Traitor's Gate

by Charlie Newton

  Saba had forced her head down, her eyes locked on the ground, her hand clamped on the pistol. She demanded that she breathe instead of fight. Her robe rustled. The lieutenant slapped the Arab’s extended hand away from Saba, then pushed him aside as a royal would a beggar. The lieutenant’s voice added measure; his eyes fixed on Saba’s dusty cloak. “You are a troubled, insolent people who would do better to stay with their camels. Make no attempt at communion with Europe; it is beyond the pale. Be on your way and grateful officers of the Crown see no glory in punishing the insipid.”

  Saba half turned, caught Rafid’s glance as he touched his cheek, and moved to the truck. The driver hesitated; Rafid eased him in from behind. Jameel and Rafid loaded in, then Saba. She told the driver, “Drive. Do not speak,” her Enfield pushed into his ribs. The fear carved into the driver’s face was new; likely the Royal Marines had scared him with their fast feet and good weapons. The truck did not move. Saba dug with the Enfield. The driver apologized without looking at her. He started their truck, looped the damaged Willys patrol truck, and then the troop carrier.

  They rumbled a mile in dusty silence and the driver apologized again. Saba wedged her back against the door, staring through the rear window, hoping they were clear. The road bounced her cloak’s hood from her head, spilling chestnut hair. She replaced the hood and touched her veil. Chalky. Saba touched the cheekbone beneath her eye, remembering Rafid’s signal, then grabbed the driver’s rearview mirror. The driver shrank and swerved the truck.

  One wing was visible; the kohl and marl makeup had flaked. Enough for the English sergeant to know, or to think he knew. But her driver, an Arab, he would have no doubt. Saba raised her pistol to his head. “You know me?”

  “It is . . . an honor.” He got smaller behind the wheel. “Please do not kill me.”

  “But I am a woman and you are a man; how can this honor be so?”

  “On my mother’s name, I—”

  “You are what tribe?”

  The driver answered, trying to be respectful and small, naming a tribe in the southern Euphrates Valley, the same tribe as Ghazi bin Faisal.

  “And how is it I am known here in Persia?”

  “The Raven is”—the driver rushed the words, then grimaced and lowered his voice to a whisper—“is much discussed by the English, Minchar al Gorab. A high price is offered for her head, a thousand gold dinars . . .” He shied. “If she is no myth.”

  Saba considered the sum, enough to buy a hundred rifles, double what she had last heard. “And you would collect this?”

  “No. No. No. I would not. This could not happen.”

  Saba recited the myth: “The Raven is of the night, the sky. She can kill an entire camp or one enemy alone in his sleep, eat his eyes in front of his children.” Saba watched the driver wilt, glad the veil hid her smile. “This I have done.” She glanced at Jameel and Rafid behind her, each with a hand covering his mustache and yellowed teeth.

  “If I am her, know that you will never speak of me. And never insult another woman. For I will be her also and from her chador I will bite out your eyes.” Saba poked her Enfield’s barrel against his temple and he veered them almost off the cliff.

  “Yes. Yes. It is so. As you say.”

  Saba nodded that it was so, that one day the women of the desert would kneel to no man, no religion, and to no foreign invader. She turned back to the black granite cliff walling the road. Where the wall met the road, she saw the lord high political officer’s future. His assassination in England’s colonial stronghold would be headlines in England’s national newspaper and read around the world. Yellowed copies would be read aloud at campfires under the desert sky and in black tents. Saba glanced at that sky where her stars would be tonight then touched the ten franc note pinned inside her pocket. She could, and would, kill the man responsible for much of Palestine’s suffering. The reality made her shiver. The promise she had made Khair-Saleh and the old women of the camps was within reach. Saba squeezed the revolver, then whispered to her window: “Dayman. Not for me. For Palestine.”

  SIX MONTHS LATER

  CHAPTER 13

  September, 1938

  Saba scanned the Huleh Valley going to shadow beneath her; the village buildings she had refused to attack were coming to light. Desert Jews were not the enemy and never had been. English garrisons and Zionist militias and lord high political officers were the enemy. And to fight them you could not rely on God or be a coward.

