The Blood of Lambs: A Former Terrorist's Memoir of Death and Redemption (16 page)

Allah!
I cried in my heart.
Allah, where are you?

Unbidden, a
sura
came to my lips, and I yelled it into the wind and into the wet, splashing darkness. “Whatever you throw at the enemy, you did not throw it. Allah has thrown it at the enemy through you!”

My head rocked back as the Zodiac slid up another dark mountain. We scaled the swell, reached its summit, then crashed down into the trough. The men screamed like terrified riders on a carnival attraction.

“Paddle! We are drifting north!” Nizhar cried. “To the right! East is to the right!”

“We make a dam before them and behind them,” I shouted. “Allah has blinded them and they cannot see!”

I did not tell anyone, but I reached out of the boat with my left hand and trailed my fingertips on the water.
My friend, my friend. Be with us. Be calm. Help us sail into our destiny.

Almost instantly, the size of the swells grew noticeably smaller. Looking up, I caught sight of the shoreline for the first time. I did not attribute the calmer seas to the closer shore. Instead I was certain Allah had calmed the water through my touch. I did not tell anyone because I did not want them to think I was crazy, but from the top of my head, goose bumps cascaded down my body. Fired by faith, my confidence returned. Suddenly I knew we would be victorious.

We are called
, I thought.
Great will be our reward in paradise
.

Nizhar and the others began to talk among themselves, relief flooding their whispers. Now the men in my Zodiac unzipped their duffels and began pulling out weapons, checking to see if they had survived the journey dry. I opened the case containing the 10 mm mortar launcher and examined it by touch. I did not feel anything amiss.

I held it in my lap and looked toward the shore. Now, every time we crested a low wave, we could see lights in high places, piercing the night. My heart raced. Silently, I recited the
sura
:

And at that moment, the sea exploded around me.

6

Red and orange flares seared across the sky, lighting the surface of the water in the colors of fire. To my left the sea convulsed, sending a volcano of foam toward the black sky. Haroon fell out of the boat.

“Haroon!” I screamed.

“Get down! Get down!” Nizhar shouted. “It is the Israelis!”

The five of us who remained squeezed ourselves into tight balls, our heads ducked, trying to make ourselves smaller targets.

How can they even see us?
I thought wildly.
We are a needle in the dark!

Twenty meters to our right, with a terrible thunder, the sea rose up two stories high. The water crashed down, sending the Zodiac lurching to port and the mortar launcher sailing off my lap. I scrabbled in the bottom of the boat to find it, but I could not.

It is like Golan! It is like Golan! It is happening all over again.

Some kind of shell exploded directly in front of the Zodiac. I did not hear Nizhar cry out, but I felt pieces of his flesh splatter across my face. To Nizhar’s left, another man also took shrapnel. In the eerie light of the flares, I saw a black rose bloom on his throat and he gurgled around it: “
Allahu akbar
…”

Then he fell face forward into the floor of the boat.

Inside my brain, a voice screamed at me:
Jump!

Instantly, I leapt into the sea, plunging into the dark water and popping up again in the flare light. Spitting out a mouthful of saltwater,
I looked around wildly. Concussions in the water pounded into my chest. A receding swell had carried me directly behind the Zodiac, and I could see Tahsein and another man still hunkering down. The raft was sinking.

The next sound I heard was a helicopter, and a single thought flashed through my head:
It’s over
.

The rhythm of its blades chopped up the night. Then, to my right, two kilometers away, I saw a bright white light boring down out of the sky, sniffing the surface of the sea like a predator.

The other boat! They’re looking for the other boat!

They must have found it. Like fire from heaven, red tracers arrowed down through the dark. I knew we would be next. With all my might, I started to swim. Again, instinct took over:
Swim back and to the left! Toward the open sea.

Wildly, I stroked the water, hoping that my black suit blended into the dark. The drumming of the helicopter grew closer. Had it turned in my direction? I dove beneath the surface and swam underwater as long as my breath would take me.
Swim to sea! Swim to sea!

