Traitor's Gate
Page 30
Saba nodded. “As the English should be. All of them.” She held out the hand he’d held moments ago. “I am Saba Hassouneh al-Saleh.”
Eddie shook her hand, but softly, not man-to-man. “Like it or not, you’re the princess, too,” and let go.
Her cheeks flushed, but she made no attempt to shield her face. “I have never been with a man . . . of my own choosing.” Her chin was high and defiant, violence and affection in her eyes. “I . . .”
Eddie allowed her to keep his hand or let go. She kept it. He leaned in and kissed her cheek as lightly as he could and remained next to her until she exhaled. He felt a tear leave her eye and stepped back, smiled, then kissed her again, tasting the salt this time. “I think you’ve seen a lot for a princess and for a soldier.”
She had tears on both cheeks and no words.
“I’m going to put my arms around you, okay?”
She didn’t move or speak and Eddie hugged her as softly as he knew how, felt her breasts and her hair and the handles of weapons in her clothes. Eddie’s embrace grew to include his family losing their battles in Oklahoma and the Nadler family on the Jacksboro Highway, losing their boy. Then Eddie was crying, too, squeezing harder than he planned. Her head fell to his shoulder and he touched her hair, the thick silk of it a surprise, and she pushed gently away.
Both were embarrassed, first-time lovers after the passion had passed. She left the tears on her cheeks and said, “You are sad as well, Eddie Owen?”
“Think it’s the salt water.” He kept wiping then admitted it. “Yeah, but I’m glad, too. Glad you’re here. I feel better every time I see you.”
“Your other friend, the one who is missing. His name is?”
“D.J. Bennett.” Eddie felt a twinge, like he’d given a clue. Maybe not to the wrong person, but . . .
“He is your good friend and what has happened to him?”
“Probably my best friend. And I don’t know.”
New headlights interrupted. Eddie squinted at the road then turned back. Saba’s revolver was between them. He started to speak; she crossed her lips with the barrel and ran inland from the water. Eddie followed, not sure why they were running, but sure cover couldn’t hurt. At the rocks of the seawall buttress, Saba patted him into a crouch. They listened, but only to wind and the surf breaking. She crawled to the top of the lava rocks, scattering rock crabs in waves, peered, and dropped back to the sand.
“The police stop to investigate your taxi. The Spanish grow nervous with Arabs. There is much trouble with the Europeans’ hold on Morocco.”
Eddie noticed her revolver was British and could imagine how she’d gotten it. “While we’re waiting, could you tell me why you’re here—not that I’m unhappy in any way, ’cause I’m not—just be nice to know, since I can’t figure out anything else.”
Saba considered him at her shoulder, his eyes close to hers. “In my group, in the Arab states, there are factions. To some I am valuable; to others I am valuable also, but as something to trade. They wish to be rid of me and the attention I bring.”
“You’re here to hide? From your own people?”
“Yes.” She stared hard at him. “No. I am here to kidnap your friend.”
Eddie blinked his way through the silence that followed.
She added, “You are the bait.”
“Bullshit.”
Saba looked at him with hazel eyes somewhere between man and woman.
“C’mon.” Eddie touched her arm, no flinch, just the hazel eyes holding his and his future.
“You’re not kidding, are you?”
“No.”
“O . . . kay. I guess since you told me that, you intend to tell me why?”
“I am here to kidnap D.J. Bennett. When I deliver him he will be tortured, he will talk, and he will die.” Her tone was military, matter-of-fact. “You, I am to . . . corrupt . . . with the many womanly ways I do not have.”
Eddie leaned away, not that he thought it might help save him, but to help process her words. The scariest thing was his hormones were still dealing with her as a woman. “Why, ah, are you telling me this stuff? You shouldn’t be, should you?”
She inhaled to answer, reconsidered, and said one word: “Haifa.”
“You’re not gonna blow Tenerife—” Eddie felt the pistol at the back of his head, then heard Arab-accented English in his ear. “Do not move.” The hand on his neck was tight and slowly tugged him backward.
