Chapter 11 Candlesticks in Bogota - 2

The jeep was driven by a man named Harmon.His original name was Herend, which he changed from the e to an a in order to Anglicize it.He served in the British Army and fought in Africa and Italy.In fact, he was a member of the 400-man detachment that had killed 75 per cent of the Italians at the expense of 75 per cent of the Italian troops near the Free French König in Bir Hakam. The teacher blocked them for ten days.The uniform he was wearing was indeed his own: he served in the 6th Airborne Division.To his British superiors, he is ostensibly currently on leave. Dolph Lazarus sat next to Harmon, wearing the major's identification mark.Behind them sat Reb Klimrod, also in uniform marked Corporal, with his feet resting on canvas bags containing explosives.A truck followed the Gupp with fifteen people on board, plus a driver and an officer with a handsome red mustache.Among the fifteen people, ten were dressed as Arabs with handcuffs on their wrists, and the other five were in full combat attire and helmets, acting as guards to escort the prisoners.

Nearly 200 meters away from the police station, Lazarus signaled Harmon to slow down the jeep and stop.But the truck kept going. The place was called Yagur, and it was halfway between Haifa and Nazareth.The police station is a three-story square building surrounded by two strips of barbed wire.Four sentries guarded the entrance, and four others on the roof of the sandbag embankment.There were about twenty other soldiers in the department, plus police officers, not necessarily in uniform at the moment, but certainly armed.It was three o'clock in the morning on March 1, 1946. "One minute," Lazarus announced.

They could see the entrance directly from the jeep parked in the shadows.They saw the truck stop at the gate of the police station.The officer with the mustache got out of the car and talked to the sentry squad leader.The squad leader seemed to be persuaded and appeared to agree.The truck entered the fortified position of the police station.Camouflaged guards disembarked disguised Arab prisoners with Stan and Bren submachine guns hidden in their robes. The whole action team went into the house. "Two minutes," Lazarus said. Harmon could roughly imagine what happened in the police station.The strike team was disarming the British one by one, first downstairs, then upstairs.All this was done in silence so as not to alarm anyone, especially the sentries on the roof who were ready to fire their machine guns.Then they would empty the armory and release the prisoners from the police station, and the fake officer with the moustache would show up at the door, take off his hat, and he--Harmon--would quite naturally take the jeep Drive to the entrance and let the two people in the car with him get out.He didn't know the names of those two people until after the event, but at that time he already knew that the explosives they carried were enough to blow up half of Yagur City.

"Three minutes. It's too slow..." Lazarus' voice seemed happy.Harmon put one hand on the gearshift and waited for an order, and the car would start within a second.He cast a quick glance at Lazarus, then at the thin, expressionless face of the other man in the mirror.He remembered being amazed by the absolute poise and contrasting appearance of the pair: one stocky and elderly, the other very young and very tall, with pale gray eyes Looking forward to a dream. "Notice……" Just a second after Lazarus issued the warning in a strangely calm tone, two things came up and disrupted all plans.First, two half-track armored vehicles appeared on the road leading to Nazareth nearly 100 meters to their right; second, there were screams, alarm bells, and gun battles from the police station.After this, everything happened quickly as usual.The order given to Harmon in advance was very clear: in the event of a serious accident, he must evacuate immediately.So he shifted the transmission to reverse and prepared to turn the car around.

"Wait." Lazarus pressed Harmon's wrist with his furry paw. "Look, honey," he said with a smile on his face, "it looks like armored vehicles are going to block their escape. They won't even be able to get away." At this moment, the two armored vehicles suddenly accelerated and took up the position in front of the police station, while the gunfire in the station had reached its peak.Harmon saw a fake Arab running from the house, but was immediately knocked down by machine-gun fire from the roof. "Totally blocked," Lazarus said, his smile even wider now. "How's it going, Reb? Come with me, boy?"