My instincts did not tell me what I would do after that—only that I had to escape the Israelis, survive the next moment. I cut into the surface chop, swimming up over swells that grew larger as I went. I did not think the helicopter would be able to see me unless its searchlight fell directly on top of me.

Suddenly, a massive explosion concussed the water around me. I felt my eyeballs push forward in my skull. My right side exploded. The sea spit me up into the air, throwing me back in the direction I had come from, then pushing me deep underwater. My vision went black and my head swam. A high whining buzz set up inside my head. Under the surface, I writhed in the dark, swallowing water, disoriented. Which way was up? Which way to air?

Let go,
a voice whispered.

And I realized that if I stopped fighting, I would float to the surface. I let my body go limp and floated up like a balloon. Then I felt air on my face, but all I could see was blackness. Blearily, I looked for lights, something to orient me toward the shore. The metallic taste of blood seeped down into my mouth. From my nose, I thought. Rising to the top of a
swell, I caught a glimpse of lights. Slowly, I began a painful sidestroke in the direction I thought was north.

7

As the sea cradled me in a northbound current, the buoyant wetsuit kept me afloat. Cool water soothed the pain seething in my right side, and I drifted between consciousness and a foggy dream world filled with helicopters with snapping jaws, bullet-riddled children playing seven stones in my neighborhood, and Mohammed’s mother waiting at the gates of paradise.

In some moments I was fully awake, enveloped in a silent, sloshing blackness, an aloneness I have never known before or since.

I thought about Tahsein and Haroon, two more of my brothers murdered by the Jews. No more cries of pain for them; right now they were standing in the courts of Allah.

One part of me wanted to join them. But another corner of my heart whispered that I wanted to live.
Live.

My mind cried out the rooftop prayer of my childhood,
Allah! Allah! If you are not for me, who will be for me?

At times, I caught sight of a light ashore and tried to swim toward it. But each time, my strength quickly failed, and I surrendered again to the sea.

Time spun out like an endless, fraying rope. As I drifted through dreams, I did not know whether days passed or only hours. But I remember the moment when sunlight pierced my eyelids, and I thought I heard the distant laughter of children. Then, worried whispers.

“What is it?”

“I think he’s dead.”

“No, he moved!”

“You stay here. I will go and get my father!”

Briefly, I felt the earth underneath me again and the tide lapping at my face. Then: blackness.

I awoke again in a small clinic, and I later learned the current had carried me past the northern border of Israel and into South Lebanon. In a brief moment of consciousness, I told the nurse I was PLO. “Please call Sabra,” I whispered. “Ask for Abu Yousef.”

The next time I regained consciousness, several PLO brothers had come to take me home. I do not remember the trip.

Back at Sabra, a PLO doctor examined me. The final explosion in the Bay of Haifa had ruptured my eardrum, and the concussion had caused internal injuries to my lungs and guts. The doctor showed me in a mirror that the whites of my eyes had gone scarlet. He told Abu Yousef that he did not have the equipment to care for me. I was taken to the American University hospital in Beirut.

My family came to visit me, my mother wincing and sobbing over the look of my eyes, my father proud of my bravery. Abdul Rahman came to visit me, as did other imams who seemed to replay the same tape they had after the failed Israel mission. Again Allah had preserved my life! When I should have been killed, he spared me!

Abu Yousef said the same thing, but this time I think he knew that would not be enough. He put me on a six-month sabbatical.

Looking back, I see that it was a strange prescription: In America, convalescent leave might mean no work and no strenuous exercise. In the PLO, it meant six months without guns, kidnapping, and murder.

1

We learned in Islam that when a man dies in the sea, he dies in the hand of Allah. While floating north from the Bay of Haifa to the south of Lebanon, the instinct to live had surged in my soul. But after Haifa, I wanted to die. It was as though Haroon and Tahsein, and even Nizhar, whom I barely knew, were like weights in a balance, an accumulation of death that now seemed alluring. Peaceful. During my sabbatical from violence, I often wandered from my home down to the shore and walked fully clothed into the water up to my hips. Swaying in the tide’s push and pull, I sometimes spoke to the sea: “If I come farther, will you swallow me? Will you devour me?”

