Tongues of Fire

by Peter Abrahams

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  PRAISE FOR THE WRITING OF PETER ABRAHAMS

  “Peter Abrahams is my favorite American suspense novelist.” —Stephen King

  “The care with which Abrahams brings his characters to life sets him apart from most thriller writers working today.” —The New Yorker

  Hard Rain

  “A good thriller needs style, atmosphere and a surprising plot, and Hard Rain … has all of these and something extra: depth of feeling.” —The New York Times Book Review

  “A class-A thriller.” —James Ellroy

  “A riveting tale of betrayal and vengeance set against a backdrop of sixties craziness and enriched by some wonderfully wicked observations on the way we live and love.” —Jonathan Kellerman

  The Fury of Rachel Monette

  “A roller coaster of a novel.” —Los Angeles Times

  “Visual, frightening, fast-paced and mesmerizing. [Abrahams] is a natural-born artist, a brilliant young writer who has a truly remarkable talent for writing psychological thrillers of enormous power, depth and intensity.” —The Denver Post

  Pressure Drop

  “[A] gripping tale … Maintaining suspense throughout, Abrahams sets his scenes with evocative details.” —Publishers Weekly

  “Thrillers aren’t generally known for sharp social observation, or for sympathetic examination of career women caught with their biological alarm clocks set to go off and good men a scarce commodity. Pressure Drop supplies both, along with the requisite amount of nasty villains and brave deeds.” —Booklist

  Tongues of Fire

  “Israel as a nation has ceased to exist. Israel and the Israeli [people] have been driven from their land into the sea by Syria, Iraq and other Arab states. Thus begins Tongues of Fire.… This fascinating story relates very plausibly to our age and time. It is gripping.” —Bestsellers

  Tongues of Fire

  Peter Abrahams, also known as Spencer Quinn

  for Enid, in memory

  To depart from evil is understanding.

  —Job, Chapter 28

  PROLOGUE

  It was the night Israel died.

  It was night as bright as day.

  It could have been day, on another planet where the sky was red and purple and green; where the clouds were balls of orange and yellow fire; where the ground never stopped trembling; where there was no air to breathe, only smoke and dust, cordite and oil, shrapnel and blood.

  It could have been a colossal experiment to drive rats crazy; but people, not rats, went mad. The rats would go on as they always did.

  It was the night Isaac Rehv crouched behind a gutted school bus on the southern slopes of Mount Carmel: Isaac Rehv, lieutenant in the Israeli army reserve, lecturer in Arab history and literature at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, husband of Naomi, father of Lena, aged ten. He still carried his weapon, he still wore his grimy fatigues, but his part in the organization of the war was finished. Syrian and Iraqi tanks had wiped out his unit a few hours before outside the village of Hamra three kilometers to the east. They had wiped out the village too. It was hard to imagine the whole country ruined like that—Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Haifa. But Isaac Rehv knew it was happening.

  He listened to Israeli artillery near the summit shelling Egyptian positions somewhere on the plain. He listened to Egyptian rockets answer back, and Syrian ones from the north. They burst against the mountain in hot fury. He felt their power in the soles of his feet.

  Rehv had not eaten for two days or slept for three. He had stopped thinking about the war or the enemy or defeat. He had even stopped hating the Americans. He thought only of Naomi and Lena. Was it only a week before he had sent them to his mother’s in Haifa? “Until they settle this West Bank situation,” he had said. But you can’t arrest a million rioters. That was the beginning.

  Rehv peered through the twisted body of the bus, scanning the lower slopes for the streets and shops and houses he had known since boyhood. He was looking for a little white house in a small square about a third of the way up the mountain. It took him a long time to picture what had been from what he saw. The buildings were rubble, the bombed streets were buried in debris. He wanted badly to rise and start running up the mountain to that little white house, but he forced himself to stay where he was until he was sure of his bearings.

