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 Germansâwe played baseball, so they got it right between their beady little blue eyesâor, 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 wasnât 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 fatherâs death was as meaningless as his motherâs, and as everyone elseâs who died that day.
Devlinâs last view of him came as he dove onto a rolling grenade. There wasnât 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 Viennaâs 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 Khaledâtwenty years old at the time of the attackâwas given a reduced sentence of thirty years in prison. The defense lawyers had argued for leniency on the grounds of Khaledâs youth, his cooperation with the authorities, and the âtraumaâ of his childhood in a refugee camp. A refugee from Israel, those Nazisâ¦
Meanwhile, âDevlinâ was one of the survivors who was rushed to the hospital. There, his fatherâs 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 officerâs own familyâunofficially, of courseâand 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 fatherâs facility for deception and his motherâs unerring ear for melody, he learned languages the way other kids learned sports or ate Cracker Jacks. He didnât 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, including all the major European languages, the Slavic tongues, Hindi, Arabic, Pashtun, Urdu, Japanese, and several dialects of Chinese, including Mandarin and Cantonese. Years later, when a woman asked him how he knew Italian, he replied, âOne afternoon it was raining, so I learned Italian.â There was no point in exaggerating.
Instead of formal schooling, he studied at the feet of his new father. Boxing and
Eric Flint, Charles E. Gannon