Siegebreakers: A Novel by fernpub

SIEGEBREAKERS

SIEGEBREAKERS JUSTIN PODUR

Roseway Publishing an imprint of Fernwood Publishing Halifax & Winnipeg

Copyright © 2019 Justin Podur All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons or events is coincidental. Every effort has been made to acquire permissions for excerpted lines from the following poems of Mahmoud Darwish: Our country is a graveyard, A lover from Palestine, A traveller, ID card, and I come from there. According to the Darwish Foundation, these are in the public domain. Editing: Fazeela Jiwa and Valerie Mansour Cover design: Tyson Kingsbury Printed and bound in Canada Published by Roseway Publishing an imprint of Fernwood Publishing 32 Oceanvista Lane, Black Point, Nova Scotia, b0j 1b0 and 748 Broadway Avenue, Winnipeg, Manitoba, r3g 0x3 www.fernwoodpublishing.ca/roseway Fernwood Publishing Company Limited gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund, the Canada Council for the Arts, the Province of Nova Scotia and the Province of Manitoba for our publishing program.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Title: Siegebreakers / Justin Podur. Names: Podur, Justin, 1977- author. Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20190129778 | Canadiana (ebook) 20190131276 | ISBN 9781773631776 (softcover) | ISBN 9781773631783 (EPUB) | ISBN 9781773631790 (Kindle) Classification: LCC PS8631.O28 S54 2019 | DDC C813/.6—dc23

This book is dedicated to the real-life Siegebreakers.

PART 1

CHAPTER 1

A good man had been kidnapped. A group of courageous men were searching for him. But Laila had come to the conclusion that the best chance of finding him was not among men of any kind. The café where she waited in a corner — known to be a place where women could come together unobserved and talk — faced the sea from the edge of the besieged city. Below, tunnels were carved out of the desert bedrock like a pattern of shadows of grape vines on the dirt ground. Above, white clouds hung in wisps from a clear bright sky. All around, walls stretched like curtains between grey control towers, carving the territory into policeable units, the miserable people inside squeezed for their defiance. More of them each year, walking with their heads held high, sharp glances betraying their fears. Two million of these people shoved into the biggest of the policeable units, fighting to breathe. Outside the café, a station wagon passed lazily on the narrow street. A half-dozen wicker chairs balanced on spindly legs around small tables. The sunlight, refracted through vertical blinds, glanced off the tile floor, the glass shelving on the wall, the tabletops. Everything was new: all the old furniture had been destroyed in the last attack. Each piece had been acquired in one of the brief moments when goods were allowed to trickle past the siege. When the owner’s baby cried out, in a cradle on the counter, Laila picked her up, held her in her arms, shushed loudly in her ear, swayed back and forth. The baby quieted. The owner looked at her like she was a miracle worker. “I volunteer at the hospital, Umm Sami. We know some tricks in the maternity ward.” Her soothing work done, Laila lowered the sleeping baby back into the cradle and the café was quiet again. She had calmed

SIEGEBREAKERS the baby, but holding the baby had calmed her, too, if only for a moment. When the time was right, she would have one of her own. A girl. Or maybe a boy, with the strength and smarts of his mother, not a handsome and brave fool like his father. Laila removed her headscarf and the thin outer sweater she wore to hide her arms. With the big curls of her hair out from underneath and the air on her skin, she felt more like herself. She sat by the window engrossed by her phone as it buzzed with messages. While the phone downloaded photos, she looked up to watch the owner work. Umm Sami had a steel pot and she filled it with the water, the least salty she could buy in a place where the water treatment facilities had been bombed out and the groundwater over-pumped. All around the enclave, the Occupier’s wells drilled into the coastal aquifer so that as the inhabitants tapped down, they let the saltwater in. There were bets on how many years were left before the whole place would be declared uninhabitable. At that point, the people here would need to ask their occupier to pipe them in desalinated water, which could be turned off at whim. Like their lives. Umm Sami turned on the gas and lit the fire below the pot, watched the blue flames lick the base, readied the plastic jar of sugar and waited until just before the boiling point before spooning it in and stirring, following it with four overflowing spoons of fine-ground coffee from the metal tin. The grounds fell into the pot and melted away, the cardamom aroma drifted to Laila’s nose as the boil came on quick, and Umm Sami stirred and lifted, played with the distance and the spoon until the foam danced to her will. She took the pot off the heat, waited two minutes as the fragrance of strong coffee filled the air and the grounds settled. She slowly poured the four coffees, switching from one cup to the other to ensure the best coffee would be evenly distributed. As Umm Sami walked the tray across the empty café to her, Laila’s mind was swimming with fears and plans and flashes of

JUSTIN PODUR detail. If this meeting she waited for succeeded she would confirm her theory. If she could confirm her theory, then Nasser and his boys could get there in time and save their friend. If they saved him, they would all be together once more, smoking on the beach and watching the waves, her translating for him to the other boys. Laila came out of her thoughts to thank Umm Sami warmly for the coffee. She heard Umm Nisreen’s car before she saw it pull up. As the schoolmistress stood up to her full height and walked across to the café, her perfectly arranged headscarf, dress, and expression made her look severe until she saw Laila through the window and smiled. She greeted the owner at the counter with a warm embrace before joining Laila. “Dr. Zamoun won’t be able to make it,” Laila told Umm Nisreen as the older woman glided into her seat. “We’ll have to meet Umm Moath without her.” Umm Nisreen ran her thin finger along the side of her cup, watching the steam rise. “Dr. Zamoun’s time in Gaza this trip must be coming to an end.” “She’s leaving today. She has a conference in Abu Dhabi next week.” Umm Nisreen sipped her coffee. “We shouldn’t need a famous doctor to convince Umm Moath about the importance of school for little Meryam.” Laila volunteered at the school and knew the girl to be slow and unfocused, indifferent to her studies, but with a quick smile, a loud laugh, and several friends in her class. Feeling a flash of guilt at deceiving her mentor about the real reason she had set the meeting, Laila said nothing. Umm Nisreen reached across and touched her hand. “It’s very sweet of you to take an interest in Meryam being taken out of school. If we can talk to her mother without her men present, maybe we can change her mind.”

SIEGEBREAKERS A taxi pulled up to the café. Laila watched as Umm Moath stepped out of the car, eyes darting, hand pulling her headscarf down as she slid the door open and then shut behind her to join them at the table. As Umm Moath slunk into her chair, Laila clenched her jaws and suppressed her urge to question the woman, waiting for Umm Nisreen to start. “Laila and I haven’t seen your daughter in school, Umm Moath.” Umm Moath looked out the window, then down. “I was told I’m not allowed… she isn’t allowed to go.” The words disappeared into the table. She didn’t touch her coffee. “That was what worried us. We wanted to find out if something is wrong at home,” Umm Nisreen said. Umm Moath wrung her hands. “I shouldn’t be here,” she said. The baby cried out again. Laila looked from Umm Moath to the cradle. She longed to help with the baby but she needed to be here. The owner put her hand up, signalling to Laila to stay sitting, picked her baby up and tried Laila’s shushing techniques. The schoolmistress touched Umm Moath’s elbow. “We don’t have much control over our lives, here. But we can educate our daughters, Umm Moath. You’ve survived so much to see that happen. Why has she been taken out of the school now?” “Her brother, Umm Nisreen. Ever since her brother came back from Riyadh, he won’t listen to me. He won’t let her go.” Laila looked at the café owner swaying with the baby, then out the window at the sea. The sun glowed on the soft waves. A family walked together on the beach, the waves breaking over the man’s feet. A fishing boat coasted, the stripes of its cracked paint and the fisherman aboard both moving to the rhythm of the sea. Beyond the fisherman, one of the occupier’s patrol boats crossed the horizon, enforcing the three-mile limit. Its communications tower bristled with electronics and its guns pointed towards the sky in warning.

JUSTIN PODUR “Would it help if we sent a male teacher to talk to the men in your family?” Laila asked. “No one needs to come to our house!” Umm Moath’s sudden vehemence surprised Umm Nisreen, but not Laila. “I’m sorry, Umm Nisreen, Laila. I shouldn’t have come. I can’t do anything about this.” Laila saw the tears welling in her eyes. Umm Moath stood up from the table to walk to the bathroom. “I’ll just be a minute,” she said. Umm Nisreen moved to follow, but Laila put a hand on her shoulder. “I’ll go,” she said, two steps behind Umm Moath as she crossed the café. The single bathroom lay empty behind a metal door painted blue. Clean and yellow-tiled, it had a toilet, a sink, and a shower, with no curtain or separation between them. Laila followed Umm Moath in before she could shut the door. In the small space, Laila towered over the smaller woman. She closed and bolted the door behind her. “Please stop crying,” Laila said. “There’s something I need to ask you.” “Wh— what?” Laila moved very close to Umm Moath and spoke in quiet, even tones. “Two weeks ago, your son Moath returned from his third trip to the Saudi Kingdom in three months. Each time, he came back with thousands of dollars in cash. His father did too. And your brother. Allowed through by the occupier with no problems.” “How do you know that?” Umm Moath sobbed. “Stop it,” Laila said. “Two days after Moath returned, my friend Viktor was ambushed by masked men, bundled into a brand-new white van, and driven away. A week before the kidnapping your family bought three white vans. They also came across the border with no problems from the occupier. Moath has one of the vans

SIEGEBREAKERS here in the city.” “How do you know about the vans?” Umm Moath wiped her face on her sleeve. “Do you even know who Viktor is? He risked his life to come to this place on a boat, and then he stayed when he could have left. He used to walk kids like your daughter to school to keep them safe from the occupier’s snipers. He is a big, strong man who wouldn’t hurt a fly because he is a pacifist. Is he in your house Umm Moath? Did your husband kidnap him?” “Please, there are other people in the house. Me, my daughter. Please don’t.” Laila was already punching a message into her phone. “You go home now,” she said. “You get your daughter. You don’t say anything to anyone, and you get out of that house. Do you understand? Say that you understand.” Umm Moath nodded her head once. “Now Umm Nisreen is going to drive you home.” Now that her theory was confirmed, Laila felt an overwhelming urgency. The baby hadn’t stopped crying, but the wail sounded distant to her. Laila wanted to run, to push Umm Moath ahead of her as she walked. Everything seemed to move too slowly: Umm Sami, crying baby over her shoulder, took the money for the coffees too slowly; Laila’s headscarf took too long to put back on; Umm Nisreen moved to the car too slowly; the car started too slowly; the reply to her text hadn’t come even though whole seconds had passed.

Minutes later, Umm Moath and Laila sat quietly in the back of Umm Nisreen’s car, staring out of their respective windows, avoiding looking at each other or speaking. Umm Nisreen had insisted on driving her home, too, which gave Laila another chance to assess the situation around the Moath house. The neighbourhood

JUSTIN PODUR woke up around them as they moved through it. Vendors headed to the market, trunks or carts full of clothes, shoes, cigarettes, tomatoes, oranges, olives, and knick-knacks. Hungry customers sought out bakeries while they could, returning with plastic bags full of flat bread. Laila’s phone vibrated. A reply to her text message. Her message had read: Where are you? She checked the reply: Buying fish, with your mother and mine. As they pulled up to the side of the narrow street, Laila looked over Umm Moath’s shoulder, through her window, into the street. Narrow and short, easily blocked with a car on either side. If the hostage was being held on this street and the police came, it would quickly turn into a standoff. The police would go through hell shooting their way in. The kidnappers would have all the time they needed to do what they would to the hostage, maybe even escape through the backyards by climbing over walls. “Please,” Umm Moath said, without specifying what she wanted. Laila looked at her with pity. Her son and husband had ensured that this would end with bloodshed, hastened now by information she had just given up. She had been unable to defy the men for her daughter’s sake, but she was also unable to defy Laila for theirs. She closed the car door behind her so weakly that Laila had to open, then re-close it. Laila moved into the front seat. “School won’t start for another hour. Where am I taking you?” Umm Nisreen asked. Laila looked at her phone, checked the time. “The market.” Umm Nisreen pulled back into the street, where more cars trickled into the gathering flow of traffic. “The street is full of neighbours, of children. Umm Moath’s house will not be easily stormed.” “You knew?” “I know about you and the Shaykh’s nephew and his boys. I

SIEGEBREAKERS know you have all been trying to find the foreigner. I didn’t know, until I saw her face when she came back from talking to you, that it was her family that kidnapped him. But you could have told me, Laila. You didn’t have to keep the secret from me and make me set up the meeting based on false pretenses.” “Do you think she really cares about her daughter?” Laila said, craning her neck to look out the rear window at the neighbourhood. “She came to the meeting, didn’t she? Laila, this woman and her daughter are not to blame. Hurting them will not help your friend.” “I told her to take her daughter and run.” “Even if they do, it will destroy that little girl’s family, and her mother’s,” Umm Nisreen said. “That is the fault of her son and her husband. Not us.” Then, worried that her ruthlessness would frighten her mentor, Laila said: “Maybe he can find a way that doesn’t destroy the family.” “The Shaykh’s nephew.” Umm Nisreen smiled a sad smile. Laila said nothing. “Have you talked to him about your studies?” “He won’t talk to me at all,” Laila pushed the thought away. Now was not the time to think about Nasser. When Viktor was safe, then she could hit his chest with her fists, demand an apology, reward him for giving one. “We’re here. I’ll see you at school.” Laila opened the car door and stepped out. Umm Nisreen reached out with a hand. With the same sad smile, she said: “I’ll see you at school, sweetheart. I am sorry.”

Laila walked up the gentle hill, the smell of the sea faint compared to the power of the discarded fish offal that hit her as the wind changed unfavourably. The market hall had been built with the high vaulted ceilings of a mosque; pillars rose up, balconies looked

JUSTIN PODUR down. On the wet concrete floor lay the glorious silver catch. A shark. Two stingrays. Shrimp. Tunas. Mackerel. Crates of sardines. Everything the ingenious fishers had been able to catch within the capricious limits set by the occupier. Twenty miles, it was supposed to be. If the Israeli gunboats didn’t shoot the fishermen’s boats three miles out, it was a good day. Laila could feel the wet puddles of brine and the fish blood seeping through her thin shoes and could taste the salt and fish in her nose and mouth. She reminded herself that this was their work, that these men and boys had made sacrifices to catch these fish and bring them to feed people, and she would not turn her nose up at them because she didn’t like the smell of the fish market. She set her jaw, looked up and around, saw her mother and her aunt and her cousin Hisham among the customers and sellers. The ladies were poring over several plastic crates of sardines, while the seller regaled Hisham with a story. Her cousin, two years her junior, stood in the middle of this crowded fish market looking so cool that he might be smoking a waterpipe at a café. Every short hair on his head was in place, his facial hair carefully trimmed. His T-shirt, belt, jeans, and sneakers fit like they had been tailored to his lean frame. He wore the perpetual grin of one privy to secret information, content to leave others to wonder what amused him so. For her, Hisham had always been the contrast to Nasser. Hisham’s style was flawless. Nasser’s hair and stubble and clothes always appeared on the edge of disorder, like he was inviting her to reach out and smooth his shirt or tuck it into his pants. Where Hisham smiled, Nasser brooded. Hisham was a fox, Nasser was her lion. “So, wait. They made you do what?” Hisham acknowledged Laila with a smile, drawing the fish seller’s attention. A young man their age, he did the inevitable double take at Laila, then the modest glance at the floor, before he puffed his chest out slightly and returned to his story.

SIEGEBREAKERS “They bring two gunboats up against our fishing boat. They shoot it up with two machine guns. Then they tell us to take off our clothes and swim home.” “They let you swim home? They usually make you swim to the gunboat and then take you to jail in Israel, no?” “Yeah, they’ve done that too. But this time, they just said, swim home. But they kept the boat. And the fish!” “Maybe they knew about your sardines!” “They do look very good,” Hisham’s mother said, without looking up at either her son or the seller, her eyes and mind fixed on the fish. “So, auntie, how much will you be buying today?” Laila interrupted the negotiation to kiss her mother and aunt, then took Hisham aside.

“What is it, Laila? Our mothers will need me to ensure they get a good price.” “Leave the fish to them. You need to find Nasser. I know where they have Viktor.” Hisham nodded deliberatively, as if she had just told him about a good deal on a kilo of sardines and not that she had located an international kidnap victim. He could be frustratingly unflappable, to the point where she wondered if he didn’t understand what she just told him. He always did. “Hisham, there’s a kid from my school in there, and her mom. I told them to run, but watch out for them.” “What street is it on?” Laila told him, and repeated what Umm Nisreen had said: “It’s a short, narrow street. They’ll block it with cars on either end. Tactically, it will be hard.” Hisham’s eyes gleamed. “Tactically, it will be perfect. I will get Nasser and we’ll put it together in an hour.” His smile disappeared.

JUSTIN PODUR “You haven’t told him your news yet, have you?” “Not now, Hisham.” “Do you want me to tell him? Or arrange something for you two?” Laila ignored the offer. “Can I help any more, or can you take over from here?” “I know where to find Nasser and Sami, but you can catch Elias — he will be around the school now, dropping his nieces off. Nasser will tell your father.” It all had to be done in person, though it cost them precious minutes. If they mobilized by phone, they would create cell-tower records, metadata, a digital trail in the soil for the occupier to trace back. They said goodbye to their mothers. Hisham walked her to the bottom of the hill while talking on one of his phones, and, like magic, a taxi was waiting for Laila when she got there. “Wish us luck,” Hisham said, opening the taxi door. Nasser would have said, grim and earnest, that they would succeed if God willed it. And she would have told him what she said to her cousin. “You boys are lions. Someone should pray for your enemies.” Her heart told her Viktor was alive. There was still time to save him.

CHAPTER 2

An hour later, Nasser rode shotgun in a white Mitsubishi Lancer, his squad assembled in their black fatigues, their Kalashnikovs checked, ordered and loaded, speeding to the Moath house. His heart raced faster than the car. He wiped his palms on his pants and steadied his knees. His shoulders and neck and jaw were tense with fear for Viktor but he felt focused, determined, alive, headed for battle, at least — any battle — after so long. He turned in his seat. “Once they know we’re coming, they’ll try to move the hostage. We’re going to try to be on top of them before they know what’s happening. If everything goes right, we’ll get them to give us Viktor and surrender to the police.” The Lancer wove in and out through civilian traffic, speeding around Gaza City’s battered residents in their beat-up cars, donkey carts or on foot in worn and hand-mended sandals. From the driver’s seat, Elias — eyes on the road — said: “left or straight?” A left turn would take them the long way around, to the opposite street entrance, wasting precious minutes. Continuing straight would get them there sooner, but take them through crowded streets with more children walking to school. Uniformed and armed, they were easily identified as men of the Resistance and so they endangered the people around them. At any moment, a missile could come from one of the drones singing high overhead, or from one of the F-16s that passed day and night to shatter glass and eardrums with sonic booms. An artillery shell could be fired from the Israeli side of the fence or from an Israeli warship out in the bay. Nasser and his men knew the risks, but the civilians had not signed up for this. Nasser also knew what the kidnap victim would do if he had a vote.

JUSTIN PODUR “Take the long way, goddammit,” Nasser said. Nasser’s fear subsided as his rage swelled hot in his face as if he had spent a long day in the blazing sun. The Brigade of the Companions, they called themselves, this supposed Islamic fighting organization that boasted about twenty members, almost all of them from the same two families. Flush with money from the palaces of the monarchies in the Gulf, they were unleashed, with the occupier’s help, to impose their retrograde ideas on people struggling to survive. This Brigade’s first action was not one of resistance to the occupier, but the kidnapping of one of the only people from the outside world who gave a damn about Nasser’s people. Viktor was one of the only people who had managed to get through the siege and into this place. The kidnappers had made demands, then changed them, then changed them again. Realizing there would be no getting the big Swedish pacifist back through a negotiation, the Resistance had spent weeks fruitlessly searching for him. Without Laila, his Laila, they would still be searching. He could not let himself think about Laila now. There would be time later.

“Mask up,” Nasser said. They wrapped their scarves around their heads. From guard towers across the border, drones and planes and satellites in the sky, from informants and hacked phones, the Israelis had eyes everywhere. In each moment, data was being collected, every image compared to others, facial recognition software applied. If an image of Nasser’s face was captured while he held a rifle today, then tomorrow, when his face appeared on another screen, buying bread at the market, or lining up for gas, a missile could quickly follow. While they lived, fighters wore masks. Their faces would be seen only on martyr posters. Hisham, from the back seat, tapped him on the shoulder and

SIEGEBREAKERS passed him a phone showing an image of the street they would reach within minutes. The Resistance had a strict no-phones policy in wartime, but this wasn’t wartime, not exactly. The phone had a photo looking down from a window onto the street where the Swede was being held. An old white Mercedes taxi was parked to block the entrance to the narrow street and behind it were two Brigade gunmen in jeans and running shoes, scarves over their T-shirts. At the other end of the street, another car blocking the entrance, two gunmen behind that. “Both sides of the street are cut off,” Nasser told the others. “We’ll have to take the other way.” “We are the Resistance,” Elias said. “Our weapons should never be turned against our people, even criminals like the Brigade. Our reputation will suffer if we do this.” “By taking Viktor, these kidnappers are doing the work of the occupier, and have made themselves legitimate targets,” Nasser said. “Now pull up here.” He handed the phone back to Hisham and told him to call the police, who would either arrive in time for a standoff or, hopefully, to make arrests and take the credit for the operation. Facing Hisham and Sami in the back seat, Nasser asked: “Your way in is ready?” “Yes,” Hisham said. “Are we all going down? We could achieve complete surprise.” “And risk being surrounded. No, I want to give them the chance to surrender. Just you two go. Elias and I will head straight for them. You have two minutes to get into position. Wait for our attack — and see what they do — before you move.” Hisham and Sami exited smoothly, eyes on the street, already waving bystanders away, before heading down an alley. Nasser got into the empty back seat and Elias inched the car forward. Nasser waited exactly two minutes, watching the street empty

JUSTIN PODUR of people. A voice in his head came unbidden and told him: You might die today with her mad at you. You should have called her. He bargained, told the voice that if he got out of this, he would fix things with her. Then he thought of Viktor, nearby and in danger, and refocused. He tapped Elias on his bony shoulder. “Go time,” he said, getting out of the car. He walked alongside it as Elias inched along, and when the angle was right began firing at the old Mercedes that blocked the street he wanted to take. After the second shot, as always happened, the shots from his own weapon sounded as if they were far in the distance. Time slowed. The holes appeared in the other car as if someone other than him was firing the bullets. Elias dropped down below the dashboard and let the car roll to a stop. Nasser didn’t need to hit either of the gunmen. He just needed to pin them down for a minute. That would place their two Brigade companions at the other end of their street in a dilemma. Did they stay in position or run down the street to help their brothers? The Moath men made the worst possible choice. They got in their car, lifted the roadblock on the other side completely, and drove down the street to help the two men pinned down by Elias and Nasser. They think they can fight like the Israelis, Nasser thought, curling his lip in scorn. The Brigade thought they could simply park a car and block a road. But the Israelis had artillery, fighter jets, tanks, satellites mapping every inch of the ground, drones, informants, and collaborators. The Brigade had not learned how to fight from a seemingly hopeless disadvantage. Nasser had. Nasser had learned how to fight like a Palestinian. Which was why, as the Brigade fighters regrouped, four men pinned down by two, Hisham and Sami came out onto the street behind him. They’d emerged from one of the many tunnels connecting houses

SIEGEBREAKERS and buildings everywhere in Gaza. Behind the Mercedes, one gunman rose to aim his rifle, far higher than he needed to. Nasser fired first and hit him under the collarbone, deliberately missing the head. His target went down. Nasser heard shots in the alley behind the gunmen as Hisham and Sami approached the enemy from the other side. Nasser got back into the car and Elias pulled up in time to see Hisham and Sami standing over all four wounded Brigade men, one of whom Nasser had hit, another almost certainly dead. The ringleader sat upright, holding his thigh and wearing a scowl of pain and contempt on a face swollen purple with bruises. Nasser had heard that the Swede had given his kidnappers the beating of their lives before they finally got him into the kidnap van. The ringleader was about five years younger than Nasser. He recognized his face: Moath, the son of the Supreme Commander of the Brigade. His men field-stripped the weapons of the fallen Brigade men while Elias got some gear out of the car trunk. Nasser fished in Moath’s pocket, found the phone, and offered it to Moath. “The police are on their way,” Nasser said, “and your roadblock is done. Call your father, Moath. Tell him it’s over. Tell them to surrender and give up the hostage.” “You kill us to save a foreign sodomite!” Moath spat back. “You’re not dead yet, Moath. The ambulance is right behind me, so your life will be saved. You can save your father too. You can save your family. Call him now.” As he saw Moath look up, defiant and silent, Nasser’s hopes for a quick negotiated rescue died. He felt an urge to throw the phone in Moath’s face but instead kept holding it in futility, as if waving the phone would change Moath’s mind. “Now, Moath!” Hisham whistled, pointed to the house they would have to assault, insinuating that Nasser was now wasting time. Neighbours were watching from the mismatched windows of

JUSTIN PODUR the street’s tight row of three-storey concrete buildings. The only way to avoid prying eyes was to get into an alley or inside a house. Nasser signalled to his squad to take positions. “My father will die a martyr!” Moath yelled as the squad moved away. “Viktor was helping us, Moath. You and your father have only helped the occupier today.”

Thanks to Laila’s information, they knew which house the Brigade held the Swede in. They snaked along the side of the street to the front door, rifles covering windows in all directions. The door was locked and bolted and barricaded. Nasser rapped on the neighbour’s door. A young boy answered and waved them in. Hisham ran upstairs to a room looking down on the tiny, walled courtyard, partially hidden behind a trellis of grapevines. The normal sound of chattering neighbours was replaced with a taut silence. Nasser and his other two men walked past the family seated in the living room straining to remain quiet and still as armed men took over their house. A familiar Palestinian routine. He nodded a greeting and an apology at the head of the household, a thin man not ten years older than himself, who sat with his wife, both parents with arms spread wide across the couch, trying to envelop their young children in a protective shield. In the light that came through the small acrylic windows, Nasser saw the whole family were immaculately dressed even though they were in their own home. He knew the frustration: for decades the Israelis had targeted their raids for times when Palestinians were asleep and they would take them away in their underwear, to add extra humiliation. Some people got into the habit of staying dressed at all times. The householder wordlessly handed Nasser a key to the neighbour’s house. Nasser paused a beat at the back door, waiting to know from

SIEGEBREAKERS Hisham what was in the yard beyond. Moath’s refusal to call his father off had shaken him. Now he worried that he was leading his men into an ambush, that in their search for Viktor they would walk into a house wired to explode. “Clear,” Hisham shouted from upstairs. The yard was now covered. They burst into the yard and threw a floor mat over the crushed glass atop the wall. Nasser slung his rifle, and was boosted over the wall by Sami. Elias followed, cautious as a cat, then Sami himself, who muscled over the jump and climb easily. The back door was locked too. Nasser turned the neighbour’s key, waiting for the soft click. “Ready?” Nasser kicked the door open and the squad snaked in fast behind him, guns darting to cover every centimetre of the living room. Empty. “Clear. Now upstairs.” A sprint up the stairs into the upstairs hallway. Empty. Nasser kicked the door of the main bedroom in. At a glance he took in two chairs, a length of rope, a roll of tape, and a cot, on which Viktor lay dead, strangled, face covered with bruises, hands bound in front of him, unseeing eyes open. “Oh God,” Sami said. The blood drained from Nasser’s head. His heart, which had been pounding, grew cold. The cold in his chest spread from his arms to his hands to his fingers. “Sorry Viktor,” Nasser whispered. He had failed.

He heard Hisham’s voice over the radio. “They’re next door to you. In the back.” Nasser looked out the window. Two armed men, one of whom was the Supreme Commander of the Brigade, were struggling to get over the wall. “This isn’t a rescue any more, it’s a murder,” Elias said, at

JUSTIN PODUR Nasser’s side. “A police matter. Maybe we should let them go, now. They can be arrested later.” “And have them go back to their paymasters in the Saudi Kingdom? And have to do this all over again with another victim in another neighbourhood? No.” Nasser stepped back from the window and said: “Sami.” Sami could hit a target at up to 300 metres with his AK-47. At this range, he could not miss. He had been a friend of the Swede’s; he should be the one to execute his murderer. The big man took aim pushing his breath through gritted teeth while his jaw muscles bulged and he easily took them down, one shot each to centre mass. Nasser indicated the crime scene. “This we leave for the police,” he said. When they got to the yard, Hisham was already there, and the Supreme Commander was spitting blood, on his way to God’s judgement. “Tell me, Supreme Commander,” Nasser asked, “were you working for the Israelis, or did you do this yourselves?” “That foreigner lay down with men. He had to die. His boyfriend came to visit him! What was he doing here but teaching Palestinian children the ways of unbelievers?” “What was he doing here? He was telling the world what the occupier is doing to us. He was telling people in his country that we are human beings, that we deserve better than to die in this cage like animals. Now you act worse than one.” The Supreme Commander held his wounded stomach, lifted his head with effort. “I am proud of what I have done!” “You are free to be,” Nasser said. He turned to Sami and nodded. Nasser was already headed away when he heard Sami fire two more shots, before Sami and the rest of the squad moved in behind him.

CHAPTER 3

In the pre-dawn hours Ari left Zahava behind and walked alone on the beach, his mind gnawing on a problem he could not properly formulate and therefore could not solve. In a sense the problem was simple: For the safety of his country, the Arabs’ phones needed to be monitored, their Facebook posts watched and if necessary deleted, their movements tracked, their travels curtailed. For the safety of his people, the fences, the walls, the moats, the patrol boats, the terminals, the checkpoints, the towers, the cameras, and the drones. And at the apex of the pyramid of data, making sense of it all, was Ari. But for several months, the volume of enemy activity had been too low. There was too little chatter. Too few reports from informants. Ari had begun to suspect a detection failure on his own side. But he couldn’t understand why his side would suddenly become deficient. He had got up from his computer screens, disconnected from the data, and walked, hoping to unleash some nonlinear process in his brain. It worked. Bits of unrelated information that had troubled him for months finally revealed their pattern. It was not a detection failure. He had discovered something real. All of the evidence had been right there in front of him. The enemy had a big plan. But what would happen if he told the General? The answer to that question, too, troubled him. He returned home and logged into the intelligence databases; this time impersonating the General, all of whose passwords he knew. He found the folder he was looking for, “Contingencies,” and downloaded all of the files, this time deleting the logs and leaving no sign of his presence. Once his computer was again

JUSTIN PODUR disconnected from all networks, Ari used the General’s clearance, the highest in the country, to decrypt the copied files. Contingencies. A folder of documents and presentation slides. Orders of battle and war plans. Triggers and automatic actions. As he clicked through them, he found his nightmares made real. If he told the General about the plan he had discovered, he would trigger the greatest catastrophe since the previous century. If he did not, he would be a traitor. Ari felt like he was sinking into the sea. He saw degradation and doom and nowhere to flee or hide, no one to tell and no force on the horizon that could stop it. Then he remembered someone.

CHAPTER 4

For the debriefing, Nasser left the car parked on a quiet street and travelled underground on foot through deep tunnels old and new. The labyrinth was by now as much his home as any fourwalled building in Gaza. The reddish dust built up on his clothes in layers. In places, he had to walk stooped, alternating between bending at the knees and at the back like an old man. The claustrophobia of his first few times down here was a distant memory. He could smell and feel where he was as he walked, how deep, the feel of the rock and the thickness of the air guiding him as much as the dim lights. His eyes adjusted to the dark. He ran his hand along the bumpy rock, his eyes wandering to the green electrical cables running along the ceiling. After the fight, the adrenaline dump had left his muscles feeling weak. His shoulder was bruised from the recoil of the rifle kicks. He turned over Elias’s questions in his tired mind. Had he misused the Resistance, committed murder against mere criminals when he should be fighting the occupier? Elias was like his conscience, always at his side to challenge him, indispensable. But Nasser had to make the decisions. The responsibility was his. And the failure. The cold feeling persisted, the one that started when he saw Viktor’s body, the feeling he had some winters huddling in front of a space heater with a blanket on, but unable to get fully warm. The images of Moath and his father, defiant to the end, played in a loop. Then, images of Viktor, first lying lifeless on the cot and then, very much alive.

Nasser had met Viktor at a late-night meeting years ago, the night the Swede first arrived on one of the only flotillas that sailed

JUSTIN PODUR in from Greece non-intercepted by the Israeli navy. Viktor was one of the activists who decided their cause was Palestine, who came to Gaza on their own time, at their own risk and at their own expense. Nasser was given the task of finding families who could take the internationals overnight, at least until they could find places of their own. At that early meeting most eyes were on Viktor, towering over everyone, just starting to grow in the blond beard that would become thick in Gaza, all smiles and bulging muscles. Nasser had arranged to put him up at the house of the Al-Bahris, a big house with a big family. Viktor stayed there only a week until he found his own apartment in the foreigner-favourite neighbourhood of Khuzaa, but he visited the Al-Bahris often. The family would tell Nasser about the visits, the tea or cookies brought by the foreigner. But he didn’t meet up with Viktor again until years later, when the Israelis blew up the Al-Bahris’ house and killed everyone inside. Nasser was nearby when the bombs fell, and so was Viktor. They helped the Red Crescent paramedics move rubble to get the bodies out, even while the bombs kept falling on other parts of the city. Nasser scrambled through the rock and dust and twisted metal, indifferent to the possibilities of jagged edges or unexploded munitions. When he unearthed a child’s hand still holding a teddy bear, Viktor had helped him move an impossibly large boulder to get the child’s body out. He remembered the Swede’s pursed lips and heavy breath through his nose as they pulled the stone off. Viktor had shed no tears, though Nasser had to wipe his own eyes when he recognized the youngest Al-Bahri boy, a boy he’d watched in the Al-Bahri living room once, toddling. “Sorry, Nasser,” Viktor had said. Another happier time, Nasser had let his man, Sami, convince him to lift weights at the gym. The Swede had been there. Nasser had watched these two giants lift inhuman amounts of weight, had laughed as he watched them try to communicate, Sami’s broken

SIEGEBREAKERS English, the Swede’s nonexistent Arabic, united in the language of building muscle. The whole squad, and Laila too, had spent more than one afternoon sharing a waterpipe on the beach with Viktor. Those were good times, because thanks to Laila’s translation skills, they actually knew what Viktor was saying.

In the still tunnel air Nasser walked a long way alone, keeping his breath controlled in the finite-oxygen environment, headed to one of the bunkers used by both the Shaykh and by the Commander for meetings. Both were there, and he had to tell each one about the operation separately. The Commander was first. They met in a chamber cut out of the same rough reddish rock as the tunnels that led to it. The Commander had a plastic desk and plastic chairs, papers, and a laptop computer, all lit by a high-powered electric lamp mounted on the ceiling. He was tall and thin. His greying hair had a wave in it; his moustache made his face harder to read. He wore a cap and fatigues with the sleeves rolled up, showing wiry muscles on his forearms like Nasser’s own. He had wrapped his scarf loosely around his neck. “This murder was a cowardly, grotesque, and shockingly criminal act,” The Commander said. “Yes, sir.” “We believe the occupier had a hand in it.” The Commander’s fingers twitched as if he wanted to reach for a cigarette. He pursed his lips and looked away from Nasser. A soldier in uniform brought two cups of tea on a plastic tray. Still hot, Nasser noted. But probably because it came out of a thermos, and not because there was some tunnel to the surface much closer to the bunker than he knew about. “This was a failure on the part of the Resistance, one we cannot ever repeat.” “I agree, sir.”

JUSTIN PODUR “We will try the remaining members of the conspiracy and punish them. We will keep investigating the death to see if we can find a connection to the occupier. But above all, we must have better security for those few people who come to Gaza.” “Yes, sir.” “Nasser, I need to understand what happened to Abu Moath. How exactly did he die?” Nasser hesitated. If he admitted that he executed Abu Moath after the battle he would be admitting a crime. If he was not punished, his commander could also be implicated. If he did not, he would be lying to his commander. “He was executed on the battlefield sir. I offered his son the chance to surrender the hostage and his son said that they would all rather die. Abu Moath’s Brigade of the Companions could become a big problem for us, having to fight an Islamic State insurgency while fighting the occupation. I made a military decision — mine alone — to take out the leader of the Brigade then and there.” The Commander finished his tea and said: “Good.” “I submit to any discipline you decide for me, sir.” “There will be no discipline. You may consider it as if I had given the order myself, son.” An idea came to Nasser then. A chance to stop more Brigades of the Companions before they exposed Gaza to further ruin. “Sir, put me and my men on the task of clearing these enemies out of Gaza. We can work with the police. If the occupier is working with the monarchies of the Gulf to sabotage the Resistance, I want to fight back.” “No, Nasser. There is another mission for you.” “Sir, with respect I don’t see what could be more important than this.” “You will. We have changes coming. New struggles ahead. New people arriving that will need protection. The unity government we have prayed for is becoming real. Men and women, refugees

SIEGEBREAKERS from the camps and Lebanon, the West Bank and Gaza, and the Galilee, all of the factions will soon have an elected government of resistance.” Nasser had never known anything but disunity and discord among his people. The occupier had always found ways to crack every attempt at unity, had found ways to refuse every compromise. People could be bought, threatened, lied to, made to fight one another. “That will never happen,” he said. “It is happening, Nasser. In this new phase it will be even more important that everyone knows the consequences of harming someone under the protection of the Resistance. You sent that message today. You have my gratitude.” “Sir.” “Now there is another matter I need to discuss with you.”

The other matter was always present between them, because although neither the Israelis nor most of the Resistance knew it, Nasser’s Commander was also Laila’s father. The Commander was a close friend of Nasser’s uncle and had known Nasser’s own father. Laila had been the first ray of light piercing the dark cloud of his parents’ death. He was thirteen. That year she had summoned him to sit beside her at a birthday party, had called him a donkey, and from that day it had never occurred to Nasser that he was going to marry anyone else. Nasser thought it no betrayal of the Commander for them to meet in secret, sometimes to have a cup of tea at a bakery, sometimes to do something more in the bedroom of a safe house. With a fixer like Laila’s cousin Hisham to help, they had no trouble making it happen, though Nasser had qualms about using the resources of the Resistance to arrange secret meetings between a boyfriend and girlfriend. “It’s the opposite,” Hisham had told him. “The Resistance

JUSTIN PODUR has these resources because Hisham does these favours. I help the baker, I help the safe-house owner, and they help me, help you.” Laila had a bright future. The last time they had seen each other, she lay on top of him in a small closed room filled with her different fragrances. He breathed her in and was overcome with fears that she would have to leave him. “Laila,” he whispered. She murmured a drowsy response. “You shouldn’t stay here.” After trying to ignore him and realizing he would not relent, she had woken up abruptly and sat up, eyebrows arched in annoyance. “It’s not up to you, my love.” “Listen,” he said. “You’ve never written a test and not gotten the highest mark in the class. You speak three languages. You’re not supposed to live the rest of your life here like a caged bird.” She was the only person he knew that had a chance to fly. The cage would open for her but not for him, and when she flew, she would have to leave him behind. “We are going to find a way,” was all she said, lying back down and putting her mouth to his neck. “Now can I sleep for a few more minutes?” Then Viktor had been kidnapped and they had run out of time.

“There are many sacrifices that must be made for the Resistance,” the Commander began. “Sir, I understand. Laila and I both understand. We are prepared to wait until her studies are finished to get married.” Nasser had been working on the problem in the back of his mind and was ready to go over it with her now. He knew that by now Laila would have received her acceptances to study outside Gaza in a nearby country. He knew that the occupier would eventually allow her to go. Inspired by her confidence, he accepted her

SIEGEBREAKERS plan. It would be a long and difficult separation, but if he survived those years they would be reunited. “Nasser, she has been accepted to go to University in Oslo.” The oxygen in the room thinned. Nasser’s breath went shallow and ragged. Oslo. Not the West Bank or Lebanon. Why hadn’t she told him? Thoughts raced through his head. He stilled his breathing and let the fear pass and remembered the truth: She was a sunbird, all brilliant colours and song. And he was a doomed man, the rest of his short life to be lived in the gunsights of the Israelis. “I have no trouble accepting that she go to Oslo,” he said when he finally could bring himself to speak, not letting on to her father that she hadn’t told him. “Even if it means I never see her again.” The Commander looked hard at the pale young man in front of him. “And you will tell her this yourself?” “Yes, sir.” “Thank you, Nasser. Perhaps we will still see you two wed, in Jerusalem, if God wills it.” “If God wills it, sir.” “The Shaykh wanted to speak to you.”

In the next chamber, the Shaykh, otherwise known as his Uncle Walid, was waiting for him. Shaving, actually, the salt and pepper beard disappearing under the dark blue plastic disposable razorblade as it moved down his weathered cheek. “Come in, my beloved boy,” he said, looking in the plastic mirror that hung on a nail at Nasser’s chin height, for the Shaykh was not a tall man. He wore a short-sleeved dress shirt and pants, loose around the middle to make room for the slow but inevitable expansion of his waistline. “Going beardless? Down here?” Nasser asked. His uncle’s charisma always took him out of his thoughts — light or dark, even of

JUSTIN PODUR Laila — and put him in a mood for banter or debate. Nasser had seen it his whole life: when his uncle was present, people with few political inclinations found themselves debating the future of the Middle East; people with somber faces and broken hearts found themselves smiling against their better judgement. Walid rinsed his face with the bit of hot water that remained in his bowl and turned to Nasser, beckoning him to sit on a cushion on the floor. Walid got himself a hip flask from a locked box, and sat down with it, sighing. “My God, is it good to be beardless and having a drink! Don’t worry my boy, no one but you and the Commander will see me until it has grown back. I am down here working on something in isolation for a while. I have told everyone I need to pray!” Walid chuckled to himself. It wouldn’t take long to grow back — the Resistance preferred short beards on their leaders anyway. They were not the Taliban, to grow long beards in some insincere attempt to imitate the Prophet. Although Walid’s reference point was more likely the long beards of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara and Camilo Cienfuegos in the Sierra Maestra.

While Walid’s behaviour might have been shocking to Nasser’s soldiers, Nasser had grown up with his uncle and knew his long story of struggle. Walid had been a child during the Catastrophe, when Israel’s creation led to the ethnic cleansing of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. He’d been one of the young Palestinian refugee-fighters in Jordan, making raids into Israel, trying to launch the armed struggle to reverse the loss of their country. He’d fought the 1967 war from there, escaped when the Palestinian coup of Black September in 1970 failed and the Jordanians massacred the Palestinian fighters and many of their families. He’d been a junior commander in Lebanon, when the Israelis invaded in 1982. When

SIEGEBREAKERS the Israelis defeated the Palestinians in Lebanon and massacred them in the camps, he’d been sent with the other fighters to Tunis. During the Uprising of 1987, Walid had managed to get back into the West Bank. When they were all deported to Gaza after Oslo in 1993, Walid had dropped his outward communist habits, grown a beard, shown the same scholarly aptitude he had shown for reading Lenin and Trotsky to interpreting the Islamic texts and becoming an intellectual and spiritual leader for the Resistance, from the second uprising of 2000 onward. As he grew older, Walid found that neither his courage nor his wisdom was sufficient to convince youth who were vulnerable to online videos by men who fought in God’s name, like the Brigade, who touted archaic and unproductive ideas that hurt the Resistance’s goals. In the role of the Shaykh, Walid found the authority he needed to convince the increasingly devout young people around him of his strategies and plans. But indoors, in these moments, with Nasser, Walid reverted to his leftism and his secularism. An old man now, but not tired. Never tired. However many more losses were ahead, he would be steadfast in the cause — the Palestinian cause, not the Islamic one — to the end. Walid would have been much more comfortable in his steadfastness, though, if the winds had blown back towards hairless faces and the occasional swig of whiskey.

“What is the Shaykh praying about?” Nasser asked, taking a seat next to his uncle. Walid took another swig from the bottle, then, when Nasser raised an eyebrow, he put it away. “I like to have a drink at the end of the day, but I am still a disciplined man. I am no drunk!” “I would never say you were, oh Shaykh,” Nasser said. “Tell me first, did you say goodbye to the girl? I told the Commander you would,” Walid said. “I will say goodbye, Uncle,” he said, his uncle’s pity and the

JUSTIN PODUR memory of her — even now, even with the possibility of losing her — lifting him slightly out of his weariness. “The occupier leaves us no choice in these matters. I would tell you loving one another is itself a kind of resistance, but that kind of resistance is not for the likes of you and me.” Nasser said nothing. “Now to the other matter. You and your boys have been assigned the most important job in all of Palestine.” “We will fulfill it, if God wills.” Walid laughed. He lit a cigarette for himself and another for Nasser. “I was trying to make you laugh, boy. When I was your age, we were able to laugh at ourselves… ah. I have to ask you a question and you have to think very carefully about the answer.” “I will, Uncle.” “Good boy. The term of the Authority’s current president has been legally ended for years — but now, so has ours. The United Nations has agreed to broker elections, and we have reason to believe enough European countries in the Quartet will back a new election and ensure it is fair. We have better media resources and more international support now than we ever have. If the election is fair, the unity platform, which we are calling the Collective, will win, and become the government of all of the Palestinians. Their plan is to organize people to resist in the territories and to pursue all of our international legal options.” Nasser leaned forward with the cigarette burning, still untouched. “Some government. All of the deputies will be arrested immediately, they won’t be able to meet or make decisions, and Israel will install whoever they like to do whatever they like.” “That will happen, if the Collective repeats the mistakes of the past. But, once they are elected, if they behave as a resistance movement should, rather than as a government of a country that does not exist, then we will have a chance at gaining some of the land back — of ending the occupation, at least.”

SIEGEBREAKERS Nasser abandoned his cigarette in the ashtray, stubbing it out unsmoked. “The Israelis will prevent the Collective from ever meeting or communicating. They won’t be able to issue any communications. And they will be assassinated or imprisoned.” “We have managed to defy them.” “By living in tunnels and bunkers under Gaza. They don’t have that option in the West Bank, much less in Jerusalem.” “Which leads to my question. There is only one place where the Collective could assemble. One place where all the representatives could gather, if they could accept that once they arrived, they could not leave. And if they could be kept safe. So, Nasser, as the leader of the best group of soldiers in the Resistance, can you keep them safe?” “What are you saying? That the Collective is going to set up here, and run the government from under Gaza? Even if they can all get here somehow unnoticed, what’s to stop the Israelis from figuring out who they are and killing them before they get here? Or from using missiles or collaborators to kill them while they are here?” “You.” Nasser watched the smoke rise around them, looked at his uncle’s intent eyes set in his shaven face. “If I say we can protect them, you will invite them here?” “Abu Laila wants to know what you think before we decide.” Nasser drank from his teacup, and in a moment he felt its warmth moving down his chest. Today had been failure and loss. But there was possibility in the future. “Invite them.”

CHAPTER 5

If her boss Brad Hoffman had not been so late, and if Camilo, her overactive 14-year-old, hadn’t decided on a campaign of revenge against their hotel manager, Maria would not have figured out there was an assassination plot in progress. She had just kissed her husband, Camilo’s father, goodbye for the day. While she met with their boss to compare notes on the security conference they’d finished attending, Mark had a plan to do his usual ritual in a new city: to visit the local jiu-jitsu club, which in Abu Dhabi was a famed one, and get a few hours of training in before returning to meet them for dinner. Camilo trained too and could have gone with him — and so did Maria, for that matter — but the boy was more interested in computer time than mat time right now. Indeed, the only shopping trip he’d wanted to go on in the emporia of Abu Dhabi was on the second day, to an electronics store, to buy a welding kit and an Arduino, items that could more easily have been found in the US. The incredibly specific nature of the request should have tipped her off, but one small excursion had seemed reasonable.

When they checked in, the hotel manager, Mr. Sultan, had introduced himself. He had bent down to ruffle Camilo’s hair and said, “We have many fun activities for kids here.” Camilo had smiled politely, but he was in a touchy phase where he wanted to be treated like a grown-up. That afternoon, Camilo went to the hotel business centre with his father and sent Maria an encrypted email full of background information about Mr. Sultan, whose real name was not Sultan at all, and who had been the manager at a hotel in Dubai where a number of sexual crimes had taken place.

SIEGEBREAKERS Camilo had “doxed” him, figured out his real name, his birthday, his address, his children’s names (“thank you Facebook,” he’d written in his note to her). From there, a few dozen tries at guessing Sultan’s password from his personal information got Camilo into the guest management system of the hotel, where he could view all the bookings, including their own. All by the end of the second day of the conference, and he still hadn’t revealed his plans for the Arduino. Maria wrote him back from her laptop in one of the conference sessions: “Please stop.” He wrote her back right away: “OK.” He never lied to her, so she believed he would stop — that particular activity, anyway, since the boy had a lawyer’s eye for loopholes and would not assume her request to stop applied to new exploits he might try. He didn’t need to do the hotel any harm, he just seemed to want to know that he could if he wanted to. Knowing he had the option seemed to be enough to make up for being treated like a kid. He was a kid, indeed wanted and expected Maria to treat him like a kid. At least sometimes. He proceeded to keep his word for the rest of the week, during which he worked slowly on the Arduino in the hotel room at night, welding components onto the palm-sized microcontroller based on a plan he was looking at online — a plan he didn’t reveal to Maria. When the conference week ended with no further incursions into the hotel- management system and no further doxing of Mr. Sultan or any of the hotel staff, Maria breathed a sigh of relief.

Too soon. That morning, while they waited in the lobby, Camilo got bored and decided to start breaking into the hotel lobby’s security camera feeds. Maria and the boy had settled down on the extremely

JUSTIN PODUR comfortable couches, a waitress immediately brought them some champagne glasses with some indescribable combination of fruit juices, and they began to wait for Hoffman to arrive from his morning meeting. Camilo lasted about forty-five seconds before he popped his laptop open, and lasted no more than five minutes before he resumed the breaking of international computing laws. “Look mom,” he murmured, “they kept the default passwords on their security cams. Anyone on this Wi-Fi network who has the password can look at any video feed in the whole hotel. Want to see us?” He pointed to a grainy video feed on his laptop looking down on him and her sitting on the circular cushions, the eager young South Asian waitress walking away after topping up their fruity cocktails, all smiles, too discreet to let her gaze wander to his screen. “That’s you, and that’s me,” he said. “Turn that off,” Maria whispered. “It’s probably illegal here.” It was illegal everywhere. But at a five-star hotel in Abu Dhabi, where a security industry conference had just wound up, where discretion was at a premium, and which happened to be an absolute monarchy whose authorities had powers broader than in most jurisdictions Maria had ever been in, having her son get caught breaking into the local closed-circuit television, exposing their abysmally bad security in the process, was not her idea of a good time. “I’m following the rules,” Camilo said. “I won’t get caught. Ooh, look here, there’s cameras on each floor at the elevator bank —” “— Mi amor, close the laptop.” Maria said it in a calm voice, but one that Camilo had never, so far, defied. He closed it. In fourteen years with him, Maria had learned you couldn’t just leave the kid with nothing to do, and had learned many methods

SIEGEBREAKERS of distraction. This was one she hadn’t used in years, on Camilo anyway. “Now, close your eyes.” He closed them, a smirk crossing his mouth as he figured out what she was doing. “Now tell me, how many people are in this lobby?” He wrinkled his olive-coloured, delicate face, which was much more like hers than his blue-eyed, square-jawed father. He had her character, too, much more than Mark’s. His father was all toughness on the outside, and sensitive inside. Maria and her son had soft, pleasant exteriors, and were iron-willed underneath. “Eighteen,” Camilo said. “Four clerks at the front desk. One uniformed security guy at the concierge desk. Four waitresses refreshing drinks. A group of three local men doing business across from us with those white robes on. A European couple waiting for their taxi. The two dudes with the tennis racquets who have been here the whole time. That bald guy in the blue shirt who just got here and started hanging around in the couches behind us with a view of the entrance. And that lady who came in with black hair but then changed her hair…” He opened his eyes and followed the thin European woman, whose hair was now straight and blond, as she exited the glass doors. Maria watched her leave too, and thought, shit. “Open that laptop again,” she said, “and follow her with the cameras if you can.” On the video feed, Camilo found the exterior cameras and Maria and Camilo watched the woman walk around the back, out of the range of the cameras, and then walk back with four large shopping bags. Very short shopping trip, Maria thought. And then: shit, again. Camilo had found an impossible number of coincidences. Men might wait in a hotel lobby to play racquetball, but not so patiently and for so long. A woman might have any number of reasons to change her hair colour — but few women came into a hotel,

JUSTIN PODUR changed their hair colour so quickly, and then left again. Similarly, women in glamorous cities like this one often went shopping — but no one could fill large shopping bags full of the latest fashions and return in seconds. And all of them seemed to orbit around the bald man lounging, quiet and alert, watching the hotel entrance and pretending that he wasn’t. Maria was watching an operation unfold. And if an operation were in progress, the equipment would be in the shopping bags, the racquet men would be watching one angle, and the bald man watching another, would be the commander. And what sort of equipment, Maria asked herself, what sort of operation would a team like this be running here today? Then she took the flip phone she’d bought here and called her husband. He had left no more than fifteen minutes before, so he wouldn’t be far. “Turn the taxi around, Mark,” Maria told him. “We have to foil an assassination.” “Vamos. Back to our room,” she said, checking the time on her phone. “Hoffman will have to call up when he gets here.”

Brad Hoffman had done everything he could to prevent events from getting exactly to this point. He was Maria’s immediate supervisor at the security firm where she worked two-thirds of the time, mostly on investigations, occasionally on operations. The other third, she taught survival skills at a school in the woods. Her husband, Mark, had the same workplaces, but the opposite split — one-third at the firm, two-thirds at the wilderness school. There was a group of them, a half-dozen, that split their time working under Hoffman and taking independent work of their own. A security conference in Abu Dhabi to keep up with the industry, meet prospective clients, and make connections was a nice and relatively rare break from work that more often took them to darker places. None of them scared easily, Hoffman no easier than any of them.

