by Tommy Tenney
The American looked over at Ari and shook his head in dismay. “Just how much do you folks want these papers, anyway?”
“They’re as important a part of this extraction as the family! Maybe more . . . !” Ari shouted over his shoulder as he ran a jagged line toward the place where Abadi’s father had fallen. With the intensity of a man under fire, he began to scoop up large handfuls of dirt, glancing back with a scowl.
And that’s when Abadi felt a mad idea burst into his head, and he did something more rash, and more manly, than anything he had ever done before.
He fixed the Israeli with a stare, willed his legs into action, and began to sprint across the open ground toward the bent form. Above the drumming of his own heart and the pants of his breathing, he heard the whistle of incoming bullets, and in that instant knew they were coming for him. Hundreds of yards away, grown men were holding his silhouette in their sights and trying to shoot him just for crossing his front yard. The brief thought made him clench his teeth, seethe with rage, and run more fluidly and swiftly than he ever had in his life. He heard, even felt, the rounds striking the earth—once, just off his right foot, so he swerved this way and that, and when another impact just missed his left ankle, he feinted, changed course, imagining himself Maradona, dribbling the soccer ball through the German defense in the closing seconds of the World Cup, with the roar around him merely chants from his fans instead of automatic gunfire.
And before he knew it, he was upon Meyer’s position.
He practically threw himself upon the older man. Then he heard commotion behind and turned to see his older brother Jalaal weaving a jagged course along the same route he had just taken. Trying to catch his breath, Abadi winced at first to see his brother diminishing what he had done, stealing away his solo glory. Then he realized that for the first time in his memory, he had seen his brother imitate him. Abadi had set the standard. He swelled with pride and turned back to the task at hand. At once all three were tearing so furiously into the soil that it became impossible to distinguish one digger’s hands from the other.
Abadi forced himself to concentrate on the task and ignore everything else taking place around him—the chopper, now at lift-off rotation, flinging a stiff wind across everything in its path, the roar of large-caliber bullets bursting from the soldiers’ machine guns, the whining ricochets of incoming fire, his mother’s screams. Most of all, the thought of his strong, capable father being carried away bloodied, as helpless as a child.
He told himself I don’t hear any of it, and made himself concentrate on clawing out as much as possible with each pull of his arms. But then a bullet whizzed past his ear so close that he could almost hear the projectile’s rotation, like an insanely rapid twirling sound. Another bullet struck dirt and sent clods into both of his eyes. Jalaal’s shirt sleeve seemed to jerk forward of its own accord, and Abadi realized his brother’s arm had been nicked. Somehow, the snipers had them sighted in.
Meyer reached up and yanked the boys as hard as he could down into the small depression they had just dug. He turned back toward the American squad leader and shouted.
“We need air support! They’ve zeroed us in!”
The American officer nodded emphatically and turned back to the helicopter.
“FAC! FAC!” he yelled into the cabin over the noise of the rotors, summoning someone out with frantic waves of his hand. An instant later two more soldiers wearing black berets and loaded with thick backpacks leaped from the chopper and ran over to the spot where the others had been sighting the enemy positions. One now swiftly removed a laptop computer from the bag and laid it next to his right elbow as he aimed the binocular straight at their enemies. The other removed a set of thin headphones from his backpack and threaded them around his head.
Back at their location, Abadi felt a sharp pain across his right shoulder and realized that he was bleeding. He had no idea how it had happened—a devastating weight of helplessness and terror engulfed him.
“Ari, are they going to kill us?” he asked, his eyes welling with tears. “Am I going to die?”
Ari pointed to the two men in black berets.
“Abadi, you see those men?”
Abadi nodded fiercely through his tears.
“Those are what they call ‘Forward Air Controllers,’ son. Air Force enlisted men, part of a special group nicknamed ‘Death on Call.’ And a few seconds from now, they’re going to make those men pay.”
“Tell me.” Abadi’s order, awash in a childlike hopefulness, was nearly irresistible.