But I knew the answer: no.

While the sea had translated my brothers to paradise, it had spit me out. Abdul Rahman and the imams called it a miracle. I was not so sure.

Autumn came. As the trees shed their leaves, I shed my last layer of boyhood. The failed Golan mission when I was seven had somehow retained an unreal quality, like jumbled, blurry-edged images from a child’s nightmare. But Haifa replayed in my mind again and again in
the crisp colors of a reality from which there is no waking. There, my dreams of redemption died. I realized now that my version of the James Bond life would never feature ink-pen kills and swooning redheads, but only blood and death and whores.

Where was Allah? Where was victory in his
jihad
? Now a new anger burned deep in my bones, the accumulated knowledge of many storms. I became very silent. I opened my mouth only to insult someone, smiled only when necessary to manipulate. When I returned to Sabra, I threw myself into higher training, perfecting my skills in hand-to-hand combat, especially martial arts, studying under military experts Abu Yousef had invited from Communist China. At fifteen, I was now taller and more muscled than most of the
fedayeen
I faced. I learned how to snap a man’s neck with my bare hands and hoped for an opportunity to do it. Outside the camp, I walked the streets freely, protected by both the aura of the PLO and the Muslim Brotherhood and by the look in my eyes that said I was willing to kill and willing to die. I could take it either way.

I began to volunteer for every mission. Whether it was a small errand of intimidation to put an upstart faction in its place or blowing up an entire building in the middle of the night, I raced to say yes.

It was during this time that I committed my first kidnapping. As was often the case, it was because the Lebanese government poked the PLO in the eye, this time by allowing the Syrian Baath party to open a fancy office on Verdan Street.

Arafat could not tolerate this, of course. The PLO considered the Baathists, who ruled in Syria, a mongrel party of socialists, Sunni, and the hated Shia. Some of its founders had even been Arab Christians. The Baathists favored a secular, socialist society in which even non-Muslims could participate in government. By the late 1960s, Syrian president Hafez al-Assad, a wily enemy of Arafat, had woven the Baath Party into the Syrian government so tightly that the two seemed of one cloth. And so, the Baathists setting up an office in Beirut was the same as Assad planting a Syrian flag in Arafat’s front yard.

Four or five times a week, Abu Ibrahim sent our entire cell to Sabra. Sometimes it was for mandatory training, other times for meetings to discuss “jobs” that needed to be done. At one of these meetings, at the home of Haj Abdullah, a Palestinian elder, Abu Yousef announced that
the Baath Party office was a direct affront to Islam and to the Palestinian people.

Members of a couple of other cells had come for a dinner of hummus and
keffeh
. After the meal, we gathered around Abu Yousef. “Whoever takes this job must infiltrate the building, gather any useful documents, then destroy the offices so completely that they cannot be salvaged,” he said from his seat on a
tesat
.

“I will go,” I said instantly.

Abu Yousef looked at me. “Are you sure, Kamal? You just finished with the
mukhtar
three days ago.”

He was referring to a small job where I had blown up a Fiat in front of the home of a
mukhtar
, an elected neighborhood leader. It was a warning, like the horse’s head in the producer’s bed in
The Godfather
, a new movie out that year: work with us, or next time it will be
you
exploding. The PLO
fedayeen
loved
The Godfather
. We hated America, but saw the American
mafiosi
as our colleagues.

“As you say, I finished with the
mukhtar
,” I told Abu Youself with a hint of freshly minted insolence. “Now I will finish the Baathists.”

I peered around the room, waiting for a challenge. The young brothers had long looked to me as a leader. I had always had Abu Yousef’s favor, and now each successful mission elevated me in the eyes of the older
fedayeen
. By snapping up every job, I was purposely building my résumé. For months, I had expected some equally ambitious
fida’i
to mount a protest. That night, no one did.