  The months since Saba’s return from the Bushehr-Abadan road in Iran had been bloody defeats, angry accusations, and the treachery one would expect of cowards and clerics maneuvering for position. While her Iraqi commanders and German benefactors postured, the English continued to deport thousands of Palestinians into the squalor from which Khair-Saleh had saved her. Five hundred more had died in skirmishes; a like number of European Zionists and militia; and, as always, far fewer of England’s soldiers, less than one hundred.

  Three of Saba’s in-camp altercations with the Army of God had drawn blood, all over Saba’s refusal to attack indigenous Jewish villages. The first altercation had been the worst. Saba had beaten an Iraqi recruit unconscious after his hands had followed the insult on his lips. She was chided by the camp’s Iraqi commander, then threatened by his cleric. Saba challenged both at the evening meal, calling the commander and Ghazi bin Faisal cowards for targeting civilians and refusing to support her return to Iran. A man’s God, she told them, did not favor cowards or slaves. Weapons were drawn, death threats made. Saba shouted the truth for the entire command staff to hear, all eighteen of her men at her back but facing fifty. The clerics were braver than her last gun-barrel confrontation with them and this time demanded her death. Erich Schroeder had risen to her defense, brokering an accommodation.

  The German’s accommodation had two components and Saba had quickly agreed to both. First she would train a select group of Army of God fighters who would combat the fearsome special soldiers from Bushehr. During this period, Saba would receive training of her own—hers in the ways of Abwehr spies and provocateurs. The second component, unknown to the Army of God, the German reiterated his promise to supply Saba the resources required to splinter into her own camp. She and her partisans would be free to kidnap or attack high-ranking British officers as they saw fit, first in Palestine and then, if she were successful, her audacious, spectacular return to Bushehr, Iran, for the lord high political officer himself.

  So, on the last sunrise of the first month, Saba set about training thirty men and two women to hunt, trap, and kill the special soldiers from Bushehr. Over the five months that had followed, the women had performed poorly, her anger with them obvious and occasionally brutal. Those who would free Palestine from England had no rights to morals or codes taught in other times. War meant death, and on the partisan side, almost always.

  Saba stared deep into the Huleh Valley. Tomorrow’s mission would be Herr Schroeder’s final test, proof that Saba could operate independently—a bold kidnap for ransom that, if it did not kill her, would set her unit on a path teeth-to-teeth against the English, the best equipped she had ever been, and far away from the Iraqi’s Army of God coward war.

  Higher behind the cliff where Saba now sat, the western face of Mount Hermon and the 9,000-foot Jabal Ash Shaykh guarded her back and flanks. Directly below her cliff to the south and east was the Golan Heights. Saba had not been in the Golan Heights since the French had killed the man whose name and life were now hers. She checked Khair-Saleh’s star in the sky, then his burial ground due west where he died. Silently, she spoke his name, then told him and all of their country suffering beneath her, “Tomorrow, it will not be you and your children who kneel.”

  Saba tapped two fingers on his wings beneath her eye. Her target was sixty miles due south in the Valley of Jezreel, well protected and sitting behind an elevated mahogany desk: the district commissioner in Janîn, Palestine. Generations of farmers had nursed Janîn into a harvest city of 30,000. Sab
a’s pride in the people here was total. They had survived despite British tyranny to push their crops under, Zionist murder to push them out, and another ten-year drought that had again decimated much of the country. Janîn’s year-round market of olives, figs, dates, and carobs was often meager but never empty. The British had added a market in suffering. For a price, everything they had, Palestinians could avoid being deported to the camps. Saba had an appointment to see the district commissioner on such a matter.

  Movement at her shoulder.

  Saba spun. Two squirrels topped the limestone ledge, staring at her and the revolver now pointed at them. They stood on two feet, craned their necks, and scampered away. She kept the Enfield trained on the rock and the shadows behind it. Tomorrow’s mission required skills not used since she was a girl flirting with schoolboys, other than the day and night spent with the American, Eddie Owen. The memory materialized before she could stop it. Some for America, some for the first man who had pierced her armor. All he had seen were her eyes and hands, but somehow he had done it. She thought of Eddie Owen more often than she cared to admit, had been harsher on the women in camp because of it, her weakness automatically theirs.

