Vengeance aka the book behind
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0408306/plot summary:
After the assassinations of eleven Isreali Olympic athletes during the 1972 Olympic games, a team of five
Isrealis were plucked from various services of their military to form a team of special agents. The agents' task will be to exact, you guessed it, vengeance on all those who were involved in the planning of the massacre, provided in a list which had to be memorized before leaving Isreal, and subsequently those who stand in the agents' way of carrying out those orders ; not the Fedayeen who carried out the massacre as they were all killed when the West German police attempted, with hindsight at the wrong time, to rescue the hostages as the Fedayeen were trying to escape at Munich's airport.
The book takes you through all of their hits which with the right information, the team, as I will now call them, find them quite easy to carry out. Their first hit had not much more sophistication, if we're to only focus on the actual killing and immediate getaway, than a gang shooting. After the initial getaway of their first killing, the team had hired, with foresight, a new set of cars to take the team to their safe houses. After that first hit, the team, I'm presuming, subconsciously wanted to have a lot more distance to their hits both physically and with their disguises to look a lot less and act less like a team of, essentially, hit men. Though most of it was taught before the team had left Isreal, people are still human and more had to be learnt(that's right not learned). Eventually, the team "moves on" to explosives and their second, though first with explosives of course, hit goes off without a hitch on the tiny Island of Cyprus except for incurring a little uneasiness, presumably, from the Island's Greek and Turkish residents who're usually at each other's throats.
Gleaming with success, the team, from their Frankfurt home base, hear about the arrival of another Arab terrorist in the Greek capital. Upon arrival in Athens, the team's demolitions expert seeks out some material from the team's usual source, which is to put it basically a well-educated, anarchistic, French family, for such illegal weaponry provides some very old and volatile hand grenades which, I don't know the name for such bombs or weaponry, suck out all the air in a sealed environment; in this case, it's to be a hotel room. The team experiences their first real hitch when the terrorist organzier, after six of these grenades had been implanted in the mattress and set to be primed when the terrorist organizer sits on the bed and presses down on a complex system of springs, primes the explosive but the bombs don't go off. The team is saved the embarrassment and possible cancelation of their mission due to failure when one of the team's older members impulsively goes to the terrorist organizer's room and throws one of the left-over grenades into the room and is able to walk away due to the small blast radius of the grenades. From here on out the team is sent, involuntarily, into a spiral of near failures and eventually the murders of some of their own team members. The team suspect the anarchistic French family to be the route cause of their losses as they are usually the only ones who know about the team's whereabouts most of the time and to the team's knowledge. In fact, it's after the death of their third member, I know slow learners, EH(
), that the team has their last telephone conversation with the French family or with the son, Louis, with whom the team usually deals. It marks the end of their access with the family who provided the team's best information and supply of materials, but as is indicative of the family's views, the way to start anew with civilization is to do away with, in any form, of all governments and their various agencies which involves selling information about either side to all different sides, and the team's mission to their consternation.
The mission ends, I forget exactly how at the moment, in a melancholy sort of way as the team ties up their loose ends, paying various informants, soothing the deceaseds' families and generally accepting their failure for not having killed all of the terrorist organizers on their list. Only when the team has returned to Isreal do they realize that their mission was not in fact a failure but rather quite the opposite when he is greeted at the Tel Aviv airport to a congratulating, pair of younger agents, who pick the remaining team members up, and their counter-terrorist team organizer(one doesn't want to think of the adjective which would accompany a team to take a counter-terrorist team out and so on down the line
). For a few days the two, including the central character Avner, are treated like royalty. However it's a brief lapse in luxury as Avner is soon brought down to earth by his superiors who want him to go out again on another similar mission, presumably to suck another ten years off his life spiritually as had been said by his wife when he had been returned to him even though the mission spanned a few years. Avner soon tries to escape to America where he'd had his wife live during the mission for the most part from the Mossad agents who invariably follow him and are quite easily spotted by Avner who with his level of expertise knew exactly how to find them. Avner reminds himself of what his father, who had been an agent, that "they'll squeeze you dry until they've gotten everything they want from you" and never has he wanted to listen and act upon what his father had wisely said. To his astonishment, after arriving in New York and checking his Swiss bank account in which his paychecks during his mission had been deposited, Avner found that there was a total of zero. After much desperation and fighting with the "Galicianers", a.k.a. the root of most Jewish stereotypes(more on that later), Avner decided to make his living in America and turn his back to Isreal.
My view: I enjoyed the book, to the point of reading it a few times, as it's quite gripping at least for a book and I enjoyed reading about the assassinations and the various details involved in such endeavors. I also took in the information on the various problems with the Jews, mostly against themselves giving me insight into the self-hating Jew apart from parts of my extended family(
), and the Arabs. I can't say that I didn't agree with Avner's dim view of the Galicianers, though I forget what Western-European Jews are called, who because of their Eastern-European ancestries, were a lot more conservative and selfish with their spending and dividing of the wealth, often to the detrement of non-Galicianers who were just as much residents of Isreal as them and in Avner's case, had stuck their necks out more than them for Isreal. The most back-stabbing thing the Galicianers did in my opinion is that they made Avner sign a contract after he'd come back to defend his country and was sleep deprived and slightly edgy from recent combat during I forget which war which nullified all his earnings unless he kept working for them. I forgot most of the details but it's pretty low in my opinion. Rant over but overall I like the book.