SIEGEBREAKERS But the Israelis scared him. It wasn’t physical danger, though of course that was there. It was moral danger. Maria had always figured it was his Jewish background that made him want to avoid touching it. His family wanted him to support Israel, to do work there, with Israeli security services, to get into the burgeoning security business with Israel. He murmured excuses, kept himself, and his team, busy with other jobs, and avoided the scenario. But he had not avoided the news. Hoffman knew every little thing that happened between Israel and the Palestinians. He explained to them what Ariel Sharon was doing when he went to the Al-Aqsa Mosque with 1500 armed men in 2000. He ranted that Israel had lost its soul when they were shooting kids in the head at the end of that year. He said that he wished someone could stop them when they reinvaded the territories and razed Jenin in 2002. He told them he thought it was a turning point when the Wall was completed in 2005. He watched, amazed, when Lebanon’s Hezbollah held them off in 2006. But he made no sense: When Maria suggested they could do something to help the Palestinians, he scoffed. “We are part of a $350-billion security industry, Ms. Alvarez. Do you know how many of those dollars are available for opposing Israel? Zero.” Maria had always thought, though, that in the right situation, Hoffman would do the right thing. She was right. But the price was high. More than a decade ago, Hoffman got them a routine job auditing IT security for the NYPD’s counterterrorism bureau. Information security for that unit, more than most, was crucial. The NYPD was confident in Hoffman’s reputation, and happy to pay for the audit. What Hoffman’s group, which included Maria, had found, and fairly quickly, was not just the holes in the bureau databases. It was also that they were spying on every single visiting Palestinian and

JUSTIN PODUR Palestinian-American in the US, and that someone in the unit was passing every byte of that information on to someone at the Israeli consulate. When Hoffman presented the report to the city-wide coordinator, the meeting was cordial and polite, the bill was paid, the report was shelved, and the firm never got another contract from the NYPD. Nor, for that matter, did they get another contract from any branch of US law enforcement, local, state, or federal. Shortly after that job ended, Hoffman was invited for drinks with a family friend who worked for “the Lobby,” he told them at work the next day. The family friend had told him that their work in Latin America, their work in Africa, everything they valued in the world, would be destroyed if they decided to cross Israel again. It would all unfold in the press. Hoffman would be presented as a self-hating Jew. The people who reported to him would be portrayed as anti-Semites on a mission of hatred against Israel and in support of terrorism. Hoffman had told this friend that he wasn’t afraid, and if they wanted to fight, they would find him and his firm were not easy targets for smears. But he had been shaken. The higher-ups at the security firm had scheduled individual meetings with all five of Hoffman’s investigators, fishing expeditions looking to see if any of them were disaffected, to see if any of them would give them anything they could use on Hoffman, to see what they might do if Hoffman were to be let go. Maria had smiled at them and said, “He brought us into the company, and I think we would all be happy to continue to work with him whether inside or outside of the company.” She wasn’t bluffing, either. There were times when she thought getting pushed out would be a relief. She would lose the firm’s resources but gain the freedom to act. It turned out, though, that the point wasn’t to let Hoffman go. It was to rattle him. Rattled, he was. Hoffman brought the squad together. “They have shown us what they can do. But what do we do?” he had

SIEGEBREAKERS asked. “Do we spend all our time fighting the Lobby, spend the rest of our careers and lives defending our names and reputations? Or do we back down and continue our work on other files?” Hoffman had let the squad vote. Maria and Mark had voted to fight, to make the surveillance and the leak public. “Even if we lose, someone will have stood up to them,” Mark had said. But the others in the group — Sergio, Walter, Evelyn, and Hoffman — were worried about their other cases. Every investigation they’d ever done would be undermined. Every future case they solved would be suspect. And they didn’t just do investigations. Their firm made it possible for them to do other operations. They had foiled terrorist plots, rescued kidnap victims. All of that work would come to an end once they were silenced. Mark and Maria were voted down. The firm would let the surveillance remain a secret, and the firm would not touch Israel again. By the time Israel started focusing their fire on Gaza, with the massacres that started at the end of 2008, Hoffman had long since succumbed to despair, a kind of geopolitical depression that was making him more generally despondent. Maria’s analysis: that by deciding to sit this one out, Hoffman was losing the focus, the anger needed to fight any injustice. If the Lobby could back him down, then why not the cartels? The corrupt? Kidnappers or murderers, or anyone else that they were hired to track down, or bring down?

It was two years ago, when Ari passed through their lives, that Maria and Mark had decided to begin making plans behind Hoffman’s back. For his own good. The man was old, yes, but he did not have to live his final years feeling completely compromised. Ari was a slightly built Ashkenazi-Jewish Israeli kid with big glasses, curly hair, and an adolescent slouch. He spoke unaccented, international English not tied to any region of the world. Each

JUSTIN PODUR word and movement were practised, as if he were a hyper-realistic computer-generated avatar in one of her son’s sophisticated video games. His one year of mandatory military service to Israel completed, he said he was backpacking North America for a few months, and he signed up to take one of their survival courses. Maria saw a little bit of Camilo in him. A sensitive boy, a brilliant mind, and strength too, but also frailty. And something deeply bothering him, some grief or guilt like a muscle spasm twisting every movement out of pattern. One of the key tasks of the survival course was to get a fire going with a bow drill. Ari was the first in the group to get his fire started, and it was no fluke — he was able to repeat the fire almost every time. As his teacher, Maria found him brilliant at all the skills of survival but he did it methodically, analytically, without any feeling for it or intuitive connection to nature. Walking around, checking on the students’ fires, Maria saw Ari looking at his growing fire with tears welling up in his eyes. “Do you have a minute, Ms. Alvarez?” he asked. She sat down next to him, showing him little tricks for building the fire — the sizes of twigs and sticks, how to arrange them if you wanted more or less heat or light. “You know, you are better at this than any of the beginners in the class. Almost too good. Should you have signed up for a more advanced class, Ari? Have you studied this before?” “Do you ever wonder,” he said into the crackling twigs of the fire, “what use it is for people like us to know how to make a fire in the woods?” “People like us?” Maria asked. Ari threw a twig on the fire. “People whose homes are powered by electrical grids.” “Grids are fragile. A lot of knowledge seems useless until you need it.”

SIEGEBREAKERS “You know in the wintertime, people in Gaza refugee camps try to use fires inside their tents to cook or keep from freezing. The tents catch fire and the whole family dies.” “What do you think could be done about that?” “Maybe I could talk to the people doing it,” Ari said as the flames rose and the wood crackled. “They sent me here to learn.” Other than the vitriol with which he said the words “they” and “learn,” Ari’s message was no surprise to Maria. The school had formal arrangements with many agencies, and, informally, she bet that every security service in the world had sent their people to the school at one time or another. But Ari was barely out of his teens. Agencies never sent them so young — they sent grown men, special forces-aged men to study these kinds of specialized skills, men at least well into their twenties, and if they were sending someone informally to evaluate the school or the training, they would send someone even older. Shin Bet? Mossad? They would not even have recruited someone like Ari yet. “You are very young to be sent by someone,” Maria said. “I know.” He wiped the tears from his eyes. “I’m special,” he said, but it sounded like he was saying, I’m dying. “What will you tell them, then?” Maria asked. “That you were too good. That I couldn’t find what they wanted.” “Are you saying you weren’t just here to learn, but to test us? To try to steal secrets from us?” Ari said nothing. “Why?” “I can’t tell you.” “You just did,” Maria said. The course went on for two more days. The day after it ended, the morning after, Maria and Mark called Hoffman to come out for a walk in the woods with Ari. On that walk, the three of them, between leading questions and deductions, got out quite a lot from

JUSTIN PODUR him: That Ari had, indeed, been recruited, and was on his way to having a special role in Israeli intelligence. That he was training to be a true generalist, the hallmark of the elite group within Israeli intelligence responsible for covert assassinations. That he was supposed to cultivate and bring new assets to his handlers at the end of this trip, that his performance would be evaluated on that basis. That he was not being groomed to be a mere assassin, but a key organizer of a new type of network, a type not fully conceived yet. And that their firm, and their school, got on his radar while he was searching for potential models. Not his handlers’ radar, only his. Because he was special, and an independent thinker. Maria had been his instructor, had taught students like him before. She knew that many organizations had very dehumanizing training methods, that Ari’s conscience tormented him for what he had been made to do. She could only imagine what that had been. She tried to imagine why his higher-ups in Israeli intelligence would let him travel so freely, give him such a long leash, when he was so obviously full of pain and doubt about the organization. The only reason to do such a thing would be because they knew they had to either let him go free, and let him return, or lose him. By the end, Maria was inclined to trust him. So was Mark. But not Hoffman. “It’s all too convoluted,” he told them after they let Ari go, off to finish his North American trip and then return home to whatever mission he had been selected for. “He could be telling us this because they want to see what we do. They could have figured out that he was going to do something like this and are watching him to see who’ll take him up.” “But why bother?” she asked. “For the files, obviously. The files they know we have about the NYPD counterterrorism bureau’s surveillance.” “But they already have those,” Maria said. “Maybe not all of them. Or maybe they want to know what

SIEGEBREAKERS we know. Or maybe they want to make sure we don’t have them. So, he couldn’t break our security, so now he’s made this approach. Social engineering us.” “But to what end? He didn’t ask us for anything, didn’t even say what he wanted. It was more like, some kind of confessional.” “Or a long con,” Hoffman said. “Or he’s a message to us, notice of the resumption of hostilities. In any case, like you said, there’s nothing to be done. Just don’t be surprised when they come back, or he tries to break into our systems again.”

Like he did with all their students, Mark had driven Ari to the bus stop, waited for the bus with him. At Maria’s request, he’d pressed a micro SD card and a piece of paper into his hand. “A special public key, just for you. An email address that no one else knows. The paper has the first few numbers of the sequence. Memorize them, give me back the paper, and when you look at the key, you can verify that they’re the ones I showed you.” Mark and Maria had believed Ari. They didn’t believe it was a long con. Where Hoffman saw the machinery of Mossad, they saw a smart boy torn in many directions. And they thought, one day, the boy might want out of whatever he was into, and if he did, they wanted him to be able to contact them without anyone knowing what he was saying. Strangely enough, over the time that had passed since Mark and Maria made that decision, they noticed Hoffman slowly livening up. They wondered if he had a sideline in the Middle East they didn’t know about: he would go on trips to the Gulf and come back with a new spring in his step. He’d lost weight, even asked Mark for some advice on how to get in shape. “He may have changed his mind about getting involved,” Mark said. “More likely, he found himself a girlfriend,” Maria had replied.

JUSTIN PODUR

Years after Ari left North America, a message from him came. It asked them to be at that hotel in Abu Dhabi, at that security conference, to meet Nahla Zamoun and assess whether she could be trusted. So, Maria had arranged to go to the conference, to speak on her security research. Mark decided he had to go too, and they had brought Camilo because they wanted him to see Abu Dhabi, because they had underestimated the risks, and because they didn’t want to leave him back home in the city for a week. Dr. Nahla Zamoun was on the program, presenting on the “Human Security of the Palestinian People.” Maria had planned her approach carefully. She would go to the lecture, introduce herself, then contrive another meeting and invite her for a drink or lunch with her and Mark. Nahla was a Palestinian, a former elected official, one of a handful of Palestinian members of the Israeli Knesset, before they were all kicked out, their existence deemed a threat. She would have been interesting to talk to even if Ari hadn’t told them to contact her. But Dr. Nahla Zamoun had not showed up to the conference. On the other hand, they had managed to convince Hoffman to come to drum up some business in the Gulf. Successfully, it seemed, since he was hours late returning from a morning meeting with some royal that wanted to discuss a consultation with the Abu Dhabi police. So late that instead of having lunch with Hoffman and getting ready to head back to the US, Maria was now turning her hotel room into a mobile headquarters from which to run an operation against a Mossad assassination team.

Camilo popped his laptop back open and trained the cameras back on the front lobby.

SIEGEBREAKERS “Who can we eliminate? Who is not in on this plot?” She asked him. “The hotel clerks, the concierge, the locals, the security man, and the waitresses. And the European couple are just leaving.” “And who does that leave as suspects?” “The bald guy, the lady with the bags, and the dudes with the racquets.” “Right. Keep eyes on all of those, but especially the racquet guys. I don’t like them at all.” Maria and Mark had talked long and hard about how much or little to involve Camilo in their work, about what to tell him, and when. He had given them hints as a child, flashes of precocious insight too soon for his age. They had feared his precociousness would bring the challenges sooner, too soon. Their fears were proven true. Mark had argued that there was nowhere safe, they couldn’t lock the kid away, they could only give Camilo the same tools they had, when he was ready for them. He was ready sooner than they had imagined, and internalized all the safety information quickly, avoiding the stupid mistakes and the pitfalls that would lead him into trouble. What they hadn’t anticipated was that the kid would be so aggressive. “Mom,” he said. She looked at her phone, counted the minutes since the call. Mark should be coming back soon, walking through into the lobby. Five more minutes, maybe. “Mom,” he said. She looked at his screen. He had, as usual, multiple windows open. In addition to the video feed, he had a secure browser where he was searching for scripts, a couple of IRC chat windows, and was reaching into his bag to pull out the Arduino he had worked on all week. “So, mom, this hotel is using the Amity lock system.” “What does that mean?”

JUSTIN PODUR “It means if this works… ah…” Camilo’s voice faded to a mumble as he looked at each of the multiple windows open on his screen. “Mi amor!” Maria said. He snapped back to attention. “It means if this works then I should be able to open any lock in this hotel in about a minute. Would that be helpful?” “It might,” Maria said. “Although maybe more helpful to them than to us, if they can do it too. What about the guest management system?” The one I told you to stay out of? “I can log in as Mr. Sultan, if you want to look for bookings.” The door “unlocker” script downloaded, Camilo attached the Arduino to his laptop to load it onto the microcontroller. “How long will that take?” Maria asked. “Not long, mom.” Maria watched for Hoffman, for Mark, or for any change in the behaviour of the four people she focused on in the hotel lobby. The first person to come through the doors was Mark, with his usual slouch, a baseball cap and sunglasses on, a short-sleeved white shirt open at the collar, a big gym bag slung over his shoulder. She saw him pause, size up the people in the lobby, then head for the elevators. When he walked into the room minutes later, he put the bag down, took his sunglasses off, and settled in behind Camilo’s laptop. Maria briefed him quickly. “Want to try opening a door, Dad?” Camilo said, handing Mark the Arduino. “Sure. But finding the right door might be the bigger problem,” Mark said, turning it over in his hand. “Working on it,” Camilo said. Maria kept watching the screens, while Mark went outside and tried the Arduino. The lock tripped, then Mark came in using his key card. “It didn’t work.”

SIEGEBREAKERS Camilo left the computer and took the Arduino from his father, walked out and closed the door. The door opened and he came back in. “How did you —?” “— Here, I’ll show you how to —” “— Boys,” Maria said. While all three watched, an Arab woman in a smart white business suit walked into the lobby. She was mid-forties, with short black hair parted to one side, wearing thin glasses. Pretty, short, medium build, good posture, head held high, with a small purse and a rolling bag. A pair of heels that matched the suit perfectly. By herself she was unremarkable, but the reaction from the racquet guys and the woman with the shopping bags was like a wave rippling from a rock hitting the water. They all pricked up, first noticing, then deliberately not noticing, like surveillance operatives trained in a way that Maria and Mark recognized. “She’s the target, I guess.” Mark said. “Camilo, can you image search for Nahla Zamoun?” Maria asked. The new woman lingered at check-in, her “surveillors” maintaining studious discretion. Camilo’s search window lit up with pictures of her. Piercing eyes behind rimless glasses, chin-length black hair with a big wave and a streak of white. This one holding a microphone, this one wrapped in a Palestinian scarf, this one giving a long-suffering smile to the camera, and one with her head photoshopped onto a crocodile’s body and a message in Hebrew above it. The woman checking in, the target of the assassins in the hotel lobby, was Nahla Zamoun, former Knesset member, and the very woman that Ari had sent them to Abu Dhabi to see. “They wouldn’t take her out in the lobby, would they?” Maria asked. “Probably not until she gets to her room. I’ll go.” Mark took off his white shirt and replaced it with a plain black T-shirt from

JUSTIN PODUR his suitcase. He picked up the Arduino and his phone, plugged the earphone into his phone and popped it into his ear. He dialed Maria, who picked it up and put him on speaker, before he slid the phone into his pocket. Please be careful, Maria didn’t say, as he walked out the door, though her heart was pounding. “Hear me OK?” he said. “Yeah,” Maria and Camilo said at the same time.

Nahla lingered at the front desk while they watched. Good, Maria thought. Give Mark the time to get there. Mark reached the ground floor and hung out around the elevators, staying out of the front lobby. When Nahla, accompanied by a valet and a hotel clerk, left the front desk and got into one of the elevators to be taken to her room, the racquetball players got into the same one, and so did Mark. Camilo switched to the camera inside the elevator. “Can you check the booking?” Maria asked. “There’s no booking under Zamoun,” Camilo said. “Sorted by date… the last booking was two minutes ago, it’s Najla Masri.” “That must be the name she’s using,” Maria said. Standard protocol. The elevator stopped, and everyone except Mark got off. He held eight fingers up to the camera, like he was spreading his hands in a shrug. “Eighth floor,” Maria said. “Get the eighth-floor-lobby camera.” Camilo clicked around, the hotel Wi-Fi choosing this moment to slow his connection down. “Mierda,” he said. Then, “sorry mom.” By the time the view from the eighth-floor lounge came up, Nahla, the clerk, and the valet were rounding the corner and

SIEGEBREAKERS heading into the hallway, watched by the two racquetball men, who remained in the lounge, chatting to one another, until Nahla disappeared. “No cameras there?” “Nope.” Mark came on to the speaker phone. “There’s no stairwell. I’m on 10. I’ve gotta come back down in the elevator.” “Wait,” Maria told him. One of the racquetball men talked into his wristwatch. “Nice,” Camilo said. “They must have, like, some special radios.” The racquetball men waited for the next elevator and got in. The next step would be for a lookout to come up, to make sure Nahla didn’t leave the room. The lookout, the blue-shirted bald man from the lobby, came out of the next elevator up. The clerk and the valet got into the same elevator, headed down. The lookout paced the lounge, either feigning or really talking on a phone, looking like a busy man who had no choice but to talk in an inconvenient place. “OK,” Maria said to Mark. “You have to take out the lookout now.” “Can you move the camera’s field of view, at all?” Mark asked. Camilo fiddled on the computer, and the camera moved on to the lookout, and then away from the lookout. “Yup,” he said. “Put it on the right elevator door — your right,” Mark said. “And when it opens, you’re going to want to move it away from anything.” Maria’s shoulders tensed. Mark was an exceptional fighter, but he had little training fighting professional assassins. “We’re going to need a room,” Maria said. “Can you find out if there are any empty rooms on that floor?” “Looking…” Camilo said.

JUSTIN PODUR

Even though Mark had been training as a fighter for his entire life, there was a world of difference between a fighter’s training and a killer’s training. Jiu-jitsu was talked about as a game, its practitioners, players, who made moves and counters and had fights that ended when one player tapped the mat twice. Yes, Mark had studied more fighting arts than jiu-jitsu. Yes, he’d spent hundreds of hours training soldiers, police, to use the exact amount of force necessary to neutralize attackers without doing unnecessary harm. But for a killer, there was no such thing as excessive force, no such thing as unnecessary harm. A killer didn’t square off against you, face to face, to test his skills against yours, to see who was the better player. A killer attacked using surprise, from the side or the rear, hit you hard and kept hitting you so fast that you could not get yourself organized to counter. For a killer to spend as much time on the mats, playing, as Mark did every week, would be a waste of time that could be spent learning the many other elements of assassination that Mark didn’t know and would never know. As the elevator doors opened, Mark looked up from underneath the visor of his baseball cap and found himself looking straight at the lookout, who assessed him calmly and, probably, accurately. There would be no surprise against this man, whose sole purpose in the hallway was to watch for trouble. Mark’s only hope was to turn this into a fight, a game, played his way and not the assassin’s. Mark walked straight up to the man, who instead of moving back, took a step towards him and made to stomp on his foot. A good opening, a Krav Maga opening, one the lookout could deny as a misunderstanding if he had assessed Mark incorrectly as a threat, and one that could be the beginning of the end for Mark if it had landed, smashing up the small bones in the instep. Mark measured the distance and caught the foot before it landed, attempting a sweep — which didn’t work, as the lookout retained

SIEGEBREAKERS his balance and withdrew the foot. The next Krav Maga move would be a poke in the eye, which came on schedule, and which Mark caught on the top of his head, which he kept moving towards the lookout until it landed on the man’s forehead. A flash of red as their heads crashed into one another, and then Mark had closed the distance, was tying up the man’s arms, sweeping him down onto his back with a leg hook and following him down, another head butt, this one taken on the man’s cheek, passing the guard, which would have been an early Krav Maga lesson, the man trying to reach for Mark’s groin, eyes, looking for a bite, then reaching into his belt maybe for a knife, but Mark shut all the limbs down, pinned the man’s biceps with his knees, and then rained elbows down on his face from the mount until the man was unconscious. Mark put his hat back on, took three deep breaths, and put the earpiece back in his phone. The whole thing had taken more than twenty-five seconds, too long, and there was still a lot that needed to be done. He had a welt forming on his forehead under his hat, some blood on different parts of his arms and face, and a semiconscious assassin to move. “Where can I put this guy?” he said into the phone. “Room 814,” Maria said. “Don’t move that camera until he says so,” she told Camilo. Mark dragged the lookout down the hall and used Camilo’s device to open the door. He dumped the man on the floor. He took the man’s watch and phone, grabbed a towel, wiped both and threw them into the toilet. He wiped the door handles on the way out, and wiped his elbows and head once he was in the hallway. “OK, put the camera back where it belongs.” Camilo pointed the camera at the eighth-floor lobby, where Mark waited for the next elevator, the towel folded in his hand. “Oh,” Camilo said. “Oh,” Maria said, as a surprise turned the corner and headed towards Mark.

JUSTIN PODUR “Keep your eyes straight ahead, OK?” Maria said. “Nahla is coming to you.” Nahla, wearing a black knee-length dress now and carrying a purse, stood a respectful distance from Mark until the elevator arrived. “Going up?” Mark asked. “Yes,” she said. “Tenth floor.” Mark said, inside the elevator. Nahla laughed nervously. “Me too.” “What the hell?” Maria said. Once again, the camera covered only the lounge, not the hallway, but Mark lingered outside their room for a minute and they heard Nahla use another key card to open the door to the hotel room right next to theirs. Hoffman’s room.

Mark used his key card to get back into their room. “What the hell?” he said. “Let’s look at the lobby again,” Maria said. No racquetball men, no thin European woman. No suspects at all. “That guy I put down, he’ll be back in the game before this night is over,” Mark said, as he changed his shirt and stuffed it and the towel back into his suitcase. “Then we’re on a clock,” Maria said. “Camilo, is there any way of knowing who else can see these camera feeds? Like, if the bad guys can see them?” “No way to know, mom.” “If they can see them,” Mark said, “then they’ll be on top of us in minutes. If they can’t, then they’ll probably reset, get their man out, and we’ll have time to get Nahla out of here.” “Well, look who’s finally back,” Maria said. Hoffman was walking into the lobby in a blazer and jeans and

SIEGEBREAKERS his huge horn-rimmed bifocals, carrying a messenger bag, looking like a tall, curly-haired version of Bernie Sanders. Hoffman got to their floor and into his room with no sign of the assassins. But Maria saw no reason to celebrate. “Tear down,” she said to Camilo. “Everything ready to go in three minutes. Check us out remotely, rent us a car from the airport, and order us a taxi at the side entrance.” “Ok, mom.” “Mark, would you please go and fetch our employer and his girlfriend? We’ll pack you out.” Mark had put a blazer of his own on, and changed his body language, now holding his head up instead of tilting it down, chest out, shoulders back, and eliminating his slouch. There was not much he could do about the welt on his forehead, but he had another hat, a fishing-type hat that he liked but that both Maria and Camilo hated. He used Camilo’s device one last time to open the door to Hoffman’s hotel room, saw Nahla and Hoffman sitting on the bed together each holding a glass of wine looking at him with their jaws open, feeling some gratitude that they were still clothed and things hadn’t gone that far yet. Nahla stood up straight, set her wine down, and said: “I am not afraid of you.” Mark put his hands up slowly. “The guy you want to say that to is unconscious in another room.” He looked to Hoffman. “Brad? We have to move.” Hoffman stood up and touched Nahla on the shoulder. “It’s OK. He works for me.” Mark said: “We have to go. Ms. Zamoun. Is there anything left in your room that Mossad might find?” She shook her head and pointed to the hotel safety box. He looked at Hoffman, who was on his way to the box. “Two minutes,” Mark said.

CHAPTER 6

Nasser moved through the narrow tunnel, Hisham’s hand on his shoulder. Unlike the complex dug into the rock under Gaza, this was a tunnel specifically built to go under the fence into Israel, concrete arches above and tiled alongside. He was already behind, trying to now catch up. The boys they were tracking had cut the fence and crossed into Israel before Nasser could get there. Now the two youths were probably wandering across the scrubby desert, liable any time to be picked up by one of the occupier’s jeeps or worse. “Give me some idea what these idiots are thinking,” Nasser said to Hisham over his shoulder. Even if time was short, they had the privacy down here to talk. As a teenager, before joining the Resistance, Hisham had first gone into Israel this same way. He’d gone past the electric fence, cut the barbed wire fence with a bolt cutter, found a road, and wandered along it. His plan had been to get to some distant cousins that lived inside Israel. That first time he’d crossed, he’d been caught immediately by the Israeli immigration authorities, roughed up, and dumped back. The second time, Hisham got the idea to swim across the boundary. He’d walked out of the sea in the early hours of the morning and walked straight up to one of the Palestinian-Israeli fishing boats and offered his services. They didn’t take him on, but they sent him to another boat that did. He’d worked on the boat for four months, saved some money and given his boss some valuable business advice before he got caught again by Israeli immigration. He was sent to jail for six months, where he worked a bit and saved a bit more money, and was dumped back in Gaza. At which point his uncle, Abu Laila, had a long talk with him and introduced

SIEGEBREAKERS him to Nasser. After that, Hisham applied his resourcefulness to different problems. “They’re thinking there’s nothing here for them,” Hisham said. “They live in tin houses and their parents can’t work. They are willing to risk jail or death for a chance to get some money or work.” The tunnel branched off in two directions and Nasser had to guess which way the boys would have gone. He chose a branch at random and they sped up for the last few hundred metres of the journey before climbing up to the surface, on the occupier’s side of the line. They crawled on their stomachs, then Nasser went up on his knees, searching the buffer zone. He saw the boys instantly, two ducklings waiting to be picked off by snipers as if on a spring hunt, or, if they were lucky, arrested and jailed like Hisham had been. Maybe turned into informers, made to spy on the Resistance and get people killed. They got up to their feet and sprinted, caught the boys after a few tense minutes in the open, and dragged them back towards the tunnel. Nasser’s command to come with them would brook no opposition. But after a minute of jogging, each of them holding an elbow of one of the boys, Nasser’s boy, a thin boy with a wisp of moustache and a wheeze, stopped. “Are you tired?” Nasser asked. “We don’t have far to go, don’t worry.” “Hey, am I your prisoner?” He wrenched his elbow out of Nasser’s hand. “No,” Nasser said, looking around at the guard tower dotted landscape and waiting for death to catch up to them. “I’m bringing you home.” “If I’m not your prisoner, I don’t want to go with you.” “We need to get out of here. We’re out in the open. The enemy could come at any time.” “Then go,” the boy said. “Don’t let me endanger you.” “Listen. What’s your name?” Nasser asked.

JUSTIN PODUR “Firas,” he said, crossing his arms. “Firas, I want you to think about your family. I want you to think about your people that you are leaving behind. There are people that need you at home. Do you really want to stay here among people who will shoot you on sight, or arrest you?” Firas sat down on the ground. “I am thinking about my family. I was born with a weak heart. I need operations in Israel. They stopped allowing my family permission to take me into Israel for treatments. They called my mother and said that they would let me in if we would spy for them. Do you want me to come back to die in front of my mother? Or should I make my mother an informant?” Nasser looked at Firas, the cold feeling of despair taking root in his body. He looked at Firas’s companion, who Hisham had let go of. The other boy went and sat next to Firas. “Let us go,” he said. Hisham pointed at the guard towers. Nasser fished in his pocket and gave Firas all the money he had. “Keep moving. Find an Arab taxi driver if you can — they have green plates.” “I know,” Firas said. Nasser and Hisham ran back to the tunnel, leaving Firas and his friend to take their chances in Israel.

CHAPTER 7

Ari looked blankly down the table at the General’s thicknecked bald head with its searching face and searing eyes. He imagined a metallic head beneath the sunburned skin, red glowing eyes in place of the General’s dark ones. A killer robot from the future, like the movies. A staring contest, then. The General’s ability to ferret out secrets against Ari’s ability to keep his. Ari’s life, encapsulated in a single moment. He blinked a few times. The anger of what this man had done, had made him into, threatened to spill out in moments like these. Dangerous moments. He would swallow some of the anger back down, and redirect the rest. “Do you think it was an American?” the General asked. “Perhaps Dayal could describe the fight again,” Ari said. Dayal, the only other man at the table, took the plastic water bottle off his bruised forehead, removed the lid, and took a drink. Both his eyes were black and shiny, his nose was broken, his lips were swollen, and his arm was in a cast. “I told you already,” he said quietly. “Someone knew exactly when I was alone in the hall, exactly when all of our other operatives were elsewhere. Someone chose that moment to send a trained fighter to take me down, and they got the target out, somewhere, by the time we could regroup. The only thing that makes sense is if the target hired American protection. It could not have been the Abu Dhabi police. We would have heard about it. We could anticipate many things, General, but I could not have anticipated being ambushed by an MMA champion!” “He didn’t have to be a champion,” Ari said. “People everywhere train that way. There are thousands of people that could have done that to you.”

JUSTIN PODUR “Not thousands,” Dayal said. “And if you think because you spent six months as a paratrooper that you’re one of those people —” “— I don’t,” Ari said, waving a hand dismissively. “— Gentlemen!” The General raised his voice to bring them to attention. “Dayal has already described what happened, and I don’t know why you keep asking him to do it again. This is a debriefing, Ari, not an interrogation. Dayal is one of our heroes who led a very dangerous operation in an enemy country and, from what I can tell, did everything right. It is your job to tell us what went wrong.” “I tell you,” Dayal said, “that man was an MMA fighter. He looked like a famous champion ten years ago, the coach on one of those reality shows. Blond, ninety kilos. I think Matt Hughes, someone like that.” The General turned to Ari. “You’re looking for an American, in his late thirties, who is highly trained in unarmed combat, maybe works in close protection or was in Abu Dhabi working as a trainer. Find out who does unarmed-combat training for the police, who works in private security. Find out who was at the hotel. Look for Americans.” With each detail that matched Mark Brown, Ari’s heart thumped louder. He feared the General could hear it, and spoke over it to make his fear sound like irritation at Dayal. “But why does a blond man have to be American? You said he didn’t speak. Could he not have been Russian? The Russians have sambo, they have their systema, he could have been using those against you. Could he not have been English? German? French? You don’t know why, you don’t know who. You have nothing but your bruises to show us,” Ari said. “Give us a list of possibilities then, Ari.” The General said. “American or Russian or European, this fighter did not just choose to attack our man in the few minutes that he was alone in the

SIEGEBREAKERS elevator lobby. He had to have known our operation, our timing.” “The camera feed,” Ari said. “I looked into that. The passwords were all changed just after Dayal was attacked, the entire portion of the feed we could have used was deleted. We can’t look at the footage — no one can.” “The hotel did that?” The General asked. “Again, we have no way of knowing. If I were to guess, I would say the same party that cracked Dayal’s head in were watching on the cameras, then burned them too.” “More proof it was Americans,” Dayal said. “Who else could do that?” “Russians. French. English. Probably Indians and Chinese, should I go on?” Ari said. “The hotel guest list?” The General said, before Dayal could respond. “I can go through everyone listed at the hotel and everyone at the conference, but what would I look for? If the target had been allowed to attend the conference,” Ari looked at Dayal pointedly, “then we could have tried to work from who she spoke to. But because we chose to deny her visa until the conference was nearly over, we don’t even have that. We know she checked in, we know she went to her room, we know Dayal went to sleep and woke up in another room, and that she was gone — and is still lost to us.” “It was a good decision,” the General said quickly. “Dayal wanted to eliminate variables, make it possible to focus on the target.” “It was a failure, one of many.” Dayal started moving towards Ari, who remained perfectly still. The General put his hand in front of Dayal. “Enough! If you think you can do better, Ari, then start by finding out who did this to us, and how. If Israel has new enemies, ones with these kinds of capacities, I would know who they are. That is what you are here for. Dayal, you have served us well.” He

JUSTIN PODUR got up and ushered Dayal to the door. “Don’t let the boy get under your skin,” he said to him, in a way that Ari could hear. “He wants the same things we want.” “Arrogant,” Dayal said quietly, and left. The General closed the door and turned on Ari. “Why do you do that?” “Do what?” Ari got to his feet, pushing the old chair away from the cheap Ikea dining table. The whole safe house was Ikea, one of thousands of “jump sites” in the capital, this one decorated in whites and beiges, neutral tourist photos posted on the walls, computers and faxes instead of cooking equipment in the kitchen, nothing but water bottles in the fridge. A man had come to the apartment in advance of the meeting and swept it for bugs. As austere as it all was, Ari preferred it to the General’s office at headquarters, the whole routine of going through the back door and the elevator, then the walk past security at the downstairs lobby, the wait in the office for the General to get there, staring at the blown-up picture of a doomed Jewish man standing between two SS guards. The General had pointed to that picture when he’d first brought Ari to that office, when Ari was still really a boy. “That was my grandfather,” the General said. “And I keep his picture to remind everyone of why we do what we do here. To prevent that from ever happening again.” Ari sank into his plush chair with a water bottle and looked calmly at the General. “Never mind.” the General sat on one of the chairs. “Tell me the truth, did he really make such a mess?” “No,” Ari said, putting his feet up. “No one was caught, no one was compromised. The team got in and out. They missed their target, but there are obviously forces at work that we didn’t anticipate. Now we have a chance to find out what they are, and at no cost in… Jewish lives.” “Tell me your feeling. Who did this?”

SIEGEBREAKERS “Maybe the Arabs have hired an American firm for protection.” “Could they have done that without us knowing?” “Possibly. I’ll find out. I’ll put Zahava on it.” “This could be very serious,” the General said. “I have always believed that the Americans, not the Arabs, will be our security, or our undoing.” “I know.”

This was what the General told Ari from their very first conversation. He had been ten years old, but had been moved ahead two grades, making him the smallest in his class and still the most advanced. His teacher had invited the General to talk to the class about how the military kept Israel safe. Things were happening in Gaza again; the General was talking about how the Lebanese Hezbollah tried to kidnap our troops. “We would not want to have to invade Lebanon again,” the General had said, “but we would have to, to keep us all safe.” “I disagree,” Ari had said, pulling a fraught silence down on the entire class and a look of fear down onto his teacher’s face. “Ari —” the teacher had started, but the General said, “Oh? Tell me why.” “Hezbollah has been preparing for an invasion for many years. They have been watching how we fight and they have been preparing and equipping themselves specifically for us. If we invade now, they will do our soldiers harm and we will be forced to withdraw.” The General smiled. “I suppose your parents are doves, then.” “This has nothing to do with my mothe — my parents,” Ari said. “And I am no dove.” “But you would have us surrender in the face of terrorism. Or do you have some other way to deal with the terrorists?” “Of course, there is another way. Let Hezbollah be Lebanon’s problem. We have plenty of friends and plenty of influence with

JUSTIN PODUR the Lebanese government. Get them to stop Hezbollah. The same way we deal with Jordan and with the Palestinian Authority. Let them work for us.” “There are those on my staff who agree with you,” the General said. He looked at the teacher, who shrugged apologetically. “Is he always like this?” the General asked. No other kid said a word, until Zahava said, “Yes. That’s why we love him.” The General had looked at Zahava very carefully, then back to the teacher. “Could I speak with the children alone, please?” Even with the threat of a new war looming, even with his staff waiting for him, the General had chosen to reschedule his meetings to spend another hour with Ari, who insisted on Zahava being there with him. The General probed Ari’s mind and tried to find his limits. When the General raised the possibility of a renewed war with Egypt, Ari said: “the Americans would never allow such a thing.” “And you think the Americans would stick with us no matter what?” “We love them and they love us,” Ari had said. “You may love them now,” the General had told him, “but we can’t afford to love them. And you should never forget it.” That day, Ari’s life, his education, his future career, all had been taken over by the General, for Israel. He went to Ari’s house that weekend and talked to his mother. He said: “If he was born in a different time, we would know your son’s name instead of Einstein’s, or Ben-Gurion’s. In this time, he could solve the water problem or climate change. But I am going to use him to prevent a second holocaust.” He was to be trained, groomed, for this purpose. “The Americans, the Arabs,” the General said, “They have smart people among them. But we have smarter people, and in a higher proportion. And we use them better because we have to.” Ari’s training started straight away. Designed especially for him

SIEGEBREAKERS by the General, it was as technical as the Talpiot program for physics and math, as academic as the Havatzalot program for languages and military intelligence, and as grueling as the Sayeret Matkal training that sent him through sleepless days of commando simulations and survival. The General created a program to provide endless ammunition to his weapon, Ari’s mind. But Ari’s mind was not a weapon, but a national arsenal. At every stage, his ego was flattered. At every moment, the General’s guiding presence was felt in the space that would have been filled by Ari’s martyred father. When he remembered it, Ari cursed his need for flattery and for guidance that had enabled the General to use him.

“This all started with the Americans,” the General said, leaning forward in his chair. “That is why I don’t think Dayal is wrong.” “No. It started weeks ago, when we noticed a lull in the Arabs’ political activity.” “Which you said was a period of relative calm, with nothing special going on. Despite the fact that the Arabs’ operational security has improved along with their military capacities.” “You have impressed on me many times that the risk from the Arabs is not from the military side but from the political side,” Ari said. “If they try to get us indicted for war crimes based on the recent Gaza operations. If they had a credible figure in an international forum, all of our secret efforts to secure Israel would be at risk. Our politicians and generals would have to fear travelling in the West. That is why Dayal got interested in Nahla Zamoun. A medical doctor, and a former Knesset member. Fluent Hebrew. Fluent English. Arabic like a poet. She could get us in real trouble in the West.” That is not why Dayal got interested in Zamoun, Ari thought.

JUSTIN PODUR “And I told you,” he said, “that now that the Arab parties are kicked out of the Knesset, she has no voice. She is not a problem. No Israeli youth care about what any Arab has to say, and no one in the West cares either.” “So then why were you searching her on your computer?” There it was. A direct admission that the General had been spying on him. Ari blinked, let the moment stretch out.

Driven by this perplexing lull in Palestinian activity Ari had used all his access points into Israel’s intelligence data to sort out what was known. As he looked through the databases, the reports by informants, the analyses and assessments, he was sure of the existence of a missing piece. He had relaxed his mind until the solution came to him, then went and found the piece in the General’s classified contingency plans. What he saw there was enough to finalize a decision that had been at the edge of his mind for nearly ten years. Having made the decision, Ari did not introspect or agonize over it but simply set to work making it happen. He copied the files he found and searched out to whom they should go for the best effect. In his mind, the image of Nahla Zamoun popped, and then, immediately, Maria Alvarez. On the strategy tree that he drew out in his mind, the only branch from him to Zamoun was through Alvarez, who he messaged on a previously set up secure channel. He made a plan, a good plan, for them to meet in Abu Dhabi. Then that night, hungry and on his eighth cup of coffee, when his laptop battery ran out and he couldn’t find the plug, he had stupidly done a series of searches on Zamoun from an office computer. Those searches had put a target over her, had sent Dayal and his killers to find her. With the General watching his every move, his every breath,

SIEGEBREAKERS Ari had no choice but to let it play out and hope Alvarez could pull off a miracle. She had, and if he was no better off for it, at least he was not worse off. He might yet have a chance to get the files into the right hands.

“You have never admitted to spying on me before,” Ari said. “But you knew I was.” The General looked at Ari with searching eyes. Ari shrugged. “What kind of spymaster would you be, if you didn’t? Anyway, Dayal is an idiot. When he became obsessed with Nahla Zamoun, I thought I should find out what he was thinking, before he could do more damage.” “Dayal came to me with her name after your searches.” “Maybe he’s keeping secrets from you, then.” “The thing is, my boy, there is something deeper going on. You are not my only source.” “And?” “What do you think the possibilities are of the different Palestinian factions coming together with a common strategy and leadership across Lebanon and Syria, Jordan, the West Bank, Jerusalem, and here in Israel? Perhaps the war-crimes trials or some other political initiative?” I think it is happening. “I think the probability is very low. Why would your other sources think otherwise?” “Something in the gaps,” the General said. “One of my subtlest men is almost as smart as you, but much older and wilier. He thinks the Arabs have changed their outward behaviour slightly. He thinks it indicates something major.” Tell me all of it, Ari thought. Your whole plan. Tell me what I already know. “There is no way we would have missed all that. No way we would have underestimated the enemy so much.”

JUSTIN PODUR

A year into his training, his mother had walked in on him as he studied a pile of his forbidden books by leftists and Arabs. She had picked him up and held both his shoulders. “Take that back to the library,” she had whispered, her eyes full of terror. “You must never let that man see you with these things.” “He said I could read what I want,” Ari had said. “He wants you to think for him, not for yourself,” she told Ari as she turned over his pile of books, lips moving to form the words of the titles silently as if the very walls could hear her and tell the General. “Yeshayahu Leibowitz? The Yellow Wind? The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine? Against Apartheid? The Invention of the Jewish People? Ari, never let him see these. If he ever thinks you are not his tool, you will be in danger.” He didn’t listen to his mother.

“You have been shutting down more ideas than you’ve been providing lately,” the General said. “Your value to me is your open mind, remember? You built us the system to anticipate the locations of rocket fire and improve our early warning system. You built our interactive map of the territories. You advised me to leave the Muslim Brotherhood’s revolution in Egypt alone, and that our old friends in the Egyptian Army would soon be back in charge. It was for this open mind that I found you and brought you to me.” “I also told you that there is no value in the proposed domes for intercepting rockets, but you didn’t listen to me.” “Most of warfare is psychological. And that’s my point, my boy. Everything the Arabs are doing, they are doing in plain sight, just like the technologies to save Israel are not hidden away like the plans for a fighter jet or supergun, but on the internet, being

SIEGEBREAKERS developed for free. There is something we are missing, and I need your open mind to find it.” “And you’re going to get it from me even if you have to spy on me, is that it?” “I have never complained about your reading list, have I? Arabic media, the Israeli left, the Western left, the revisionist histories, American radicals, Arab Marxists, British leftists, UN reports, Nasrallah’s speeches, the Anarchists Against the Wall? I told you to read it all, and we are all safer because you did.” The General got up, got himself a bottle of water, and continued. “But you haven’t told me everything about what you learned in America during your leave.” When Ari had returned from America, the General had debriefed him on all his activities while there. Ari told him what he had learned about communications and surveillance technologies. He had brought back some interesting software and some secrets. He did not tell him about Maria Alvarez’s wilderness school or Mark Brown’s dojo, or their security firm. “You think I am keeping something from you, sir?” “Of course not, boy. I just think that maybe if you go back over what you saw there, you might see that Dayal is right. That the people attacking us now are the kind of people you met and studied with. I just ask that you go back over your list of contacts and your time there, and look at it again with an open mind.” Ari put the cap on his empty water bottle and balanced it upside down on the table. “Fine.” “And once you have figured out who foiled Dayal’s attack, I think you’re ready to move on again. Where would you go, if you had the choice?” Gaza, Ari thought. Put me back in the Army and send me straight to Gaza. “I am happy to serve right here, General. I do my best work with data, I don’t need to be in the field. You have sent me out there, and I understand why. I understand what our people are

JUSTIN PODUR risking to keep us safe. But I think the best thing I can do is to help you make sense of it all. That’s what I’ve always done best.” “You do many things best, my boy. And I will grant your wish. I will give you more data than you could have dreamed of. Your next assignment is to Unit 8200. I think there’s a problem brewing there, and I need you to uncover it.” Unit 8200 was the signals-intelligence unit. It was very far from where he needed to be, and Ari already knew what the brewing problem was. “Can I take Zahava?” “Of course. After you figure out what happened to Dayal’s operation.” “Yes sir.”

CHAPTER 8

Nasser’s concentration was broken by the drone’s buzz. Standing on the rooftop, shielding his eyes against the sun with one hand, he squinted to see where the drone was going next. As it flew overhead, Elias, who stood next to him, mumbled the poet’s words. Gentlemen, you have transformed our country into a graveyard, Gentlemen, nothing passes like that without account All that you have done to our people is being registered in notebooks. After quoting the poem, Elias turned to him: “Why did the poet say that we are registering what is done in notebooks, when they are the ones recording our every move?” “I don’t think Darwish knew about the drones,” Nasser said, his eyes following the drone as it disappeared from view. “Snap out of poetry class. It’s time to go.” Ducking under the clotheslines, they headed down the stairs and out on to the street. The first call to prayer had sung out earlier, before sunrise. Now they walked to the schoolhouse together listening to the morning’s other sounds. Taxis blared their horns. Car engines sputtered along. A boy in shorts and sandals pulled a donkey cart, loading it with plastic bottles from the street. The bombed-out schools ran two shifts so that all the kids could study. The first shift would start soon, at 6 a.m. The kids would start their journeys in minutes. But not yet. Their teachers, however, had already arrived, as had the schoolmistress Umm Nisreen, who awaited Nasser and Elias in the

JUSTIN PODUR courtyard of the school. She stood alone amid the rubble, nearly as tall as Nasser and twice his age, wearing a headscarf, a blazer and a long skirt. “I am so sorry about your friend, the foreigner,” she said. Nasser had been turning it over and over in his mind. Too slow. Too late. Viktor’s hand on his shoulder when he cried in the rubble. Viktor, hands tied, strangled, on the cot. “May God give him peace,” he said. Umm Nisreen had taught Nasser and Elias when they were boys. Now, in intact buildings and destroyed ones, she continued to teach the kids of this neighbourhood. Umm Nisreen and her teachers acted like a pillar holding a roof over the kids, even when the physical roofs were being brought down on their heads by the occupier’s bombs. The rubble had slowly been removed from this courtyard since the tank shelling in the last attack. Three partial walls stood where the main schoolhouse had been. Four smaller classrooms remained, their corrugated metal roofs glinting in the light of the dawn. A younger teacher brought small cups of tea for Nasser and Elias. “Have you boys eaten?” the schoolmistress asked, thanking the woman with a hand on the elbow. “Of course,” Nasser lied. He looked at his watch, just as he heard the Shaykh’s white VW van pull up outside the courtyard. He heard the doors of the van close, and all three of them waited for the Shaykh to materialize from the corner. When he did, Nasser’s uncle looked splendidly Pharisaic, his beard majestically regrown. He walked magisterially, flanked by Nasser’s other two men. Shaykh and schoolmistress exchanged elaborate greetings, before Nasser’s uncle clapped his hands twice and said: “Well, boys, it’s time to work!” Nasser’s squad walked back to the van and set about unloading its cargo: paper, markers, pencils, pencil crayons, blackboards, and

SIEGEBREAKERS chalk. The occupier hadn’t allowed them in for some time, but Uncle Walid had found a way, with help from Hisham. “And so, Umm Nisreen,” Uncle Walid said, “I fulfill my promise to you today.” “One of your promises, Shaykh.” The schoolmistress looked pointedly at the destroyed main building of the school. “The cement,” Uncle Walid said, following her gaze. “Give me one month more, and I will get you the bags, if God wills it.” “To be able to repair the main building would mean a lot, Shaykh.” “I have some ideas,” Nasser heard his uncle say as he and Elias unloaded the last blackboard from the back of the van. Umm Nisreen pointed to the classroom where it would go. Holding the big blackboard, Elias walked forward, Nasser backwards, across the courtyard and into the classroom. Children’s drawings, made in two colours of crayons on plain white paper, hung up and down the walls. Hula hoops rested next to worn wooden toys and a few well-used children’s books. Elias smiled shyly at the teacher as she sat at her desk. Nasser and Elias placed the long blackboard along the wall of the classroom. Nasser watched his friend hesitate, then, unable to find the words, rush from the classroom, a skittish gazelle leaping away from a movement in the grass. Elias the fighter, brave enough to face the occupier, too scared to talk to a pretty girl. The Shaykh left the school as ceremoniously as he had arrived, with his two-man guard. The girls had started to arrive for school. “There must be a poem appropriate for telling the teacher you like her?” Nasser said to Elias as he followed him back to his house. “Are we discussing our love lives, now?” Elias said. “Because if we are, I have some choice lines of poetry for a man who is trying to be kind but is being cruel, a man who by trying to minimize pain is maximizing the suffering of his beloved, a man who —” “— OK, enough. We won’t discuss it.”

JUSTIN PODUR “You will talk about it today, my friend. Our long day is only beginning.”

Years ago, the occupier decided to put Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger. They did detailed calorie counts, deciding that Elias, or Nasser, or their parents and nieces and nephews, could get along on 2,279 calories per day. From there, they decided those calories could be obtained from 170 trucks of food and supplies coming in from the border per day. Then, they decided to only allow sixty-seven trucks. Or just three or four trucks. Or, sometimes, no trucks at all. When allowed, Elias’s father drove one of the trucks. Elias’s whole life, his father was known as a wealthy man, a savvy businessman, lucky enough to own a big house, two cars. A man with connections, a man who had employees. Today, he was the worst businessman imaginable. He gave most of his goods away. He took a loss on every truck. He started with a fortune and ran it down. Now he worked every waking hour, but he hung his head. He was the person who went and returned empty-handed. He was the man who had the permissions to cross the border and came back with so little. The Occupier had, at one time or another, restricted pasta, flour, rice, salt, sugar, black pepper, garlic, cinnamon, cooking oil, tea, coffee, chick peas, lentils, beans, olives, cookies, canned tuna, and powdered milk. Soap, diapers, shampoo, toothpaste, writing paper, pens, fuel, seeds — all had been banned. Those times, Elias’s father simply could not get these items, at any price. Those times, Elias had turned to Hisham and his network of tunnels, because his father never would. Elias’s father could never use the tunnels, because those merchants who wanted to be a part of the trickle of trucks allowed through Kerem Abu Salem needed to be completely clean in the

SIEGEBREAKERS eyes of the occupier. To be allowed to do business, Elias’s father had to prove he was willing to starve rather than break the occupier’s rules.

Nasser sat in the passenger seat of the truck, waiting in an endless queue at the crossing. After unloading the supplies in the school, Nasser had gone with Elias and his father to try to cross the border into the lands occupied in 1948. The plan: to load up on the first trucks of construction goods allowed into Gaza since the last war. The goods were paid for. The import licenses had been arranged. Unless the capricious occupier changed his mind, soon cement, gravel, iron — things unseen in years above ground — would fill Elias’s father’s truck. Looking at the thin, grim, grey-haired man in the driver’s seat, Nasser could hardly imagine this was the same man he knew as a kid — Elias’s fat, happy father with the thick dark hair and thick hands. The strength the man had, hauling things on and off the trucks, singing songs all the while. The times he would let Elias try to lift a box, and laugh as skinny Elias held it, shaking, before taking it from him. “Try harder, boy!” he had said, laughing. Today it was Elias, in the middle seat and Nasser, in the passenger seat, who would help with the loading and the unloading. Elias’s father didn’t know their secrets. He thought of them as boys. Nasser was Elias’s friend from school, not his squad leader in the Resistance. Better that way. The boys, too, had clean records, despite who they were: no arrests, no protests, no angry posts on social media. If the Israelis allowed them across, they would drive to an empty field of pallets the occupier left in the open. Consumer goods were always from Israel. Gaza was their captive market, and the prices went up and up. Elias’s father had to pay rising taxes, which he

JUSTIN PODUR eventually had to charge for the goods, which got passed on to the people, who had no money. Israel collected the taxes and, according to the Oslo Accord, was supposed to pass the tax revenues on to the Authority. But it was far more useful for Israel to use them as a ransom, to ensure the Authority’s compliance, than to simply pass the money on as per the treaty. Elias was sure they were going to be turned away, as they had been the last five times. But they crossed Kerem Abu Salem that day. They took the many humiliations, the searches, the questions, the queues of trucks, having documents scanned and studied. Their mission was too important to waste on some pointless expression of rage. The Israelis kept them waiting four hours at the crossing. They drove the long, deserted road and passed between the control points. Their truck was scanned by the highest-tech container scanner the Europeans could donate: the logic being that by helping the occupier scan the trucks, the donors were helping the occupied too. They passed the Israeli flags, the Stars of David flapping in the wind, the fences ringing the roads closing in tighter this time than the last. Then, on to the deserted field where they picked up what they came for, loaded the truck. Often, the goods themselves were spoiled. Today’s goods were non-perishables, but there were, as was often the case, fewer of them than his father had paid for. A minor theft, one among many. And so, for Elias’s father, it was a good day. On their next trip, they would be trying to get strawberries out after the harvest. That would be still more difficult: the occupier allowed import into the captive market of Gaza, but had a special hatred for exporters who might show the world that Palestinians could make things and might bring in some money that people in Gaza could use. Nasser didn’t look forward to sitting in a queue while the fruit, the farmers’ patient work, rotted on the back of

SIEGEBREAKERS the truck. But he would bear it. For his friend, and his friend’s family. That night, they got back to the city and celebrated. Nasser had dinner at Elias’s parents table. Elias’s mother was as famous for her cooking as his father was for doing business. Before the siege came down around them, her fame had been in the absurd generosity of her portions and the decadence of her dishes. Now, she was renowned for making miracles happen with whatever was available. Tonight, she had cooked lentil soup, bread baked with thyme, chickpea spread, olives, rice, tomatoes, enough for everyone: Elias’s father and mother, his older brother and sister-in-law, and their two boys, along with Elias’s other two nieces, Samira and Aya. The girls were orphans of Elias’s other brother and wife, Karim and Ayesha, who had been paramedics. They were killed in the last bombing. It was a classic double tap: one bomb to drop the roof on the family, then another bomb to kill Karim and Ayesha when they arrived to try to pull the survivors out of the rubble. Nasser liked watching the kids eat. He listened to the clanging of the cutlery on the plates and protested ineffectually as Elias’s mother plied him with lentils and rice. Dinner was not yet finished when the electricity cut out, as it did most nights. Nasser reacted the fastest, pulling his phone out and turning its flashlight on. It was nearly out of charge when Elias’s mother and sister-in-law began to clear the table. Elias’s father led the cascade of praise for Elias’s mother and her cooking, outdone only when Elias quoted the poet. Take me, however you are. To be restored to the warmth of face and body, To the light of heart and eye, To the salt of bread and song, To the taste of earth and homeland.

JUSTIN PODUR At the end of the night Nasser lit the path upstairs for Elias’s brother and nephews. Elias followed in the dark. In the room, Nasser connected his dying phone to a backup battery he’d charged with a solar charger. Elias’s nephews watched in fascination. “Keep it,” he told the boys, “I can get another.” “No,” Elias’s brother said sternly. “That’s not necessary.” “Of course, it’s not,” he said, “but let them have it, anyway.” These boys would grow up to be shorter than Nasser and Elias, no matter what Elias’s mother could do in the kitchen. Most of the kids in Gaza were malnourished. “You better take care of it!” Their father said. “Your Uncle Nasser might come back for it and if he does it will be working perfectly like it is today, you understand?” “Yes Dad!” they said, in unison. Nasser, Elias, and the boys all rolled their mats out in the room. The night had fallen clear and cool at the end of the hot day, but the mosquitoes circled, hungry for blood. The fan was plugged in, in case the electricity did come on during the night. If they got any hours of electricity, the fan would help. That night Nasser didn’t feel any bites, didn’t hear the buzzing of mosquito wings in his ears, and didn’t remember whether the fan had come on or not. Nasser fell asleep while Elias listened to Darwish poetry on YouTube on his headphones. He woke up looking at the ceiling before the pre-dawn call to prayer. He turned his phone on, looked for Laila’s message. I’ll be ready at 8, it read. As the sun rose, the morning rhythms played their music. The ladies getting the coffee going and the bread out, the kids getting ready for school, people starting to move around outside. Nasser woke Elias up gently, touching his shoulder and handing him his glasses, so they could eat and drink with Elias’s parents and the kids. They moved silently downstairs and found a spread of Arabic coffee, bread, olive oil, and bless her soul, Elias’s mother had managed to get some strained yogurt to eat with it.

