Nathan Mills

Isaiah 5:19. [Woe] to those who say,
“Let God hurry, let him hasten his work so we may see it.”

The Azrieli Bombing
1
March 3, in the near future
Thailand

He was strapped to a gurney. Foreign tongues chattered around him. His eyelids were heavy, and even if he could’ve lifted them, the bright lights proved to be unbearable. The annoying, screeching sounds of the wheels rolling over the bumpy, cracked tiled floor kept him from falling into a deeper sleep. The lights then faded as he was pushed into another room.

How he ended up groggy, he didn’t know.

The air in the room turned cold and musty. More prating tongues, words of a language he could not understand. The gurney came to a stop after turning sideways and making contact with an unseen object. Then the voices faded.

Yoram lay listless. A stench in the air nauseated him. He was conscious enough to question whether he could rise up. He tried moving his arms and legs and bending his knees, but lacked the strength to test the bonds. He fluttered his eyelids, anticipating the painful, invasive light, but the room was dim. He opened them fully and found himself beside an old concrete wall covered with dirt and cobwebs, and with water coursing down, its continuity intermittently obstructed by the wall’s cracks and mortar-filled gaps. Yoram turned his head and studied the ceiling, crisscrossed with thin, crooked wooden beams. He raised his head to see how he was strapped to the gurney. He then relaxed and began to go back to his thoughts.

He held an image of armed men raiding his dingy hotel room, dragging him from his bed and beating him. The blurry memory of the attack was replaced with another where he was lying in the bed of a pick-up truck, and then tied to the gurney. Was it a dream or had he been drugged? Either way, he could not connect these events coherently. So he breathed in deeply and waited for the grogginess to subside, as his mother, who had passed away when he was eight years old, used to tell him to do when waking up in the middle of the night, conscious of his surroundings but completely paralyzed. The feeling terrified him. He’d struggle to force his limbs to obey his brain’s commands to move. Not even a toe would heed. After deep concentration and hard flexing, he’d break from his paralysis, wide-awake. His mother had told him it was because he lacked potassium. He needed to eat more bananas, she had constantly reminded him. And if the sleep-induced paralysis happened again, to relax, try to fall asleep again, take his mind off the paralysis. That strange feeling would occur at least half of a dozen times per year. After eating bananas on a daily basis, he had cut that number to one. Now it was time to forget his befuddled state, and wait.

2
Tel Aviv, Israel

Two years following Arafat’s death, Israeli Prime Minister Eliyahu Beit-Hallahmi and Palestinian President Rafiq al-Kawas signed what was simply called the agreement. It was an event that the world heralded as a sign of the good things to come in the twenty-first century. Palestine was now a sovereign state. Israel had withdrawn from ninety percent of the occupied territories.

Following the agreement, left-wing peaceniks raised questions about the need of the Shin Bet and Mossad. They cried for the dismantling of the organizations, leaving military intelligence, Aman, as the only intelligence agency. They taunted the security agency and the intelligence service, saying they would suffer an identity crisis. But for Mossad Director General, Memune Bialik Magen, who had been appointed to the position less than a week after Beit-Hallahmi’s acceptance of the mantle of Prime Minister, met with section heads and veteran agents and told them that the Institute will continue. The Palestinians and the Israelis may have lessened the dangers by signing a document, but the Palestinians must still be watched as judiciously as before. Israelis must continue to be vigilant in protecting its citizens and newly found peace, which, Magen warned, is like a water vapor, dissipating before you could reach out and feel the warmth on your hands or before making the tiny hairs on your arms tingle.

A small corner of office space on the lonely third floor of a semi-modern building down the street from the tallest mall in Tel Aviv, Azrieli Center, was rented using a fake name, the next six months paid for in cash. It wasn’t a long lease, but the amount handed over was what the owner could have made in a year with another tenant.