  At last he crept into the open. Even before he could take a first running step across the road a steely insect hissed by his ear, and another whined against the body of the bus. He dropped to the ground and rolled under the bus. Two more bullets bit into the road in front of his face. The stranger who was trying to kill him was hidden somewhere to his right, not far away. In the past week Rehv had grown knowledgeable about the sounds different weapons make, the way he had once learned to identify the instruments in an orchestra; he knew that the stranger was trying to kill him with a Russian-made AK-S. It was not much different from the standard AK-47, but to his ear it had a more authoritative crack. It also fired fragmentation bullets, which dug holes the size of soccer balls and carried legs away instead of wounding them. He made himself very small. That didn’t stop the sniper from firing a few more rounds. One shattered glass; one tore up a lump of pavement; the third didn’t appear to hit anything at all, shot somehow into the void.

  But the third bullet drew a brief staccato reply—the familiar voice of the Uzi submachine gun. It was so near it made Rehv’s tired body jump. To his right, where the man with the fragmentation gun was hidden, he heard a muffled cry, then nothing.

  Rehv looked around. There was another man under the bus. With some difficulty he was pulling himself out into the road. For a moment Rehv thought he must be wounded, but then the man stood up and the reason was clear: He was enormous, the kind of man called a giant in former times. He carried one Uzi in his hands and another across his back. They both seemed like toys. With surprising lightness of foot he advanced on Rehv, reached down, and took him by the elbow. Rehv glimpsed the sergeant’s stripes on the sleeve as he was whisked to his feet. Rehv was six feet tall. That brought his eyes to chest level with the sergeant, where he read the name tag sewn on his shirt: “Levy.”

  The big man smiled down at him. “You’re lucky he couldn’t hit anything, Lieutenant,” he said. “You’d be dead.”

  Rehv didn’t need to be told. And in no way did he feel lucky. The big man seemed to notice how his words had been understood. He patted Rehv lightly on the shoulder. “Take care of yourself,” he said, and turned to leave.

  “Wait. Where are you going?”

  Sergeant Levy pointed his gun barrel at the summit. Rehv looked up. Fans of flame erupted from its surface like storms on the sun. He heard the pounding of the enemy guns, so incessant now that he couldn’t separate one explosion from the next. They merged into one roar like a ghastly drumroll. He could no longer hear the Israeli artillery fighting back.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” he said to Sergeant Levy. But the big man had already disappeared quietly into the shadows.

  Carefully Rehv picked his way up the mountain, half bent over, edging along from crumpled house to splintered tree. He recognized a butcher’s shop. Mr. Kardish’s, he remembered, where his mother bought her meat. One wall remained, and on its meat hooks in a tidy row hung sides of beef.

  Rehv turned into the next street, a narrow street which opened into a small square. In the center of the square stood a stone fountain. Rehv saw that it was still working: The big green fish spouted a steady stream of water into a scalloped seashell below, as it had done for years. He couldn’t hear the fountain’s gurgl
e because of the bombardment, but he could see that it was undamaged. So were all the houses around the square, including the little white one at the end. He began to hope.

  He ran to the familiar blue door and turned the handle. The door opened and he stepped inside.

  “Naomi? Lena? Mother?” He listened to his voice call their names through the dark house. “Naomi? Naomi?”

  He tried the light switch by the door but there was no electricity. Automatically, without bumping into anything, Rehv went to the dining room and felt along the dining room table until he found the candleholder. His mother liked to dine by candlelight. He took a wooden match from his chest pocket and lit a candle.

  “Naomi? Lena? Mother?”

  He went from room to room. Everything seemed completely normal. A bottle of sherry stood on the drink tray, and American magazines were scattered on the coffee table. Rehv walked quickly through the living room, the study, the kitchen. He opened the broom closet. It was full of brooms.

  He climbed the stairs. His mother’s bed was made. So was the one in the guest bedroom where Naomi would sleep. An open box of tampons lay on the bedside table. In his old bedroom Lena had left the bed unmade. On the pillow was a book of stories by Edgar Allan Poe, in English. Lena liked scary stories.

