The major frowned an already soured face. “Regardless of the crap you hear and read in the Hearst papers, Roosevelt will be reelected in a landslide. After he’s sworn in, he’ll be assassinated in favor of his vice president, John ‘Cactus Jack’ Garner. Although Garner has never said it in public, Garner hates everything about the New Deal, labor unions, and Communists. When he’s president, he’ll admit it, return to the gold standard, and side us with Germany.”
Eddie shied, like you would from a loud drunk with a broken bottle or a mental patient who should be in a straightjacket but wasn’t. “Ah . . . someone intends to assassinate President Roosevelt so we’ll side with the Fascists . . . in a war . . . that hasn’t started?”
The major turned just his head like an evil Charlie McCarthy ventriloquist dummy. “And you find that hard to believe. Because of your vast fucking experience outside Oklahoma and Itasca, Texas.”
“Well, I—”
“Listen, sonny, our Wall Street bankers and captains of industry are just fine with Hitler. They say someone has to stop the Communists and their labor unions or the Communists will bury the world’s democracies in another Depression.” The major pointed at the triangle of his windshield. “And for the record, the big dog king of England agrees.”
Eddie said, “My family’s still in the Depression, Major. So any answer that ends it is a damn good idea. And from what I’ve read and heard, Stalin’s Communists seemed dead set on pouring fire across Europe, so stopping the Communists might be a good idea, too.”
The major’s cheeks reddened, pushing heat into his scars. “I’ve seen the Jerries in person, college boy, in the trenches steel to steel. Seen towns after Jerries’ been there.”
A long silence followed, as if the major were deciding whether to continue. Finally he flexed his neck, raising the square chin, and said:
“We’re having this conversation because somebody found an ocean of oil under the desert where you’re headed. Keeps getting bigger . . . fuel the world’s moneymen want worse than male children. All the oil the Fascists, Communists, and Capitalists will need to march their armies at one another. And once these dumb bastard bankers and munitions makers start this war—in Europe or Russia or maybe the Balkans again—it’ll spread . . . like a plague. No way these turncoat sons-a-bitches here will be able to stop it where and when they want. Your aviation gas is the antidote. With luck, Mr. Roosevelt can be protected, kept alive long enough to try these Wall Street and Detroit bastards for treason. Then we’ll use your gas to bomb their Nazi friends back to their fucking castles.”
“We, meaning the Army Air Corps?”
The major didn’t answer.
Eddie felt the noose around his neck but couldn’t see who held it. “Who wears an Army Air Corps uniform but has USMC on his wrist? And how’s it you have the inside scoop on the world’s politics?”
The major inspected his USMC tattoo. Chesterfield smoke hid his expression. “You and the rest of this democracy’s citizens aren’t paying attention. It’s a bad habit.”
“I pay attention.”
“Yeah? Like that blonde and her playmates speaking German tonight. Six to five she’s Nazi Luftwaffe and you’ll see her again, somewhere, an accident, but she’ll be there, on the arm of somebody you trust . . . You don’t have a clue, Mr. Owen, but your ass better get one.”
Eddie cocked his head to answer.
“And you better get it soon, ’cause the USA won’t be neutral forever. ‘Our side,’ and whoever ends up deciding our nation’s intentions, needs 100-octane AvGas if we figure on being anything but prisoners of war to the winner, and we need 100 octane before these treasonous bastards kill Roosevelt and give everything you know to the Nazis.”
Eddie tried to figure how “these treasonous bastards” could get AvGas if “a company in New Jersey” that ten to one had to be Standard Oil had the only formula? Or the small detail that only a handful of Americans knew how to theoretically modify the current refinery equipment to make AvGas. And so far, only Eddie Owen and East Chicago, Indiana, had actually done it. And no one knew how consistent the run would be until several runs had been completed. And that hadn’t happened yet.
The major said, “When asked what you’re doing—by anybody, including Americans—you’re in Bahrain for the start-up, trying to fix a temperature problem. You’ve heard of ‘cracking’ but know nothing about it, think it’s bullshit, in fact. Don’t know nothing and ain’t interested.” The major’s eyes were just slits now and not much goodwill left. “Think you can follow that, Eddie the Cushing Fucking Flash? Or do we need a map to Montague County?”
