Robbie found the going tougher than he’d imagined. His feet sank through the stone chips, lacking purchase. Colin saw the two bright glittering things, dismissed them as dream objects, product of heat and exhaustion. Robbie slipped. He fell forward onto his hands, inches away from the glittery points.
The bright jewels reared out of the scrub and became eyes, eyes attached to a waving brown column. The viper had been watching their approach, keeping itself buried in the scree, everything except for its eyes.
Robbie yelled and flung himself sideways. He rolled down the scree slope to the wadi floor and lay there clutching his leg. Colin whipped up a stone and flung it at the snake. It vanished; he did not see where it went.
“Robbie! Are you all right? God,
say
something.”
The scree was treacherous. Colin slithered down as best he could, but by the time he reached Robbie he, too, was on hands and knees, the skin grazed raw.
Robbie lay there panting, eyes squeezed shut. Colin helped him sit up.
“Did it get you?” he cried hoarsely.
Robbie shook his head. He was hiccupping back tears, now, and Colin’s anger drained away. This would take even a hardened adult to the utter limit, and his son was a child, a grown-up child. Colin sat down, hauling Robbie into his arms.
“You all right?” Sharett’s weary voice.
Colin looked up. His heart pounded in his chest as if desperate to get out. The silence, total, awful, oppressed him to the borders of terror.
“All right.”
“The kid should have followed me.”
A thousand years or so ago, it seemed, Colin had been thinking the same thing: Robbie should have gone after Sharett, around the pile of scree. He’d known anger toward his son. Now, cradling that poor head in his lap, Colin couldn’t understand himself at all. His baby. His child.
He could have prevented this tragedy. Everything that had happened was his fault. On the plane he’d been a hero; here he was less than nothing. But any way you looked at it, he could have stopped all this simply by staying at home, by having nothing whatever to do with …
He was going mad. Fear of it frightened him into full consciousness.
“Must … rest,” he gasped. “That scared the shit out of him. Me too.”
“Prop him up in the shade. Be careful. Snakes, scorpions.” Sharett shrugged. He wanted to do a Raful, but the effort cost too much. “Up ahead, I can see scrub. That means water below the surface. I’m going to dig, see what I can find. Suck a stone. Put a pebble into your mouth and suck it. That helps.”
“I’ll dig,” Neeman said. “You rest.”
But instead Sharett walked a few paces away from the Raleighs, with one arm across Neeman’s shoulders, and they spoke together in low voices. Occasionally a word or two would penetrate Colin’s consciousness—"Tiberias … Masada Group … Southern Command"—but nothing he heard made any sense. His ears felt blocked, his head hurt too much for thought.
Robbie had opened his eyes and was stirring slightly. Together he and Colin managed to circle the fall of scree that had blocked their path earlier and find a kind of shallow cave beneath the limestone overhang.
It smelled bad, a rotten-food-and-sewage kind of smell that Colin associated with cliffside caverns at the seaside in England: places where people came to urinate and defecate and throw contraceptives after making love. Tribesmen must have been here, for he could just make out the remains of a fire and a dirty old square of cloth left half in and half out of the ashes. At least it was cooler than on the wadi floor.
Colin kicked stones into the recesses of the cave—it wasn’t very deep—watching warily to see if anything moved. He settled Robbie with his back against the wall. The boy slumped forward to rest his head on his knees.
They were on the verge of dehydration. Colin fell rather than sat down. His legs had no strength. His head was going round and round. He was going to die in this place. Desperation surged through him. He clenched his teeth shut to stop the scream. Next second, tears came. Or wanted to come: there wasn’t enough moisture left in his body to fuel real tears, only dry sobs.
Robbie was shaking. A spasm. Colin couldn’t see his face, so he didn’t know what was wrong, if the boy was crying or violently ill. The limestone advanced and retreated, refusing to stay still. Suddenly, shafts of pain drilled their way through his head and he moaned aloud. His stomach hurt. Everywhere hurt.
Suck a pebble, that’s what Sharett had said.
Crazy.
Try it.
Somehow he managed to lift a pebble and put it in his mouth. For a moment, nothing happened. Then a trickle of moisture made its way through his saliva glands, scorching in their dryness. He picked up another stone and leaned across to his son. Gently he raised Robbie’s head and prized open his mouth. Not difficult: the boy hadn’t an ounce of strength left.
