She spun, panicked, and struggled to keep her tone even.
“I’m sorry. I was looking for…for a bathroom. It’s an emergency,” she said in Arabic.
“A bathroom? What does this look like? How did you get in here?” the man growled, suspicion dripping from every word.
Maya knew he wasn’t buying it but had no choice but to bluster through. “I tried the door there. I thought maybe the mosque might have a service restroom. I’m sorry. I meant no harm.” She began walking away from where she’d been eavesdropping, but when she caught a glimpse of the man’s face, she could see he didn’t believe her.
“Not so fast,” he barked, reaching into his jacket pocket.
“I said I’m sorry,” she protested, her hand sweating on her pistol.
The man withdrew a snub-nosed revolver, its stainless steel length glinting in the moonlight. “Oh, you’ll be sorry, all right.”
The explosion of the Jericho 9mm pistol firing from inside her robe echoed off the walls. Her first shot caught the man in the chest. The second hit him in the throat, but he was still standing. She freed the gun from her vestment and fired a third time, taking off half his face, and he crumpled to the ground as the door she’d been listening at burst open. She darted to the building nearest the courtyard entrance as men piled out, guns in hand. Her slim advantage was the light inside the room, so their eyes would take a few moments to adjust before they’d be able to make anything out. She pulled at the door in front of her, and it opened. The creak of its hinges drew immediate gunfire, and chunks of the heavy wooden slab splintered off as a dozen bullets pummeled it and the surrounding stone wall, sending rock chips flying.
Maya bolted the door and found herself in a windowless storage room with musty air tainted with an odor of petroleum. She felt along the wall and almost tripped over the distinctive form of a generator. Beside it rested two jerry cans of gasoline, which she confirmed by opening one. More bullets pounded into the door, which then shuddered on its iron hinges as someone threw their weight against it. Maya knew it wouldn’t hold long, and she was vastly outgunned.
She felt for her cell and sent the text message to Samuel, hoping that he would be able to make good on his promise to send help. She barely made out the dark shape of a door at the far end of the room, with a faint light shining through a chink in its surface.
Of course – there would be a way to access the equipment area from inside the mosque in the event of a blackout.
Maya eyed the gas can as the courtyard door shuddered again. This time the wood next to the iron bolt split with a crack. She kicked the container over so that fuel spilled onto the stone floor and then ran to the mosque door and fumbled with the lever.
Locked.
The courtyard door shattered. She pivoted and shot four times into the opening as it swung inward, then turned her gun on the mosque deadbolt and fired at the wood around it. Desperate, she slammed her shoulder into the planks as more gunfire erupted from the courtyard. The lock gave just as a man’s frame blocked the courtyard doorway and the distinctive shape of a rifle swept the pitch-black room. She pirouetted and fired at the gunman and then at the generator.
Her third round caused a spark from its metal chassis. The gasoline on the floor ignited with a whump that drove her backward into the mosque, eyebrows singed. The second jerry can of gasoline exploded, sending a fireball through both doors, and she rolled onto her stomach and crawled away, wincing at a burn of pain where a ricochet had grazed her biceps.
The main entry rattled as someone outside pulled at it. She forced herself to her feet, blinking dust out of her eyes as she stumbled deeper into the darkened mosque. Her phone vibrated in her pocket, but she ignored it, choosing instead to slap home a fresh magazine in her pistol while she had the chance. Voices cried out from the exterior grounds as gunmen tried to find a way into the building, and she knew it was only a matter of time before they tracked down a key or someone braved the sea of fire in the equipment room. She gazed around frantically looking for any means of escape, but saw nothing.
Maya pushed into a smaller room where piles of rugs were stacked next to a grimy window. She hurried to it and felt for the latch handle, and was about to unlock it when a shadow flitted across the pane as someone outside approached. She knelt in a corner, her robe and hijab pulled over her, praying that in the darkness she would be mistaken for a shadow.