“Well, first of all, that’s no regular set of binoculars the first guy’s holding. It’s a laser-guided range finder. And right now, it’s using a laser beam to fix the exact geographic coordinates of those shooting at us, then feeding that data into the laptop, which has a GPS unit installed in it along with a software program that has mapped out an exact picture of the whole combat area around us. And then”—Ari looked around to see if any of the army men were close enough to hear his rather imprudent disclosure—“they beam these coordinates through a powerful radio on the second guy’s back, up to a couple of fighter planes flying what we call ‘tactical air support’ in the skies not far from us.”
“And they’re going to get the men who shot my father? Who are trying to kill me?”
Ari smiled, noted the tears shining in the boy’s eyes, and gripped him by the shoulder. “Let’s finish digging. You’ll see.”
Despite the seeming casualness of his descriptions, Ari Meyer was being modest. As a member of the Israeli defense and a former officer in its Air Force, he knew a great deal about the operation of the F–16 Falcon.
As such, it would not have surprised him to know that only two miles behind them, a pair of Air National Guard F–16s was racing toward them on full afterburner, at an inbound, final approach altitude of twenty thousand feet. Or that at that moment, the lead pilot had in fact just received a signal bounced to him from the two air controllers via a “gateway” computer programmed to resolve incompatibilities between his network and that of the active duty Air Force—little more than a laptop mounted in the galley of an American AWACS plane circling discretely in the distance.
The signal’s arrival had caused a small red triangle to appear on the jet’s HUD, its “heads-up display,” a holographic recreation of the craft’s control data projected against the inside of its cockpit’s glass bubble.
The pilot reached out and “selected” the triangle with the tip of his finger from the center of his Situational Awareness Data Link. Instantly the GPS coordinates uploaded into the innards of the F–16’s internal computer, as well as the guidance kit of a five-hundred-pound bomb slung under its wing. This brand-new state-of-the-art ordnance, pride of Air Force tech squads, had cut the weight of previous bombs by three-quarters, thereby allowing the jets to carry more munitions, save on fuel, and reduce collateral damage.
The target area doomed to encounter this menace was flowing swiftly into sight. A long, straight mountain valley, anchored by a large mountaintop fringed in smoke.
“Tiger One FAC, can you confirm target package?” the pilot mumbled.
“This is Tiger One” came the muffled reply. “Viper Driver, you are cleared hot for target package Alpha-six. Repeat, cleared hot.”
Nearly invisibly in his helmet, the pilot nodded. His target was certified. No friendlies would be in the line of fire.
“Roger, Tiger One. Stand by. . . . ”
Chapter Thirty
Ari Meyer glanced at his watch, then back up. . . .
Just in time for Abadi to hear a roar rip the sky apart and spot the elegant nose of the sleek lead fighter pierce the air above him with its wingman nestled close behind and to its left.
Right above the house, the warplanes left their course and dove southward with a precision so deft and beautiful that it formed a knot of awe in Abadi’s chest.
“Now watch, son!” Ari shouted.
Normally, an F–16 would have delivere
d its bombs from a high-altitude, level angle. But because of the steep mountain profile of its target, the lead pilot was in for a thrill. At precisely fifteen thousand feet, he reached his intended diving delivery angle of thirty degrees. At that exact second, his thumb pressed down on the “pickle button” of his stick, detonating two shotgun-shell-sized cartridges that propelled the bomb well clear of the wing for a safe separation.
Watching from his front yard, Abadi had barely enough time to focus his eyes on the small dark shape falling from the diving aircraft. Nor could he see the flurry of invisible electronic signals that knitted the skies between the bomb and GPS satellites above them in outer space.
As the planes raced away from him, two overwhelming noises engulfed Abadi: the thunder of two military-size turbines on full afterburner, their flames quivering orange just before him, and then, only seconds later—the fighters already dots in the eastern sky—twin detonations so savage and merciless that he would never forget the sensation.
He felt them like a double-punch to his solar plexus, a sonic frying pan striking him in the ears and twin tsunamis of air pounding him across the torso.