"I couldn't figure out what they were trying to do," Harmon said afterwards, "and even if I knew, I wasn't sure I'd have the courage to go with them. But they were both unusually calm. I didn't realize it until later, It turned out that they both wanted to surpass each other to a certain extent. It was only later that I realized that both of them were crazy." Harmon parked the jeep exactly between the two armored vehicles. "Great," Lazarus said, getting out of the car, nodding approvingly to the British in the armored vehicle.The Englishmen were looking at him in amazement, wondering where the hell had he come from? "Good job," Lazarus said in English with a slight Irish accent. "It's so damn nice of you to block off the bastards. Keep that door in your line of fire and don't let any of them get away. I'll go in and see if I can get any alive. I'm going to get them alive. "

At this time, he seemed to have just noticed that a sentry standing outside the door fell to the ground when he heard the first shot, almost at his feet, and was ready to take aim with his automatic rifle. "Is this the time to play, my boy? Why don't you get up and take your place on that corner. I remember there was a door there, and the bastards might try to get out of there. Put it Locked down. Who's the duty officer tonight?" "Lieutenant Parnell," replied the young soldier who had received a hot sarcasm from his superior. "Another Irishman!" Lazarus said emotionally, "Without us, I don't know what the British lead the country can do." He turned half his body and shot at the sentinel on the roof who was looking for targets with machine guns. He made a friendly gesture, and then said to Leiber: "And you, Barnes, what are you waiting for? Why don't you move your butt out of the jeep and come with me?"

He walked slowly through the first barbed wire fence, heading straight for the house, which still heard the crackling of automatic small arms.As it sometimes happens, there was a sudden pause in the shootout, and Lazarus seized the opportunity immediately. "Parnell!" he cried, "we've got them here, but I'm going to catch them alive! Did you hear me, Parnell?" The answer was that a shuttle of bullets bloomed less than one meter away from him, but it didn't touch him at all.So Harmon understood two things, one was that the bullets came from his fellow Irgon, who were trapped at the ground floor; the other was that they had heard his voice and recognized his likeness.

A head protruded from the second floor. It was a young officer with a rather disheveled appearance and a shirt with only two sleeves on, holding an ordinary pistol in his hand.Lazarus grinned at him and said: "Lieutenant Parnell? I'm Major Connors. God bless Ireland. We've got the bastards. Now we're going to try to get them to talk. I'm going to talk to them in their son-of-a-bitch language." .Will you order your men to stop firing, please?" Then, at the top of his voice, he spoke in Hebrew with a stronger Irish accent than usual.Even if there happened to be someone in the British army who could understand him, he took no chances.He called out to these members of Irgun, urging them to lay down their arms and surrender immediately.He told them that he was going into the house, that they had no chance of getting out alive, unless they were captured, in which case he would personally guarantee that they would be treated as political prisoners.

At this time, Reb Klimrod came to him with two heavy canvas bags on his back.After the last shot, there was a sudden silence.In the silence, they all heard the rumble of a tank approaching, followed by several trucks, all loaded with paratroopers.These reinforcements spread out and surrounded the house.Lazarus glanced at them and nodded, more satisfied than ever. "It's absolutely impossible to rush out," he said first in English and then in Hebrew. "I'll go in and take a look." After speaking, he went into the house—he went in with Klimrod.Harmon sat stunned at the steering wheel of the Guppe, watching them disappear into the police station. According to him, he felt "extremely nervous" at that time. He only felt that the encirclement of the paratroopers was getting tighter and tighter around him. .