The two men, Adiel and Herzi, normally came to the office at six in the morning every weekday and left late in the evening. The building’s old security guard, if quizzed on the matter, would never remember seeing the two men leave the building during lunchtime, nor any other time of the day. Perhaps he had noticed that Adiel and Herzi would arrive each day shortly before the occupants of the office above theirs, and that they would leave shortly after the occupants. But no one would ever ask him. An explosion ripped through the third floor, splintering office furniture and building material and shredding people in the building. Walls burst and floors convulsed. Destroyed water pipes soaked the second and first floors. Fires gutted every corner and partially damaged the rest of the building. The old guard was crushed by a fallen wall.

The windows of the Azrieli Center facing the little bland office building were blown out. Glass sliced pedestrians between the two buildings and shoppers milling around the façade of the shopping center. Because of the proximity of the nameless office building to the more famous shopping center, the bombing was referred to by the media as the Azrieli Bombing.

The charred corpses of veteran agents Adiel and Herzi were found among the dead. Tel Aviv, the city known as Spring Hill, sexy and raucous, modern and narcotic, had returned to the horror of terrorism once again. There were nine more lives that had been taken in the explosion. But three victims were found with the two Shin Bet agents, on the same floor and in the same room where the explosion occurred. Fire officials, police detectives and Shin Bet agents determined where the dead were positioned at the exact moment of the explosion, and all agreed that they were surrounding the bomb, which had been placed in the center of the room.
Only two men knew of Adiel and Herzi’s assignment, which was to observe, record, and report on the five young Americans above them, but never have contact with them.

3
Thailand

The stench of the room would not dissipate. Yoram came out of his deep sleep because of the disagreeable smell. His senses returned; he no longer felt drowsy. His first feeling of pain came from his stomach. His mouth was dry. Food and water, he thought. He tried to move his limbs, but they were still strapped down. His brown, glassy eyes surveyed the drab room again and he saw one wooden door and one small window behind him.

‘Hello?’ he moaned, before clearing his throat to try again. ‘Hello?’ he said with more force. ‘Where am I?’ He waited for a response but heard nothing. He laid his head down and waited.

‘Reuven?’ he yelled. ‘Are you here?’ he shouted in Hebrew. Again he waited but no response came. He bent his elbows and tried mightily to break through but no progress. He only made red marks and deep impressions on his arms and wrists. He let his mind wonder in an attempt to piece together what had happened and formulate a theory to why he was being held prisoner.

He had a clear memory of leaving their safe house in New Dehli, boarding a crowded Indian train with his handler Binyamin and fellow jumper, or overseas agent, Reuven, and traveling to the Kullu district of the northern state of Himcachal Pradesh, the very heart of where the first hippies arrived in the 60’s to cultivate cannabis. A large number of the pot-smoking foreigners there today were Israelis, and a small, localized Israeli mafia controlled distribution of hashish grown by local Indian farmers.

Kullu was dangerous. Many backpackers from Europe, Australia, and North America would go there to find inner tranquility and cheap dope, and never return. They would end up missing and local police and foreign investigators hired by worried families could not uncover one clue to the disappearances.
Yoram and Reuven had been assigned to Binyamin as soon as they had joined the intelligence service and were being trained in Iraq before Operation Freedom. Yoram spoke Arabic and Kurdish and had a couple of courses of Russian but never took that language seriously. They had been in New Dehli for several months looking into the Israeli mafia’s network in India. Had this excursion to Kullu been an extension of his training? He grimaced as if the inability to answer his own questions caused him physical pain.

Images flashed through his mind. He and Reuven had been left outside a tent on a blustery cold mountainside far from any city, fighting the elements, while Binyamin was meeting with contacts inside the tent. The images stopped there, so he relaxed his muscles and steadied his breathing.

Reuven was a good friend, one of Yoram’s only friends. And they had become as sons to Binyamin. They even resembled each other with their dark features and curly, unruly hair. Though Reuven looked more clean-cut, Yoram seemed to always wear a 5 o’clock shadow, his brown eyes rounder, and his expressions more solemn.
Reuven had the better background. He had come from a large family, his father a naval officer who had dabbled in Naval Intelligence. He had had a mediocre military career that was easily forgotten, but he wanted his son to carry on the family tradition. Reuven did, and he was very good. Binyamin, a man with more than thirty years of service to the tiny nation, recruited him after noticing his high aptitude for intelligence work, his natural ability to learn languages, and his adaptability to nearly any situation, culture, or problem.

