“The marine counterintelligence people did a brilliant job of analysis and counterplanning, and, yes indeed, it pretty much destroyed Sergeant Alaqua’s sniper force in a single afternoon. He himself escaped death, barely, having killed much and learned much. But his name had been made in radical circles. He was eagerly recruited and offered not merely princely sums to keep himself available but, most of all, interesting targets. Upon returning home, he disengaged from the army and became radical Islam’s go-to guy. We have him in Afghanistan, Africa, India, even the Philippines. He seems to have gone to work mainly for Tehran. But he helped the home folks too. In 2005, the prime minister of Beirut—occupied at the time by Syria—had run afoul of young Assad and old Tlass. On February fourteenth of that year, he was blown up by car bomb in Beirut. The mystery was, how did the killers wire the bomb? The answer is, they didn’t. Too tricky to use radio detonation in a heavily urban area, flooded already with transmissions. Rather, they planted twenty kilos of Semtex under the street, leaving a lump of highly volatile contact compound visible, possibly chlorine azide or silver nitrate. Perhaps it was camouflaged as dog shit. As the car passed over the bomb, from three hundred yards out, Juba, as he was now called, hit the compound with Bulgarian heavy ball, and the whole thing detonated. A great shot, a huge blast. Twenty-two others perished.

“Which brings us at long last,” said Gold, “to the incident of the bus.”

7

Outside Tel Aviv

June 15, 2013

The old Arab’s pony pulled his cart through the streets of Herzliya, a leafy suburb of well-appointed, well-landscaped houses, as well as luxury high-rises with ocean views, for the Israeli professional classes. Many lawyers, many engineers, many dentists, many doctors lived here, people far insulated from war and want and the anger of the Islamic entities. Twice the cart had been stopped by police patrols, and the old man offered to give them some of the fruit he had left over. They laughed, and one young policeman took a ripe banana. They checked his papers, checked his cart, warned him not to be out so late, and sent him on his way.

Somewhere between Yefet Street and Harmony Cove, the wagon drifted wide until it almost reached the sidewalk, and there a shadowy figure slipped off the vehicle’s underbelly, rolled swiftly to a thicket of bushes, and slid deep into them. The wagon continued its meandering ways to a central road, which took it out of Herzliya, then it disappeared into the maze of streets in the city’s Arab section.