One Englishman was killed in the police station and three others were wounded, and the commando losses were two dead and three wounded, one of them in the abdomen. It was only later that Harmon learned that the commandos had lost time for a completely ridiculous reason; no one had discovered where the keys to the armory were kept. A minute or two passed in eerie silence.At this time Lazarus spoke again. "Is it Parnell? You can come down now. They are willing to surrender. Tell those brave reinforcements that the battle is over." Behind Harmon, there was an opening in the circle of soldiers wearing steel blue heads.A captain and two plainclothes walked forward, all three of them belonged to C. I． D． (Criminal Investigations Service).They passed by Harmon and entered the police station. Lazarus greeted the newcomers with smiles, and in that split second he must have realized that at least one of the three recognized him, or would recognize him soon.He took Parnell's arm; walked towards them.He said to Reb without turning his face, "Let them see, boy." Klimrod opened the two canvas bags with his left hand, revealing a package wrapped in black oiled paper, and wires were dragged out of the package. "Each bag contained fifteen kilograms of TNT," Lazarus explained. "That guy has a piezoelectric detonator in his armpit. You can see that his right arm is close to his body. As long as he throws his arm away, even if he sneezes, boom! We all have to Fly to the sky in the smoke of gunpowder. I can guarantee that your police station will be completely blown up..." Klimrod's eyes wandered, and he said in an emotionless tone, "We are in a closed place. The explosive power will be further enhanced because of this..." "That's right," Lazarus admired, beaming with joy, like a teacher seeing his favorite student answer a question correctly.Through rimless spectacles, his pale blue eyes flickered with a merciless ferocity, convincing one that he was murderous.He went on, "Anyway, it's not surprising at all if you count forty or fifty dead. Boy, go and stand beside that guy with the blue tie. He's from the C.I.D. I guess he recognized me..." Only then did he show his cards. The same truck that originally brought the commandos still took them back, leaving only the bodies of two of their own, before going through a search for any papers or relics that might lead to a quick identification of the dead identity of.They took the road leading to Haifa, and according to the original plan, they met three people five kilometers northeast of here. The task of these three people was to cover their retreat, so they prepared a few cans of gasoline. Sprinkled on the road, you can build a wall of fire. This situation, which was estimated in advance, did not happen. As for Harmon, he used C. I． D．The situation that appeared within a few minutes after the personnel arrived, slipped away quietly.He took off his military uniform for civilian clothes, and quickly disappeared into the streets and alleys of Yagur. He still has lingering memories of the painful journey back to Nazareth by bicycle, because he was there in name Vacation and family reunion.He later returned in time to his unit at Port Said.For a long time, he didn't know how the incident ended, not until much later. James Parnell watched as the paratroopers circle opened up, allowing the trucks carrying the commandos to drive away.Before they left, the terrorists—terrorists in his eyes—had carefully burned all the documents found in the police offices.However, according to the agreed conditions.They didn't touch any of his weapons.It was the only thing that satisfied him.Nothing else cheered him up, and he found himself, along with the two C. I． D．Representatives of the 1990s, along with five others (all policemen, not a single soldier), became hostages to the self-appointed Major Connors and his young companions. Parnell never asked whether the explosives were real or not (the question arose later, and the answer came much later).He felt at once a strong antipathy, and fear, of the older, Irish-tongued one.But the other tall young man with the peculiar eyes disturbed him even more in a certain sense; his aggressive and unfathomable gaze really frightened him. Parnell, who later became a journalist and returned to Israel many times, was forced, like the other hostages, into the back of the truck and lay there with his hands folded behind his head.The terrorist in glasses sat next to the driver, holding a grenade in one hand and a Smith & Wesson in the other.With an unnerving knack for psychological warfare, he hand-picks a policeman in his fifties to drive, the last person likely to think up ideas and make desperate moves. His young accomplice climbed into the back of the truck, expressionless and silent, with one arm close to his body and an automatic rifle in the other. The paratroopers let them through again.The truck was going rather slowly as it left.Parnell thought they were trying to make sure there were no pursuers, but he couldn't see any himself.The truck was heading in the direction of Nazareth.Parnell expected: a few kilometers to the south there was a military barricade.But three or four minutes later, the car changed direction and walked along a muddy path for half an hour before stopping.He heard the man with the glasses say: "Get out of the car, all except the two specialists from the C.I.D. and the Irishman I'm particularly fond of." They left the freed hostages in a desert and continued on the road, this time asking Parnell to drive and letting the two C. I．Personnel shackled and handcuffed lying in the back of the truck.The car crawled for an hour on an almost impassable road. So the car stopped again.Parnell was strapped to the front fender of the car.He knew a little Hebrew and could understand the conversation—the argument, really—that was now going on between the two terrorists.The older one will take two C. I． D．The personnel were killed on the spot. "After killing them, he's going to kill me," thought Parnell. "Oh my God, who called me Irish?" Dawn in Galilee is drizzling.Parnell thought he could hear a gunshot every second.Unexpectedly, the tall and thin young man walked up to him, bowed and untied him, and said to him in an unexpectedly soft and calm voice: "Don't act rashly, okay? Otherwise, I can't be safe for your life." Responsible." "Okay," said Parnell, genuinely relieved. "Thank you, thank you so much." Those gray eyes flicked across Parnell's face, still inscrutable. They arrived at St. John in Acre at six-thirty in the morning.Parnell was alone in the truck cab.Twenty minutes before, two of his opponents had switched to the back, and the younger one had warned him not to turn his head, and had smashed the mirror so he couldn't see what was going on behind him. The car arrived at Hanel-Amdan Square and stopped slowly near the designated destination, the Column Hotel.A long silence reassured him.Needless to say, there was no one in the car behind him, only the two C. I． D．Personnel are furious, but alive.