  Rehv returned to the study. Perhaps, he thought, they’ve gone somewhere safe and left me a note? He began opening the drawers of the desk. He found bills, receipts, letters, stationery, keys, and 6,420 shekels in Israeli currency, far too much money to be left lying around the house. But no note.

  And far too much money to be left behind.

  Suddenly Rehv thought of the toolshed in the back garden. He had often hidden inside as a boy, playing hide-and-seek. There was plenty of room for three people, especially three small ones. He ran to the kitchen and threw open the back door.

  In the wild light he saw the shed door dangling at an angle, torn off its hinges. Naomi, Lena, and his mother lay in the rock garden. Rehv felt his insides turn to ice. Almost against his will he went closer, as if drawn by magnets.

  They were naked, bloody, raped, battered, and dead. He could see a streak of semen on Lena’s cheek. It was not quite dry.

  Rehv began to scream; but all the screaming stayed within his head. His screams pounded from one side to the other of his skull, crashing back and forth in overwhelming waves. He did not utter a sound.

  Isaac Rehv was not a religious man; he did not believe in heaven or hell, or any sort of life after death. Prayers for the dead, funerals, burials were meaningless. That was the kind of man he was.

  Rehv went into the house, found a large washbasin under the kitchen sink, and turned on the tap. There was no water. He carried the washbasin out into the square and filled it at the fountain. He returned to the backyard with water, soap, towels. Then he knelt in front of Lena and washed her face. He washed her body, and his mother’s, and Naomi’s. Clutched in Naomi’s hand he found a torn scrap of cloth—the black-and-white check of the Palestinian Army keffiyeh.

  Gently he dried them with the towels. In the toolshed he found a small garden spade. He began to dig a hole in the middle of the lawn. He wanted to dig a very deep hole. He took off his shirt so he could move more freely. Sweat ran down his arms, soaked the wooden shaft, dripped off the blade. He dug for hours, not conscious of the bombardment or the small-arms fire coming closer. He heard two sounds: the shovel slicing into the earth and the screaming in his head.

  When he thought he had dug deeply enough he reentered the house and gathered some clothing—sleeping gowns for Naomi and his mother, flannel pajamas for Lena. He dressed them and lowered them carefully into the hole, side by side. For a long time he stood at the edge, watching them. Down in the shadows they might have been sleeping. Then whiteness flared around him and showed how they really were. He threw in the first shovelful.

  Later, when he had filled in the hole and made the ground smooth, he went looking in the garden for flowers. He wanted roses, but his mother was a poor gardener; he could find only morning glories, closed for the night. He plucked a few and scattered them over the grave. There was nothing more to do. He had buried them in Israel.

  Isaac Rehv walked into the square. The fountain was gone. Broken stone lay scattered on the ground, and water gushed from the broken pipe. A large dark form was crawling slowly away.

  Rehv didn’t reach for his rifle; he didn’t have it anymore. Or his helmet. Or his shirt. He was content to let the dark form crawl away when something about it made him think.

  “Wait,” he called. He felt he had to shout to be heard above the screaming.

  The form stopped. Rehv, crossing the square, stumbled. He looked down: a leg, a human leg with an enormous black army boot at one end and horror at the other. He hurried over to the form. It moved, and a scratched and blackened face looked up at him, smiling faintly.

  “This time I will,” Sergeant Levy said.

  Rehv stripped off his trousers—all the clothing he had—and tore them into strips. He tied a tourniquet around the massive upper thigh and tried to fashion a bandage over the wound. But it was a difficult fit because the femur hung down several inches lower than the rest of the leg.

  “I’ve always like this fountain,” Sergeant Levy said. “Fighting makes me thirsty.”

  “Can you sit up?”

  “Sure.”

  But he couldn’t for a while.

  Finally Rehv helped him rise up on his one leg.

  “Not too much touching of the old stump,” Sergeant Levy said very quietly.

  “Sorry.”

  “No need to shout. It’s all right.”

