“I was hurt,” he said. “I’m in pain.” He coughed and his lips were covered in blood and foam.
I stroked his forehead. I really wanted to hug him. I had never seen him so helpless.
“Help me,” he whispered with a desperate look on his face.
“You’ll be alright,” I said but my voice was broken
“Don’t cry,” he said and coughed again. “Don’t be mad at me.”
“Don’t say anything, please,” I said.
“I was thinking about you two,” he continued to whisper.
“I know.” It was an unclear moment. There were lies but there was also sympathy and maybe a little bit of love, too. I held his hand tightly. He returned a weak grasp.
“I always loved you,” his eyes were wide open in great pain. “And Pnina, too.” He closed his eyes and became silent. He must have lost consciousness.
The doctor who was near me signaled to a group of soldiers who carried the stretcher quickly to an evacuation bus with me walking near them. The paramedics pushed me away from Danny.
“One bullet in the lung and another in the shoulder, lots of bruises, cuts to the face, pulse is reasonable, no great loss of blood. Trauma, probably,” said the doctor. “It could last anywhere between a few hours and a lifetime,” he continued without being asked.
A second bus was already parked near the plane. The last stretchers were being taken off it and placed on the tarmac for initial triage and body evacuation. I walked among them as if in a trance. Two jeeps loaded with soldiers stopped by the plane and the soldiers quickly boarded it. A group of hostages stood near the plane, feeling their way around. Some were weeping. I looked at the survivors quickly. “Jean-Claude!” I embraced him for a long time. He was thin, unshaven, teetering, and insisted on standing up although he couldn’t see a thing.
And then, there was Karni. She was still on a high from the adrenaline. God knows how she managed to have an improvised interview with the terrorist who was still alive. He was frightened and hostile and explained in broken English the plan to load the plane with bombs in preparation for a mass-casualty bombing as they had pledged before God and man. Now she stood with her back to the plane. Ronny was glued to his camera. The soundman held up five fingers in preparation for a live transmission—four, three, two… an early winter wind kicked up a wave of dust from the runways behind us.
“Israelis killed. Dead Palestinians. This is the conclusion, the essence of this tragedy,” Karni summed up, looked at the camera and then shot straight from the hip. “The dead are neither right nor wrong. There are no good guys or bad guys. There are only dead people.”
The camera turned to the survivors and then back to Karni. “The Middle East is once again torn between hope and trust on the one hand and desperation and rage on the other,” she went on. “Between new opportunities and dark fanaticism. Today, deception was the victor. Today, we saw the hatred rising and exacting its toll; maybe the least possible, in terms of lives lost but nevertheless, a human price was paid. Our viewers’ presence at the scene was not enough to stop the murderous hand, nor did it serve as a guarantor for newfound trust. A sliver of hope that was opened was at once closed down, giving way to yet another round of death and destruction. But despite it all, remember, there was a glimmer of hope that was kindled for a moment. If it were to reignite once more, do not allow it to be extinguished. From Ben Gurion Airport, this is Karni Meridor, CNN News.”
She finished without any pathos, waited and looked at Ronny the cameraman until he signaled with his fingertips across his throat to show “cut”. She turned to me and let out a long gasp of air. The determination on her face turned to irony again.
“So, have we managed to ruin CNN’s reputation yet, you and me?”
“What reputation?” I smiled tiredly. “There was no choice, and you may have saved us. You always were the best.”
Soldiers from the unit were helping clear the last hostages from the hijacked plane. Karni left her crew and joined those who were caring for the wounded. The emergency crews and commanders gathered in the hangar where the switch was made between the bus carrying the CNN crew and the bus with the unit combatants.
I hung on Ronny’s arm and together with Hezi we started making our way towards the hangar. We were exhausted. The head of military Intelligence strode towards us, shook Hezi’s hand warmly, dangled it mercilessly and pulled him towards the group of officers on the tarmac. I continued to walk, leaning on Ronny.