Saba watched the road and did nothing to help him. She glanced, then said: “Do as you are told and we will not harm you. Do otherwise and you will die.” She spoke brief Arabic to the figure holding the gun behind Eddie, then turned back to face him. “I am ashamed for our time together, and yet I wish it. Do not think you were the cause of my death.” She removed the ring. “Keep this and remember me.”
Before Eddie could speak, she ran toward the taxi and the new headlights.
CHAPTER 21
October, 1938
D.J. Bennett was worked to death, King Ranch tired. He sat in the transom of a falúa contraband boat as it approached the far south end of Tenerife Island. The boat was more shadow than shape, gliding low in the oily water. D.J. found himself in a pirate boat, although he was not a pirate, wanted for murder and sedition. Nor was he a Communist, although he’d fought alongside them. He’d fought against them as well but now found his sympathies, in some areas, to be once again in line with theirs. (“Politics makes strange bedfellows” was not mindless chatter.) Nor was D.J. a Fascist. Nor was he a blind believer in capitalism at the expense of the little guy—the working guy—or the nation he’d sworn to defend. And survival of the nation was what he believed to be at issue.
Had he been inclined to describe himself, D.J. would’ve used “realist.” The facts were what the facts were. And the facts were that the world had become increasingly cruel during his lifetime, each and every decade producing more misery than the last. And the war that was about to engulf mankind—a mechanized, airborne slaughter D.J. could see just beyond the horizon—had no precedent in western history—history that included the Great World War to end all wars that he’d fought steel-to-steel in the mustard gas and trenches not twenty years ago.
A lone thunderclap shook the air and rattled D.J.’s boat as it motored nearer to Los Cristianos. An odd cross current slid the stern seaward. D.J.’s Canarian captain eyed the oily water, then the island of Tenerife to their right. The city of Los Cristianos was quiet, too quiet. And dark, as if the power were down. D.J. squinted beyond the city to the volcano silhouetted high and lethal in the moonlight. A powerful force, volcanoes.
Ahead, two long deep-water docks bracketed the main harbor of Los Cristianos. Beyond the docks, the beach was lined with the silhouettes of un-motored lanchas, honest fishing boats, their only equipment unlit carbide lamps. D.J. refocused on the two deep-water docks. Bobbing there were gray-and-black silhouettes. Larger boats. These boats were not honest, all had motors, no names, and pirates for owners. A silent gull sliced above the boats in moonlight too dim to reach the water. The hair stiffened on D.J.’s arms. He focused for the threat that would be well placed on any of those boats, his fingers sliding to the .45 in his belt. In the last twelve hours D.J. had learned that his death had become mandatory, the failure of his mission a priority of powerful men with empires at stake on both sides of the Atlantic.
The dock up ahead and its risks would end a grueling twenty-day trek from Haifa that had required far more personal risk and mission risk than he would have allowed a subordinate to accept. From Haifa to French Beirut had been by truck, then Beirut to Alexandria, Egypt, by steamer. A smuggler’s coastal boat carried him across the Southern Mediterranean to Tripoli, then a caravan from Tripoli across French Algeria into French-British partitioned Morocco, and finally a car to the ferry at Casablanca. Far too many participants had been paid, trusted, and eventually outrun. The truth was he’d taken some of the risk because he wanted Eddie to survive. A combat line officer c
ould not feel this way, yet D.J. did.
The capper for the father-son trek was yesterday’s forty-mile boat trip to Gomera Island and forty miles back, separated by a night trek up and down the Hermigua Valley that had tried to kill him twice. The objective had been a crank-antenna radiophone at three thousand feet, placed there in 1937 by Communist remnants of the International Brigades—American fighters from the Abraham Lincoln Battalion who had survived Franco’s prison ships. The Americans had reorganized with Gomera’s smugglers and pirates, hoping to interdict the next flotilla of prison ships before the 100,000 prisoners aboard could be murdered.
The Americans had been unsuccessful. But their phone still worked.
While at three thousand feet, D.J. cranked the phone, hoping to make three life-or-death calls that could not be monitored or reported by any overseas operator. The first call was to Palestine. The news in Palestine was bad: D.J. was still wanted for murder, as was Eddie Owen. Rather than a British retraction of the charges that D.J. had been promised, an “eye witness” to the policeman’s death had been added. D.J. was squarely on Great Britain’s wanted list and that reduced the navigable world by one quarter. D.J. was also considered a prime suspect in the Haifa bombing. That put him in the “Black Book” of the major oil companies, almost as bad as being wanted by Great Britain, and further reduced the navigable world by another quarter.
