3

Thailand

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

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

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

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

Kullu was dangerous. Many backpackers from Europe, Australia, and North America would go there to find inner tranquility and cheap dope, and never return. They would end up missing and local police and foreign investigators hired by worried families could not uncover one clue to the disappearances.

Yoram and Reuven had been assigned to Binyamin as soon as they had joined the intelligence service and were being trained in Iraq before Operation Freedom. Yoram spoke Arabic and Kurdish and had a couple of courses of Russian but never took that language seriously. They had been in New Dehli for several months looking into the Israeli mafia’s network in India. Had this excursion to Kullu been an extension of his training? He grimaced as if the inability to answer his own questions caused him physical pain.

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

Reuven was a good friend, one of Yoram’s only friends. And they had become as sons to Binyamin. They even resembled each other with their dark features and curly, unruly hair. Though Reuven looked more clean-cut, Yoram seemed to always wear a 5 o’clock shadow, his brown eyes rounder, and his expressions more solemn.

Reuven had the better background. He had come from a large family, his father a naval officer who had dabbled in Naval Intelligence. He had had a mediocre military career that was easily forgotten, but he wanted his son to carry on the family tradition. Reuven did, and he was very good. Binyamin, a man with more than thirty years of service to the tiny nation, recruited him after noticing his high aptitude for intelligence work, his natural ability to learn languages, and his adaptability to nearly any situation, culture, or problem.

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

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

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

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

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

‘Swedish. They’re speaking Swedish.’

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

‘And those?’

Yoram listened. ‘Greeks.’

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

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

Next Chapter: Chapter 4