I chose three other
fedayeen
for this new job, including a wiry, brown-skinned Palestinian named Ahmed, who was an up-and-coming young sniper. A week of surveillance on Verdan Street revealed that the Baathists followed tight security procedures during the day. At night, a Kurdish concierge kept watch over the lobby. We knew he would not open the door for us because the Syrians would kill him for it the very next day. And we could not blow our way in without forfeiting our chance to sift the Baathists’ documents for treasure.

The solution: we learned the concierge’s home address, and, as she swept her front steps, snatched his wife off the street.

Thirty minutes later, Ahmed and I walked up to the Verdan Street office and rapped on the lobby glass. The night was cold and moonless. A
brisk winter wind skated through the street, giving us good reason to cloak our faces in red
keffiyeh
. The concierge, a round man with curly dark hair, met us at a security window resembling those at a theater box office. His nametag said “Marwan.” I watched his eyes narrow as he took in our dark pants, gloves, and black leather jackets.

“What do you want?” Marwan asked curtly through a round vent.

I held up a Kurdish
hijab
and a lock of auburn hair. “I have a message from your wife.”

The concierge’s face went pale. Ahmed, his face dark and serious, pointed to the sliding drawer in the security window. With a trembling hand, the concierge pushed it open. I placed his wife’s hair and scarf inside, and he retrieved them. He stared first at the hair, then pressed the
hijab
to his nose and inhaled.

Tears sprang to his eyes and his whole body quivered. “What have you done to my Samra!” Marwan cried.

“Nothing yet,” I said darkly. “But she is with two of my friends who will kill her if you do not open the door and let us in.” Then I held up a two-way radio. “All I have to do is make the call.”

Marwan did not hesitate, but snatched a jingling ring of keys off his belt and hurried to unlock the door. We stepped inside. The lobby light had been dimmed for the evening, and our faces were crossed in shadows.

Ahmed lifted the back of his jacket, withdrew a Makarov 9 mm, and pointed it at the concierge. “Lock it back again.”

“Now Marwan, let me tell you what is going to happen,” I said. “You are going to escort us through the Baath party offices. I will be collecting paperwork, and my friend here will be watching you. If you help us, you and your wife will live. If you do not, you both will die. Do you understand?”

Marwan’s face had gone pale as death, and I could see beads of sweat rolling from under his hairline. He nodded quickly, but did not speak.

An hour later, Marwan, Ahmed, and I exited the front doors of the Verdan Street office. Ahmed and I each carried a fat folder of documents—maps, schedules, correspondence. We walked six blocks, the concierge with Ahmed’s gun in his back. Finally, we stopped in front of a café, which was shuttered for the evening.

I withdrew my radio from my jacket and spoke into it. “We have what we need. Let the woman go.” Then I turned to the concierge. “Go home.”

Even in the light of streetlamps, I could see his face flush with anger. “How do I know you let her go! How do I know you did not hurt her!”

“You don’t, but what choice do you have?” I said, then repeated the threat that I had first heard Abdul Rahman utter when I was seven years old. “And if you are thinking of calling the police, remember: we know where you live.”

Again, the color drained from Marwan’s face. He cast his eyes on the sidewalk, walked slowly across the street, around the corner, and out of sight.

At that moment, a series of explosions ripped the night. Minutes later, as Ahmed and I continued walking, fire engines screamed past us toward the Baathists’ former offices, on their way to destroy with water whatever we had not destroyed with flame.

2

Two weeks later, in a meeting of cells at Haj Abdullah’s house, Abu Yousef told us about a job connected with Musa as-Sadr, a Shia imam. A few years before, as-Sadr had become the first leader of the Supreme Islamic Shiite Council, a group formed to win more power for the Shia in Lebanese government. The Sunni considered the Shia to have twisted Islam centuries before, instituting idolatry and pagan rituals related to their illegitimate line of prophets.

When the Prophet Muhammad died in 632
A.D
. without naming a successor, some Muslims said the role of
caliph
should pass through Muhammad’s bloodline, beginning with his son-in-law and cousin, Ali ibn Abi Talib. But most of Muhammad’s followers favored Abu Bakr, the Prophet’s friend.

