by Chuck Holton
But those were questions for chaplains and clerics. At the moment, John had time for neither. If God wasn’t going to keep kids and the other innocents of the world safe, he and his men would do it.
He consulted his watch again. “We’ve got fifteen minutes.” He keyed the Motorola. “Dan, get ready. We’re going for it.”
Beirut Lebanon
“LIZ! SHE WENT BACK!”
Liz Fairchild looked up from her laptop and the interview she was transcribing to see Nabila standing in the doorway, a letter dangling from her shaking hand. “Who went back where?” she asked the family’s housekeeper/cook.
“Zahra. To the refugee camp.”
Cold coiled about Liz’s heart. “Are you sure?”
Nabila waved the letter. “My cousin Hanan has seen her, though she hasn’t had a chance to talk to her.”
The cold seeped throughout Liz’s body, chilling her to the fingertips. It was barely eight o’clock, too early to hear such terrible news. “She’ll probably be all right.”
But neither of them believed it. Zahra would certainly suffer. The only questions were how much and when.
Nabila read from the letter. “‘I worry about her. You know her mother and father. In their eyes Zahra has shamed the family.’”
Liz didn’t actually know Zahra’s parents as Nabila did, but she knew all about them.
“My aunt and uncle are so ardent, so passionate about the letter of Islamic law.” Nabila’s face was a study in concern and distress. “My aunt especially is fanatical. I fear her more than my uncle. He is more compassionate by nature, and he is a broken man over what happened to Zahra. That his sons, the future of his family, would rape their younger sister and make her pregnant has shattered his heart. They sit in jail for their crime, and he is shamed. My aunt, on the other hand, is shamed that Zahra got pregnant and had a child outside of marriage. She blames Zahra, not the brothers.”
Liz frowned. “I can’t understand that thinking. Zahra is the victim. She was only fourteen to the brothers seventeen and eighteen. She needs sympathy, not condemnation.”
“You think like an American or a European, not a Palestinian raised in the camps.”
Liz couldn’t deny that. “Does Hanan specifically say she fears for Zahra’s life?”
Nabila shook her head. “Hanan has to be careful what she writes in case a letter is intercepted. No one, not even her husband, knows she writes me.”
“Why do you think Zahra went back? She was safe with your relatives in the Bekaa Valley. She could have stayed with them forever. Everyone told her over and over not to go back. She would be putting herself in danger.”
Liz knew an honor killing was Nabila’s main fear. The crime was not very common in Lebanon anymore, but sometimes in one of the crowded Palestinian camps, where there was essentially no civil law enforcement, terrible things happened in the name of Allah.
“You know the pull of home,” Nabila said. “Much as you love living in the United States, you keep coming back to Beirut.”
Liz nodded. She had been raised here from thirteen until she went to the States for college. Her parents, Drs. Charles and Annabelle Fairchild, still lived here and taught at the American University of Beirut. Her sister, Julie, had married a Lebanese and lived here, too.
“And I know how hard it is to stay away.” Nabila’s voice was low and harsh, full of regret over things she couldn’t change and deep in her heart wouldn’t change.
She had come from the same camp that her cousin Zahra had returned to, and Nabila knew she could never go back. She, too, had dishonored her family when at eighteen she had walked away from her culture and hitched a ride to Beirut with only the dream of more. It was bad enough that she was getting an education at the American University of Beirut, but she also worked as housekeeper/cook for two American professors.
“Oh, Nabila!” Liz went to her and hugged her. Nabila had been with the Fairchilds for so many years that it was easy to forget she had lived seventeen hardscrabble years in the camp.
“But you left a difficult life, especially for a woman, to seek a better life and your dream of becoming a doctor. Zahra was in such a good situation with people who loved her, and she’s gone back to virtual enslavement.” Or worse.
“In your eyes. In my eyes.” Nabila blinked and brushed futilely at the tears that ran down her cheeks. “I am so frightened for her.”
