The Terrorist Who Fell in Love

John Livingston

Description

A reluctant Palestinian on a suicide mission dupes a young widow from deep south Georgia to assist him in an assassination attempt on the Israeli prime minister.
A young Palestinian man, George, who has lost the whole of his family in warfare over the years volunteers out of guilt, loss and desperation for a suicide mission to blow up the official residence of the Israeli prime minister using a explosive-laden van. The Mafia in Naples outfits the van so it can get through Israeli customs in the port of Haifa. The young terrorist needs to find, seduce and dupe an American Jewish woman to put the van in her name and take it to Israel. He find his woman in Venice, but she's a Baptist from deep Georgia who is with her friend, Regina, on a long European vacation. Janice has lost her family in a terrible car crash that kills her alcoholic husband and three little children. After a year of mourning, she and Regina, recently divorced, go on their European tour in celebration of beginning a new life, reborn Georgian Baptists, as it were. Janice falls for George and his story about being in the car import business, but being Palestinian he needs someone to bring the van to Israel. Janice agrees but Regina thinks the whole thing is fishy and suspects George. During the weeks George, Janice and Regina are in Italy and getting the van ready for shipment from Naples to Haifa, the Mossad gets wind of the assassination attempt and tracks George down in Rome but a mix-up with the Mafia ends in the wrong man getting killed, Rodolfo, who was having an affair with Regina that was becoming serious. By the time the van is being loaded onto the ship in Naples, a middle aged Mossad agent, Jerzi, who is on the verge of retirement and has pretty much lost his family to war, alienation and Alzheimer's,, finds George, Janice and Regina in Jerusalem. His mission is to find the car bomb and bring George in alive, if possible. Passing himself off as a business man, he befriends George and the girls. Regina, badly bruised by the loss of Rodolfo, is attracted to the older man, a father figure offering security. As Jerzi gets to know George, he is reminded of his soldier son killed in the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, and can't help but feel a fatherly affection for the young man who has lost his family in warfare, as Jerzi knows. Jerzi also falls for the young, russet-haired beauty Regina and finds himself in a bind between duty and love.

Sujets

• Adventure (Guyana)
• Military
• Israeli?Palestinian conflict
• Terrorism
• Adventure
• War
• Romance
• Love
• Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: iUniverse
• Date de parution: 05 novembre 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781663228031
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

THE TERRORIST WHO FELL IN LOVE
 
 
 
 
 
 
JOHN LIVINGSTON
 
 
 
 
 

 
THE TERRORIST WHO FELL IN LOVE
 
 
Copyright © 2021 John Livingston.
 
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
 
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
 
 
 
iUniverse
1663 Liberty Drive
Bloomington, IN 47403
www.iuniverse.com
844-349-9409
 
Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.
 
Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.
Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.
 
ISBN: 978-1-6632-2802-4 (sc)
ISBN: 978-1-6632-2804-8 (hc)
ISBN: 978-1-6632-2803-1 (e)
 
Library of Congress Control Number: 2021917221
 
 
 
