Blood Rules

by John Trenhaile

  Another half hour, and thirst was making him dizzy. Clouds of tiny flies buzzed around his head, settling on his lips, his eyelids. At last Sharett raised a hand, and with a groan of relief Colin sank to the ground.

  It was cool and dank beneath the stone overhang that Sharett had chosen. Robbie sat with his arms curled around his legs, head down so that Colin could not see his eyes. He was panting. Colin assessed his own condition. His arm and shoulder had almost ceased to hurt, but his back was smarting painfully in the wet heat and he wondered how long he could go without hospital treatment.

  A hand came down lightly on his shoulder. “My friend.” Sharett had come to squat beside him. He spoke softly, allowing no one else to hear. “I can guess what you’re thinking.”

  “Can you?”

  “You can blame me for this, yes, but don’t blame yourself. You did what was right.”

  Before Colin could respond, Sharett had risen and was striding off to talk with Neeman. Colin looked at them through bloodshot eyes. I’d like to kill that man, he thought.

  He took stock. Robbie was all right, thank God, albeit distrustful. Sharett and Neeman were tired, but they were on their feet and talking with heads close together. Mahdi—Mahdi had disappeared.

  Colin rose silently and surveyed the wadi. The barren floor yawned empty, although there were several large boulders the Iranian might be crouching behind. Above him, the sky shimmered with a white intensity that hurt his eyes. The cliff walls, bleached of all color, had risen to about fifty feet, with nothing that even a goat could have used as a foothold.

  Colin turned back the way they’d come, brushing away the cloud of flies that had descended the moment he left the shadow of the rocks. Just before Sharett had called a halt they’d rounded a sharper than average outcrop. Was Mahdi behind it, perhaps?

  Colin made an effort to approach quietly. By the time he was within a few feet of the crease in the cliff wall he knew he’d found his man, because he could hear somebody slurping liquid. He broke into a run; stones crunched beneath his feet; the drinking noises stopped. As he rounded the outcrop, Mahdi was in the act of picking up a rock. Colin shouted and Mahdi staggered back, but he did not drop his missile. When Colin continued to advance he waved the rock high above his head. Colin’s sideways glance showed him that Mahdi had discovered a small pool of emerald-green water in a hollow, saved from evaporation by the shade.

  Mahdi threw the rock, but because he was weak it flew wide. As he bent down to find another, Colin launched himself forward, remembering too late his burns and wrenched shoulder. He crashed into the Iranian as a leaden weight, unable to fight or do anything but scream out his agony. It was enough: pain brought blissful seconds of unconsciousness and by the time Colin had recovered, Mahdi lay pinned to the ground with Sharett and Neeman on either side.

  “Water,” Colin croaked. “Bastard found water.”

  “Useless,” Sharett snapped. “It’s been lying here for weeks; think of the flies. Look at it! Green!”

  Colin wasn’t listening. He saw that the two Israelis were involved with Mahdi and jumped for the rock hollow, still half full of water. But as he put his face down a noise penetrated the muddle inside his head. Retching. Somebody was being violently sick.

  He came to himself with a jolt, to find his eyes mere inches above the water. It stank of sulfur; funny he hadn’t noticed that before. The bodies of half a dozen flies floated on the scummy surface. He stood up, wiping a hand across his brow. His head felt so strange, so strange. …

  Mahdi had stopped vomiting. He lay on his side, chest heaving and a wild look in his eyes. Fear. Terror.

  “We’ll leave him.” Sharett stood up. “We can’t carry him, and he’s in no state to walk.”

  “No!” The shock was patent in Robbie’s voice. “You can’t!”

  Sharett shrugged. “You want to be the one to carry him?”

  “I’ll help, of course,” Robbie said.

  “And evaporate two liters of sweat when before you lost only one? Don’t be stupid.”

  Robbie turned to Colin. “Help me, Dad?”

  It was clear from his expression, from his tone, that he regarded this as a token question, capable of receiving only one answer. So when, after a long pause, Colin said no, it rocked the boy on his heels.

  “Son, he’s got a much better chance lying here to rest, in the shade, than if we force him to march with us.”