“It was difficult,” he noted in his succinct manner.
I observed Ronny as he supported me. His embarrassed look was very focused now, perhaps because of his exhaustion. Only his half-deprecating smile was gone. He looked at me with concern. Ronny has a good eye, the eye of a photographer. He is sensitive and honest. My eyes were stinging, my legs hardly carried me, but I smiled at him. He was so handsome and strong. I knew that nothing was too late for us. Scarlett O’Hara would say that she would start working on it tomorrow. But I am no longer part of the fantasy world. Ronny would be mine. Maybe he was already. It would be a good note on which to end all this mess. But this is not what happened.
Uzi, who was standing with the group of officers, abandoned them for a moment and walked uneasily towards us. I didn’t want him now. Not now. He came closer, his glasses glinting in the sun, his face reddening. Uzi’s health had improved in the last few years. The yellowish hue that he had carried with him since Manila was gone.
And then, as if struck by lightning, it dawned on me. The Chinaman wasn’t a reference to the Chinese people but rather to the color—“the yellow race”. Few people beside me knew about Uzi’s history of jaundice. His friends from Geneva knew, though. I was sure of that now. It was so simple and so stunning that it sent an electric current running all the way to the roots of my hairs. My terrible exhaustion vanished.
“Do you have a tele microphone?” I asked Ronny quietly. He gave me an inquisitive look and then turned to see Uzi as he approached us.
“I always have one,” he said and moved to the corner of the hangar.
I didn’t have time to say anything else before Uzi was there, with that little smile that he always had for me. I looked at him in a new light with a bit of apprehension and an unexplainable fear.
“All’s well that ends well!” he said in a scholarly tone and with a repulsive satisfaction.
“Whose end exactly?”
“Danny is alright. There’s nothing to worry about.”
“I’m not worried. But you look a little bit too smug.” I had a hard time trying to hide my hostility.
His look turned hard and surprised. He took off his thick glasses, looked at them and quickly put them back on. He took them off and put them back on. “The operation, as far as violent attacks are concerned, ended with relatively few losses. Even politically—”
“Yes, yes, I know, our position is strengthened and all that—”
“Yes, all that. As far as all the fears and alerts, I think we can all be satisfied with the results.” I hated his use of the first person plural. I peeked at my beeper with an air of concern.
“Life goes on, right?” he said as if he understood. “Are you waiting for something?”
“My battery is running low. I’m afraid of missing the security service’s press release.”
“What press release?” he asked politely.
“They are about to announce that they’ve uncovered the person who was giving operational information to the terrorists.”
“That can’t be.” Under his confident guise, there was the first sign of alarm. “Don’t get carried away by the media’s exaggerations. I would have known if they had got hold of the stool pigeon”
“We received a heads-up on our beepers,” I gambled. “All the media outlets, the newspapers, the websites, even the police correspondents received it.”
“From whom?”
“From the CCHSS. The chief of cabinet of the head of the security service.”
<
br /> “It’s bullshit.”
He took a handkerchief out of his jacket pocket and dabbed at his neck. “If you ask me, all the ‘leaks’ they were talking about were nothing but coincidences; sheer coincidence.” He uttered a deep groan. “I need to get back to the hangar. They’re about to start a final debrief on the operation.” He looked in horror at his shoes, immersed in a puddle of oil on the tarmac. “I need to get my shoes cleaned first.”
“No, no, no,” I said, and I saw his eyes turn red. “It’s not a coincidence; anything but a coincidence. Someone warned the hijackers that the army was going to use the Viper to cut the plane in half. There’s no way they could have discovered it by coincidence ten minutes after the practice run. Someone gave the Red Cross information about the planned TV broadcast from the plane. Someone on the inside did it. Abu Shahid exited the plane seconds before the assault. It couldn’t possibly be a coincidence.”
