Prince of Fire

world, plummeted. Literacy rates, among the world’s lowest, increased dramatically. Radical Islam and the influence of the PLO would eventually turn the West Bank into a seething cauldron and place IDF soldiers in daily confrontations with rock-throwing children, but for Gabriel, army service had been largely an exercise in boredom.
    “So you’re going to see the Irrelevant One,” said Yonatan, intruding on Gabriel’s thoughts.
    “Your father arranged a meeting for me.”
    “The man’s seventy-five years old, and he’s still pulling the strings like a puppet master.” Yonatan smiled and shook his head. “Why doesn’t he just retire and take it easy?”
    “He’d go insane,” said Gabriel. “And so would your poor mother. He asked me to say hello to you, by the way. He’d like you to come to Tiberias for Shabbat.”
    “I’m on duty,” Yonatan said hastily.
    Duty, it seemed, was Yonatan’s ready-made excuse to avoid spending time with his father. Gabriel was reluctant to involve himself in the tangled internal disputes of the Shamron family, yet he knew how badly the old man had been hurt by the estrangement of his children. He had a selfish motive for intervention as well. If Yonatan were a larger presence in Shamron’s life, it might relieve some of the pressure on Gabriel. Now that Gabriel was living in Jerusalem instead of Venice, Shamron felt free to telephone at all hours to swap Office gossip or dissect the latest political developments. Gabriel needed his space back. Yonatan, if skillfully handled, could act as a sort of Separation Fence.
    “He wants to see more of you, Yonatan.”
    “I can only take him in small doses.” Yonatan took his eyes from the road a moment to look at Gabriel. “Besides, he always liked you better.”
    “You know that’s not true.”
    “All right, so it’s a bit of an exaggeration. But it’s not all that far from the truth. He certainly thinks of you as a son.”
    “Your father’s a great man.”
    “Yes,” Yonatan said, “and great men are hard on their sons.”
    Gabriel glimpsed a pair of large tan-colored armored personnel carriers parked ahead of them at the edge of the road. “It’s best not to enter town without a bit of muscle,” Yonatan said. They formed a small convoy, with Yonatan’s jeep in the middle position, and drove on.
    The first evidence of the approaching city was the stream of Arabs walking along the edge of the highway. The hijabs of the women fluttered like pennants in the midday breeze. Then Ramallah, low and drab, rose out of the arid landscape. Jerusalem Street bore them into the heart of the city. The faces of the “martyrs” glared at Gabriel from every passing lamppost. There were streets named for the dead, squares and markets for the dead. A kiosk dispensed key chains with faces of the dead attached. An Arab moved among the traffic, hawking a martyrs’ calendar. The newest posters bore the seductive image of a beautiful young girl, the Arab teenager who had detonated herself in the Ben Yehuda Mall two nights previously.
    Yonatan turned right into Broadcast Street and followed it for about a mile, until they reached a roadblock manned by a half-dozen Palestinian Security officers. Ramallah was technically under Palestinian control again. Gabriel had come at the invitation of the Authority’s president, the equivalent of entering a Sicilian village with the blessing of the local don. There was little tension in evidence as Yonatan, in fluent Arabic, spoke to the leader of the Palestinian detail.
    Several minutes elapsed while the Palestinian consulted with his superiors over a handheld radio. Then he tapped the roof of the jeep and waved them forward. “Slowly, Colonel Shamron,” he cautioned. “Some of these boys were here the night the Egoz Battalion broke down the gate and started shooting up the place. We wouldn’t want there to be any misunderstandings.”
    Yonatan weaved his way through a maze of concrete barriers, then accelerated gently. A cement wall, about twelve feet in height and pockmarked by heavy-caliber machine-gun fire, appeared on their right. In places it had been knocked down, so that the effect was of a mouth of bad teeth. Palestinian security units, some in pickup trucks, others in jeeps, patrolled the perimeter. They eyed Gabriel and Yonatan provocatively but kept their weapons down. Yonatan braked to a halt at the entrance. Gabriel removed his helmet and body armor.
    Yonatan asked, “How