  Eddie Owen was in Haifa; she had seen him shirtless there in her binoculars while she scouted the refinery by boat and again from the roof of a café north of the harbor. A refinery the Germans would no doubt level soon, killing everyone in it, deaths of Palestinian collaborators she had not yet determined how to prevent, or if she should. There was no question the Germans intended to deny England the gasoline produced there, gasoline that could help free Palestine if it could be controlled by Palestinians, not Europeans. Saba spit between her feet. But that would never happen; her countrymen lacked the will and foresight to think larger than the moment, larger than their own tribal disagreements and whatever God they picked.

  The squirrels returned, interrupting her thoughts. They crept closer until she frowned, used names she had given them, and shared her rice. She had brought them from the camp. They would be the last inhabitants of the camp to see her alive.

  At noon the following day, Saba was one of many crowding the dusty narrow streets, her right eye covered with a patch, her robe and shoes those of a shopkeeper. As she walked deeper into the city, the buildings gained menace. Her usually cool skin began to sweat. Saba glanced at shadowed doorways, then the alleys, and for too long. The hills and deserts had become home; these cities all bristled with her memories. Saba willed herself cold, adding confidence in skills she did not possess.

  Two blocks from the commissioner’s grand residence, armed men, European men, stood near the corners eating falafel they were not eating. Saba lowered her head, shuffling with the other Arabs, and affected a slight limp. The Europeans’ attention stayed too long. The familiar fight or flee rose in her blood. The instinct was old and controllable. She turned away from the commissioner’s residence, following three boys running toward the market just passed. Saba palmed the eye patch off her face, fearing the patch would mark her.

  Another pair of Europeans eyed her, then another.

  Trap—Irgun, Haganah, or England’s special soldiers. A man shouted in English, possibly at her. Saba hurried around a building’s plaster-spalled corner. More shouts followed. She sprinted between two buildings, then through an open gate into a courtyard filled with noisy children. Another gate led into a crowded street. Horses neighed, bothered in the dusty commotion. A mare bumped her off balance. The crowded street fed the market square and was shoulder-to-shoulder with first-harvest buyers and sellers. Saba joined the throng. She inspected dates with one hand, her revolver in the other hand under her robe.

  European men—at least three—in the square but not shouting. All three turned toward a confrontation in the street Saba had just left. The Europeans drew revolvers. The crowd behind her was large and she shrank into the crush, most of them dressed exactly as she was. The crowd flowed her deeper into the market. Under the canvas awnings, men and children offered all manner of vegetables and fruits. Saba shuffled, head down. Bumps and jostles pushed her to the square’s farthest edge. The Europeans held their stations, disciplined; discipline meant English. And it meant they were unsure if the figure near the district commissioner’s residence had been her. They would guess soon. By then her partisans who waited there would be gone, melting away to regroup when she did not appear.

  Saba and her partisans re-formed in the hills outside the city.

  They hid for seven days and six nights while British patrols combed Janîn and always in groups of four or more. The pursuit was an expensive use of manpower and absolute proof the English believed the Raven was there. Instead of retreat, Saba reconstituted the kidnap plan. She did not inform Schroeder or her Iraqi commanders. As always in the desert, war meant religion, and religion always meant men, men like bin Faisal and his camp commanders, men who feared her popularity in Palestine, men who despised her as an infidel woman who would not bow and would not worship. Men who had betrayed her. Again.

  When she had the commissioner in hand, Schroeder would know it had been her and they would proceed with his ransom plan. She would prove this to bin Faisal as well, in person, at night, and soon. At sunset of the seventh day, Saba put her plan in motion, dispatching Rafid back to the Iraqi camp and Jameel to Jerusalem. Rafid would arrive at the Iraqi camp at dawn of the following day. He would inform the camp commander and his mullahs that Saba had been fatally wounded in a bandit skirmish outside Janîn and had been taken to a safe house in Jerusalem. There was little hope for her survival. Rafid would give the mullahs her safe house so the Pan-Arab Army of God might render Saba assistance and comfort. Rafid’s reward would be lamb and milk and great praise for his journey. His risk was that the mullahs would have him murdered in his sleep. Rafid was told this. He said his good-byes, asked to be remembered if this was to be his end, and accepted the mission.