Liz grabbed some tissues from the box on her night table and handed them to Nabila. “When was Hanan’s letter written?”
Hanan was the only one from Nabila’s family who had kept contact with her after she left. When Hanan went to market in Sidon, she gave her letters to a merchant who sold produce in the souk, and he posted them for her, adding the cost of the stamps to her bill. When Nabila wrote back, the little man wrapped the letter in the papers about Hanan’s fruit and vegetables.
“The letter is two weeks old.”
“Yikes.” So much could have happened in two weeks. “I need to go see that she’s fine. Maybe I can talk her into returning to Nabatiya.”
Nabila’s face mirrored her relief. “I was hoping you would do that.”
“I can’t do anything else.” Liz Fairchild, would-be Fixer of the Universe. “Zahra’s been stuck in my mind and heart ever since you arranged for me to interview her last month.” Liz saw the slight girl, swathed in black clothes and head covering, hugging herself as she talked about her despair.
“Who will ever marry me now?” she had asked, dark eyes stark. “I have brought shame upon myself, upon my family, shame so severe I can never recover. I am ruined.”
Liz wanted to cry. She leaned forward, note taking forgotten. “Zahra, it wasn’t your fault.”
But the girl’s mother had told her it was. Her culture had told her she was impure, an abomination, a temptress who brought the rape upon herself.
Zahra stared at the floor. “I feel everyone has cast me out. I am all alone,” she whispered.
That loneliness was why she had returned, Liz knew. Family ties, no matter how dysfunctional the family, called a siren’s song almost impossible to resist, no matter the consequences of listening. Family was security, especially to a traumatized fifteen-year-old.
“I think she misses her baby, though she didn’t tell me so.” Liz slipped her feet into a pair of Reeboks and tied the laces. Walking around the litter-strewn streets of the refugee camp called for sturdy shoes. “And who knows how much of her despair is postpartum problems.”
“There was no way she could have kept that baby girl.”
“I agree, and at least some family now has a child they otherwise wouldn’t.”
Nabila’s cell phone rang as Liz made certain her passport was in her purse. She’d need it at the checkpoints.
“Hanan!” Nabila said, shock in her voice.
Liz blinked. Hanan never called. Literally. It was too dangerous. The conversation was short, and Nabila groaned as she hit the disconnect.
“Hanan says my uncle has left the camp on business of some kind. He will be gone overnight. It is only Zahra and my aunt and the younger daughter.”
Liz nodded. She understood the danger all too well. She shoved a piece of paper at Nabila. “Directions once I get to the camp.”
As Nabila wrote, Liz grabbed her car keys. “Tell my parents that I might not be back in time for dinner.”
The road from Beirut to Sidon was good, and Liz drove as fast as she dared.
Heavenly Father, help me get there in time. Please!
The road from Sidon to the Sainiq camp was not as good, and she was forced to slow. She felt the clock ticking, and the sight of the checkpoint outside the camp ratcheted her tension. She rubbed at the base of her sternum, trying to relieve the sick feeling that grew stronger with each moment.
She slowed and held out her passport and journalist’s credentials to the young Lebanese soldier who peered in her window. His gun was pointed to the ground, and that’s the way she wanted it to sta
y. She tried to appear calm, to give no hint of the anxiety that drove her or the need she felt for speed.
“Why do you want to go in there?” the soldier asked in fractured English.
“I’m a writer. I’m writing a story about what it’s like to be a Palestinian woman today,” she answered in Arabic. And today I’m interested in one small Palestinian.
The soldier looked at her in surprise and switched to his own language. “An American who speaks Arabic?”
“I lived many years in Beirut. My parents live there still. So does my sister.”
“But you now live in America?” His eyes were bright with curiosity.
“I do. In Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.”
“My cousin Habib lives in Thorndale, Pennsylvania. Do you know him?”