It was the detonation shockwave of the five-hundred-pound laser-guided bomb striking its target, its FMU–113 nose-mounted fuse detonating at exactly fifteen feet above the ground to shoot its force outward and pulverize everything within a three-thousand-foot radius. Effectively vaporizing his father’s sheep pasture—approximately twenty-one acres of alpine Middle Eastern grazing meadow—into airborne particles of dusty mushroom cloud.
The clouds drifted off with an almost insolent nonchalance, the F–16 engines throbbed away into the distant horizon, and the guns fell silent.
And that is when it occurred to Abadi that the coward who had confidently stalked his father and brother and then ambushed the rescue, shooting his Poppa from a perch they had thought impregnable, and targeting an eight-year-old boy for death, had just become charred scraps strewn across a half mile of mountainside.
Despite his relief, the thought of it also made him want to vomit.
Instead he looked over, saw that his brother and the Israeli officer had resumed their digging, and threw himself into the fray with them. One minute later they struck canvas. In one swift move the officer had pulled out a thick, flat wrapping stained with mildew and dirt. With hardly an acknowledgment, he scrambled to his feet, grabbed the two boys by the wrists, and shouted, “It’s time to go! Into the chopper!”
JERUSALEM, IDF COMMAND CENTER, MINISTRY OF DEFENSE
Four hours and twenty-eight minutes after American bombs fell above Maydan Saray, a fax machine began to hum in the half-light of a military command center eight hundred miles away in Jerusalem.
Its heading read, “Spot Translation of Rescued Battaween Documents—Arabic to English. For Classified Raven 5–290 use only.”
Over a dozen officers from across the spectrum of Israel’s intelligence and military establishment stood waiting in the shadows to receive, assess, and respond to the information contained in the fresh translation.
But the first fingers on the first sheet, yanking it away to read before anyone else could, belonged to the nation’s First Lady, Hadassah Kesselman.
She sat next to the machine—better to establish her territorial claim over all subsequent pages that would emerge—and began to read as if her life, and the life of everyone in that room, depended on the content of its words.
Chapter Thirty-one
THE ROYAL BEDCHAMBER, SUSA—TEN YEARS INTO THE REIGN OF XERXES
That night with Xerxes, the nightmare started as it always does. With darkness broken by veils of shadow, by gently waving ribbons of alternating gray and black . . .
. . . and my awareness, through the fog of sleep, that something, someone, is approaching.
It might only be a faint change in the temperature, betraying an opened door or a window’s shutter now left ajar. It might be the slightest flex in the floor beneath me. Or some foreign shape inching past the light somehow at variance with the pattern drifting across my face. Or the sound of a muffled step approaching oh-so carefully across the floor.
But it always ends the same way. My eyes fly open to glints of moonlight framing the upraised curve of a scimitar. My ears fill with chilling sounds of murder, my nostrils with the odor of freshly spilled blood. My world ends with the plunge of that blade down across my mother’s neck to sever flesh with that awful sound I have never been able to forget. The face I have loved more than any other, falling from its shoulders and striking the floor not five inches from my own. To see her loving eyes frozen open, staring at me but not seeing me. The mouth that kissed me good night gushing forth blood down her cheek and across the floor to within an inch of my own trembling lips . . .
And then I usually awake, unable to bear again what I actually did endure all those years ago.
Very few people know how horribly this memory has plagued my nights ever since childhood. Ever since it took place. The night of my seventh birthday, when I awoke in the midst of my entire family being slaughtered by a gang of Agagite marauders. I survived only because there had been no bed for me, there at my uncle’s house, so I was sleeping on a pallet on the floor.
On this night, though—the actual evening of which I write, my warning did not consist of the usual cues. It came as sound.
It was a barely audible scraping accompanied by rapid breathing under desperate control. Some aspect of it—its timbre, its strength—told me at once that it was that of a man. Or maybe several. All of a sudden my mind, my entire body, clenched with a sense of impending danger, a throbbing sense of alarm.