Yoram’s life was simpler and more tragic. He was orphaned by age eight after his mother’s death. His father, a nobody in Israeli society, had already died from alcoholism.

It was 1961 in Morocco during the Moroccan aliya campaign when Mossad was smuggling Jewish emigrants from the country to Israel through Gibraltar. They had enjoyed a few years of success, transporting a few hundred every month. Yoram’s father was living in Mazagan with his first wife and two young children, a girl and boy. Despite the growing violence and danger for the North African Jewry, he held on to his business and resisted the Zionist ideology. But, the near death of his son in an attack on his store changed his heart. He went first to Gibraltar to help pave the way for his family who would travel shortly after with a male cousin. In January they boarded the Pisces, a World War II relic that had been used to recover downed pilots and crew in the Mediterranean, later purchased especially to ferry the emigrants from Morocco. But that night the ship didn’t make it. It struck rocks during a storm and a few dozen passengers drowned. Yoram’s father had lost his entire family.

He continued on to Israel a broken man. Hating God nearly as much as he did those “violent, death-loving Arabs,” he turned to the bottle. He later married a poor, young and parentless Ashkenazic Jew. Their union produced a handsome and insecure boy who grew up with a face and skin tone that could pass for a European along the Mediterranean or even a light-skinned Arab or Kurd. Yoram never knew why his parents had married. Fear of loneliness perhaps. A few years later he was conceived. Only months after that his father died. His mother later died, some would say of a broken spirit. Not even he could have given his parents a reason to live.

Yoram was taken in by a man in the neighborhood, a man without a son who loved his country and who would do anything for its security. Yoram had felt he was being trained as a soldier or a spy, but he depended on Binyamin, and learned to love him as a father, though he never told Binyamin this, and Binyamin never outwardly reciprocated any feelings. The act of taking him in and giving him a home was his act of love, Yoram convinced himself; and Yoram learned not to expect more. Binyamin gave only stern, angry looks, but there were rare, occasional touches on the shoulder, which Yoram craved.

‘What country?’ he asked Yoram while they sat in a parked car. Yoram was only eleven years old. The window was down and a small group of tourists were walking past.

‘Swedish. They’re speaking Swedish.’

‘Very good,’ Binyamin flashed Yoram a rare smile.

‘And those?’

Yoram listened. ‘Greeks.’

Binyamin backhanded him. ‘Can’t you recognize the blending of the front vowels, boy? They’re East Bulgarians. Country people.’

Yoram heard a banging sound outside the wooden door. He hoped someone would enter, the doorknob never turned. Yoram faced the ceiling again.

4
Tiberias, Israel

Colin dropped his overstuffed, army-green backpack on his hostel bed. He fell down beside his backpack. This hostel would do fine, he thought. With his faded T-shirt and knock-off khaki Camel shorts from Bangkok, unshaven face, and oily, messy hair, he was the typical despised backpacker. From Japan, China, Thailand, India, Greece, and more, he had traveled the world on a shoestring, and in the same outfit. Khao San Road in Bangkok and Ko Samui in southern Thailand were two of his favorite spots, but Tiberias was a close third. With a seedy and tacky environment and a cheap hostel in the old city to smoke his dope, he was happy. After getting a high, he’d head for the rock beach. That was a holiday for this Aussie.

Colin checked his watch and realized he had an hour before his contact would meet him in the rooftop bar. He had information that would fetch a pretty penny with the Israeli intelligence. This would be a big payday. He wanted it over with soon, so he could truly be on his holiday and fulfill his hedonistic desires with some other lonely backpacker, armed with a fresh stack of crisp new bills courtesy of the Israeli government. Sighing with a big smile across his face, he turned and unzipped the ‘special’ compartment in his bag, pulling out a baggie full of Kullu hashish. The next hour was spent taking slow drags, staring out the opened window, smiling at the chaotic sounds of the outside world.