SIEGEBREAKERS They waited for Elias’s nieces at the door. Since their parents died, Samira and Aya were too scared to walk to school alone. An adult always went with them, to and from. Elias often took the girls to school alone. This morning Nasser would join him. From Nasser’s perspective, it was good security protocol anyway. There were Israeli sharpshooters near the wall, some of whom were very good shots. Nasser had been to the home of a girl who was shot in the head by one of the occupier’s snipers, blinded by the shot. For some time now, Nasser had believed there was one sniper, one he called the Fish, who had a thing for shooting little girls. Maybe inspired by the T-shirt, the one for Israeli infantry snipers showing a Palestinian mother with her dead baby and the caption, “Better Use Durex,” the Fish probably believed killing Palestinian girls was the key to defusing the demographic time bomb. He didn’t think the Fish had orders to do this, but he also didn’t think the occupier would punish the Fish for doing it. He and Elias had talked about the Fish, about how they might settle up with the man with the propensity to shoot girls. There was no easy way, no way to know who the sniper was or when he was out there, no way to write his name on a rocket and send it to him, no rocket powerful or reliable enough in their arsenal anyway. So long as the girls were with an adult male, a military-aged male, Nasser believed the bigger target would be impossible to resist. As far as ways to die, walking a couple of girls to school was as noble a death as a fighter could wish for on this earth. They saw the girls into the building, greeting Umm Nisreen and seeing them join the other kids. Elias strained to catch a glimpse of his teacher crush. As they walked back, Nasser said: “We’ve survived another morning. We are one day closer to an accounting with the Fish, if he exists.” Elias replied with another poem:

JUSTIN PODUR A hunter points his rifle; I will howl like a wolf so the white gazelle can flee the fire and the hunter is scared. Then Elias followed with: “Now there is no way you can avoid driving Laila to Erez.” “And never see her again,” Nasser said. “You told me not to talk about it but I am going to talk about it. Do you think there is any man between Morocco and Oman that would not kill you to be with Laila? And you are so special that you can’t return her calls?” “When did I not return her calls?” “You are trying to get her ready to leave you as if you are the first man whose woman moved to a different city. As if no Palestinians have ever had to love each other from afar.” “It’s different. She’s different. She has a chance for a different life than we do.” “But my friend, it is her choice what life she has, not yours.” Nasser couldn’t win the argument, nor could he shake his feeling of what he had to do. They walked the rest of the way in silence. Most of the buildings in this neighbourhood had been damaged by the occupier’s bombs. Some of them had been pounded into rubble. Families still lived in tents atop the piles. At the current pace of rebuilding, a return to the pre-bombing city would take four hundred years. When they arrived, Elias found a cloth and began wiping the car — which he kept in good shape. “It should look good,” he said. He handed Nasser the keys. “Think about what I said.”

The car started smoothly. The drive was quiet. Nasser checked his

SIEGEBREAKERS face in the mirror, checked his teeth, dabbed extra cologne on. The road stretched ahead of him. At the end of it, Laila.

When Nasser was thirteen years old, he returned from the beach with his uncle to the smoking ruin of his parents’ apartment building. All of them were supposed to go to the beach, but the day was cooler than expected and only Nasser and his Uncle Walid were up for it. “You two are the proud few,” Nasser’s father had said. The last words he’d heard from him. His mother’s laughter. “We’ll have a feast when you get back.” The occupier had dropped 500-pound bombs on half a dozen homes in the city. They had killed no commanders, no one from the Resistance at all, just mothers and fathers and children and grandparents, twenty-four people in all, among them Nasser’s mother and father and Walid’s pregnant wife. His Uncle Walid had surveyed the wreckage, taken Nasser to his home and raised him as his own. They never knew for sure, the attack was so senseless, but widower and orphan had spent the next years wondering if Walid had been the real target. If the occupier still believed they had got him. Nasser’s life had all been written down and laid out according to a plan. The talents he was given, to see and understand a battle quickly. To make a plan in a moment that others would follow. The absence of fear or rage in the face of the occupier’s weapons, the calm steadfastness that drew others to him like an oasis. In exchange for those talents, all as part of the plan, he didn’t have certain things. No parents. No siblings. No special ability in English, or with computers, no talent of any kind that would help him make a living outside the walls around Gaza. If someone had been born of this land, of this time, to live and die in this place, that someone was him. He would never leave. He would die in

JUSTIN PODUR battle with the occupier, and he would make the occupier pay for it. His life would be a wait for his moment, the moment when he could use his life best as a soldier for his people. When that moment came, he would know. And until then, he would prepare. This was a private plan, between him and the one who wrote it. He never shared it, not with his Uncle Walid, nor with his best friends. He knew they would all complicate it, they would attack it as a simple way of thinking in a complicated world. And all of that would make things more difficult when the moment came. Nasser knew this private plan from before they killed his parents, from as young as his memory stretched, as young as his first memories of his mother’s perfume and flying in the air in the thick, calloused hands of his father. He knew with certainty that nothing could dissuade him. Not the warmth of the sea, not the feel of the sand between his toes. Not the smiles and laughter of his friends. Not the wind in the olive trees. Not the consciously cultivated hope of victory. Not even Laila’s eyes or lips on his, not even her long legs wrapped around him.

He remembered his uncle bringing him to a birthday party, the same year his parents died. Playing soccer with Laila’s cousins, running circles around them, amazing them with his skills. Laila blowing out the candles. Sitting down with a small glass of lemonade and some honeyed cheese pastry at a table with Laila and a few other kids. He got up to walk away, maybe pick up another soccer game, and she frowned at him. “Sit right here,” she said. He remembered the frown. The first flaw in his plan. Until that frown, wasn’t his uncle’s friend’s daughter no different than the ocean or the moon? They, too, brought beauty into this world, but what responsibility did he have to them? But when he got up to walk away from her, and she frowned, when she explained he

SIEGEBREAKERS shouldn’t do that because she wanted to talk to him, and he said, what do you want to talk to me about, and she said, I just wanted to talk to you, you donkey, he realized he was a part of her world. Not like the ocean or the moon. He invented reasons to be around her. He found ways to be available. He befriended her father, who was eager to have a protegé. At her father’s feet, he grew up, learned about past and present battles with the occupier. Out of the corner of his eye, he was always looking for her, wondering where she was, if she was in the house or somewhere with aunts or cousins. When they started meeting in secret, through Hisham’s engineering, they thought they were deceiving everyone. But their guardians knew. They wanted their happiness.

Nasser stopped the car in front of Laila’s house and was greeted by all the children of her family. So, he would have to come in for tea, see her mother’s tears, hear her grandmother’s wailing. To visit with her father, his Commander. Abu Laila would give her away to him at this, the opposite of a wedding.

CHAPTER 9

Laila watched as the men who had decided her future for her — ignoring her wishes — embraced, but said nothing to one another. She wore a shapeless black dress and a tight headscarf like a vehicle she drove, shielding her against the road in discomfort and heat. She had packed only one rolling bag, which she gave to Nasser to hold, and her purse, which she kept. She didn’t want to speak to him. Her last moments with him, by his choice, and she had a hard time even looking at him, this beautiful, irritating man. All along the drive she felt his eyes on her, his searching glance, his hopes she would say something, but all she wanted to say she had said. He hadn’t listened.

When the Oslo Accord went into force, Israel began to build a wall around Gaza. The wall was complete two years later. People from Gaza who had commuted to work in Israel and returned to their refugee camps at the end of the day found themselves without work. Many were experts in construction. Their hands had built the refugee camps they lived in. They had helped build the Jewishonly settlements that spread over what had been their own land. Having done all that, they found themselves building the wall that would prevent them and their children from ever leaving. They ran the bulldozers, they poured the concrete, they pulled up the giant grey tiles of the wall. Then, having survived that, they looked around within their new prison for new options. Nasser was like that, to Laila. He had set to work building a wall between them. Bulldozing the fruit trees and the flowers. Digging the trenches. Pouring the concrete. Mounting the wall.

SIEGEBREAKERS Looping the razor wire around the top. Putting her on the other side and then marveling at how he couldn’t reach her. They hadn’t seen each other in weeks. While they waited for news of the border opening, she realized, by their absence, just how many chance encounters the rhythm of their lives had brought them: Her father, his commander. Her cousin Hisham, one of his best men. When she was gone, they talked of her. She would send him to his men with a stupid grin on his face, they would all know she put it there. They would share a waterpipe and talk on the beach, all together, with Viktor. Or when he would come to their door, all gravity in his face, to deliver or receive some solemn notice of the battlefield, and she would know that seeing her was of higher importance to him than the battle with the occupier. Then, after the acceptance from Norway: nothing. Suddenly it was important for him to meet her father according to good security protocol and avoid his house out of danger. Suddenly, he was able to meet her cousin outside of their neighbourhood, in her absence. He answered all her calls and texts, polite and sweet and called her “my love,” but all from the other side of the wall. His eyes glazed, the thousand-kilometre stare, a fighter getting ready for battle and freezing the rest of the world out. She was the rest of the world. She was out.

From the city to Erez was not a big distance, but the occupier had turned it into an alien planet. The Palestinian side was easy, all was in order and they let both of them through, though Nasser only briefly, to drop her off. Laila looked at her documents again, flipped her Green ID over in her hand. “We never talked about Viktor.” Nasser took a long breath, his shoulders slumping over the steering wheel. “When I had no idea where to find him, you found him. But I… I was too slow. I missed it by seconds, I think. And I

JUSTIN PODUR keep wondering, where could I have found those seconds? Could Elias have driven faster? Was my plan too complicated?” “You did everything right,” Laila said. “We did. We couldn’t save him.” “But it was seconds, Laila.” She squeezed Nasser’s arm. “You think I don’t wonder what would have happened if I had figured it out sooner?” “No, my love. Don’t say that. It wasn’t your fault.” “No. And it wasn’t yours. He died a hero. A martyr.” She sat in the silence, watching his face. “I don’t want to go. Let’s just go back.” “It will be okay.” “You’ll wait here? Maybe they won’t let me go and then I’ll just come back and then we won’t have to —” “— I’ll wait here.” He would have to drive around, and wait well back from the crossing, but he would wait. She knew he shared her sinking feeling. She didn’t know whether he feared they would not let her out, or whether they would.

Laila made the long walk through the wire-encaged sidewalk, like an enclosure at a zoo, to the first turnstile. Israel modified these turnstiles to reduce the space between the arms, to press harder against Palestinian bodies. Remote-controlled, of course, by the occupier’s security who watched her progress through the tunnel from above. Through the turnstile — if the invisible occupier chose to open it, by remote control — then, a big steel door. Also, remote-controlled. Once it opened, there was another long, outdoor passageway to the terminal. She rolled her bag along behind her, her shoulders slouching when she forgot herself, but when she remembered, with her back arched and her chin up. She faced the sliding steel doors at the entrance to the terminal, waited in suspense for the occupier’s decision to open or close it. They opened it

SIEGEBREAKERS for her, so she could go through the metal detector and the next set of turnstiles. She put her luggage on the carousel and it disappeared into another room, where someone working for the occupier went through her every possession. Then, the occupier used a scanner to create a three-dimensional model of every centimetre of her body. More remote-controlled doors. More modified metal turnstiles. Laila claimed her bag and went to face the occupier’s passport inspectors, who sat in blast-proof booths. She handed the inspector her documents. If they accepted her documents, they would send her onward. She would go to Ben Gurion airport and through another set of screenings. There would be interrogations, secret police, hours of answering the same questions again and again. Then, a flight. Then, Norway. A different world. Freedom, but for herself alone. She would be a member of the diaspora. If they accepted her. If the stone-faced man behind the glass liked the papers in front of him. If they would let her go. With a shuffle and a shrug, the inspector sent her back. “No students,” he said. Laila retraced her steps back to her own world. She went backwards through each step, through each turnstile, back through the cage, crying and laughing, until she was rolling her bag and going towards his car. He came running to her, picked her up. She buried her face in his neck. “What happened, my love?” “They said no students.” “We’ll get you out through Rafah, when it opens,” Nasser said. “Call Hisham,” Laila said. “We have to find someplace for tonight.” Through a series of calls, Hisham found them a tent that had belonged to a family after their house was destroyed in the last attack. But recently, the family had moved out of their tent and in with their parents.

JUSTIN PODUR Laila called her mother and told her the news, and gave her a prepared explanation about staying with a school friend whose family lived near Erez. Hisham had a friend, who was pretty good at voices, who called Laila’s mother and told them all was well and the young man was staying with her sons and the girl with her. Laila’s mother thanked Hisham’s friend for her hospitality, and begged for the chance to return the favour. After they watched the stars, after they made love, as they lay alone in the tent, limbs entwined, fingers playing on each other like on an Oud, Nasser said: “I wanted you to be free. But I am glad they didn’t let you go.” “Me too,” Laila said. In the night, they took turns sleeping, so neither heard the other cry. Her tears were of disappointment and then relief. His were for her, first, then for himself, for he realized that in spite of today, sooner or later she would get out of this place and they would be parted.

CHAPTER 10

The drive to Dubai from Abu Dhabi, parallel to the coastline on the E 11 in two cars, felt longer than it was. Maria and her family rode in the rear car. She spent the whole hour looking backward, suspecting every new dot on the desert horizon. She did not think the assassins would be able to organize a pursuit — or even figure out who they were — in time to follow, but she could have missed something. Hadn’t Hoffman found a famous Palestinian girlfriend without Maria knowing? She looked ahead through the windshield from the back seat, to Hoffman and Nahla’s car. They had packed up efficiently and stayed completely cool, both accustomed to these situations. They were not tactile with one another — no hand holding, no little kisses — but connected by an invisible length of twine, each always looking for the other. The same way, in any room, she looked for Camilo and Mark. She looked at them now, Mark in the passenger seat and Camilo next to her. Both pup and wolf had fallen asleep: Camilo’s capacity for sleep always astounded her, while Mark simply had the philosophy of sleeping wherever he could. They chose the big, sail-shaped famous hotel in Dubai, the best place to hide in plain sight. They rented suites that had an adjoining lounge and conference room, where, after putting Camilo down for the night, the four of them met. Nahla wanted to know how they knew she would be in Abu Dhabi. “We had a source that told us to be there,” Maria said. “And did this source tell you there was a plan to assassinate Nahla?” Hoffman asked. “We had to work that out ourselves,” Maria said. “Same as we worked out… about you two. But we have to think about what next. Nahla, you can’t go back to Israel.”

JUSTIN PODUR “Are you sure it was the Israelis?” Nahla asked. “The guy certainly fought that way,” Mark said. “It bears their hallmarks in every way,” Hoffman said. “Maria’s right, you can’t go back. And I think getting you to the US would take some… finesse.” “I don’t want to go to the US,” Nahla said. “I have to go home.” “You can’t go to Israel,” Maria said. “I didn’t say that.” “You also didn’t say why they want to assassinate you,” Mark said. “What do you have? What is on that thumb drive?” Nahla, who had kept her fist closed since taking it out of the hotel safety deposit box, opened her hand and looked at the piece of white-and-blue plastic. “It’s a dossier. Video and image evidence. Hard numbers. Testimonies. And also, expert briefings, legal arguments, and context. It is a war-crimes dossier collecting the most solid evidence that Israeli generals target civilians and civilian infrastructure in its attacks on Gaza.” “The kind of stuff the human rights NGOs have been collecting,” Mark said. “In recent years,” Hoffman said, “Nahla has become known as the hub for these materials. She has been sent more and more of it. It includes trophy footage and photos, stuff we have always known existed but have never seen.” “It is also the most thorough dossier. For every schoolchild that was shot, for every hospital that was bombed, for every patient denied the right to get to medical care, my teams of researchers have a good idea of who gave the orders. We have most of the International Criminal Court’s work, already done.” “So, the Israeli generals have to kill you, to stay out of jail,” Maria said. “We don’t really think they’ll ever go to jail,” Hoffman said. “But they hate the idea of it hanging over their heads.” “So, then you want to go to Europe? To The Hague?” Maria

SIEGEBREAKERS asked. “I thought you said you wanted to go home?” Nahla paused a moment, looked briefly at Hoffman, then back at Maria. “There is some data I am still missing. As a doctor, I worked in an ER in Gaza during the last attack. I know the medical community in Gaza. They have collected a set of data for the dossier: the nature of injuries, the pattern of victims, the locations from where people were hit with bombs and shells. It shows a pattern of discriminate attacks on civilian targets, a deliberate attempt to destroy the society. It will make it possible to try the Israeli decision-makers for genocide. Once I have these records, my dossier would be complete. “Wherever I have to take it, whatever court in Europe or America I will try to get the indictments, I will have the data to take. But to get that last set of data, I have to get back into Gaza. They won’t transfer it over the web and they won’t give it to just anyone. It has to be someone they trust.” “And they only trust you,” Mark said. “I get it. But given that Israel has just sent an elite squad to assassinate you, getting to Gaza through Israel seems unlikely.” “That leaves Egypt, and Rafah.” Hoffman said. “Which is closed now, isn’t it?” Maria asked. “But it sometimes opens,” Nahla said. “And the tunnels —” “— the tunnels have been almost entirely sealed off from the Egyptian side,” Hoffman said. “But they, too, could open.” “With respect, Dr. Zamoun, that sounds like wishful thinking to me,” Mark said. “There must be a different way to get that data, maybe one of the foreign doctors can get in and out with it, or some NGO worker or UN official —” “— with each attack, the Israelis attack more and more health facilities. More hospitals, kills more doctors and medics. I can’t wait for this data. It could be destroyed at any time.”

JUSTIN PODUR “But Dr. Zamoun, what you are proposing is to go to Egypt and wait.” “It is no worse than waiting here, only closer to home.” “What is the difference? I don’t understand,” Mark said. “You don’t understand,” Nahla said, “because you haven’t been where I have been or seen what I have seen.” “Doctor, I just fought an assassin sent to kill you while my son was in a hotel room a few —” “— Mark,” Maria said, and he stopped. “Nahla, do you have a plan to get into Gaza? It seems to me that the tunnels are too risky — once you go in that way, you have no good way to get out. If you plan to present this dossier to a legal entity, you have to stay above ground, in every way.” “I will cross legally from Rafah, when it opens.” “Do you have some reason to think it will open that we don’t know about?” Nahla said nothing. “Is that a no?” Nahla said nothing. Maria looked at Hoffman, who shook his head very slightly. Maria looked at Mark, stood up. “We’re going to bed,” she said. “In the morning, let’s try to figure out who we know in Egypt.” In fourteen years of stealthy trysts Maria and Mark had learned how to spend nights together without waking their son. The fear and adrenaline of the operation in Abu Dhabi had made the need to be together more urgent. She had not allowed herself to think of what could have happened to Mark until he was on top of her, in her arms, his head in her hands. Afterwards, resting her head in the crook of his shoulder in the dark, she ran her fingers over his forehead, across his chest. “What is it about her you don’t like?” Maria asked. Maria felt Mark’s chest rise and fall. “Nothing. I like her. She’s honourable, she’s decent. I’m happy

SIEGEBREAKERS for Hoffman. I’m being… unfair to her. I’m annoyed with Ari, for putting us all in this. If he has a plan —” “— it had better be a good plan,” Maria said.

Nahla called Maria early in the morning, while the men and boy slept. Maria put on a T-shirt, jeans, and slippers, and walked into the lounge that joined her suite to Nahla’s. Room service had come and gone, leaving behind orange juice, coffee, croissants, and fruit, for three. Nahla sat at the breakfast table next to a smartly-dressed, thin, wiry man in his thirties, with product in his hair and a creative and minimal pattern of facial hair around his chin and nowhere else. He put his half-empty cup of coffee down and stood up. “This is my friend, Gamal,” Nahla said. “You told me to try to figure out who we know in Egypt. Gamal is who we know in Egypt.”

“This woman is my hero,” Gamal said, pointing to Nahla. “I was at NYU studying math and our Palestine solidarity group invited her to campus. When I heard her speak, I knew that I would have to continue, however hopeless the situation became, because I had to follow her example.” Gamal described how after graduating he’d returned to Egypt and got a job doing financial investigations for a security firm, but soon after the revolution broke out and he was swept up in the Tahrir Square revolution, Egypt’s short moment of hope. He camped in the Square for weeks, fought the Army and police in the streets, and met the love of his life there. Gamal painted an image of him hearing the announcement that Mubarak was leaving, hand in hand with his beloved. “I hope I get to meet her one day,” Nahla said.

JUSTIN PODUR “Him. It must have been a him, right?” Maria said. “Omar,” Gamal said. “His name was… is… Omar.”

“Mubarak’s departure was a split second of joy,” he continued. “Then the Army stepped in and crushed the people’s protests.” As Gamal spoke, Maria remembered a video of one such protest at Maspero, the armoured personnel carriers racing back and forth like dragons from a fantasy movie while the protesters screamed and fled. “But elections did happen, and an elected government came to power. That government just happened to be the Muslim Brotherhood.” “That must have terrified Omar,” Maria said. “For a year, we lived in fear of the Brotherhood’s government. Nothing happened to us until that government was overthrown in a coup by the Army. That coup, and the massacres at Rabaa and Ramses, were the final straw. I told Omar that we would have to leave,” Gamal said. Things were in motion for them to emigrate when Omar got picked up in a televised police bathhouse raid. After the initial public humiliation led by one of the dictatorship’s journalists, Omar was arrested, moved around from one secret prison to another. Gamal tracked him using his firm’s resources, but remained ever a step behind. “A month into Omar’s detention, before his trial, I got one visit to see him through glass. Omar had been beaten, stomped, electroshocked, crammed into a box with fifty other men, sleeping in shifts because the cell was standing-room-only. Omar talked about the cockroaches, the salty drinking water. His anus was inspected to determine if it had been “used.” Gamal went on. The court acquitted Omar and the other men captured in the raid, but Omar was never the same. He broke

SIEGEBREAKERS up with Gamal, moved back in with his parents, and stopped returning all of Gamal’s messages. Gamal gave up on his dreams of happiness and his dreams of revolution. Like so many other defeated revolutionaries, he kept quiet, went back to work, and read politics on social media at night, alone.

“I saw your name on the program of the security conference,” Gamal said to Nahla, “and I convinced my firm to let me go. I don’t know what I hoped for, maybe that seeing you would give me hope again. But then you weren’t there. I thought it was a final message from the universe, telling me to give up. But then you called me.” “And you came,” Nahla said. “Thank you.” “I want to help. I want Egypt to help. But you see, Nahla, once upon a time the people of Egypt could join the fight against the occupier, but today we are broken ourselves. We can’t help anybody else.” “All the same,” Nahla said. “You are my only hope.” “Tell me more about your firm,” Maria said.

By the time Gamal left, Maria had arranged for him to meet them in Cairo and take them to Rafah. In Cairo, she was worried mainly about the secret police. But if they managed to get out of Cairo, they would have to cross the Sinai, currently the site of a hot war against the government by local insurgents. Maria knew she couldn’t do it with Camilo, and she was not going to send Camilo home alone. Only one of his parents could go, and Maria was better suited for this job. So, she sent both her boys home. Instead of telling her son harrowing stories about what Gamal’s lover had suffered, Maria retold him a different story she had heard from Gamal, one she knew that Camilo would search out and read for himself.

JUSTIN PODUR “These people arrested an actual stork, mi hijo” Maria told her son. “I need you to sit this one out.”

The next day Maria left Dubai for Cairo with Nahla and Hoffman. Gamal still had a network there, safe houses for them with other Tahrir Square revolutionaries. Maria and Hoffman entered Egypt together, got a room at the Kempinski, and later arranged for a chance meeting at the Lakeside Café in al-Azhar Park with Nahla and Gamal, who then invited them over for lunch. The next morning, they checked out and got picked up by their new friends, who, they told the hotel clerks, were going to take them to the pyramids. The hotel clerks would tell the secret police, who monitored foreigners and who would hopefully be satisfied with the story. Later that afternoon, in a third-floor apartment where Gamal had set the three of them up, Hoffman sat with a glass bottle of Coke in a chair too small for him. “The trouble is, we have a complete lack of leverage in this country.” According to Gamal’s network, there was nothing in the foreseeable future that would lead to the opening of Rafah. With Israel wanting to kill Nahla, there were not too many safe places to take her. With the secret services of Israel and Egypt cooperating ever more closely, the list of safe places did not include Egypt. The danger to Nahla of being taken by the secret police grew with every day that passed. The US was not much safer for her, assuming they would give her a visa, even if Hoffman married her. If only we could get her into Gaza, where it’s safe, Maria thought. A sentence too strange to say out loud. But Israeli assassins could not ambush Nahla there, nor could Israeli or Egyptian police arrest her. Nahla’s life was in danger there, but no more or less than any of the other two million people in Gaza. “There must be someone in this country that can get Rafah

SIEGEBREAKERS opened,” Maria said. “The secret police,” Nahla said. “the Army, and the President.” “But it’s an international border,” Maria said. “Foreign Affairs isn’t involved?” “Gaza is not a foreign policy issue for Egypt, it’s a security issue. The only people with the power to open the crossing to Gaza are the General Intelligence Services and the National Defense Council.” “And since it’s not Foreign Affairs, we can’t use diplomatic protocol to get to them.” Maria said. “No Embassy, no State Department, no nothing. I can’t see any above- board way of getting the crossing open.” Hoffman sat up in his chair. “Ms. Alvarez, spell out what you are implying.” “Would it not be the case that members of the intelligence service might have unofficial contacts with counterparts at the US Embassy? Maybe even contacts, on business matters, with private companies like ours?” “Maybe, but what would we offer them? Some training courses? In exchange for which they piss off their nuclear-armed neighbours, the Israelis?” “We can offer them some insight into their own situation. Insight into their neighbours, and what their neighbours know about them.” “Are you talking about…” “Yes.” “First of all, how would we know?” “How did Mark and I know about Nahla? How did we know about Abu Dhabi?” “You think that he would…” “I think that he might. I also think we may not even need him.” Nahla interrupted. “I don’t understand what you are talking about.” Hoffman said: “You will.”

JUSTIN PODUR

Maria and Hoffman spent the next few days working like salespeople trying to land a big client. Using onion routing and an encrypted chat channel, Maria gave Mark instructions on what to search, from back home in New York. He put together a briefing on the high-ups in the General Intelligence Services. The director of intelligence was a career military man. There was nothing public on him, nothing but a couple of sentences on his Wikipedia page and two bland articles about his appointment a few years before. The interior minister had just been appointed after a shuffle, so there was even less on him. Mark and Camilo were peeking around on the chance of finding something through more subtle means about either one. No luck. But there was an opening through a certain private security firm, Gamal’s firm, which was close to the President and to one of Egypt’s billionaires. In addition to personal and premises protection, Gamal’s firm provided technical and system security. Mark took a look at the systems they put together and the components they used, and found several vulnerabilities. Gamal would take these, and their patches, back to his firm. He would state that he was given them for free by an American security company who wanted to propose a meeting to sell services to their Egyptian counterpart. From there, they would work their way around to either the director of intelligence or the minister of the interior, hinting that they had US signals intelligence that would be useful to them in securing the Sinai against the Islamic State insurgency that was one of Egypt’s worst-kept secrets. Maria hoped that by the time they got the meeting, they might have some intelligence — either Mark and Camilo could find something, or maybe Ari would come back out of the woodwork and help them, for once. As for Nahla, she would have to stay out of sight. Maria had

SIEGEBREAKERS her give Mark her (terribly insecure) email password so Mark could open her email from New York and send some emails to family saying she was there. Let the assassins go looking for her in Central Park.

Gamal didn’t come to the meeting with Egyptian Intelligence. Maria thought it unwise to draw attention to any connection between Gamal and Maria’s group. But a VP from Gamal’s security firm did attend. So too did the Egyptian director of intelligence, his deputy, and five other men with no specific job description. Maria and Hoffman, at the other end of the long table in the hotel conference room, took their arrival, the number of them, and the fact that the director came himself, as very polite signs, signs that they were being taken seriously indeed. All clean shaven, all immaculately dressed, if in suits that were suited more to Hoffman’s style than, say, Mark’s. Not a beard in the bunch, Maria thought, and they want us to know it. “Your firm’s reputation is good,” the director of intelligence said, shaking Hoffman’s hand — and making a point of shaking Maria’s. “If I may,” Maria said. She stood up, smoothing the uncomfortable suit that, when worn by an American woman in a foreign country, declared a US government affiliation. She called it the State Department pantsuit, and even though she didn’t exactly have a US government affiliation, she was in no violation of any laws wearing it and using it to her advantage. She brought up her presentation slides. She took them through a number of analyses of network vulnerabilities, the extraction of security information from satellite data, and how Egypt could shore up its intelligence in a number of ways using their firm’s methods. Maria was Hoffman’s best social engineer, but as they sat in silence, some playing on their phones, she could tell they were not moved.

JUSTIN PODUR The plan was, if they were unmoved at the end of the technical presentation, that she would move on to her bluff. If they took the bait, it would buy them some more time for Ari to come through. She put up a slide with three men’s faces. “Now to the final part of the presentation. These three Palestinian leaders were killed in Israeli airstrikes in Gaza at the very end of the last round of warfare. They were killed after Egypt had brokered a round of talks. Now, I know these men had no friends in this country or in ours, but nonetheless we thought you would find the sources of the leaks to be interesting, since these assassinations interrupted a peace process you were brokering. We have some information, if you are interested, in how Israel obtained the targeting information.” The director looked at his men, and at the VP of the firm. Maria looked at Hoffman, and back at the director. “And what are you asking for from us, to not release that information?” “To not release, yes, of course, to not release that information.” Because the director already knew how the Israelis got it. Because the Israelis got the targeting information from the Egyptians, who, in the process, helped them assassinate the Palestinian leaders with whom they were supposed to be brokering peace. An embarrassing fact. Not the one Maria had planned to trade on, but she could roll with it. “Well, we have some operations we need to complete in Gaza,” Maria said, finding herself unexpectedly telling the truth. “We need Rafah opened, in a way that we can move in, and opened for long enough and big enough that our move would be inconspicuous.” “How many days?” “Three to five.” The director was already standing up, as were his aides and Gamal’s VP. “You’ll hear from us,” he said.

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CHAPTER 11

Nasser sat on the beach watching the last rays of the sun play on the water with Laila leaning into him, her soft voice in his ear. It was, he thought, a typical conversation for a couple on the beach: she was earnestly trying to explain a prearranged set of codes she could use to communicate with him from outside; he was distracted by her proximity and attention, and the thought that she would soon be gone. Hisham was a ways off, playing the lookout, prepared to intercept and distract interlopers. Couples spent time on the beach, but so did pious and idle men who felt it their obligation to stop unmarried people from unsanctioned activities. He didn’t dare tell her, but Nasser thought it would be better for Laila to stop all association with everyone from the Resistance once she was out. She could become a public figure instead, make a bigger contribution than passing secret messages ever could. But he had tried to tell her what to do once, before he had failed to get her out through Erez: he wouldn’t do it again. “I don’t trust the technology,” Nasser said instead. “How can you be sure they aren’t intercepting your communications or that they can’t break your code?” “Because I’m not sending you a message, I’m posting it publicly among thousands of others. It won’t look like anything to them. Yes, they can monitor everything coming out of here, but they can’t monitor everything everyone posts publicly from anywhere.” Nasser shook his head. The sun had begun to dip below the horizon on the water. Two surfers were splashing about in the tide. He reached out and held her hand, brought it to his face and inhaled. He looked at her face, intent on his and at the edge of disappointment.

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JUSTIN PODUR “I will look for messages from you,” he said. She smiled, and he involuntarily did too. At that moment, Hisham cleared his throat, signalling them their time was up. Laila stood, and Nasser with her. She smacked the sand off his jeans attentively, rose up on her toes and kissed him, her hand on his chest, and was off home. He watched her leave, his fingers on his lips where she had touched them. The surfers left. The sea was clear. The sun fell below the horizon and twilight had begun to drain the colour out of the day when Hisham came to stand by Nasser’s side. “We have a problem,” he said. Or rather, Hisham elaborated, an opportunity. Most of the tunnels out of Gaza into Egypt had been flooded with sewage and seawater from the Egyptian side. Those tunnels had served as conduits for weapons to the Resistance, as well as the only real economic link to the outside world, an underground way of breaking the siege. With their flooding, Gaza’s people were besieged once more. Smugglers — and others, Nasser thought, remembering the boys he had left in Israel — had resorted to even more desperate methods. On the Egyptian side, Hisham explained, smugglers’ boats would set out from Sinai and sail along the edge of Gaza’s waters, which were controlled by the occupier. On the Gaza side, motorboats would set out in the dead of night at the highest speed and hope to return with the goods before the occupier’s navy could catch them. Financing would be arranged before, or afterwards, in deals that took place in Egypt on the rare occasions that people were allowed legally through the Rafah crossing, for it, too, was often closed. “Smugglers pretending to be fishermen? These criminals give the occupier a pretext to attack the fishermen’s boats,” Nasser said. Hisham smiled. “Does the Occupier need a pretext?” “Will you tell me why you are giving me the economics lesson, professor?”

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SIEGEBREAKERS “Imagine a shipment of arms that has already been paid for. A boat that has already left from the Sinai with a container for the weapons that will float and be carried by the current to our waters.” “And this magical container would help our cause. But?” “But the fellow who was supposed to pick it up on our side was one of the Brigade of the Companions. Moath’s men.” “So, now that I’ve killed them you want me to steal from them too.” “Well, I would put it differently, that having committed a horrible crime and paid the price, their illegal property is also subject to confiscation by the Resistance.” “If we are caught at sea by the Occupier, or blown up by them, the Resistance will suffer far more from the loss of two good soldiers than they would gain from a few weapons.” Hisham shrugged. “It’s up to you. If you think we have enough weapons to face them in the next war, then let’s go home.” Hisham knew that the Resistance would never have weapons to match the Occupier, and how important it was to get whatever arms they could. Nasser looked up at the starlight. A sliver of moon cut the night. There were no city lights now: the electricity would not be back until tomorrow. Their movements would be covered in darkness. On the other hand, the boat would be detected on radar, the enemy had plenty of night-vision equipment, and if the enemy’s navy was close, they would be lost. But there did seem to be a chance to go out, pick up the weapons, and be back before the enemy could respond. Could he afford to leave weapons that could help the Resistance? “Let’s do it,” Nasser said. “Such risks build the Resistance,” Hisham said. “That remains to be seen.”

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JUSTIN PODUR

Some time later in the dead of night, their faces covered with scarves, they roared along on the waves in the dark. Cold wind blasted them in proportion to their speed. The sound of their motor cut the night, and (it seemed to Nasser) screamed to the enemy to come and get them. Nasser and Hisham had 9-mm sidearms, which Nasser considered using on himself if they were caught. It was not for him, to have the screws put to him to turn on his uncle and friends, on Laila’s father. He would rather die here, in this prison, for the people he fought for, than to allow himself to be taken to a new one. “We’re here,” Hisham said, checking his GPS. “It should be close.” They were still within the three-mile limit — at its very edge — but if they had been detected, they would never convince the occupier that they were fishing at this time of night. Hisham produced a flashlight and scanned the water. They moved the motorboat across the invisible line. More scanning. More moving. “It’s not here,” Nasser said. “Wait.” Hisham kept scanning. “I’m turning us around.” “I found it.” The container had been designed to be innocuous from a boat and nearly invisible from the air, which was why it had not been easily found. They hitched it and pulled it onto the boat and headed back to the beach at top speed. They made it to land: luck was with them, but the night’s work wasn’t done. Hisham had already dug a hole for the container and Nasser was for burying it straight away. But Hisham wanted to see what was inside, so they pried it open. Two rocket launchers and two mortar launchers, with four

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SIEGEBREAKERS rounds of ammunition per piece. “Well,” Nasser said. “let the Occupier tremble.” “I admit this doesn’t alter the strategic balance,” Hisham said. “But they were going to be used against us. Now we have them.” They packed dirt and then sand over their buried weapons. Nasser looked at the sky, still lit only by stars, for sunrise was still far away. He had a long walk ahead, to get home, and at most two hours of sleep afterwards. At the end, Nasser walked Hisham home. Outside of Hisham’s family’s gate, they walked into an ambush.

The black berets approached from both sides, their Americanmade M4 rifles drawn. They stopped at a distance where they could be heard speaking quietly, but at which there would be no possibility of missing their targets should guns go off. And go off, they might. Nasser had already drawn his pistol at the first sound of footsteps and Hisham was less than a second slower. They were back to back, each facing a group of two men who had their weapons calmly trained at their centre mass. A taller man approached, older, also in a black beret, emptyhanded, officer’s pistol holstered at his side. “Lower your weapons, boys,” he said. “That’s not going to happen,” Nasser said through gritted teeth. “A shootout on the street tonight would not go your way, as I think you can see. One of you is wanted for questioning. That’s all. If you cooperate, we don’t have to have any problem here.” “Like I said, not going to happen.” “Let me be clear. We are going to take the person we want to question with us tonight, on behalf of the rightful Authority of these territories. With cooperation, that person will be returned after he answers our questions. Without cooperation, that person

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JUSTIN PODUR and anyone else obstructing us will be killed.” “Rightful Authority?” Nasser scoffed. His shoulders were burning from holding his pistol at extension. He was very well trained in close-quarters fighting. He thought he could take out the leader and one of his men before they could react. If Hisham could do the same, there would only be one survivor of the encounter. Unfortunately, that survivor would be neither Nasser nor Hisham. “Rightful collaborator, you mean. If you think we would rather go peacefully with you to be handed over to the Occupier, you don’t know who you came to arrest.” “I didn’t say arrest, did I? I said question. And no one will be handed over to the Israeli authorities. This is an internal matter.” Nasser said nothing, just made a wordless, contemptuous sound. The leader softened his voice from one of authority to one of entreaty. Nasser could see the outlines of the man in the dark, his height and bearing as he stepped forward. “Come on now. I wouldn’t have come myself just to hand one of us over to them. Help me out here.” Nasser recognized him now. This was the Secretary of the Authority, the leader of the force in charge of collaborating with the occupier and containing the Resistance. He had once been driven out of Gaza, now returned as part of a unity deal between the Resistance and the Authority. “Nasser,” Hisham said, a plea in his voice. Nasser could see no benefit to the Resistance from any outcome of a shootout here. He held his pistol up with his index finger and put his hands up. Hisham followed. “I’ll go,” Nasser said. “Good boy.” The Secretary pointed at Hisham. “But he is the one I need.” Hisham handed Nasser his sidearm and walked over to the Secretary.

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SIEGEBREAKERS “If you break your word,” Nasser said, “if he is mistreated, if he is not returned to us by tomorrow, I promise you that you will regret this night forever.” The Secretary had already turned his back and called over his shoulder. “You have my word I’ll send him back to you unharmed.”

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CHAPTER 12

Ari’s transfer to Unit 8200 was scheduled for the day after Intelligence Day, the ceremony for families that commemorated fallen spies with the motto “by way of deception, thou shalt do war.” His mother didn’t go to Intelligence Day. She never went. The General picked him up. They sat in the back of the black SUV together as they had done each year, the hopelessly smooth drive to Glilot headquarters. They started with their habitual trip to the memorial, the concrete maze in the shape of a brain. “I know that to your mother,” the General said, “this memorial commemorates the destruction of your family. And I understand why she feels that. But today we honour your family differently. I hardly knew your father, but his record of service to Israel was extraordinary.” “Thank you, sir,” Ari said. “He was a Sephardic Jew from Syria, a man who looked like an Arab, and spoke Arabic. Such men are highly prized for clandestine work. He was excellent at his job. After his compulsory service, he stayed on with the Army. He was recruited from the Army. He met your mother in the Army. You would not be here, Ari, without the Army. Your mother doesn’t see that. She sees only the bad, not the good.” Ari said nothing. In his mind, he drew the family tree as far back as he knew it. His father’s line stretched back into Syria, the Ottoman Empire, the Umayyad Caliphate. His mother’s line back to Russia, the Soviet Union, the Czars and the ghetto. Looking on the tree from afar, all his ancestors from different places converged on a point like the tip of a spear. The sharp point was him, piercing the earth in Palestine. The General and Ari went down to pray in the small synagogue.

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SIEGEBREAKERS They went into the museum of spy artifacts. They went into the File Room so Ari could see his father’s file, see the photos he saw once a year of a man who died when Ari was just a baby, a man whose memory he’d only accessed through his mother’s handful of pictures.

The next day, Ari walked into Unit 8200. Ari only had to be there for a few days to establish a reputation as someone who could solve an analytical problem that left others lost. It started with Ben. Smart kid, European background, Computer Science degree from a good school, impressed them during his Army service, and assigned here. Thin framed glasses below as full a set of curls as the regulations would allow. A lifetime spent as the smartest kid in the room. He popped up in Ari’s cubicle: he had been looking at this metadata all morning, and was there a pattern? Ari clicked through the files. International mobile phone calls to Lebanon, domestic calls to the UN clinic, then that SIM stops submitting. A new SIM starts making calls to the same people, including the number in Lebanon. The Lebanon number was a phone that in turn made calls to a wealthy Shia businessman. Wealthy Shia businessmen were the money men behind the Lebanese fighters that opposed Israel. “So, you think this is a connection between the armed groups in Gaza and Lebanon?” Ben shrugged. “The Arab making the calls is from a… terrorist family.” A terrorist family? “How many of his family did we kill in the last round?” “His grandparents, his parents, his wife, his daughters, his sister, her husband, their kids. Everyone but him and his youngest son,” Ben said.

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JUSTIN PODUR “Look at the son,” Ari said. “I bet he has an injury or a disease. The calls to the UN clinic are persistent. I think he’s looking for a doctor, maybe a specialist, and that’s probably who he’s calling in Lebanon too.” “If he finds a doctor, do we let him out? Do we try to recruit him when he’s out?” It was standard practice to try to recruit Palestinians who required health care. They made perfect informants, since their cooperation was motivated by rewards that meant life or death to them and their loved ones. “That’s what we do, isn’t it?” Ari said. Ari tried to turn back to his own work, but his next consult came right on Ben’s heels. An older analyst, Keren, who Ari quickly decided was an uncreative bureaucrat. She was using an interface especially built for Unit 8200 by the Americans. The system looked at private social network posts by the Arabs. There was a set of social media posts that were going around. Keren could not tell whether they were bluster, or genuine threats to be flagged. The American-created interface had enabled Keren to own the social media account and see everything that an Arab was doing on the system. She could do the same thing to their email accounts, if they were using the email system that everyone used (most of the Arabs were). She noticed that they sent each other a lot of innocuous images along with the video links of audacious exploits of Islamic fighters in different parts of the world. “You’re right to be suspicious,” Ari said. “You’ll need to use a different system to see if the images are hiding data.” Steganography, hiding data in images, was too advanced for most of Israel’s enemies, so if Keren had found it, it would be a first. But the images of flowers with inspirational, meaningless quotes in Arabic did get Ari’s attention. He directed Keren to a system he had built for finding hidden patterns in image data and set her to work on it. “Come back if you find anything,” he said.

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SIEGEBREAKERS When Ben’s buddy Eitan showed up half an hour later with drone footage, Ari wondered if anyone did their own work around here, and what people did before he got here. But there was something in this drone footage. They were tracking a shipment of cement bags that a merchant had picked up from Kerem Shalom. The truck went from the crossing to the warehouse, and then made some trips — to a damaged school, to some damaged houses, then to a different warehouse. Some of the cement, according to the drone footage that Eitan had put together, might still be in that warehouse. Which meant it might be used to build terrorist tunnels. “Should we hit the warehouse and the merchant’s house?” “I think we should wait to do that,” Ari said, smoothing his voice to hide his interest in this warehouse. “Add them to the target list, but not high priority. It might be nothing, and you might see that cement get picked up in the next few weeks. Keep an eye on the warehouse though.” And, so will I. Eitan bumped into Zahava on his way out. “Lunch?” Zahava asked Ari from his doorway. “Definitely.”

When Zahava was a little girl, a rabbi came to her village in Peru and converted her family to Judaism. She was taken with her family to Israel, taught Hebrew, had her name changed from Chaska to Zahava. She rode a coach bus straight from the airport to Gush Etzion on the West Bank of the Jordan river, and was taught everything she needed to know to live in, and defend, Israel for life. Many of the new settlers from Peru had difficulty with Hebrew, even though they learned their religious and political lessons well. There was Jewish blood everywhere in Peru anyway, her parents told her. Cristobal Colon was Jewish, or so it was said in Peru. But after her conversion Zahava never went back to Peru, never

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JUSTIN PODUR followed news from Peru, never thought about the heritage her parents had given up. For Zahava, Hebrew came easy. She did not stand out: many in her new country shared her jet-black hair and dark skin. Most things came easy. Zahava was identified as a gifted child, and taken from the settlement’s school to a special school in Israel. She had taken a liking to Ari right away, gone straight to him with whatever question was on her mind and come away surprised by the answer every time. She was bigger than him for most of their childhood, and before he learned to take care, had backed him up when his quick mouth got him into trouble. She was sitting next to him in class when the General came to talk to them. Zahava remembered the thick forearms, the wrinkled neck, the deep, pitiless eyes looking down at her and Ari. He had identified a special role for Ari then, and another role for her. “Watch over him,” the General said in his deep, cold voice. “He is Israel’s greatest asset.” He had brought a cloud of fear with him. It made her stick close to Ari instinctively, made her want to watch over Ari from the General. That childhood conversation with the General made her want to be a warrior, and she thought Israel alone could give her that. She was disappointed. When she was considering which service to join, she heard the air force slogan: “the best men to the cockpit, the best women to the pilots.” She joined the Army. But upon joining, she was sent to a special women’s corps, the Beauty Brigade, and taught about how best to make her uniform look sexy. She didn’t follow the instructions. She focused on her training, earned her accolades, and followed Ari into Intelligence. But no amount of focus could protect her from a superior officer’s sustained harassment and career sabotage. She took the abuse for as long as she could, tried to get help from senior female

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SIEGEBREAKERS officers, and tried to keep it from Ari. It took Ari three weeks — during which he had seen her briefly twice — to deduce it. By the time she got back to her unit, that second time, her superior was gone, his desk cleared, his nametag gone, all trace of him disappeared. A crushing weight bearing down on her back, shaken off to a zero. “Reassigned,” was all anyone said. She was kept in that unit for another month under a new superior officer, before he wrote her a superlative evaluation and sent her to the next assignment. It was Ari, not Israel, that let her be who she was. So, her loyalty was first to Ari.

“What do they have you working on?” Ari asked before taking a giant bite out of his falafel sandwich. They were eating at a street vendor’s, one Zahava had discovered and that Ari had since become obsessed with, going as often as his paranoid security culture would allow. “The trucks, same as you. I’m counting trucks and we’re calculating how close they are to the caloric intake that’s been determined to be allowed for Gaza.” “2,279 calories per day. On a diet…” “…but not starvation. ‘No development, no prosperity, no humanitarian crisis.’ That’s the one. But we are way below that number now. We’re not sure what to say about it.” Ari walked away from the vendor’s stand, so that they were walking along on the street. It was bright and hot, the street noisy and crowded. Plenty of white noise, Ari thought, enough for a few minutes anyway. “It’s a lot worse than that. There is a plan in place to escalate casualties into the hundreds of thousands in Gaza.” “Of course, there is. There are plans to use the nuclear bomb, too. That doesn’t mean they’re going to happen.”

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JUSTIN PODUR “This one is going to happen. It is going to be triggered automatically.” “What’s the trigger?” Ari took a brief glance behind him. “A car is coming. Shit.” Zahava followed his eyes. A black SUV turned the corner, slowing down as it approached them. “Ari, what…?” “It’s nothing. A meeting.” He smiled wide, showed his teeth, but his eyes remained hard. “I have to warn them,” he said, as if he was telling a joke. “Smile back, I will have to figure out how to warn them. Will you help me?” “Of course,” she said, as if she was laughing at his joke. Then the SUV pulled up, Dayal got out, and told Ari to get in the back.

“I was having lunch,” Ari said, looking up at the General’s grandfather in between the two SS men, ignoring Dayal at his side. “Couldn’t we have talked at the end of the day? Did you have to snatch me off the street during my lunch?” “The target we had for liquidation in Abu Dhabi? She has showed up in New York.” Wow, Maria Alvarez is efficient, Ari thought. “One of our informants saw her there?” he asked. “No sighting. She’s been emailing from a New York IP address.” So, she’s not there, then, and Maria’s trying to misdirect. “An IP address where? A public library? An apartment?” “The university campus, but we found no footage of her. We thought maybe she was using a relay but she is not technologically sophisticated,” Dayal said. “She has no history of using —” “— She also has no history of kicking your ass, but she managed to do that in Abu Dhabi.” “Again?” Dayal looked at the General. “I need you, Ari,” the General said. “I need you to find out how she got to America with none of our friends at the airports,

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SIEGEBREAKERS none of our friends at the visa offices, nor at Homeland Security or the CIA, no one giving us any notice of it.” “Aren’t you being naive?” Ari said. “We can’t afford to love them, remember?” “I don’t love them,” the General said. “But I expect them to tell me if they are going to shelter one of our targets.” “Give me some time, I’ll find out.” Ari said. And some space, please. The General had stuck so close to him that he had never had the chance to contact Maria since the initial message he’d sent. It was as if he had to carry the General piggyback, making him the slow runner in the race, and Maria was going to lap him. He hadn’t had the chance to even explain to Zahava what he was thinking and planning. He badly needed to do these things before he made his next moves, and before Maria made too many moves without his information. He hoped Maria would take Nahla to America. That would at least buy him some time, some time to find the commander on the other side that he needed to reach. “Tell me what you have by tomorrow, we’ll pick you up at lunchtime again.” “You have another problem, you know,” Ari said. “I know,” the General said.

At the Unit 8200 office, Zahava stood as Ben and Keren looked at each other, and at her, and at each other again. “Do you think he’ll sign it?” Keren asked. “I already told you, I don’t know,” Zahava said. “We’re taking a huge risk talking to you,” Keren said. “Tell us what you really think.” “Why are you talking to me?” Zahava said. “You don’t know me, or him.” “We know he has the ear of the General. We know he’s much more important than his rank in this unit. We know he’s out of our

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JUSTIN PODUR league technically. He’s somebody, and so are you. If he signed this, it would be a big deal. It could make a big difference.” Zahava looked at the document. It was an open letter to the Prime Minister in which members of the unit refused to take part in actions against Palestinians or otherwise help with military control in the Occupied Territories. It went on to accuse the occupation of espionage, surveillance, political persecution, driving Palestinians against each other, settlement expansion, economic exploitation, collective punishment. “Who’s signed so far?” “Obviously we’re not going to tell each other who signed. So far, we have sergeants, lieutenants, and a couple of captains.” “You get a little carried away at the end, here. Israel’s future depends on it?” “It does,” Keren said. “It was not that different from what the old Deputy Defense Minister said on Holocaust Memorial Day. Or what all the old secret police commanders say when they retired. But they all do the same thing when they’re in charge.” “We are trying to be more than gatekeepers, Zahava.” G-d knew that she and Ari had their own conversations about these matters. But they were whispered conversations, on the beach at night, or on the street in a crowd, or, a few times, in bed. But never to be shared with others, and certainly never to put their names to. Ari’s mother had told him, you will have to keep yourself hidden. Was now the time to come out? Or too soon? Or too late? “I’ll talk to him,” she said.

When Zahava and Ari finally did get a moment together, it was late that night. Ari had claimed one of the General’s safe houses. Swept for bugs, cleaned, perfect for his purposes. He could finally

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SIEGEBREAKERS show her what he had assembled on a computer he had solely for this, a computer that he had built himself, that had never been on the internet, and that no one knew about. He showed a video from a drone over Gaza, zooming in on a street battle in which the Palestinian fighters came in and out of houses, appearing on the street, then in a backyard. “They’re killing each other,” Zahava said. “That’s not the point. The point is, look what they can do. I’ve been watching this squad. The one guy’s built like a tank, there’s the driver, there’s the guy who’s always leading them in and out of the tunnels, and then the commander.” “You’ve invented stories about them. They’re in masks. You have matched them with their IDs?” “No, I haven’t. But I look for them all the time, and I’ve seen them whenever they came out for an operation. These guys, they’re as good as we are. Better.” Ari replayed the battle again. “You read about this, Zahava. These guys are killing the people who kidnapped and killed that anti-Israel Swedish guy.” “I thought their police did that,” Zahava said. “Their police came later,” Ari said. “Has the General seen this?” “No.” “You’ve grown attached to these Arabs? You’re protecting them from him?” “Maybe someone has to.” “Maybe you should protect Arabs that aren’t building tunnels and training to kill us. Not to mention each other,” Zahava said, pointing at the screen. “Those too,” Ari said. He closed the drone footage and opened another window, this time a set of presentation slides with battle plans, a whole order of battle for Gaza. “The plan for the next attack,” Zahava said. “Which will be

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JUSTIN PODUR just like the last five. We bomb them all summer and then stop before school starts.” Ari clicked the slides forward, and Zahava stopped commenting. “This is the contingency plan you were talking about.” Ari nodded. “So what triggers it?” “A few things can trigger it, as far as I could discover. A unified Palestinian leadership. A democratic revolution in Egypt. An unfriendly government in Washington. Or, just the opening of any of Gaza’s borders — land, air, or sea.” “The borders open every few days at Kerem Shalom and Erez and Rafah,” Zahava said. “I know. I think the trigger would be if they stay open for more than a few days.” “What are you saying?” “What I’m saying is that if any of ten things happens, including the Arabs achieving any success in the near future, then we will close the borders, seal the Arabs in, and fire much more heavy weaponry than we’ve ever done before. The numbers will be one hundred times what they were before. They think we can do this and still keep most of the Arab countries and America on our side, while putting the Palestinians down for two generations.” “So,” Zahava said, standing up. “What do we do? You think we have to publish this? Leak it?” “Like Vanunu? We’d be in jail and the war would still happen. No thanks.” Zahava unfolded one of the copies of the letter from Ben and Keren. “So, what? Become refuseniks like these ones?” Ari looked at the note quickly. “I knew about this. We’ve had refuseniks for decades. It’s amounted to nothing. They want to feel good about themselves and sacrifice nothing.”

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SIEGEBREAKERS “That seems unfair,” Zahava said. “They suffer a lot. These guys are risking a lot.” “They sure are, because I’m going to turn them in.” “They came to me in confidence! They trusted me!” “I knew about them before they did that, Zahava. I’ll tell them that before they’re all arrested.” “Why would you do that? They’re on the same side, if you believe anything you’re telling me.” “They’re not on the same side I’m going to be on,” Ari said. “I don’t understand what you’re talking about, Ari, and you are starting to sound crazy to me. Do you want to do it like Snowden then? Leak the documents and go to Russia?” “Same problem. Everything Snowden leaked is still happening. I have to stop the war from starting.” “No one can do that.” Ari brought up the drone footage of the battle to show Zahava, paused it as the four fighters walked away from the field. “This guy,” he said, pointing to the screen. “If I can talk to this guy, I can do that.”