Great Britain’s wanted list included a price on D.J.’s head, an accolade the Brits reserved for known IRA bombers, White Chapel slashers, and “colonial terrorists who incite violence or sedition against the Crown.” D.J.’s bounty was likely levied at the request of the oil companies. The death of one Palestine policeman left no London parliamentarian in tears. The death of a refinery was another matter. Protecting Eddie would be very difficult now, if not impossible. And that created another problem—there was no possible way Eddie could be allowed to fall into the hands of the Nazis. Even D.J.’s people would view Eddie training Nazi engineers as too dangerous to allow. They’d kill him. Sure as shit, they would. Eddie would have to run. But still make AvGas for the good guys. To accomplish either, or both, would take some doing.
D.J.’s second call produced better news, “heaven sent” if one believed in such: Eddie Owen’s note left for D.J. at the Hotel Royal in Beirut inferred that Eddie had the Mendelssohn papers. The only surviving copy. If Mendelssohn’s papers were as Eddie described and they were genuine, the papers could be used a number of ways, including, but not limited to, keeping one Eddie Owen alive, free, and working for the defense of a nation, the nation that D.J. saw as mankind’s salvation if her soul could not be stolen by the oil companies and their support for the Fascists.
D.J. made the third call, now harboring the grandest expectations he’d had in this decade. Mendelssohn’s papers felt like Resurrection—again, if a guy believed in such. The third call failed. D.J. cranked and tried and cranked and tried. Somewhere along the line of extended relays to the USA, the magic would not connect. There would be no cavalry for Eddie Owen, D.J., and the papers. No Roosevelt or his champion, Smedley Butler. The papers could still do their magic, but only if D.J. could grab Eddie and the papers tonight, get them all the hell out of Dodge before the flotilla of bad guys could slam the door. D.J. had finished that thought already running downhill through the jungle.
The lone gull cut across the moonlight again. D.J. thought, Albatross? His captain cut the engine and they drifted to the dock at Los Cristianos. The captain was a third-generation smuggler from Fuerteventura and skilled at night maneuvers. He squeezed them between a fat wooden trawler and an island-green skiff crowded with rope and shallow barrels. Two gulls spooked near the shore. D.J. gripped the .45 he’d already drawn. A shape materialized on the road beyond the beach, a man in western clothes, both hands visible. The man made himself plain, then walked three hundred feet to where D.J. had left the old truck provided by Doña Carmen. The man stopped and stood next to the fender.
D.J. exited his boat when it touched the dock. The air above him was oddly still and reeked of sulfur. The volcano. D.J. cocked and leveled the Colt for his dock walk. The weathered wood creaked under his feet. Each boat he passed could kill him. None did. The man at the truck raised both hands when D.J. arrived. “I am Moshevsky, a friend of Tom’s.”
D.J. made “Tom’s friend” as some kind of European mix—ruddy, maybe a Jew, and sturdy, about five-foot-eight. The man affected “reasonable” with his posture and expression, but not “defenseless.” D.J. said, “You don’t know me. And I don’t know anyone named Tom.”
“The papers. Your Eddie Owen was given them the day he left Haifa for Beirut.”
“Step away from the truck. Keep the hands up. You’re a Jew?”
The man nodded small.
“Are we alone?”
“No.” The man glanced toward the shadows across the road.
D.J. didn’t look. “Why are we talking?”
Moshevsky short-versioned a story of Jews in Germany and her territories, adding bits of detail to what Eddie had repeated—loss of citizenship and theft of property. Formal Jewish ghettos being demarked for those who could not escape. Once in the ghettos, Jews would be sent to forced labor camps, then to extermination camps, and finally mass executions. Eleven million Jews. All of Europe. And if Russia fell to the Nazis, all of the Soviet Union as well.
“And if I had something to do with these papers of ‘Tom’s,’ what would you have me do with ’em?”