  Rehv tried not to hear the screaming. He lifted Sergeant Levy’s arm and braced himself beneath it. “Ready?”

  “Where’s your weapon?” Sergeant Levy asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “You’re not much of a soldier, are you, Lieutenant?” Sergeant Levy said. He still had a Uzi strapped on his back.

  Before Rehv could think of anything to say, the sky turned white and exploded in their faces, knocking them down. He and Sergeant Levy huddled together on the shaking earth. When it stopped shaking, Rehv looked up. There was nothing left of the little white house; only the toolshed remained, its door dangling from broken hinges.

  They started walking down the mountain, making their way around the broken buildings, craters, and fires of Haifa toward the beach. They walked very slowly. It gave them time to look at the famous view. On the beach black figures were massed by the edge of the sea. From time to time they moved about frantically like nervous ants. Their long shadows ran after them in the red glow.

  “Dunkirk,” Sergeant Levy said.

  “No. At Dunkirk the boats came right up to the beach.”

  Rehv was right. Beyond the beach stretched the sea, empty and black for a long way out; three miles, Rehv guessed. And beyond that, like a phosphorescent tide, shone the lights of boats and ships, dozens, hundreds, thousands of them. Some were huge—American warships, they could tell that from the shore. They waited out there like the promised land.

  “I always thought the Americans would step in if it came to this,” Sergeant Levy said softly. “They say there was a secret agreement.”

  “That’s the trouble with secret agreements. Who do you complain to if they’re broken?” What’s the value of a secret agreement, Rehv thought, when regular gasoline was selling for six dollars a gallon at the pumps in Cleveland, Ohio?

  They kept walking.

  When they came to the beach Rehv felt the cool wind blowing in off the sea. He saw that only a few of the thousands watching the ships offshore realized that they would come no closer. They were the naked, pale figures swimming off in ones and twos. He lowered Sergeant Levy onto the sand while he removed his boots, the only clothing he still wore. Sergeant Levy took off his boot and his shirt.

  “I’d better leave the pants on, don’t you think, Lieutenant?”

  His stump was turning the sand red.<
br />
  “Yes,” Isaac Rehv replied.

  He knelt down to get his shoulders under Sergeant Levy’s arm. It occurred to him how much he admired Sergeant Levy for making no false offer to be left behind.

  Someone else said it for him. “Surely you don’t propose to take this poor man into the water?” Rehv looked up into the angry eyes of a tall, middle-aged woman. She was wrapped in a sable coat against the cold.

  Rehv didn’t answer.

  “It’s one thing if you want to drown yourself, quite another to drown this poor man.”

  “I’m not a poor man,” Sergeant Levy said.

  She ignored him. “I insist that you leave him where he is.” He knew from her tone she had done a lot of succesful insisting in her life. “The landing craft will be here any moment.”

  Rehv tried to laugh a bitter laugh, but it was swallowed up by the screaming. He lurched to his feet, bringing Sergeant Levy upright.

  “I insist,” the woman began again, but her words were drowned out by noise from above. Everyone on the beach looked up. A helicopter passed overhead.

  “You see!” the woman shouted.

  But all Rehv saw was a cameraman leaning out of the cabin and the letters CBS on the fuselage.

  Isaac Rehv and Sergeant Levy stumbled into the cold sea. “Don’t worry,” Rehv told him, “I was on the swimming team at university.”

  “Really? I can’t swim a stroke.”

  Rehv began by swimming on his back, holding Sergeant Levy’s head on his chest with one arm and paddling with the other. At first he tried a frog kick, but he kept bumping Sergeant Levy’s bad leg, so he gave it up. Above the night sky shone in many unnatural colors. Isaac Rehv never forgot the way the sky looked that night.

  After a while he had to stop.

  “Can you tread water?”

  “Sure.”

  But Sergeant Levy couldn’t, and Rehv had to bring him up, the two of them sputtering and splashing. He knew he had kicked Sergeant Levy again. The big man didn’t say anything, but his face turned to tallow.