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CHAPTER 13

“It is not the water park that makes it un-Islamic,” Nasser heard his Uncle Walid, the Shaykh, tell Elias. He wore a robe, a head cover, and his now glorious beard. He had let his guard down in front of Nasser, but in front of the squad, the transformation was impenetrable. Uncle Walid was The Shaykh. The illusion was only broken by the fact that his current position was less than lordly. He sat in the back seat, joined by Sami, whose muscles squished him. Still, he managed to sound severe and Nasser saw no glint in his eye as he continued: “It is the other uses to which it was put. Think of where we are going.” They were passing Al-Safeena, site of the Crazy Water Aqua Fun Park in Tel al-Hawa, with its little wooden bridge over an artificial clear-water canal. Kids once floated across the canal in innertubes. They darted down rainbow-coloured waterslides. They waded in shallow pools. Sheltered under big umbrellas, their parents on wicker chairs drinking lemonade and watching their children splash and squeal with delight. The site of fond memories for every member of Nasser’s squad, the Crazy Water Park had been destroyed years before, and never restored to its former glories. Elias, who didn’t know Walid’s secrets like Nasser did, pushed his glasses higher on his nose and pressed the argument as if he were talking earnestly to any other holy man. “That is not why it was ordered burned to the ground, Shaykh Walid. Four squads attacked it, burned it, years ago, because women were smoking nargilas and sitting with men.” “Are you really so eager to believe the occupier’s propaganda?” Walid asked. Elias looked at him in the rear-view mirror. As usual, Nasser rode shotgun and could see the glint in Walid’s eye had returned.

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SIEGEBREAKERS The Shaykh sat, one of the most valuable targets in Gaza, surrounded on three sides by meat shields, riding across an open road with the occupier’s drones flying overhead and listening posts straining their ears, oblivious to the rich target below them. “We are not going to the Crazy Water Park today, my boy. We are going to the Ship. The unsinkable Ship of the old guard’s military intelligence.” “Yes,” Nasser said, “and do you really believe that they are going to give us what we want?” The sun had risen without Hisham’s promised safe return. Nasser had reported in immediately and the mobilization had begun without delay. They would go straight to the Authority and get Hisham back. “I have business with the Authority anyway,” Walid had said. When they visited the bombed-out site of the girls’ school days before, Uncle Walid had promised the schoolmistress dozens of bags of cement, and the Resistance needed several hundred bags besides. The bags had been sitting in a warehouse, bought and paid for, when the Authority seized them and put them under armed guard. Nasser had presented the Commander with a dozen different plans for simultaneous raids, one taking the cement back, and the other to get Hisham out, but Uncle Walid wanted to try talking to the Authority first. So, here they were, the Shaykh and a single under-strength elite squad, walking into the lion’s mouth, because Uncle Walid insisted on the path of negotiation. “Never forget,” Walid said, “we have been given our weapons to turn them on the occupier, not on one another.” “Agreed,” Elias said. “Tell the collaborators that,” Nasser said. “They will be held to account for what they do. We need to concern ourselves with what we do,” Walid said. “And what we will do —” “— is ask them very nicely,” Elias said, making everyone

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JUSTIN PODUR laugh, breaking the tension they felt because of their missing comrade. “That is right, my boy.”

Elias slowed the car as they approached. Walid had instructed them to park several blocks away. Elias went off on his separate instructions. Sami and Nasser settled into close protection of the Shaykh as they approached the outer walls of the Ship. The name was metaphorical — the Ship was no boat, but a building. Now a single, three story, completely new grey structure. Once, a sandcoloured five-story double building with the suspended bridge linking it. Twelve million USD to build, much of it American money, one hundred rooms. One hundred rooms, Nasser knew, where the collaborators tortured their own people for seven years to give the occupier the human intelligence that they would use to kill more of their own people. That changed when the Resistance took over. Nasser and his boys were still recruits at the time, those years ago, not yet ready for that operation. The Resistance had taken over from the collaborators in a battle that took eight and a half hours. Half an hour was for the rest of Gaza: the remaining eight hours were for the Ship. But the Resistance defeated the collaborators and moved into the building, to find all of the collaborator’s documents torched. They invited the people to come and loot, to strip the place of everything, to reclaim it as a place that was not a centre of torture and humiliation. So, the Resistance had begun the destruction of the Ship. The occupier did the rest: in the next three wars, over the next seven years, the buildings were blown up, then blown up again, and then again. For seven years, the Ship had stood as a symbol of the power of the occupier and his collaborators. Over the next seven years, the Ship was gradually blown to pieces from the air. And then,

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SIEGEBREAKERS as part of a unity deal between the Authority and the Resistance, it was rebuilt. While families continued to live in rubble, while hospitals awaited equipment, the collaborator’s Ship was rebuilt. Not like it was, but still rebuilt, and occupied again by the collaborator’s security forces. The Resistance told Nasser that they were not to refer to these forces as collaborators any more, but as the Authority. And Uncle Walid, the Commander, and everyone else had played along. Not Nasser. Nasser and his squad would never recognize the Authority. Nor would he recognize the Secretary that commanded them, a vampire who rose again and again, popping up in Gaza, then the West Bank, then Dubai, tried in absentia for corruption, accused of plotting a coup, accused of assassinating the Leader with a radioactive poison, now back in Gaza and back as the captain of the Ship. The man who had taken Hisham in the early hours of this morning. The man who awaited them. The walkway from the street to the new Ship was deserted. A fat, moustached man stood at the front entrance, waiting for them. A second man, grey-haired and frowning, sat idly at a desk inside. The Secretary’s fighters. Soft. Old. Out of training. The legends of Nasser’s childhood, the men who had made the occupier tremble. The squad named for the Leader’s phone code, now marching to the occupier’s tune under the leadership of the Secretary who probably helped kill him. The security men searched Nasser and Sami, and somewhat apologetically searched the Shaykh as well. A lazy search, like the lazy men they had become. As they walked up the stairs with the desk man behind them, Nasser estimated the number of seconds it would take him and his squad to deal with them. The Secretary’s office was on the second floor. Even here, in a new building and newly set up, with no other appointments, the Secretary made a show of making them wait. Two more soft

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JUSTIN PODUR old men stood guard, rusty rifles that had not been fired in years slung over their shoulders. A decade ago, when the Resistance had fought these men for this building, it had been a real battle. The Secretary had had thousands of well-paid, loyal men here. Four such men had been there to take Hisham from his front gate just hours ago. Was he hiding them somewhere, showing the Shaykh these washed-out old heroes to lull the Resistance to sleep? When the obligatory wait was over, Nasser and the Shaykh were ushered inside. Sami was left in the waiting room with the two guards. Inside, Nasser saw what the Secretary was hiding. Two real soldiers, black berets, stood behind the Secretary’s desk, in impeccable uniforms. They were guarding a back door that may have led to a bathroom, but without knowing the building better, may open out to another part of the floor. Two in front, two behind, two on the ground floor, and who knows what behind that door and on the third floor. The tactical situation was no longer so straightforward, with just him and Sami and the Shaykh in the building, none of them armed. “Welcome,” the Secretary said, unsmiling. He looked at the Shaykh and right through Nasser, genuinely not recognizing him from the night before. The perfect fit of his suit, the clean short haircut, muscles underneath the suit that rivalled Sami’s, his big hands that reached out for the Shaykh’s, made him look like he had been dropped out of a television program and not a man who grew up a refugee in Khan Younis like the rest of them. The Shaykh sat across from the Secretary. Nasser stood behind the Shaykh, in the same ready stance as the Secretary’s black berets. The Secretary looked Nasser up and down in a fraction of a second, giving nothing away, before turning back to his uncle. “Thank you for accepting my invitation.” “Thank you, Mr. Secretary, for inviting me.” “How is your family, Shaykh Walid?”

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SIEGEBREAKERS “They are well. And yours? Your dear mother’s health has improved, I hear?” “Yes, she was able to receive treatment which was very successful,” the Secretary said. “I was very glad when I heard of it. And your wife and children are well in Serbia? That part of Europe has had no trouble in many years, has it?” The Secretary smiled. “The Europeans of the former Yugoslavia were able to find a way to live in peace over there, by the grace of God. I think if they could do it, we should be able to as well.” “Yes, I believe that we should, although of course they divided the land and we believe in sharing it,” Nasser’s uncle matched the Secretary’s kind and fake smile. Nasser admired his uncle for being able to say what he didn’t mean. It was never a talent Nasser had possessed, the talent of a negotiator. Nasser could create deceptions in battle, but not in an office. Walid, he knew, could do both. Maybe if more of our people were like Uncle Walid, and fewer were like me, we would not be living under the occupier’s heel. If Walid could talk them out of this, Nasser would be amazed. “My family is here, though, Shaykh Walid, not in Serbia.” “Oh, how wonderful. It is good for families to be together.” A new soldier, another thirty-something black beret and hard eyes, came in with a silver tray holding small golden-rimmed glass cups of tea. Nasser put his hand up, refusing. Walid accepted a cup and then promptly spilled it. The Secretary had been suspected of using poisons in the past. “Oh my, apologies Mr. Secretary, I have made a mess on your floor. Let me wipe -” “Never mind it,” the Secretary said. His man left the room with the tray and came back with a cloth to wipe the floor around Walid’s feet. “Let us talk,” the Secretary said.

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JUSTIN PODUR “I’m sorry,” Walid said, “but I cannot talk about anything until a young man, who was unfortunately arrested yesterday in error, is returned to us.” “Ah, yes of course.” The Secretary nodded at his man, who went in the back and returned with Hisham, who looked rested, unharmed, and, typically unsurprised to see Nasser and Walid here in the Secretary’s office. He took his place next to Nasser, who looked at him with curiosity. “Later,” Hisham murmured. “The young man can tell you the details himself, of course. But the Israelis wanted us to update them about illegal crossings into their territory.” “Their territory?” Walid said. “You understand me well enough. They wanted an update about it and they gave us names of people who had crossed illegally before. This young man was one of them, so we asked him some questions about how he crossed. No new information, and we will not be giving them anything about individuals or their connections — just general information we will say we gathered by questioning people on the list they gave us.” “Well,” Walid said, ever quick on his feet. “I would definitely call this a goodwill gesture, and I am happy to see him unharmed.” He turned and looked back at Hisham with the same questioning gaze, and when Hisham nodded, he turned back to the Secretary. “I think this is a good way to start our discussion.” The Secretary leaned back in his chair. “Very good, Shaykh. There are several matters that I would like to discuss with you about the future of Gaza and the future of our people, matters of cooperation between organizations that will enable us to do the best for our people. As we both agreed with our Egyptian friends, the border crossings are to pass from your control to ours, our security forces are to be merged, we will resume our payments to Israel for electricity, and we will begin to pay salaries of government employees.”

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SIEGEBREAKERS “Yes, Mr. Secretary. Do you have any details on when the electricity will be restored and the salaries might begin to be paid?” “Very soon, Shaykh.” “And do you have any details about whether the Erez or Kerem Abu Salem crossings will be opened any more than they are?” “Soon, as well.” “And any word about Rafah?” “We will be hearing soon. But what I wanted to talk to you about was, in return for the progress made on these fronts, we will require some things from you.” “And what is that?” “We require your cooperation in arresting criminals involved in the construction of illegal tunnels and in smuggling contraband. Not good young men like this one here,” the Secretary said, indicating Hisham. “But criminals.” The Shaykh stroked his beard, smiled. “Well, Mr. Secretary, we have every intention of cooperating with you on every front, of course. But I was hoping to talk to you about something very specific today, which I hope we could get out of the way first?” The Secretary spread his hand open across the desk. “Anything,” he said. “You know the girls’ school, the one that was bombed in the latest attack? The biggest one?” “Of course. I know Umm Nisreen, the schoolmistress, since she was a teenager.” “Yes, she spoke well of you, Mr. Secretary. She wishes to rebuild the part of the school that remains damaged, and the Resistance made promises to her that we would provide her the materials and the labour to do this. We have paid for the cement and obtained it, but through a misunderstanding it was interdicted. We were hoping you could clear this up for us and for the schoolgirls.” “I don’t know about that,” the Secretary said. “I know about some shipments of material that we are investigating that may

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JUSTIN PODUR have come from an illegal tunnel and have therefore been smuggled.” “No, no, this is precisely what I meant when I said I think there has been a misunderstanding. We were directly involved in this cement purchase and it was 100% above board, including duties paid to the Authority and so on. So, I think there should be no problem clearing this up.” The Secretary placed his smartphone on the table, spun it around, and looked up at Walid. “A misunderstanding?” “Yes, Mr. Secretary.” “Let’s come back to this,” he said. “What about turning over criminals and smugglers to us?” “Well, Mr. Secretary, there are a few complications with that. Let me tell you a few stories for you to think about, before we discuss the turning over of people from one side or another. There is the story of a man, let’s call him Ahmad, who was hanging around at one of the mosques, asking a lot of questions about who was recruited into the Resistance. He made a series of phone calls to a handler reporting on these things. He was asked to burn some cars, and he did that. He told his handler where one of the Resistance leaders was going to be, and that house was bombed, one of our leaders martyred. We spoke to Ahmad. He told us his handler’s name. We were surprised to hear it. Should I tell you his handler’s name?” The Secretary’s eyes narrowed, his jaw set. “Are you sure this Ahmad wasn’t just telling you what he thought you wanted to hear?” “You are talking about torture,” Walid said. “Torture victims tell you whatever they think will make the torture stop. That is not what we do, Mr. Secretary. We do not believe in it. On the other hand, if you catch a man in a lie, several times, he will soon give up and tell the truth.” “I had no idea you used such gentle methods,” the Secretary

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SIEGEBREAKERS said. “I had been hearing stories of executions, of people thrown off rooftops or shot in the back of the head.” “Such things have happened, and they are greatly regretted.” Including by those of us who did them, Nasser thought. “But not in this case,” Walid continued. “So, what do you want, Shaykh Walid?” “We will give you your man back. And the other informers. We want our cement, and we want your non-interference in our defense of the land against the occupier. We won’t hand over anyone to you who is involved in resistance to the occupier, and we want you to stop sending informers and infiltrators to undermine our resistance.” “What you call resistance,” the Secretary said, “I call bringing the occupier’s wrath down on our people, to no good effect. My answer to your proposal is no. No cement, no non-interference, and we demand you hand over any criminals we ask for, when we ask for them.” “Mr. Secretary, you are Palestinian too. Don’t forget that. Tell us what it would take for you to join us, so that we could face the occupier together. You have people who still believe in you, men who would still fight for you. You are from this place, just like us. Don’t do the enemy’s bidding for them.” “No.” “If you joined us, we would sit with the occupier at any table. We would endorse your candidates in elections. We could give you control of our weapons. Just fight alongside us, instead of against us!” No one said anything for a moment. Nasser wondered if Walid had just surrendered the Resistance, not to the occupier, but to the Authority. Was what he had offered really worth it? Was unity really worth so much? Nasser tensed, more afraid that the Secretary would accept Walid’s offer than decline it. “No,” the Secretary repeated.

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JUSTIN PODUR “I thought that we would be able to remain pleasant for a few minutes longer than this, but that time seems to be over already. Mr. Secretary, you have just finished telling me that you have made absolutely no progress, extracted nothing from the occupier in exchange for your surrender, won nothing, except maybe the reconstruction of this building after the occupier blew it up. Now you are saying you expect the Resistance to surrender as well. “You fought the occupier in Lebanon. You fought him here in Gaza. You are a son of this land. You were the heroes of our people, not very long ago.” “We were,” the Secretary said, “the heroes of our people before you and your people joined the fight.” The Shaykh smiled at that. The Secretary obviously didn’t know his history. “So, you were. And now you sit in this building, which the occupier bought you with, and you do his bidding in every detail.” “Your so-called Resistance has brought us nothing but the destruction of this place.” “Your collaboration has not liberated one inch of Palestine. We only exist because of resistance.” “And throwing my men from rooftops? Has that liberated Palestine?” “Your men were not the only ones thrown from rooftops. You forced us to spend lives defending an election we won, so that you could keep taking the occupier’s money to crush our people on his behalf. Mr. Secretary, we will not be crushed. We will not surrender. And we will not be handing anyone over to you so you can resume torturing them in this unholy building.” “Then I am afraid, Shaykh, that we are at an impasse.” The Shaykh leaned back in his chair. “Well then maybe we can at least agree on the small thing I came here to talk about.” He fished in his robe. The black berets tensed, and Nasser was figuring out how he would leap over the table and take one of them out,

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SIEGEBREAKERS but even if Hisham took out the other one, he knew there were other men behind that door. The Shaykh took a battered flip phone out of his pocket. “I just turned it on,” he said. “Don’t worry. I am using it to call your man at the warehouse where you are holding up our cement. We need the amount I promised to the schoolmistress, and we need you to stop asking questions about it.” The Shaykh passed the phone, ringing now, to the Secretary. The Secretary picked the phone up and flipped it shut. “Not today, Shaykh.” He slid it back across the desk to the Shaykh, who left it on the table. “May God forgive you for this,” Walid said. “Actually, Shaykh, the situation is worse than that. If you are refusing to cooperate, and if, as I suspect, the cement that we have interdicted is intended for the construction of illegal tunnels, then I have to arrest you and your men right now.” The black berets raised their weapons but did not come any closer. They were out of hand-to-hand range, but they had pointblank range on the Shaykh, Nasser, and Hisham. “And still worse,” Walid said. “Excuse me?” the Secretary said. “And still worse,” Walid repeated. “The situation is still worse. You see, the mobile phone on your table is a phone known to the Israelis to belong to our high command. It was turned on a few minutes ago. The new Israeli policy is to launch missiles against this phone anywhere it is in Gaza, ignoring collateral damage. That collateral damage is you and your men.” The Secretary stayed surprisingly cool, remaining seated and making no move for the door. The soldiers, though, wavered in their resolve. “The Israelis wouldn’t launch an attack on this place,” the Secretary said. “Are you sure?” Walid said. He looked around. “They have before. For less. Maybe they will call first,” he said, spreading his hands.

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JUSTIN PODUR “You and your men will die, too,” the Secretary said. “Of course we will. Unlike you, we have never forgotten what it is to be Palestinian.” “Then I will shoot you and your men right here.” “And my men will shoot you and yours as you leave the building.” Nasser held his head rigid, trying to be a perfect pawn in this chess game, not looking at his uncle, lest he give away the bluff. The Secretary signalled with his hand to his soldiers to lower their rifles, which they did. “Listen, Shaykh. There are other houses nearby, people who would be hurt if …” “— my men have been evacuating those houses since this meeting started,” Walid said. “How long?” “You know as well as I do,” Walid said. “Another three or four minutes, maybe.” The Secretary slammed his big hand on the table, leaving a dent. “God damn you people.” He told the soldiers to go out the back and evacuate the third floor. “Shall we all leave together?” Walid asked. As they climbed downstairs, Walid kept up with the Secretary, and Nasser, Hisham, and Sami struggled to stay close. “You really should call off your men at the warehouse. We have several of these phones lying around. Could you do that for me, please?” “Yes, yes, I’ll do it!” The Israelis took a surprisingly long time to launch their strike. The new Ship was hit by a smart missile a full five minutes after evacuation. Nasser’s squad, now restored to the full four men, had already changed cars once. A few minutes later, they were back underground.

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CHAPTER 14

As they stepped out of the metro station Maria adjusted her headscarf again, a habit like a teenager or a new convert, one she was trying to banish. Straightening up (but not too much), she followed Nahla and Gamal through the crowded market at New Marg, a red-brick desert of tenement blocks in northeastern Cairo. A billboard hung above: the dictator in a blue jacket and tie instead of his military uniform, staring into the future. Maria hoped to find safety for her group in anonymity, getting lost in the crowd for long enough to get out of the city. The secret police had many eyes, but many more people to watch. Maria was the same colour and height as the people she travelled with. She had shed the blue tailored State Department pantsuit she’d worn to meet the Ministry men, for the “NGO uniform,” loose white shirt over a T-shirt, cargo pants, hiking boots, headscarf. She had a good ear and had been picking up Arabic phrases. If the car and driver were right, they might stay safe by blending in. They were waiting for Gamal’s man, the Bedouin taxi driver who would take them to Ismailiya. As they came out of the market and walked past an array of nondescript old Mitsubishi Lancers, she was happy to see Gamal stop to greet one unobtrusive driver out of the crowd. Blending in might work after all. After the initial polite greeting and the exchange of cash, the driver stayed silent. Another good sign. All four of the passengers — the driver, Maria, Nahla, and Gamal — had been trained by different organizations not to talk in cars. The traffic thinned and narrowed until their Lancer was orphaned, the only car on the road for miles. They were out of Cairo. To get to Gaza from here was a simple matter of not getting killed or kidnapped at a checkpoint.

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JUSTIN PODUR They took the Ismailiya Desert Road and Maria watched the speedometer rise to ninety mph more than once. As the distance from the capital lengthened behind them, the cotton fields became progressively more sparse. At the first checkpoint, the driver passed a few small bills through the window to the expectant officer, and they were on their way. At the next, an armed man in civilian clothing — jacket, jeans, and sneakers — stood in the road and signalled them from afar to get out of the car. “I think it’s Egyptian military,” Gamal said, “but I’m not sure.” The driver pulled up on the highway side. Maria’s group exited, then lingered around their car. Three men with Kalashnikovs waited for them. The ringleader, whose rifle was slung behind him, asked for passports. As he leafed through them, checking the pictures, he looked at each of them in turn. A look of pity for Nahla’s Palestinian ID. A flash of contempt for Gamal’s and the driver’s Egyptian ID. Disbelief, then level-headed cost-benefit analysis for Maria’s American passport. He demanded their papers for Gaza. As he studied them, flipping quickly through some and barely glancing at others, Maria realized he didn’t read English. When he reached the letter of invitation from the Palestinian authorities in Gaza, he read the Arabic with relief before handing it back. He searched the car, then all their bags, then had his subordinates pat down the males. “No laptops?” Maria shook her head no. “There are invitations for two people. Why so many of you?” Gamal started to speak: “He is the driver, I am the translator —” “— I was not talking to you!” Gamal went quiet. Maria waited for one beat, then said, indicating Nahla: “Only the two of us are crossing. She is a Palestinian

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SIEGEBREAKERS doctor headed for Gaza. I am an American paramedic planning to work at the hospital with her.” It was not an inaccurate cover. Maria had the training, keeping it up was a necessary part of the wilderness school’s curriculum and she worked ambulances in the city to stay up to date every few years. “Fine,” the man said. He handed her back the papers, then her passport. “Can I see that again?” Maria put a few bills into the passport and handed it back to him. “You are free to go,” he said, taking the money.

The pile of cash Maria had assembled for bribes receded from one checkpoint to the next. They got to Ismailiya, the Suez crossing, less than two hours later. There, Nahla and Maria were surprised to learn what Gamal and the driver already knew — the Suez bridge was closed, and had been for years. And yet, people continued to cross the Suez Canal. Maria didn’t understand how when Gamal and the driver began negotiating with a man by the shore. Even though she saw the boats going back and forth, she didn’t really believe what was happening until the driver and Gamal got back into the car and he drove the car right on to a boat. Their car sat behind other cars. Many others followed behind until they were sandwiched and behind them, cars hung off the end of the barge. Motorcycles weaved in and out around them and piled on, in some cases with whole families piled on to a single motorbike. Halfway across the canal, Gamal turned to Nahla and said something that sounded like “Africa.” He turned to Maria and said: “We are no longer in Africa. Welcome to Asia.” “Not such a big deal. We were just here,” Maria murmured, thinking of Abu Dhabi. “The big deal is coming. Interrogations ahead,” Gamal said.

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From Ismailiya to Arish, the last major town before the Rafah crossing into Gaza, Army checkpoints sprung from the road, abundant as cotton bushes. At first, they took Gamal’s and the driver’s phones, checked them over. Gamal explained that the lady doctor and medic had no local phones and planned to buy them in Gaza. They looked over Maria’s papers, and Nahla’s. Then they let them go. The second outpost went identically to the first. By then, night was starting to fall, something that happened quickly in this part of the world. The third was slower. At the fourth checkpoint the Army detained them.

Maria counted eight soldiers who surrounded their Lancer. Poorly turned out, undisciplined. Bad moves all around. Reliant on a lot of yelling and barking, mainly at the driver. First, they asked for the papers. Then they had them get out of the car. When they told them to leave the car and walk to the outbuilding, Maria got the sinking feeling in her stomach, felt herself silently saying Mark’s name, then Camilo’s, as a comfort. The soldiers’ fingers were on the triggers, the tension apparent in every move they made. Fear held them so tightly they would break and run at the first loud sound. They were useless in battle, dangerous only to the unarmed and to those more terrorized than them. Maria’s was the only car stopped at the checkpoint. Another car, a newer Hyundai, had been parked at the outbuilding, next to a military jeep. Maria and Nahla were marched separately from Gamal and the driver, each pair surrounded by four soldiers. In the distance, over the top of a hill, Maria saw limping men holding shapes that moved like worms: Two pairs of soldiers

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SIEGEBREAKERS walking, each pair of men struggling to carry a heavy body bag. The outbuilding had a front office area, with a desk where two men sat. Both looked like they had minor injuries. One had his wrist wrapped in a tensor bandage and held an icepack over his eye. The other pressed a bandage to his neck. Behind them lay a back area with two desks and a door that opened to another part of the building. Gamal and the driver were made to sit on the floor in the front office, Maria and Nahla in the back. There they waited, ignored by the soldiers. The Army men searched their belongings, studied their papers, walked in and out, and talked on radios. The four captives sat quietly for forty minutes, no one saying anything. Maria flexed and unflexed her muscles, staying limber without moving, impressed by everyone’s discipline. The main way to get in trouble in these situations was to speak. Maria heard another jeep, counted twenty seconds from when the door closed on it to when the front door opened, calculating distances. Two men walked in, one older and moustached, the other younger. The first two men who knew how to wear a uniform. Probably the captain of this outpost and his aide. The captain ignored Gamal and the driver, and walked up to her, standing altogether too close and towering over her and Nahla as they sat on the floor. “You are the Palestinian?” he asked in Arabic. Maria said nothing. “The American, then,” he said in English. “Why are you in this part of Egypt? Don’t you know the situation?” “We are on a medical mission, sir,” Maria said, looking up at him from the floor as he stood over her. “We are just transiting through Egypt.” “Transiting,” he repeated. He clicked his teeth. He turned to Nahla and they went back and forth in Arabic. Maria could make out little, though she thought she heard the word for war, soldiers,

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JUSTIN PODUR and the Arabic acronym for the Islamic State. He turned to Maria. “It is not safe for you to travel at night. There have been incidents in this area. You will have to wait until the morning.” “I think we would be fine to travel. But we respect your judgement.” “For your safety, it is.” Maria looked at Nahla, who shrugged. The captain signalled to his man, who moved towards the door of the back room. “We had better lock you in here,” the captain said. “For your own safety.” “Of course,” Maria said, and then decided to try a bluff. “The only problem is, my supervisors at the International Committee of the Red Cross are expecting me to call them from Arish tonight.” “But you don’t have a phone.” “They expected me to get one in Arish.” “You can call them from here, later, with one of our phones.” “It has to be by 11 p.m., or they will start calling their contacts in the American Embassy and the Ministry…” “I understand. Please follow my man.” The aide opened the door to the back room. Maria followed Nahla with a glance back at Gamal, who watched, tensile, like he was waiting for a signal or the right moment. The captain’s man closed and locked the door behind them. Maria walked into a dark and bare room furnished with a couple of stools and an exposed lightbulb. In the centre of the room, her back turned, stood a woman in a military-style tank top, black pants and boots, and black straight hair in a ponytail. She turned around like a fighter in a late round, all grim resolve that, upon seeing them, melted into surprise and then amusement. Nahla moved quickly towards her, arms out, to catch her in case she fell forward. Even in the dim light, it was easy to see the woman’s face was badly beaten — swollen lips, black eye, bloodied nose. She held her arm across her side, holding what Maria made to be broken or bruised ribs.

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SIEGEBREAKERS Probably pretty under all that damage, and ten years younger than either of us, Maria figured. When the woman spoke, Maria didn’t understand everything she said, but she could hear the physical pain in the voice and she gathered it was something like It’s not so bad, Dr. Zamoun. Maria recognized the accent, though. It was Palestinian Arabic. Her name was Reem, and once she realized Maria didn’t speak Arabic, she switched to English. Like Nahla, she was travelling from another part of Palestine, taking the long way around to get to Gaza. The only way around, for someone like her. She didn’t say what she planned to do in Gaza, and Maria didn’t ask. By her count they had taken her and her two cousins just half an hour before Maria had arrived. Had Maria seen two Palestinian men anywhere in the building? Reem had heard them being beaten. Maria remembered what she had seen on the way into the building, four men carrying two body bags up the hill. “We didn’t see your cousins,” Maria said. “I’m sorry.” Maria thought Reem said “May God have mercy on them,” in Arabic, and she wasn’t sure if that meant on Reem’s cousins’ souls, or on those who had probably killed them. “I am thinking,” Maria said, “we stumbled on a crime in progress, which is why they took us too, to stop us from witnessing anything.” Reem said: “Or this place is about to be overrun by the soldiers of the Islamic State.” “Is that even real?” Maria asked. “Some of the tribes here, people who have been fighting against the government since before the Tahrir revolution, have declared allegiance to the Islamic State. They see themselves as a branch of ISIS, here in the Sinai. They used to call themselves the Champions of Jerusalem,” Nahla said. “So, not the same guys who are taking hundreds of women at a time as sex slaves and beheading everybody,” Maria said.

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JUSTIN PODUR “That’s Iraq,” Reem said. “They have been fighting, Sunni and Shia, for more than ten years. Here, it’s Bedouin, and they’re fighting the government. So, it’s different.” “What’s their end game? Of the local ISIS?” “To do with the Sinai what they like, without the Egyptian state interfering,” Nahla said. “But that doesn’t mean they won’t harm us if they find us. And it doesn’t mean we should stay.” “And it doesn’t mean they are our champions,” Reem said. “I counted eight soldiers, plus the two you injured sitting out there.” Maria said. “They tried to touch me,” Reem said. “We fought until their captain called them off.” “Their operational security is poor,” Maria said. “They should have posted some uninjured guards in here. Their checkpoint is one barricade deep instead of two. They didn’t search us thoroughly. If ISIS does come through here, they are going to make short work of this unit. We have to go.” Reem walked close to the door and listened, signalled she heard nothing. Maria told her and Nahla the plan. More than Maria, Mark and Camilo stayed on top of what gadgets were available to people in the security industry. Whatever they bought, they insisted she take. Among other tricks, Maria had a coin with a mini-SD card in it and a fake visa card full of lock picks. What they were locked behind wasn’t a deadbolt, and it would take her seconds to have them out. With two injured deadbeats and Gamal and the driver outside not restrained, they could own the building and two rifles in two minutes. The real problems would start after that, depending on what the Army squad did, and then, depending on whether ISIS really were in the area. By the time Maria came out, with Nahla following, the two injured guards were asleep in their chairs, Gamal and the driver on their feet with their weapons in hand. Maria asked Reem to stay in the room until the initial negotiations were done, given the bad

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SIEGEBREAKERS history between her and the two men who had tried to rape her. Nahla began speaking gently in Arabic, in charge and soothing like a doctor, until the guards woke up. She told them that ISIS was in the area, and recommended they leave their weapons and desert the Army. Then the noise came from outside: first the sound of cars driving by, fast. Then in the distance, shooting, and was that artillery? “Definitely time to go,” Maria said. She turned to the soldiers. “I really think you should go too. Locking yourself in the back room won’t help if they take this place.” Nahla translated. The soldiers ran out the front door. She looked at Gamal and the driver, both of whom looked comfortable with what she thought was the Beretta AR70, an Italian origin assault rifle. “You trained on that?” She asked Gamal. “Just the AK-47,” he said, looking it over. “Reem?” Maria asked, as the woman came out. “Same.” “They’re not that different,” Maria said. “Do you think you can handle it?” She turned to Gamal. “Reem’s coming with us,” she told him. The driver, speaking to Maria in Arabic as if she understood, carefully handed the rifle over to Maria. “Because he needs to drive,” Gamal translated. She, in turn, handed it over to Gamal. I make it a rule not to kill the locals, she thought. But she didn’t say. They picked up their bags, which were sitting in the corner of the office. “OK. You and I are out first. Reem, you are at the back. Nahla and uncle driver, you’re in the middle. We are going straight back to our car.” “My cousins,” Reem said. “We have to find them.” “We will take a quick look if we get the chance, Reem, but we have to go.”

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JUSTIN PODUR They went outside to find the checkpoint lifted and the jeeps gone. Reem’s Hyundai was gone too. “It could be they got away, too, Reem. Or the Army took them back behind the lines. We can’t assume the worst and we can’t verify either way.” “If they got away, we are to rendezvous in Arish before crossing. We have a time and place designated,” Reem said. Reem sounded hard. Experienced, whether with battle or with loss, Maria couldn’t tell. The front line of the battle was behind them now, where they had come from, and presumably the attackers had so far ignored this building, driven right by it while the Army fled back towards Ismailiya. Their Lancer was still on the road, though, a few new bullet holes but otherwise in working order. The driver swore as he ran his fingers over the holes on the driver’s side of the door, but didn’t delay. Maria, armed, sat behind the driver, Nahla in the middle, Reem behind Gamal, also armed. Their weapons might help them if they did come across ISIS in the desert, but they would not help them if there were any live Army checkpoints ahead of them. “Back roads, from now on,” Maria said. Gamal translated. The driver took them off the road, into the sand.

But they couldn’t continue like that for long. In a Land Cruiser, maybe, but not in a beat-up Lancer. And the ISIS fighters were locals. They knew the back roads as well as uncle driver did. “Is there somewhere we can get off the road altogether, maybe start again tomorrow?” Maria asked. Gamal translated. The driver didn’t reply. Visibility was only as far as the headlights could show, and the Lancer bumped along and travelled up and down more hills than Maria thought existed in Egypt. The driver made a phone call,

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SIEGEBREAKERS speaking in a dialect Maria couldn’t begin to make out. He had a relative that could take them in, until dawn, and then they would have to move on, before their presence needed to be explained to anyone. They pulled in to the small house, lit by their headlights alone, the engine noise echoing in the silent village. They ducked their heads at the door and walked into a room where tea and dates and almonds were spread on trays on blankets on the floor. The Bedouin auntie had arranged a small room for the women to sleep and a chance for Nahla to treat Reem’s face. “You’ll be beautiful again soon, don’t worry,” Nahla said. “I was never beautiful,” Reem said. “You’re very pretty,” Maria said in English, unable to stop herself. She took off her shoes, headscarf, and the blouse she had been wearing over her T-shirt, then put the shoes back on and decided to go to the bathroom. The bathroom was in an outhouse, but there was a mirror and a lantern to walk to the outhouse with and to use to look at herself. Her face was in better shape than Reem’s. But not by much, Maria thought. She hadn’t been in a fight. But there were bags under her eyes, no chance to put on any makeup, her hair was a mess, and she kept waiting for something she missed, something she forgot, to come back and spoil her plan. She had been in worse situations. Abu Dhabi was a worse situation, in some ways. But then again, I’m not in Gaza yet.

The two-hour nap on the hard floor left Maria more tired and disoriented than she had been before sleeping, but her companions looked better. The swelling had gone down on Reem’s face. Gamal, Nahla, and the driver all looked fresh and ready to move. They were each brought a shot glass of coffee to down before leaving and the driver got them a bag of bread for the road.

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JUSTIN PODUR They had to get back on to the main road for a stretch. They passed the carcass of an Army vehicle on the roadside, obvious victim of an improvised explosive device. IEDs were not the only risk. With ISIS operating in the area and an active firefight the night before, the whole peninsula was probably under lockdown by the Army — when they weren’t running scared. If they were stopped, two Egyptians, two Palestinians and an American, three of whom were women, and two Egyptian Army issue rifles in the car — well, they couldn’t be stopped. After they passed the smoking ruin of an Army outpost, the driver took them off the main road again. They went back to darting from village to village as much as they could, avoiding the main road when possible, taking much longer than they otherwise would have. It was on one of those back roads that they began to be pursued by a white Land Cruiser. The driver saw it in the rear-view first. For ten minutes, it remained at the outer edge of what they could see, just a dot, disappearing when they went over a hill, reappearing as they went back up the next hill. Then it started to gain on them. In the next ten minutes, Maria, Reem, and Nahla all craned their necks. As it approached to within a quarter mile, Maria thought she counted six men overflowing the Land Cruiser, three in the front, she assumed as many in the back, assault rifles in every hand. She thought she could see masks and scarves covering their faces, and no military uniforms. “Nahla? Reem? Tell me what you see.” “ISIS,” Reem said evenly. “ISIS,” Nahla said. For a moment, Maria hoped they would be able to play it cool and let them pass. Then she saw two of the ISIS fighters start pointing their weapons at their car. “Gamal, could you please tell the driver to drive more irregularly? Big sweeps, left and right. The idea is to make them think we

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SIEGEBREAKERS are turning off, and see if they follow us. Let’s see how they react.” The driver started calling to God, in Arabic, muttering to himself, but did what Maria wanted. The ISIS Land Cruiser followed their sweeps, one big move one way, then the other. She handed her rifle to Reem, over Nahla’s lap. “Sorry doctor,” she said. Now Reem and Gamal, both on the passenger side, had both weapons. No weapons on the driver’s side. The ISIS Land Cruiser was about a hundred yards away and fired three warning shots. Maria was counting on them assuming no one in her Lancer was armed. “Who’s got a handkerchief?” Nahla had one, a white square piece of bandage, which she dug out of her bag and handed to Maria. On the left side sweep, Maria held the flag out the window. False surrender. It was a tactic she taught to women, especially, and often created an opening to escape. “Get ready,” she said to Gamal and Reem. “The idea is to hit the engine block. You should be able to do enough damage to the front of the car to stop them from following us.” It was nearly time for the next turn, and the idea was for this one to be sharp. “Tell the driver to slow down until we’re in front of them. The rest is up to you two,” Maria said to Gamal and Reem. The driver turned right, more sharply than the previous turns. He understood the manoeuvre. As they slowed down, the passenger side of their car faced the oncoming Land Cruiser and slowed right down. Gamal, as instructed, fired at the engine block and took out the headlights. Reem fired directly at the driver, starting with holes in the windshield and, by the second burst, shattering the windshield. She hit the driver, then the middle gunman, then the man on the passenger side. The front of the car burst into flames, and with no driver, the car went off course. “Christ, Reem!” Maria said.

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JUSTIN PODUR Everyone else in the car was speaking rapid Arabic, and Reem’s voice silenced everyone else’s. Maria understood none of the words, but heard Reem give a command to the driver in a way that expected no opposition. “What?” she asked Gamal, feeling helpless. “Reem wants us to follow the car and finish it.” “Shit,” Maria said.

After they did, after her brief foray into murder, Reem was happy to go back to following Maria’s plans, and Maria recovered enough to tell them what to do. They dumped their weapons in the Land Cruiser with the fallen ISIS fighters. The driver took them to a different village, where he arranged for another car to take them the rest of the way to Arish. Going into the fight, Maria had been worried about Reem, the only unknown quantity and recently potentially traumatized. Her assessment of Gamal and Nahla as having nerves of steel had been proven right, but Reem was harder than both. When she talked to them afterwards, no one was showing any serious signs of critical incident stress. Except maybe me, Maria thought.

They entered Arish as if nothing had happened. They took two rooms at the Swiss Hotel in town. The new driver stayed in the new car. Gamal came into their room to hug Nahla, and then left back to Cairo. “Hope your trip back is less eventful,” Maria said. But Gamal didn’t do deadpan. “May God protect you,” he said, with his hands on her shoulders. “Please watch over Dr. Zamoun.” “I will. Be safe,” Maria said.

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SIEGEBREAKERS Reem went into the bathroom, came out ten minutes later transformed into a conservative Palestinian woman, with the big loose dress and the headscarf. “I have to go and see if my cousins made it. I’ll come back tonight.” Maria thought they should stay together, but was too exhausted to protest. After dinner with Nahla, alone in her room, Maria had a sudden thought. She called Nahla’s room. “Are Reem’s things in the room?” “No,” Nahla said. After three seconds, Nahla asked: “She isn’t coming back, is she?” “I don’t think so, doctor.”

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CHAPTER 15

Somewhere in a suburb in Ness Ziona, south of the capital, sprawled a concrete-walled mini-campus as fortified as any West Bank settlement, complete with guard towers, fences, and cameras facing every direction. In one of the buildings, as many floors down as the nuclear production facility at Dimona, Moshe was coming to the end of another shift as the sun rose, taking notes on the report he was reading on the latest strain of equine encephalomyelitis. He was comparing the reports on its efficacy to the fruity-smelling Soman nerve gas, the odourless blister agent Tabun, diphosgene, phosgene, and some newer experimental agents, aerosols, things that could be delivered remotely. Despite having access to a bewildering number of biological weapons, he was going to have to tell the General once again that there was nothing here, nothing in Israel’s arsenal that could change the equation in Gaza. When 2.5 million people live in a closed-off Gaza, it’s going to be a human catastrophe. Those people will be even bigger animals than they are today, with the aid of an insane fundamentalist Islam. The pressure at the border will be awful. It’s going to be a terrible war. So, if we want to remain alive, we will have to kill and kill and kill. All day, every day. This part of the lab wasn’t airlocked, but he had to swipe his card to get out, swipe again to the clean area, where he showered and changed, sign out, check out, before walking over to the office building where his phone was waiting. A secure message from the General. He wanted a meeting at his office.

At the same time, in Megiddo prison, a younger interrogator asked Shabtai about how to break a recalcitrant Arab prisoner.

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SIEGEBREAKERS “What have you tried?” “He has been deprived of sleep for three days, beaten, and cuffed.” “And you think he really knows something?” “His family is involved in the Resistance somehow, I am sure of it.” “And how old is he?” “Twenty.” “OK, leave him in banana for a while, let him out. Do that a few times, and then put him in the frog crouch for the next round of questioning, probably tomorrow. Banana again, and if he’s not talked in another three days, he probably doesn’t know anything.” “Thank you, sir.” Shabtai wasn’t optimistic, neither about this case nor the situation in general. The growth of hunger strikes among the Arab prisoner population was bad enough. But new detainees were ever harder to break. He had detected something beyond the usual, technical problems, and he couldn’t find the pattern. When he got the summons to the General’s office, he jumped to his feet, anticipating that some of the mysteries he had been seeing in his interrogations might be resolved.

Danny stilled his heart, slowed his breathing, prepared for the seconds ahead as time slowed down and his view tunneled down to the tiniest spot through his scope. He was among the best in Israel and, therefore, in the world, able to still himself more quickly than any of the snipers he’d trained with. His spotter was on the phone, messaging back and forth with a camera operator watching the Arabs cutting the fence from the other side. When they came through, Danny would take them out. “They’ll be through in a second, they’re cutting the fence.” the camera operator told his spotter.

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JUSTIN PODUR “How old are they?” “Boys.” “Aha.” The spotter tapped Danny on the shoulder. He waited for each of the three boys to come through, and popped each one. Pop. Pop. Pop. Three easy kills. Danny liked the West Bank better than Gaza for that reason. Around Gaza, there were surprises, unknown variables, terrorists who might pop up from a tunnel or drop a rocket on you. Here in the West Bank, it was good clean work. He brought himself out of the trance slowly, and his spotter raised an eyebrow at his phone. “You have a big meeting,” he said.

By lunch time, Danny, Shabtai, and Moshe were together in the General’s office. They sat around a low table with the General, eating falafels. Ari was standing, and not eating, having come into the room last, as they were finishing up. Ari knew each of them, though they didn’t know him. “Ah, Ari,” the General said. “We were just talking about the Unit 8200 petition signers you caught for us. We were thinking of pushing for relatively light sentences.” Moshe said: “They are young, idealistic. They shouldn’t have to pay for one little mistake, don’t you agree, Ari?” “Treason is treason,” Ari said, returning Moshe’s pointed gaze. “But I accept whatever you decide, of course.” “Meanwhile,” the General said, “Colonel Shabtai has found that his prisoners’ resolve has strengthened in recent months. Why do you think that is, Ari?” Perhaps so that you could bring me here to do tricks like a trained seal, Ari thought. “Sir, I know you don’t think much of it, but I’m convinced that the election they held is the key to what is happening now.” “The UN refused to recognize it, the Americans refused, only

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SIEGEBREAKERS a few European countries care, and the Russians are ignoring it. Plus, the Arab countries don’t give a damn. Still,” the General said, waving a hand towards Shabtai, “tell him your theory, Ari.” “The Palestinian factions held a conference months ago, where they combined the physical presence of many West Bank delegates in Ramallah with virtual participation from refugees in Lebanon, Syria, Gaza, and the diaspora, and messages from the prisoners via their families. At that conference, they agreed that because the democratic mandates of Hamas in Gaza and Fatah in the West Bank have expired, new elections were needed.” Shabtai looked at the General. “This has not come up at all in any of my interrogations.” “Of course, it has not, Colonel,” Ari said. “I believe this is the most important thing to the Palestinians and this is the last thing they will reveal to your interrogators.” Torturers. I can say it, even if not out loud. Ari continued: “The elections were held yesterday. We have been watching the results overnight, and they have been finalized as of this morning. As the General says, they were not given legitimacy by any international organizations, especially because the refugees outside of the territories were allowed to vote, prisoners were allowed to stand as candidates, and the party affiliations were not entirely clear. What is clear, however, is that the candidates who won, won nearly unanimously. They were unity candidates.” “And who were these candidates?” Shabtai asked. “A symbolic number of them are in your prisons, Colonel,” Ari said. “Many of them are in the West Bank. The candidates in Gaza were mostly Hamas, re-elected. And there are representatives from the camps in Lebanon and Syria, including Yarmouk.” “Have we arrested the winners yet?” “That is standard operating procedure, Colonel. But here is a problem. Take a look at the winners.” Ari unfolded the set of photographs he had assembled of the unity candidates. He had also

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JUSTIN PODUR identified the five-member executive, who he had figured out the Palestinians called the Collective. But he wasn’t passing that on. Just the photos, some old and grainy from ID cards, and ambiguous Arabic names. “Do they all name their kids Mohammad and Ahmad on purpose to confuse us?” Shabtai said, looking at the list. “It’s possible,” the General said. Ari said: “The problem isn’t their names, Colonel. The problem is that virtually none of the at-large members who won the elections can be located. We are going back and tracing their movements and figuring out when they went missing, but it looks increasingly like they have been moving, over a period of months, into Gaza. Slowly, patiently, getting visas to get out of the West Bank and Jerusalem to travel to Jordan, then from Jordan to Egypt. I think most of them are either waiting for an opening to cross legally at Rafah, or have already crossed through the tunnels.” “What did you just say? You said into Gaza?” “Correct, Colonel.” “Well, can we get the Egyptians to stop them?” “We are looking into that, but it might be too late,” the General said. The General leaned back in his seat, typed a text on his phone. Men came in and cleared away the falafels and tidied up the table, brought coffee. Ari stared at the photo of the General’s grandfather in between Hitler’s soldiers. The General stood up and walked back to his desk before speaking again. “You think, Shabtai, that these Arabs are fools for walking themselves into our trap like rats. And when Ari first told me about these elections, I thought the same. Let them have their rituals, pretend they have democracy. The world won’t listen. We will keep the Authority in power and things will continue as they have been. But Ari thinks the Authority is already irrelevant. And he has convinced me the Arabs aren’t fools. Look at these faces,” he said,

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SIEGEBREAKERS pointing to the pictures. “These are men and women not known to us. Many of them are young. Maybe some of them are young eagles like Ari here, not old men of the last generation like me and the Arabs I spent my career defeating. I am tired of having things thrown at us that we aren’t ready for. I know the Prime Minister is tired of it. “That’s why I called you all here. My best signals-intelligence man, my best interrogator, my best sharpshooter, and my best scientist. The Arabs have sent their best into Gaza. Now I am sending my best there. You have the same mission as always: to do whatever must be done to protect Israel. If you need to take out their leadership in one move, find out how to make that move. Whatever equipment you need,” he said, looking at Ari, “whatever permission you need,” he said, looking at Shabtai, “you will have. Find out the Arabs’ plan, and foil it.”

Ari remembered the General’s first betrayal. It happened when he was thirteen. Ari was given access to some of Israel’s datasets and allowed to work in secret intelligence locations around Tel Aviv. That summer, his assignment was to build the interactive map of Gaza with rocket sites and likely trajectories, to improve the early warning system. It was a test of how he had incorporated what he had learned, how his thinking had matured since his training started. He set to work. Ari’s complicated system of notes on his laptop were embedded in each of the projects he worked on. In one set, he kept notes about all of the things he was learning about the Islamic resistance — they said and did a lot, and a lot could be deduced from what they said and didn’t say. He was developing a rough idea of where some of the leaders lived, from media reports, intercepts from journalists who talked to them, profiles that he cross-referenced. He started to be able to predict their behaviour, to tell when

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JUSTIN PODUR they were going to make a new announcement or take some new action. By studying them so carefully, following his curiosity, he started to like them. In a file he called “games,” Ari kept a list of addresses of where he thought a dozen of them lived, and kept a map of Gaza updated with his list. Every time he saw a reference to one of them in his media searches, he would move the flag that represented the leader. It was just a game. He hadn’t double-checked it for accuracy or verified anything. He would never have shown it to anyone. He would never have given it to anyone. He was sitting with his feet up, moving flags, when the General came in, introduced him to a young operative named Dayal. “Dayal will be staying here when you are done for the day,” the General told him. He put his laptop down, jumped to his feet, shook Dayal’s hand. Dayal immediately walked over to the laptop. “We have heard a lot about you, the General’s wonderkid. What are you working on?” “Oh, that’s nothing.” Ari rushed over, picking up the laptop and taking it to the kitchen counter. As he moved, he shut the “games” folder down. With the General and Dayal huddled around, he opened the folder that had some of his finished maps with the historical data on the rockets and some projections of rocket trajectories as the Palestinians improved their technology, clicking through them and demonstrating what the system would be able to do. “Very good,” the General said. “You can get back to it.” Ari returned to his seat, one ear trained on the General and Dayal as they chatted about things he didn’t follow or care about. Maybe they were speaking in code, or maybe they really were just gossiping about what was happening in the office. In retrospect, he thought maybe they were planning the

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SIEGEBREAKERS operation they were about to run on him. Or, maybe, discussing whether they would need to do it. “Would you like to get some ice cream?” The General asked, out of the blue. Ari, who as a habit forgot his hunger and thirst when he worked, had eagerly stood up. “Sure, let’s go.” “Are you coming, Dayal?” The General had asked. Had he sounded especially insincere in the question? “No, I had ice cream already today. Pistachio.” Ari would always remember those words in their curious order. Already today. Pistachio. So, they had left Dayal in the apartment. And he had left his laptop open. When he came back, he remembered, the laptop was closed. He told himself that he’d misremembered leaving it open. The General got called away. Dayal went into another room. Ari worked for another hour and played his game for another half hour, during which he realized that every single address he had chosen, every flag he had placed, was wrong. He felt ashamed, then relieved that he hadn’t shown this game to the General or anyone else. A week later, at home in his room, he started reading about the air force strikes conducted with no warning on suspected militants. The names stuck in his head. He checked each address in turn. Each one, from his list of addresses. Each one, from his game that was never supposed to be seen by anyone but him. 500-pound bombs. Eight children, four women, one of whom was pregnant, and twelve men were killed. Not one resistance leader. He went into the living room and put his head on his mother’s lap and cried. It didn’t take her long to figure it out. She told him that they would leave Israel. She hung up on the General when he called. But that night and the day that followed, he turned the problem

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JUSTIN PODUR over in his mind, imagining a moral geometry for what he had done and what the General had done. Parallel lines that intersected with a group of Palestinians who died from the combination of Ari’s game and the inscrutable reasons of the General. Ari reasoned that he couldn’t flee from what he had done. He had to make it right. And there were no lines leading backwards, only a possible path to a better intersection at a different angle. The only possibility of a better intersection would be if he continued to travel parallel to the General. The General put the story out that all of them were terrorists. The General never mentioned Ari’s laptop. He never mentioned the list. Neither had Dayal. There were no consequences for any of them, no charges, no questions of illegal orders. In the years that followed, the General watched Ari and Ari watched for opportunity. Now that it had come, he wondered if he had created too complex an equation to solve.

His attention returned to the room he was in, as Ari watched Danny the Sniper’s big unblinking eyes. Like Moshe the bioweapons scientist, he had remained silent this entire time. When the sniper spoke, Ari understood why the Arabs called him the Fish. Not because of his face, but because he was the stereotype of a sniper: cold, unfeeling, unemotional, alienated. Ari wondered if he was in a position to judge such a person. “Who’s in charge?” Danny said. “I am,” the General said. “But in the field, you will follow Ari. Moshe will be my liaison. If you have anything to report, report it to him. That means you, too, Ari.” The General had never put a monitor on him before. Ari looked at Moshe, and found Moshe looking right back at him. He realized that of the three of them, he knew the least about this scientist. He made a note to find out.

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SIEGEBREAKERS Ari looked again at the photos of the newly elected Palestinian government. He had seen them so many times, he had the panel of faces memorized. He scanned it, looking from one Collective member to the next. Three young men, an older man, and a young woman. All from political families, all educated. The woman was from the West Bank, the older man from Gaza, one of the boys from Jerusalem, one in Megiddo, and the last from Bourj alBarajneh refugee camp in Lebanon. Ari was pretty sure that the two young men and the woman were in Egypt right now, waiting for their chance to get in. With quick action on his part and help from Egypt, the whole Palestinian plan — and Ari’s — could be spoiled. If he waited, the General would eventually figure it out and deploy Dayal’s squad or someone from Intelligence to Arish to watch the border. I will have to warn Maria Alvarez, he thought, and wondered when he would get out from under the General’s, and now Moshe’s, eye to do it. “Is there anything you want to say, Ari?” I am finally going, he thought. “Nothing, sir,” he said.

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CHAPTER 16

As instructed, Nasser’s squad picked Sami up from his family home. Hisham had arranged a special gift for Sami that would lift the big fighter’s spirits and give great trouble to his mother and sisters. The package sat surprisingly calmly on Nasser’s lap on the drive there. Sami answered the door to their ground-floor flat, dressed and ready, his strong Alfred Sung cologne broadcasting that this was a civilian mission, his mother behind him, peeking to see who’d arrived. “Is that Nasser? Come in Nasser, have coffee!” “For Umm Sami’s famous coffee? I do have a few minutes.” “I will put extra sugar for you,” Umm Sami said. “No…” Sami started protesting, but then he looked in Nasser’s arms and saw the 10-week old German Shepherd puppy, and his eyes started to well up. “Is that —” “— Hisham delivers as promised.” Sami took the puppy into his arms, then hugged Nasser with one arm in a way that squeezed most of the air out of his lungs. Sami immediately put the puppy down on the floor. “Mom, look!” He said, like a boy ten years younger. In the last attack, Sami had to leave his two precious dogs, Abbas and al-Ghoul (the latter named after the sniper rifle that Sami had begun to train on at the time he got the puppies), with his family to join the fight, and then his family had to flee. In a critical moment the dogs had run back to the house while his parents were running with the kids. The dogs were in the house when it was brought down. When he heard the story, Sami was sure the dogs had run back looking for him. Nasser, Elias, and Hisham had

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SIEGEBREAKERS never been able to convince him otherwise. Nor had his parents. Like all of them, Sami had lost family members in that attack, but he took the loss of his dogs the worst. Nasser waved to Hisham and Elias to come in from the car. “You’re a she,” Sami said. “You will be Thawra.” He rubbed under the puppy’s neck, and then put his hand in the puppy’s mouth, letting her nip him. “Wow! You have some drive!” Dogs were rare in Gaza but Sami knew them all. He knew their breeds and drives, their abilities and limitations. He volunteered at a shelter for stray dogs, travelling across the city once a week to accompany the pups that showed up on the wrong side of the border. He knew more about the temperaments and abilities of different dog breeds than he did about the differences between Palestinian factions. Nasser, Hisham, and Elias drank Umm Sami’s coffee while Sami and his sisters played with Thawra on the floor. Sami gave his mother stern instructions for what to do while he was gone, which she repeated back verbatim until he was satisfied. As they walked back to the car, Sami slapped Hisham on the back so heartily that Hisham almost fell over. “You are amazing, man! Amazing!” “Sorry that you have to leave her so soon,” Hisham said. “Oh, I’ll see her again tonight!” Sami said, his eyes still clouded with happy tears.

