Okay, so this story gave me a chance to combine two things I love; Heroes and international terrorism. Okay, I don't love internation terrorism. But I find it very interesting. I love the character of Hana Gittelman, and the combination of an ex-Mossad agent and a suicide bombing was too much to pass up...
I'm a Zionist, but this isn't supposed to be an indictment of Hamas, or of Lebanon, and certainly not of Islam.
Conspiracy
P.S. The bombing is the one Isaac paints...
She'd heard it.
In a hotel room.
In New York.
Halfway around the world from Israel, from the old Mossad building in Tel Aviv, and light-years away from her past, her mother and grandmother driven off her bed…
A message. From Hamas. Well, from a part of Hamas. To an operative in Israel. A mission.
To blow up a bus.
She intercepted an image of the bus.
Red. In Israel… the operative was a suicide bomber. Like the man who had killed her mother… her grandmother. A terrorist.
She had tried contacting Mossad.
They wouldn't listen.
She tried sending the bomber a new assignment.
His phone was off.
She didn't sleep that night.
The next morning, on the day of the eclipse, the world event, she saw a newspaper. On its front page was a picture of a bus, red, on fire, its windows broken, dozens dead. A headline confirmed her fear. A terrorist attack in Israel.
She had failed.
Now here she was.
In the Baaka Valley, in Lebanon, a gun held to the chin of the man that had ordered the bombing. She felt years of hatred pour forth into her finger, snaked around the gun's trigger.
This man was not the one who had ordered the attack on Bus 405, but he may as well have been.
He was a sheik, a radical outlawed in Israel and Lebanon, driven out of Pakistan and Iran, and hated by Hamas itself. He'd single handedly masterminded a bombing in Munich, the assassination of a progressive Palestinian politician… and this latest act of terror against her people…
He hadn't even looked surprised.
He knew that Mossad would be coming after him sooner or later.
"You killed them." Hana accused, leveling her Berretta at him. "All of them."
The sheik said nothing.
"Speak!"
He remained silent.
She'd clambered aboard a flight, the first out of New York she could get; she'd flown to Israel, and headed north, avoiding the IDF and Hamas, living up to her reputation as 'Wireless'. She'd ignored the man in the glasses. She'd come to Baaka only for revenge.
Now here she was. About to put a bullet in his brain.
"Kill me, infidel whore!" he spat.
Hana didn't flinch.
She had a choice to make. Kill him. Set him free. Or take him back to Israel, to answer for his crimes. He'd been thrown in prison, taken to the Hague…
It was odd, she thought.
First the Nazis, those that had escaped the first time, brought to heel by Mossad death squads.
Now the radicals that had pushed Hamas to commit its heinous acts…
"Kill me! Let me die for Allah! Let me die for God!"
Hana tightened her grip on the trigger.
"Do it!"
Hana scoffed. "The God you serve is death!"
"The God I serve is the one true God!"
Hana shook her head.
The old man, his teeth crooked and yellow, smiled. "Shoot me."
"No."
The old man's eyes widened.
She stepped back, tucked the gun into her belt. "No. I'm not going to kill you for this. I'm going to take you back to Israel. They're going to send you to the ICJ. They're going to kill you, or lock you in jail. Either way, I won't become a murderer. I won't be like you."
Hana turned, and walked to the door of the sheik's single-roomed shack.
"You'll never leave Baaka alive!"
She turned back. "I don't have to. I was never here." She disappeared into the sun-baked noon heat of the Lebanon day.
The sheik sat silently, in shock over his escape.
His elation didn't last long.
Thirty-six minutes after Hana Gittelman left his shack, six agents of the Israeli Mossad snuck inside, as he rested. He was captured, taken back to Israel. He was assassinated in Tel Aviv international airport, on his way to face a crimes against humanity tribunal in the Hague… Hana Gittelman, formerly of the IDF and the Mossad, went back to America, and continued to work for a mysterious man in horn-rimmed glasses.
On the day of November 8, 2006, she was killed while trying to bring down a satellite maintained by an organization known only as a company.
But, in her own words, transmitted on the day of November 10, 2006, to one Micah Sanders in Las Vegas, Nevada, death is never quite what we expect it to be…