A bearded face flattened against the glass, the man’s hands cupped around it, and she held still, afraid to move. The moonlight reappeared in the window when the man moved on, and she exhaled a soft sigh of relief, which was cut off by the sound of shattering glass in the mosque, followed by agitated voices. Inside.
Maya instantly decided that taking on an unknown number of assailants outside with at least the benefit of running room was preferable to shooting it out with heavily armed gunmen inside the mosque. She was under no illusions that her pistol was any match for assault rifles, and whether inside or out, she knew she was outmatched.
The window latch opened with a snick, and she pulled the glass open, grateful that the hinges didn’t make a sound. A grind of metal against stone echoed through the mosque behind her. She hoisted herself through the window, landing on the dirt outside as two gunmen spun toward her no more than twenty yards away. She rolled as they fired at her, and she squeezed off six shots in rapid succession, cutting down the shooter with the rifle and sending his pistol-toting companion sprawling for cover.
Maya found herself in a small clearing adjacent to the mosque, the air thick with the odor of garbage from a makeshift neighborhood dump. She rose onto one knee as the surviving gunman loosed a shot at her, and she fired four more rounds at his muzzle flash. He cried out in pain and fell backward, hitting the ground hard before lying still.
Machine-gun fire chattered from a window, and she threw herself behind the remains of a stripped car, nothing left but the rusted carcass. Bullets pounded into it as she peered around one side. Maya aimed carefully and fired twice, and was rewarded by a grunt and a pause in the shooting. She was debating making a break for it when she saw three men round the corner of the mosque, weapons in hand. Maya crept away from the car, further to the rear of the lot, where a pile of rubble rose from the ground, the only trace of the structure that had once stood in its place. She made it to the debris and was preparing for her final stand when a blinding pain shrieked through the back of her head and everything went black.
Chapter 12
Maya regained consciousness to the percussive sound of shooting – the rapid-fire stutter of automatic weapons, higher pitched than the AK-47s the terrorists were using. She tried to sit up, but her skull was splitting, and she immediately felt so dizzy she almost passed out again. Tongues of flame licked from the mosque windows as gunmen returned fire at soldiers wearing the distinctive uniforms of the IDF. She watched one of the Israelis toss a grenade at the window from which she’d escaped, and a blinding flash shattered the night.
A pair of Palestinians darted from a nearby half-collapsed wall and let loose a volley at the soldiers, who hit the ground and fired back. Slugs whined around the shooters, and then another grenade landed a few feet away from them and exploded, shredding both men in a blast of shrapnel and flame and nearly severing one man’s torso at the waist. The soldiers leapt to their feet and continued across the field, weapons at the ready. Maya watched the exchange with a sense of surreal detachment, her vision blurring as she tried to make sense of the images.
The thumping of a helicopter overhead greeted her. A spotlight on the aircraft’s nose flickered to life and played over the exterior of the mosque before moving to the courtyard side, where it sounded like a pitched gun battle was still underway. Maya groped on the ground for her pistol and found it nearby. More shooting split the darkness. A man screamed in agony and went down at the rear of the mosque. Disoriented, she held a hand to her head and probed the back of her skull under the hijab. She winced as she felt a swollen bump, and her fingers cam
e away slick with blood from where a rifle stock had slammed into her.
The chopper’s big .50 caliber machine gun belched its deadly payload into the courtyard. More grenades exploded, and the interior of the mosque blinked orange as a firefight played out inside. The helicopter roared lower, firing as it descended, and in another minute the battle was over. Silence settled over the area.
Across the street handfuls of locals emptied from the buildings to watch the show, their natural fear of a battle overruled by the desire to see what had happened. IDF soldiers quickly established a perimeter around the mosque, and Maya watched as three of them approached her, two with rifles at port arms, the man in the middle…Kevod.
When they reached her, he looked down like she was something he’d scraped off his shoe. His tight smile of contempt was visible even in the dim light, and her stomach sank.
“So. Here you are, out of uniform, off base illegally, involved in an armed assault in hostile territory, creating an international incident that will be in all the Arab newspapers for the next month. I can see the headlines already: Israelis attack mosque in West Bank; brave Palestinians defend their sacred ground. Tell me how this could get any worse?”