  Colin watched the boy’s face, and it was like looking through a window. Intellectually, Robbie had grasped the situation: he understood that although a sacrifice was necessary, he didn’t have to be the one strapped to the altar. Faced with the starkest choice, him or me, he saw deep down inside how he was going to choose me and hated it.

  “Robbie.” Sharett spoke. His voice sounded tolerant, compassionate. “In cases of desert survival, there is only one way to save a sick colleague. You seek help in the fastest way possible; then you go back and rescue him. That’s what we have to have the courage to do.”

  Silence.

  “Think of the airlines,” Dannie Neeman said unexpectedly. “There’s an oxygen failure and the masks come down. If you’ve got a kid with you, they tell you to fix your own mask first, then see to the child. Right?”

  Robbie looked at Dannie with something like gratitude on his face, and Colin understood that Neeman, extraordinarily, had found Robbie an out that could marry brainpower with gut emotion.

  Sharett laid a hand on the boy’s shoulder. “Right,” he said. “Isn’t it?”

  As Robbie nodded, Colin turned away. But then he found himself gazing at Mahdi, who lay on the ground panting. Every so often his body would go into spasm and lie still, before those horrible, dry pants began again. So Colin raised his eyes and caught something he wasn’t meant to see. Something that, despite the searing temperature, chilled him to the bone.

  Sharett had kept his hand on Robbie’s shoulder, but his face was turned to Neeman. Now he smiled gratitude for his friend’s intervention, at the same time squeezing Robbie, and in a flash of horror-filled intuition Colin perceived why those two actions were linked, what the combination meant: in Robbie, Sharett had the means of drawing Leila to himself, and when she came he would kill her son, just as she had butchered his daughter, all those years before.

  An eye for an eye.

  Sharett clapped the boy’s shoulder. “Let’s go,” he said.

  The sun was high when she found her first real confirmation that she was on the right track: a molded pattern in the dust at the foot of some scree. Leila squatted on her haunches, close enough to observe the pattern but not so near as to disturb it.

  It was a shoe print, she felt sure. A man’s shoe. Her first guess had been right: they’d follow the dried-up watercourse in the hope of finding water, shade, and cover. Much depended on how far inland this wadi extended. If it was short, they’d soon find themselves in the neck of a trap and, to judge from the way the terrain was changing, the cliff walls at that point would be too sheer to climb. She’d have them cornered.

  Leila looked up at the sky. It was a bright cloudless blue but, this being a monsoon month, rain might come at any time. She knew this territory, had studied it thoroughly. About once every five or six years torrential rains lashed the coast of South Yemen and its mountainous hinterland. Because the ground was parched rock-hard, none of the water could drain away; instead, it coalesced into a mighty flooding wave called a sail. Bedouins traveling in the monsoon months avoided camping in wadis for this very reason: the force of the water was enough to uproot crops and sweep men away to their deaths, helpless before one of nature’s strangest phenomena.

  None of her quarry were likely to know about the sail.

  She stood up, scanning the horizon. Heat had fused everything she saw into the same dull, pale sandy color: desert floor, limestone, even the band of light where cliff met sky. The wadi was definitely narrowing. Far ahead she could see where the watercourse changed direction, a turn in the rock
wall blocking her view. It was hard to judge whether the cliffs were any higher there than here.

  She drank a quarter of a liter of water, enough to take the edge off her thirst. If Sharett had any water, he would share it and order the rest of them to take sips. Ignorant people always made that mistake in the desert, which is why they usually died. They would walk for more than the daily tolerance of five kilometers, taking a mouthful of water here, a mouthful there, until their exhausted, dehydrated bodies packed up. Leila knew that she must swallow enough to save herself from the distraction of constantly thinking about water. With thirst banished she could concentrate on pursuit.

  As she set off again she could feel the water doing her good. Her limbs moved easily, despite the fierce heat, because she was fit to start with and she had put her trust in Allah. Progress seemed faster now.

  She heard the groans long before she rounded the distant corner of cliff that she had observed from her resting place. She did not so much as break step, but unslung her M3A1 and clicked off the safety catch.

