roadblock, manned by two recruits and one of the instructors, stationed here where the road curves uphill to the village and the camp. There’s a bunker with a heavy machine gun on top of the hill over the quarry which is manned during the day. I’ve never been able to get up there at night because the gate in the perimeter fence is locked and I didn’t want to raise suspicions by asking for the key.”

“We must assume it is manned at night. They’d be fools not to. The machine gun must be a priority target. What kind of communications do they have?”

“Don’t know really. Never saw the radio shack, or a radio for that matter. Spotted what looked like high frequency antennas on the top of the minaret of the mosque, so whatever they have must be somewhere around there.”

“We don’t want to bomb a mosque, so we’ll have to take that out by hand. Does Dr. al-Karim have a satellite phone?”

“Never saw one but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have one.”

“When will this round of training be finished.”

“I’ve told Dr. al-Karim I needed ten more days.”

“What happens then?”

“The graduating class goes off to the front to kill Israeli soldiers occupying the buffer zone in Lebanon. And a freshman class turns up to start a new cycle of training.”

“How many instructors and staff are in the camp?”

“Including transportation people, including the experts on small arms and martial arts, including Dr. al-Karim’s personal bodyguards, four that I’ve seen, I’d say roughly eighteen to twenty.”