Authors: Russell Blake
The ambulance tore away, leaving a dense cloud of dust in its wake as it plowed through the wooden barricade. Sarah’s rounds shredded into its fender, blowing out the front tire and puncturing the radiator in a spray of steam. Her mouth flooded with a taste like copper pennies, and she struggled to breathe. The ceramic plates of her body armor had protected her from all the bullets except the one that tore through the top of her shoulder, ricocheting off her scapula and fragmenting into several chunks before lodging in her lung. Her vision blurred as her blood pressure plummeted, but she kept squeezing her rifle’s trigger even as she tumbled to the ground, landing with a grunt by Eli’s side, his sightless eyes staring at her like a startled lover, the puckered red wound in the center of his forehead just below his helmet an obscenity on his youthful face.
The rear doors of the ambulance swung open and gunfire belched from the interior. The distinctive low-pitched bark of AK-47s drowned out the screams of the startled soldiers as they returned fire from behind her. One of the detail cried out as a slug caught him in the upper thigh, and she heard the clatter of his rifle strike the ground as he collapsed. More shooting erupted from the back of the van as Israeli rounds pounded into the bumper and rear quarter panel through a cloud of dust and scorched rubber.
Bullets whined as they struck the hard-packed dirt near Sarah. She fired another volley and blinked uncomprehendingly when her weapon’s breech locked open, its ammunition spent. After a moment of shock, her numb fingers grappled at her vest for another magazine, and she’d almost worked one free when a small orb sail toward her from the bowels of the ambulance. It struck the ground two meters in front of her and bounced before rolling within reach: a hand grenade, only seconds remaining before it detonated.
Sarah forced herself to one knee and grabbed it and, with a final desperate effort, lobbed it at the ambulance, which was accelerating away from the checkpoint. It landed on the road behind the fishtailing van, missing it by four meters. When the grenade exploded, it sounded like a cannon, and the last thing she registered before the sky spun in a giddy cartwheel was a pink froth of foam bubbling from her nostrils.
Maya ducked instinctively as she ran from the barracks in time to see the blast. Her weapon chattered as she closed on the ambulance, aware that at over a hundred yards she was unlikely to hit it while moving. The van straightened as eruptions of dirt rose around it. More rifle fire burped from the back, and then it careened to the right and disappeared behind a collection of buildings as one of the emergency lights on its roof shattered in a spray of colored glass.
The soldiers stopped firing and stood motionless, unsure of what to do next. Maya froze when she saw Sarah crumpled in the road near Eli’s inert form.
“Call this in. Get a medic and reinforcements. Now.
Go
,” she screamed at a nearby soldier, who was slapping another magazine into his weapon. He nodded, dazed, and she rushed to her friend, eyes roaming over the surroundings, where timid locals were emerging from their shabby dwellings. Maya fell to one knee next to Sarah, who was gasping for breath, blood streaming from both corners of her mouth as her life seeped out of her. Maya took in the damage at a glance and set her weapon by her side before applying pressure to the entry wound in a futile gesture – but the only one she knew. Sarah winced in pain, and her eyes fluttered open.
“Help’s on the way. Just hold on,” Maya whispered.
Sarah shook her head and reached out with a limp hand. Maya took it, and her stomach dipped like she’d fallen from a great height when she felt how cold it was. Sarah tried to speak but only coughed blood.
“Don’t. Stay still. You’ll get through this,” Maya said, gently setting Sarah’s hand down. Maya fumbled at Sarah’s uniform, searching for the flaps that would free her of the bulletproof jacket as a corporal came running up, the thud of his boots on the road barely audible over bursts of static from his radio. He eyed Eli’s dead form and turned to Sarah. Maya peered up at him, and he glanced away.
“Reinforcements are on their way,” he said, his voice seeming to come from a great distance.
“How long?” Maya demanded.
“Five, maybe less.”
Maya leaned toward Sarah, her hand still pressing on her wound. “Do you hear that? Hang on. Just five minutes. That’s all. Hang on, do you hear?”
Sarah’s breath burbled in her chest, and she coughed again. Her eyes widened with a look of surprise, and she gasped like a beached fish. Maya’s breath caught in her throat as Sarah groaned softly and then shuddered and lay still.