Then came a disorienting uncertainty. Was this the old nightmare returning, or something real intruding through the clouds of my slumber? Or a third possibility—was this a routine confusion I encountered every single night and promptly forgot every time? Did my nightmare always arrive after a period of wondering if some real-life murderer actually was sneaking toward my bed?
You see, I knew one thing for certain—I wasn’t awake. I lay suspended somewhere between true sleep and consciousness, but I was not a fully wakeful person at that moment. And yet something was objectively not right. Even within the routine of my perennial nightmare, this seemed jarringly out of the ordinary.
I sensed motion, lightning fast and graceful. And movement just next to me, yet nearly silent. Not enough provocation to truly awaken me. Was Xerxes having his own restless dream?
Until . . . a groan. A man’s voice, not in the throes of a nightmare. It was a groan of mortal agony forced into some form of restraint.
Thank G-d I did not allow my eyes to fly open as swiftly and emphatically as my mind did. Yet in the tiniest instant I was truly alert, aware only of my heart hammering away in my chest. I parted my eyelids, but only by the slightest margin.
And, Leah, I cannot—nor do I wish to try—describe to you the full weight of terror that crushed down upon my entire body, soul, and mind at that moment.
For it hung there—quivering in the gloom of a real night. A long, polished sword, poised barely a cubit above me.
As on that earlier night, my shock and fear kept me silent far more than my actual poise. My limbs were paralyzed. The air within me seemed frozen still. I could not have moved even the tiniest bit if flight had been my only hope.
But now confusion, mixed with an implacable dread, descended upon me. Every sensory cue I had told me that I was now awake, in the real, present world. Yet how could I be once again in the center of a midnight murder? How could I awaken twice in one lifetime to the reflection of moonlight on sharpened steel? This was not a coincidence, or a fate, I could bear to live through again. One such night was enough.
I parted my eyelids again and rolled my shoulders slightly, feigning sleep-induced motion. Now I could glimpse a ways beyond my immediate surroundings. And not ten cubits beyond, I saw my Xerxes in all his bulging nakedness, struggling with every muscle he had against the grip of two men with gi
ant arms holding him from behind. A cloth covered his mouth, pulled as tightly as seemed possible.
Another man stood before him, holding a sword in that two-fisted, downward-facing hold of an executioner about to make his thrust.
And then I gained my true bearings about the situation. I had been asleep next to Xerxes in the royal retiring chamber, for I often spent the night with him in those days, and plotters had chosen this of all nights on which to strike. Something inside me shattered into pieces. My husband was going to be killed, and any attempt to help him would mean we would both be dead within moments of each other. My only hope for survival lay in continuing to feign sleep and give his killers no reason to fear me. If I even twitched, the sword quivering above me would surely plunge down and eliminate my witness along with my husband’s.
I did the only thing I knew: I shut my eyelids again and concentrated on imitating the languid rhythm of deep sleep. But from Xerxes I now heard an emphatic thump! and a long exhale, and I realized my husband was dead. Only the terror of my closest brush with death was keeping my throat closed against the cry of a heart rent in two. The killer watching me had to make his final, crucial determination of whether or not to let me survive. I poured every ounce of my will into continuing the breaths without interruption, pause, or acceleration.
A moment passed—the most terrible and endless of my life. I was not sure I could bear another instant without succumbing to the ice bath of terror and heartbreaking sorrow pumping throughout my body. Yet I knew: the tiniest mistake, the slightest miscalculation, and the next thing I felt would be a blade cleaving my own chest.
The moment passed. I heard a whispered cry and footsteps in the foreground, felt the air move about me, and heard more running, closer. I parted my eyelids again and saw only the distant, ornate ceiling.
The massive doors shut with a slapping sound.
The murderers were gone.
I practically fell off the bed to crawl over toward Xerxes’ prone shape. I cradled his body, bent down toward him, and felt the whole vastness of emotion I had trapped within me now escape in one violent, inner heave—then a shrill scream flung up in the air. I know it was imprudent to raise such a cry, for I did not know how far evil had fled. But now it was not a matter of choice.