Uzi shook his head skeptically and wiped the sweat off his neck once more. “Really, Shira—” he tried to say. I wasn’t letting him go. I couldn’t stop now.
“I am sure there was a continuous cell phone connection to the plane from someone in the vicinity and I think it had to do with the Red Cross. I am sure, Uzi, do you hear me? I am sure. I heard it from COMINT sources, do you understand?! And that’s not the end of it, either. Someone on the inside gave them the information. Someone whose connections are so good that he thought he would never be exposed.” I fell silent, breathing heavily, enraged.
“Connections good enough to avoid being exposed? What kind of crap is that? There’s no such person!” he snickered.
“You collaborated with them.” My eyes were filled with tears of anger.
“You mean with the security service? Or with the Red Cross?”
“I mean with Abu Shahid.”
He froze in place just as he was examining his shoes once again. “Shira,” he said, and then he was quiet again.
I was so close, and there was no way back. I now had to know the truth.
“Yes, Uzi?”
“Surely you can’t be serious.”
“I am serious as hell,” I looked at him carefully. He could be dangerous.
“It’s clear beyond doubt that you gave classified operational material to the Red Cross. The COMINT material leaves no doubt about it.” In fact, I had seen no such material, but I guessed that Dana had, and in any case, I had no choice but to gamble. “There are recordings of all the cell phone calls you made. You know how easy it is to intercept cell phones. And I don’t have to tell you about voice signatures. There are recordings, Uzi.”
“I had to update the Red Cross.”
“Your friends from the UN Project on Asian Diseases?”
“What’s my illness got to do with all this?”
“The Red Cross was connected to the project through which you received treatment, and in this case too, the person making the leak used the Red Cross as a conduit.”
“So what? In this case, it was a political effort. I had to update them, to avoid an international scandal. You saw for yourself that nobody was willing to talk to them.”
“Did it include the Viper exercise that leaked?”
“A violent takeover at that moment would have turned the whole international community against us.”
“You’ll have to prove that in a court of law.”
“Your father also supported a moderate attitude, even one of appeasement. You heard exactly how he explained to Abu Shahid—”
“Don’t try to smear him with this. He was fighting to save his life, whereas you collaborated with terrorists!”
“Only with the Red Cross and only in order to minimize damage and help the State of Israel. Unlike your father; your father…” He uttered the words with anger and disgust. “Your father only believes in his own personal promotion.” He gripped my arm as if ready to pull it out of its socket. There was a lot of bitterness in his voice.
“How dare you?!” I tried to push him away.
“He is a man without a homeland, he has no national affiliation.” His grip weakened. “Why do you think he supported the peace process and all those lovely things? Because he believes in it? No, he just wanted to get into the history books at any cost while cutting corners wherever possible and ignoring obvious risks and damages. Just like everything that’s happening right now. It’s all in order to make it into the history books. He was dreaming of it back in our army tent, and in the apartment on Haifa Road, and everywhere he served. He was always lurking, waiting for an opportunity, grabbing as much as he could and moving on, leaving me with the damages, to do the cleanup for him.”
“You’re seriously talking about endangering the country?”
“He is an exploiter. He exploited you, and me, and your mother, and everyone around him.”
“He believed in you,” I said. “And I believed in you so much.”
I was shocked and bitter with disgust and dismay. The last of my childhood heroes was, in fact, a villain. “How could you stoop so low? How did you—you of all people—get into this whole thing?!”
His face was frozen. Only a cold, distant shell remained of the charming and sensitive person I once knew.
“At first, I forced myself to believe that it would really help liberate the other hostages peacefully. Only at a later stage did I understand that Abu Shahid was only pretending to cooperate with the bus plan after he supposedly softened up following his conversation with his daughter.”
“Did you understand it or did you know about it ahead of time?”
