Traitor's Gate

by Charlie Newton

  The British patrols west of the River Jordan were more murderous but less worrisome. They rarely strayed this far north from southern Palestine. In reality, the northern reaches of the Sea of Galilee, and the malaria marshes beyond, were no-man’s-land. “God’s will” and man’s laws were adjudicated here by brute force and without quarter. Yesterday had been such a day. Saba had been dressed as a woman stranded on the Damascus Highway. Four Legionnaires stopped to offer assistance, then decided to rape and rob her instead. The sergeant dropped his pants to have her first. He died by her knife, the others by gunfire. Half their weapons would be gifts to the guerrilla fighters, the other kept for sale in the Damascus souks.

  Dusk’s chill came with the setting sun. Saba tightened the blanket at her shoulders, warming herself with thoughts of the clean water, a wound that had been successfully dressed, and no ride in the morning. The noise came from the rocks behind her and then in front. She registered the uniforms before she knew they were French. Impossible, but somehow she had been tracked. Five rifles were pointed at her, bayonets fixed on three. The nearest spoke in French. She shook her head.

  He used Arabic. “Where is he?” She shrugged, feeling the Frenchman’s eyes on her naked face, her pistol covered by her shirt but too far to reach.

  The soldier lunged his rifle at her mouth. “Khair-Saleh. Where is he?”

  Saba said, “I do not know this man.”

  “The Raven. Where is he?” Four of the five rifles were mounted tight to French shoulders, fingers white inside the trigger guards, the barrels too far to grab. These Frenchmen were scared, anxious in their battle line. An incorrect movement by her and their fear would kill her. Saba stood with her arms extended, hoping the Frenchmen would not shoot her. “I am alone . . . with my husband.” She pointed toward the water through the cedar trees on her right and covered her face with a black keffiyeh. “He swims the river.”

  Three sets of eyes followed her finger.

  She ducked. The closest rifle fired flame past her face. Tree bark exploded behind her. The soldier unlevered his bolt but pitched forward, struck from behind. The rifleman on his right sprayed blood from his coat and snapped at the waist. An 8mm bullet grooved her shoulder. Saba spun sideways, reached her Enfield pistol, turned into a series of explosions, and fired. A soldier crashed at her feet, his face gone. Another charged, his bayonet slicing through her shirt. The knife was in her hand and buried in his liver before she knew she had done it. He screamed almost in her mouth. Saba twisted and fell under his weight, his hand clawing at her eyes. She bit at his face and stabbed through his coat. They wrestled until he quit and he was jerked dead from her chest.

  The Raven tossed the soldier aside and scanned the others. His black robe was bloody, as was his face, the black wings under his eye all that remained of his cheek. He sank to his knees, his eyes not leaving hers, then relaxed until he rested on his boot heels. The exhale was deep, a wet, wheezing rattle. He filled his hands with his pistol, dagger, and a bloody ten franc note, then pushed all toward her.

  “Dayman. Not for me. For Palestine.”

  EIGHTEEN MONTHS LATER

  September, 1935

  The rebel camp had been betrayed. Hidden under the cliffs and cedar trees of Lebanon’s Beqaa Valley, they would be under siege by French mercenaries before today’s sunset. Fawzi al-Qawuqji was the commander of this camp. He was a French-trained Arab and a decorated officer who had deserted the French army after the Great War to join what he passionately believed were “the Arab Nationalists” and what the French and British Authority defined, without exception, as a “murderous gang of terrorist criminals.”

  Looking beyond the hills, al-Qawuqji weighed battle options. To his north and west would be a fast death. To his east was to be pushed out of the fight. To his south, in the hills and cities below him, was the fight. Palestine was ablaze in civilian riots and strikes that had killed many but had not ended the League of Nations Mandate or halted England’s plans for her desert territories. At his shoulder, an Iraqi mullah lobbied for al-Qawuqji’s ear. “France and Great Britain warn all those with an interest in the region that you must be stopped, that you gather the ‘zealots’ of our many tribes into these mountains. They fear you will mount a second Arab Revolt.”

  Fawzi al-Qawuqji nodded but did not speak. It was true; his commanders and rebels had all sworn a blood oath with him to rally the factions of the desert against England’s occupation, swearing to die fighting against the final phase of expulsion from their homeland. This mullah wished them to join a larger organization with Islam at its center, the Arab Higher Committee’s Pan-Arab Army of God.

