Legends

“The shot came from behind us,” Martin shouted and he lunged for cover behind a low stone wall as the second shot nicked the dirt a yard beyond the spot where he’d been standing. Crouching behind the wall, massaging the muscles in his bad leg, Martin could see Stella and her sister, with her skirt hiked, running back up the hill toward the settlement, which was ablaze with searchlights sweeping the area. Moments later two Israeli jeeps and an open truck filled with soldiers came roaring down the road from the nearby army base. Leaping from their vehicles, the soldiers, bent low and running, charged the slopes on either side of the road. From behind the cistern came the staccato sound of automatic rifles being fired in short bursts. Martin suspected that the Palestinian rifleman—assuming he was Palestinian—had melted away and the soldiers were shooting at shadows.

Dusting the dirt off of his sabbath suit, the rabbi came up to Martin. “You okay?” he asked breathlessly.

Martin nodded.

“That was too close for comfort,” Ben Zion said, his chest heaving with excitement. “If I didn’t know better, I would have thought they were shooting at you, Mr. Odum.”

“Now why would they want to do that?” Martin asked innocently. “I’m not even Jewish. I’m just a visitor who will soon go back to the safety of his country, his city, his home.”

1997: MARTIN ODUM MEETS A BORN-AGAIN OPPORTUNIST

BENNY SAPIR LISTENED INTENTLY TO MARTIN’S ACCOUNT OF THE incident in Hebron. When he finally broke his silence it was to pose questions only a professional would think to ask.

“How can you be sure it wasn’t some Arab kids letting off steam? That kind of thing happens all the time around Kiryat Arba.”

“Because of the diversion. The attack was synchronized. The tire came first. Everyone looked off to the right. The two cops and the armed settlers raced uphill to the right. That’s when the first shot was fired. It came from the left.”

“How many shots were there?”

“Two.”

“And both of them hit the road near you?”

“The shooter’s rifle must have been pulling to the left. The first shot hit a yard or so ahead of me, which means he was firing short and left. The shooter must have cranked in a correction to the rear sight and elevated slightly. The second shot was on target—it hit beyond where I’d been standing, which means the bullet would have hit my chest if I hadn’t leaped for cover behind the low wall.”

“Why didn’t he shoot again?”

“Fact that he didn’t is what makes me think he was shooting at me. When I disappeared from view behind the low wall, there were still a dozen or so settlers crouching or lying flat on the ground. The search lights from Kiryat Arba were sweeping the area so he could easily see them. If he was shooting in order to kill Jews, he had plenty of targets available.”

“Maybe the lights and the siren scared him off.”

“Soldiers scared him off. But that happened five, maybe eight minutes later.”

“Beseder, okay. So why would someone want to kill you, Dante?”

“Retirement hasn’t dulled your edge, Benny. You’re asking the right questions in the right order. Once we figure out the ‘why,’ we move on to the ‘who.’”

Returning to Jerusalem from Kiryat Arba (Stella had remained behind to be with her sister), Martin had braved the rank stench of a phone booth and had asked information for the phone number of a Benny Sapir. He was given five listings under that name. The second one, in a settlement community thirteen kilometers outside of Jerusalem, turned out to be the Benny Sapir who had briefed Dante Pippen in Washington before the mission to the Bekaa Valley eight years before; Benny, normally the Mossad’s point man on things Russian, had been covering for a colleague home on sick leave at the time. When he came on line now, Benny, who had retired from the Mossad the previous year, sounded winded. He recognized the voice on the other end of the phone immediately. “The older I get, the harder it is to remember faces and names, but voices I never forget,” he said. “Tell you the truth, Dante, never expected our paths to cross again.” Before Martin could say anything, Benny proposed to pick him up in front of the Rashamu Restaurant down from the Jewish shouk on Ha-Eshkol Street in half an hour.