The blood flowed first in the city where Sabri had served his apprenticeship. The Jordanian prime minister, on a visit to Cairo, was gunned down in the lobby of the Sheraton Hotel. More attacks followed in quick succession. The car of the Jordanian ambassador was ambushed in London. Jordanian aircraft were hijacked and Jordanian airline offices were firebombed. In Bonn, five Jordanian intelligence officers were butchered in the cellar of a house.

After settling the score with Jordan, Sabri turned his attention to the true enemies of the Palestinian people, the Zionists of Israel. In May 1972, Black September hijacked a Sabena airlines jet and forced it to land at Israel’s Lod Airport. A few days later, terrorists from the Japanese Red Army, acting on Black September’s behalf, attacked passengers in the arrival hall at Lod with machine-gun fire and hand grenades, killing twenty-seven people. Letter bombs were mailed to Israeli diplomats and prominent Jews across Europe.

But Sabri’s greatest terrorist triumph was still to come. Early on the morning of September 5, 1972, two years after the expulsion from Jordan, six Palestinian terrorists scaled the fence at the Olympic Village in Munich, Germany, and entered the apartment building at Connollystrasse 31, which housed members of the Israeli Olympic team. Two Israelis were killed in the initial assault. Nine others were rounded up and taken hostage. For the next twenty hours, with 900 million people around the world watching on television, the German government negotiated with the terrorists for the release of the Israeli hostages. Deadlines came and went, until finally, at 10:10 P.M., the terrorists and the hostages boarded two helicopters and took off for Fürstenfeldbrück airfield. Shortly after arriving, West German forces launched an ill-conceived and poorly planned rescue operation. All nine of the hostages were massacred by the Black Septembrists.

Jubilation swept the Arab world. Sabri al-Khalifa, who had monitored the operation from a safe flat in East Berlin, was greeted as a conquering hero upon his return to Beirut. “You are my son!” Arafat said as he threw his arms around Sabri. “You are my son.”

In Tel Aviv, Prime Minister Golda Meir ordered her intelligence chiefs to avenge the Munich eleven by hunting down and killing the members of Black September. Code-named Wrath of God, the operation would be led by Ari Shamron, the same man who had been given the task of ending Sheikh Asad’s bloody reign of terror in 1948. For the second time in twenty-five years, Shamron was ordered to kill a man named al-Khalifa.

DINA LEFT THE ROOM in darkness and told the rest of the story as though Gabriel were not seated ten feet away from her, at the opposite end of the table.