Free Hostile Intent by Michael Walsh

was what animated him, fueled, propelled him. He was alive because she had died, she who had already given him life once before, and if nothing else he owed it to her to live and keep on living, to kill and keep on killing, until the madness that had engulfed his family either was put to rest, or he was.
    The death of his father he witnessed with more equanimity. He had always known his father was a hero, that his father had accomplished great deeds, which he could never hope to match or equal. For as long as Devlin could remember, he had been aware that his father had sought precisely this life, which meant that he had also sought precisely this death.
    Up to this moment, the only grenades Devlin had ever seen were in war movies. German television was full of war movies, in which the good Americans killed the beastly Germans or the even beastlier Japs. For some reasons, Germans enjoyed being the bad guys, and for all Devlin knew maybe they still did, but every movie had a scene in which the Germans tossed one of those funny long skinny grenades, so unlike our grenades, and then their grenades would roll around our trenches until either they exploded, killing at least one of the secondary characters in the movie, or one of our guys picked it up and threw it back at the Germans—we played baseball, so they got it right between their beady little blue eyes—or, best of all, one of our guys fell on the grenade, muffled the explosion with his belly and saved the lives of everybody else in the trench. Even though he died.
    Of course, it wasn’t like that in real life. Memories:
    Father, pulling his service pistol, trying to return fire. His father was a good shot and Devlin thinks he remembers dad knocking down one of the Arabs with a single shot. True or not, he wants to remember it that way. Otherwise, his father’s death was as meaningless as his mother’s, and as everyone else’s who died that day.
    Devlin’s last view of him came as he dove onto a rolling grenade. There wasn’t much left of him to bury next to his wife, just a bloody trunk and the severed fingers of one hand.
    When it was over, when the Israelis guarding the El Al terminal that was the target of the attack had killed three of the four Arabs, eighty people were wounded, and sixteen of them died. A nearly simultaneous attack on Vienna’s Schwechat Airport took two more lives, and wounded sixty more, all at the behest of Abu Nidal. The same Abu Nidal who, years later, had turned up mysteriously dead in Baghdad as a guest of Saddam Hussein.
    The only surviving Palestinian gunman, Ibrahim Mohammed Khaled—twenty years old at the time of the attack—was given a reduced sentence of thirty years in prison. The defense lawyers had argued for leniency on the grounds of Khaled’s youth, his cooperation with the authorities, and the “trauma” of his childhood in a refugee camp. A refugee from Israel, those Nazis…
    Meanwhile, “Devlin” was one of the survivors who was rushed to the hospital. There, his father’s friend, the man in the Munich apartment, told the doctors to stop. He told them the boy was dead. And then he ordered them back to work, saving the lives of those who could be saved.
    And so that boy, whatever his name once had been, was no more.
    He was adopted into that officer’s own family—unofficially, of course—and he changed his name like he changed his socks. At each overseas duty station, and they were all overseas duty stations, he got a new name, a new identity, a new history, a new school transcript, a new life.
    Along the way, the boy learned. Blessed with his father’s facility for deception and his mother’s unerring ear for melody, he learned languages the way other kids learned sports or ate Cracker Jacks. He didn’t just learn them, he snacked on them until he had mastered at least as many tongues and dialects as his idol, the great nineteenth-century British explorer and adventurer Sir Richard Francis Burton,