“I…I sent a…a message to…one of the men.”
“A message? That’s nice. What the hell are you talking about?”
“It’s…the men who shot…Sarah…a bomb…”
Kevod looked around uncomprehendingly. “I don’t have the faintest idea what you’re going on about, but we’re here in response to shooting and explosions, not some phantom message. Corporal, I want her shackled and held in custody, am I clear?”
The man on Kevod’s right looked uncomfortable, but nodded. “Yes, sir.”
“You…you’ve got it…all wrong,” Maya tried again, but her voice sounded odd to her ear, as if coming from the bottom of a deep well.
“Sure I do. Save it for your trial. You’ve gone way over the line this time. There’s no excuse. None.”
“But…” Maya drew a deep breath, steeling herself for a last attempt to explain her presence, but the sky began spinning, the stars and moon pinwheeling overhead, and then the world closed in.
~ ~ ~
Maya’s nose twitched. The air smelled like chemicals – astringent, a cleaning product or an antiseptic. She cracked an eye open and was treated to sun streaming through a row of white, partially open vertical blinds. The room she was in was painted off-white, and it took her a few seconds to register the IV line in her arm and the muted beeping of a monitor behind her. She was lying in a bed, presumably in a hospital, obviously alive.
She tried to sit up, but her head protested with a sharp spike of pain. When she reached up to touch it, she was stopped by the bite of a steel handcuff secured to one of the bed rails. Maya tried to recall what had happened, but her last memory was of Kevod standing over her after the gun battle.
A military nurse entered and wordlessly examined her vital signs and then changed the dressing on her head wound. Maya’s brow scrunched, and she sucked in her breath as the woman’s fingers probed the tender area, and then a warm relaxation flooded her when the nurse injected pain reliever into the IV line.
The stern-faced woman left, and moments later a tall man with a lieutenant’s insignia on his uniform entered carrying a briefcase. He pulled up a chair next to the bed and sat, regarding her with a neutral gaze before switching on a small voice recorder and placing it on the side table.
“Maya Weiss, is that right?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I’m Lieutenant Wasserman. I’m going to ask you some questions, and I need you to answer them truthfully and completely. Do you understand?”
“Of course, sir.”
“Very well. Let’s start with some easy ones. What’s your name and rank?”
“I’m a Turai – a private.”
“How old are you?”
“Nineteen.”
He studied a folder he’d withdrawn from his briefcase. “I see you’ve had your share of brushes with the law. Spent…two years in juvenile detention and then an orphanage before the IDF?”
“Yes, sir.” She saw no reason to comment on the charges that had placed her there. He obviously had all the details in his hands.
“Why don’t you take me through what you were doing off base at a mosque in the West Bank? Start at the beginning. Leave nothing out. I might interrupt you with questions here and there, but it’s strictly to get a better understanding or to clarify some point.”
“Yes, sir.” Her head felt woozy, but a sudden thought occurred to her. “Why am I cuffed to the bed?”
The door swung open, and a short, trim, uniformed man with a pencil-thin mustache entered, a look on his face like he’d spent the morning sucking on lemons.
“Yes, Lieutenant,” he said. “Why don’t you tell the prisoner why she’s cuffed?” he suggested, his tone sharp. “Or did that slip your mind when you came in to question her before she’d had a chance to confer with her legal counsel?”
Lieutenant Wasserman looked annoyed. He reached out and retrieved his recorder.
“Avi, always a pleasure.”
Avi looked at Maya. “Did you say anything?”
“Just name and rank.”
Wasserman shrugged. “And age. We beat that out of her, too.”
Avi scowled and spoke to Maya, ignoring Wasserman. “You’re in custody. You’ve been charged with serious crimes, and this man is an interrogator. He works for the prosecution. Do not say another word to him. To anybody. From now on you speak only to me. I’m your legal counsel. Lieutenant Avi Fleisher.”