  The mullah added, “Without us you will be alone and perish without success. Your focus in Palestine is too narrow, too—”

  “Here, two hundred thousand Palestinians are deported to make room for the European colonists.” Fawzi al-Qawuqji waved his hand. “Here, not Iraq, England imprisons and exiles Palestinian Nationalists. Here, the British Mandate Authority steals Palestinian land to give or sell to the European colonists.”

  The mullah stiffened but maintained his reasonable tone. “Yes. But your camp remains small and fragile. And England speaks daily in the Arabic, French, and English newspapers of the soldiers they are sending. The newspapers frighten your partisans back into their homes. To succeed you must join the Pan Arab—”

  “No.” Al-Qawuqji looked at the mullah. “Palestine must build her army here, now. Kill the invader in greater numbers than he kills the people of Palestine.” Al-Qawuqji hardened his tone. “Send me weapons and ammunition, not words.”

  The mullah hardened his tone to match. “And the women who defame your camp? What of them?”

  Fawzi al-Qawuqji allowed few women to train in his camp, and those were segregated, bound under the strict codes of desert traditions. Women were not men. And never treated as such.

  All but one woman. She was tall for an Arab, olive-complected, and fierce like the desert tribe that had birthed her. The Enfield pistol in her left hand was smoking, the target at twenty feet had six holes in the center ring. The man to her left was on a knee and bleeding from his eyebrow, his checkered keffiyeh askew. Without looking, the woman hit him again, this time with the butt of the pistol, and knocked him unconscious. She spoke in Arabic, then English.

  “I am Saba Hassouneh al-Saleh.”

  The men stepped back. Hers had been a trick, an exercise in new-world etiquette and combat. They had thought her a whore or lower, forced to wear a western man’s clothes, her faced covered out of shame, not piety.

  “In this camp, no man will place his hands on me. Until you are as I am, until you have killed thirteen with your hands, you are dogs—all temper and without talent.”

  The professor’s proud teenager was now twenty-two. She wore suspendered pants and a warrior’s calm. Her hip pocket held a bloodstained ten franc note pinned to the lining, a talisman from the man who had saved her. In his blood, tiny bird wings were tattooed black beneath her right eye.

  She belted the Enfield and adjusted her black keffiyeh. The tail draped a powerful shoulder scarred twice by French bullets and hid all but her scorching eyes.

  The men saw the bird wings and added distance, unsure if this could be her—the Raven—or another trick. None wanted to know badly enough to remain within reach of her hands.

  Saba licked dust from her teeth. “There is no God here. If you fight for Him, take your holy book and leave. We fight for Palestine.”

  ITASCA, TEXAS

  CHAPTER 2

  September, 1935

  Eddie Owen kept himself upbeat and happy; the alternative was beaten and unhappy and what did that solve? There were things twenty-two-year-olds could fix in a Dust Bowl Depression and things a fellow couldn’t. Focus on the fact that you had a job today, no matter how hard or dangerous the work, outwork your boss’s expectations so that you had your job tomorrow, and everybody wins.

  Sort of. Eddie’s grizzled bosses still had troub
le figuring him and said so, often pointing him out to visitors like a man would a good hunting dog with three legs; didn’t seem to care how Eddie felt about it, either. “That boy there’s one-of-a-goddamn-kind—a college-educated roughneck. So damn smart at books the college there at Norman let him come for free. Hell, prior to ’29, you’d call him a liar even if he had the damn diploma in hand.”

  September’s last Friday was seven and a half hours old, the Texas sky blurred brown by the blizzards of overplowed land and the Great Plains blowing east. The radio was on, and had been all night because that’s what the rig’s driller wanted. The driller’s name was Thurman Deets.

  Eddie focused on the radio, happy that Thurman Deets and his fellow wildcatters had embraced the big wooden boxes. Walter Winchell’s live staccato bulletins had finished long before midnight, but the harsh realities Winchell spoke about were being rebroadcast into the parched slaps of a sapless wind.