Ready for his meeting, he splashed water on his face. No point in changing his clothes. He was going to jump in the Galilee as he was. He wetted his red hair and slicked back the long curly bangs. He bent over the sink and blew snot from his left nostril, then his right, not bothering to turn on the faucet and wash it down. He stepped to the door and gripped the knob while slipping into his sandals. He opened the door but, as he normally did, he kept his head down. He didn’t have time to notice or react to the three men who burst into his room. One man slammed his powerful fist into Colin’s chest cavity, knocking the wind out of him; a second man immediately covered Colin’s mouth and shoved him onto the bed. The third man’s job was to close the door soundlessly.

The first man drew his knife and gripped the Aussie’s thick, oily red hair and slit his throat from left to right, and then shoved the redhead into the pillow. They ransacked his room and went through his backpack. They found items of value, but they tossed them onto the bed, uninterested. A passport confirmed they had the right man, but the leader tossed the backpack to the floor in disappointment. They then left as quickly and quietly as they had come.

5
Thailand

The hunger pains were more than he could bear. His mouth was dry to the point he was afraid he wouldn’t be able to continue yelling for help. But Yoram tried to stay calm. It was as if being paralyzed while in his sleep. Relax, his light-skinned Ashkenazic mother would tell him. Relax until you can break free from it. Don’t panic.

The piercing wind on that Kullu mountainside had made his hands go numb. He and Reuven could hardly speak with each other because of their chattering teeth. Yoram now could remember that after boarding the train and returning to New Delhi, Binyamin was unusually garrulous. Normally he was an old man who kept to himself, rarely showing emotion, but always passionate about his Zionistic beliefs and the crucial need for accurate intelligence and sharp, strong agents to gather it. Do whatever Israel needed of them. Drivel or pointless speech had never dripped from his tongue, but that night on the train he spoke of the cultures and sites found in the area.

At that time, Yoram thought it was such a peculiar topic. Did his mentor really care about a theme park in Singapore? Or going to the top of the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur? Then there was talk of a small tribe in northern Burma, discovered by Christian missionaries as having customs and beliefs that were remarkably Jewish-like. But it had been Binyamin speaking, and Yoram listened to everything he had to say. Yoram wondered what Binyamin could have learned on that mountain to have made the old grey-haired, hawkish-looking man giddy.

Binyamin Mizrahi was born before the war had ended. His parents had escaped the Nazis and arrived on the shores of the Promised Land while Binyamin’s mother was three months pregnant. His childhood was spent observing the daring adults surrounding him build a nation and survive the hostile Arabs that surrounded them. He became politically active in his late teens when he caught the attention of Israeli’s leaders. In an effort to increase the tiny country’s operations against hostile Arab nations, starting with Iraq, the only country not to sign a ceasefire at the end of the war for independence, the Israelis started courting the Kurds in northern Iraq. Mossad began using Israeli spies in Arab countries at this time, too, as before 1964 their spies were mostly non-Jewish. Binyamin was barely an adult, but he was sent to Kurdish territory.

His assignment was to help build Kurdish resistance to distract the Iraqis but also create opportunities to gather intelligence on the Iraqi army. He was very successful. He knew the geography as well as any Kurdish guide and learned the language to add to his skills in Arabic. So much so that when Mossad came in contact with Munir Radfa, an Iraqi air force pilot frustrated with being passed over for promotion and mistreated because he was Christian, Binyamin was given a great responsibility. Radfa was going to hand over a Soviet MiG-21 to the Israelis but not before his family was safely taken from Iraq. Some members had been spirited away by Mossad long before the pilot’s run. But the morning that he took off in his MiG, the rest of his family members were driven to the Iranian border and helped across by anti-Iraq Kurds. Binyamin was there escorting the van, as a member of the fourth of the five teams set up for the mission, watching the pilot’s family safely cross the border.