  A man lay holding his stomach. His eyes protruded, he retched dryly. Leila knelt beside him, feeling for his pulse. It was intermittent and very weak.

  “Tell me,” she said softly.

  But he could not answer. At last he managed to jerk his head behind him. She looked up, saw what he meant, and rose to inspect it: a pool of water cupped in a rocky hollow.

  “You drank that?” she asked.

  He made no reply, but what had happened was obvious.

  “Did anyone else drink?” she snapped. “Did they?”

  When he shook his head Leila felt a second’s respite from anxiety. She was on their trail, this man proved it, and now she must be closing fast.

  “Which way?” She pointed up the wadi. “There?”

  He nodded. She believed that he nodded. Leila knelt again, held out her hand, folded Mahdi’s fingers around it.

  “How many?” she asked softly, and began to close her own fingers, one by one. Four. The two Jews, Colin, Robbie. “How long ago did they leave?”

  Again the trick with the fingers. Four … forty minutes. But the sick man was guessing, she knew that, guessing wildly in an attempt to buy mercy from her. He was eyeing her water flask. She knew that soon he would make a grab for it and so she stood up abruptly, wrestling with this problem of mercy.

  Shots made a lot of noise. Did she want to advertise her presence?

  Her spent brain found no easy solution to that, so she left it to God. He too seemed to find the mystery a hard one, but in the end he sent his message and she knew that, as always, he was right. Three .45 ACP rounds swept Mahdi up to Paradise.

  Leila envied him, and not only because she had just made her task that much harder. They would know she was coming now. Even if Colin and Robbie did not realize the significance of the bangs, mere pops in their far-off ears, Sharett would understand.

  She hugged the shade beneath the rocks while making a quick survey of the wadi. That curve in the watercourse that had blocked her view earlier … they would be beyond it by now, but keeping a close eye on their backs. Because she had water and was in training she could probably catch up with them, but after the shots they’d be expecting her, even if they weren’t before. There was a better way. She would scale the wall here, where it was still comparatively easy going, and move fast along the cliff top until she cut them off, beyond that distant turn. They’d be anticipating an attack from the rear. But she would be on top of them, and in front. Yes. Surprise was essential when dealing with that accursed Jew.

  Sharett… odd that he should be here, at the end. On the plane he’d talked of his daughter, and for a moment the two of them, terrorist and victim, had found illusory contact. Would his daughter be there at the gates of hell to greet him? she wondered, as she emerged from shade into blinding sunlight. She found it strange to think of Sara Sharett in hell. But why? The girl had been an unbeliever in this life; there was no hope for her hereafter. Should she not go to hell and perish there?

  Perhaps it was something to do with the way she’d died.

  She’d seen Raful Sharett dimly, through a haze of smoke, for the one and only time, in New York on the evening of 3 June 1982. The day she’d last held her son before the hijack. She could have stopped it, she could have saved him, she could, she could, she could!

  By now the sun was almost directly overhead, illuminating a landscape barren beyond belief, leaching it of everything except savage white light. Leila shouldered her weapon and trudged on into the face of brilliance, powerless to prevent the coming of memory, suddenly afraid.

  24 JULY: MORNING:

  AL MAHRA, SOUTH YEMEN

  SHLOMO Stern caught sight of Gabriel humping ammunition belts over to the shade beneath the plane.

  “Come here, I want you to meet someone.” As Gabriel approached the bottom of the escape slide, Shlomo said, “This is your target in the doorway last night; you should know each other. Captain Roger Morgan and … we’ll just call him Gabriel.”

  The two men shook hands.

  “It was your white shirt that saved you, Roger. Terrorists are like the bad men in old-time Westerns: they wear black. White makes too good a target, you see. But for five seconds there, Gabriel’s finger was on the trigger, you were in the telescopic sights"—he held up his forefingers in the shape of an X—"where the wires meet, so.”

  Morgan glanced ruefully at Gabriel. “Would it have hurt?”

  “No.” Gabriel’s finger made a little circular movement over the pilot’s chest. “The heart.” He waved his right hand in what might have been nearly a salute and started for the shore. “Swim, Shlomo?” he said over his shoulder.