A shadow crossed the light. Colin turned to see Sharett blocking the entrance to the hollow, an ominous, impenetrable pillar. He advanced slowly, keeping his eyes fixed on Robbie. Colin felt the threat and was powerless.
“Stay away from him,” he said. “He doesn’t need you.”
Sharett focused his bloodshot eyes on Colin and smiled. The meaning was quite clear. Robbie did not need Sharett, no, but the Mossad agent needed him. After a brief hesitation, he continued to approach the boy. Colin wriggled closer to his son and laid a hand on his forearm.
Sharett was looming over them now, his face a black hole against the afternoon light. Through thick, sluggish silence Colin was aware of his own heartbeats. But then an odd noise reverberated outside: odd, because it seemed to ripple. Colin’s brain worked slowly. Not a single bang but several, so close together in time they seemed as one. Shots. Automatic fire!
Neeman fell into the cave, clutching his calf. Colin let go Robbie’s arm and dragged himself onto all fours, forcing himself to ignore the agony. He helped Neeman rest his back against the wall, then turned his attention to the wound: a single bullet hole. But there was nothing he could do. They had no antiseptic, instruments, or bandages.
Another shadow added itself to those around him, this one darker than the rest. He looked up. Leila stood with her legs apart, the M3A1 suspended from her shoulder and covering the cave.
Colin began to retreat. He saw Leila glance behind him and stiffen. His back prickled with cold. Oh, God, oh God!
Stupid, stupid, stupid’
In his desire to help Neeman, common humanity donated to a stranger, he’d forgotten his own son!
Like an actor in slow motion Colin turned his head. Sharett lay with his back propped against the wall. One arm encircled Robbie’s throat, the other his waist. The boy lay on top of Sharett, staring at his mother.
“Don’t come any closer, Colin,” Sharett croaked. “Don’t see your boy die, not now we’ve got
her.”
Leila took a step deeper into the cave. Sharett jerked Robbie’s chin up warningly, and the boy cried out. He raised his hands as if to grapple with Sharett, but they hung suspended, without making contact, until at last he lowered them again, convinced of his own helplessness.
The cry had a dramatic effect on both parents. Colin put his head in his hands and looked into the emptiness behind his eyelids, seeking a path in places where there was none. Leila drew herself up; lips parted to reveal her teeth clenched in rage, she raised the gun … only to lower it again.
She stood near the entrance to the cave. Sharett and Robbie lay perhaps some twenty paces deeper in, with Colin and Neeman halfway between them. A flicker caught Colin’s eyes. He twisted his head around to see Neeman silently prize himself a little more upright. Leila hadn’t seen. Colin knew what the Israeli had in mind.
“No,” he yelled, although the monosyllable came out as a croak. In his mind’s eye he launched himself forward, grabbing for Neeman’s legs. It didn’t happen like that. He fell against the Israeli’s ankles in a pathetic apology for an attack, and Neeman kicked his chin. Blood flowed into Colin’s mouth, its silken saltiness foul on the tongue, but he’d done enough. Leila had her gun against Neeman’s temple and was screaming at him in a language Colin didn’t understand. She cracked the muzzle across his brow a couple of times and pulled back sharply, waving the M3A1 in a deadly arc that covered all of them.
“Now,” she said in English, and her breathing was difficult. “Soon we will have a death count here. I can keep track of that Jew with my son more easily if I kill the two of you first.”
Colin, looking up at her, knew she meant it. Thirteen years of marriage had been enough to sort out the bluffs and double-bluffs.
Leila struggled to get her breathing back under control. It took her a long time. At length she squatted down on her haunches, continuing to sweep the cave with her gaze, her eyes never still. When nobody else moved, she felt for her water flask and unslung it.
“Give this to Robbie,” she ordered Colin. But she continued to hold the flask. “Nobody else drinks. Nobody. Sharett, when you get the water, see that he drinks slowly, but let him take all he wants. If,
if
you manage it, I’ll let the rest of you drink too.”
Colin received the flask, enduring torture as he heard the liquid splashing inside. It weighed so heavily in his hand that he could scarcely pass it on, and even after he was no longer holding the flask he continued to watch it as if that were the only object in his universe.