As they drove to the tunnel’s mouth, Nasser remembered a time, just a few years before, when all this was much easier. When the tunnel trade from Gaza to the Sinai was a hydra with so many heads that he would never have believed that Egypt would be able to choke them all. Of course, the occupier protested, and the occupier’s protests fell on listening ears in Cairo. They would fill a tunnel here, flood a tunnel there. But for every tunnel that was

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JUSTIN PODUR filled, there would be two more built. The labyrinth seemed to grow without limit. It seemed the underworld would defeat the siege, and that all it cost was that life had to be lived in secrecy and darkness. Then the coup in Egypt happened, and the new president of Egypt, in addition to having monogrammed underwear, T-shirts, chocolates, necklaces, and sandwiches, turned out to be the hero that burned the heads of the hydra. Tunnels were flooded. The tunnel trade shriveled. With Egypt working for the occupier, the siege would not be so easily broken. Now, the only way to get through Rafah crossing was legally, if Egypt decided to open it. And they almost never did. There was one exception. One tunnel continued to exist. And it went only one way. Egypt into Gaza. Once you had come through that tunnel, you were in the trap like everyone else. But according to Uncle Walid, that was exactly what the Collective wanted.

Now Nasser and Sami waited in the simple house at the mouth of the tunnel, a corrugated metal roof over their heads shielding them from the prying eyes of the occupier’s surveillance drones. Sami held the lantern high in his massive arm as they watched the stairs leading up to the hole in the floor. Nasser checked the time on his phone. Hisham and Elias had been down in it for almost an hour. Nothing ever worked exactly as it should, here, so no news and no sound from the tunnel was good. All the same they were late and Nasser expected them back. Their task was momentous. When they climbed out of the ground and up into the house, they would be escorting the new government of the Palestinian people. An executive chosen by the elected representatives, in the most representative election the Palestinians had ever had, one that included the refugees. There

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SIEGEBREAKERS were five members of the Collective. One was in the occupier’s jail and would never come out but it was important that he be there symbolically. Another, Abu Eyad, already in Gaza, was well-known to Uncle Walid and Commander Abu Laila, and was committed to working with the Resistance. The other three would be coming through the tunnel any minute. Nasser knew all three by reputation. The refugee from Lebanon was a young man who nonetheless was legendary for having fought alongside the Lebanese resistance when the occupier invaded in 2006. Then there was a very smart young man from al-Quds, completely fluent in English and Hebrew, who was chosen because he would make the most telegenic spokesman. Finally, there was the unknown quantity, the only woman on the Collective, the woman who had apparently come up with the entire electoral strategy and the creation of the Collective. And, Uncle Walid said, that was all just the beginning of her strategy. “Here we go,” Sami said. His ears were sharper than Nasser’s, who didn’t hear anything until a minute later. A minute after that, a couple of tiny knocks, which Sami answered, and then Elias came through, glasses fogged up, followed by Hisham. Hisham turned around, reached down, and pulled a young dark-haired woman out of the earth. She wore jeans and a T-shirt. Her hair was uncovered, tied back in a ponytail, her expression unsmiling. Her face was badly bruised. “We are now no longer a Collective of five, but of three,” she said. “Two of us were martyred by the Egyptian Army in the Sinai.” “God be with them,” Nasser said. “You can call me Reem,” she said. “Please take me to the Shaykh.”

They moved as they always did, weaving in and out of houses, changing cars, assuming their movements were being watched,

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JUSTIN PODUR logged, and analyzed for patterns. It was early in the morning and none of them had rested, but Nasser knew there would be little rest for them from now on. Uncle Walid had organized something special to receive the Collective, he told Nasser, and it had to happen right away. The bunker they met in, deep underground, was a different one than where Uncle Walid usually met people. When Nasser’s squad emerged with Reem out of the tunnel, they found themselves in a true meeting hall, bigger than many mosques that Nasser had been to in Gaza, carved out of the red rock. He could have stood on top of Sami and reached up and still not touched the ceiling. Bright fluorescent lights hung from above lit the cavern as if it were an office. Cold air moved through the space, a different feel than the still air his skin knew from other tunnels. More people stood and talked, milled around, than Nasser had ever seen underground, including faces he didn’t recognize. For every pair of hands Nasser saw, one held a glass of tea. Most of the squad commanders of the Resistance were here, as was Abu Eyad, Gaza’s member of the Collective, a benevolent, bent man older than Uncle Walid with a glass eye and a limp from an old assassination attempt. Nasser recognized several politicians, and realized that Walid had gathered all of the representatives here. This was an assembly: the military command, the elected government, and the Collective, were all gathered. One collaborator among us, Nasser thought, and Gaza is headless. Uncle Walid stood with the Commander at the lectern at the front of the room. He smiled and waved when he saw Nasser, and both Walid and the Commander made their way through the crowds to Nasser’s group. “Peace be unto you, Madame Reem. I am so sorry to hear about the martyrdom of our other two leaders.” “Peace be unto you, Shaykh Walid. They are with God now. Greetings to you, Abu Laila.”

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SIEGEBREAKERS They each put their hands to their chests. “Come, Madame Reem, you must meet Abu Eyad. I hope you have prepared something to say.” “Yes, Shaykh, I have.”

Elias murmured to Nasser: “Do you think they will accept a woman with uncovered hair as their leader?” “A woman who was elected by the people and who came here on a one-way trip when she could have stayed in the West Bank? Yes, I think so,” Nasser said. He turned to Sami and Hisham. “At ease, I suppose. Get some tea.” Elias wiped his glasses on his shirt and made his way to the videographers who were setting up to tape the speeches at the lectern. Nasser suspected he wanted to make sure that no one from the military wing was seen. Sami and Hisham headed over to the side of the room where the fighters had gathered. This deep underground was about as at ease as they could be, although Nasser suspected he was not the only one who thought the idea of an assembly was an unnecessary security risk in times like these. The cameras were still off when Walid called the meeting to order from beside the lectern. “We are recording this meeting,” Walid began, “to be able to show the speeches to the people and to the media, to show we can manage a democratic process. The video will be shot close-up, with no way to identify where we are, and only of elected leaders whose faces are already known. So please follow wartime protocols, no phones, no recording. I would like to use this hall more than once,” he said, to laughter. “I would like to start with a moment of silence for our martyred comrades, who we chose to lead us but who were taken from us by the Egyptian Army, working with the occupier.” Nasser put his head down, along with everyone else. For a

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JUSTIN PODUR moment, there was silence in the crowded hall. “I will not take up too much time,” Walid said. “I wish to allow our elected representatives the maximum amount of time here. I only wish to make a few remarks in order to provide a context. As you all know very well, in the past few years we have, against all odds, managed to create a small amount of strength to resist the occupier. Those who came before us, may peace be upon their names, made some decisions that have borne fruit. When they decided that we would focus our efforts on fighting the occupier’s best soldiers, to humiliate him and make him afraid, rather than on attacking the occupier’s people, this was a good decision so that we can walk with our heads high. No matter what ugliness comes from the occupier, we do not need to reflect it on his children as he does to ours. “What we have not been able to do until now is convert our strength into the power to save our people from the siege. Our demands have been entirely humanitarian. We want the airport, seaport, and land borders open and under international supervision. We want to be able to study and work and move about freely. We want to be able to fish and farm. We have offered a ten-year truce in exchange for these things, and although the occupier cannot defeat us, we cannot get these things from him or the world with the strength we have. “I believe this is not because of the occupier, but because of his many friends in the world. So, our strategy must be to try to isolate him and win more friends for ourselves. Here and there we see signs that he may one day be isolated. There are boycotts, there are people refusing to come to be tourists. But too many of our people are still working with the occupier. “We have held elections. It does not matter that the occupier and his friends ignore them. Our people believe in them, and they have chosen you. You, and the rest of you in the West Bank and in the refugee camps, are now the elected government of our people.

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SIEGEBREAKERS We serve our people, and so we serve you. Our arms and our lives are in your hands now. If you apply your minds to how we can reach our humanitarian demands, you will have our gratitude as well as our arms. Abu Eyad, please take the podium.” The old man limped from the front of the audience to the lectern. He spoke slowly and deliberately. “Everything that Shaykh Walid said is correct. I am here as a link with the past, and I am happy to be here, happy you have chosen me. My family is gone, as you know, they were wiped out in the last attack. When I go, I will be the last one of my family tree. I cannot solve the problem that the Shaykh raised, I cannot answer his question. But I believe it can be answered. I believe we will be free. And I will give my last breath to see it done.” Reem took the lectern after a long period of applause. Elias was wrong: No one had the slightest reaction to Reem’s age, uncovered hair, or Western dress. She walked to the lectern like a soldier and held control of the room easily, all eyes turning to her. She patiently waited for the applause to quiet down, before she spoke. “My name is Reem, and I am from Bil’in. My childhood and youth were shaped by a long, failed struggle to try to stop the Wall from being built around us. What I learned there is not about failure, though. I learned there is a time to hide from the occupier, and a time to be seen by the world. There is a time, when he comes for our children, to make him fear our weapons, and a time, when he comes for our land, when he fears nothing more than he fears our words and our images. “Shaykh Walid was speaking of military strategy, and he was right that you,” she looked at the fighters, and met Nasser’s eye, “are the most formidable fighting force that we have created. But the occupier will not come here to fight you if he has the choice of destroying all of us from afar, loading endless supplies of rockets into his artillery guns. “So, we need rockets too. If we have to, we will target his

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JUSTIN PODUR military facilities, which he hides among his people. We will target his airport and his ports. We will disrupt his ability to live a normal life while he starves and kills us. “And it may come to that. But we are going to try something else, first. As the elected representatives of the people, you will be called upon to endorse a platform in the coming weeks, that will have the force of law should you vote for it: equal rights for all people in this land, Jews, Muslims, Christians, irrespective of religion. The right of return for refugees. And the demilitarization of the region. “Next, you will be asked to support a strategy. No longer will we allow our people to violate the boycott we are asking others to do. We will be beginning and escalating our movement throughout the occupied lands. We will be submitting evidence of war crimes to every international court, and we have people preparing dossiers of evidence to take to the tribunals. We will be better and stronger in the media than we have ever been before. “I know, and you know, that we will not win our political demands. Not right away. But we have a democratic mandate now, and we have true unity. We can wage,” Nasser saw the hint of a smile cross Reem’s face, and found himself smiling as well though he didn’t recognize her reference, “a much cleaner struggle, a much more popular struggle, and ultimately a much more powerful one, than we have in the past, when our leaders were disunited. Now we have a political strategy to achieve, at first, our humanitarian demands for our people. We begin the legislative work tomorrow.” Nasser thought that maybe if there were houses above them, that they might feel the ground shaking, as the delegates and fighters thundered their applause. He found himself unable to take his eyes off of Reem as she walked down from the lectern, his heart pounding. As the Commander took the lectern and began a straightforward

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SIEGEBREAKERS military briefing, Nasser, still looking for Reem, didn’t even notice Walid sidling up to his elbow. “Are you impressed?” Walid asked. Nasser turned, stunned, to Walid. “Never mind,” Walid said. “Look at the Commander. Does he look sad?” Nasser looked to the Commander, and back to Walid. “I don’t understand.” “The Egyptians are opening Rafah crossing today. We don’t know why, but we have it confirmed. Laila will be gone by the end of the day.” She hadn’t told him she was leaving. She hadn’t texted him. That night in the tent, when they grieved and celebrated her not leaving, he had let himself dream of the two of them living out their days here like a pair of caged sunbirds. But hadn’t he told her he wanted her to go? He had learned her secret codes for communicating, had been watching the social media channels for her to test the techniques. Why would she leave without even texting him? “He’s probably relieved,” Nasser said. “Maybe he is,” Walid said. “Because like you, he has another woman that he has to keep safe 24 hours a day.” “Uncle, you are speaking in circles.” “Until further notice, you are attached to Reem. You are her guard.”

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CHAPTER 17

Maria heard about the election at the beginning of her second week waiting at the hotel in Arish. By that time, thousands of dollars of Hoffman’s money, a week of her husband and son in the summer, and about two hundred hours of worrying about ISIS, Israeli intelligence, and Egyptian police coming up behind them had gone by. She hadn’t expected the Egyptians to immediately and thoroughly honour whatever agreement it was that she had arranged. But she was impressed by how artfully the Egyptians managed to keep stringing Maria and Nahla along, waiting at the border for forces beyond their control to open it with a bureaucratic keystroke. Gamal was gone, back to Cairo. When she had waved goodbye to Gamal, she wondered whether she should have left Nahla and gone home too, to Camilo and Mark. She wondered whether her honour would have let her. Nahla, who had been both a parliamentarian in a hostile Knesset and a trauma surgeon in wartime, was at least ten years Maria’s senior and had the energy of someone half her age. While Maria worried, Nahla had been able, through her network of Palestinian medical contacts, to patiently build up a store of medical supplies to take across the border, things that the hospital apparently needed badly. She had used every minute of the time the Egyptians had given them, and was pleased for it: when coming through in the past, getting these supplies often took far more time than Nahla had. Maria sat in Nahla’s room studying the older woman doing hunt-and-peck typing at a laptop Maria had set up for her. With each day that passed, Nahla seemed to take years of age off compared to how she looked in Abu Dhabi, her clothes looser, her style breezier.

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SIEGEBREAKERS She imagined Nahla with Hoffman — the scene Mark walked in on at their hotel, the two of them sitting on a king-sized bed sharing a bottle of wine was an image she couldn’t believe, fitting as it did with neither of them. Nor could she get it out of her head. Nahla had not said one word about Hoffman the whole time they were here. But they had both arranged at great expense to travel a huge distance to see one another. Nahla turned the laptop around and put it in Maria’s face. A picture of Reem looked out from the screen on an Arabic media site, one face on a panel of many photos. “One of the newly elected Palestinian representatives,” Nahla said. “Does she look familiar to you? Reem is not her name — it’s just a nom de guerre.” This explains everything, Maria thought. The disappearing act when they arrived. The capture by the Egyptian military. The bloody-mindedness. The deference to Nahla, the steel beneath. The two missing “cousins,” probably others, elected like her. Maria’s next thought was about Nahla’s dossier. “What does the media say about international verification of the elections? Was the UN there?” Nahla scanned the document. “There was an American organization that observed the election, like last time. I can’t find any statements or reports by them.” Maria’s phone rang.

When he called Maria over an encrypted connection, Mark, like Maria, was watching a computer screen over someone’s shoulder. “The kid’s been in touch,” Mark said. “We need you to tell us what to type.” Ari had sent a chat account ID and fingerprint to the email account they had dedicated to receive messages from him. Camilo created one of his own, sent that data back to Ari, logged in over an onion-routed connection and, after some verification, Maria was

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JUSTIN PODUR telling Mark to tell Camilo what to type to him. A: I believe you have N. in the US. Keep her there. She will want to go to G. It is too dangerous. Stop her. If you have already moved her, expect eyes everywhere en route. Abort. “Thanks a lot,” Mark said. “Do you want me to write that?” Camilo said. “No,” Mark and Maria said at the same time. C: It is too late for that. They are already in. Mark and Camilo watched the screen for a minute before Ari replied. A: Somewhere safe, at least? C: The hospital. A: I see. “Well, that was useful,” Mark said. C: Is that all? A: No. N. is assembling a dossier. I have material for her. Orders. Look at them: Ari pointed Camilo to an address on the dark web where he had left the documents, and Mark spelled the URL out on the phone for Maria to view them over an onion-routed browser. Maria couldn’t download them securely without it, though Mark and Camilo already had. “I’ll call you back when we’ve reviewed this,” Maria told Mark, hanging up. She could not read the Hebrew, but Nahla could. And her reaction to them was dramatic. “This is what we have always believed existed but could never get,” Nahla said. “It is the other half of my dossier. With these documents I can match these orders to the events on the ground, match who ordered what attack to the deaths and impacts that their orders had. This is evidence that could be used to try Israeli generals and politicians for war crimes in international court.” “They’ll deny their authenticity,” Maria said.

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SIEGEBREAKERS “Perhaps they will, but if we succeed, they will have to do that in court.” “In that case,” Maria said, “we badly need to do something in the States.” She called Mark back.

Mark arrived at the electoral monitor’s office building in DC fairly confident of his cover. There was still an extensive network of coach buses going between NY and DC, for which you could buy tickets in cash. He had spent his career taking advantage of a nondescript appearance, which made identifying him difficult when he made even minor changes like adding glasses or rearranging a beard, stubble, goatee — all of which he had done. He had arranged for Camilo to stay with Walter, a childhood friend and colleague in Hoffman’s group, as well trained as Mark was — better in some ways. The boy was safe behind him, so he could keep his eyes forward. He’d approached their media office as a freelancer preparing a story featuring the monitor for one of the big political blogs. After a few questions, they’d agreed to take the interview. Then, with a brief pang of regret, he had Camilo make the move they had discussed. He signed in at the security post at the front lobby under his fake name, and rode up in the high-ceilinged elevator to the ninth floor. The elevator doors opened out into a glass-and-stained-wood office floor. Young interns moved around at excessive speeds. Three secretaries sat at reception behind computer screens that were no more than months old. His contact awaited him, wearing what Maria called the State Department pantsuit, not a hair out of place and a firm handshake. “Matt? I’m Barbara. Come with me,” she said. She led him through a common area of shared desks to a private

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JUSTIN PODUR office with a glass wall and door. “Coffee? Water?” Both were ready at a little table in the sitting area designed for informal meetings, a miniature living room with four leather chairs and side tables. Barbara sat rail-straight, elbows wide, a woman headed for bigger things than electoral monitoring. “I’m good, thanks,” Mark said. “Shall we begin?” Mark asked Barbara a standard set of questions about her organization, before finally getting to his real question. “Why hasn’t the report on the recent election in Palestine been published?” Barbara froze. “I’m not going to talk about that,” she said icily. “Next question, please?” “I just think that a lot of our readers will be interested in that question.” “These things take time, Matt.” “But in the last elections there was a press conference straight away and the report was published quickly afterwards.” “That was a long time ago.” “All the more reason this is of interest.” “Can I level with you, Matt? This is one of the most politically sensitive topics that you will ever cover. You aren’t a young man, but whatever you used to do before, you need to understand that this issue can sink your career before you even get started.” “I heard a rumour that your mail server was hacked,” he said, as if Barbara had not spoken. Camilo had hacked their server, but that wasn’t what Mark was talking about. Maria was unwilling to rely on social engineering to try to get that report. Some time before, a private company that specialized in breaking encryption on behalf of governments had themselves been hacked and their intrusion software leaked to the world. Camilo had downloaded it and played with it. Using it often left very few traces of the intrusion, but when Camilo had gone in to look for a report, he saw that someone had just

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SIEGEBREAKERS been there, using a more crude method of intrusion that ultimately failed. Camilo got a copy of the report off of the mail server, and then left additional traces of intrusion to point to the previous intrusion. “Well, I hope you aren’t going to print a rumour.” “I wouldn’t have to if you published your report.” “It will have to wait.” Barbara looked at her phone. “I’ve got five more minutes,” she said. “I only need one,” Mark said, standing up. “I thought it was great, on page 34, that your organization concluded that the electoral authority was ‘independent, competent, and professional’. I also thought that Appendix D, that had all of the results, showing 63 percent for the unity slate and 70 percent participation, was especially important.” Barbara stood up. “How did you…” “The report is coming out, Barbara. In forty-eight hours on my schedule, or twenty-four hours on yours. You decide. I’ll see myself out.” Mark got out to the street, and into a taxi, then to the subway, where he rode around for a while. He bought a disposable razor at a CVS and removed his goatee in a public bathroom, where he also rinsed the product out of his hair. He could probably walk right past Barbara now and she wouldn’t recognize him. He was about to board the bus back to NY when the back of his brain tingled. He’d learned to trust this hyper awareness, intuitions accompanied by sensations, so he backed out, apologized to the people behind him in line, and walked into the station. He went back over his meeting with Barbara, the office, the interns. There was something he’d missed. There had been someone watching, a young man, talking on his cellphone, when Mark had come in. He’d passed Barbara’s office twice during Mark’s interview, still on the phone. And he’d been at the elevator lobby when Mark left.

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JUSTIN PODUR Someone is a little too interested in Barbara’s meetings, Mark thought.

Mark had learned to cooperate with the voice in the back of his head that made his skin crawl and his adrenaline surge. Instead of doing what it told him, which was usually to run away, Mark would breathe, get the thinking part of his brain working, and make a plan. That was how Mark ended up in a silver rented Ford Windstar that night, several houses down from Barbara’s, on a quiet little street of row houses, one of a very few places where rent was more expensive than Manhattan. The streetlights weren’t on yet, but the sun faded below the horizon. Barbara wasn’t home yet. Mark wasn’t surprised: she’d need to stay at the office late to deal with the crisis he had just created for her. He had put together an outfit well-suited for the modern burglar, a dark blue hoodie and baseball cap over black jeans and gloves. His taste apparently was not unique — before two hours had passed, after the children of this street were back from their lessons, the adults back from yoga and gym classes, and the dogs walked, two men came walking down the twilit street in outfits very similar to Mark’s. Baggy sweatshirts and baseball caps. Probably carrying. There was something about the smaller man that Mark recognized. They walked right up to Barbara’s front door, did some quick work on the lock, and slid in. Mark followed. Like his own, this had to be a hastily planned operation and he didn’t think they would have a big team watching the outside. He was taking a chance that it would just be these two, and they would be setting up to wait for Barbara. He walked right in and right into the first man, the bigger man, who was watching the door. The man reached behind him into his pants. Mark pinned the man’s hand to the shirt and smashed his nose with an elbow. He stepped sideways, his hand still on the

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SIEGEBREAKERS other man’s arm, and bashed his knee with a sidekick, then stepped in behind and elbowed the back of his head, cupping his mouth and pinching his nose as he fell. Mark put his knee between the man’s shoulder blades and straight-armed his face to the ground, then leaned down and retrieved the weapon he’d been reaching for — roughly, twisting to break fingers. The whole thing had taken less than two seconds and made no more noise than a few low thuds. “Everything ok?” Mark heard a low call from down the hall, then steps towards him. With one knee on his opponent and the other foot on the ground, Mark pointed the weapon — a 9-mm Beretta, he noted as he sighted it — down the front hall and stood up as the thinner man walked back into view, holding a file folder of papers and a USB key in gloved hands, in complete confidence that he was going to see his friend standing guard. Mark recognized the man from the elevator bank at the Abu Dhabi hotel. They recognized each other. “Hands,” Mark said. The man put his hands up. “You can’t shoot,” the man said. “Noise. Will bring the police.” “That’s gonna be your problem, not mine. Walk towards me a couple of steps. Good. Now stop.” “Here’s what’s going to happen —” the man said. “— Quiet.” Mark slid his foot forward on to the other man’s head and leaned on it until he groaned. “You were going to kill an elections officer? In her house? Do they just send you whenever there’s a woman to kill?” “I knew you were an American. I am going to find your family and you will pay. Do you have any idea who you’re dealing with?” Mark aimed low, towards the man’s hip area, and fired. Then, at point-blank range, he fired through the other man’s shoulder. He approached the man from Abu Dhabi. “Don’t move, OK?” He left the files and the USB stick, but searched him and took another

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JUSTIN PODUR Beretta off of him, as well as a syringe kit, presumably with one of their poisons. He took both men’s phones. “Who am I dealing with? A man with a hole in him, a man about to create an international incident while spending time in the hospital and then jail. When you do get home, go back to your desk,” Mark said to him. “And stay there. Or I’ll be there the next time, too.” He put the poison kit in Barbara’s mailbox, disassembled the Berettas, and went out the back way, where he left the actions of the pistols. He left the van on the street and only came back for it much later, when the police had come and gone. Later, with Camilo’s help, he used the phones to make several clumsy cyber attacks against the FBI. Then he destroyed the phones. Afterwards, Mark heard nothing about whether the burglars were arrested, investigated, jailed, or deported. Nothing about the incident made the news.

The next morning, Barbara and a delegation of electoral observers were on television presenting their report. “Free and fair,” they called the election, and although they were not happy that the winning party did not renounce all violence against Israel, they noted they had pledged to adhere to the Geneva Conventions in any conflict, and said they expected the international community to hold them accountable for any crimes against Israel that they committed. The news cycle followed on with various members of Congress, ambassadors, and spokespeople from the president’s office denouncing the new government: but all conceded that it had, indeed, been duly elected.

Maria and Nahla watched the press conference on a live stream

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SIEGEBREAKERS at their hotel. “Now your dossier can be presented by the elected government of the people,” Maria said. “I don’t know how you did that,” Nahla said. Then Nahla’s phone vibrated. “The border’s open,” she said. “Time to move.”

Their new driver took them to the border, where they found their usual dance partners: Egyptian soldiers with sunglasses and German Shepherds on chains, multiple passport checks, an Egyptian intelligence man asking questions in an outbuilding. “What are you doing here?” “I am a doctor, and this is a paramedic. We are going to work in Gaza.” “Do you have approval?” “Yes, here.” The intelligence man took their passports to the little office. They stood and waited for two hours in the sun. He brought back their passports and another man, who inspected their bags and supplies, then sent them into another building where they had to load the materials onto an x-ray machine. After that, they sat on hard plastic chairs in a public waiting area like a bus terminal. Children cried and coughed and crawled around between suitcases in a cloud of cigarette smoke blown by the adults. Maria and Nahla were beckoned to the desk of approval and made to hand over their passports to a border guard who sat behind glass and added them to a stack, dozens high. Maria watched her passport disappear into the stack, then watched the stack itself be passed to another guard, who disappeared behind a door. She could hear yelling from the room. Active interrogations of Palestinians were happening in another room to the right. Maria avoided looking at the clock or her watch, knowing that

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JUSTIN PODUR it would only slow the time down. The guard called names out over a microphone. Entering Gaza is apparently like winning the lottery, Maria thought. He called her name, and Nahla’s, handed them back their passports. Nahla stuffed money into her passport and Maria’s. “Processing fee,” she said to Maria. They handed the passports to the guards at the door, who took the money and handed the passports back. A bus, the kind that left when it was full, waited outside the building. The driver let Nahla and Maria board. They were followed by two Palestinian young men. The driver waited until another two large families boarded the bus before passing through the no-man’s land of barbed wire separating Egypt from Gaza.

They didn’t talk to each other until they were on the Palestinian side, off the bus. An old ambulance, with a handful of bullet holes in the sides, sat waiting to pick them up. The two attendants, handsome young men both, smiled widely at the sight of Nahla. The bigger one, Hamed, picked up the medical supplies, while the thinner one, Yousef, took their bags, calling Nahla “doctor” and treating her like she was a respected elder aunt. “Welcome to Gaza!” Hamed said, pointing to the giant wall with a sweeping gesture. Nahla, whose energy level had grown with each step closer to Palestine, completed her transformation once they were across the border. She smiled and laughed and joked freely with the ambulance attendants, despite the buzz of the drones that Maria started to hear over the ambulance’s engine, the wall surrounding them, and the remote-controlled machine guns that followed their ambulance’s movements. Looking out the rear window, Maria watched the landscape recede, the bulldozed desert buffer zone by the wall, and then buildings in every state: some intact but full of bullet holes, some

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SIEGEBREAKERS partially destroyed, leaning and threatening to fall, some collapsed with twisted metal innards reaching out from them like fingers grasping for help, some completely pulverized beyond recognition. “Are you two boys looking for a new team member?” Nahla said, pointing to Maria. “This one is a medic from the States.” “You don’t speak Arabic?” one of them, Yousef, said. “Very little” Maria said, in Arabic, one of her small number of phrases. Yousef ’s partner Hamed laughed, and said in surprisingly good English: “You will love working here. Great pay. Great benefits.” “No doubt,” Maria said. As the ambulance moved through the city, Maria thought of security trade shows she had attended where the Israeli exhibitors presented their weapons as having been proven, battle-tested in the real world. Here in Gaza was the ultimate proof of concept for the weapons she’d seen at the trade conferences. It was her first time seeing buildings not just destroyed, but turned into powder. The medics pointed out the former glories of old buildings. “That one was a mosque,” Hamed said. “That one was an apartment building,” Yousef said. The tour continued. “In the last attack, the Israelis targeted this southern zone for the most destruction,” Nahla said, “Unlike two attacks before, when they focused on the northern zone.” “They are working their way,” Hamed said. “When they have finished, they will do it all again.”

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PART 2

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CHAPTER 18

The Department of Homeland Security showed no patience for Dayal’s story that he had been stalked and assaulted. He insisted that rather than arresting him, they needed to find an unarmed-combat specialist who had claimed to be a blogger named Matt. Homeland Security thanked him for the tip, but ignored it. On the other side, negotiating the release of an arrested and injured covert operative was financially and diplomatically costly. For an operative with a record as impressive as Dayal’s, the Israeli establishment did not hesitate. Dayal’s assistant in the failed operation was an American citizen. The deal the General negotiated for him involved the assistant’s emigration and a change of citizenship. There were people in DC who were very upset about the whole thing. But, ultimately, it was a small problem between friends. It would take much more to do any lasting damage to the special relationship. After two successive failures, one in Abu Dhabi and one in Washington, both involving outlandish claims of some sort of American MMA Bogeyman, Dayal’s career could not be saved. Even the General admitted to Ari he was no longer certain the man hadn’t become unhinged. Ari said nothing. He was busy making preparations. His research on Moshe had turned up the following: Moshe lived in Haifa. He had done all his degrees at Hebrew University. There was one posting in Brussels as assistant to the economic attaché at the embassy, ten years ago. Nothing else. No other records. The absence of data was alarming. More alarming than the absence of data was the certainty Ari had that the data existed somewhere outside his reach. But what

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SIEGEBREAKERS other data were out there Ari didn’t know about? Did the General keep paper files somewhere? “Pay attention, Ari,” Shabtai said, snapping him out of his thoughts. They were in the back of a black Land Cruiser, moving on the 65 along the separation barrier, the hills of the national park just popping up on the other side. At the end of their journey, one of the most difficult Palestinian prisoners. Shabtai leaned in too close to Ari when he spoke. Ari didn’t like it, but didn’t react, recognizing on some level this was a test. What isn’t a test with an interrogator? How much consideration for my comfort can I expect from a torturer? “Do you understand what I’ve said to you?” “Yes,” Ari said. “He’s particularly resilient to your tor— to your techniques.” “No! You have not been listening. This prisoner was on hunger strike for several weeks, then force-fed for several weeks, then he abruptly ended his hunger strike. Then I discovered he was on this list — he was elected to the parliament! Then, it turned out, Intelligence told me he has been communicating with the outside the entire time — there are letters from him, messages on Twitter and Facebook, published articles in the Arabic media!” “Well, he’s dictating to friends who dictate to their families, or smuggling notes out.” “He’s been isolated for a month! He was isolated when his victory speech was tweeted!” “So, it’s not him writing then. Someone on the outside is writing for him. Where are the materials originating from?” “Gaza. But there’s no single address, so we can’t just resolve the problem with an air strike.” Maybe he’s a telepath, Ari thought. “Does he answer your questions?” “No. No matter what we do to him, he says almost nothing to us. He speaks to other prisoners when he’s out of isolation.”

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JUSTIN PODUR “So, solve it that way. Send some sparrows.” “Of course, we tried that. He recognized it instantly, and led us around in circles for weeks before we realized he knew. That was when we put him in isolation. We’ve brought a cellphone jammer, we’ve tried jamming all radio frequencies for a day. He still gets messages out.” “Well, let’s have a look. But I believe the solution will be to put him in with the other prisoners and watch what he does, rather than try to learn something by isolating him.” After the wooded area and the open field, and another wood, the concrete blocks topped with electrified fences, topped with razor wire, topped with barbed wire, came into view white walls and floating cabins in front of yellow buildings. Exercise time was running out as uniformed guards watched from above. Prisoners paced in street clothes below. They went through the main gate and parked, went through security checks conducted with extreme respect for Shabtai’s station. They went down into the isolation area. Their escort unlocked the door for them, and then locked them in. The Prisoner sat cross-legged on the floor, his hand on a copy of the Koran. He continued to stare straight ahead as if he was alone in the room. “Are you fine?” Shabtai asked. “Yes, thank you,” the Prisoner replied, in unaccented Hebrew, but without making eye contact. “We have some questions for you,” Shabtai said. The Prisoner said nothing. Ari had scant experience with interrogation. His trainers had instructed him about how people breathed and what they did with their faces and bodies when they were telling the truth and lying. But the Prisoner was in some kind of altered, meditative state. Ari couldn’t read his body language. Shabtai was at a loss too, or Ari wouldn’t be here.

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SIEGEBREAKERS “We know you were elected to the parliament, despite being down here the whole time.” “The people made their choice,” the Prisoner said. “What will you be able to do for them, in here?” “We are all in one or another of your prisons. Behind walls and wire, not allowed to move or breathe. Some prisoners voted for another prisoner. Why not?” “Don’t try to be modest. We know you are important. We have seen your writings. We have noticed you distancing yourself from your organization’s old anti-Semitic charter. Your last article argued that your old charter is a historical document irrelevant to the current struggle. And shortly after your article, a new charter comes out, with all of the anti-Semitic material removed. Don’t try to deny your hand in these things. My question is, how did you get the writings out of here?” The Prisoner said nothing. “If you tell me how, maybe we can talk about getting you out of isolation and back with the other prisoners. You can be a leader again. That’s what you want, isn’t it? To be a leader?” “I want nothing but what God wants for me.” “How do you get the writings out of here?” Ari said: “Would you mind if I looked around your cell?” The Prisoner shrugged. Ari looked carefully along the walls and the baseboards, but saw no cracks, no holes, nowhere a phone might fit or even a thin RFID chip with a watch battery. And how would he change or recharge a battery? And if it was a cellphone, there would be cellphone tower data. Now Ari was intrigued. How was he doing it? Shabtai said: “Maybe we will decide you are experiencing a severe mental disorder and prescribe some psychological medications for you. I wonder how you will write or perform as a politician then.” The Prisoner said: “If God wills it.”

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JUSTIN PODUR “I don’t understand,” Ari said. “If you had written everything beforehand and you had people publishing it for you, then how would you keep up with events? If it’s someone else writing for you, how do you know what they’ve written?” The Prisoner said nothing. He had still not made eye contact. Ari looked at Shabtai to say he was done. Shabtai turned to tap the door. “Jabotinsky,” the Prisoner said. “What did you say?” “Your Prophet, Jabotinsky, he said you had to use force to teach us that you were here to stay, whether we liked it or not. Have you read this?” “Of course,” Shabtai said. “What did it teach you, this use of force?” “The same thing. That we are here to stay.” “Maybe. Or maybe it taught you that force is the only way to solve problems.” “It does work,” Shabtai said. “Everything works until it doesn’t,” the Prisoner said. “Like your secret messaging system,” Shabtai said. “It will work until it doesn’t. And I will crack it.” He tapped the door and the guard opened it for them. Ari left the room first. Shabtai turned to face the Prisoner as the door closed, and didn’t move until he heard the click of the door locking.

It might be the difference between the kind of training Ari had as a spy interested in information, and the kind of training Shabtai had as a torturer interested in breaking the spirit of the individual and of the people, but Ari knew the Prisoner’s fatalism was affected, that he was as close to the edge as a person could be. “What did you think?” Shabtai asked him as their car stopped behind a commuter bus.

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SIEGEBREAKERS He couldn’t believe Shabtai couldn’t see it, and he wasn’t going to tell him. “I don’t know exactly what they are doing, but I know the… Arabs did not invent telepathy while we were not looking. I think he has prepared much of this in advance and distributed it. The rest is common enough that his followers outside can deduce what he would say and write it and then he says the same thing in prison.” “It is impossibly precise for that, Ari, I am telling you. Specific phrases and reactions.” “Then let him out of isolation, and put some sparrows around him, and see what we find out. That is a better approach than isolation.” For what I want, not for what you want. “Hmm,” Shabtai said. They were still on the 65, their driver taking them all the way around Nazareth and into the Galilee. Ari had always liked it here, next to all the Arab neighbours, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon. All, he thought, one day would be friends of Israel’s. No time to head back to the capital tonight. The General would find them a place in Haifa. They arrived at their second prison of the day — a prison famed for its therapeutic approach — before dinner but after the support-group session. The architect here had envisioned this place differently from the previous hothouse. After signing in, they walked through a courtyard where pink and white interlock tile alternated with short manicured grass and low fence grates on top of lines of white pebbles. Shabtai and Ari followed the diagonal of an arrow to a two-storey yellow building: the library, where they were told they would find their prisoner reading before dinner. They found him exactly as promised, sitting at a four-seater table by himself with the business sections of several foreign newspapers spread out before him. He looked up from glasses he wore low on his nose. He dried his hands on his white T-shirt and stood up to shake hands.

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JUSTIN PODUR “Mr. Shabtai, hello. Hello, to you, too, sir.” Ari counted about fifteen nods accompanying the eight words. “Please, return to your seat, Mr. Cohen, you have nothing to worry about from us,” Shabtai said. A good way to start someone worrying, Ari thought. Cohen was in the final days of a short sentence for a crime that fell somewhere between treason and ordinary white-collar greed. Unknowingly, Ari and Shabtai had worked as a team to catch him. A businessman with interests in electronics and metals, Cohen exported both to Gaza through the Kerem Shalom crossing. Legally, with permits. Ari had noticed irregularities in the accounting for the goods and brought it to the General’s attention. Shabtai had caught and put Palestinians to the question until he could put together a case that Cohen was smuggling prohibited materials in with the permitted ones. The Palestinian businessmen he was dealing with went to ground in Gaza and couldn’t be caught, and Cohen’s lawyer had dismantled most of the evidence against him. Ultimately a short sentence was awarded in order to assuage public opinion that Cohen was a traitor. “You should know,” Ari said, “I’ve never thought you were a traitor.” “Thank you, thank you, sir. I am here to reflect on my mistakes and do better next time.” “We know you have been over this many times, but we were hoping you could tell us again everything about your Palestinian counterparts and what exactly they were asking for, especially towards the end.” “Well, it was all metal goods, rods, sheets, really they wanted everything.” “Construction materials?” “Yes sir,” Cohen said. “And electronics? I know your business includes electronics,” Ari asked.

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SIEGEBREAKERS “Yes, sir, but no, they had no special interest in mobile phones or any of the other electronics I deal in — mostly it’s mobile phones now. “I understand that because the Strip is governed by a hostile organization that we are not to do business with anyone there any more,” Cohen said. “Not strictly true,” Shabtai said. “In fact, your crime is not that you did business with them, only that you sold prohibited goods.” “I am sorry sir, I should have kept my list updated.” “It’s true, sometimes the changes can come quickly,” Ari said. He noticed something pass between Shabtai and Cohen, a hidden message, a look of challenge and an answer of recognition. Something perhaps Shabtai wanted him to see all along. “Yes,” Shabtai said. “Change can come quickly. For example, I have some good news for you. We have commuted your sentence. You are going to be released first thing in the morning. Keep that list of yours updated. Once you are settled, you will be one of our businessmen that we truly know well and understand. Who better than you to continue this dangerous trade?” Cohen laughed and continued his uncomfortable, placating head nodding. Shabtai led the conversation for a while longer, and although Cohen never slackened, all his answers charged with fear and nerves, Ari was able to figure out why Shabtai had brought him here: he and Cohen had a business relationship with whatever Cohen was exporting to Gaza; Shabtai wanted the relationship, and Cohen’s business, to continue after Cohen was freed; and Shabtai didn’t want Ari to involve or alert the General, and was implicitly offering Ari a piece of the business as an incentive. Your secret is safe with me, Ari thought. Mr. Cohen, you might be the most useful person I have ever met. They had dinner with Cohen and other members of his support group at the prison. Rather than go on another drive or find

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JUSTIN PODUR another place, the warden suggested they take some quarters on the prison grounds. “It’s safe, comfortable, and we don’t have enough Jews to fill the beds!”

They drove back to the capital early in the morning. Shabtai went back to his duties, and Ari had a half a day to decompress with Zahava before an evening meeting with the General. When he got to the General’s office, only Moshe was there. Trouble. “The General was called to the Prime Minister’s Office,” he said. “Shall we wait for him, or do I come back?” “He wanted you to report to me, remember?” “We haven’t even gone to Gaza yet. What are we supposed to report?” “Our American problem,” Moshe said. “I thought we might talk about it.” “I thought our task force was working on our Arab problem, not the Americans.” “I debriefed Dayal,” Moshe said. Ari said nothing. “The General said he thought he had come unhinged,” Moshe said. “But he was completely lucid when I spoke to him. He is already working in private security, you know? You know what he said?” Ari said nothing. “He said that the man that attacked him had an accent from the Northeastern US, probably New York City.” “So Dayal’s an expert in accents, now.” “You more than most should know we must be experts in many things, Ari. He also told me to talk to our informants in DC. The

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SIEGEBREAKERS one who contacted him to warn him about what was happening with the electoral monitor’s report. So, I did. That young man told me he called Dayal because he overheard a conversation that suggested someone compromised that organization’s computer system and also knew about our own attack on their system. The description of the person who gave that information matched the description Dayal gave of the fighter that attacked him in the DC house.” Ari waited. “And that description matches the description Dayal gave of the fighter who attacked him in Abu Dhabi. And didn’t the Abu Dhabi crew also have an extremely high level of technological sophistication?” “So Dayal convinced you of his American theory. That the Americans are secretly working with the Arabs behind our backs.” “Don’t exaggerate my argument so you can make it sound ridiculous. It does not need to be all of the Americans. Just some group of them. A well-connected security firm gone rogue.” “No one well-connected could be working for the Arabs and stay that way.” “Ten years ago, that was 100 percent true. Now?” “Now it’s 100 percent true too.” “Maybe it’s 99 percent true. And maybe these Americans are testing the waters. So, I looked into it. These security companies don’t exactly feature their employees on LinkedIn. But we have our ways. I found one case, an American Jew, a criminologist near retirement age now — so not Dayal’s fighting man — who wanted to expose our network in New York years ago, and who was given a warning. Not many photos of him available either, but I have an old one and we got a sketch of what he would look like now. I showed it to members of Dayal’s team in Abu Dhabi. Do you know what?” “They saw him at the hotel, too,” Ari said quietly, his stomach turning.

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JUSTIN PODUR “They saw him at the hotel too. His name is Hoffman. I have already found what I can from the web, which is not much. I have our people on the ground looking to learn more. But are you still so sure we don’t have an American problem?” I certainly have an American problem now, Ari thought. “So, what do we do? Have the Americans handle him?” “We have to find out what this is, first. Is he after us for pride, because we silenced him a decade ago? Does he love an Arab woman? Was he always a self-hating Jew? Before we act, we must know what it is.” “What do you need?” “From you? Nothing,” Moshe said. “OK then, I’ll get back to —” “— No, no, not that way, Ari.” Although Ari knew it had been meant exactly that way, a probe, maybe the probe of someone who thought the General had put too much faith in this young protegé, or the probe of someone who thought Ari’s abilities had been overhyped. He had seen both of those before. But no, Ari thought, Moshe’s probe was neither one of those. Moshe was trying to put pressure on Ari because he was looking at the whole pattern, like Ari did, and saw something that didn’t fit. That something was Ari, and Ari couldn’t divert him or out-think him or find his weaknesses like he had every other obstacle he had faced. This guy is just some biologist? Some former assistant to the economic attaché in Brussels? No, no, this is trouble. “You come from a celebrated family,” Moshe said, completely out of context. Ari said nothing. “You know your father died in Israel’s service. But your mother’s father was also a fighter. A Russian Jew. He fought the Nazis at Stalingrad and Kursk and liberated Auschwitz.” “He never wanted to come here.” Ari said. He hadn’t wanted to say anything, but something about Moshe was cracking him,

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SIEGEBREAKERS causing him to speed up and miscalculate. “He never let go of his identity as a Red Army soldier. He never learned Hebrew. He stuck to Yiddish and Russian. Every day he told your mother —” “— he wished he had gone to America. Why are you telling me about my own grandfather?” “Maybe a soft spot for America runs in your family.” “You reasoned this out based on my Syrian father and my Russian grandfather? And the General gave me the impression you were some kind of superspy.” Moshe straightened, thrust his chin forward. Not unflappable, then, Ari thought. Good. “I am going to continue to investigate this myself and you are to focus on Gaza. Shabtai wanted you to see what is happening with the Arab prisoners, to understand the business links at Kerem Shalom, to try to get the whole story before we go in.” “Yes, it’s definitely important to know all the variables before trying to solve the equation.” “Exactly right, like the equation about the collapse of a terrorist organization Q = qlnq + 1/qln(1/q). Imagine trying to use such an equation to guide an assassination policy without knowing the values of q.” “That is what we did, sir,” Ari said. “No need to call me sir.” “Of course.”

That night in his bed, after sending a warning message for Hoffman, talking to Zahava in whispers, he asked her: “Do you remember what I said would trigger the General’s mass-casualties war plan?” Lying on his side, watching her, she reminded him of the way he had been as a young teenager. Confident in what his mind

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JUSTIN PODUR could calculate, but wanting her approval. Zahava mimicked Ari’s words from the night Ari had told her his fears: “A unified Palestinian leadership. A democratic revolution in Egypt. An unfriendly government in Washington. Or, just the opening of any of Gaza’s borders — land, air, or sea. But of those, there’s only been a change in Palestinian leadership. And it’s not unified.” “Not that they know of,” Ari said. “But it will be. And now they think they have enemies in Washington because someone’s been frustrating them.” “Someone?” Zahava said. “The point is the wire has already been tripped. The General just doesn’t know it yet.” “How much time?” “Days,” Ari said. “And I need weeks, at least. Especially now.” “So, replan,” Zahava said. “There is no conceivable other plan.” “So, you are saying every day counts?” “Every day counts.” “Then delay it as long as possible.” “I can’t do it all myself,” Ari said. “Let me help you.” “I don’t want to make you a traitor, too.” Zahava sat up in the bed, put her chin on her knee and dug her foot under him. “I will never be a traitor. Neither will you. I am a soldier, and I trust your orders over the General’s. Plus, your mother made me promise to protect you.” “My mother made you a liar,” Ari said. Zahava wrestled him efficiently until he was pinned on his back. His eyes were on her, but he was far away.

He waited for her to sleep, then popped open his laptop. He needed to finish work on a program he had come across in his

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SIEGEBREAKERS travels, that could converse realistically if the topics were vague enough, one of the many Turing Test apps that programmers wrote to amuse themselves and that people sometimes used as substitute therapists. Ari had been repurposing the program, including recordings of his own voice. Now when someone called, Zahava or his mother, it would answer on his behalf, and string them along with one-word answers for a few minutes until somewhat abruptly saying goodbyes and hanging up. Not an especially useful program for an intelligence officer, Ari reflected, looking at Zahava asleep in the glow of his screen. Unless your phone’s location was being tracked and the times and lengths of phone calls, recorded. In such a case, sending a couple of cryptic “call me” messages around to loved ones and then leaving the phone at home to fend for itself while you dashed around on some additional errands could be useful indeed. In the early morning hours, he tested the program on his computer, downloaded it to his phone, then let himself sleep for a few minutes. In the morning, as Zahava was leaving, they both received orders to report to a base on the border with Gaza. “I’m going to need you to call me, in twenty minutes,” he said at the door. “And stay on the phone. But it’s going to be a boring conversation.” “Never,” Zahava said.

His timeline newly compressed, Ari sent a message to the General, knowing full well that Moshe would know about it. “I need four hours,” it said, “to talk to mom and get my affairs in order.” Ari grabbed an alternate phone he kept for an occasion like this and double-checked that his laptop was in order. He was already rushing down the stairs of the apartment when the reply came: “Make it two.” He ducked into a taxi. He lost more minutes at a bus station,

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JUSTIN PODUR changing taxis and following the counter-surveillance protocols he had been taught under the General’s eye. In the back of the new taxi, he tethered to his alternate phone’s wireless internet and clattered away in the Army’s logistics network. The military to which he belonged, like all armies, could do battle because the ammunition was always restocked, the gas tanks were always refilled, the spare parts were always ready, and the stores were always resupplied. These feats of organization were only possible because every item was carefully labelled and tracked at all times. But such a complex system relied on trust. If the database had erroneous numbers for a few crates of rifles, or a few missiles, or even a few prototype devices, good-faith mistakes happened and readjustments could be made later. If some war materiel were ordered moved from one place to another, closer to the Gaza border, during a war with Gaza, it would raise no flags, certainly not if the orders came through a legitimate channel. He put the orders through, then shut his laptop down. He kept the taxi driver guessing, giving directions only at the last second, until they pulled up in front of a villa. The villa had a metal gate with a buzzer, and a camera pointing down that he wanted to avoid. He had hoped to avoid using his phone, too, and to avoid being in the street for too long. He took a slow walk away from the villa and dialed a number on his phone. The phone rang three times, long enough for Ari’s heart to begin to sink before the answer brought it back into his chest. “Mr. Cohen?” Ari said. “I think you remember me, I visited you in jail with Mr. Shabtai?” “Yes, of course, sir, of course. Anything I can do to help, as always, sir.” “Good. I’m glad you said this. I’d like you to meet me at the park beside your villa right away.” “Yes of course, sir. May I ask, what this is about?” “Your country needs your services, Mr. Cohen.”

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The conversation with Cohen completed, the alternate phone destroyed and dumped, Ari got back to his apartment with more than fifteen minutes to spare. His phone told him that his program had conversed with his mother for five minutes and with Zahava for two. He took a shower and was waiting downstairs for his ride to the base. When he arrived and found Zahava, she said: “What the hell was that about?” “Can we just forget that conversation ever happened?” Ari asked.

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CHAPTER 19

The Mediterranean sun rose in the east and after the morning prayer, played light and shadow in the leaves of the olive trees. Clean, cool air breezed slowly from the sea. For a second, the only sound Nasser heard was that breeze playing in those leaves. The only feeling, the air on his cheek and the sandy soil under the soles of his boots. No drone overhead, no F-16, no bulldozers in the distance, no rockets raining down. He took a deep breath, willing the moment to last as long as it could. Then he turned his attention back to Elias, who was instructing a group of thirty civilians, at the last days of their Resistance summer camp. He looked at the bony bespectacled fighter-poet, radiating confidence to calm a group of frightened recruits who thought of him and his men as heroes. What Nasser knew of warrior-poets like Antar and Ibn Ammar he knew from Elias. Antar had been legendary for strength and endurance, neither of which Elias had. Ibn Ammar was a diplomat and a chess master, but Elias’s mind didn’t work in subtleties. A poem about Elias would be one about courage, not power. And only Elias could write it. Nasser and all his men — Elias the wordsmith, Hisham the escape artist, Sami the giant — had studied together, under many instructors, only a few of them who yet lived. Now they were the instructors. “Remember that the occupier will not accept your surrender. You cannot make yourself or your family safe by surrendering.” Elias pointed to an older man in the crowd. “Remember what the Imam told you. They stripped him naked and paraded him through his village, and told him to call all the young men out. When they came out, the occupier kidnapped them. Many of them were killed on the spot. Others are still in the occupier’s jails.

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SIEGEBREAKERS They used him to do their work. Don’t do their work. And do not speak to them in Hebrew. For some reason, they kill Hebrew speakers on the spot.” Nasser looked carefully at the students. Some old, some young, all terrified for their families and wanting some tools to do something, anything, when the occupier came to take their lives. Nasser understood them exactly. Many of them wouldn’t make it through the next attack, but maybe they would die on their feet. Who could know these things? A kid with big shoulders and a breaking voice, who Nasser made to be about eighteen, bombarded Elias with questions. “So, is it better if we don’t speak at all?” “Probably,” Elias said. “But then, is it better even if they are yelling at us to speak? Or, if they are trying to get someone else to speak, should we speak if we think we might want to draw attention away from the person they are trying to speak to?” Elias rubbed his forehead, adjusted his glasses. “What’s your name, kid?” “My name is, um, Falesteen.” “Good name,” Elias said. “The truth is, Falesteen, I cannot tell you what to say. The moment will bring its own challenges that I can’t predict. Every attack is different, and every occupying soldier has his own mind. You have to decide what is best for you, your family, and for your country. I will leave you with the words of our poet: I do not hate people And I do not steal from anyone But if I starve I will eat my oppressor’s flesh Beware, beware of my starving And my rage.

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JUSTIN PODUR No training session with Elias would be complete without the poetry, Nasser thought. He heard a familiar sound in the distance. “Drone,” he said. As they had hundreds of times during the camp, the attendees scattered among the trees and moved in pairs to the next location.

Nasser walked two kilometres through the fields to where Sami was training experienced men in the grim art of knife fighting. Not the most elegant of arts — especially the way Sami taught it — but to fight the occupier, one had to get close. “Of course, they can kill you up close, too. They can do that from far or close. But for us, up close is our only hope. Do the drill again,” Sami said, noticing Nasser. “How are they coming along?” Nasser asked. “A few are promising,” Sami said. “I don’t know if they’ll be ready in time.” “The elections have been ratified. It’s coming soon.” Nasser knew it was, because the occupier had shot three children from sniper posts in the past week, rocketed two houses and bombed a third, shot a fishing boat and killed the fishermen aboard. The occupier’s politicians were making the usual noises about Palestinian children being “little snakes,” about the need for “genocide,” about the need to rape Palestinian women as deterrence. Apparently, Twitter flowed with selfies of young girls from the occupier’s country and captions that read “Death to the Arabs.” The Occupier was expecting the Resistance to answer with rockets. His politicians were taunting in the media that the Resistance was a “spent force,” that they had “run out of rockets,” that they had “degraded capability.” Many of the fighters wanted to show their capability was not degraded. But Reem and Uncle Walid said wait, wait, wait, wait. Once the Resistance answered, the occupier would have what he wanted

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SIEGEBREAKERS and he would take it to the Americans to get permission. If he was going to come anyway, we could wait for him to come. Let the Americans show themselves, giving him permission while we wait with no answer to his attacks.

“If it’s coming soon, you’re going to need this,” Sami said. He loped over to a gym bag under a tree on legs like trunks and returned with a flexible metal gauntlet that he handed to Nasser. “What is this, chain mail? I’m right-handed, anyway. How’d you make these?” “Hisham got them made. They’re easy to make, even here. It goes on your weak hand. Every squad is going to have at least two of these. I’m training people on them later today.” “I see. So, we can dress up like Saladin and punch the occupier until he leaves us alone.” Sami didn’t laugh. “So that we don’t repeat Ayman and Khalil.” Ayman and Khalil. The fifth and sixth members of Nasser’s squad in the last war. Barricaded themselves in a house to cover their escape. Nasser remembered hearing their screams over the radio. They had tried to surrender. Nasser whispered a prayer for them. “I will be at your training,” he said.