  “Later, maybe.”

  Morgan watched Gabriel, noting the ease with which he shed his sand-colored camouflage denim shirt with its black shoulder flashes and admiring the thick muscular torso beneath. He wondered how you got to such a peak of fitness. That, he suspected, did hurt, unlike being shot in the heart.

  “What happens next?” he asked Shlomo.

  The officer did not answer at once. His gaze strayed to the sea, a quarter of a mile from where they stood, where many of the recently liberated passengers were splashing around. Despite the earliness of the hour, the sun was already hot and had long ago burned off any lingering mist. Out there in the desert it would swiftly become a killer.

  “Wait for the vessels coming from Oman to pick you up,” he replied at last. “But you’re not going to get her out in a hurry.”

  Morgan saw that he was looking at the plane.

  “I doubt if she’ll ever come out, colonel. It’s an insurance problem now.”

  Shlomo nodded. “You’re a hero,” he said unexpectedly. “What you did is regarded as one of the most heroic feats of flying since the Second World War. Fun for you, I should think.”

  Morgan flushed and looked at the gravel. He wasn’t sure how to take Lieutenant Colonel Stern. Plenty of shadows lurking. … “What will you and your men do?” he asked.

  But Shlomo had just seen Vered breast the hill with the others he’d taken to check out the crashed helicopter. “Our job,” he answered tersely. “Excuse me.”

  He set off toward the foothills where his troops had bivouacked, wishing he felt better. In Jerusalem they’d be operating about now: Rebecca would be anesthetized, pale, horizontal beneath a green sheet, her hair stuffed into a cap. Is she dreaming of me? he wondered. Was she afraid, in the minutes before the plunger of the syringe went down, bringing oblivion?

  He stopped while still a hundred meters short of his temporary HQ and wheeled around as if to survey the shoreline. In fact, he’d given himself sixty seconds to face what was happening to his wife, to worry about it, pray about it, and then forget it.

  A minute later he turned on his heel and approached Vered’s group.

  “Those satellite pictures were accurate, Shlomo. The ‘copter crashed right where we thought. Survivors, more than one. Faint tracks heading north
.”

  “The hijackers?”

  “Maybe. But there are other tracks heading southwest, nowhere near the helicopter. So the tracks leading north must belong to someone else. Two parties, definitely. Hijackers or—” He broke off with a shrug.

  Shlomo mentally reviewed what they knew. Hanif and some of her men had left the plane together; nobody knew where they’d gone. Two scarcely visible sets of tracks led away from the aircraft: multiple footprints heading southwest, where lay the small town of Al Ghaydah, and another set, one person only, making for the wreckage of the helicopter. But according to Vered, there were still more tracks leading away from the wrecked chopper. Tracks plural.

  Then there was Morgan’s information: Sharett and the Raleighs had escaped from the plane alive. There’d been a firefight. Morgan had seen everyone piling into the helicopter, which had crashed behind the first range of foothills.

  But, yes, Vered was right: the multiple tracks leading north, inland, away from the helicopter, must mean that there’d been survivors. And now Hanif was going after the boy. Had to be, had to be.

  Tel Aviv’s orders were perfectly clear.

  “I’m going inland,” he said to Vered. “You’re coming with me. Group of four. Plenty of water. Arrange a frequency. Weapons check before we start. Yuram’s to take command here.”

  “Got it.”

  “Oh, and Uri … I want Gabriel in our group.”

  24 JULY: AFTERNOON:

  AL MAHRA, SOUTH YEMEN

  Afternoon’s more tranquil light had softened the rocks to a pale shade of orange. Sharett and Neeman seemed made of iron; they kept going doggedly forward as if there was something to be had at the end of all this. Colin and Robbie could scarcely stand, let alone move. But they knew they had no choice except to go on. The shots had told them that. At first, they’d refused to believe that such understated pops, scarcely loud enough to puncture the silence, could signal the hunter’s approach. But when they saw Sharett and Neeman redouble their efforts, saw the set of their faces, the Raleighs changed their minds.