Israel tapped into Binyamin’s knowledge of Iraq once again during the Six-Day War. Though the Israeli assault mostly targeted the air forces of its immediate neighbors, it did want to retaliate against Iraq for shelling Israeli targets. Binyamin confirmed the presence of many Iraqi aircraft at an airbase in its far western desert. Ten aircraft were still on the tarmac. They were swiftly reduced to seared scrap metal.

But later that same year, Binyamin was pulled from Iraq and “loaned” to Shin Bet, as arranged by the Va’adat. As a result of the Six-Day War, the region saw the emergence of Palestinian nationalism. Shin Bet needed every individual it could find who could communicate in Arabic and send them to the territories to sniff out fedayeen support for the PLO and search out cell groups. His actions in the West Bank during the late 60s cemented his reputation for being harsh, decisive, and in control. Mossad, with the need to focus on Palestinian activities abroad, took Binyamin back in 1970. Binyamin most likely didn’t have enough time to establish long-term moles, but it was rumored that he helped provide names of individuals which Shin Bet interrogators would drop in front of Palestinian suspects before letting them go, planting in the poor suspects’ minds that their colleagues were double agents, increasing the tension among the Palestinians.

After he rejoined Mossad, the nature of his work began to change. In the early part of his career, his skills were used to gather intel. But the 70s saw a more violent Binyamin emerge. After the EL AL hijacking, Binyamin had a hand in the assassinations of the terrorists involved. He may have been involved with the assassination of three senior PLO officers in Lebanon and a car bomb in Paris, but few knew the truth. He was nearly selected to help plan the assassination of a wanted terrorist thought to be in Lillehammer who turned out to be just a Moroccan waiter. The Lillehammer fiasco and its black eye on Israeli intelligence were excuses Binyamin could use to leave his work. He realized how hardened he was becoming.

So in 1974 Binyamin left and became a Foreign Service Officer in the United States. He was a member of the Israeli committee that tried to pressure the U.S. to force France to halt its assistance to Iraq’s nuclear aims. But when the Lebanese Civil War broke out, Mossad came calling again. He was to monitor U.S. attitudes toward the war from D.C. And after the Israeli ambassador to Great Britain was assassinated by Abu Nidal, an anti-Fatah, anti-Arafat leader backed by Iraq, Binyamin was asked for his assessment of Iraq’s support. After explaining the differences between the Palestinian groups and the politics between them, he was ignored. Prime Minister Begin saw no difference. Every armed Palestinian was PLO to him. Frustrated, Binyamin returned to D.C. and determined that he wouldn’t become involved again.

But the U.S. press in the 80s unknowingly saw a lot of blowback, false information, about Syria, Arafat, and PLO. There were leaks and rumors regarding Israel’s capability to deter Syria. Binyamin became quite adept in creating rumors for Israel’s benefit.

When the PLF, Palestinian Liberation Front, hijacked an Italian cruise liner, Binyamin once again had the chance to explain the differences between the groups and how the PLF was not happy with Arafat’s move toward diplomacy. But Israel again wanted to implicate the PLO as a whole.

Then without explanation, Binyamin was ready to leave the U.S. and willingly return to Mossad. He was given the chance to work on a peaceful mission of helping the Falashas from Ethiopia. After the Gulf War, he was consulted about the Kurdish uprising against Saddam and how Israel could “stoke” it. What Binyamin did for the rest of the 90s before taking in Reuven and Yoram is unknown. But Yoram saw Binyamin as hard and withdrawn from the very beginning, with the occasional sign of tenderness shown when Yoram made him proud.

Yoram’s thoughts stopped, interrupted by the sound at the door. He turned and saw four uniformed men. The first one was the oldest and by the number of colorful pins and badges on his shirt, the highest ranking. They weren’t dark enough to be Malays or Burmese, and they certainly weren’t Chinese. They looked Thai. They looked at his limited mobility and talked amongst themselves. Yoram noticed the tonal syllables in their language, up and down as though singing a song. That ruled out the Cambodian and Malay languages. Besides Chinese, the only languages in the area that were tonal were Thai, Lao, and Vietnamese. But these men were too dark and big for Vietnamese.