  Eddie’s boss swallowed the last of his chalk beers, head canted toward the radio like he was listening to the broadcast a second time, as was his way. Thurman Deets looked no happier after six beers. Walter Winchell warned that a second Depression was coming, this one the backbreaker. Winchell painted word pictures of America’s industrial cities roiling right now with job riots and Communist agitators. Five years of hunger marches hadn’t added hope or reduced the breadlines. Walter was scared for America—said that her great promise could come to an end right here and now—and wanted to know what President Roosevelt intended to do about it.

  Deets spit on the drilling platform halfway to Eddie’s boots, then answered the radio. “He intends to not get assassinated. If he can.”

  Behind the derrick tower and through the brown clouds, the sun hinted at Dallas to the east, a gambling town that Eddie hadn’t seen and didn’t figure he would, a town that Thurman Deets repeatedly said he could piss on or let burn. Deets turned up the radio’s volume. Winchell was replaced by the News Cavalcade, rebroadcasting yesterday’s presidential Fireside Chat. Sandwiched between the static and New Deal rhetoric, FDR offered little comfort or contradiction. He denounced the nation’s bankers as “moneychangers and the privileged princes of industrial dynasties.” They and their scions, not he, were the architects of the nation’s ghost banks and the workingman’s soup kitchens.

  Thurman Deets spit the deck again, fairly goddamn certain he’d shoot whichever of them goddamn New York–Washington, DC high-collar bastards stepped in front of him. Deets called for drill pipe. Eddie Owen was already moving. Deets almost complimented Eddie’s speed, but didn’t; beyond the Bambino not much warranted compliments. Deets watched Eddie work. Even the tired-ass business agent called Eddie Owen the Cushing Flash. Said it with a grudging pride, as the business agent was doing right goddamn now, telling the owners at the derrick’s stairs whatever the fuck business agents told owners when they came to watch.

  “Lotta gristle in that Okie kid,” the agent said. “Lotta heart for a candy-ass college boy.”

  Thurman Deets half listened while he worked. His people were from Oklahoma, too, and dead since ’33, buried by Dust Bowl wind and Great Depression reality. Eddie Owen wasn’t all that special to him, just another starving wheat-farmer’s kid looking for food and a day’s pay to feed the parents back home. Kid had a fast smile, though, and faster hands if you forced him. And the sumbitch didn’t complain.

  Eddie grinned at the agent labeling him “college boy.” The best boots Eddie could afford were on his feet and held together with tape. Not exactly the “college plan.” And not a girl to dance with within fifteen miles. A tremor rumbled the platform. The wind gusted out of the west. Eddie grabbed for balance. Thurman Deets’s eyes sharpened, then jumped from workstation to workstation. Deets cupped an ear, sorting rhythmic banging from wind. His knees flexed—drillers listened for the really bad news with their feet—the last layer of Itasca, Texas, topsoil showered the platform and Deets covered his mouth. Eddie used a raised shoulder to block the same grit. A second rumble stumbled him forward. The drill pipe wrenched to a stop and the roughnecks flinched back from the wellhead.

  Methane and sulfur.

  Thurman Deets cut the motor and waited. The rumble quit. He pointed Eddie to the corrugated roof of the doghouse, waved the derrick man down from the top and everyone else to the stairs. Cochise No. 1 was a wild well, plagued with gas pockets, bent pipe, and broken men. More tremors. A chill straightened Eddie’s back—not a good sign, not at all. But like Thurman Deets had said, “Where else you going? On the relief? If you could get on. Bakersfield? Wander two-lane highway outta the dust and into California’s migrant camps? Ain’t no money in the Hoovervilles and no damn victory in picking peaches.”

  Eddie smiled in spite of the chill. Peaches didn’t sound all that bad; they rarely exploded, almost never flashed a hook knife after swilling bucket beer, and peaches tended to grow in the sunshine, usually beneath dirt-less air you could breathe. Eddie forced another laugh. It died in his throat. Best not to think about sunshine and dirt-less air. There weren’t any paychecks in California. And from what he’d heard, nowhere else, either. A year ago, Eddie had been a graduating petroleum engineer with “brilliant” prospects—he’d been full scholarship/Phi Beta Kappa, top of his class at OU, class president even though he couldn’t afford the suit and tie. Eddie’d had big plans then, big dreams that would send enough money home to beat the wind and the bankers, then carry him through far-off lands with oceans and mountains and exotic people of every shade.

  Thurman Deets coughed dust and a string of profanity. Eddie grinned at the gruff old monster. Roughnecking was far better than your parents and brothers and sisters starving or begging in California—

  The methane again. Another rumble.

