“Your father was the victim of a truck bomb in Ankara.”
Tom felt nauseous, his brain finding it hard to digest what he’d been told. He clenched his jaw and grimaced.
“You wanna glass of water? Something stronger?” Crane said.
Tom fought hard to hide his shock; his pain, too. “Just tell me he’s okay and then give it to me frame by frame.”
Crane stopped riding the chair, eased forwards a fraction and pinched his forehead. “He survived the blast, but the last I heard, he’s in a bad way.”
“You don’t have anything up to date? I heard there were two American casualties.”
“No. Sorry, Tom. He was there on an official visit to find out how the sectarian violence is panning out, and whether there’s a threat of civil war. Face-to-face is always preferable,” Crane said. “They hit him in a square. The bomb was likely Semtex. The Americans were a couple on a world tour. Pensioners by all accounts. Goddamn bad luck.”
“That it?”
Crane nodded.
“If you’re holding out on me, I won’t take it kindly.”
“I’ll forgive you that one, Tom, cuz of your old man and I like ya. But you keep pulling my chain, I won’t take kindly to that, either,” Crane said, and he began to ride the chair again.
Tom nodded, almost imperceptibly.
Crane smiled, his lips closed. “Okay then. The Pentagon is sending a medical team. If he’s up to it, he’ll come home where he belongs. I’m sending four CIA paramilitaries to make sure there ain’t a replay. You’re free to go along, too.”
“Who was it?”
“We don’t know. Yet,” Crane replied. “But I promise you this, Tom, when we do they’ll either rot in solitary, or the earth.”
Ibrahim had been driven for three hundred and forty miles due south on state highway D715 to Bozyazi, a journey that had lasted just over seven and a half hours. Bozyazi was a remote Turkish town on the Mediterranean. The roads from either direction along the coast or over the Taurus Mountains, which formed a monolithic backdrop to the town, were too hazardous for sightseers, and that was good.
From there he’d been put aboard a fishing boat that had motored the forty-seven miles to an isolated bay in the Karpass Peninsula in northern Cyprus, which the Turks had styled the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus following the military invasion in 1974. Not one country had recognized it as legitimate, yet it still existed.
Ibrahim had left the fishing boat in the remote bay and, with his head and face covered by a white linen scarf, had been rowed ashore the last half a mile, where he’d been met by two Turkish Cypriots who dealt smack for the mafia to European tourists and residents on the island. He hadn’t liked having to rely on these types, but the Afghan Taliban had been growing and trading heroin for years to fund their jihad and it had been a necessary evil, he’d believed.
He’d stayed hidden in a beach shack for several hours before heading south-east via the Mediterranean Sea for a further sixty-two miles. He’d travelled in the hold aboard a small freighter, with a cargo of fruit bound for Lebanon. It was the most religiously diverse country in the Middle East, albeit due to ongoing sectarian violence, it was the most segregated, too.
The main religions, Ibrahim knew, were Muslim and Christian. In terms of percentages of population, there was an equal split between the Sunnis and Shias, closely followed by Maronite Christians. The Sunnis primarily occupied West Beirut, the north of the country and the southern coastal regions. Given his ultimate destination, the Gaza Strip in the Palestinian territories, the freighter had travelled down the coast to the ancient Phoenician city of Sidon, a major port about twenty-five miles south of Beirut.
Sidon was the third largest city in Lebanon. If a man wanted to stay hidden, Ibrahim had learned, he had two choices: go somewhere remote or somewhere teeming with humanity. But their network was growing after the death of bin Laden. Apart from Hamas and the Islamic State group, there was al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, Al-Shabaab in East Africa, a dozen more smaller affiliated organizations. Even the hawks in Washington, he’d been told, were admitting that al-Qaeda and militant jihad generally was on the rise.
After docking, he’d been met by a local Sunni fighter, who’d driven him in a rusted Mazda to Sidon’s walled medieval city. It was located on a promontory jutting out to the Mediterranean, a veritable maze made up of a plethora of narrow alleyways. After resting up in a first-storey room a hundred yards from the Sea Castle, and eating a meal of fresh fish, bread and citrus fruit, he’d linked up with a two further Islamists and had been hidden in the back of a truck beneath a pile of cardboard boxes and a filthy tarp.
He’d been driven to within six miles of the Rosh HaNikra Crossing between the small coastal city of Naqoura, Lebanon, and the northern Israeli kibbutz that bore the name of the international boundary. But he hadn’t been able to cross over there as the terminal was operated by the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon and Israeli Defence Force, the IDF, and forbade the passage of tourists or visitors. Instead he’d been led along a narrow goat track to the outskirts of the city.
The Gaza Strip was surrounded on two sides by Israel, and travelling in what Ibrahim considered to be the most anti-Muslim country on earth was just too dangerous. The routes into Gaza were either open or closed and the situation changed regularly, depending on whether or not Hamas and Israel were at war. Even entry by sea to Gaza was a hazardous lottery.
A land, air and sea blockade had been in force by Israel since 2007. This was in direct response to Hamas winning legislative elections there the year before and their victory against Fatah, the largest faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization, in the subsequent battle for the city. The Israelis had long memories and, despite the promises, things remained the same, especially after the intermittent kidnapping of Jewish settlers led to violent IDF incursions into the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
Israel maintained the blockade on the basis of preventing rocket attacks and to curtail Hamas’s ability to obtain ordnance for skirmishes. Following international pressure the blockade had been lessened in 2010, with Israel allowing civilian goods into Gaza. But the damage had been done. The economy hadn’t recovered and unemployment was at forty per cent, with manufacturing decimated, and the restrictions on people entering and exiting the region continued unabated. The war that took place in the summer of 2014 had brought about such enmity between the two sides that a lasting solution appeared to be hopeless.
The naval blockade was secured by Israeli patrol boats that fired on Palestinian fishing vessels, which strayed beyond the designated three nautical miles’ demarcation line from the shore. Despite the Turkish Prime Minister threatening to use warships to protect aid reaching the Gaza Strip, the position remained fraught to say the least.
Still, Ibrahim knew that it was the only way in, apart from what was left of the tunnels that connected the Egyptian town of Rafah to the south with the Palestinian refugee camp of the same name. But the Palestinian border with Egypt, like that on the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, which together with Gaza made up the Palestinian territories, was heavily fortified, albeit lacking the West Bank’s high barrier. Besides he’d suffered from claustrophobia since childhood, and he knew many of the tunnels could be precarious, so it had been agreed that entry by sea was the only option.
The coast around Naqoura was rocky, the sea a tantalizing kaleidoscope of emerald, turquoise, silver and gold. The distance to the Gaza Strip was just over two hundred and twenty miles. After struggling into on a full-body wet suit, including a balaclava-type hood, both to keep the sun from his head and to add to his disguise, Ibrahim had been put aboard a sixty-foot luxury motor cruiser, with a gleaming white hull, the interior finished in pale oak and leather upholstery. The boat had been supplied by a Lebanese businessman who was sympathetic