The question didn’t surprise Liz. One of the first things a Lebanese asked when meeting someone was, “What village are you from?” To someone who lived in the small country of Lebanon, the size of the United States, even the size of Pennsylvania, was hard to grasp. “No, I’m afraid I don’t know your cousin.”
“He is handsome. You would like him. He has a pizza shop.”
Liz smiled, though all she wanted to do was hit the accelerator and be gone. “If I ever go to Thorndale, Pennsylvania, I will stop at his shop and say hello to him.”
The young soldier looked pleased. He pointed to the camp. “You do not want to go in there. It is dangerous.”
“I know, but I do need to talk to the people who live there.”
“They don’t like Americans.”
Another soldier rushed out of the kiosk, shouting and pointing back toward Sidon. The young guard stepped back and frowned down the road.
Liz looked in her rearview mirror and saw three speeding cars, lights flashing on top, bearing down on the checkpoint.
“Go.” The young soldier held out her passport, making shooing motions with his hand. “Go!”
As the sound of sirens cut the air, Liz drove the last small distance into the camp, which was not really a camp but a small city. She wanted to pull over, let the speeding vehicles pass, and then follow them to their destination. Stumbling onto fresh news was about as good as it got for a reporter.
But she reined herself in. Today there was something—someone—more important than a scoop. She carefully followed the directions to Hanan’s house. She made two turns when she became aware that the speeding cars with the flashing lights and blaring sirens were roaring up behind her. The road was little more than a dirt lane with homes built closely on both sides, and she looked about for somewhere to get out of the way.
A horn blared loudly behind her, a bass to the tenor warblings of the sirens, just as she saw a house set back from the road a few feet. She pulled into a small strip of dirt that was essentially someone’s front yard. It was just big enough for her dusty, black rental. She waited as the cars rocketed by, her own car swaying in the air currents of their passing.
She drove back onto the road, feeling somewhat claustrophobic from all the buildings set so closely to each other. There was literally no space between the structures. One house’s west wall was the next house’s east wall. Women and children stood in doorways to see the passing vehicles.
What did these women think of their lives? Did they harbor the generations-old hatred for Israel, or did they see its futility? Did they meekly accept the fundamentalist interpretation of Islamic law that said they were lesser beings than men, or did they think themselves of value, at least secretly even though they couldn’t voice such heresy? Would they see Zahra as the sinner and her brothers as the victims, or vice versa?
To her surprise and growing dismay, Liz found herself making the same turns as the speeding cars. It was like she was deliberately following them.
They couldn’t be going where she was going. They just couldn’t.
Oh, God, please, no!
She rounded the final corner as the official cars skidded to a halt, and men in uniform jumped out. They raced to a house, nearly pulling the screen door off as they rushed inside. The street was full of people, many of the women crying, most of the men looking pleased. She saw Hanan’s home and counted one, two, three more.
It was the home the police and soldiers had entered.
That coil of cold wrapped its hoary arms about her again. Zahra!
“What’s happened?” she asked the first man she came to. He looked at her, glanced quickly away, then without a word joined three men standing near Hanan’s.
It wasn’t bad manners. In her distress she’d forgotten that a lone woman shouldn’t talk to a man. She approached a group of women. “What’s happened?”
They turned to her, their sad eyes suspicious in spite of the fact that she spoke Palestinian Arabic.
Liz tried again. “Is Hanan here?”
The women’s eyes darted to a young woman standing with two little girls hanging on her skirt. Liz approached her.
“Hanan, I’m Liz Fairchild.” She dropped her voice to little more than a whisper. “Nabila got your letter today.”
Hanan looked at her, dark eyes awash with tears. She was a pretty woman with a strong resemblance to Nabila. “I am afraid it is too late.”
Beirut
THE SOFT KNOCK at the door took Jamal by surprise. Panic shot through him as a muffled female voice drifted in from the hallway outside. “Housekeeping. Turndown service.”
He dropped his burden, which landed on the floor with a thud, and leapt across the bed toward the door. He heard the maid’s electronic master key being pushed into the slot.