The War Council met in a cabin in the olive field. Nasser walked past the gnarled trees, walking over burlap mats and gravelly earth. He moved past the stacks of crates outside and came in, navigating around piles of fruit in various stages of pressing. Farmers waited with their olives and a mill was going, olives and pits squeezed together into paste in one part, while the slow mixing and pressing filled the air with oil the scent of home. He found the corner in the back of the building and joined Reem, Abu Laila, and Uncle

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JUSTIN PODUR Walid as they hunched over a set of taped-together printed maps from the internet. “Generals always prepare to fight the last war,” Uncle Walid said. “So far we both seem to be fighting the last war,” Reem said. “Is there any other kind of war to fight?” Abu Laila looked up at Nasser when he asked. “I know what kind of war they want,” Nasser said. “They want our rockets against their bombs. They want a war where we toss firecrackers that don’t explode at their military bases, and they drop white phosphorus on our babies in their houses. What they don’t want is to meet us in the fields or in the tunnels where we can see them and they can see us, and lose one of theirs for ten of ours. They don’t want that trade.” “There is only so long I can keep a lid on our people,” Abu Laila said. “They are hitting us and our people want to hit back at them.” “How can we break the rhythm, then?” Reem asked. “What don’t they expect us to do?” “Unite,” Walid said. “We are united. We won the election, Shaykh,” Reem said. “The new government has passed the whole strategy. We will be taking them to court and pursuing them in every international arena, and we will be working on principles of universal human rights and isolating the occupier instead of ourselves. We have begun to do everything we said we would.” “Exactly,” Walid said. “And the occupier rejected your legitimacy, saying they will deal directly with their chosen interlocutors in the Authority.” “We were planning on firing all of the functionaries. But that is not unity.” “I think you need a public handover of authority from the Secretary, right here in Gaza.”

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SIEGEBREAKERS “The Secretary whose office you had the occupier blow up?” Nasser asked. “I don’t control the occupier’s actions,” Walid said with a gleam in his eye. “And you might be right that I should not be the one to talk to him. The one to talk to him is the elected representative of the people,” he said, turning to Reem. “She can accept his pledge of loyalty.” “He’s as likely to arrest Reem and hand her over to the enemy,” Nasser said. “He can try,” Reem said. “It won’t happen that way, my young comrades, for two reasons. First, because your squad will be with Reem here. And second, because the Secretary is grieving. You know the big bombing the Israelis did on Saturday?” “Eight people killed in a house, right? I don’t know the family.” “That was the Secretary’s sister’s family. His brother-in-law, his sister, and four of their children, the grandparents, were all killed.” “I didn’t know…” “Sometimes grief can bring people together,” Walid said. “This is a test of your political abilities, Reem.” “You’re testing me, Shaykh?” “This war will test us all, Madame Reem, and you more than anyone. If you can get him to join us, that will surprise the occupier.” “It will surprise everybody,” Nasser said.

It took Walid and Abu Laila some investigation to find out where the Secretary was mourning. Had the Secretary’s sister died of natural causes, they would have mourned in the mosque or in the courtyard of his brother-in-law’s house. But the brother-in-law and all their children had also been taken by the occupier, along with the house. The next logical place would be near the patriarch’s

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JUSTIN PODUR house — the father of the brother-in-law. But that house, too, had been destroyed in the last attack. So, a cousin had set up a black tent in the courtyard of his house, not far from the ruins of the power plant and next to one of the many destroyed mosques. As usual, Elias drove, Nasser rode shotgun, and Reem was sandwiched in the place of honour between Sami and Hisham in the back. Elias drove deliberately, expressionless, calm, the road flashing by on the surface of his glasses, his peace time nerves and anxieties damped down now that war was upon them again. Nasser noticed that quality from everyone in the car: lowered nerves, deliberate calm, preparing and conserving energy for what was definitely coming now, rather than being hyper aware of the possibility of a surprise. Waiting for the thing was always worse than the thing. When they wound their way into the neighbourhood, they saw the mourning tent hanging weakly, a curtain of sorrow among many sorrows flapping in the wind. People waited outside, some going in, some coming out, a train of people paying their respects. By habit, Nasser made a quick security assessment. He knew of two tunnels nearby for possible evacuation, probably at least one more that only Hisham knew about. The houses surrounding the tent had two stories and flat roofs with the water tanks on top. Concrete, refugee-camp construction. If hit by a bomb, the houses would collapse and kill everyone inside. Most of the time the occupier’s bombs didn’t kill directly — they turned the people’s houses into death traps, slabs of concrete that fell and crushed families. The key would be to evacuate the tent and nearby houses quickly — if there was any warning. Simple problem, Nasser thought. Just evacuate a tent of four or five dozen mourning people, and find a safe place for them within a span of a minute or two. The squad would remain outside, while Reem went in to pay her respects accompanied by Nasser. A brief silence fell when Reem stepped out of the car, and then women —obviously distant

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SIEGEBREAKERS relatives, based on their composure and presence of mind — started to step forward to pay their respects to her. An older woman took her by the hand, making ready to take her inside past the queue of mourners. “No, aunt, I will wait with everyone else,” Reem said. “Come, come,” the woman said, ignoring Reem’s protest and pulling her inside. Nasser followed her into the tent where people sat on plastic chairs and on the rug. Most maintained silence. Some cried quietly. The martyr posters had been made, graphic designs photoshopped in behind photos of each member of the family. A few people stood up, seeing Reem. A young woman handed her a cup of unsweetened, watery coffee, which she accepted. Reem touched the women’s hands and paid her respects to each of the elders. Nasser followed her around the room. When he got to the Secretary, he realized the man didn’t remember him. As a personal guard, once to Walid and now to Reem — even after their encounter on the street when the Secretary detained Hisham overnight — Nasser was, and remained, beneath notice. After a few minutes in the tent, the Secretary stood up, beckoning to one of his men to follow him. He led them outside, his man behind them. Once outside, the Secretary said quietly: “You should not have come here.” “We came to pay our respects,” Reem said. “You came to exploit the death of my sister,” the Secretary said. “Your sister’s blood doesn’t matter to the occupier any more than yours or mine,” Reem said, coldly and quietly. Only Nasser and the Secretary could hear. “They choose their targets carefully, sir. Do you believe that they accidentally killed the sister of the former General Secretary of the Authority after an election?” “They… they… should not have been home,” the Secretary said, his eyes unfocused. “They were killed to send you a message. And that message is

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JUSTIN PODUR that you should know your place. All these years you worked with them, thinking you could show them that we were reasonable, that we could negotiate. But all they gave you was hate and death. Will you keep taking it? Even now?” “If you fight them, they will kill us all.” “Look around you, sir. They mean to kill us whether we fight or not.” The Secretary’s phone buzzed. He turned to answer it, held an imperious finger up to Reem. Nasser wanted to take the finger and twist it, but he held himself still. The person on the other end of the phone spoke loudly enough that Reem and Nasser could hear. “Hello, my name is Shaul, and I’m with the Israeli military. Mr. Secretary, we are going to blow up this house. You have five minutes.” “We are mourning, here, you killed an entire family and this house is being used for —” “— I am not fucking joking! You have five minutes! Get everyone out of the house!” The Secretary turned off his phone and turned to Reem with a crazed look in his eye. “Nasser,” he said as if he had not ignored Nasser the last two times they had met and not called him “boy” the first time, “if you and your squad help me get everyone out of here safely, then I will pledge my allegiance and my men, to your government, Madame.” He turned to Reem when he spoke his last word. “I accept your allegiance,” Reem said. Then, to Nasser: “What are our options?” “We scatter. Those who have cars should take them — I don’t think they’ll hit the cars as they’re leaving. They wouldn’t have done the roof knock if they planned on it. Those who have to go on foot, follow Hisham and Elias,” Nasser said. “They’ll stay with you, sir. Sami and I will take Madam Reem.” Without a second’s hesitation, Reem moved towards the house

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SIEGEBREAKERS to begin the evacuation. Nasser grabbed her elbow: “Thirty seconds,” he said, “then I’m coming in after you.” She nodded and left. The Secretary took a business card and a pen from his suit jacket, scribbled on it. When Reem came out in under thirty seconds, pushing and leading women and children out of the house, the Secretary pressed the card into her hand. “What is in here is yours,” he said. “Use it.” Reem put the card in her pocket without breaking eye contact. The car would be left behind. Hisham and Elias led the mourners through a new tunnel to a new civilian shelter of Shaykh Walid’s design. Since the occupier bombed UN shelters and schools in the last attack, there were attempts to build a network of underground bunkers for civilians to hide from the occupier’s rockets and bombs. They were far from complete, but Hisham knew of one nearby, and, after a moment’s hesitation because of the Secretary’s history of collaboration, he led the Secretary and the mourners to it. Nasser, Reem, and Sami walked eight blocks through the alleyways to one of their safe houses. They were still on the street when the rockets destroyed the mourners’ house, along with the posters and mementos of the martyrs that were being mourned there.

The safe house had been superficially damaged in the previous attack and was unoccupied, but it was kept in working order by the Resistance. There were two small rooms, a tiny bathroom, and a kitchen. Nasser decided to stay inside overnight, to not try to move again until the morning. Sami and Nasser claimed the small room, which had obviously been shared by three children, leaving the former parents’ room to Reem. At night, Reem appeared in Nasser and Sami’s doorway. “Do these coordinates mean anything to you?” She handed

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JUSTIN PODUR Nasser the card the Secretary had scribbled on — GPS coordinates, apparently. Nasser showed them to Sami. “They are here, in Gaza, I know that,” Sami said. They all had some knowledge about GPS, Sami more than the rest. “We will find out in the morning,” Nasser said, handing the card back to Reem. “I need to discuss tomorrow’s plans with you,” she said. Then she walked away. For a moment he didn’t understand why she couldn’t talk about the plans in front of Sami. Sami raised an eyebrow at Nasser, then rolled demonstrably away so that his back faced the door. In her room, Nasser stood while Reem sat on the bed. “Relax, soldier,” Reem said. “You’re not going to see any more combat tonight.” He was too nervous to relax. From the moment Hisham had pulled her out of the tunnel, Nasser thought of Reem as the symbol of the Resistance, the legitimate authority. Himself, as a soldier under her command. Now she had summoned him to her bedroom, alone. “Can we talk?” Reem said. “I haven’t had the chance to talk to anyone.” “Yes of course,” Nasser said. “Why are you standing so far away?” Nasser sat next to Reem on the bed. “So, talk to me,” Reem said, then followed with something in English. Nasser smiled and shook his head. “I don’t know English well,” he said. “You don’t?” Reem leaned forward, came so close he could feel the temperature rise. “There is an interesting word in English. What we call a guard, which is what you are to me, in English is called, a bodyguard. You are my bodyguard. What do you think of that?”

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SIEGEBREAKERS Nasser felt his cheeks get hot and his head get light like he had drunk his uncle’s whiskey. How can she smell so good after the way we ran through the streets? He felt his eyes moving down to her mouth and her neck and forced himself to pull them back up to her eyes. Reem leaned away. She looked down, serious again, the light whimsy gone. “This life we chose, I don’t wish it for everyone and not everyone can take it. I am ready to die here. I know you are, too.” “I am,” Nasser said. She was keeping him off balance, with humour one second, seriousness the next. He tried to rebalance himself and get some advantage back in the conversation. “Actually, I have a question. You are married, right?” “Yes,” Reem said. “So, why didn’t your husband come with you?” “I didn’t want him to. I was married young, and my husband is like my friend. He is not like me. He’s sensitive. He is a teacher. He teaches children. I know we don’t all have choices, but we all knew when we came here, those of us who came here, that we would never walk out of here. So, I just had to…” “…let him go,” Nasser said. Reem swung her leg up on the bed so that she sat facing Nasser and held his eyes. She pulled out a phone and a pair of earbuds. “Do you want to listen to music? I have it recorded on my phone. No need to connect to the internet or risk security, in case my bodyguard is concerned.” She popped the bud into his ear and ran her finger down his neck, then fiddled with the phone until a song started. Reem’s taste was for Lebanese pop music, not the sad nationalist ballads on Nasser’s playlist. He listened with one earphone while Reem listened with the other. She hummed along with the music, her eyes open and on him. He wanted to wrap his arm around her and pull her in to him,

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JUSTIN PODUR kiss her and put his hands in her hair, but he feared she would stop him, tell him to get out, he had misunderstood, she was married, he had Laila, he was her guard, they shouldn’t. So, he touched his neck where she had touched him and held still. She put her hand on Nasser’s chest, leaned forward, and put her mouth on his.

They had heard too many stories of night arrests, early morning bombing raids, having to run out or be marched out naked or in underwear, to do anything but get dressed immediately afterwards. When Nasser snuck back into his own room it was still dark. Sami was lying flat on his back, biceps and forearms bulging on either side of his head, fingers interlaced behind, a twitch of amusement playing across his lips. “Shut up,” Nasser said as he lay down. “I didn’t say anything,” Sami said.

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CHAPTER 20

When Maria and Nahla arrived at the hospital, the Health Minister waited for them. He was as expressive as he could be within the bounds of his religion and professionalism, but Maria thought that without those restraints he might have picked Nahla up and danced around the office. He ushered them into a conference room with the director of hospital services, the hospital manager, and four other doctors. Nahla walked them through the medical supplies she had brought. The minister made introductions to Maria. Finally, Nahla told them the truth. “Maria is here for my security,” she said. “She is trained as a medic. But she is here to see to it that I obtain the final evidence from the dossier and that I get out with it, safely.” Nahla and the minister went back and forth in Arabic for a minute. Maria heard the Arabic word for “security,” and the word “American,” from both of them. Then the Health Minister smiled at her, and Maria felt the smile was genuine. “We will see to it, if God wills it,” the minister said.

The hospital campus sprawled over several acres. In one corner, the minister set them up with their own three-bedroom house, complete with a kitchen and a shared bathroom. Nahla and Maria shared one room, and there were three nurses sharing the other two rooms. Tarps covered the room’s broken windows, long since shattered by sonic booms and bomb blasts on the street. Repairs were underway. Yousef, who carried their bags to their room, told them to expect acrylic windows within a few days. A girl came by with towels and tea, and hugged and kissed Nahla with delight. Nahla introduced her as a volunteer who would cook for them and take care of the house.

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JUSTIN PODUR Maria didn’t plan to be there long. Nahla needed only to assemble and complete the dossier, and then they were going to try to get back out. Meanwhile, Nahla was as safe as Maria could make her: no bodyguard could protect her from the kinds of death that came down here. Maria signed up to take on an ambulance shift. Yousef brought Nahla her scrubs, and Maria the uniform of a female medic just her size. “Her name was Ayesha.”

For ten days after her arrival, Maria worked shifts at the hospital. She spent a few minutes each morning reading case studies by a Norwegian anaesthetist who often worked at the hospital. His accounts helped her familiarize herself with what kinds of injuries and situations she might encounter. Mostly, though, Maria travelled with Nahla. They took very specific pictures of wreckage at specified GPS locations. Nahla collected and scanned interviews and testimonies at offices and houses up and down the Strip. She assimilated them into her dossier until every evidentiary gap was filled, and the case she had been trying to prepare was complete. Then, Maria used a third party’s secure system to upload the dossier to a site and a group of people who could act as a last-resort publisher. Another copy, she uploaded via a similar mechanism for Mark to pick up. He messaged her that he had it. She moved her chair back from her laptop, looked at Nahla in the lowlight of her lantern (the electricity hadn’t been on for hours). “It’s done,” she said. Maria felt lighter, a heavy burden lifted, but not like a celebration. Her mission was completed. She had volunteered to get Nahla this far, so that she could complete her dossier and get it out of Gaza. And so, it was done.

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SIEGEBREAKERS Between Nahla and Maria, the silence stretched. Maria noticed for the first time a streak of white in the part of Nahla’s short charcoal hair. “I did not ever really think it would be completed,” Nahla said. “I don’t know if anything will come out of it. Having the evidence has never been enough to help our people. But I never thought I would be able to put it together and get it out. It would have been impossible without you.” “You are an amazing woman,” Maria said. “You would have found a way.” “I will go with you to Rafah in the morning,” Nahla said. “There’s no rush. I can stay another day or two. And there’s no need for you to come all that way, Nahla. You stay here, it’s where you need to be.” “We will talk about it in the morning,” Nahla said. Maria lay back on her bed and rolled to her side, turned her lantern off, and fell asleep, dreaming of return, of home. An hour before dawn, she was awakened by the sound of the first explosion.

Nahla and Maria were quickly dressed and walking briskly to the ER by Maria’s lamplight. Her paramedic buddies were ready for her: Yousef caught her at the ER and they headed for the roundabout where Hamed waited with their ambulance. Nahla gathered with the doctors to wait for casualties. Hamed drove them through the darkness, headlights lighting up a few feet of empty street as they raced along to the latest bomb site. With their flashing ambulance lights identifying them to Israel’s drones and manned aircraft, Maria knew they were in maximum danger as they reached the bombed house. The “double tap” was a favourite tactic of the Israelis: bomb a target, wait for the rescuers to show up, and bomb them too.

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JUSTIN PODUR As they got close to the house Hamed decelerated the ambulance, letting it inch along towards the people gathered at the site. A dozen cellphone lights flashed in front of the ambulance like sparklers. Hamed blared the ambulance horn. People got up from clawing at the rubble and made a path. Civilians ran back and forth taking the injured to cars to rush them to hospital. A young man opened the gate for them. Others got out of the way as the ambulance passed through. When Maria and Yousef got out of the back, Yousef engaged some of the young men in Arabic as they approached the house front, lit by the ambulance headlights and the eager cellphones. Smoke like dead campfires came up from two big holes in the front of the house, one on the ground floor and one on the second floor. “Two one-ton bombs,” Yousef told Maria. “From an F-16. There are eight people who live there.” It took five minutes to find and gather all eight: grandparents, parents, four children of varying ages. The explosion had killed the ones on the second floor. The collapse of the second floor onto the first had killed the rest. Hamed drove straight to the mortuary, not the ER. Nahla met them there and made the calls. Maria’s first mission as a medic, no lives saved.

The second bombing of the night was a more challenging extraction. Another one-ton bomb had come through the roof of a house, through the second floor, sitting like a houseguest in the living room on the ground floor, unexploded. When they arrived, the mother was standing in the window — which was shattered, along with all the glass in the houses nearby — shouting down to other family members who stood outside the house. From below, Yousef had a short conversation with the young mother. He explained to Maria that the family was afraid to come

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SIEGEBREAKERS downstairs because of the bomb in the living room, and afraid to stay in the house for fear that the Israelis would finish the job they started. Maria looked up. “A fire engine would be nice.” Yousef laughed. “I can’t do that, but maybe…” he spoke rapidly in Arabic to the people gathered around, and some boys ran off down the street. Within a few minutes two teenage boys in shorts, T-shirts and flip-flops appeared carrying a wooden ladder. “Hold the ladder?” Yousef said. “I’ll go up,” Maria said. “I’m lighter.” The mother cleared the broken glass around the windowsill so Maria could climb into the room. Two young girls, four and six, and a boy of eight, huddled in a corner around their mother, all conscious, and breathing, no bleeding injuries that Maria could see. On the other side of the bomb hole in the floor, their father, a bigger man, was lying on his back. He looked at her as she climbed in, his eyes blinking and unfocused. Nothing obvious on him either: maybe something had fallen on him, maybe his head got hit or he was overwhelmed to the point of paralysis. No way Maria or anyone else was going to get that guy down a wooden ladder. She shuttled the kids down and coached the mother down the ladder. Then she and Yousef took a deep breath and walked into the ground floor of the house, briskly past the bomb in the living room, up the stairs to load the father on to the stretcher, and back down. “You’re going to be OK, sweeties,” Maria said over and over to the kids on the ride back. She continued her assessment of the father and found no airway or breathing problems, no wounds or bleeding. When they arrived, she wheeled him over to the lessurgent part of the ER. Maria guessed they’d be assessed, he would be treated for his psychological trauma, and they would be sent back out into the city. Not home. Their home was already on an

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JUSTIN PODUR Israeli target list. In the game of probabilities, it was less safe than the random target zone that the Israelis had made the rest of Gaza.

They returned to the hospital and gave themselves ninety seconds to eat. Maria gulped down sweet tea, spooned up some strained yogurt, shared bread, cucumbers, and tomatoes with Yousef, Hamed, Nahla, and half the medical staff, and they were off again.

As their ambulance pulled up to the beach, two men and a woman were running to meet them. Each one held a small boy, eight or nine years old, in shorts and T-shirts. Maria took one in her hands and lowered him onto a stretcher as he twisted and writhed and screamed for his mother. His shirt was torn in a dozen places. There were burns and blood and dozens of small wounds, shrapnel wounds that looked just like the photos she’d been looking at. Metal splinters that sprayed in all directions from the explosion to break bones and lodge in little bodies. �Dense inert metal explosive (DIME) shrapnel: shells launched from Israeli warships towards the beach where the kids were playing. She looked up at the man who had handed her the boy, a beautiful, rugged young man with short hair and short stubble, his jaw set in concern and anger, no trace of fear anywhere. “Thank you,” she said, as the woman came up right behind him and handed her a second boy while Yousef took the third. She put the second boy, limp and with more shallow breathing, down and looked up to thank the woman for moving so quickly. The woman was Reem. “We’ll be coming to the hospital later,” Reem said. She held up her bloody hands in front of her bloody shirt and made like she was holding a box. “Supplies.”

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SIEGEBREAKERS “I will see you then,” Maria said, and loaded her patients into the back of the ambulance.

“I hate shrapnel,” Nahla said. They were on break together, drinking more tea as a substitute for a second meal of the day. Shrapnel could go anywhere in the body, and no matter where it was it was hard to find, traumatic to extract, likely to cause internal bleeding. Dressings had to be changed frequently and wounds repacked. Israel did not allow the hospital the supplies they needed to do the job. The hospital had solar electricity, but some systems still needed the backup generators. Fuel reserves were already low, and the ground invasion had not even started yet. “That’s when you’ll see real trauma,” Nahla said. Reem arrived with supplies, escorted by the handsome man from the beach and three other men in civilian clothes. Nahla kissed Reem formally, as did Maria, who recognized quickly from the way these men carried themselves that they were an elite squad of some kind: Reem’s escort radiated confidence. Sidelong glances from staff and patients alike spoke of awe and deference. Two of his squad mates efficiently brought in and unpacked crates of medical supplies and fuel. The fourth man, a mountain of muscle, carried two boxes for every one carried by the others.

Reem, followed by her escort, went into an office with the medical director, leaving Maria and Nahla with the rest of the squad. Bright-eyed female staff — girls Maria had never even seen before — came out of nowhere with tea and cookies (which Maria had also never seen served here before) for the boys. All three accepted shyly. The fighters stole glances at Maria and one of them, a thin one with glasses, spoke to Nahla. Maria made out the word for

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JUSTIN PODUR “foreigner,” “American,” and then, from the soldier, the name “Rosario Dawson.” Nahla laughed and turned to Maria. “He says you look like —” “— Yeah, I get that a lot.”

When Reem came out of the office, the medical director and Nasser behind her, she took a breath and silence fell over the front lobby. “You are the last hope of our people when they lose everything,” Reem told the gathered medical workers as Nahla translated in Maria’s ear. Reem had that quality, a way of looking around the room as she spoke, that made you feel she was addressing you directly. Maria had to remind herself this was the same woman whom she’d watched machine gun an ISIS attack group in the Egyptian desert. “In the past dozen years, you have taken our people through attack after attack, mended their bodies, given them hope. “Another attack has begun, and it is going to get worse. But we have made preparations and we’re doing things to try to make this time different. If you can hold on one more time, please try.” Then, Reem and her boys disappeared.

That night, Maria listened to the news on a cellphone radio while Nahla worked on another wave of patients. There was still no rocket fire coming from the Gaza side. Maria knew the pattern from the last half-dozen attacks: Israel bombs, Gaza launches rockets, Israel launches ground invasion, kills thousands, destroys more of Gaza, declares a ceasefire, and returns to the siege. But so far, no rockets. Was this Reem’s plan to do something different? Or Ari’s? If you do have a plan, Ari, now would be a good time to put it into action.

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While Maria worked around unexploded ordnance and rubble, Hoffman sat in his favourite deli, staring across the table at his well-connected family friend who worked for the Lobby. The waitress brought their plates. The white ceramic of the plate reflected the fluorescent lights, which hung in a neat row from the white-tiled ceiling. Blue paint covered the walls in a perfect, smooth coat. On the two sides facing the street corner, the diner was walled by glass. Happy men and women sat out on the patio in the sun. Families with kids sat inside. The wait staff spoke and moved back and forth in a loud, rapid blur, Hoffman’s waitress among them. On Hoffman’s plate: Lox and bagels, cream cheese, smoked meat, knishes, two latkes, sliced pickles. He breathed deep, closed his eyes, and let the aromas wash over him. On the Lobbyist’s plate: A cheeseburger, fries, and salad. Hoffman noted the indifferent expression on the Lobbyist’s chiseled face, how his thin gaze drifted over the basic diner food you could get anywhere without really seeing it. The Lobbyist reached out with his manicured hands and lowered his plate gently down as if it had floated to him through no human agency at all. He made no eye contact with the waitress, spoke no words to her, merely put the plate down and returned to watching Hoffman with his chin forward and the padded shoulders beneath his tailored suit pushed back, with his chest pushed forward. Hoffman smiled at the waitress, ignoring the Lobbyist. The T-shirt the waitress wore said: “Kicking it Old Shul,” white on blue on white. She wore jeans and white sneakers, the better to make quick footwork back and forth in this incredibly busy deli. “More coffee?” she asked. He looked at his cup, the light creamy, sweetened, lukewarm gold reaching only halfway to the brim now. “Yes. Oh, please, yes.”

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JUSTIN PODUR She would rush off, come back with a refill, and he would take two of the tiny white cups of cream and two more sweetener packets, and he would slurp the newly hot liquid, and they would do that again and again. Hoffman looked over the shoulder of the Lobbyist as a toddler at the table across from him stuffed a piece of baked chocolate challah bread French toast into his mouth, smearing his face with maple syrup and whipped cream. “How you, as a Jew, could come to this place and order a cheeseburger, is completely beyond me,” Hoffman said, his mouth already full of latke. “More than a decade ago,” the Lobbyist said, “I warned you to stay out of the conflict if you wanted to stay in the security industry and keep your people safe. You didn’t listen.” The Lobbyist picked up a french fry. “And now it’s going to go hard for you.” “Here we go,” Hoffman said. “You think this is funny? We know about Abu Dhabi. We know about DC. We know your firm has a personal protection detail for a woman named Nahla Zamoun, who is suspected of abetting terrorism.” “I’m very impressed,” Hoffman said. “So, you admit it?” “Nope.” “You really think you can protect the identities of your personnel? You think we can’t get someone inside your firm?” “I think if you could, you would have done it by now…” The Lobbyist put down his fork and knife, reached into his messenger bag, and pulled out a series of printed photos. Mark Brown, in the electoral monitor’s office. Mark Brown, in a street surveillance camera, going into a DC subway. “Unrecognizable photos of two different guys who could be anybody,” Hoffman said. “You were seen in Abu Dhabi with Nahla Zamoun,” the

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SIEGEBREAKERS Lobbyist said. “Maybe you will be brought to account for abetting terrorism.” “That’s a good one,” Hoffman said. “You haven’t got a photo to show me of that one?” The Lobbyist said nothing. “Can I keep these?” Hoffman asked. “Thanks. I’ll put them on my wall. I’m glad you brought them out, because I have a few things to show you.” He reached into his briefcase and put one piece of paper down in front of the Lobbyist after another. “At some point in the next few days, and I’m not going to tell you when — you can wait for it, and know you can’t do a thing to stop it -—there will be published a dossier with signed orders from generals on the one side and testimonies from civilians and soldiers on the other. We have everything. Every trophy photo, every targeting trajectory, every memo.” “No American outlet will publish that.” “Are you sure? I’m not. It’ll get around, though. Might even go viral. At the same time it goes up, the new Palestinian government will be taking it to international courts, and national ones. And don’t think that US courts will be left out. After the Arab Bank case, there’s a precedent — and your settler buddies have gotten a little too keen on lighting Palestinian kids on fire, and some of those kids have American relatives who will be suing.” “None of those cases will go anywhere.” “Maybe not. But I think some judge somewhere might just issue an arrest warrant for some of these generals and politicians. Maybe in Spain, or France. Those countries will then be off limits for your buddies to go to. And the list will get longer and longer. “And you can forget about soccer. That bid they dropped years ago to ban Israel from international soccer? The new Palestinian government is picking it up, and every shelling, shooting, and

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JUSTIN PODUR maiming of a Palestinian soccer kid is going to be submitted as evidence.” “That’s what you’re threatening me with? Soccer?” “Keep blustering, it’s a good look. But no, I wasn’t finished. At some point, the Egyptian dictator is going to fall. Do you have a plan for when his successor opens the border and arms the Palestinians to fight a proper proxy war? I didn’t think so.” “Oh, so now Hoffman’s security firm can overthrow the Egyptian government?” “It won’t happen during this war, and it won’t be me doing it, but it will happen. That’s why I think you should go back, and tell the people you answer to, that this is actually your last chance.” The Lobbyist picked up the papers and stuffed them into his bag. “Are you sure you want to do it this way?” Hoffman picked up his cutlery and resumed eating. He didn’t look up as the Lobbyist walked away.

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CHAPTER 21

Years ago, in the presence of the General, Ari met a banker who said that war was about investment: how many assets you had, how many assets your opponent had, how you deployed them, how they deployed them. Israel had won every war since 1967, the banker said, because Zionists knew how to seize every opportunity and make the most of it. Later, the General had asked Ari what he thought. Ari, who had been reading military history at the time, had not been impressed. “Nonsense,” Ari had said. “War is about space and force, not assets and interest rates.” “Actually, neither you nor he are wrong. You are an asset of mine, that I have to deploy carefully, along with many others, for the good of Israel. But you are both wrong. Because war is really about information and deception.” This morning Ari had another thought. Drinking coffee from a big mug, American style, he looked out from one of the guard towers that ringed Gaza. Zahava sat behind him working at her laptop. Before his eyes, bombs burst and shells dropped on buildings and people. Ari was thinking that war was about guessing right. On his side, aerial photos and spatial algorithms decided which houses would be destroyed from afar and which houses would be occupied and used as a base for further operations. For many years, the Palestinians had unknowingly suffered the power of such equations. Then some time before 2006, the Lebanese sat down to look at the same aerial photos and contour maps of South Lebanon that the Israelis had. They had laid them out and asked — which buildings provide the best vantage point? The best cover for controlling the street? The best mobility through the environment?

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JUSTIN PODUR From a mathematical perspective, it was not a difficult problem. Constrain a problem enough and few solutions remained. The unique solution quickly emerges. So, the Lebanese had guessed — solved — their formula for choosing houses, and in the 2006 war, Israel felt the consequences. Some Israeli squads were setting up in their occupied houses, rolling up their sleeves, kicking off their boots, opening their cans of sardines, when Lebanese guerrillas came up through basements or walls. Knife fighting in the dark with their shoes off. He knew of squads that called for backup, got backup, and with a dozen men in close-quarters combat inside a house, the Lebanese blew up the whole house, accepting the deaths of their own men to inflict casualties on the Israelis. In the last round with Gaza, the Palestinians had made a few lucky guesses as well. That was why Ari was here. Because of what he guessed the Palestinians guessed. And what he hoped that neither the General nor Moshe would guess. If he could just wait here, he would be right where he needed to be. He was sure of it. As Ari’s coffee cooled, a specialist set up the video conference with the General’s team. Shabtai’s face appeared on the screen, then a man he knew by reputation: Hadar, a Brigadier-General that led his troops into battle with the righteousness of G-d. But when the General and Moshe appeared on the same screen, sitting next to one another at the General’s office, Ari knew he was in trouble. “What are the updates? You begin, Shabtai.” “We have trouble on our side, in Judea and Samaria,” Shabtai said. “The Arabs are revolting up and down the territory. The hunger strike is expanding in and out of the prisons. The marches to the separation barrier are growing in spite of our best efforts. Now that their Palestinian Authority is refusing all cooperation with us, we have to police these demonstrations ourselves. We need more men.”

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SIEGEBREAKERS “You shall have them. Brigadier Hadar?” “We have been highly successful with our artillery efforts, as has the air force. There has been no rocket fire from Gaza for several weeks, so we can pursue our campaign without worrying about the public opinion problems we would have if the rockets kept up. I think this indicates a highly degraded capability among the terrorists, and we are ready to begin the ground invasion to mop up.” “That sounds very good, Brigadier Hadar. What about on the signals-intelligence side of things, Ari?” “Well here I have to disagree with Brigadier Hadar somewhat. Rocket fire isn’t the only consideration. The Arabs have been dominating the media war, in the Arab world and, to a new extent, in America as well. We have had great difficulty isolating them or even understanding their communication network and system, and they seem able to disseminate their message regardless of our counter-efforts.” “We have prevented journalists from entering?” “Yes, most of the official journalists are sitting on the hill of shame.” “And Arab journalists?” “There is as usual no differentiation of media or medical personnel, as Brigadier Hadar can confirm.” “I can,” Brigadier Hadar said. The General turned to Moshe, next to him. “Moshe, do you have any insight into how they might be doing this?” Moshe looked directly into the camera when he spoke, which Ari figured was trying to unnerve him. Ari sipped his coffee and tried to look bored. “We can target specific sites for interference. The hospitals, some neighbourhoods, perhaps?” “That’s not a bad idea,” Ari said. “We could do it experimentally, and see what happens when we change a variable.” “Be mindful of time, Ari,” the General said. “This is not a

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JUSTIN PODUR scientific experiment. It’s a war on terror. We have time limits: we are not yet sure that there won’t be a reaction from Lebanon, and our Egyptian friends are not confident they will be able to hold their side of Gaza closed for long.” Ari said nothing. “Actually, General,” Moshe said, “let me take over this part of the experiment for a while. I think Ari might be able to learn more about how the Arabs are communicating, up closer.” “Absolutely not,” the General said, “Ari is not an infantryman, none of you are.” “But General,” Moshe continued, “Brigadier Hadar believes that this operation will be safe. There has been less response from the Arabs than ever before.” “They could have surprises in store,” the General said. “But we have learned how to foil their surprises,” Moshe said. “I am not sure. What do you think, Ari?” Ari knew from the General’s tone and Moshe’s persistence that he had already lost, and that it was better to look like he agreed than not. “Maybe Zahava and I could act as aides-de-camp to Brigadier Hadar,” he said. “We’ll show you what it’s really like,” Brigadier Hadar said. “Take Danny with you as well,” Moshe said. Ari saw all of his work unravelling before him, everything he had done to get himself to precisely this perch, and now he was seconded to a fanatical commander right on the front line and with a psychotic sniper watching him and Zahava. “Thank you, sir,” Ari said. As he and Zahava prepared to muster out on base, he was picking up his gear. The clerk, a very young female soldier with dark hair, said to them: “Yeah, give it to them. Kill them all.” He nodded. Ari and Zahava went outside and took their places near

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SIEGEBREAKERS Brigadier Hadar, who was standing on top of a tank with an unfolded piece of paper in his hand. He motioned to Ari, who was handed a loudspeaker by an NCO and who then held it up for Brigadier Hadar. “I wrote this letter,” Brigadier Hadar said, “some of you may have read it. But I am reading it to you before we begin our mission.” “The Lord, the God of Israel, light our path, as we wage war against an enemy that abuses your name. In the name of the soldiers of Israel may the verse be fulfilled that ‘the Lord your God goes with you to fight for you with your enemies to save you,’ and we will say ‘Amen.’ Together and only together we will win.” “Amen,” the troops said. “I have heard a lot of talk about what are the rules of engagement, what are the orders, and I am here to put your minds at ease. Your first priority is your safety and that of your companions. Safety above all else. We do not take risks, we do not spare ammo. The Arabs have been warned repeatedly. They have been told to leave. So, anyone we come across, you can assume is a terrorist. Treat them accordingly. We go in wet, we go in heavy, we go in screened, we fire at everything. Understood?” “Yes sir,” the troops said.

An hour later, Ari, Zahava, Danny the Sniper, and their new squad mate, a short, dark-skinned Sephardic boy named Yuval, stood with the rest of their platoon watching their explosive screen fall like a curtain ahead of them: artillery shells over their heads and the F-16s doing repeated runs. The buildings shook. Clouds of dust kicked up. Sometimes the ground shook. They waited then for the D9s, the armoured bulldozers, to grind into motion. As the bulldozers advanced, they knocked down those houses that remained standing, one wall at a time. They destroyed roads and turned them into sand dunes. They

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JUSTIN PODUR built ramparts out of rubble to secure spots for the infantry to use to guard the tanks, while the tanks flattened the houses with shells and then covered the bulldozers while the bulldozers flattened the houses again. In the last operation, a buffer zone of five hundred metres around the perimeter of the Gaza Strip had been flattened. As Ari watched, he estimated that the General was going for an initial depth of another three hundred metres. The order came to mount up, so they loaded into the armoured personnel carrier and began the penetration south into the buffer zone, firing the whole way, at everything and nothing.

Presumably by Brigadier Hadar’s own order, via Moshe and ultimately the General himself, Danny was in charge of Ari’s squad. In the urban environment the time-honoured infantry task of guarding tanks had to be done from houses. The first part of the task was to take the houses. Ari’s squad was assigned a house at the edge of the buffer zone. The area had already been sterilized: shelled from inside Israel and bombed by the F-16s. The tanks re-shelled the houses as they approached, and Yuval, carrying the squad’s �MATADOR shoulder-launched anti-tank missile, was ordered to hit the house to prepare for the entry. Over Yuval’s diminutive frame the big green tube looked monstrous. Ari watched him set up, looking through the sights open-mouthed at an empty two-storey house less than a hundred metres away. What an unlikely choice Yuval was to round out their squad, Ari thought as they walked along the empty moonscaped street. In battle, Ari saw sequences of numbers, distances and ranges, speeds and forces, all coming down to a point of choosing from incredibly narrow options which, if you saw clearly, understood clearly, there was only ever one that was right. He might find it or not, but

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SIEGEBREAKERS nothing about the equation frightened him. He looked at Zahava, saw the ease with which she held her rifle and pack, the confidence of her gait. A born soldier, a warrior all the way through, no fear there. And Danny, a sniper psychopath, for whom war was the most natural place to find victims. That man wouldn’t blink if rockets were falling all around him. Hadn’t the General chosen him for exactly that reason? But Yuval? Just a boy on his first campaign. On the march to defend the homeland. “Good shooting,” Danny said, smirking. Hitting the side of a house at a hundred metres with an anti-tank missile was much easier than missing, but it was probably Yuval’s first shot fired in an actual war. They jogged the remaining hundred metres to the house, got into position to take it. “OK, going in wet!” Danny said, tossing a grenade in through the hole in the wall Yuval’s grenade had opened. They cleared each room in pairs, Danny and Yuval upstairs, Ari and Zahava downstairs. As they cleared the sitting room, then the kitchen — firing at the refrigerator as per orders that refrigerators were ‘suspicious points,’ then a downstairs bedroom and bathroom with many toothbrushes in a cup on the sink. Ari imagined a big family with multiple siblings, spouses, and grandparents had lived here. A family of modest means with a few breadwinners working ordinary jobs. Once the house was cleared, Danny called in the D9. Ari watched from the upstairs window while the giant grey machine destroyed each of the neighbouring houses. By radio, Danny told the driver of the armoured bulldozer to clear his line of sight from the window to the tanks they were in charge of protecting. Ari watched the bulldozer knock three houses over. He went downstairs and watched it knock the electrical poles down. As the D9 headed to the mosque on the corner, he stepped away from the window.

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JUSTIN PODUR He sat in the corner of the cleared bedroom on the cold concrete floor, avoiding the rug and leaning against the wall. He opened a can of sardines. He heard Yuval’s footfalls on the stairs. The young man poked his head in the room. “Sir… I… ah… wondered…” Ari already knew what was coming. “You want to know where to go to the bathroom?” Yuval spread his hands out and shrugged his narrow shoulders. “Different rules for different units. Only Danny can answer that question.” “Will the toilet work?” Ari looked in the direction of the bathroom. “You might get one flush,” he said. “Make it count.” As Yuval turned, he ran into Danny’s chest. Ari hadn’t heard him on the stairs, nor seen him come up behind Yuval. Useful qualities for a sniper to have, no doubt. Danny was holding up a T-shirt with a Palestinian flag on it. “This is from upstairs,” Danny said. “And no, soldier, we will not be using the toilet in this house. We will be making a proper crap chair in the backyard.” He looked at Ari, tossing him the T-shirt. “Will you instruct this recruit in the proper use of a crap chair?” Ari caught the shirt, tipped his head and stood up, throwing his empty sardine can on the floor. They took a cane chair, one of two, from the kitchen, and used rifle butts and then knives to cut a hole in it. Yuval carried the chair and they walked a few metres from the house. Helmeted and kevlared, Yuval put a pot from the kitchen under the hole in the chair, put the shirt in the pot, and shat into the pot while Ari stood guard next to him and Danny and Zahava, presumably, covered them from the second-floor window. Yuval tossed the shirt, and carried back the pot and chair. “That’s two successful operations,” Danny said to Yuval when they got back. “You are on a good track.”

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SIEGEBREAKERS They waited in the house for orders, listening to a soundtrack of their own mortars, bombs, and small-arms fire. They heard no engagements with the enemy on the radio or anywhere around them. An hour before sunset an order came down that the ruins of the mosque were to be fired at upon the hour, throughout the night. Danny took care of the shooting until midnight. Zahava and Ari drew the night watch. Ari set up the alarm to wake him on the hour so that they could fulfill their order. “Sleep,” Zahava said. “I’ll shoot the mosque.”

The following afternoon, they got the order to move in deeper. Ari got to know one of the tank drivers, a kid named Ofer who played heavy-metal music and deployed the Merkava’s smokescreen overzealously. After the usual artillery screen and F-16 bombs, Ari’s squad found themselves beside Ofer’s Merkava, breathing in the fumes, staring down a long, eerily quiet commercial street of mostly intact shops — broken windows and bullet holes, of course, but the buildings were still standing and cars were still parked on the street. Ofer came in on Danny’s two-way radio. “That white Mercedes, I’m going to run it over!” “You have permission?” Danny asked. “Yes!” Ari’s squad waited for the tank to pull in. Ari watched Ofer do a parallel parking manoeuvre on top of the white sedan, flattening the car completely. “What did it look like?” Ofer’s voice came in over the two-way. “I couldn’t feel anything.” “Why don’t you get out and see?” The top of the tank opened. Ofer climbed out, as did the gunner and loader. They high-fived as they surveyed the flattened car. The tank commander’s head popped up. “Enough!”

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JUSTIN PODUR As they got back into the tank, Danny said to Ari: “Idiots. They’ll have to clean that off the caterpillar tracks later.” Ari was getting ready for the order to advance down the street when Danny’s radio crackled again. “Hold,” he said. “You guys ever see the Giant Viper?” Danny asked. “Never,” Yuval said. Zahava looked at Ari, who said: “Only in videos.” “Well you’re in for a treat. Engineering’s just a minute out.” The engineering company arrived with several of the vipers, innocuous two-wheel trailers sporting angled barrels, towed by Merkava tanks. Ari watched one of the tanks pull ahead and stop. A few seconds later the barrel was launched on a low arc along the centre of the street, shaking C-4 bombs off in a line on top of the businesses below. A split second after the barrel hit the ground, the bombs exploded, shattering every storefront on the street in a snakelike pattern. A weapon meant for clearing a path through minefields, the Giant Viper apparently performed admirably against commercial areas, Ari thought. “Now let’s see how we did,” Danny said, looking up. Ari’s eyes followed, and sure enough a Hermes 450 drone flew over their heads and down the street, no doubt doing a bomb damage assessment for people like Ari to look at and study, if he weren’t down here looking at it from up close, learning nothing, wasting precious time, unable to affect events as he had planned. You wanted to be here, Ari thought to himself, bitterly. You wanted to be close. Now you’re close. “Are we following with D9s?” Ari asked. The armoured bulldozers usually followed this type of raid. “Doubt it,” Danny said, obviously pleased to know something Ari didn’t. The engineers were fanning out, planting mines. Danny turned to Yuval, Ari, and Zahava. “Engineering brought too many mines. They don’t want to bring any back home. Orders

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SIEGEBREAKERS are to use it all. So, they’re gonna plant them all here. Maybe see if we get a tunnel.” “Right, because the Arabs need to build tunnels between their tea shop and their bakery,” Ari said. Danny regarded him with open mouth and dead eyes for a second, then smiled and turned away. They didn’t get a tunnel, as Ari knew they wouldn’t. But they left the block razed, before splitting up and moving on. They took the house in the new neighbourhood the same way: went in wet, hit it with the anti-tank weapon, cleared each room — only this time, there was an old man and a teenage boy left behind in the house when they went in the side, all four of them, Tavors drawn, yelling and pointing their weapons at the two Palestinians who stood with their hands up, yelling back in Arabic. “Shut up! Shut up!” Danny said. “Don’t shoot!” The old man said. “Ari, what the fuck are they saying?” Danny said. “They’re saying don’t shoot. Just don’t shoot, over and over.” “Tell them to sit on the floor with their hands on their heads,” Danny said. Ari did, and the Palestinians complied. “What the hell, what the hell, what the hell are they doing here?” Yuval said. “Calm down,” Zahava told him. But Ari was wondering the same thing as Yuval, and thinking of some way he might help them get out of this alive. The strategy tree had no branches for him at this moment that led anywhere good. Danny pointed to the fifteen-year old Palestinian boy. A bit of hair had grown on the boy’s lip. He wore his hair in a buzzcut, was dressed in a yellow T-shirt and jogging pants. “You,” Danny said. “Upstairs. With me.” He pointed to Zahava and Yuval: “You two down here.” He looked at Ari. “Follow me.” Danny made the boy climb the stairs with Danny’s Tavor at

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JUSTIN PODUR his back, and Ari behind Danny. After climbing the stairs, Danny prodded his rifle into the boy’s back, pushing him into an upstairs bedroom. “Sit down,” Danny said, in Hebrew, and Ari translated. The boy sat on the bed. Then Ari watched, his finger on the trigger of his Tavor, as Danny blindfolded the boy and handcuffed him in a series of quick, practised, efficient movements like a rodeo cowboy hog tying a calf. “Watch him,” he said to Ari. Danny removed his pack and assembled his M89SR sniper rifle. Then, again, he picked the boy up and dragged him to the window. “Kid’s going to help us.” Ari imagined how he might explain how Danny got shot by friendly fire. He wondered how Yuval would react. He imagined all his patient work undone. “I’ll call for the prison service to pick him up when you’re done, and get a unit to move him and his grandfather back to our line,” Ari said. Danny, taking aim over the boy’s shoulder, said “fine,” without looking at Ari. By the time the two terrified prisoners were removed the sniper had acquired several new notches on his rifle, firing over the kid’s shoulder well into the night. As much as Danny wanted to stay, they were called in the very early hours of the morning to back up the rest of their company, who had found themselves in the middle of something big. “Looks like the terrorists have some fight in them after all!” Danny said. “Mount up!”

A short, loud, rough ride in the Namer APC had Ari and Zahava sitting across from one another, Zahava trying to read Ari’s eyes, Ari’s mind racing in too many directions to focus.

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SIEGEBREAKERS Ari thought: If they call Hannibal… According to the Hannibal Directive, the Army would indiscriminately attack enemy soldiers even if they had captured friendly ones, annihilating both the enemy and the bargaining chips they had hoped to acquire by kidnapping. To Ari’s relief, Danny said: “We are headed to a real firefight, and the terrorists are in among our troops. Four of our soldiers were already down, but with the terrorists mixed in among us, Brigadier Hadar can’t call “Hannibal” or we’ll end up annihilating a whole company of our own forces. So, we go in, encircle the terrorists, and extract the trapped soldiers. Let’s go!” Their squad dismounted on one side of a hill of rubble and raced up to high ground in the cloudy darkness as fast as fear of mines and of sprained ankles would let them, Zahava bounding gracefully, Danny slithering effortlessly, Yuval struggling, Ari at the back. At the top, they got on their stomachs and in the pre-dawn light, they looked down at the intersection below trying to make sense of what had happened. Ari heard small-arms fire coming from a three-storey house. Another squad outside the house trained their weapons on the upstairs windows and the open door. Two Israeli dog handlers stood with the squad with two Malinois war dogs. The handlers unleashed and released the dogs, who bolted into the house, barking and snarling. “We lost a squad in the house across,” Danny said. “But that’s the house where we think the terrorists are now,” Danny said, training his sights on an upper window. “We’ll see how they like the dogs. If you see one of the terrorists in any window or coming out, take them out.” “They might come out of another house,” Yuval said, “because of the tunnels.” “Yes Yuval, very good,” Danny said. The back of the house wasn’t visible. Ari thought it unlikely

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JUSTIN PODUR that he would see any of the enemy fighters inside, popping their heads into a window to give Danny a chance to pick them off. But given the effectiveness of the war dogs, he expected to hear screams soon. After a beat, he heard nothing. The dog handlers readied their weapons and followed their dogs into the house. “Let’s back them up,” Danny said. Ari’s squad was charged down the hill, covering the other houses. Ari saw something flash in a window opposite their target house. He said nothing. An anti-tank missile came flying out from the window where Ari had seen the flash. It hit the target house and blew the downstairs wall out. The dog handlers, and their dogs, as well as the squad they intended to rescue, and probably the Palestinians they were fighting, were all gone. “Shit!” Danny said. “Return fire!” They fired at the window, unanswered, and ran into the street and around the corner of a building. Danny yelled into his radio for air support, but they were stuck down here until it arrived. “Yuval!” The diminutive soldier got his MATADOR set up while Zahava laid down covering fire. Yuval turned the corner and fired his anti-tank missile at the window where the Palestinian missile had come from. “It’s a hit!” he said. A tank came over the hill of rubble and shelled the building, followed by a Predator drone overhead, which fired a missile and collapsed the wall. “Fall back,” Danny said. “Our men are out, we can blow this whole fucking place.”

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That night, Brigadier Hadar ordered that all of the tanks in the group line up, and had the infantry watch from their buildings. He read the names of the six soldiers who had fallen in battle with the terrorists, and he ordered the tanks to fire shells in their memory. Ari counted one hundred shells by the end. Through the nightvision goggles he watched the buildings shelled until they looked like they were being blown up from the inside or collapsed by D9s. He watched the buildings fall. They followed that up with a “Good Morning” shelling at 0700. After another can of sardines for breakfast, Danny called the squad to alert. An elderly Arab man was walking down the street, waving a white flag. They went to their posts. Ari and Yuval watched from the ground floor as the man approached the house across the street, belonging to another squad. He watched the man get hit in the stomach from a shot from the second floor. “Shit!” Yuval said. “Danny didn’t get a good hit.” If he didn’t get a good hit, he didn’t want one, Ari thought, watching the Palestinian man writhing in pain. “Why doesn’t a medic go and treat him?” Yuval asked. “They’re afraid he might be booby-trapped”, Ari said. Danny came down the stairs. “We’re to clear out in fifteen.” “What about him?” Ari asked. “I called a D9.” Danny said. The bulldozer came over and dropped a mound of rubble on the old man, finishing him off.

Back on the march among the tanks, this time through an already bulldozed area, Danny sidled up to Ari. “I’ve had enough of this.

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JUSTIN PODUR I’m going to tell the General that I’m ready to go back to special duties.” Thank G-d, Ari thought. One week is already lost, never to be recovered. But he said: “Oh?” “What are we learning? It’s been a whole week, we’ve penetrated hundreds of metres, and the Arabs haven’t done anything differently than last time. They have no surprises for us. You people can go back and make your plans.” “If you want to tell the General that,” Ari said, “you can tell him I agree with you.” “Good.”

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CHAPTER 22

The night he had been with Reem the first time Nasser lay quietly in the pre-dawn hours, not asleep or awake, full of every feeling he had ever felt: joy and sorrow, exhilaration and dread, love and shame, open doors and closed ones, like he could breathe and like he couldn’t. Ari, still watching the bombs fall from his tower, had yet to join the ground invasion. The images playing in Nasser’s mind, the scents and sounds, Laila’s name whispered to himself in confusion, were interrupted by the morning call to prayer. He heard it, then slipped back into unconsciousness. He woke again in the light of dawn to see Sami doing air squats. He pushed himself up until he was sitting and heard Reem moving in the other room. She drifted to his side and knelt beside him, in his personal space again, clutching the Secretary’s scribbled note in her hand with its mysterious GPS coordinates. “We have to find where this is,” she said. “Probably another deception, knowing him.” Nasser said. Reem turned the paper over in her fingers. “But how well do we know him?” “Well enough to know he is a murderer and a collaborator,” Sami said, folding the bedsheets he had used. Nasser got on his feet and followed Sami’s example. “Fine,” Reem said, “but he was mourning his sister when the occupier blew up the funeral. He swore an oath to me and asked for your help by name, Nasser. Does any of that sound like the Secretary you know?” “A desperate snake is still a snake,” Nasser said. But he remembered that the Secretary had kept his word and returned Hisham unharmed after questioning. “I believed him yesterday, Nasser. He might be more

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JUSTIN PODUR complicated than you realize. There is a famous story about him. I don’t know if people tell it here, but they tell it where I am from, in the West Bank. At the top of Israel’s most wanted list is one of your commanders — I have never known who he really was. Maybe your uncle the Shaykh, or Abu Laila. But the story goes that the Israeli head of Army Intelligence personally met with the Secretary and demanded that the Secretary take his forces and go and get this commander. The Secretary looks the head of Israeli Army Intelligence in the eye and says, ‘never heard of the guy.’” “I never heard that story,” Nasser said. “I think he still has a part to play in all this,” Reem said, the paper between her thumb and forefinger. “And it starts with whatever is at this location.”

When they arrived at the GPS location later that morning, Nasser and his squad stood facing a steel warehouse door. They had set flashlights on their rifles. There was no electricity. As usual, the occupier took the power plant out on the first day. The only solar power available was in hospitals. The Resistance had backup generators in the tunnels and bunkers, and some night-vision goggles, but those were only for fighters who were going to be facing the occupier directly. They were too precious to be used on a mission like this, investigating a warehouse that might yet be a trap. They gathered in front of the one way in: a big, steel door, with a heavy lock on the front. They started with a bolt cutter, Hisham adeptly making the cut in one move. Then Nasser pushed the door open and they fanned out into the huge warehouse. In his whole life, Nasser had never seen an intact warehouse of this size. Even when Elias’s father’s fortune was at its highest, there had always been a hole in the roof, a broken window, some bullet holes in the corrugated metal, some wall that needed repair. The

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SIEGEBREAKERS Secretary, though, had always been able to make a special arrangement. He should have known, Nasser thought, with the occupier, no special arrangement ever lasts. The warehouse was full of inventory. Dense pallets were stacked on skids along every side. Hisham pulled a crowbar from his bag to pry open a crate and shine his flashlight down into it. “Oh, God,” Hisham said. Sami, then Elias, repeated the same. “What are you donkeys on about —” Nasser said, walking over from the other side of the warehouse, his Kalashnikov now pointed at the floor. “In the name of God,” he said. “Are those… Tavors?” Elias said. “M-16s,” Nasser said. “If all of the crates have those,” Elias said, “then there are…” “A few thousand,” Nasser said, “in this warehouse.” There were: 2,000 M-16s, and at least fifty rounds of ammunition for each. But there were also three hundred MATADOR anti-tank weapons, one hundred pairs of night-vision goggles, and a number of devices that Nasser didn’t recognize or understand. By the time he had this count, they had brought a whole company of fighters to move all of the materiel out of the warehouse and underground. Every fighter dropped what he was doing to be redeployed to this clandestine duty of moving the weapons without creating a big footprint for the occupier to see from the skies. They knew the lengths the occupier would go to prevent such a cache from getting into their hands.