Eddie had a burning desire to get out of the car but didn’t. “So we understand each other, Major, my family matters to me more than I matter to me.” Eddie tapped the .45 he’d been given. “I do know how to use this. Threaten my family again and I will.”
CHAPTER 4
June, 1936
The Arab Revolt was in its sixtieth day. To Saba’s south and west, Palestine was open war. The Revolt had begun in Jaffa as a national strike organized and initiated by the AHC—Arab Higher Committee—an uneasy alliance of Arab kings, sheiks, and emirs headquartered in Iraq. Saba agreed the national strike had begun in Jaffa, but “uneasy alliance” was the Red Crescent and Red Cross description of the AHC. She knew the AHC for the violent factions and open betrayals that it really was.
Spread beneath her and her partisans was the French detention-refugee camp at Dhār el Baidar, the camp where she had been sent to die seven years ago. The camp’s forced relocations up and down the mountain each winter had thinned the constant flow of refugees expelled from Palestine and displaced from Transjordan, Lebanon, and Syria. “Thinning” was the French intention, a practice also employed by the English. Despite its death rate, Dhār el Baidar remained crowded to its limits, the stench stronger than last week when Saba had secreted herself inside the fences to plan the raid. Tonight she would pay a debt long overdue. Tonight would be a message to Paris and London and those who believed they could spend Arab lives as worthless chattel. Saba touched Khair-Saleh’s ten franc note pinned inside her pocket, repeated his mantra “For Palestine,” and gave the signal.
She and twenty-one partisans descended on the one hundred French guards, soldiers, and their Arab collaborators. The initial attacks were silent and with knives, then gasoline bombs in the garrison tents, then close-quarter pistols, and finally rifles for the French cowards and Arab traitors who ran. By first light, the camp was free. Saba stood in the smoke rising from the French garrison tents. The air around her was cordite, humid with blood, and almost soundless. The blood on her face was her own; the blood on her knives, hands, arms, shirt, and pants was French. As the light spread across the camp, Saba scanned what remained. The power of the moment shook her far beyond her expectation. She had done many raids and those raids had successfully continued the terrifying legend of the Raven, but this . . . this was somehow the full circle of her rebirth.
Saba walked through the muck and smoke, unaware her keffiyeh was loose, her face covered but her hair exposed. As she entered the fouled Palestinian quarter, two old women pointed, then helped each other to their feet. They pointed again, women who had replaced those who had tended Saba the teenager and whom Saba had not saved. The bolder of the two hobbled in front of Saba, staring at her hair, the pistol and knife in her hands. The woman feebled a hand forward as if to reach. Saba stepped to her. The old woman raised her hand, touched the black wings beneath Saba’s right eye, and wept. Another came forward. Soon there were ten. Saba’s breath caught in her throat.
Movement behind her in the marl.
A wounded Arab collaborator stretched for a bloody revolver too far to reach. Saba spun. The camp’s self-appointed Muḥāfiẓ jumped between them—a pious and brutal Assyrian who Saba had not expected to find when the fighting was over. The Assyrian cleric forbade Saba to harm the guard-collaborator and shouted for her submission—the camp was his to govern, his
leadership ordained by Allah and the Arab Higher Committee and beyond challenge by a marked woman infidel. He grabbed for Saba’s hair to jerk her to his knees. “No whore will—”
Saba slammed the cleric’s head with the butt of her pistol, then kicked his collaborator away from the revolver. Straddling the cleric from above, she belted her knife, grabbed his wrist, and twisted his arm in its socket. He screamed. His male followers reached for rocks to stone her.
Saba yelled, “I am her. Minchar al Gorab. Know this now and forever. You have seen her.” Saba slammed her pistol against her chest. “A woman! And the women of this camp are mine.” Saba wrenched the holy man’s arm out of its socket. He screamed again and she shot him dead. His followers ringed back. She shot the cleric’s collaborator, then raised her pistol to the sky. “My sky. My women. You will protect them with your lives until I return. This is so because I, the Raven, say it.”