  Jameel and two partisans waited at the safe house in Jerusalem with a badly mutilated and beaten corpse, the right eye tattooed to match Saba’s wings. Jameel was told to expect assassins, not assistance and comfort. The mullahs’ representatives arrived. Jameel would not acknowledge Saba’s death, nor show the corpse, until he had negotiated to collect England’s bounty, finally agreeing to share the bounty with the mullahs’ representatives.

  Once the bargain was struck and the mullahs’ men satisfied that the corpse was indeed the woman whose face the mullahs’ men had never seen, the mullahs’ men conscripted three farmers to show the corpse to England’s Royal Marines and claim the bounty. This was done on their farm outside Janîn and included Saba’s clothes, weapons, and personal belongings. The farmers told the story of her bandit skirmish on their road, her men calling her “al Gorab” and weeping at her death. The Raven’s men had run off without her body when a company of Royal Marines had driven into the area.

  Word spread like fire throughout Palestine: the Raven was dead.

  Black wings began to appear on walls in Janîn and Jerusalem. For ten days the Raven was mourned and the English gloated, one more wog myth put to the sword. The Pan-Arab Army of God publicly mourned her passing but privately would be hunting her infidel partisans. Saba waited in hiding. She did not relish adding to the sadness of her people, nor did she relish her popularity and the pressure it brought, but the Raven’s death was the only way she could approach her target and the only way to gain German money from Erich Schroeder.

  On the fourteenth day, the East Indian maids at the commissioner’s residence reported a return to normal security. Through intermediaries, Saba facilitated an appointment, but as a woman this time, one of some means, desperately trying to save her children from the camps, a woman who could pay with property. The Raven was dead; the Europeans did not fear a lowly Arab woman, although it was unusual for a woman to speak for a family. Her story was not unusual—no brothers and the father dead in the fighting outside Haifa.

  Saba concealed a small pistol and two knives, the hope being that s
he would not be searched thoroughly, and the tattoo beneath her eye covered by two layers of marl and kohl paste. If she were discovered, she would assassinate the commissioner in his office, an act that in the previous plan had been strictly forbidden by the German. She would kill the commissioner and what soldiers she could, then herself before she could be captured. If she were successful, she would run through the rear of the residence dragging the fat English pig to a narrow alley and her escape team waiting there.

  “Wait for me with the cart, here.” She pointed a young man at an intersection just past the commissioner’s two-story residence. “They will chase me and be shooting. You cross the road and fall there.”

  The young man she had trained all summer fingered his food cart then his disguise, trying to hide his worry. Three of her six partisans would provide cover fire from the rooftops.

  Saba reiterated, “Have no weapons. Make no statements and mount no defense. The English will beat and accuse you; they know of the camp and our Iraqi benefactors there. Your comrades from the camp are gone and only the traitors remain. Any admitting will condemn you to English prison and death. The English lie; you know this. Their promises of pardon will be as empty as all the others.”

  The young man agreed, his death almost a certainty, and stepped back. Saba scanned the alley beyond, straightening her black robes and the keffiyeh covering everything but her eyes. She stopped him with a hand to his shoulder and thanked him: “Shukran.” Her heart was in it. “You are my one success among the Iraqi pigs. Be brave, for you are.” Saba worried for him, and herself, and all of them. She signaled Jameel and the others to the rooftops, then walked three blocks out of her way, gathering her nerve.

  At the front wall of the residence, two British soldiers barred her path. Large men with rifles, red tunics, and narrow eyes. She provided proof of her appointment and shrank from the leering, prodding inspection. A third soldier, an older corporal, his jacket sweaty and tight to his belly, escorted her up a long walk, through a garden without flowers, and into the grand residence’s anteroom. The interior was opulent, more so than any Saba had seen. Huge floor tiles three times the normal width spread out in all directions, alternating green and a silver-veined black. Woodwork edged the floor and ceiling; two stairways wound upward under hand-carved balusters, a red carpet covered the treads.