That night was the second night of bombing. Nasser found himself at Reem’s side when she met with Commander Abu Laila and Uncle Walid in the bunker. All were confounded by the contents of the warehouse.

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JUSTIN PODUR “Is there any way this is some kind of Trojan Horse?” Reem asked. “The weapons and ammunition are standard issue. Whatever doesn’t have electronics is as advertised,” Abu Laila said. “And as for the rest,” Uncle Walid said, “we’re still trying to figure out whether to believe the… ah. Instruction manuals.” “This miraculous cache came with instructions, Shaykh?” “In English, Madame Reem. Instruction manuals, in English.” “And are these devices broadcasting our location to the occupier right now, so he can send a bunker buster down into our headquarters?” “There are no batteries we could find, and the devices are all deep underground now. I don’t believe we have anything that is broadcasting, Madame Reem.” “I haven’t been able to reach the Secretary since the funeral,” she said. “I have no idea where he is.” “Oh, he’ll turn up,” Walid said. Reem stood up. “Well, since God himself did not decide to give us a cache of advanced Israeli weaponry, and since most of these materials were not even given to the Secretary’s forces, what explains this?” Walid, Abu Laila, and Nasser all said nothing, silenced by the impossibility of the situation. “OK, then. Another question. What do the manuals say these exotic devices are?” Walid cleared his throat and stroked his beard. “Several are drones. Others are… ah… guided missiles. Two of the devices are intended to scramble radio signals, probably to break the connection between a drone and its pilot. The last, is similar, but it’s a maritime device.” “The Secretary left us a submarine?” “Not one that we can travel in, Madame Reem. But one that perhaps could accompany divers and be deployed from the coast.”

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SIEGEBREAKERS “I don’t understand,” Reem said, walking away from the table. The shadows of the two dim lightbulbs running on generator power played on her face. Next to Abu Laila and Walid, she looked younger than her age. Her confidence seemed shaken and her voice sounded higher. “All these years, we’ve been alone. The Arab countries turned their backs on us. The West cheered the occupier to kill our children. The Israelis celebrated our deaths on Facebook. We waited for a demonstration, for a vote in a parliament somewhere. We heard that people were trying to get singers to cancel visits to Tel Aviv. Less and less of those things. Now someone just decided to send us a warehouse full of advanced weapons?” “That does seem to be the situation, Madame Reem. Now we have a more important question. You came here,” Walid said, “you gave up hope to come here.” When he said the word “hope,” he had cast his eyes on Nasser, eyes that lingered absently as he continued to speak. “You made a plan, a plan we accepted. Can you fit these weapons into your plan? Do we use them? Or do we leave them, keep faith in ourselves and not trust our invisible benefactor?” “I don’t know,” Reem said quietly. She looked at Nasser, with that look she had given him when they first met, one of approving appraisal. “You would use them, I guess?” “Yes,” Nasser said. “Commander?” “Yes,” Abu Laila said. “They could change the course of a ground invasion. They are weapons our men are trained on, just never had enough of.” “I trust you,” Reem said. “I will not take weapons from your hands, wherever they come from. But we don’t know where they did come from, and we don’t know the will of he who gave them to us. Let us prepare them, and wait for the ground invasion as planned. Let us wait seven days, let us hold out that long. After

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JUSTIN PODUR that, when we start to hit back, then we will start to use these weapons. Is that acceptable?” “You are our leader,” Uncle Walid said. “We accept what you decide.” “No, no, no, we have had elections. We have a democracy. We are deciding this together.” “Then it is decided,” Abu Laila said, his hand out. Reem shook his hand.

They waited seven days into the ground invasion before they started hitting back, as Reem wanted. But Nasser’s squad went into action on day six.

Elias’s family forced them to it. Uncle Walid’s incomplete system of civilian shelters had a tunnel not far from Elias’s father’s home. A prosperous businessman, Elias’s father had a home that had become a community hub for the extended family. Nasser remembered staying there just before this latest war, before Reem had come. Nasser had sent Elias to tell his family about the tunnel, so that they could plan to get to it when the occupier came. Sending Elias meant sending Hisham, because he didn’t want anyone in his squad travelling alone, and it also meant sending both with their gear, which they promptly stashed upon arrival. When they got close to the house, they realized they were too late. The occupier was already there. Hidden in the dark, they entered an empty shop the occupier had shelled from a tank but not razed with a bulldozer. Over the radio, Elias told Nasser what he saw. A company of the occupier’s infantry, including a unit with war dogs, were pulling people out of their houses and leading them on foot to the warehouse. The soldiers herded the mothers, the

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SIEGEBREAKERS mothers herded their children, and a pair of old men were already lying dead in the street. “There must be at least forty people in there,” Elias told Nasser. “It’s very close to our tunnel,” Hisham said. “No more than thirty metres.” “That won’t matter if they bomb the tunnel shaft,” Nasser said. There were ways to prepare for it, but if the occupier hit a tunnel shaft with a large bomb or mine, it would collapse the tunnel, and everybody in it would be lost just as surely as if the occupier had bombed them in the warehouse. “We are on our way,” Nasser sighed. “Stay out of sight. But if you see the occupier pull away, get in among them and hit them and let the families run.” It won’t work, Nasser thought, but our people won’t die alone.

Elias and Hisham sat in the dark, waiting and listening. The occupier’s forces did move back, but not too far. They had set up in houses around the warehouse, in houses chosen from aerial photos. “At least one of the houses they’re in,” Hisham said, “we are also in. We have a tunnel to it.” “Let’s go then,” Elias said. The two fighters slithered over the rubble at a slow, measured pace. Clouds hung low in the sky, blotting out the stars and the moon — and making life harder for the drones and F-16s, which was probably why the warehouse full of Elias’s extended family hadn’t already been hit. They moved into the mouth of the tunnel. At the other end was a living room full of the occupier’s soldiers, stripped down to their shirtsleeves and playing cards on watch. Nasser and Sami entered a different tunnel from farther away. The abandoned house they came up into was in the same street corner as the warehouse and the houses where the occupier’s

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JUSTIN PODUR squads had set up. They moved silently into the basement. Nasser signalled to Sami to go up to the second floor. Nasser took most of the night to sneak across into the warehouse, full of Elias’s terrorized family members huddled together in clusters waiting for doom. He saw the hope light up their faces when they realized who he was, and even as he held his finger to his lips and motioned to them to stay down, he felt cold with fear that he would let them down. He told them the plan, told Elias’s father himself the location of the tunnel they would have to take to get to the civilian shelter. “If you see anything in the sky, forget the tunnel, just run for cover. We are going to try to win you enough time to get out.” “My son…” “Your son is fine, uncle,” Nasser said. “No, I meant, you are my son,” the old man said, and hugged Nasser and kissed him. “We’re going to wait as long as we can. So be steadfast, here. Just know we’re there, OK?” “We’ll be steadfast,” Elias’s father said. Nasser sneaked back into position at Sami’s side, and made a final radio check with Elias and Hisham. In two pairs they would make separate attacks moving in and out through the tunnels, to make the occupier think there were many more of the Resistance than there were. “Go time,” he said.

Elias and Hisham’s tunnel opened into a hidden part of a room adjacent to the one where the occupier’s squad was camped. The man on watch died from a knife in the throat, as did one of the other three. Then it was a one-on-one, hand-to-hand knife fight, Elias fighting one man, Hisham fighting the other. Hisham ended up with a much bigger soldier on top of him, all bald head and

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SIEGEBREAKERS gritted teeth, and found himself on his back, holding the man up with his shoulder muscles, as the man bore down on the knife and on Hisham with all his weight. Elias, who was clinched with his own opponent, a slender soldier about his own size, felt the soldier’s hands feeling around his belt, probably trying to pull a pistol (which Elias didn’t have) or the pins on a grenade (which he also didn’t have). Elias pulled, then pushed the guy back, across the room, long enough to turn and soccer kick Hisham’s bald enemy in the face. Hisham was up, but the slender soldier was almost up with his rifle. Hisham threw his knife, which hit the soldier blunt-side first and on the rifle, but bought Hisham a second to get close, get his hands on the rifle, and get into another grapple. Elias had followed up with a stomp and another stomp to the bald man’s face, finishing the fight and recovering his knife. Once Elias was able to come to Hisham’s aid, it was a two-on-one again, and the slender soldier fell to the two of them. “It’s done,” Hisham said, gasping. “Time to go,” Elias said, bringing his own breath under control consciously. “This house won’t be standing long.” They picked up the enemy’s weapons and went back into the tunnel, to set up in another house.

The alarm sounded immediately when the occupier’s squad failed to check in. The house Elias and Hisham had just left was immediately pounded with three anti-tank missiles from a squad of soldiers firing from next door. Nasser, who had a clean line of sight on one of them, didn’t think he could shoot around the body armour. But Sami, who’d had sniper training on the Ghoul rifle, might. “Nope,” Sami said. Then: “Shit.” Sami put his head down. “We’re made,” he said.

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JUSTIN PODUR Seconds later, they heard growling from just outside the house. “Ayman and Khalil,” Nasser said, reaching into his pack for his metal gauntlet. He put it on, felt its cold weight on his arm. Sami had his on and was standing facing the door, ready. “For Ayman and Khalil,” he said, holding his metal fist up, but looking white in the face and shaken. “There is no way to fight off the dogs,” Abu Laila had said in the after-action briefing when they were trying to analyze what went wrong. “Isn’t there?” Walid had asked. The two Malinois dogs burst into the room at unbelievable speed, growling and raging and, as they were trained to do, leapt up for the bite. And as Sami had trained repeatedly, he took his mailed hand and took the bite, then with the other hand, held his dog’s jaw on to his mailed arm, trapping it. He grabbed a fistful of skin on the dog’s neck, and then jammed his mailed arm deep into the dog’s mouth, hearing the flesh rend and the bones crack. Nasser was not as strong, nor as well trained in this procedure as Sami, who’d designed it. He swung his mailed fist at the dog as the dog leapt, punching it and sending it back for a beat. The dog recovered and leapt for another bite, which Nasser blocked, but failed again to catch the dog. God’s curses, I am in a fist fight with a war dog. Which was a problem, because the soldiers would quickly follow. On the dog’s third charge, Sami grabbed the dog’s rear legs and pulled them apart, giving Nasser time to stomp the dog until it was dead. Nasser picked up his weapon and Sami’s, while Sami grabbed two grenades, pulled the pins out and threw them down the stairwell on to the Israeli soldiers who were coming up following the dogs. They ran down the stairway into the tunnel and radioed Elias, who was in position to hit the house. “Hit it in ten seconds, and then get out yourself.” Nasser said.

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SIEGEBREAKERS “See you underground, or in heaven. Over.” Elias said. Racing in the tunnel, trying to get into the relief tunnel before the airstrike, Nasser heard Sami sobbing. The one member of his squad that was built like a mountain of muscle, and always the first one to shed tears. “It’ll be OK, man,” Nasser said, trying to comfort him. “I am sure that most of them escaped. We bought them the time they needed.” “I know… but it’s… it’s… the dogs. They could have been Thawra,” Sami said in between tears, referring to the puppy Hisham had smuggled in for him. “We shouldn’t have killed those dogs. They are so loyal, so strong and smart and brave… we should have… saved them… they should be on our side.” Nasser thought for a minute about telling him they did what they had to do, but he decided Sami knew all that and that he should just let his friend grieve. “I’m sorry, my friend,” he said.

They met up back at the bunker, all four of them, and found out their mission was successful. Of the sixty-two people who the occupier had made martyrs that day, only three were elders from Elias’s family. Everyone else had escaped through the tunnel: Elias’s father and mother kissed their own son that night, as well as Nasser, before the fighters had to go on.

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CHAPTER 23

For Nasser, Oslo was the symbol of Palestine’s capitulation to Israel. But for Laila, it was hope. Researching places to study she had looked at pictures of the small-windowed houses overlooking boats on the water, of people shopping on clean cobblestone streets, of the Oslo campus building that looked like a yellow version of the White House. She had long been in touch with Norway’s Palestinian solidarity community, members of whom had picked her up at the airport with kind, concerned faces, and quiet competence like elder family members who always knew what needed to be done. As a volunteer at the hospital in Gaza City, she had met the famous Norwegian doctors who came every year, war or peace, to work shifts alongside Palestinian doctors and tell Europe her people’s stories. She had arrived in Oslo before the war started and went straight to a meeting with the one everyone called the Mad Doctor. On campus to lecture a group about the kinds of injuries and situations he saw in Gaza, he made time to meet with her at an office he borrowed from a colleague on campus. He remembered her from the hospital, asked her about colleagues at the hospital, reciting their names and their family members’ names like a library. They had been sitting only a few minutes when she heard a knock. “Sorry doctor, I won’t take more of your time,” she said, getting up. “No, no, Laila. Stay, please. Come in,” the Doctor said to the door. “Laila, this is my nephew Geir.” Until Geir, Viktor the Swedish bodybuilder who had come to Gaza in solidarity and been murdered there had been the tallest man Laila had ever met. Geir was taller, and had as many muscles hard against his T-shirt, giving him a leaner look. He looked right

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SIEGEBREAKERS at her with big blue eyes and a warm smile as he reached out to touch her. His hand felt warm and dry in hers, a firm clasp. Doctor and nephew spoke to each other in Norwegian for a minute, turning to Laila several times, while she watched them and listened for English words she might know. “Geir lives here, in Oslo,” the doctor said. “Maybe he can show you around.” “That would be… great,” Laila said.

They met for coffee the next day at a German-style bakery two houses from Geir’s flat. She noticed he ordered hot chocolate. His eyes lit up when he told her about the sights of Oslo, how much she would enjoy the campus. He asked her, probing gently, about Gaza. She saw from his questions that she wouldn’t have to explain or defend herself the way she feared she would have to. She was expecting questions like Why are you people terrorists? Why can’t you just make peace? But Geir asked none of these questions. She watched his eyes, and saw they lingered on her own eyes, and her mouth, and sometimes, involuntarily, would slip below for a split second. The last thing he asked her as she was leaving was: “Do you need help setting up?”

When Laila visited his flat the morning after as they’d planned, she brought him and herself cups of hot chocolate. They sat together on the wooden chairs at his two-seater dining table. His apartment was minimalist and neat, all clean Ikea furniture, exactly as she had expected. A queen-sized mattress on the floor, a sleek black ThinkPad in the space next to his side of the bed. “Your girlfriend is a laptop?” Laila said. “I don’t have a girlfriend,” Geir said quickly.

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JUSTIN PODUR He took her out on the town, first to get her a new phone and a Chess SIM card. “We’ll root it later,” he said absently. She knew what he meant — Hisham had a guy who would delete and reinstall the software on all their phones, replacing it with a more secure version. They went to Ikea to shop for her apartment. The bed had already been set up, and a few other basics donated by the solidarity committee. She only needed some kitchen equipment she ordered, delivered the next day. He offered to help her set it up, and she accepted. They had lunch at the Ikea, the standard meatballs and potatoes and lingonberry sauce, and walked in the city. Cobblestones, maple trees, cool air. Safe and strange. How lonely she would have been if she hadn’t met Geir. They picked up sandwiches at the bakery and went up to Geir’s flat. He made no suggestion about her going home, of taking her home, of wondering when she would go home. Before the end of the night, she had moved his ThinkPad on to the floor and set herself up comfortably in its place. Geir accepted her into his flat and his life as if he’d been waiting for her, as if it hadn’t been a chance meeting that had brought her to him. His comfort with her presence was so instant and total that she wondered if it reflected a lack of consideration. After the next two days spent as a whirlwind mostly in bed together, Geir put on a pair of jeans, set up his laptop at the dining table, and went to work as if she wasn’t there. “You’re going to want to bring your computer here, of course,” he said, “or will you need to get one?” “Maybe you could help me find an old one?” “Oh, yes, definitely,” he said. Laila watched him work for a while, expecting him to check his emails and then get back to paying attention to her. After five minutes, when she realized his mind was on work and not returning to her for a while, she hung up her towel, got dressed, and set

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SIEGEBREAKERS up the stove top. “Coffee?” “Yes please.” She sat with him at the dining table, drinking coffee while he worked. She played on her phone for a while, then, realizing that the afternoon stretched ahead with the only person she knew in the city fascinated with nothing but his computer screen, she said: “I’m going to the bakery.”

She sat in the bakery nibbling a butter cookie and sipping a cup of black tea, and for the first time, felt homesick, felt like she would trade Geir and Oslo and safety, the chance to do something for her people from here, where it mattered, like she would trade it all for a chance to be home with a cup of sweet tea and a slice of cheese pastry. And Nasser. He was the one who told her to let him go. And yet. Geir appeared in the doorway. He ordered himself another hot chocolate and sat with her. “I have to go away for a couple of days,” he said. “I’m sorry it’s an inconvenient time.” Laila felt like the ground had disappeared from under her. The only person she knew. “Oh, that’s OK… you can call me when you’re back?” Geir reached across the table to touch her hand. “Don’t be foolish, Laila. I wanted to ask you if you wanted to stay at my place when I’m gone.” “I don’t…” “Well, I’ll give you the key anyway. And we’ll get you your computer and all that before I go.” “Where are you going?” “London.”

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When he got back from London, and she had started to attend classes, she started to get a better sense of him. He wasn’t inconsiderate. He was just, himself. They found a rhythm where they spent mornings and evenings together and afternoons working. Geir worked late into the night. While Laila attended meetings and lectures by the solidarity committee and took on work, met people on and off campus who were doing work, she found that Geir was not really part of the committee’s work. According to Laila’s reading, watching signals from Israeli politicians and what she was hearing from Hisham back home, war was about to break out any day. Geir didn’t even come to meetings, content to talk to her about the situation when she got home each night before returning to his computer when she went to sleep at his side. He knew so much about Palestine because he was a graduate student in political science, specializing in the Middle East. But for a political scientist, he was uninvolved in political matters and he was unusually competent technically, having rooted her phone, insisting that she install Linux on the laptop he set up for her, and that all their communications, even the most trivial ones, use secure and encrypted means. Coming from where she did, Laila didn’t find any of this especially suspicious or disconcerting. It just didn’t fit with how she met him or who he said he was. She was lying in his bed, on her stomach, propped up on an elbow, watching him at his computer, thinking about how to ask him about it, when he looked up and closed his laptop. “Can you look at something for me?” “Could I refuse you, my darling?” Laila said. Flashing her a boyish grin, Geir popped his laptop back open and put the tiniest USB drive in. Laila came around and looked at his screen.

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SIEGEBREAKERS “You can read Hebrew, yes?” As Geir flipped from one document to the next, Laila read the signed orders that Ari had sent to Mark, Maria, and Nahla, that Nahla had assembled in the dossier. “Where did you get this?” Geir shook his head, quietly. “Keep reading.” He continued to scroll through as she called out when she was ready. “There’s a lot more. Do you have a sense for what is here?” “Yes,” she said. He closed his laptop again, removed the USB drive. “I could use a stretch. Want to go for a walk with me?” No phones, he said, voicelessly. Out in the street, he said. “I got these in London. We are pretty sure of their authenticity, based on the sources, but a few of us were asked to verify with people who could read Hebrew and knew the situation on the ground, and could be trusted. In your opinion, are they authentic?” “Yes. These are extraordinary. They provide the Israeli side of the evidence that Dr. — that we have been gathering on our side. It is a level of proof that we have not had. It must mean there is a leaker within the Israeli establishment. We have never believed such a thing could happen. Are you publishing them?” “That’s not up to me,” Geir said. “I was just asked to help verify them. I think they are going to be presented at an international tribunal. I think they were sent to us as a backup. The source who sent them to us hinted my organization might have to publish them if a war starts again.” “It is going to start again,” Laila said. “Any day.” “So, you think these documents are authentic?” “Yes,” Laila said. “Everything in there is proof of what we know they are doing to us.” “What about if it is a double game by the Israeli intelligence?” “To do what?”

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JUSTIN PODUR “Maybe it is an operation against us? Maybe they are sending us false information so that we publish it and look like fools?” “But who are you? You must be an important organization to receive such documents and to be targeted by intelligence agencies. That must mean that you are —” “— yes.” Laila said: “We really aren’t alone.” “Of course, you are. And we are alone with you,” Geir said, holding her hand and squeezing it. “The information is not false, Geir.”

The war started. Laila divided her time between white-knuckled terror for Nasser and her family and friends, survivor’s guilt for being here while they were under the bombs there, political work with the solidarity committee, street demonstrations, not doing her school work, and the translation of the archive of documents assembled by Ari and Nahla. Laila knew her translations into English weren’t perfect, but her language ability had been the key in getting her the scholarship to Oslo and they were good enough. A week into the ground invasion, when Laila could no longer reach anyone at home, and Geir’s organization had heard nothing from their sources, its headquarters in London decided to start rolling out the publication of the documents online. Picked up by the media, the publication of Nahla’s dossier, with Ari’s leaked orders, had ripple effects. A representative of the Palestinian unity government announced that all of the material was going to be presented to the international court. Incredibly, the court responded that it would hear the case. The Israeli Prime Minister denied the validity of the dossier, denied the jurisdiction of the court, and said it would not comment on any leaked material. The US Secretary of State declared absolute support of Israel and reiterated that it was seeking the arrest of the publisher of leaked material.

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The General, and Moshe, had long taken an interest in the London publisher Geir worked with — the one that specialized in leaking secret documents online in their entirety — and the Israeli consulate monitored every Palestinian who studied abroad. Even if they had no idea that Laila was the daughter of a man high up on their most- wanted list, they knew she was a Palestinian overseas, involved with the solidarity committee, and suddenly, connected to an anti-Israel publisher of leaked material. During the first weeks of the war, as they shelled and bombed, then rolled unopposed into and beyond their buffer zone, the General was feeling confident, as were his political masters. But after the first week of the ground invasion, when things started to unravel, the military establishment thrashed about like a wounded bear, and the General was told in no uncertain terms to send his agents to take wild risks to try to stop the unravelling. One of the teams the General activated was to grab Geir and Laila off the street and take them to a safe house in the Oslo. The agents were given just forty-eight hours to set the operation up, and were given an open-ended mission of finding out what they knew and stopping them. After what was for the General’s agents an unreasonably short period of surveillance, a white van screeched to a halt in front of the German bakery, just as Geir and Laila were walking out, and three of the General’s men in ski masks came running out. One of them pinned Geir’s legs together, the second tackled him to the floor. The third man bear hugged Laila, picked her up and dragged her towards the van.

Laila struggled, her arms pinned, trying to get something to hold on to, while Geir was efficiently being zip tied and hit in the head with a sap. Martyred by the occupier after everything, Laila thought.

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JUSTIN PODUR “Geir!” she screamed. Laila heard a small car approaching down the quiet street. She looked at the driver, tried to scream but a hand was slapped over her mouth. She tried to look back at the baker, but her head was wrenched back towards the van by the man pinning her mouth closed. She heard, then saw, the car crashing into the front of the van. She coughed and smelled pepper spray, felt her attacker let go of her. She covered her eyes with her hands and kept coughing, getting down on her knees and finding Geir on his stomach, his arms zip tied behind him. She held on to him. “Laila,” he mumbled, his face in the pavement. She heard the sounds of a fight going on all around her. At some point the air cleared, she heard the van doors close. She looked up, her arms still around Geir, and saw the van reverse, then drive away. She saw the baker looking down at her, and another two men in their forties, both dressed in dark paramilitary clothing, dressed like fighters, watching the van drive away. One of the men was an African, she saw, puzzled. A knife appeared in his hand and he reached down and, with two sudden, vigorous moves, cut Geir free. The other man, who she had assumed was Norwegian, reached a hand down to her upper arm and gently pulled her to her feet. He said her full name with an American accent and followed with: “my name is Mark. This is my associate, Walter. It’s nice to meet you.”

The Americans stayed to talk to the police. The police inspector on the scene was skeptical about the story they told, that they were tourists whose car happened to veer out of control at that precise moment, crashing into the van. They realized that something untoward was happening, and jumped out of their car, at which

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SIEGEBREAKERS point the kidnappers got spooked, got back into their van, and drove away. “It was strange,” Mark said. “Very strange,” Walter repeated, nodding solemnly. “And the pepper spray?” the inspector asked. “Theirs,” Walter said. “But they managed to spray themselves with it, and miss all of us.” But they stuck to their story, so the inspector took their statements, and Laila’s, and Geir’s, and then left. “You’ll hear from me,” was the last thing the inspector said. “I imagine they’ll have gone through your apartment,” Mark said to Geir. The four of them made the short walk, and then a quick inspection of the flat. The ThinkPad was gone, but they hadn’t gotten the dossier, which was on a USB on Geir. “Probably some sensitive stuff on the laptop,” Walter said. “I’m not worried,” Geir said, straightening up. He held a handkerchief to the side of his face. Laila fished in his fridge and came out with some ice, which she put in the handkerchief. He bent down to let her help him. “It will take them a hundred years to break the encryption,” he said. “Might not have to break it, if they can break the software,” Walter said. “Well, in that case,” Geir mumbled, and then dialed a long series of numbers on his phone. “It was a nice computer,” he said. “Too bad.” Geir had remotely triggered a sequence that would turn his hard disk into mush. “You bricked it?” Walter asked. “Yeah.” “I would advise that you dump the phone,” Mark said, “except I suspect you’ll want to pick up the phone when your… what is it

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JUSTIN PODUR called. Police Security Service calls.” Geir’s phone rang. Geir spoke on the phone in Norwegian while Laila looked at the two Americans. Mark spoke quietly. “They are going to tell him to stay put, and they are going to offer the two of you police protection. But we have another offer for you.” “How did you even…?” “Know that this would happen? We are connected to the source of the documents that he,” Mark pointed at Geir, who was still on the phone, “was looking at. His boss in London told us who he had vetting the documents, and got more and more concerned about his safety. We were headed in this direction anyway, so we thought we should stop and say hi. Imagine our surprise when we found you were being watched.”

Mark had told Laila a simplified version. The reality involved a lot of messages flying back and forth between Camilo’s various secret identities and his contact in Geir’s organization, who had contacted Camilo soon after Camilo had uploaded Nahla’s dossier to them. Geir’s boss, Camilo’s contact, sent the documents out for vetting, then began to worry about the people he’d sent them to. His worries grew the worse the war got, and he expressed his worries to Camilo, not realizing he was communicating with a 14-year old whose mother was in the line of fire. Camilo’s growing panic combined with Mark’s and Hoffman’s when Maria and Nahla stopped checking in because the Israelis kept messing up the cell network. “Papa, you have to go,” Camilo had said. “The war will end,” Hoffman had said, “and when it does, we’ll need to get them out.” So, Mark and Walter were sent on the extraction, via Europe.

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SIEGEBREAKERS At Heathrow they heard from Camilo about the importance of a stop at Oslo, and they had arrived in time to see another clumsy operation in motion, this time to snatch Geir and Laila. “These guys are so overrated,” Mark had said to Walter as they watched the snatch squad get into the van. “I’m starting to feel like Sam Sheepdog with Ralph E. Wolf.” Despite Mark’s joke, the fight with the kidnappers had hardly been a rout. The two guys pinning Geir to the ground had been chosen for size and strength, and without the pepper spray taking the first one out, Mark would have been hard pressed to fight both. He took the first one out with the spray, and had already hit the second one with a shin and a knee to the head while he was still holding Geir down. But then, instead of staying down, the big man rolled away, shook off the two blows to the head, and stood up. Walter’s man had had the presence of mind to drop Laila in a split second and turn on Walter with a knife, quick, short, defensive, unpredictable slashes, impossible to interrupt or catch, backing Walter up step-by-step, then backing both Walter and Mark up, covering for his friends long enough for all three kidnappers to get organized and escape. Mark and Walter had let them go. Maybe the Norwegian authorities would catch them, maybe they wouldn’t. But there would have been no apprehending them without a knife fight. And there were no winners in a knife fight.

“So, what is your offer?” Laila asked the Americans. They were confident, these two men, speaking to her like old friends would. Geir was done with his phone call. “The Police Security Service is on their way,” he said. “They want to offer us VIP protection until they have caught the kidnappers.” “I think you should take it,” Mark said. “Just me?”

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JUSTIN PODUR Mark looked at Laila. “It depends on whether you want to go home for a little while.” “I can’t,” Laila said. “if I go back now, I will lose my status here.” “What if that wasn’t the case?” Laila looked at Geir for a long time. Geir’s big eyes gave her the same look she felt like she’d known her whole life. She was welcome if she stayed, and free to go as she wished. Like Nasser, he wasn’t pulling her. But unlike Nasser, he wasn’t pushing her either. “If that wasn’t the case,” Laila said, still looking at Geir, “if that wasn’t the case… then I would want to go.” “In that case,” Mark said, “I know a pair of hotel journalists who need to hire a local fixer to help them cover a certain war in the Middle East.”

At that moment, in Gaza, Maria was looking at Yousef in the back of the ambulance, the corpse of a young girl lying between them, and thought, however bad this is for me, if I live, I will go home to Mark and Camilo. If he lives, Yousef will stay here. This girl, 14 years old, they hadn’t even been able to try to save. They were called by her family and asked to pick up her body. She had some kind of a psychosis, and had lost touch with the reality of what was happening, had lost touch with the danger. She had fallen behind in her family’s flight from their house and found herself wandering behind where the Israelis decided the new battle line was. The closed military zone had enveloped her. Her brothers tried to get in to retrieve her, retreating each time as the Israelis fired at them. Then they watched as Israeli snipers shot their sister down in the rubble. They made calls for an ambulance. The calls kicked around until they landed on Maria’s ambulance. Hamed, the driver, had been through these situations before and was confident the Israelis would negotiate to let them pick her up.

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SIEGEBREAKERS They had followed the usual protocol. They inched forward, lights flashing. An Israeli voice on the loudspeaker ordered them to halt. It told them all to get out of the ambulance. Hamed asked for permission to go and retrieve the body. When it came, Maria and Yousef scrambled for it. Hamed waited by the ambulance. As she loaded the body in the back, Maria felt the young girl’s hair and bones under the skin, felt a thin young teen kid. Maybe 14 years old. Like Camilo. She gritted her teeth and closed the doors, and Yousef banged the side of the ambulance to tell Hamed he could get back in the ambulance and start driving. Then the Israelis shot Hamed. Maria and Yousef leapt out of the vehicle, towards the gunfire, ignoring the possibility that they might be shot in turn, lifting Hamed into the back. The Israelis had shot him in the thorax. He was breathing heavily, unable to speak as his chest filled with blood. “Hold on, Hamed,” Maria said through gritted teeth. Yousef was speaking steadily to him in Arabic. “You may go now,” the voice on the loudspeaker said. They loaded Hamed on to the stretcher and Yousef left Maria to try to keep him alive while they drove back towards the hospital. She failed.

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CHAPTER 24

Leaving the Resistance a warehouse full of advanced weaponry wasn’t enough for the Secretary. The man who led the descendants of the commandos that had struck fear into the occupier, now equipped and trained by the Americans in Jordan to fight the Resistance as the most reliable shield of the occupier, brought his elite forces into the fight for Gaza. Not on the side the Americans intended. Ever since Uncle Walid had brought the occupier’s bombs down on his office, relations between the Resistance and the Authority had been relatively poor. Reem’s visit to the Secretary’s tent of mourning had gone some way to mend them. But that meeting, too, had been cut short by one of the occupier’s bombs. The Secretary had no reliable way of contacting Reem, Shaykh Walid, or Commander Abu Laila, all of whom were directing efforts from bunkers underground. So, the Secretary found another way of signalling that he and his troops were in the fight: by joining it. He did so in a way that almost destroyed both of the forces, those working for the Secretary and those under Abu Laila’s command. Nasser’s rescue operation had been followed by a “good morning” shelling. The occupier commemorated the losses of his men by leveling people’s homes. The occupier followed his “good morning” shelling with a predictable plan for a ground invasion of a new neighbourhood. On the seventh day, as Reem had ordered, in this new neighbourhood, the Resistance waited, prepared. The civilian shelters were built, the tunnels dug, the fighters in place. Abu Laila himself was in the field, commanding a battalion of troops, in which Nasser’s group had to take up new roles. They had spent minutes putting the Ghillie suit on Sami and

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SIEGEBREAKERS perfecting its detail. He looked perfectly silly in it from up close and almost invisible from afar. “I’ve always thought you look like a big slab of concrete,” Nasser said. “More like a chunk of meat,” Elias said. “A mound of rubble,” Hisham said. As the best shot — the best soldier — of the group, Sami would be in the Ghillie suit with his �Ghoul sniper rifle hunting enemy snipers and enemy commanders, as would other snipers around the chosen and prepared battleground. Elias led a squad with the new �MATADOR anti-tank weapons. Hisham and Nasser both had new squads of light infantry assigned them. They waited in the tunnels for the Israelis to shell the houses and clear them, move in with tanks and take up their places in the houses. They waited for Abu Laila’s signal. While they were waiting, an anti-tank missile set one of the occupier’s tanks on fire. The Secretary’s forces began their own ambush, from houses and places in the rubble that Abu Laila had counted on being open lines for attack. Nasser quickly figured out what was going on. “The Secretary,” he hissed. “Even when he helps us, he hurts us.” Two tanks were in flames before the occupier started even to return fire. The Secretary’s forces laid covering fire down on the occupier’s positions, but they fought from cover of their own. If the Secretary digs in and tries to hit them from safety, they’ll call in the artillery and F-16s. “Go!” Nasser called, running out of a tunnel to a house he’d watched a squad of the occupier’s soldiers enter, his squad following. He threw a grenade in, waited for the boom, and followed. His new troops were right behind him, just as his old boys had been. Following Nasser’s example, Hisham’s squad sprang out of a

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JUSTIN PODUR tunnel to attack another house. Other squads followed. The block became a death trap for the occupier’s tanks, the Resistance fighting too close for him to get reorganized. With Abu Laila’s troops closely engaged with the occupier, the Secretary’s forces used their copious supply of ammunition to continue to take out the tanks. They moved to higher levels of buildings, firing down on the occupier from the high ground. That’s a mistake, Nasser thought, looking up at a tall apartment building from the window of a house his squad now owned. At the top he swore he saw the Secretary himself, standing among a group of the tall, bereted, professional, well-equipped soldiers that he had always looked to with a pang of envy. “Is he posing for a photograph, or what?” Elias’s voice came over the radio. “He should get off that building,” Nasser said. The F-16s were inevitable, and they showed a special anger when the occupier had just lost soldiers. The occupier’s artillery shells started falling around them. Nasser heard the engines of F-16s in the sky. The Secretary’s building remained standing, and he remained on it. “Time to withdraw,” Abu Laila said. Nasser knew he had to leave, but he continued to stare, openmouthed, at the Secretary. Was he planning a dramatic death, a final atonement for his years collaborating with the occupier? After a loss such as the occupier had just suffered, the pilots in the sky behaved differently. They wanted to show their rage, too. They flew as low as they could, flying above and between the houses, two wings of them, four F-16s coming one way and four from the other. “I’m out,” Hisham said. “Out,” Sami said. “I’m out,” Elias said. The other squads continued to report they’d left the area.

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SIEGEBREAKERS Abu Laila called for him on the radio. “Just one more minute, Commander. I can’t believe what I’m seeing.”

It is not even theoretically possible for a soldier with an anti-tank weapon to take out an F-16. No matter what. The �S-7 MANPADS of the Syrian civil war were shooting at slower aircraft. The famous Stinger missiles that had taken down Soviet attack helicopters in the 1980s were hitting — helicopters. Compared to F-16s, helicopters were floating death machines. F-16s had maximum speeds of more than 2000 km/h, speeds that the human brain of someone on the ground, experiencing a sonic boom, couldn’t comprehend. But. It is theoretically possible that an enraged and overconfident pilot, weaving in between buildings, flying at the lower limit of altitude and consequently as slow as possible, might see the impossible sight of a soldier aiming and firing a shoulder-launched missile in his direction, lose control of his plane, and crash. Under those circumstances, with people watching, it was immaterial whether or not the soldier had brought down the plane. Nasser watched the Secretary ready the MATADOR and fire it in the direction of the F-16s. He watched the F-16s fly on past the Secretary, and he heard the crash as one of them hit the ground. Then he saw the Secretary and his troops rappelling over the side of the building while shells continued to land all around them. “Why wasn’t that guy on our side all along?” Nasser asked himself. “Sir?” his second-in-command asked, waiting for orders. “I said… I said let’s go.” He led his squad back into the tunnels before the occupier’s missiles streaked in by the dozen and the buildings crumbled.

The Resistance spokesperson, a highly articulate young man who

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JUSTIN PODUR appeared with his face wrapped in a scarf, made a video commenting on the several cellphone angles that had caught the crash of the F-16. It had millions of views by the next day. After that battle, the occupier’s ground forces withdrew in an orderly but quick way behind a strong artillery screen. The plan to double the punishment from the air, however, floundered when two of the occupier’s drones awkwardly crashed into one another. This incident, too, was caught on video. The following day, another day of saturation shelling from the sea and over the fence, a drone recognizable as belonging to the occupier fired a missile at one of the occupier’s own warships. The warship wasn’t sunk, but it was damaged and there were casualties. “Having run out of targets,” the Resistance spokesperson said, “the occupier in his wisdom has turned his weapons against his own weapons.”

In the bunker, Reem, standing, hands on the table, leaned forward and addressed Commander Abu Laila, Uncle Walid, and the Secretary. Nasser was at the doorway. “We’ve had the first feelers for a ceasefire,” Reem said. “What are they offering?” Uncle Walid asked. “Nothing. Just a ceasefire.” “No prisoner exchange? Even for the pilot?” Nasser’s ears pricked up when Walid said “the pilot,” but he didn’t know what they were talking about. What could “the pilot” be code for? He might ask Reem later. “Not yet.” “Then no ceasefire. Absolutely not.” The Secretary said. “Obviously,” Reem said. Nasser looked at the Secretary, leaning back in his wooden chair, in battledress, his beret still on. The most legendary collaborator, recently the star of the most legendary Resistance video (though he wasn’t even in the Resistance),

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SIEGEBREAKERS now reluctantly allowed to sit on the War Council and suddenly its most intransigent, aggressive member. “The question is,” Reem said, “how far we can go. I think they will meet our humanitarian demands. But can we go beyond? The West Bank is starting to rise up. Their international alliances are fraying. Have you heard what’s been happening in America?” The three old men stared blankly at the young woman at the head of the table. “Police shootings,” Reem said, “on campuses. This has not happened since the 1960s. They arrested most of the leaders of the solidarity movement. But the protests have continued to get even bigger. The media are cracking. This dossier of war-crimes evidence has been making big news. Many of the occupier’s current commanders are named in it.” “I’ve heard this story before, Madame Reem,” Walid said. “I know, I know Shaykh. I am just trying to analyze the balance of forces right now. When the ceasefire comes, where will we stand? Every ceasefire in the past has left us deeper in the rubble, in more hunger, more fear. We have fought hard to try to make this time different. Will it be?” “It must,” the Secretary said. Because you joined, you think it must, Nasser thought. “We have convinced them that it’s bad idea to come in here,” Commander Abu Laila said. “For it to be different this time, we have to convince them that they can’t just hit us whenever they like from afar.” “The drones helped,” Uncle Walid said. “As did your, ah, manoeuvre, Mr. Secretary.” The Secretary acknowledged the praise with a falsely modest bow of the head. “But we have to keep it up,” Abu Laila said. Reem straightened: “Meet again in an hour.” Abu Laila and the Secretary left together, while Uncle Walid

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JUSTIN PODUR stayed in the room. When Reem and Uncle Walid both looked at him, Nasser realized that Reem’s ending of the meeting was mainly a ploy to get rid of the Secretary. “Sit with us, my boy. Your next mission is particularly dangerous,” Uncle Walid said. Reem sat silently and looked sick. “I’m ready,” Nasser said. “It’s a naval mission.” Nasser swallowed, took a deep breath. Among the best resistance troops, a few were selected for training in their equivalent of Navy SEALS — special operations forces that could infiltrate by sea. These Resistance frogmen had done extraordinary things, attacking the occupier’s fortified bases in groups of one and two and showing unbelievable courage. Nasser’s entire squad had trained extensively in the operations, and had performed better than any other in training. There was one problem. No frogman had ever come back from such a mission. “As I said, Uncle, I am ready.” “The point is to keep the pressure on. We have to show them we can hit them even if they remain on the other side. Our mysterious benefactor helped us with the drones, and we have a few other things he gave us that we have yet to use. This is one of them. We waited to see if the drones worked. Now that they did, we have more trust in the other items and instructions he left.” Nasser said nothing. He just listened to Uncle Walid’s artificially steadied voice, and watched Reem folding and unfolding her hands, as she looked up at him with her mouth closed and her eyes wide with fear and the colour drained from her face like she wanted to tell him to refuse the mission. “These missions are one way,” Walid said, “and we know that. And this one will be, if our benefactor lied to us in any way.” “And if he didn’t?” “If he didn’t, then you and your boys will be back here to celebrate our victory.”

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SIEGEBREAKERS God knows he didn’t need good odds, but he’d never been comfortable with going into battle certain of martyrdom. If Uncle Walid was telling him he had a chance, that he could tell his boys they had a chance, then he was ready to try. “If God wills it,” Nasser said. Reem shook her head. “I need to take a minute before our next meeting. Shaykh, can you give your nephew the details later? I need him.” “Of course,” Uncle Walid said. “Security protocols are that none of the council travel without a guard. You will escort Madame Reem to her quarters so she can get some rest?” “Yes, Uncle.” Out of earshot, Reem whispered, “we have forty minutes, my crazy bodyguard.”

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CHAPTER 25

The type of videoconferencing available to the General was such that Ari could see every line on his face, every trouble, every minor cut suffered maintaining the perfect shave of head and face that made him notorious. The screen, much larger than the General’s face, sat at the head of the table in the conference room, and gave Ari the impression that he was in the room with a giant golem. Or maybe a golem’s head, anyway. Ari walked around these days with a spring in his step, choking down the light threatening to beam from his voice. Maintaining the aspect of someone depressed at a losing war was difficult when he was watching each of the things he’d planned fall into place. The Palestinians had used the drones he’d sent creatively, better than he would have. They had found some way to bring down an F-16. It had the air force spooked that they had the magical ability to do it again. The West Bank revolt was spilling over Shabtai’s ability to control. Troops withdrawn from Gaza had to be sent to suppress the West Bank revolt with little rest, having to fight in a totally different way with cameras everywhere on them and restrictive rules of engagement. The Europeans were furious. The General’s agents had fumbled and got caught trying to kidnap solidarity activists and overseas Palestinians. America had gone as far as it could, arresting and even firing at campus activists, which made for some viral videos almost as awful as the F-16 coming down. What none of the millions of viewers of that video knew was the pilot had survived and was in Palestinian hands. The General had received a video of the pilot, alive and unharmed, looking solemnly into the camera and asking for the release of all the Palestinian prisoners. That video, thank G-d, had not yet made it

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SIEGEBREAKERS to the internet. And Ari immediately thought, how to get that video to the internet? Before the drones, before the F-16 was downed, the plan would have been to do a few days of especially heavy bombardment, hit some of the leaders’ houses, demolish some of the West Bank, then seek a ceasefire. But with the West Bank in revolt too, and with these unpredictable capacities of the Palestinians, everything was uncertain. Then, an even more unthinkable thing had happened. “My office!” The General had said. “They sent a cruise missile to my office!” He’d gone right into a meeting with the Prime Minister for a videoconference with the American President. What they asked for, Ari didn’t know. But he knew, from the General’s face, that they had asked. And cajoled. And threatened. And thundered. And raged. But the President had answered, no. Maybe they’d asked to drop a nuclear weapon on Gaza. Or a fuel-air bomb. Or maybe they’d threatened to drop one, unless the US did something. Maybe they’d threatened to activate the Lobby, to push the President from power, to cause a revolt in the Congress to bring the government to a halt. Maybe they’d threatened a media blitz the likes of which had never been seen. The General had been in the control room when the fighter jets attacked the USS Liberty during the Six-Day War in 1967. He had watched, with binoculars, the Mercedes truck as it pulled into the Marine base in Beirut before it blew up 241 Marines in 1983. When their asset in US Navy Intelligence had provided Mossad with intelligence on the CIA network monitoring South Africa’s nuclear program, the General passed the intelligence on to the apartheid regime, sending the CIA scrambling to leave the country. He had made a career of knowing how to provoke and manipulate the Americans. But the General and the Prime Minister had walked out of the

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JUSTIN PODUR meeting with nothing. In spite of an F-16 being downed. In spite of drones being used. In spite of a cruise missile hitting the office of the head of Intelligence in the country (never mind that the cruise missile hadn’t exploded). “My head is spinning, boy. I don’t even know any more, if the Americans are behind all this.” “To what end?” Ari asked. “Maybe,” the General wiped his face with dry hands. “Maybe they want to come in, themselves. Maybe they want to occupy the territories themselves and take them from us.” Maybe we should let them, Ari thought. “I think we may have to consider… peace terms.” “Take some rest, General,” Ari said. “We are tearing down, here. There’s just a handful of us, and we’ll be out by the end of the day. I’ll come straight to your… to headquarters. We will work out a strategy to turn this around.” “OK, boy.” Ari walked out of the conference room. This base, sitting on the border with Gaza, had become a ghost town. Suddenly, a post of aggressive invasion had become too vulnerable to the enemy and his unknown weapons. Ari had convinced the General to let him work from here during the second week of the ground invasion, when everything had gone to hell. The worse it got, the lower the base’s value sunk, and when the general retreat was sounded, this base was to be evacuated. Only a handful of troops remained. Ari was charged with shutting the place down and ensuring that no data was lost or fell into enemy hands. Ari walked from one building to the next, saluting a senior officer here (“did you take your computer with you?”), shaking hands with a junior officer there (“you sure you didn’t leave anything behind?”), checking each room for computers or other devices according to his mission. He walked into a clerical building close to the outer edge of the

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SIEGEBREAKERS base, a one-floor building with metal desks, which had functioned as a very efficient coordination centre. He settled down at a desk by the door and popped his laptop open. The last laptop on the base, if his inspection had been as thorough as he believed it was. Ari had read a lot about this base. He’d studied its architectural plans, studied the records made by sappers and engineers. What he had found was very interesting. It turned out that the Palestinians were not the only ones who dug tunnels, which were a part of any sound military strategy. For a military base comprising multiple buildings, having tunnels between them was also sound. For example, the base Ari was on right now, in the very building, in the very office where he sat with his laptop, there ran a tunnel right to the outer wall. That tunnel ran between the buildings and all the way out from the base. Soldiers could use them to travel between buildings or — should the base fall to the enemy — to escape. The tunnels could also have been used for training in tunnel fighting, had they not fallen into disuse decades ago, and been forgotten. Ari looked at the top right corner of his laptop and began the countdown. He closed his eyes and thought of the forest in America, the cool pine trees, the open sky. He thought of his mother, admonishing him for being too honest. He thought of Zahava, who he would never see again. “Listen,” Zahava said, at the door. Ari looked up, closing his laptop and cradling it in his hand as he stood. Ari tried to speak calmly but only managed to choke out the words: “You are not supposed to be here now.” “What the hell do you mean, Ari? I am leaving with you.” “I told you to leave two hours ago!” Ari hissed, walking towards her. She walked straight to him, not about to be pushed out. “And I said I was leaving when you left. You just didn’t listen.” They were in each other’s faces now. Just minutes left, Ari

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JUSTIN PODUR thought. “Why couldn’t you have just listened to me, today?” Then Zahava was turning around, her Jericho 941 drawn, facing the open doorway through which Moshe strode, emptyhanded, his pistol still holstered, with Danny following and coming to stand beside him, Uzi drawn and pointed at Ari’s chest. “Put your weapon down, Danny,” she said. “Nope,” Danny said, quietly. Moshe turned his nose up as he looked at Zahava. “Danny will end both of you before you have a chance to fire. Put your weapon down, little girl.” Zahava held her ground. Ari took a step sideways, to see if Zahava would follow and if Danny and Moshe made the matching move. They all did. “What is this about, Moshe?” “A few things. Court martial. Treason. Execution.” “I didn’t think you did anything so terrible, Moshe, but I haven’t seen all your records. If you are going to turn yourself in, though, it should be to the General, not to me.” Ari inched to the side. Zahava followed. Danny and Moshe followed. They were circling each other now, very slowly, and Ari was angling them away from the doorway and towards the opposite wall. “You are not funny. And you are not special. You have spent your whole life thinking you were, being coddled by the General. But you are not.” “You sound like you have some psychological issues that need working out, Moshe. Have you spoken to an Army psychologist? They require debriefings with them after critical incidents.” Ari inched. They followed. Moshe said: “MATADOR anti-tank weapons. Hermes drones. A huge cache of our weapons. You think no one on our side could figure out that they came from our side?” “I imagine keeping track of it all can get hard when not everyone is as smart as Moshe.” Ari inched. They were about at a

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SIEGEBREAKERS forty-five-degree angle now. Ari had about a minute to get them through another forty-five degrees. “We found out about Shabtai’s dealings with the Arab terrorists through that businessman, Cohen. We found evidence of Shabtai’s involvement all over that massive shipment of arms that got into Gaza. Too much evidence. When I asked Shabtai, he didn’t know what I was talking about. But he slipped and mentioned a meeting you had with Cohen. The two of you.” “Wow, you found out about a meeting. The wonders of our intelligence apparatus never cease to amaze.” Sixty degrees now. “You managed to be at the front for the whole advance, and miss the entire retreat.” Now Moshe was attributing things to him he hadn’t even done, assigning Ari magical powers. “I also snuck off in the middle of the night and launched all of the rockets at Ashdod myself, you know.” “Let me shoot him,” Danny said, “so he shuts his mouth.” “I will blow your goddamned head off,” Zahava said. Seventyfive degrees. “Answer me this: when did you start to hate your own people so much?” After decades of holding back, Ari felt the dam burst, felt the blood rising to his head. He choked a bitter laugh, fearing hysteria if he let it out. “Good question. It’s a very good question. Do you know we used to be the ones who fought tanks with stones? We were the ones who hid in latrines and jumped out of tunnels with firebombs. We were the ones who said, it’s better to die on your feet than live on your knees. We were the ones whose children hid underground, waiting for someone to come and kill them. That was us! “Look at that man beside you. He hid behind a teenager and shot other children. I watched him do it. He used a human shield! For the rest of your lives, you’re going to have to live with what you

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JUSTIN PODUR have let yourselves become. You. Not me.” Ninety degrees. Ari and Zahava were now behind a metal desk. Danny was the best marksman in the entire military apparatus, with an excellent weapon at what was, for him, point-blank range, so Ari wasn’t going to make any sudden moves. Until. The back wall blew open with a crash. Smoke and stone whipped past and guns started to sing. Danny turned to the wall and opened fire. Moshe drew his own sidearm and began to fire at the blown wall. Ari grabbed Zahava and pulled her down under the desk. A sound bomb, flash-bang, then automatic fire rang out in bursts. A Palestinian fighter stood over him, helping him up. Another, a big muscled man, took Zahava’s pistol and helped her up in one move. Behind them, a small fighter was helping another, apparently wounded, applying a field dressing to a wound in the man’s side. Danny never misses, Ari thought. He looked for Danny and Moshe. Both were on the floor, fallen in bullets and blood. Though they wore masks, Ari recognized the men. The squad he followed like comic-book heroes. The soldiers who had made him believe the time was right to make his decision. “So, you are real,” Nasser said in Arabic. “I am,” Ari replied in Arabic. “In that case, I brought you something, you can do it yourself.” “I would prefer if you did it.” There are degrees of being a traitor, Ari had told himself, and he didn’t want to fire the �electromagnetic pulse (EMP) weapon, even if he had put it in their hands. “Well, let’s do it quickly, then.” While experimental, the e-bomb was not, in Ari’s view, extremely complicated. It was just a power supply connected to a magnetic coil with a detonator at one end and an antenna on the other. Once the detonator went off, the short circuit crushed the magnetic field into an ever-smaller volume, pulsing energy

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SIEGEBREAKERS through the antenna that would fry electronics for some distance. Long ranges were only possible by risking mass casualties, so Ari had chosen a weak pulse. The effect of this weapon, which would harm no human beings, would be to turn a part of the Israeli Army into primitive guerrillas, unable to access any of their high-tech. They set it up, took cover, and watched the lights around them go out. They had come by sea, but they had a plan to leave by land. Thanks to the EMP, they would travel in the dark, with time enough to get to the entrance of the tunnel that ran under the fence. There was, before they left, one final problem. “Madame, we can’t take you, I’m sorry,” Nasser said to Zahava. Ari translated. “I go where he goes,” Zahava said. “No,” Nasser said. “The world will not tolerate us having a female soldier for a prisoner. And our own people won’t like it.” “You’ll have to put a bullet in me,” she said. “That isn’t a bad idea,” Ari said. “Heroic female soldier wounded trying to prevent kidnapping.” “Hey,” Zahava said, “I’m right here.” Ari held Zahava’s shoulders. “You know he’s right. We can’t take you. I’m sorry.” Her face changed to grim determination, and she took two steps back. Nasser signalled to Sami, who drew a pistol Ari didn’t recognize, probably one of their homemade ones, or a Russianmade one, and handed it to her. “If you need to do it for your story, at least wait until you’re closer to help,” Nasser said. “After, get rid of the pistol.”

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CHAPTER 26

Mark and Walter waited with Laila and Geir for the Norwegian Police Security Service to arrive. Hoffman had made a call: they had something worked out for Laila in Gaza. More than ten years before, Mark remembered Hoffman in despair after talking to a man from the Lobby. Hoffman had painted them a picture of calls increasingly going unreturned. Of each of them becoming pariahs. Of their skills languishing. Of people they could have helped losing their chance at justice, even their lives, because Hoffman had dared to touch Israel. Now the three of them sat in the back of a Lexus limousine, heading south on Theresesgate to the Royal Palace of Norway, where the monarch owed them a favour. Laila’s visa status would be expedited by the assent of the Norwegian king, whose ceremonial authority was sufficient to move the file along on an emergency basis. Hoffman had once helped a group of Norwegian aid workers out of a thorny situation in central Africa. Walter had done most of the heavy lifting, but as usual, Hoffman was given the credit. Walter, dehydrated and badly ill by the end, had declined to go anywhere but home to the US, even though he, like Hoffman, had been invited to Norway and promised a warm welcome. Hoffman had gone, had been given a special prize personally by the king at a ceremony in Oslo. At a private audience with the king and queen, he’d been told that the kingdom of Norway was in his debt, and he could call them if he ever needed anything. Hoffman proceeded to call in that favour of old times, arranging for Walter to finally see the country. From the palace, they went to the airport, a long flight to Cairo, and a long overland trip to al-Arish, following the same

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SIEGEBREAKERS strange route that Maria had taken. But it was different this time: several times in the past few years, Israel’s wars in Gaza had caused this whole part of Egypt, the Sinai Peninsula bordering Gaza, to shut down. The Islamic State insurgency in the Sinai had grown and changed. Maria had had to find a way across in great peril. But short weeks later, journalists from all over the world were making the trip across, and Mark’s group encountered them at every step along the way. At the open Rafah crossing, the Egyptians had put a higher standard of operator forward than the disorganized bands of soldiers Maria had faced when she had come through. Hoffman had arranged meticulous press credentials for Mark, Walter, and for Laila. A delay — no longer for them than for anyone else — and they were in.