Tonight’s ambush would be in minutes, a high-risk trap sprung in the moonless dark and parched July heat of the Transjordan border. Saba finished reassembling her Schmeisser MP18 submachine gun, cleaned sand from each 9mm bullet, and loaded her drum magazines. If successful, she and the partisans would capture a weapons shipment bound for the Haganah militia, men from the same outlawed militia who had murdered her family in Jerusalem. Masked, nameless men who continued to kill Palestinians and Englishmen in order to birth a Zionist state.
On a mission such as this, the partisans’ risk of betrayal was constant, the Transjordan desert full with treachery, propaganda, and conscription. The desert had always been so, though worse now. To arrive here undetected, she and her partisans had been forced too close to England’s patrols of special soldiers and Royal Marines. For the three years that France, England, and the special soldiers had been hunting her, their traps and ambushes had been numerous and lethal, but to date had produced only near misses, mistaken identities, and dead English soldiers. Saba hoped tonight would be no different.
The Arab Revolt that had begun sixty days before her assault on Dhār el Baidar was now in its ninetieth day. What had begun as a national strike had been a strike in name only. Saba knew this because she had been there. The AHC’s demand for an Arab government in Palestine had instantly degenerated into hand-to-hand combat among England’s occupying army, Zionists, and Arabs. The death and destruction spread from Jaffa to Jerusalem, where the fighting was house-to-house, and then everywhere amid the gunfire, billowing smoke, and funerals of Muslim and Jew, European and Arab. Hundreds were dead and thousands displaced. The Red Cross reported only England’s truth: England’s “security forces” were the victims of terrorist attacks, first by Arabs, then in quick succession by Zionist militia gangs. The Red Crescent reported only the Arab truth: Arab civilians were the victims, murdered by an unholy alliance of England’s occupying army and Zionist militia gangs utilizing superior arms and assassinations to drive out the Arab.
Saba knew all of it to be true, and in far worse volumes. Moving through the fighting always dressed as a man, she had seen the Red Cross and Red Crescent often, but always at the periphery of the carnage. Their access to the actual Revolt remained limited by the English to inspections and triage in the refugee camps. En route to tonight’s ambush, Saba and her partisans had encountered two Red Crescent workers at a well near the refugee camp at Irbid. Both men mentioned they had encountered an odd, new defiance in the old women of the camps. The women whispered as they always had, but the whispers had pride now. The old women said their children would not die as slaves or refugees in their own land. This was possible, for some had actually seen her. Minchar al Gorab, the Raven.
According to the women, the Raven was not a child’s lie, not the myth that for three years England had promised she was. Their myth had risen out of the night and raided the French camp at Dhār el Baidar, a camp where the Raven herself had once been a prisoner. The camp’s armed soldiers who did not die in the raid had fled, their food stores looted and distributed throughout the camp—personally, the old women said—by the Raven herself, and first to the old and the weak. The Red Crescent workers said the story was being passed from camp to camp along Palestine’s borders. When the women whispered the story, it seemed to glow in the low fires and their children’s eyes.
Saba’s fingers tightened on the Schmeisser’s magazine.
Her return to Dhār el Baidar had proven costly. The anonymity and self-control that were her hallmarks had melted when the old women approached. Many in the camp had seen her emotional display. Their descriptions had produced waves of undeserved adoration coupled with expectations far beyond the achievement of anyone but a myth. A high price for anyone who believed in her. France and England could no longer deny her existence and now admitted her, labeling “the Raven” a terrorist bandit, nothing more. The occupying armies and their bounty hunters openly circulated Saba’s given and surnames. England could not afford a champion of the people to emerge—of the Arabs or the Zionists. Successes like the assault at Dhār el Baidar could not be tolerated.