He got there just as the handle turned and the door started to push inward. By a supreme effort, he stopped short of crashing into the door. Instead, he eased it closed with both hands and flipped the dead bolt, which he’d foolishly forgotten to turn after the waiter entered.
“La, shukran,” he croaked, trying to sound calm. “No, thank you.”
The maid mumbled in Arabic that there was such a thing as a Do Not Disturb sign. He heard her move away, off to bother some other hotel guest.
Jamal took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. How could he have made such a foolish error? To be discovered now would ruin his entire mission.
He looked at the room service cart by the window. The sight of it appalled him, though not because the man who had delivered it now lay in a crumpled heap between the two double beds, nor because the food on it was bad. In fact, it was some of the best he’d ever tasted. No, what disgusted him was the knowledge that some people thought nothing of paying a third of a working man’s daily wage for a plate of stuffed grape leaves.
For four days Jamal had been staying in this luxurious room in the Hotel Rowena, one of the most expensive hotels in Beirut. To him its opulence was nothing short of profane. He thought of his mother and father and their tiny flat in the Sabra refugee camp near Sidon, sixty kilometers to the south. It wasn’t much larger than this room. He had lived there since birth, working with his father from the time he was a small boy as they struggled to make a living in their red and white fishing boat.
His earliest memories were of desperation, of warfare. Images were seared into his brain of the 1982 massacre in his hometown, carried out by Lebanese Phalangist Christians out to avenge the assassination of their president.
The screams he had heard and the blood he had smelled as hundreds and hundreds of men and even some of the women and children were murdered rose in his mind’s eye as regularly as the sun rose red over the Anti-Lebanon Mountains each morning. His father had been dragged into the street and beaten severely while five-year-old Jamal cowered behind a pile of refuse and watched.
He had nightmares for years, fueled by the fear that the thugs who entered the camp with the permission of the Israelis would come back. This time they would kill his father and maybe his mother, and he would be alone, at their mercy.
Jamal had been powerless then, and even as a child he hated the feeling. He longed to control his own destiny and to have
the security to enjoy it. But control was something that did not exist for him or any Palestinian, and security was not to be found, not even in his religion.
No matter how doggedly Jamal pursued his faith, he could not feel safe in it. Islam seemed insatiable, requiring that he forever work to gain Allah’s favor. He believed as he had been taught—there is no god but Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet. Jamal prayed without hesitation or regret whenever the muezzin called. He even gave a portion of his meager earnings to the needy, as if he were not needy himself.
But it was never enough. Allah would judge him by his deeds someday, and deep inside Jamal knew he could never be good enough to earn Allah’s favor. He knew many people in his village saw him as a devout young man, but they never saw his inside. They never heard his thoughts when one of the far-too-plentiful “liberated” Palestinian girls passed him on the street. They never knew the doubts and questions about his faith that he sometimes struggled with. If Allah knew these things, however, he was doomed.
Finally, Jamal had come to understand that there was only one way to guarantee the acceptance of Allah—martyrdom. But coming to that conclusion and actually becoming a martyr were two different things.
He was not a ruthless or violent man. Nor was he brave. On the contrary, he had always been quiet, devout, and thoughtful. When the man had approached him after Friday prayers three weeks ago and asked if he would be willing to accept a mission from Allah, Jamal was taken by surprise. He understood immediately what such a mission would entail, but why did the man ask a nobody like him?
“Let me think about it,” he said to cover the fact that he didn’t really want to die, not even the glorious death of a martyr. His mother and father would despise the idea, so he shared nothing of the man’s offer with them. He could imagine his mother saying, “Your glory will be my pain, and I already have enough pain for many lifetimes and all eternity.”
He also knew that if he said yes, his family would be cared for, even richly rewarded, though the identity of the benefactors would not be known. He as a martyr would even be heralded on trading cards—revered as a hero by young boys in the camps.