“Don’t exaggerate. I wasn’t party to any planning. I just understood that he intended to abuse the trust given to him in order to blow up the bus in the terminal or in front of an office building in Tel Aviv.” He paused for a moment to gauge my reaction. “The use of a man’s apparent love for his daughter isn’t the sole property of anyone. As you can see,” he added as if as an afterthought.
“It’s all because of him, isn’t it?” I suddenly realized. “It’s all because of Danny.”
Uzi shrank as if he had lost all his oxygen, released my arm, and wiped his neck again.
“You of all people are supposed to understand me. You are one of his victims too, after all.” He emitted a hard, dry sigh from the depth of his stomach and didn’t wait for a reply. “It was the first time that I suddenly thought that Danny might die,” he paused and breathed heavily and looked ugly all of a sudden “But, to my surprise, I found myself not regretting it, but on the contrary, I was filled with such great joy that I couldn’t even understand it at first.”
“All this time, you just hated him,” I said, understanding but still disbelieving.
“I hate him,” he agreed with me, with a directness that I hadn’t known before. “I’ve hated him for a long time. His cynicism, his unlimited exploitation, his quiet and absolute condescension. Why? Haven’t I been a good friend to him? Wasn’t I prepared to do everything for him? He knew that I was ready to kill for him, but I couldn’t stand his disdain.” Uzi’s voice choked.
“He made you spokesman, he made you Assistant to the Foreign minister and Deputy Director General,” I said, astonished.
“I never wanted it and I never asked for it. I’ve stopped living my own life, the life I wanted, a long time ago. I always followed his path, according to his desires.”
“Always?”
“All the way back to the army, to basic training, to the apartment on Haifa Road. I think that I wanted him to die more than anything. I would finally get rid of this humiliating dependence. Of this crazy charade.”
“Charade?”
“I could no longer stand the pretension. I couldn’t go on being part of the Taylor Project. He is as big as a Hyatt Hotel, a master of illusion, manipulator of the media, and builder of false towers that never existed, and never will. I couldn’t go on like that. The whole nation stands amazed and applauds Danny Taylor who planned and put together and marketed the great illusion, the em
peror’s new clothes. And the emperor understands the scam but loves him even more.” There was foam in the corners of Uzi’s mouth. He took his glasses off and wiped them. His eyes were red and teary.
“Do you remember how we used to argue after the cadet course? You were a little girl, playing in the corner, and always listening. I’m sure you remember. We used to argue what was real, the truth or the report of the truth? He learned the lesson better than all of us and honed it into a masterpiece.”
“You helped plan a terrible bombing! Nothing can justify that. You will be tried for this!” I was so tired all of a sudden and wanted to end this.
“Not a chance,” he exclaimed quietly, but for a moment didn’t sound so confident anymore. “I am covered. The whole thing will be swept under the rug. The state has no interest in exposing it. Military intelligence will not expose its listening activities for something that by the end of the day turned out to be a victory.”
“The security service has the material. They won’t hesitate,” I said, now less sure of myself.
“What interest would the security service have in exposing me? They have a file on me just as they have files on anyone they think they may need in the future. I certainly don’t mind. I am a willful collaborator. They will be telling themselves that this is nothing more than a one-time slip as a result of poor judgment. The fact is, they haven’t arrested me yet. The operation was a success, everyone’s a hero. If there’s no fuck-up, there’s no investigation.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“I am not ideologically motivated. I am not a fanatic, or a lunatic. You’re the only one who knows that this was more than a slip of judgment.” He examined his soiled shoes once again. “You’re the only one who still has a problem, and you of all people should have understood better than anyone…”
I couldn’t understand or rather didn’t want to understand. A tractor pulling a cart with suitcases passed us by. Life at the airport was returning to normal.
“I don’t believe it,” I finally told Uzi. “You won’t get away with it.”
“Why not? What proof will remain? Whatever the security service has, will be archived. There’s not enough meat in this file, and I certainly won’t piss any of them off, so nobody will ever have any interest in giving this story to the media.”