Moshevsky explained a blackmail plan against Standard Oil and its primary stockholders. Standard Oil would facilitate the transit of Jews out of Germany. In return, the documents would remain out of public view. Standard Oil and Vacuum Oil were important partners of the Nazi war machine. It could be done easily.
“You don’t know Standard Oil. Or its partners.”
Moshevsky said, “Eddie Owen is under grave suspicion for the events in Haifa. He remains free of the PJs’ cages here, but only with the sponsorship of Nazi Oberstleutnant Erich Schroeder. Twelve hours ago, Eddie Owen was abducted by the British but freed by Schroeder.”
D.J. frowned. The Brits had taken off the gloves. The dumb sons-a-bitches were playing the Nazi’s cards for him. D.J. knew the game, had played himself, and likely so had Moshevsky. Maybe this guy knew where the Brits had Eddie. That would be a start at least—
“My people in Tel Aviv,” Moshevsky continued, “were unaware of Eddie Owen’s . . . friendship . . . with Saba Hassouneh. She is most dangerous and would not wish Eddie Owen to help our cause. Now our documents may be lost.” Moshevsky eyed D.J. for a reaction. “Eddie Owen was rescued from the English by the Nazi and the Armada police who Erich Schroeder pays. Eddie Owen was put under guard at the refinery where he makes many telephone calls to America, but as of one hour ago, he is absent without permission and no longer there. I may lower my hands?”
“No.”
Moshevsky frowned and reset his shoulders. “Your interests and ours are compatible. Your assistance now, before it is too late, is beneficial to everyone.”
“How’d you find me?”
“Doña Carmen. She directed me here to wait for your return . . . from . . .”
D.J. cut just his eyes to the shadows and squeezed tighter on the trigger. “Don’t think she’d do that.”
“Yes. Our network has assisted her many times on the mainland in Algiers. Like you, we share alliances and goals.”
Algiers was French. Doña Carmen had serious underground connections in Algiers and French Morocco. Doña Carmen was also a Palestinian, although almost no one, including this Zionist, would know that.
“What’d you tell her? Why were you looking for me?”
“The Brigades. Americans who are attempting to evade capture by the Spanish in Morocco.”
D.J. wagged the .45. “Maybe we’ll talk. Be where I can find you if I have something to say. Hit the road.”
“Do you intend to help us—”
“Hit the road.”
D.J. nodded. Moshevsky wasn’t clairvoyant, just pragmatic. Murder on the scale being organized by the Nazis would empower leaders in the lesser ethnic conflicts once the war started—places like Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Armenia would become the bloodbaths of Nanking. Europe would be the white man’s turn at the plate.
“So, Mr. Bennett, you will help?”
“We ain’t at ‘the beginning,’ son.” D.J. wagged the .45. “Get outta here. Gimme a day or two and we’ll see what we see.”
Moshevsky started to speak.
“Move.”
Moshevsky didn’t. D.J. began a silent count. Moshevsky turned and walked toward whomever was in the shadows. D.J. watched. He suffered no confusion about the value of an exodus to those it might save or what they would do to achieve it. Nor did he harbor illusions that Moshevsky’s reasonable tone was an accurate representation of Moshevsky’s capabilities or intentions. Saba Hassouneh was a capable enemy. Before allowing Mendelssohn’s documents lost to her . . . or to Erich Schroeder, or, for that matter, to D.J. Bennett, the Zionists would kill Eddie, recover their papers, and start over. Such were the realities of war and genocide.
D.J. walked away from his truck into the dark and waited for the headlights of Moshevsky’s vehicle to pass. Moshevsky represented a tribe of survivors who hadn’t accomplished that by quitting. Very soon, if not immediately, Moshevsky would be everywhere there was a chance to interdict the Mendelssohn papers or convert Eddie to the cause. And that included tonight. D.J. stayed in the dark, waiting for a trail car that did not materialize. An Arab did. On the beach, his robe and headdress silhouetted dirty white against the dim moonlit sea. The Arab did not approach the dock or its boats; he walked straight toward D.J.’s empty truck. At the truck, the Arab stopped and turned to face where D.J. hid in the dark.