Maya inched closer and hovered over Sarah and then removed her hand from the wound, her fingers slick with blood, and pushed on her friend’s chest with both hands, as though through sheer will she could force life back into her. She continued for several seconds before the corporal’s hand touched her shoulder. Maya started, a wild look on her face, and the corporal shook his head.
Tears ran down Maya’s cheeks as she shuddered. Sobs racked her body until it felt like her abdominal muscles would cramp. The corporal stepped back with his rifle at the ready, taking in the hostile expressions on the Palestinians watching from their doorways, their children gathered around them as the last of the smoke from the grenade blast drifted lazily across the road. At a crackle from his radio he snapped back to the present, leaving Maya to grieve over Sarah’s crumpled form. His boots crunched on the gravel as he marched to where his men stood shell-shocked, his training the only thing keeping him from emptying his weapon at anything that moved.
Chapter 2
The checkpoint was back to a semblance of normalcy by the following afternoon. The investigation team had concluded its re-creation of the event, and the bodies had been carted away. A long line of cars waited their turn under the watchful eyes of agitated IDF soldiers as a desultory road crew toiled in the swelter, repairing the pothole blown in the road by the grenade as vehicles detoured around them. Heat waves distorted the dun-colored surroundings. The outskirts of town baked under the sun’s intense glare, and only a few pedestrians shambled along the blistering roadside, their robes coated in a film of the pervasive dust that was a constant in the inhospitable high desert.
Inside the main building, Maya waited at silent attention as Sergeant Kevod sat at his desk. An air-conditioning unit throbbed behind him with a monotonous hum.
“These are very serious charges,” he intoned as he read from a hastily prepared report, pausing occasionally to glance over the top of the paperwork at where Maya was standing stiffly. “What do you have to say for yourself?”
“Regarding what, sir?” Maya asked, refusing to cede an inch.
“The claim that you deserted your station, contributing to the death of two of your fellow soldiers.” Kevod’s face reminded Maya of a baked ham, perennially pink and bloated, eyes like black marbles peering from beneath hooded lids. He sat back and touched a hand to his thinning, oily brown hair, a career soldier and petty tyrant with no future above his current rank as he approached thirty.
Maya cleared her throat, biting back anger. “Deserted my station? I have no idea who would make that statement. I was using the latrine. I cleared it with Sarah beforehand.”
“Who is conveniently no longer with us. So it’s just your word we have to go on, versus the word of one of your peers who claims to have seen you emerge from the barracks, not the latrine, when the attack was over.”
Maya took a deep breath. “With all due respect, sir, that person is mistaken. For starters, the attack was still very much underway. If anyone bothered to check my magazine, they would find that I emptied most of it at the ambulance as it was firing at us.”
“That proves nothing.”
“Sir, it proves that I fired while everyone else was firing – unless your ‘witness’ also claims I was shooting in the air after the ambulance disappeared. Which would be easy to verify, because I would have been the only one doing so, and there are dozens of Palestinian witnesses in addition to our men. That leaves only one possibility: that I participated in the defense of the checkpoint, which is underscored by the fact that I was the first person to reach Sarah on the access road.”
Kevod narrowed his brows and eyed Maya with an insinuating leer. He spoke softly, his voice a purr. “You know, things don’t have to be so tense between us. This can all go away. There’s no reason that we have to be so…adversarial.”
“Sir, you’re accusing me of deserting my post. Is that not the case?”
“I’m investigating troubling reports of a dereliction of duty. It’s my job. I can understand you wouldn’t want your actions analyzed if you’d actually abandoned your post, which probably accounts for your attitude. But I’m not your enemy. If anything, I’d be a good ally to have.”
“I appreciate that, sir.” Maya would not say another word or allow him to bait her. She knew full well that he could claim she’d said anything he wanted, making her life even more difficult, but that in the end he didn’t have enough evidence to take action, or he already would have. So it was a standoff.
Kevod sat back, and all Maya could think was that he was the human embodiment of a toad. “You’re going to be here for another nine months, whether you like it or not. I’m suggesting that you could thaw the arrogant attitude and try to be friendly. It doesn’t have to be the most unpleasant nine months of your life. That’s up to you.”