Sharett took the flask and unstoppered it with one hand. Robbie leaned forward to snatch it away. Sharett restrained him. Then the boy was drinking, forced by the pressure of his captor’s arm to take only a small amount at once. The others watched greedily, although Leila’s greed was of another dimension. She had no eyes for water; all her attention was focused on Robbie.
As if to prove it, she suddenly wailed, “My son! My
son!”
She made no attempt to hold back the tears. She rocked to and fro on her haunches, keeping her weapon trained on them but somehow as helpless in the grip of grief as Robbie was helpless in Sharett’s.
She was squatting within inches of the son she’d loved and waited for so long, and she could not touch so much as his hand. Nor, it seemed, any portion, however small, of his heart, for the boy cried, “You’re not my mother, you’re a monster.”
He spoke the words but didn’t believe them. He longed for her.
“I had a reason,” she said at last, “for everything.”
The silence in the cave reverberated with its own leaden pulse. It was Robbie who broke it. “So tell me,” he wailed.
“What do you want to know?”
He considered that question for a time. At last he said, “I want to know why you left me.” “Yes. I can tell you why.”
“I want to know whether it really was my fault that you went.”
She stared at him, appalled.
“Your
fault?” “I want to know why I was the one who was made to feel guilty. Not you. Me!”
Shlomo Stern checked the sun’s elevation before raising the glasses to his eyes, anxious not to betray their position by a careless flash. “Where?” he asked Gabriel curtly.
“In the cliff face. See that ‘ilb tree … behind, to the right ten degrees.”
Shlomo directed the binoculars to a spot on the far side of the wadi from the rock behind which they’d taken cover. “Got it.”
His adjustment of the focusing ring made little improvement; the light here was impossible. Around the jagged edges of the recess in the cliff wall, some four hundred meters from their position, lay a brilliant white frame of sunlight-reflecting limestone. Yet he could see a human figure. It crouched in shadow, keeping its back to the wadi, as if intent on something happening inside the cave.
“Man or woman?” he breathed.
“Hard to say.” Gabriel shrugged. “Guess female.”
“Target?”
Gabriel pursed his lips. He unslung the sniper’s rifle and took a long slow panning look through his telescope.
“Not a clean shot,” he said finally.
Shlomo’s patience snapped. “First the man in the doorway of the plane, now ‘not a clean shot'! Name of God, what kind of marksman are you?”
“A first-class one who doesn’t shoot airline pilots unless he has to, Shlomo. And I’m telling you, there’s a ninety-five-percent chance I’ll miss this time.”
Shlomo subjected him to a withering look and said, “But is it
possible?”
“For a mathematical theorist, possible,” Gabriel conceded at last.
“Do you see more than one person in that recess?”
“I thought I saw something move, deeper in.”
Shlomo waved him back down and took a long drink of water. Despite his outburst of temper he knew he would not order Gabriel to take out the human figure on the edge of the cave, first because of the absence of positive identification, second because he might accidentally hit Sharett, and third, most important, because Gabriel was against it. They would have to find a way of moving in closer.
“Well,” he said at last, “do we assume it’s them, or could it be some tribesman taking a shit?”
“It’s them,” Uri Vered observed. “The tribesman would have a camel, a goat, something. What he
wouldn’t
have is an automatic weapon—remember those shots we heard?”
Shlomo nodded. “But is it all of them?” he asked. “Could they have gotten separated?”
“We haven’t seen anyone else on our way in,” Uri said. “If it’s her she’ll have the rest of them with her. Because if she hadn’t found them, she wouldn’t have stopped.”
Shlomo considered the analysis, liking it. But Uri’s words didn’t solve the tactical problem.
Direct approach was impossible: about a quarter of a mile of wadi separated them from their quarry, and it lacked any cover. To complicate matters further, the surface was covered in gravel; a silent attack would be out of the question. Even if they managed to cover half that distance without one of them spraining an ankle, the noise of their coming would be bound to alert the woman.
There was a way, but it meant leaving the situation in the cave to develop without interference. Shlomo loathed that.
“Uri,” he said, “assume you are at the top of that cliff face opposite. How quickly can you get down to the cave?”