Unknown to England and France, Saba’s strike against a French camp was seen by the AHC and the Pan-Arab Army of God as a significant tactical blunder bordering on treason. Her murder of the Assyrian cleric could not be verified or she would already be dead. The AHC funded Saba’s partisans. Furious, they placed her unit under the stern Iraqi wing and the direct control of King Ghazi bin Faisal of Baghdad—the Pan-Arab Army of God. Bin Faisal and his holy-men mullahs made Saba ill and she avoided their main camp at all costs. The Iraqi boy-king had recently declared that one day he would unite Iraq, Syria, Kuwait, and Palestine into one great, powerful country. His country. Saba spit into the marl. When the Palestinians finished fighting the Europeans, the Palestinians would face their Iraqi benefactors. The Iraqis’ orders for tonight had forced her partisan unit out of Lebanon’s Beqaa Valley and into the furnace of the Syrian Desert. Tonight’s ambush would intercept an arms and explosives shipment from England’s Royal Marines in Transjordan destined for the Haganah and Irgun militias in Arad, Palestine, near the Dead Sea. Saba understood the tactic—militias could kill in ways that even the English could not openly sanction.
Saba set the Schmeisser across her lap and surveyed the layered marl rock. A new moon’s first bit of light added little to the desolate, rugged nothing that rose above the East Desert Road to Irbid and Al Hosen. Four men sat with her. They were unusual for Arabs, seeing only minor insult in female authority and little blasphemy in Saba’s denouncement of all gods. The same was true of the other fourteen men in her unit who waited beyond the rise to cover the ambush’s escape. Her new Iraqi commanders were far less tolerant. They were men of God, fervent believers and openly hostile toward Saba and her partisans. She and they were infidels, allowed to live only because of Saba’s successes against the English.
Saba spoke with controlled calm. “There will be two trucks if our Iraqi brothers in bin Faisal’s camp do not lie. The lead truck will be smaller; the second truck will carry the arms.” She handed two grenades to Safiy, the twenty-four-year-old on her right. “Murad and I will stop the first truck when it slows to enter the second turn.” Saba pointed to the serpentine road below them and a tight hairpin curve with no shoulder, a thousand-foot drop from the outside edge. “Find a grip at the edge. When the lead truck arrives, roll one grenade underneath.”
Safiy glanced at her instructions to hang off the road’s thousand-foot edge.
Saba smiled an inch. “You are young and strong, Safiy, or so you tell all the women we encounter.” She turned to the remaining two men, brothers older than she who had been with her since Fawzi al-Qawuqji’s camp in the Beqaa Valley had been overrun and al-Qawuqji killed. “The arms truck will be forced to brake or stop behind Safiy’s explosion. The truck will be trapped between the two turns.” Saba pointed at the older brother. “Khalid, you charge the arms truck from the front, and you, Jul, from behind. If possible, do not disable the truck or we become the camels carrying the arms on our ba
cks.”
The brothers nodded. There were no safe jobs in this type of ambush, the notice and planning too short, the equipment limited, death a certainty for the losers.
All five waited in silence, Murad at Saba’s shoulder, fingering his submachine gun. The small sliver of desert moon rose higher in the east. Saba allowed herself the moment before the battle, as was her way. She thought of school in America instead of war in Palestine, of green ivy climbing brick walls, black gowns and graduation hats—pictures of hope her father had provided, leafy pathways that ended in powerful orations and the liberation of her homeland. Then the drunken English soldiers, as also was her way, ripping at her clothes and hammering inside her. She remembered the camps and the old women no English or Zionist or Arab neighbor cared about, and what precious little she had accomplished for them herself. Her last thoughts were always of the man who had saved her and what he had asked. Saba touched his pistol and the bloodstained ten franc note pinned inside her pocket, then the wings beneath her right eye.
She checked his star in the sky and said, “For Palestine.”
Headlights flashed low and distant on the mountain’s serpentine edge. Saba sprang to her feet. The headlights were two sets, possibly fifty yards apart, and traveling faster than caution would dictate. She listened to the engines whine up the steep grades and coast down the dips. Not amateur drivers. Few were familiar with driving in the desert, unless they were English or their collaborators. Saba and the partisans descended the cliff’s face to the narrow road. They landed just past the road’s second serpentine turn. She pointed Safiy and his grenades to the canyon side of the road and a few feet down grade closer to the turn. “One grenade, as soon as the first truck reaches you.”
She told Khalid and Jul, the brothers who would confront the arms truck, “Your truck will stop. Kill the driver and guards, not the truck.”
The brothers ran down the road. She and Murad ran fifty feet up road from Safiy, the grenadier. Saba cocked the submachine gun, touched her hand to her heart, and told Murad: “For Palestine.”
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