Free Prince of Fire by Daniel Silva Page B

the warlord to name his price.
    “Tell me the name of the man who betrayed me in Hadera.”
    Haj Amin hesitated, then answered truthfully. Sheikh Asad was more valuable to his cause than Abu Fareed.
    “Where is he?”
    That night Sheikh Asad traveled to Beirut and slit the throat of Abu Fareed. Then he returned to Damascus to bid farewell to his wife and son and see to their financial needs. A week later he was back in his old straw-and-mud cottage in Beit Sayeed.
    He spent the remaining months of 1947 raising his force and planning his strategy for the coming conflict. Frontal assaults against heavily defended Jewish population centers would prove futile, he concluded. Instead, he would strike the Jews where they were most vulnerable. Jewish settlements were scattered around Palestine and dependent on the roads for supplies. In many cases, such as the vital Jerusalem Corridor, those roads were dominated by Arab towns and villages. Sheikh Asad immediately understood the opportunity before him. He could strike soft targets with complete tactical surprise; then, when the engagement was over, his forces could melt into the sanctuaries of the villages. The settlements would slowly whither, and so too would the Jewish will to remain in Palestine.
    On November 29, the United Nations declared that British rule in Palestine would soon end. There were to be two states in Palestine, one Arab, the other Jewish. For the Jews, it was a night of celebration. The two-thousand-year-old dream of a state in the ancient home of the Jews had come true. For the Arabs, it was a night of bitter tears. Half of their ancestral home was to be given to the Jews. Sheikh Asad al-Khalifa spent that night planning his first strike. The following morning, his men attacked a bus as it made its way from Netanya to Jerusalem, killing five people. The battle for Palestine had begun.
    Throughout the winter of 1948, Sheikh Asad and the other Arab commanders turned the roads of central Palestine into a Jewish graveyard. Buses, taxis, and supply trucks were attacked, drivers and passengers massacred without mercy. As winter turned to spring, Haganah losses in men and materiel mounted at an alarming rate. During a two-week span in late March, Arab forces killed hundreds of the Haganah’s best fighters and destroyed the bulk of its fleet of armored vehicles. By the end of the month, the settlements of the Negev were cut off. More importantly, so too were the hundred thousand Jews of West Jerusalem. For the Jews, the situation was growing desperate. The Arabs had seized the initiative—and Sheikh Asad was almost single-handedly winning the war for Palestine.
    On the night of March 31, 1948, David Ben-Gurion, leader of the Yishuv, met in Tel Aviv with senior officers of the Haganah and the elite Palmach strike force and ordered them to go on the offensive. The days of trying to protect vulnerable convoys against overwhelming odds were over, Ben-Gurion said. The entire Zionist enterprise faced imminent collapse unless the battle of the roads was won and the interior of the country secured. In order to achieve that goal, the conflict had to be taken to a new level of violence. The Arab villages that Sheikh Asad and the other warlords used as bases for their operations had to be conquered and destroyed—and if there was no other option, the inhabitants had to be expelled. The Haganah had already drawn up a master plan for just such an operation. It was called Tochnit Dalet: Plan D. Ben-Gurion ordered it to begin in two days with Operation Nachshon, an assault on the villages lining the besieged Jerusalem Corridor. “And one more thing,” he said to his commanders as the meeting adjourned. “Find Sheikh Asad as quickly as possible—and kill him.”
    The man chosen to hunt down Sheikh Asad, a young Palmach intelligence officer named Ari Shamron, knew that Sheikh Asad would not be easy to find. The warlord maintained no fixed military headquarters and was rumored to