Abu Bakr was named the first
caliph
, succeeding Muhammad. Ali
became the fourth
caliph
, but was murdered in 661
A.D
. and so, like a spiritual fire, the battle over succession flared again. Those in the camp of Ali favored the
caliph
’s son Hussein, while the majority favored Syrian governor Mu’awiyah and his son, Yazid. The dispute led to a battle at Karbala, a city near Baghdad, and Hussein was killed, giving the
Shi’at Ali
, or partisans of Ali, a martyr. Mu’awiyah became the fifth
caliph
, and his followers became Sunni, which means followers of the Sunnah, or Way, of the Prophet.

Fourteen centuries later, we still despised their idol worship, their lurid and profane mourning every year on Ashura, the anniversary of Hussein’s death when many Shia would publicly whip themselves. Now, at Haj Abdullah’s house, we learned from Abu Yousef that Musa as-Sadr, the prominent Shia imam, had installed an offset printing press in a building in a Shia neighborhood in Beirut.

“He is using it to print Shia propaganda and the Shia’s perverted books,” Abu Yousef spat, referring to the rival sect’s version of the Koran and
hadith
. “Who will go and destroy it?”

“I will go,” I said as usual.

But this night a voice sounded from a far corner of the room: “Hold on.”

A
fida’i
from another cell stood. He was older than I, a tall, dark-skinned Lebanese with charcoal eyes that seemed to dip too far back in his skull. I knew his name to be Issa.

“You are taking every job lately,” Issa said. “You are not the only fighter here worthy of leading others.”

As outrage filled me like a flash flood, the room grew instantly still. In one way, I was impressed that Issa had challenged me, since he knew Abu Yousef was like a father to me. Still, I could not allow him to humiliate me.

Seeming emboldened by my silence, Issa spoke again. “You do not even know the details of this mission, what’s involved.”

I leveled my eyes at him. “I don’t care what the details are. I’ll take it.”

Abu Yousef stood. “You two work it out between yourselves. I need an answer by tomorrow.”

For a moment, his lack of support stung, then burned as I saw Issa smile at the opening my mentor had given him. Then a thought hit me:
Abu Yousef cannot always play favorites. Perhaps he means I must win this job on my own merits.

So after the meeting adjourned, I walked outside, and using what the Chinese martial arts experts had taught me, beat Issa into a bloody pulp.

A week later, as I was stealing an electrician’s van to convert into a bomb for the Shia, the electrician ran out of his shop, waving his arms as he came.

“Stop! Stop!” he yelled. “What are you doing? That’s mine!”

Dashing past the windshield to the driver’s side door, he jerked it open and began trying to pull me from the seat. With my left hand, I grabbed his throat. With my right, I jammed an AK–47 muzzle against his lips.

“If you scream like that too much,” I told him calmly, “you will lose your voice.”

The electrician’s hands shot into the air and he backed away, eyes wide. I slammed shut the van door and roared off. Three days later, Musa as-Sadr’s printing press was incinerated in a bombing for which no one claimed responsibility.

Neither did anyone claim responsibility for the deaths of nine Syrian envoys shot dead in a four-star, ocean-view hotel, or the deaths of three foreign intelligence agents gunned down in front of their embassy in Beirut.

3

I was only sixteen when I found myself rumbling in a GMC Jimmy, an American vehicle, across an ocean of blazing sand. We were traveling through the Ribiana Sand Sea in the south of Libya. Fine as powder, the
sand shone blindingly white, with hints of pale yellow and tangerine. My
keffiyeh
ruffled in the breeze, shielding my head from a scorching sun.

Finally, I felt I had ascended to something important. My zeal in Beirut had earned my place on a stage that, while secret, would make a difference for Allah. As the Jimmy bounced over the desert moguls, I flashed back to the conversation with Abu Yousef that sent me here.

“There is an opportunity for you in Libya,” he told me in his office at Sabra one day about a month after the as-Sadr bombing. “Gaddafi has requested more PLO assistance in training liberation groups from around the world.”