  The wellhead flashed and fire shot up the cable. Eddie stumbled sideways. He and Thurman Deets locked eyes when their knees buckled. Rumble became roar. The explosion blew the platform sideways and crushed two roughnecks scrambling off the stairs. Bolts snapped and buzzed bullet trails. Deets was chunk shredded in red mist. Flames erupted below the deck and the sky billowed black. Eddie braced to be buried in pipe and fire. A second explosion splintered the tower. From seventy feet up, wood and steel showered the well site in jagged spears and slugs of burning oil. Derrick to deck, Cochise No. 1 killed everybody it could.

  On that same morning, Newt Owen, Eddie’s forty-four-year-old father, coughed into his hands and fought another day to save his farm. All around him, Western Oklahoma was suffocating. As was much of Kansas to the north and West Texas to the south. Six years of drought and four years of the brown blizzards had reduced the landscape to a thick, dead blanket of surreal gray dust.

  Another towering dust storm had just blown across the Owen family farm, uprooting hollowed-out cedar trees and stripping whole sections of barn from the wall studs. Newt and Mildred-Mae, his wife of twenty-five years, labored in the last of the sandpaper wind. Mildred-Mae shielded Newt while he hammered up barn siding long ago bleached of paint and any real job to do. Man and woman, they were frail at middle age. Everything was frail now, farm and family past their good years, rushing toward affliction and early death. The wind gusted and Newt clutched for Mildred-Mae, hugging her safe to his chest. The brown cloud rolled on to the far fence line and smothered the cottonwoods.

  Their youngest children huddled on the gray farmhouse porch. Howard and “big” sister Lois wore goggles and wet-cloth masks and coughed into their shoulders. Howard and Lois were clothed and safe as Newt and Mildred-Mae could make them—there was victory in that—and fed three times on most days from the posthole and tin-can garden. The livestock was gone, all but the one cow dead to the elements or sold off for lack of feed—grinding the Russian thistle tumbleweed hadn’t worked as a feed substitute. The neighbors were gone, too, victims of their mortgages, or dead to the “dust pneumonia,” or swept away in the never-ending drought.

  Grit peppered Newt’s neck and back. His wife’s mettle, and maybe some of hi
s own, had kept their family from the “terrible faith”—the road to California, and there was victory in that, too. The few neighbors who’d straggled back said it was better to die here, where there’d once been family and friends, and churches and pride. None of that existed in California; California was a lie, a desperate paradise fevered in your dreams but brutal as a slaughter pen.

  Newt coughed and squeezed his wife, forgetting her bones had begun to hurt. Mildred-Mae winced and Newt gentled, looping his arms to keep the grit off her best he could. Their end here was close; he couldn’t help but see it now, same as he’d seen the terrible faith settle into his neighbors. It was in his wife’s silent shivers when she slept and their youngest child’s cough every morning since the cold nights had come early. And once that terrible faith grabbed hold, it was a plague men with plows and sweat and pride couldn’t overcome.

  Newt tightened down the hat he’d worn every dawn since leaving the coal mines for Oklahoma. Thirty years of farming—first in Cushing, then this grassland ground—but now their fields were dead. Only charity or President Roosevelt might save his wife and children. The Owen family’s survival—here or in California—would no longer hinge on how hard he and Mildred-Mae could work, and that was a bitter pill for a man to swallow. Now the survival of the family would be up to their oldest boy, Eddie. And a monthly bank draft sent from the oilfields of North Texas.

  Sixty-seven days after the explosion on Cochise No.1, its only survivor ended his hospital stay. Eddie Owen was only semimended and weeks earlier than the doctors felt was prudent. Eddie had sixty-two dollars—the last of the drilling company’s hospital money—no job, no prospects, and a letter from his mother. The letter scared him. That’s why he was leaving. It had a tone between the lines Eddie hadn’t heard before. On his way out, Eddie stopped by the rehabilitation room to see little Colette Porter Weiss of Bayou Teche, Louisiana. Colette was with her “therapy nurse,” a busty platinum blonde, ex-nickel-hopper (taxi dancer) from Bossier City hired special by Colette’s father. She testified that Colette was the gutsiest twelve-year-old polio victim God ever made, and as in love with Eddie as a little girl knew how to be.