Earlier, when Maria arrived at the hospital, riding in the back of the ambulance with her friend Hamed’s body and that of a teenage girl, she stepped out of the ambulance and willed herself not to collapse. She arrived at the height of another wave of mass casualties. There was no time to process, to go over it, to think about it. She didn’t remember what she did before she went to her own room. She remembered Nahla coming in like a ghost, and stepping back out again. She slept. She woke. She went on more runs, brought back more people alive and dead. She pulled a screaming child off a stretcher and brought her into an operating theatre past her terrified family members, no free beds, one victim after another in every one. Her arms and sleeves were soaked with blood. Explosions in the distance. Artillery screaming its way to crash to the ground. Nahla’s arm on her shoulder. Nahla’s hand on the child’s forehead. The doctors did what work they could, then sent them back out into the rain of bombs. The casualty rate slowed. The medical staff watched on screens

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JUSTIN PODUR in the front lobby the news of the end of the ground invasion. A short period of bombardment and shelling was followed by one misfortune after another for the Israelis. Their F16, crashing. Their drones, attacking each other. Their base, bordering Gaza, attacked and the power in a neighbourhood of southern Israel out from what military experts on American television were speculating to be an EMP weapon — one not used by the Americans but used here by the Palestinians? Since their networks went through Israel, the EMP had knocked out the Palestinians’ own cellphone service. But their other electronics were fine — Gaza was, for this brief moment, at a higher technological level than part of Israel. Maria, barely able to stand, through an exhaustion deep in her bones and a coldness in her chest that she couldn’t get warm, kept going by thinking about Camilo and Mark, safe and waiting for her at home. She watched the pundits speculate about Israel’s mishaps and the EMP weapon, and felt an unusual feeling, an undeserved pride, the desire of a ninth-grade music teacher to say about a prodigy, I taught him everything he knows. This is Ari, she thought. Before long, everyone would know Ari’s face, as well as the face of the F-16 pilot, as they were broadcast on television as captives of the Palestinians. The two Israeli faces on one side, the thousands of Palestinian faces on the other — but that was to come later. At that moment the hospital was transitioning into working on the aftermath of the war. The people started coming out of their hiding places to look at the rubble and destruction the Israelis had wrought of their homes. They pulled bodies out of the dust. They cleared roads of the carcasses of their cars. They hooked power lines back together. They applied themselves to the post-destruction actions which, after so many attacks, had become like a ritual. Maria watched the war end on the screen at the hospital and saw, behind the war’s end, Ari’s hand. Then, Mark came through the doors of the hospital, Walter

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SIEGEBREAKERS behind, and a young Palestinian beauty Maria didn’t recognize behind him. Maria blinked twice, wondering if she had finally cracked under the strain and could no longer distinguish fantasy from reality. But in her fantasy, she was on a lake with Camilo and Mark, looking out at still water and pine trees in a cool summer breeze. So, this was real, and Mark was here, and she was in his arms, up in the air, tears streaming now, her Palestinian co-workers relishing the chance to see a husband and wife reunited after the war. To the Palestinians, Mark and Maria were that: just another husband and wife reunited after the war. Time was less scarce than it had been for the past few weeks, so Mark and Maria were given a little of it. Nahla still had work. There was still no cell service. Walter and Laila found things to do around the hospital. When they were alone in her room, Maria collapsed in Mark’s arms. “So many children,” she said, over and over, sobbing. “I know, I know,” he said. Yousef came to the door. “There’s someone here to see you,” he said.

When they returned from their mission, Nasser had reported in and then sprinted back to Elias, who kept losing blood and who was running out of time under the treatment of one of their best field medics. Ari had been blindfolded and stashed in a corner of the underground network under heavy guard. Commander Abu Laila told the War Council: “He has admitted he worked for the occupier’s intelligence services at the highest levels. We cannot trust this man. Nasser was a fool to treat him like a guest instead of a prisoner.”

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JUSTIN PODUR “I understand your point of view, Abu Laila,” Uncle Walid said, with a stroke of his now full beard. “You are completely right that this young man’s background is troubling. But consider this: what would someone have to do for us, before we would treat him like a guest, sit with him and hear what he has to say? And then, consider what this young man has done: betrayed his people, given weapons to our people, and then put his life in our hands.” “But Shaykh Walid, that is my point. Why would he do that unless he had some other plans for us?” “He says we will need him.” “We do not need him,” Reem said. “We have fought. We have bled. We have died. Our fighters have walked right into death to meet the occupier up close and fight him. We have wept for our children and our parents; whole families’ names have been erased. This Zionist comes to us with a box of guns and wants us to put him on our shoulders? No, Shaykh Walid. We do not need him.” Walid gave Reem the same warm parental look he sometimes gave Nasser, the look of an old, wise teacher to an over-smart pupil. “He brought us a little bit more than a box of guns. And you know that with him and the pilot we could get many of our prisoners back. And he has promised that if the occupier resumes the war, he can continue to help us. He doesn’t need us to put him on our shoulders. But aren’t you curious to sit with him? He is a specimen I haven’t seen since I was your age: an Israeli who is willing to fight on our side. I know that you haven’t seen it in your lifetime, I understand your point of view, Madame Reem, but I have seen it.” Neither Abu Laila nor Reem moved. Uncle Walid continued to work on them, but he made little progress over the next hours. Then, Nasser came back, with Sami and Hisham following. All three were bone-white, all three had faces puffed from crying. “Elias,” the Shaykh said. Then, seeing their reactions: “May his soul rest in God’s peace.”

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SIEGEBREAKERS Reem set immediately about making the mourning arrangements. Nasser took her aside. “Nasser, I’m so sorry —” “Thank you Reem. Thank you. But there is something… else. The Israeli prisoner, Ari. He says he knows the American woman who was working with Dr. Nahla Zamoun at the hospital. He says that, if we trust her, maybe she can help us to trust him. Do we trust her?” Reem clicked her teeth. “Americans and Israelis. We made so many plans to survive their onslaughts. Now all any of them want to do is help us.” The reflected lights of the fluorescent bulbs played in her eyes. She said: “Yes, we trust her. Can you get her?” “I’ll send Hisham.”

Rather than exposing their tunnel network to foreigners and civilians, they risked bringing Ari up to the surface. They chose a mostly intact house, carefully secured and swept for unexploded bombs now that the occupier had left. The process of families returning to their homes was just beginning, and this family had not returned. In the meantime, the Resistance could move their prisoner around. Driving an old Lancer, Hisham had brought Mark, Maria, and Laila with him to translate. They walked through warrens of blown walls, over piles of rubble and fallen power lines, in and out of destroyed courtyards, to get to a row of houses. To Maria, it felt like a blanket of silence had descended, and she found it impossible to believe her ears. They strained for drones, tank engines, rockets, bullets, shells, bombs, screams. “So quiet,” she said. Hisham had used a two-way radio to arrange the meeting point. They would wait in the house for the prisoner and his

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JUSTIN PODUR guards to arrive. The four of them stood awkwardly in someone’s living room, not wanting to touch the belongings of the family who’d fled, one of the lucky ones whose house mostly still stood. Mark and Maria watched through the windows while Hisham made small talk with Laila. In the distance, at the bottom of the hill, Maria saw a silver VW Passat station wagon pull up behind their Lancer. Four people got out: Reem and her handsome escort Nasser, his big fighter Sami, and then a fourth man. One with a new shave and haircut with plenty of product in it, in a black T-shirt, close-fitting dark blue jeans and new sneakers, walking unaided with no visible restraints and looking already to all the world like a Palestinian youth who had been in Gaza all his life. Ari, in a disguise given to him by his hosts. “There he is,” Mark said. Laila and Hisham went to the window to look. “There had been a fourth,” Maria said to Laila who translated to Hisham, who spoke to Laila quietly, and Maria heard the name, and the word “martyr,” saw Laila’s eyes tearing. “Elias,” Laila said. “I knew him. He was my friend.” As Reem’s group entered the living room, Laila ran to Nasser and leapt into his arms like a child. He picked her up and buried his face in her neck like it had been there many times. Reem took a step back and looked both of them up and down as Nasser awkwardly put Laila back onto her feet. Awkward introductions were made. Maria deduced the love triangle. She noticed that Hisham and Sami were taking some measure of amusement from it, even though she could read the pain of their loss and feel the absence of their squad member in the room, could practically hear the memory of his voice, asking questions about her at the hospital. Then Ari walked into the centre of the room. “Ms. Alvarez. Mr. Brown. It is good to see you again.” Laila began to translate into Arabic. Reem interrupted her by

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SIEGEBREAKERS raising a hand. “It’s fine.” Maria stepped forward and gave the thin boy a hug. He squeezed her tightly. When they let go, she kept her hand on the back of his neck for a moment. “It looks like it worked, Ari.” Hisham and Sami had slipped out of the house, Mark following their lead and retreating from the conversation. Nasser and Laila were in a different corner. With a flick of the head, Reem dismissed both to wait outside. Reem, Maria, and Ari stood facing each other. Reem spoke flatly. “He says that he was working with you all along.” “It’s true,” Maria said. “He tipped us off that Israeli intelligence was going to try to assassinate Nahla Zamoun, which is why I accompanied her here. He contributed leaked material to her dossier when we published it from here.” Ari looked at Reem with his head down, shoulders slumped. “Can you believe me, now?” Reem crossed her arms and said nothing. She looked at Maria, then returned her appraising gaze to Ari. “What do I do with you?” “Just let me help. If the General goes back to a war footing, I can help you. I know how they plan and how they think. If he decides to negotiate, then you can trade me for Arab prisoners.” “Arab?” “Palestinian prisoners. I’m sorry. I have had to maintain a character for so long that I misspoke. I apologize.” “A character? How do I know that you aren’t maintaining a character now?” “Reem,” Maria said. Reem lifted her hand again. “It’s fine.” “Alright,” Reem said. “After everything, I am ready to say this. I acknowledge what you have done for us, Ari. And you, Maria. I

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JUSTIN PODUR acknowledge it, and that is why I do trust you. Which is why we are going to go back now. You are going to talk to Shaykh Walid for as long as you feel you need to. And then, I am going to let you go.” “No, Miss Reem,” Ari said. “Please don’t do this. You would be wasting a valuable bargaining chip.” “The prisoner exchange will take months in the best case. We already have to keep one of our chips here,” she said, referring to the F16 pilot. “I don’t want to keep two.” Ari shook his head, put his hands up defensively. “I don’t want to go back to Israel!” Reem raised an eyebrow. She looked at Maria pointedly, then back to Ari, and said: “You will go back to Israel, when we exchange you for our prisoners. In months or years.” “I don’t understand,” Ari said. “I do,” Maria said, her eyes on Reem. “You’re coming home with us.”

They went their separate ways, left the house at different times. There were no aggressive or danger signs from the Israelis, but security habits die hard. They saw one another again later, at the mourning tent for Elias. There were mourning tents all over Gaza that day. Elias’s was but one. Laila sat with her father and mother. After paying their respects, Nasser’s squad went to the ruins of the Crazy Water Aqua Fun Park, the subject of Elias’s heated argument with Uncle Walid. “A Darwish line for Elias the poet,” Nasser said. Mine is the moon at the far edge of the words, And the bounty of birds, And the immortal olive tree. “In God’s name,” Sami and Hisham said.

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Then as promised, Uncle Walid and Commander Abu Laila debriefed Ari. He talked as long as they would let him, and then they pushed him on, as they did with Mark and Maria and Walter, and Nahla and Laila. The Rafah crossing was wide open in this uncertain moment. There were even American soldiers in desert fatigues at the terminal here and there, reposted from Iraq for a brief period. They could all cross now, and get across the Sinai, in a way that they might not be able to again if things changed in Egypt. Ari’s new appearance wasn’t coincidental. Uncle Walid had instructed Hisham to remake Ari’s appearance to match that of a 19-year old boy named Aziz, who the occupier had just killed, a boy whose ID was completely clean and ready for use. In the bunker, before sending him off, Reem put a hand on Ari’s shoulder. “Goodbye my little Zionist, and thank you. Surprises for us are not usually good. But you managed to surprise everybody in this war. Me more than anyone.”

Reem told Nasser to go across. “You may never get to do this again,” she said. The thought of leaving Gaza, even for a day, made Nasser feel strange and exuberant. Not because he wanted to leave. But because he wanted to be able to say he had been out. Everyone else he knew had left — Sami, Hisham, Elias, Uncle Walid, Abu Laila, Laila, Reem — but he had only ever been to the Israeli side of Kerem Abu Salem. “Reem, if this is about Laila, I —” “I’ll be here when you get back, my bodyguard.” “Then, I would like to go, to see.” “Have an ice cream at Rukab’s in Ramallah. See the pyramids in Giza.”

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JUSTIN PODUR “I have heard that Rukab’s has the best ice cream.” “You should also say goodbye to her, properly.” So, Nasser joined the group that left. He would cross to the Egyptian side and then decide whether he had to come back immediately or not. With Nasser and Ari, Mark and Walter, Laila and Nahla, and Maria, the group filled a microbus. At the Rafah terminal, Mark recognized one of the men from the Rangers who he’d trained at their camp. He chatted casually with the man while crowds of people sailed through the terminal in both directions, after the most casual ID checks.

They were all together, an island of seven travellers in a sea of people on the Egyptian side. Maybe not a sea, but a river, one that had flowed past all the checkpoints. Their group was trying to figure out transport for the next phase of their journey to Cairo when something in the air changed. They all sensed it. There is a moment when a crowd’s attention catches on something. A single person looks up, and someone else follows. The more people look up, the more people follow their eyes, until thousands of people were looking up at a small quadcopter in the sky. Far lower than the drones that flew over Gaza. A hobbyist’s drone. The kind that filmmakers used. It flew back and forth, up and down, and then eventually flew up very high, until it was just a dot in the sky, and people started to lose interest. The moment ended, most of the crowd went back to the business of trying to find transport. There were rumours of lines of taxis and buses not two miles away. They went with the flow. But Mark kept looking up. “That quadcopter’s got a payload,” he said to Maria. “That’s because it’s a bomb,” she said. As he always did when he wanted to jump up nervously, Mark moved his head slowly, languorously, and looked at Maria. Then,

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SIEGEBREAKERS looking forward again, he said, casually, “Are you sure?” The three of them, Mark, Maria, and Walter, were taking point in the group, Ari and Nahla behind them, then Nasser and Laila. “I noticed it when it was at its lowest point. It’s watching the crowd, so it’s important we behave no differently than anyone else.” Maria said, her face in the sun, as if she was enjoying the breezy walk and the freedom of being out from behind the fence like everyone else. “Is there any chance,” Walter asked, “this isn’t for us?” “Sure,” Maria said. “It can mean many things. None of them good.” Mark glanced back and forth in the crowd looking as casual as possible as he walked. “The range on these things is short. It’s all locals around here. No one paying special attention to a phone or tablet, no computers out that I can see.” The panic, the trampling, would kill many more people than the tiny bomblet that could be carried on such a tiny drone. The panic and horror of the attack would also serve well to hide an assassination, if that was the true intent. Maria’s party was radioactive with high-value targets. A defector. A humanitarian and leader. An elite squad commander. Three security professionals. All on the wrong side of a powerful, wounded, enraged military machine. “I bet the operator’s in a car somewhere. Maybe a taxi. Walter,” Maria said, in a singsong of someone asking to pass the sugar, “no one in our group will panic. Why don’t you take a step back and tell them our concern, and that they should keep cool, but look for the operator?” Walter slowed down his pace until Ari and Nahla were beside him. “It’s not fancy enough to be who I think it is,” Mark said to Maria. “It’s an improvised kit. It could be them, but trying to frame

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JUSTIN PODUR someone else. Or it could be the someone else.” Ari sped up until he was beside them. “Should I try to find it with my phone and take it over?” “No reason not to try,” Maria said. “But I don’t think that will work.” Ari walked alongside them punching away on his phone. “If that doesn’t work,” Maria said, “we should try to find the operator.” They walked for harrowing minutes with the crowd, trying to present what would look like non-suspicious behaviour to someone watching from above: a skill Nasser and Laila had developed over their whole lives. The crowd began to thin out at the promised line of buses, microbuses, and taxis that stretched out and rapidly filled with eager travellers. The drone had swept down now, had briefly drawn eyes, and then people had again gone back to their attempts to get transport. “I can’t connect to it,” Ari said. “My plan won’t work.” “He won’t be in a bus,” Maria said. “He’ll be in a taxi. Probably inside, and on a phone or, more likely, on a computer. Fan out and find him. I think he’s here somewhere. If you do find him, don’t move on him unless he does something with the drone. We’ll have to slide in when we nail him and keep it flying until we can make it safe. Groups of two. You,” she said to Ari, who she suspected was the target of all this, “stay with me. The rest, go.” Maria and Ari and Nahla, Mark and Walter, Nasser and Laila, fanned out in pairs, just travellers looking for a taxi. Nahla spoke to the drivers, asked them questions, and slowed their group down. Maria didn’t want them to be as active in the search, because her priority was protecting Nahla and Ari. Nasser and Laila murmured to each other, and then talked to other travellers asking about a specific item they wanted. Within three minutes, they had both acquired what they needed, and began their own search of taxis.

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SIEGEBREAKERS Mark and Walter just walked along like a pair of Americans, sore thumbs that they were, and it was they who stumbled on it, a taxi with the driver standing outside like everyone else and a passenger sitting inside with a laptop. The passenger was light-skinned for a local, bald-headed and sporting a particularly religious-looking beard. The beard and the clothes and the laptop — didn’t go together. “Shit,” Mark said, as they walked past the taxi, looking away as naturally as he could. “I know that guy.”

The operator had travelled a long and uncomfortable route to get to this crossing from the Egyptian side, to assemble and build this kit in the field, and deploy it at just the right time. He knew his target was here, a target that would be trying to hide in the flow of humanity taking advantage of this tiny breathing space. It didn’t matter that no one believed his theory. His gut told him that the war had been lost because of a traitor, and he was going to avenge Israel. He would wait for the traitor to reveal himself and he would strike. But in the meantime, he had to stay alert, so he kept himself in the sights of his drone, watched himself and his own taxi from above, and checked out anyone who approached. The two military-aged males walking by his taxi, the operator knew instantly, were a threat. Their clothing, their bearing, their size, their confidence. Hadn’t he been trained to spot things out of place? At the exact moment they walked by, he waited until he saw the one look at the car — he kept his gaze down. Then, when the man looked forward again, the operator looked up. And remembered the bullet burning through his hip, remembered the elbows raining down on him, saw his American enemy walking past. The operator, Dayal, realized as he saw Mark that the traitor must be here too, that his instinct was right, and that these men would lead the traitor right to him.

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JUSTIN PODUR Dayal dropped the elevation of his drone to get a better look. He watched the images of Mark and his companion closely, saw them slowing down after three or four cars, stop and face one another to talk. The crowd had thinned considerably, to clusters of dozens of people here and there. Dayal brought his drone down even closer. When Mark and Walter met up with the traitor, he decided, he would bring the drone right down in a swoop, and detonate it like a terrorist suicide bomber right in the middle of the group. Then he watched Mark and Walter walking back towards his taxi, with intent, and he knew he had seconds to decide what to do. He brought the drone way down, towards them, but they were already too close to his taxi to risk setting the bomb off. He swooped the drone back up, getting it ready for another pass, but in doing so he lost visual on them. He looked up and they were upon him, one had unlocked the back door and was opening it and the other had pushed the driver aside and was moving in to block the other side. He put his laptop down, drew his Beretta, and started firing. Walter and Mark sprawled as Dayal fired two shots in Walter’s direction, then two in Mark’s. “He’s not out of rounds,” Mark said. Unarmed, they had no good plan for how to get Dayal out of the car. If he tried to get out, they could hit him with the door. But if he waited, he could take them out easily the second they tried to get in. The driver and other people had scattered away from the taxi. Mark and Walter were still on the ground, trying to decide what to do, when two Egyptian soldiers strolled up and casually sprayed the back of the car with bullets, killing Dayal and making a mess of his laptop.

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SIEGEBREAKERS Nasser and Laila watched the drone flying away, then careening out of control, back and forth above the crowd in a predictable pattern but lower each time. They had gone out away from the crowd, and spread out, away from each other. The drone circled, from Nasser, to Laila, to the crowd, and back.

Laila had told Maria their idea to bring the drone down, which Maria had accepted, in case they had to bring it down to protect the crowd, to minimize the risk of casualties if the operator blew it up. Despite the stereotypes, Nasser was nothing special at throwing rocks. He’d been a child during the second uprising and growing up where he was, he only ever saw tanks, F-16s, and the aftermath of shells. Not a good target for a rock in sight. He might have thrown a rock at the Secretary if he’d had the chance, but he hadn’t. He had a good eye and a good arm, though, so when he threw the rock he’d found, it almost hit the drone. Laila, on the other hand, had had girlfriends who’d been to the West Bank. On an afternoon when she was sixteen, they all went out and practised with slingshots, imagining themselves using the stones to protect other kids like themselves. She was not only an excellent shot, but she also could spot the kid in the crowd who’d brought one with him on his first trip out of Gaza, who had made sure he brought it when his family fled their house from the occupier’s bombing. The rock she slung was a direct hit to one of the motors, and it sent the quadcopter spinning and falling, spinning and falling, in just the right direction, far out from the crowd. But close, too close, to Nasser, who was moving away from the drone when the bomb went off.

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EPILOGUE

He remembered Laila’s face. Not Uncle Walid’s, not Reem’s, not Elias’s, not ever again. But Laila’s breath on his face, Nahla’s voice and hands. Ambulance sirens. A hospital room? A helicopter? A boat? From a fog of images and sounds, Laila’s face, again and again. Someone’s room. Curtains, the bright sun blocked out but blazing against the curtains, breaking through on the sides. Floors of marble. A soft bed. No medical gear, no IV drip. Not a hospital. A house. A bedroom. Someone’s bedroom. Laila’s perfume. Nasser sat up, and Laila walked in. She closed the door behind her. “Are you really awake this time, or still delirious?” “Laila, darling. You are here. I am… am I home?” Nasser saw Laila’s lips smile and her eyes sad for him. “No, darling. We’re in Beirut.” “When can I go back?” “You are on a different ID now. They fixed it for you. Not a Gaza ID. That’s how we got you here.” “What does that mean… I don’t understand. What are you saying?” “My love, I don’t think you can go back.”

The Americans were in Rafah, overseeing free land travel in and out for people from Gaza. The seaport from Gaza to Cyprus was officially opened a week later. Erez remained fundamentally closed, but it didn’t matter because there were now two ways to get in. The restoration of Yasser Arafat International Airport, bombed in the 1990s and never rebuilt, was underway — construction crews

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SIEGEBREAKERS were at work. The unity government had passed a number of laws governing the transparent use of reconstruction funds and the payment of salaries for civil administrators. The humanitarian demands had been passed, but other negotiations were ongoing. Endless hours passed with the Israeli and Palestinian leaders staring at each other. Everything was on the table: right of return for the refugees, equality for Palestinian citizens like Nahla, the dismantling of the wall and the end of the occupation. The boycott movement proceeded. Rather than suspending operations while negotiations proceeded, the movement had intensified, costing Israel billions in business. No one had been indicted based on the evidence in the dossier, but certain generals and political officials had cancelled numerous international travel plans. Among the thorniest issues was the prisoner exchange. An F-16 fighter pilot who had ejected when his plane crashed was exchanged for over 3,000 prisoners. But another captive, a young intelligence analyst who was kidnapped directly from a military base on the border during the night the Palestinians used a very high-tech EMP weapon, remained in their hands. One of the Israeli soldiers had survived that attack. The young, elite female soldier had known the analyst well, and the incident and uncertainty about her fellow soldier had caused her such psychological stress that she had decided to leave Israel and move to the United States. She had done a final interview on television before heading to New York. Her companion, they promised, would be released when the remaining 2,000 prisoners were released. The Israelis periodically demanded some proof that he was still well, in the form of videos recorded from Gaza.

At a wilderness camp in upstate New York, a very young instructor, a skinny, thoughtful boy named Camilo, was showing a group

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JUSTIN PODUR of students how to make a fire from a bow drill. The instructor’s apprentices, oddly, were at least seven or eight years his senior. One was a jet-black-haired, dark-skinned young woman who demonstrated physical skills with endless reserves of cardio and great intensity. The other was a man who wore long hair and a hipster’s beard, looking like a real wild man. He was of slight build and had a similar impatience in his eyes to Camilo’s, like the world was moving too slowly for his brain. But the bearded apprentice looked at peace, and explained very patiently to each student how to do the new skill, while the instructor walked back up the hill to the cabin and back. When the instructor returned, he pulled the apprentice away from his teaching. “Can I have a minute, Zachary?” he asked. “I’ll handle the class,” the female apprentice, named Allie, said. Camilo and “Zachary” walked up the hill a ways, out of earshot of the students. “You have to shave,” Camilo said to Ari. “They want another video.” “Let me wrap up the class,” Ari said, “and I’ll meet you in front of the green screen in an hour.” “Try not to look so happy this time, dude.” Camilo said. “Just stick to the script. Look at the camera, tell them you’re in Gaza and safe and you hope to be home soon.”

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

There are many people who have helped inspire this book. When I first started studying the issue in 2000, I was encouraged by Michael Albert and I relied on Noam Chomsky to help me understand it. In the years since, there have been many others that I’ve relied on — a very non-exhaustive list, including Tarek Loubani, Mohammed Loubani, Ali Abunimah, Jacob Smith, Jon Elmer, and Neta Golan. Mark Brown’s fighting style plays a minor role in all this, but whatever I know about the topic I learned from Shawn Zirger and Simon Walder. This book benefited from a large number of early readers, all of whom gave me incredibly helpful feedback: Khalida Ramyar, David Power, Brad Macintosh, Uyen Dias, Cynthia Peters, Suzy Harris-Brandts, Dan Freeman-Maloy, Sam Gindin, Catherine Cole, Joseph Walters, Gita Kolanad, Varghese Podur, Lauren Mohamed, Stef Gude, Joe Emersberger, John Greyson, Mary Armour, Jonelle Bowden, Mischa Hiller, Leah Kotkes, Ali Loconte, Tyson, and Maya Kingsbury. I am grateful to Beverley Rach and the team at Roseway/ Fernwood for giving me a chance, to my copy editor, Valerie Mansour, for her work on the manuscript, and to my editor, Fazeela Jiwa, for seeing exactly what I was trying to do and for helping me do it.

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AFTERWORD

The first draft of this novel had footnotes. Because the subject matter is an active matter of public debate, and one in which every fact and argument is tested and disputed, I thought that it would be important to document for the reader that the most outrageous things in this book are the true things. This afterword is intended to let readers follow up on any political or technical matters that might have struck their curiosity as they read. Chapters 1, 2, and 3

Palestinian parents are nicknamed after their first-born. So, Umm Sami is the “mother of Sami,” Umm Nisreen is the “mother of Nisreen,” Abu Laila is the “father of Laila.” Viktor the Swede is a tribute to Vittorio Arrigoni. Vittorio was not Swedish, but Italian, a pacifist activist who helped revive the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) when he came to Gaza in 2008. He was kidnapped and killed by an Islamic organization as Gaza police were attempting a rescue. A brief article about him: “Six year anniversary of the death of Vittorio Arrigoni” can be found at the ISM’s website <https://palsolidarity.org/2017/04/six-year-anniversary-of-the-death-ofvittorio-arrigoni/>. Chapter 4

Walid and Nasser use the term “the Quartet,” which refers to the US, the UN, the EU, and Russia, all of which are involved in the Israel/Palestine conflict. Chapter 5

Walid and Nasser discuss the banning of the Arab citizens of Israel from the Knesset. This has not yet come to pass, but campaigns of terror against Palestinian citizens of Israel, targeting members of the Knesset, have escalated continuously, including MK Haneen Zoabi being suspended from the Knesset for six months. See, for example, Jonathan Cook, November 5, 2014, “Israel moves to outlaw Palestinian political parties in the Knesset” <http://www.jonathan-cook.net/2014-11-05/ israel-moves-to-outlaw-palestinian-political-parties-in-the-knesset/>.

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SIEGEBREAKERS And <http://www.jonathan-cook.net/2016-04-25/in-israel-an-ugly-tidesweeps-over-palestinians/>. There is new material in 2015 and 2016 from Cook, and Electronic Intifada, on this issue. Some notes on the Gulf States: Nelson Jones, July 23, 2013, the New Statesman, “The Shocking Case of Marte Dalelv shows why we should be boycotting Dubai.” Hamas leader Mahmoud al-Mahbouh was assassinated in the Al Bustan Rotana hotel by Mossad in 2010, in an operation that was captured on the hotel’s closed-circuit television and broadcast by the authorities in Dubai who put a film of the operation together as a result of their investigation. For an account sympathetic to the assassins, see <http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/an-eye-for-an-eye-the-anatomy-of-mossad-s-dubai-operation-a-739908.html>. Israel’s international assassins are sometimes called the “Caesarea fighters.” The New York Police Department (NYPD) counterterrorism bureau has branches in several countries, Israel included <http:// www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/06/nypd-opens-branch-israelveteran-charlie-ben-naim_n_1860733.html>. Targeted surveillance of Muslim-Americans by the National Security Agency was reported in September 2014 <https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/07/09/ under-surveillance/>. Intelligence information being passed on to Mossad from US agencies is on the public record. The most remarkable case is Jonathan Pollard, which is treated at length in Gordon Thomas’s book Gideon’s Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad. “The Lobby” refers to the pro-Israel lobby, which includes organizations such as the America-Israel Political Action Committee (AIPAC) and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), and advances Israel’s interests in the US. There are similarly organized “Lobby” organizations in Canada and the UK. Ari looks into the fire and reflects about refugee children dying in fires. This has occurred numerous times; the winter of 2015 was a particularly difficult one. See, for example, Al Jazeera February 24, 2015, “Babies die in Gaza due to the resource siege” <http://www. aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2015/02/babies-die-gaza-due-resourcesiege-150223075856017.html>. On technical matters of this chapter, the best-known hotel-management system hack happened to the Wyndham hotel chain in 2008 <http://www.hospitalitynet.org/news/4065825.html>. The Onity lock system, which was estimated to be installed on four million hotel-room locks worldwide, was found to have a fatal security flaw in 2012. A hacker named Cody Brocious presented how the system could be opened using

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JUSTIN PODUR an Arduino setup <http://demoseen.com/bhpaper.html>. Gideon’s Spies provides a detailed, if awestruck, presentation of Mossad history and operations. Chapter 6

The story of Gaza’s youth trying to escape into Israel is told by Hamza Abu Eltarabesh, May 19, 2017, The Electronic Intifada. “Dangerous escape from Gaza’s despair” <https://electronicintifada.net/content/ dangerous-escape-gazas-despair/20506>. The same journalist on April 5, 2017, wrote about Israel’s recruitment of families of Palestinians who need medical treatment in a story titled “Spy or die” <https://electronicintifada.net/content/spy-or-die/20091>. Chapter 8

When the Palestinian characters talk about the “Leader,” they mean Yasser Arafat, who led the (more or less unified) Palestinian Liberation Organization from 1969–2004, when he was likely assassinated; when they talk about the “Occupier,” they are referring to Israel, and following military convention they refer to the Occupier or the Enemy in the singular, as “he/him;” when they talk about the “Authority,” they mean the “Palestinian Authority,” which is the organization created under the 1993 Oslo Accords to administer the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories (the West Bank and Gaza). Elias quotes Mahmoud Darwish, Our country is a graveyard. I’m using As’ad AbuKhalil’s translation <http://angryarab. blogspot.ca/2008/12/all-is-registered-in-notebooks.html>. At dinnertime, Elias quotes Darwish again, this time A lover from Palestine <https:// www.poemhunter.com/poem/a-lover-from-palestine/>, as well as in a conversation with Nasser, Darwish’s A traveller <https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/a-traveller/>. They discuss the caloric counts allowed to Palestinians. Dov Weisglass, advisor to PM Ehud Olmert, talked about putting Palestinians “on a diet” in 2006. See Conal Urquhart, April 16, 2006, The Guardian, “Gaza on brink of implosion as hunger starts to bite” <http://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/apr/16/israel>. For more details, see Jonathan Cook, November 24, 2012, Electronic Intifada. “Israel’s starvation diet for Gaza.” Cook describes an Israeli document called “Red Lines” that outlines the calculations <http://electronicintifada.net/content/israels-starvation-diet-gaza/11810>. For some restricted goods, see the Institute for Middle East Understanding’s page <http:// imeu.org/article/putting-palestinians-on-a-diet-israels-siege-blockade-ofgaza>.

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SIEGEBREAKERS Kerem Shalom is the only crossing permitting commercial goods to enter Gaza. IRIN News, May 10, 2009,”Israel-OPT: What’s happening at Kerem Shalom?” <http://www.irinnews.org/report/84312/israel-optwhat-s-happening-at-kerem-shalom>. The story of the girl shot in the head while in class is told in the 2003 documentary, Gaza: The Killing Zone. The “Better Use Durex” T-shirt is an actual Israeli Army T-shirt. See Adam Horowitz, March 20, 2009, Mondoweiss. “Racist and sexist Israeli military shirts show the mindset that led to war crimes in Gaza.” Israeli demographers are concerned that Palestinian birth rates are higher than Israeli birth rates, seeing Palestinian children as a “demographic threat.” Chapter 9

Some details on the experience of the Erez crossing can be found in Dion Nissenbaum, May 17, 2007, McClatchy Newspapers, “High-tech border crossing serves as monument to Mideast gridlock” <http://www. mcclatchydc.com/2007/05/17/16243/high-tech-border-crossing-serves. html>. On Israel’s modification of turnstiles to press harder against Palestinians going through them, see Eyal Weizman’s Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation. Students are banned from travelling out of Gaza through Erez as of 2012. The Israeli state claims that students fit a “risk profile,” being between sixteen and thirty-five. Despite court challenges, the ruling has held up. See Gisha <http://gisha.org/publication/1666>. Chapter 10

On schoolchildren shot: The Forensic Architecture group did this sort of analysis to identify who shot 17-year old schoolgirl Nadeem Nawara <http://www.dci-palestine.org/documents/new-forensic-architectureevidence-identifies-nadeem-nawara%E2%80%99s-killer>. On Palestine taking Israel to the International Criminal Court (ICC): it is a possibility, though unlikely. See Al Jazeera January 17, 2015, “ICC to probe possible war crimes in Palestine” <http://www.aljazeera. com/news/middleeast/2015/01/icc-probe-possible-war-crimes-palestine-2015116151720780168.html>. On the Maspero demonstrations in Egypt: The Maspero demonstrations on October 9, 2011 — twenty-eight people were killed, 212 injured, by the Army’s use of live fire and running people over with armoured personnel carriers (APCs). The Mosireen Collective in Egypt created a documentary, The Maspero Massacre 9/10/11 on YouTube <https://www.

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JUSTIN PODUR youtube.com/watch?v=00t-0NEwc3E>. On the controversial protests against the Muslim Brotherhood, see Hugh Roberts, September 12, 2013, London Review of Books, “The Revolution that wasn’t” <http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n17/hugh-roberts/ the-revolution-that-wasn’t>. On the bathhouse raids in Egypt: See the blog, A Paper Bird, February 16, 2015. “One of Mona Iraqi’s victims tries to burn himself to death” <http://paper-bird.net/2015/02/16/one-of-mona-iraqis-victimstries-to-burn-himself-to-death/>. On the acquittal of the men accused: A Paper Bird blog, January 12, 2015, “Victory” <http://paper-bird. net/2015/01/12/victory/>. On Egypt’s prisons: Tom Stevenson, February 19, 2015, London Review of Books, “Sisi’s Way: In Sisi’s Prisons” <http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/ n04/tom-stevenson/sisis-way>. On Egypt’s arrest of an innocent stork: Rob Williams, September 8, 2013, The Independent, “Fowl play? Stork suspected of spying in Egypt was killed and eaten by villagers” <http://www.independent.co.uk/news/ world/africa/fowl-play-stork-suspected-of-spying-in-egypt-was-killedand-eaten-by-villagers-8803679.html>. On the assassinations of Hamas leaders during peace talks brokered by Egypt: Mohammed Abu Shamaleh, Raed Attar, and Mohammed Barhoum. Amos Harel, Haaretz, August 22, 2014. “Targeted assassinations of its top commanders deal Hamas a heavy blow.” Chapter 12

Gideon’s Spies, Chapter 3, describes Intelligence Day events for Mossad families. “The best men to the cockpit, the best women to the pilots” is a quote by Ezer Weizman, a former Israeli President and former Air Force commander. It’s reported on page 292 of Max Blumenthal’s book, Goliath: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza. The Beauty Brigade and the pressure on female soldiers to be sexually available are also discussed in Goliath, chapter 55. On Unit 8200: Peter Beaumont, September 12, 2014, The Guardian, “Israel’s Unit 8200 refuseniks: ‘you can’t run from responsibility’” <http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/sep/12/israel-unit-8200refuseniks-transcript-interview>. Also, The New York Times published a letter from forty-three veterans of the real Unit 8200 in September 2014. “Letter from Israel’s Unit 8200” <http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/09/12/world/middleeast/13Israeldoc.html>. The film, The Gatekeepers, features six Shin Bet heads speaking about their experiences. Some of them express frustration about the ultimate futility of their

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SIEGEBREAKERS policies <http://www.thegatekeepersfilm.com/>. In May 2016, deputy chief of staff Yair Golan gave a speech on Holocaust Memorial Day suggesting that there were traces of Nazism in Israeli society. Uri Avnery’s column, “I was there” is one of the most illuminating on the speech and its background and consequences <http://zope.gush-shalom.org/home/ en/channels/avnery/1463759865/>. On the Peru-Israel connection: See Neri Livneh, August 7, 2002, The Guardian, “How 90 Peruvians became the latest Jewish settlers” <http:// www.theguardian.com/world/2002/aug/07/israel1>. Also, National Public Radio, September 17, 2002, “Profile: Peruvian Indians converted to Judaism and moved to Jewish Settlements in West Bank” <http://www. npr.org/programs/morning/transcripts/2002/sep/020917.gradstein. html>. The phrase “no development, no prosperity, no humanitarian crisis” was stated as Israeli policy to a UN official, reported by Sara Roy, August 6, 2015, The Nation. “The Gaza Strip’s last safety net is in danger” <http://www.thenation.com/article/the-gaza-strips-last-safety-net-is-indanger/>. Ari and Zahava discuss Vanunu and Snowden. Mordechai Vanunu leaked the Israeli nuclear program in the 1980s. He was captured by Mossad in Europe and imprisoned. He is now stuck in a church. See Duncan Campbell, April 20, 2014, The Guardian, “Israel’s Mordechai Vanunu is as much a hero as Edward Snowden” <http:// www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/apr/20/israel-mordechai-vanunu-hero-edward-snowden>. Chapter 13

There was a real Crazy Water Park, and it really was attacked. Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, September 19, 2010, “Crazy Water Park Set Subjected to Arson by Unknown Gunmen” <http://www.pchrgaza.org/ portal/en/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=6984:cr azy-water-park-set-subjected-to-arson-attackby-unknown-gunmen-&cat id=36:pchrpressreleases&Itemid=194>, accessed April 11, 2017. There is a real “Ship,” and it has been repeatedly bombed. Hugh Naylor, November 20, 2012, The National (Abu Dhabi) “Gaza’s unsinkable ‘Ship’ still stands” <http://www.thenational.ae/news/world/ middle-east/gazas-unsinkable-ship-still-stands>. Journalists Matthew Kalman and Matt Rees argued that Yasser Arafat was poisoned with polonium, and suggested that Mohammad Dahlan may have played a role in the assassination. See the Times of Israel review of their book. Elhanan Miller, January 15, 2013, “Who killed Arafat?”

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JUSTIN PODUR <http://www.timesofisrael.com/who-killed-arafat-possibly-his-closestcolleagues/>. Force 17 was formed in the 1970s as Yasser Arafat’s personal security force and intelligence service. On the internal wars between Fatah and Hamas in Gaza, see for example, Ali Abunimah, March 15, 2015, “Hamas says videos reveal PA collaborators who helped Israel kill resistance fighters” <http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/hamas-saysvideos-reveal-pa-collaborators-who-helped-israel-kill-resistance>. Chapter 15

Gideon’s Spies describes the Institute for Biological Research, citing Victor Ostrovsky, who claims that Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) infiltrators were “used as guinea pigs… a prisoner brought to the Institute would never get out alive.” The bit about killing and killing all day, every day, is a direct quote from Arnon Soffer at the University of Haifa in 2004. Soffer has been an advisor to numerous Israeli governments. Quoted in Blumenthal, 2013, Goliath, page 92. On interrogation methods: The “banana” position is described by the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem as follows: “The interrogators turn the chair so that the interrogee sits with the backrest to the side, and cuff his hands in front of him, then push him backwards, so that his back rests at a forty-five-degree angle. The moment he cannot maintain this angle, he falls backwards, his body forming an arch” <http://www. btselem.org/torture/special_interrogation_methods>. The “frog crouch” is described by B’Tselem as follows: “The interrogators force the interrogee to crouch on his toes non-stop for a few minutes, his hands cuffed behind him. When in the crouch, they push or strike him until he loses his balance and falls forward or backward.” Danny’s sniper shots and conversation about it come from the transcript of an actual WhatsApp conversation before 14-year old Yousef al-Shawamreh was killed on March 19, 2015, crossing the fence in the West Bank <https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/patrick-strickland/ whatsapp-messages-show-israeli-soldiers-knew-they-were-about-killchild>. Chapter 16

There are a small number of people trying to take care of dogs in Gaza. See Agence France-Presse, September 4, 2016, via Al-Monitor, “Stray dogs find shelter in battered Gaza” <http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/

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SIEGEBREAKERS afp/2016/09/palestinians-gaza-dogs.html>. On Sisi’s personality cult: BBC Monitoring, March 31, 2014, “Egypt’s Abdul Fattah al-Sisi ‘cult’ sees surge in merchandise” <http:// www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-26775516>. Abu Eyad says his family was wiped out in the last attack. Eighty-nine families in Gaza were wiped out completely in Israel’s 2014 attack, every child, parent, and grandparent. The Bil’in movement Reem discusses is probably the best documented Palestinian non-violent movement in recent decades <http://palsolidarity.org/tag/bilin/>. About the cleaner, more powerful, and more successful struggle Reem mentions: Reem is quoting Ehud Olmert in David Landau, November 13, 2003, Ha’aretz, “Maximum Jews, minimum Palestinians.” “We don’t have unlimited time…. More and more Palestinians are uninterested in a negotiated, two-state solution, because they want to change the essence of the conflict from an Algerian paradigm to a South African one. From a struggle against ‘occupation,’ in their parlance, to a struggle for oneman-one-vote. That is, of course, a much cleaner struggle, a much more popular struggle — and ultimately a much more powerful one. For us, it would mean the end of the Jewish state” <http://www.haaretz.com/ general/maximum-jews-minimum-palestinians-1.105562>. Chapter 17

On international electoral monitoring: The 2006 Palestinian election was observed by the National Democratic Institute and the Carter Center, as well as the EU. On the technical: An example of encrypted phone communications is RedPhone. On the encryption-breaking software: the Italy-based Hacking Team was hacked on July 5, 2015, and their Remote-Control System (RCS) software leaked. Chapter 18

In the wake of several successful hunger strikes from 2012 on, Israel’s Knesset passed a law allowing the force-feeding of Palestinian prisoners <http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2015/06/israel-passes-bill-force-feedprisoners-palestinian-hunger-strike-150615004735288.html>. Shabtai mentions sparrows. “Sparrows” are the informants Israel uses to obtain information from Palestinian prisoners. Sometimes the entire prison will be populated with sparrows, except for the target. See Emily Harris, January 28, 2014, National Public Radio, “In Israel, an elaborate theatre of interrogation” <http://www.npr.org/2014/01/28/267629161/ in-israeli-prison-an-elaborate-theater-of-interrogation>. Interrogating

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JUSTIN PODUR the Prisoner, Shabtai mentions that the Resistance now talks about the Hamas Charter. In a July 15, 2015 interview on Hamas’s website, Hamas spokesman Usama Hamdan says that the charter “should be viewed as a historical document. It is not a true expression of the movement’s overall vision” <http://hamas.ps/en/post/114/an-exclusive-interview-with-usama-hamdan>. On the pedagogy of force and what it teaches to whom, Susan Drummond discusses Jabotinsky’s concept of the Iron Wall and teaching the Arabs through force in her book, Unthinkable Thoughts: Academic Freedom and the One-State Model for Israel and Palestine. In this chapter, the contrast between Israel’s prisons for Palestinians and Israel’s prisons for Israelis is made. Some notes on prisons for Israelis: Matt Lebovic, September 15, 2012, Times of Israel, “Israel a ‘prisoner’s paradise,’ says American cable series” <http://www.timesofisrael.com/ israel-a-prisoners-paradise-says-american-cable-series/>. See also Maurice Labi, Notes from Galilee, “Taking No Prisoners” <https://notesfromgalilee.wordpress.com/tag/hermon-prison/>. The list of items Israel prohibits from reaching Gaza has included sage, coriander, chocolate, nutmeg, potato chips, as well as, of course, plaster, tar, wood, cement, iron, fishing rods and nets, donkeys, goats, cattle, and towels. See Gisha.org, June 2010, “Partial list of items prohibited/permitted into the Gaza Strip” <http://gisha.org/publication/1632>. Given the difficulties getting materials into Gaza, questions about how materials get in are inevitable. Some food for thought comes from Isabel Kershner, March 2, 2015, New York Times, “3 Israelis Are Charged on Suspicion of Supplying Materials to Hamas Militants.” See also <whoprofits.org>. On the mathematical formula used to guide Israel’s assassination policy, see the documentary film The Lab, 2013. Chapter 19

On resistance summer camp: IMEMC.org, July 26, 2015. “Hamas military wing offers thousands combat training” <http://www.imemc.org/ article/72368>. See also Dan Cohen, June 4, 2015, Mondoweiss, “Gaza’s al-Nasser Salah al-Din Brigades prepares for next Israeli war” <http:// mondoweiss.net/2015/06/brigades-prepares-israeli>. Anecdotes about the 2014 war from the Palestinian side are told by Blumenthal. He tells the story of Khalil al Najjar, an Imam from the Kuuza mosque, on pages 70–71 of his 2015 book The 51 Day War. Blumenthal documented on page 93 “several cases” of “the shooting of older male relatives who had revealed their ability to speak Hebrew.” Darwish’s poem, ID card, was the subject of a minor controversy

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SIEGEBREAKERS in Israel. Ha’aretz, July 21, 2016, “The Mahmoud Darwish poem that enraged Lieberman and Regev” <http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/ culture/poem-of-the-week/1.732421>. The warning signs Nasser points to when he believes war is coming come from the lead-up to the 2014 war: Israel’s justice minister, Ayelet Shaked called Palestinian children “little snakes” on Facebook. See Ishan Tharoor, May 7, 2014, Washington Post. “Israel’s new justice minister considers all Palestinians to be ‘the enemy.’” Op-ed writer Yochanan Gordon, wrote a column about “When Genocide is Permissible,” August 1, 2014 <http://mondoweiss.net/2014/08/yochanan-genocide-permissible>. Dr. Mordechai Keidar said the threat of raping Arab women could deter terrorists in 2014. See Ami Kaufman, +972 Mag, “Israeli scholar: ‘only raping the sister of a terrorist can deter him’” <http://972mag.com/ nstt_feeditem/israeli-scholar-only-raping-the-sister-of-a-palestinian-candeter-him/>. On the teenagers’ terrifying tweets: David Sheen, July 10, 2014. Mondoweiss. “Terrifying tweets of pre-Army Israeli teens” <http:// mondoweiss.net/2014/07/terrifying-tweets-israeli>. While mourning for his sister, the Secretary experiences the “roof knock,” a practice Israel used often in the 2014 war. See Adam Taylor, July 9, 2014, Washington Post, “‘roof knocking’: the Israeli military’s tactic of phoning Palestinians it is about to bomb <https://www.washingtonpost. com/news/worldviews/wp/2014/07/09/roof-knocking-the-israeli-mjilitarys-tactic-of-phoning-palestinians-it-is-about-to-bomb/>. Chapter 20

Perhaps Maria was reading Mads Gilbert, Eyes in Gaza (2010) and Night in Gaza (2015). Last-resort publishers in the real world include Wikileaks, and methods for securely transferring files include SecureDrop. On the double tap: See section 2.1.1, page 34, of Bachman et al., Physicians for Human Rights —Israel, “Gaza, 2014: Findings of an independent medical fact-finding mission” <https://gazahealthattack. files.wordpress.com/2015/01/gazareport_eng.pdf>. Maria’s ambulance picks up young boys hit by naval shells while running on a beach. This occurred in the 2014 war. CNN, July 17, 2014, “‘They went to the beach to play’: Deaths of 4 children add to growing toll in Gaza conflict” <http://www.cnn.com/2014/07/17/world/meast/ mideast-conflict-children/index.html>. On the many issues covered in Hoffman’s discussion with the Lobbyist: For a flavour of what testimonies from Israeli soldiers look like, see Breaking the Silence, 2015, This is how we fought in Gaza: Soldiers’ testimonies and photographs about Operation ‘Protective Edge’ (2014). On

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JUSTIN PODUR trophy photos: Ali Abunimah, February 9, 2014. “Israeli soldiers pose for photos while abusing Palestinian child” <https://electronicintifada.net/ blogs/ali-abunimah/israeli-soldiers-pose-photos-while-abusing-palestinian-child>. On Palestinian children attacked by Israeli settlers who use fire as a weapon: Mohammed Abu Khdeir in 2014, Ali Dawabsheh in 2015, are two examples. On the Israel-Palestine conflict in soccer, May 29, 2015, New York Times, “Palestinian Soccer Association Drops Effort to Suspend Israel from FIFA.” Chapter 21

Brigadier Hadar who has G-d on his side makes speeches in the tradition of real officers like Col. Ofer Winter of the Givati Brigade. The speech Hadar gives is very close to Winter’s letter to his troops in 2014 prior to the invasion of Gaza that year <http://www.breakingisraelnews. com/18416/idf-commander-attacked-bringing-god-war/>. On information operations and the “hill of shame:” Journalists were allowed into Gaza in 2014, during Operation Protective Edge. But in 2008-09, they were not allowed in. Many of them gathered in Sderot on the Israeli side of the wall with Gaza, watching the bombing from a hill which was called the “hill of shame.” See Jon Snow, for example, in the UK Independent <http://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/tv-radio/ gaza-war-from-a-distance-1419147.html>. Doctrine, anecdotes, and incidents Ari experiences in the Gaza invasion are drawn from the report Breaking the Silence, “This is how we fought in Gaza,” including: Testimony #5, page 31; Testimony #28, 79; Testimony #70, 163; Testimony #62, 148; Testimony #72, 165; Testimony #50, 125; Testimony #14, 50; Testimony #27, 76; and Testimony #61, 147. Testimony #31, 84 (‘Blow it up, blow it up, use it all’); Testimony #71, 163 (‘They fired the way it’s done in funerals, but with shellfire and at houses); Testimony #29, 80 (‘Good morning al-Bureij’); Testimony #86, 191 (‘The civilian was laying there, writhing in pain’). From the Palestinian side, Blumenthal’s The 51Day War provides details. The Giant Viper, for example, was used by the Israeli army in a populated neighbourhood in Khuza’a in Gaza in 2014. See page 69. In the 2014 attack on Gaza, 19-year-old Mahmoud Abu Said was used as a human shield as Danny does. See page 93. The “Hannibal Directive” is the practice of using heavy firepower to prevent Israeli soldiers from falling into enemy hands. Indiscriminate fire is used to ensure that the captors and the captive are eliminated. Hannibal was invoked several times in the 2014 attack on Gaza.

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SIEGEBREAKERS Chapter 22

Reem’s story about the Secretary is a version of a story told about Yasser Arafat and Mohammad Dahlan. In Ha’aretz it’s told by Amos Harel as follows: “Moshe Ya’alon, the head of the army’s Intelligence Directorate, met with Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat. Ya’alon warned Arafat about Deif ’s plans and demanded that the PA act decisively against Hamas. Arafat disregarded Ya’alon’s warning, asking Dahlan, “Mohammed, who’s that?” Amos Harel, August 20, 2014, Ha’aretz, “Who is Mohammed Deif?” Nasser’s squad is trying to prevent a massacre at a warehouse: The Samouni family was forced by Israeli soldiers into a warehouse during the 2009 attack, after which the warehouse was bombed by F-16. Twenty-six people were killed: ten children, seven women, nine men. Mads Gilbert, Night in Gaza, 2010. On the use of dogs: Blumenthal’s The 51 Day War, page 74. Chapter 23

Hamed’s fate follows a story told by Blumenthal in The 51 Day War, page 80. “The soldiers ordered the driver of their ambulance, Mohammed Abadla, to exit the vehicle. When he obliged, they told him to walk five metres forward and switch on a flashlight. As soon as he flicked the light on, the soldiers shot him in the chest and killed him.” Chapter 24

On the Palestinian forces trained in Jordan by the Americans, see, for example Jon Elmer, Jan/Feb 2008, Canadian Dimension, “Fighting in the Gaza ghetto” <http://jonelmer.ca/files/elmer_cd_jan2008.pdf>. On Palestinian fighters in the battle of Shujaiya: see pages 40-41 of The 51 Day War. On the behaviour of F-16 pilots in that battle: page 55, The 51 Day War. “The F-16s were no longer up in the sky bombing us, they were flying just above the houses… four F-16s coming one way and another four from the opposite direction, weaving between the houses.” Abu Obeida, the spokesperson for Gaza’s Qassam Brigades, is described in various media. On the frogmen: December 11, 2014, Ynet, “IDF probe of Protective Edge infiltration leaks: Army presentation sheds light on the incident, that saw 5 Hamas commandos entering Israel via the sea.”

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JUSTIN PODUR Chapter 25

On Israel trying to shut Palestinians out of YouTube <http://www.jonathan-cook.net/2015-12-06/israels-cynical-approach-is-feeding-unrest/>. On the e-bomb <http://science.howstuffworks.com/e-bomb1.htm>. The final Darwish quote in Elias’s honour comes from I come from there <https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/i-come-from-there/>.

If this book has sparked a further interest in Israel/Palestine or in Gaza in particular, the reader might find fiction from young Gaza writers to be of particular interest. Atef Abu Saif ’s edited collection The Book of Gaza: A City in Short Fiction, and Refaat Alareer’s collection Gaza Writes Back: Short Stories from Young Writers in Gaza, Palestine, are full of beautiful short stories. For nonfiction, Mohammed Omer’s Shell-Shocked: On the Ground During Israel’s Gaza Assault is full of feature stories by a journalist who is from there and lived through it.

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