“Yes, sir.” Her eyes focused a thousand miles just left of his shoulder.
Kevod sighed, clearly exasperated. “You think you’re a tough one, don’t you? I know your history. The incident with your foster father. The years in Ofek Juvenile Detention.” He gave her an ugly grin. “I have my sources, you see. I know it all.”
Kevod had made the last months misery following his overture, which had been wholly inappropriate as well as forbidden by the regulations. But that hadn’t deterred him, and he’d switched from an initial aloof deference to an overtly hostile approach when she’d made it clear that she was uninterested in anything he had to offer.
Maya continued to stand silently, wondering how long this pointless muscle flexing would continue. Kevod didn’t scare her in the least, so he was wasting his breath.
“You don’t have anything to say to that?” he asked.
“No, sir.” As uninterested and detached as she’d ever sounded.
Kevod set the file down on his desk and glared daggers at her. “Fine. Then we’ll do this the hard way. This investigation will be ongoing. You may think you’ve weaseled out of it, but you haven’t. I’ll keep digging until all facts are known, and if you’re guilty, I’ll be at the head of the line to see you roasted for it.”
An image of Sarah lying in the road, her spirit ebbing from her ruined body, threatened Maya’s rigid composure. She swallowed hard, which Kevod obviously misinterpreted as a sign of fear.
He grunted. “That’s right. You should be worried. You should be very worried.”
Maya had known bullies like Kevod when she’d been a ward of the state. Bullies with chips on their shoulders, their animosity driven by self-loathing and cowardice. Years of that had toughened her to the point where she was bulletproof, and she had to bite her tongue to keep from laughing in his face. She maintained her rigid stance, having retreated into the recesses of her mind where malignancies like Kevod could never reach her.
“Get out of my sight. I’m done with you for now.” He dismissed her with a sneer.
“Yes, sir,” Maya said, her tone neutral, trying to keep the relief out of her voice. She spun and marched to the door, feeling Kevod’s eyes burning holes through the seat of her pants. Let him have that, she thought. It was as close as he’d ever get, at least while she was alive.
She made her way to the barracks and saw one of Sarah’s friends, his shift over, sitting outside on the steps. His face was drawn; he was reading the Arabic language newspaper’s account of the attack. Ari was slight and thoughtful, twenty years old and quieter than most of his peers. He glanced up and set the paper down when her shadow fell across him.
“Hey. How did the ass-chewing go?” he asked.
“How did you know?”
“He was doing everything he could to get me to say you hadn’t been in the firefight. I told him I remembered seeing you running and shooting at the ambulance. He lost interest at that point, but it was pretty obvious what he was after.”
“He’s a prick.”
“That he is, but a dangerous one.”
Maya glanced at the newspaper. “What does the paper say?”
“My Arabic isn’t so hot. From what I can gather, they’re going to throw the terrorists a parade.”
Maya bent over and scooped up the paper, taking only a few moments to read the short article. “Apparently they’re freedom fighters striking a blow for Allah.”
His eyes narrowed. “What else is new?” He spat in the dust and glanced back at her. “I didn’t realize you read Arabic that well.”
She nodded. “I’m pretty much fluent.”
“Sarah said you also speak English.”
She shrugged. “That and a few other languages.”
He studied the toe of his boot. “It’s terrible about Sarah. She never did anything to anyone. She was kind to the kids here, always trying to help however she could…” His voice tightened and he stopped talking.
She handed him back the paper.
“She didn’t die in vain. Parasites like the men in the ambulance always leave a trail. It’s just a matter of finding and following it.”
“We haven’t exactly done a stellar job at infiltrating the locals and earning their sympathy. The killers might as well be in China by now.” He spat again and watched the moisture dry into the baking dirt, the sun erasing the stain in a matter of seconds.
“Maybe. Or maybe not. There’s more than one way to catch a rat.”
He regarded her with new caution. “You’re not thinking of doing anything stupid, are you?”
She waved his concern away. “Of course not. Do I look suicidal?”
Ari studied her and then glanced away. “Kevod’s already gunning for you. Don’t give him more ammo.”