iUniverse rev. date: 01/20/2022
CONTENTS
Chapter 1   Rome
Chapter 2   West Beirut
Chapter 3   West Beirut
Chapter 4   Valdosta
Chapter 5   Venice
Chapter 6   Venice
Chapter 7   Florence
Chapter 8   Tel Aviv
Chapter 9   Florence Continued
Chapter 10   Rome Revisited
Chapter 11   Tel Aviv
Chapter 12   Naples
Chapter 13   Valdosta Revisited
Chapter 14   Naples Continued
Chapter 15   Tel Aviv to Valdosta
Chapter 16   Naples Continued
Chapter 17   Israel
Chapter 18   Arab Israel
Chapter 19   Valdosta
Chapter 20   Tuscany
Chapter 21   Jerusalem
Chapter 22   West Bank
Chapter 23   West Bank Continued
Chapter 24   Ramallah
Chapter 25   Tel Aviv
Chapter 26   Jerusalem
Chapter 27   Jerusalem
Chapter 28   Jerusalem Continued
Chapter 29   Jerusalem
Chapter 30   Dimona
CHAPTER 1 ROME
George’s eyes darted from rearview mirror to side-view mirror and back again. Then to his watch. He was nervous. His hands were shaking. Sweaty. The arrival of the target was long overdue. Or else the ambassador had taken an alternate route. He hoped so. He wasn’t sure he was up to it. He looked again at his watch. It was too late to question if he was up to killing someone. He grimaced at the thought. He felt cramped. He’d been sitting in the car for over two hours.
He took a deep breath to calm himself and tapped his fingers on the armed RPG launcher resting across his lap. He was afraid. Not of death. Of failing. He had reconciled himself to death. Dying was easy. You didn’t have to apologize or excuse yourself for dying, not once you were dead. Failing was something else. You had to live with that hanging around your neck for the rest of your life. Living was hard enough. Killing was feeling even harder now that the moment was getting close. He’d have to live with that too. Why hadn’t they just given him a suicide mission so he could’ve been done with it once and for all? Or was this one in disguise? He wished it were. Easier to kill himself than others. A suicide mission would have been a means to his own end. He was tired. There was no more left in him. He wanted out.
He looked at his watch again. The thought of killing and the fear of failing weren’t the only things wearing him down. Just as bad were all those times the operation had gotten underway and then had to be halted for some reason or another. It had gone on for weeks. The anticipation, the waiting, the anxiety. This was the third attempt. The ambassador’s car hadn’t appeared for the first two. Israeli intelligence had probably caught wind that something was up. By now, Mossad would have uncovered the mission, would be about to snuff it out. George expected Israeli agents to pounce any second and shoot him dead. He doubted his heart could take a fourth try.
No, Mossad wouldn’t shoot him. He had sketched out in his mind how it would go. They’d want to take him alive, interrogate him, torture him, learn what they could, and then turn him to work for them and let him live his life in misery and regret as a well-paid traitor. George was resolved not to be taken alive. He took a deep breath and held it to steady himself.
“Patience,” he murmured while breathing out. “Patience is the key to ease.”
His first mission, his first act of violence. He trembled. His stomach turned with nerves. He wasn’t fit for this. He had joined the movement and had volunteered for the mission, but he had never let his mind penetrate the reality of what offering his life for a cause really meant, inflicting violence, killing. He had wanted to kill, in a vague, angry, confused way, back when the Israelis invaded two years ago. But now he wasn’t sure of himself. He was a virgin when it came to killing, to any form of violence, even schoolyard fistfights. But he had volunteered, and here he was. Not that he’d say he didn’t want to be here, sitting in this car with a loaded RPG across his lap, waiting, waiting. The dead needed to be avenged, and the living needed to be justified for having not been killed with the rest. He had volunteered to prove himself, to be at peace with himself, to die and be at rest in the grave with those he had known and loved.
He looked from the rearview mirror to the launcher across his lap. Was it vengeance? He wasn’t sure anymore. It wasn’t hate he felt. He didn’t feel hate in his heart, or what was left of it. He didn’t know any Israelis. How could he hate them? But somehow, he did. Over two years, the anger, the rage had dissipated, leaving loss, hurt, a hole in his heart for having survived. Killing the ambassador wouldn’t fill it. But the ambassador’s bodyguards might, if one of them could shoot straight.
It wasn’t intended to be a suicide mission. He was expected to survive. It had been designed that way. An escape route had been planned. He hoped he wouldn’t need it, that he’d go up in smoke with the ambassador. He looked forward to it. He didn’t want to go back to Beirut and that wretched civil war. The Palestinian war was more than enough. War within war. Who needed to live in a world where one war was being fought within another? His entire life had been war and resistance. He had lived twenty-six years, and now no one was left. Wars had wiped out his family. It was his turn.
He rubbed his hands together. They were cold, his stomach queasy. Why was he so nervous? Wasn’t this what he wanted? Was he at bottom a coward? Could he not be as strong as his enemy? Was his enemy that strong? Invading Lebanon, bombing Beirut, leveling buildings with smart bombs, incinerating people with phosphorus bombs, cutting them to pieces with cluster bombs? What was strength, having been given the modern machines of mass killing? If that was strength, then what was cowardice? Sitting in a car on a Rome street, waiting with a loaded launcher and being afraid? The suspicion and fear of being a coward had tormented him since the day he was given the mission.
He glanced at his watch. Seeking calm, he told himself he could be as brave in facing Israelis with a Soviet RPG as they could be in raining bombs down on Beirut from American jets. He could be just as brave, he told himself, and thought of the phosphorus-impregnated body of his little sister being burned alive, cooked from the inside, her innards charred in fuming phosphorus. He could be just as brave.
He looked at his watch again. It was getting late in the afternoon. He hoped with all his heart that the target had taken one of the alternate routes to save him the sweat of proving himself. A man in a van with a rocket launcher was stationed on a corner at each of the three alternate routes. Months of observation had gone into planning. The routes were known. New ones were periodically added based on what the Italian informer inside the embassy told them. There was no certainty regarding which route the ambassador would take, but the informer had insisted this was the route for that afternoon. As mission chief, George had elected to man it. He had chosen his fate freely and would meet it bravely. He wasn’t a coward. He’d prove it even if he had to die doing it. He smiled grimly, checked the mirrors, and looked at his watch. Had the operation been called off?
It had rained in the early afternoon, a long dismal drizzle that added a blanket of gray dampness to the already leaden day. The wet streets were slippery. A getaway after launching the grenade would be more difficult on wet streets. Maybe the weather had delayed the ambassador. Maybe the operation would be postponed for another day. Maybe he’d feel braver on a sunny day. The view outside the car window was bleak.
His eyes shifted again to the side mirror. He had a clear view of the street for two blocks behind him. The limo, if it came, would appear in his mirror as it came up the street. Traffic was beginning to thicken. The waiting had made him nauseous. His hands were unsteady. Was the ambassador’s limo stuck in traffic? Had it taken a different route? Informers would say anything to collect the money. They couldn’t be trusted. Italians were notorious. He hoped the ambassador would be alone. He feared he wouldn’t have the guts to launch the grenade if he saw a girl or a