Maya’s eyes narrowed as Wasserman stood and glowered at them both. “You win this round, Avi, but she’s got to talk to us sooner or later. You know that as well as I.”
“Yes, but I’m a stickler for those boring little details like protecting my client’s rights. Or even alerting her that she has them. I presume you failed to mention to her that she was in custody?”
“I was just getting to that.”
“Sure you were. Well, it’s been fun, but you have no legitimate business here. And you can bet I’ll be filing a complaint.”
“File away. I just stopped in to see how she was doing.”
“Uh-huh. Is there anything else, Lieutenant?”
Wasserman collected his briefcase and slipped the file and recorder into it before making his way to the door. He glared at Maya, any semblance of friendliness gone. “I’ll be seeing you both very soon.”
“Don’t let it hit you on the way out,” Avi said.
When Wasserman left, Avi took the seat he’d vacated and set his backpack on the floor. He retrieved his own file and opened it, flipped through the three pages, and then closed it.
“You’re being charged with going AWOL, eight counts related to being at the mosque, and a treason charge. This is as serious as it gets, Maya. I can call you Maya, right?”
Maya nodded. “That’s crazy. I tried to tell Kevod what I was doing there, but he’s got it in for me. He wouldn’t listen. And then I blacked out.”
“Well, whether or not it’s crazy is up to the court. My job is to defend you. To do that I need to understand the truth. Not your spin. The whole truth, warts and all. Everything.”
She nodded again. “It all started with my friend Sarah. She was killed in the attack on the checkpoint three weeks ago. Along with two others.”
“Go on.”
She described her plan and how she’d sneaked out, day after day, working the locals for information until she was able to find one of the men responsible for the attack.
Avi interrupted her. “How did you know it was him?”
“I had a photo. Of both men, from the security cameras.”
“Ah. Go on.”
She explained how she tailed the terrorist, the discussion she’d overheard, and her final decision to follow the men to the bomb factory. She ended with the events leading up to the shootout. “Then I passed out.
That’s all I remember.”
“So your contention is that there was a bomb in the mosque?”
“Not in the mosque. In the outbuilding.”
“Right. And the ball bearings were part of the device.”
“Correct. Like I said.”
She yawned, exhausted, and Avi’s frown deepened. He made several more notes in the margins of the report and stood. “I’ll be back tomorrow. Again, Maya, do not speak with anyone. Do not answer any questions. If anyone attempts to interrogate you, refuse to answer and demand that I be called at once. Here’s my card, with my cell number on the back.” He fixed her with a cold stare. “This is deadly serious, young lady. I don’t know what you did to infuriate your superior, but he’s pulled out all the stops to see you buried.”
“Right. Sergeant Kevod. He’s a shit. He’s angry because I wouldn’t have sex with him. He’s a liar and a bully.”
Avi stood, motionless. “Your position is that this is all about a failed overture?”
“If you want to call bullying and sexual harassment an overture, sure. Why do you think most of the time women in the IDF report to female officers? This is obviously why.”
Avi nodded slowly. “Perhaps. But unfortunately it comes off as a weak defense, trying to tar and feather your superior instead of responding directly to the charges.”
She matched his scowl with her own. “Right. Because we can’t have it on the record that it’s all about his small dick syndrome, can we? The boys’ club protects its own.”
He moved to the exit and turned to face her. “Maya, let’s get one thing clear, shall we? I’m not the enemy. I’m the only thing standing between you and a world of hurt. So don’t talk down to me or accuse me of being part of your problem. I’m not. I’m your best friend, your savior, and the answer to your prayers. So lose the attitude. I’ll be back tomorrow. Get some rest.”
The door closed behind him with the finality of a judge’s gavel, leaving her to consider her dim prospects in silence. The reality of her situation settled over her like a malevolent fog. She closed her eyes, the narcotic numbing the worst of her anxiety, and retreated into the recesses of her mind, where she escaped when the external world became unbearable, as she had in childhood when those chartered with her protection had betrayed her in the dead of night.
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