“What do you want from me?”
“You speak, English. That’s good. We’ll talk when you’re in a cage. But you clam up on me, well, nobody will be able to save you. I’ll see to it that you get thrown in with the crazies. Simple. There’s only one option. Only one.”
“What option?”
“Well, that’ll be me, son.”
“I want a lawyer.”
“Yeah, and I want me a beach house down in Santa Monica. Besides, you think a lawyer will save you from what’s coming? Not even God can save you from what’s coming. Only me. Now you remember my face, son.”
Crane gave the Somali a closed-mouthed smile before looking at the FBI man who’d sought the okay from the unit chief. “You can flip him over now.”
A metallic grey minivan pulled up parallel with the bungalow and a broad-shoulder guy wearing jeans jumped out of the passenger side. He walked around to the back and opened the twin doors.
The unit chief walked over to Crane and asked him what the hell was happening. “He’s a US citizen, least he has been for the last few years,” he went on.
Crane put his hand into his breast pocket and handed over a piece of paper. The unit chief peered down at it, his face turning pale.
“That don’t matter no more,” Crane said, feeling ambivalent. He jabbed at the document with his thick forefinger. “And that’s the president’s signature.”
The document authorized the Somali, now a US citizen, being taken into military custody. A trial was deemed superfluous, and was legal, under the broad anti-terrorism provisions in the National Defense Authorization Act.
The CIA paramilitary who’d opened the doors came over to the FBI agents holding the Somali. “Just toss him in there, okay guys,” he said, gesturing towards the minivan.
As they looked nonplussed, Crane patted the CIA guy on the arm. “You keep that mother safe for now, you hear?”
“Yes, sir.”
The upscale motor cruiser that Ibrahim had been travelling in had sped down the Mediterranean Sea at a distance of fifteen nautical miles from the coast, safely away from the internationally recognized twelve nautical miles’ limit. It had berthed in the Egyptian coastal city of Rafah in northern Sinai.
The democratically elected Muslim Brotherhood, fellow Sunnis, had been deposed by the Egyptian military in a coup d’état led by General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, the army chief, on July 3 2013. As a result, what would have been a friendly city for Ibrahim was now a potentially lethal one. The subsequent election, boycotted by many Muslims, had elected el-Sisi as the new president. No big surprise to Ibrahim.
Following the subsequent outlawing of the Brotherhood as a political entity, a move supported by the educated middle classes of Cairo and Alexandria, as opposed to the rural poor, who were devout, the essentially secular and pragmatic Egyptian military had embarked on a process of healing wounds with its old allies. In 2013, it had closed the Rafah crossing to Gaza indefinitely. Previously used as an entry point for Muslim pilgrims en route to the hajj in Saudi Arabia to the south via Jordan, Ibrahim knew it was in response to jihadist violence in the Sinai after the deposing of President Morsi.
Ibrahim met up with a couple of the young men from the Sinai-based Islamic terrorist group, Ansar Bayt Al- Maqdis, who were responsible for the violence. They would guard him as he travelled to the tunnels. He would be met on the other side of the border by his Hamas brothers, and, if all went well, be taken to see the Amir in Gaza City. He already had forged papers for his time in Gaza, having travelled there on several occasions, and the Egyptians had handed him fresh ones for the Sinai after a brother had radioed ahead to Rafah. There hadn’t been enough time to get new ones made so they’d had to adapt existing ones, stolen in a marketplace by professional pickpockets.
An hour later, after transporting him to Rafah in the back of a Toyota pickup truck, his body covered by hessian sacks full of dates and olives, they dropped him off in a side alley and told him to walk to the fourteenth house on the right in the adjacent street.
As the pickup pulled away Ibrahim brushed off the old brown suit he’d been given to wear and covered his head with a red and white chequered keffiyeh headdress. This was as far from Cairo as you could get in Egypt, both in miles and in views and customs, and he would have to look the part. He carried a small plastic bag in which he’d put a pair of jeans and a T-shirt. Other than this he had no personal possessions.
Walking up the dusty alley bordered by rundown, concrete apartment blocks, he watched a couple of skinny dogs scavenging around a pile of garbage beneath a rusted-out fire escape. Otherwise nothing stirred. Even in the shadows the heat was in the low hundreds, and as he reached the sun-baked street he glanced back, feeling the first tendrils of claustrophobia as he thought of the tunnel that awaited him.
Be vigilant, he thought. Be strong.
In December 2009, Egypt, with technical assistance from the US and France, had begun to erect a steel wall along the Gaza border, which had been sunk eighteen yards below the surface. They had reinforced the border area with a thousand troops to protect construction crews from Palestinian sniper attacks. The construction process had already damaged almost a hundred smuggling tunnels and Ibrahim knew that not only had many fighters perished, but the process had hit Hamas financially, given that it charged an annual fee of two-thousand five hundred US dollars for their use.
The only comfort was he knew that the Gaza-Egypt border was seven and a half miles long, and, as yet, most of the construction had been confined to either side of the Rafah terminal some miles away. Even the bloody incursion by the IDF in the summer of 2014 hadn’t destroyed more than a third of the tunnels there, as the Israelis had focussed on the tunnels that had led directly into Israel, especially in the north and east of the Strip.
The street had never seen tarmac and was crater-ridden and stony. A woman wrapped from head to foot in a black and light blue burqa was walking beside her husband as he sat astride a bedraggled donkey. A small group of barefoot kids with dirt-stained clothes threw rocks at a tin can. Seeing an Egyptian Army armoured personnel carrier pass along an abutting street about fifty yards away, Ibrahim kept walking so as to not to draw attention to himself.
Seconds later an open-topped military jeep with a roll bar passed behind the APC. It stopped abruptly and turned down the street towards Ibrahim. He looked behind him. The kids scattered, the old man drew his hand over his neck before gesturing towards the alley with a crooked finger.
“Go, go,” he said.
But Ibrahim knew if he ran there was a good chance he’d get caught, and if he did, he didn’t want to think what the Egyptian Army would do to him in such a remote and volatile place. He’d heard they had carte blanche from the generals to quell the unrest by any means, and in northern Sinai that meant days of torture, followed by imprisonment in a hellhole or death.
He decided to stand his ground and take his chances.
Inside the military hospital’s lobby, Tom saw two doctors with stethoscopes draped around their shoulders standing before him like sombre sentinels. One was a clean-shaven man wearing thick eyeglasses, the other an elegant-looking woman, with her blue-black hair in a neat bun. She was holding a black clipboard and as Tom got closer he could see that her lips were full, almost lascivious, her eyes dark and humane.
She smiled without revealing her teeth, holding out her hand to greet him. “Mr Dupree?”