‘Where am I?’ he asked, interrupting their discussion.

The older officer nodded for a junior officer to approach Yoram.

‘What’s your nationality?’ the junior asked. He was thin but wiry, approaching Yoram with confidence and authority.

‘Israeli,’ Yoram said. He wanted to ask about Binyamin and Reuven, but he couldn’t. Not until he knew what had happened, and whether they or him were in danger.

‘Where’s your passport?’

Yoram shook his head. He didn’t know where he was. ‘What country is this? Where am I?’

‘Thailand,’ the junior officer answered.

Yoram tried to raise his arms, showing the men his predicament. ‘Why this?’

The junior turned to the older one and spoke in Thai. Facing his superior his shoulders slumped, showing deference. Translating the older officer’s response, he said, ‘You threatened the lives of many policemen.’

‘Policemen,’ Yoram muttered. Another question answered. Their uniforms were so army-like to him. ‘Please tell me why I’ve been immobilized.’

‘Drug addicts can turn violent at any moment, as you did in your hotel room. This,’ the junior policeman said, gesturing to Yoram’s tied-down limbs, ‘is for your protection as well as ours.’

Drug addicts, Yoram repeated in his mind. He closed his eyes and wondered if he was still asleep. ‘Drugs? I don’t take drugs. I’m not a drug addict. Let me go,’
he said, in neither a demanding nor begging tone.

He turned to speak with the older officer again, and they laughed together. ‘You were a wild animal yesterday, full of yaa bah and heroine. Yaa bah is-‘ he thought of the long, lisping word in English ‘-amphetamines. We found it in your blood and you had more in your hotel room.’

Yoram raised his neck and shook his head at the policemen, frowning incredulously. ‘I said I don’t take drugs.’ Mossad or not, he needed to know where Binyamin was. He had always been there to help Yoram. A spine-chilling feeling swept through his body at the thought of Binyamin abandoning him. ‘I was with two other men. Where are they?’

‘You were alone.’

‘My belongings, where are they?’

‘You had no belongings.’

‘My friends’ belongings, were they in the room?’

‘You were alone.’

Those words scared Yoram. He turned to face that dirty wall. He tried not to believe them, resisting a foreboding that he had been left for dead. He took a few deep breaths. His mother’s words rang in his head. Relax he did. The training, think of the tough, crushing training. He was a Mossad agent. Part of a fearsome institution that had hunted down Nazi leaders, terrorized the terrorists, pounded mighty reputations of world leaders to dust with truth and lies. He was to be feared, not the one to be conquered by his own fear. Binyamin would have backhanded him across his cheek if the old man could have seen the fear and self-pity raising their ugly heads in Yoram’s heart.

His spirit resurrected the boldness and fearlessness that had been pounded into him at the Institute. Be brutal, he could hear Binyamin say. Relax, he could hear his mother say.

The young officer stepped forward again, reestablishing his authority with his posture. ‘What’s your name?’ he said.

‘Yoram,’ he answered.

‘Do you have a passport?’

‘If you didn’t find it in my room, and if my belongings are truly gone, then I’m afraid it’s lost.’

Yoram saw him write something on a notepad. ‘How do you spell your name?’

‘Y-O-R-A-M.’

‘And your last name?’

Yoram only stared at them. The junior officer waited for an answer.
‘Your last name?’ he demanded.

‘I’d like to have a representative of my embassy here.’

‘This isn’t Bangkok,’ he said, but smiled before adding, ‘I doubt there’s another Jew within two hundred kilometers from here.’

Not in Bangkok, Yoram thought. And what damn hotel had he been found in? He couldn’t remember checking into a hotel in Thailand. No Jew near here. The police did not have Reuven and Binyamin in custody. They were not near him. Fear tried to well up inside him again, but he wouldn’t let it.

Nathan Mills

Friday, June 5, 2009

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