By the Rivers of Babylon (40 page)

“I’m sure you will. There’s an army procedure for that, too. It’s happened before. You’ll both be found guilty on the testimony of Burg and myself.”

“Is this all show or do you actually intend to shoot one or both of us?”

Hausner lit a cigarette. He wondered if he could even get anyone to sit on a court-martial board, let alone form a firing squad. What, then, was the purpose of this exercise? To show the rank and file that the game had to be played by the rules right to the end? To instill fear in all the fatigued men and women who wanted to sleep on guard duty or who might be slow in obeying orders in other situations? Or was this Burg’s way of bringing him down a peg or two?

“Well? Do you intend to shoot us or not? If not, let me out of here. I have things to do. If you’re going to have a trial, have it now and don’t keep us waiting until morning.”

Hausner threw his cigarette on the floor and looked down at her. Moonlight from the porthole illuminated her face. She was staring up at him, and her face did not look as angry or hard as her voice sounded. It looked open and trusting, ready to accept whatever he said. He suddenly realized that any meeting could be their last.

“Would you pull the trigger yourself, Jacob?” The voice was inquisitive, as though she were asking his views on capital punishment in general.

Hausner stepped toward her. He seemed undecided about what to do or say. He suddenly knelt in front of her and put his hands on her bare knees. “I . . . I would kill myself before I would harm you. I would kill anyone who tried to harm you. I love you.” The words didn’t surprise him as much as they seemed to surprise her.

She turned her face away and stared out through the hole in the bulkhead.

He grasped her knees and shook them. “I love you.”

She turned her head back and nodded. She put her hands over his. Her voice was low and husky. “I’m sorry I put you in a compromising position, Jacob.”

“Well . . . you know, one’s lifelong beliefs don’t amount to a hell of a lot when it comes to these decisions—decisions of the heart, as they say.” He forced a smile.

She smiled back. “That’s not true. You’ve been pretty consistent. A consistent bastard, I might point out.” She almost laughed. “I
am
sorry I put you in this position. Would you have had an easier time shooting Esther Aronson?”

“That’s enough of that. I’ll get you both out of this.”

She squeezed his hands. “Poor Jacob. You should have stayed in your father’s villa. Idle and rich.”

“Would you come to my father’s house for Passover?” He suddenly felt that if he asked her that question, he might make it there himself.

She smiled, then took his hands and pressed them to her face.

He felt a heaving in his chest that he hadn’t felt in many, many years. He waited a moment before he trusted himself to speak. “I . . . I’m sorry I . . . walked away from you before.”

Her voice was deep and soft. “I understand.”

“Do you?”

“The future. We have no future.” She put her cheek against his chest.

He pulled her closer. “No. We don’t.” He wanted to live. He wanted a future. But even if he lived, he knew he would lose her. Laskov or her husband. Or someone else. This was not a match that was destined to last. Then he would wish that he had died in Babylon.

She was weeping now, and she sounded to Hausner like the wind, overwhelming and perpetually sad.

He felt her tears against his face and thought at first they were his own, and then they were. It was all so sad, he thought; like waking after a bittersweet dream of your childhood and finding that you had a lump in your throat and your eyes were misty. It made the whole day sad and there was nothing you could do about it because it was a dream. It was that kind of sadness that he felt with her.

They both clung to each other and she cried uncontrollably. He couldn’t think of anything to say to make her stop because, he thought, she had every right to cry if she wanted. That’s right, he thought, scream, cry, do anything you want, Miriam, only don’t suffer silently. That’s for fools. That’s the Miriam that everyone knows in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Let the world know your pain. If everyone howled at every injustice, every act of barbarism, every act of unkindness, then we would be taking the first step toward a real humanity. Why should people walk, unprotesting, to their deaths? Scream. Cry. Howl.

As if she could read his thoughts, she threw back her head and let out a long wail.

That’s right, Miriam. Scream. They’ve extinguished your blood, slaughtered your family, stolen your childhood, taken your husband, killed your son, murdered your friends, and left you here alone with a man like Jacob Hausner. You have a right to cry.

Her sobs became louder, louder than the wind, and Hausner knew that Becker could hear her and that they could probably hear her outside, and he didn’t care if they did. “If I could do something to make it a little better, I would, Miriam.”

She nodded to show that she understood, then suddenly she grabbed his head in her hands and kissed him the way she had kissed her husband on the day he went to war. “Yosef,” she sobbed his name. “Jacob.” She mumbled something else that Hausner could not make out.

He put his lips to her face and neck and tasted her tears. Yosef. Teddy. Jacob. What difference did it make? As long as they brought her comfort and did not hurt her any further. Hausner wished that her husband would turn up alive. Should he tell her that Rish knew? No, never. He would never tell her that. But while she waited for Yosef Bernstein, he hoped that Teddy Laskov, or anyone, could give her what she needed. He wished it could be he, but he knew it could not be. He would not see Jerusalem again, and even if he did, he would be no comfort to her outside of Babylon. He licked her tears the way an animal licks another’s wounds.

Dobkin had never tasted blood, or another man’s sweat, for that matter, and he was surprised at how salty they both were. The Arab had him by the testicles and he had his teeth in the Arab’s windpipe. They both meant to kill the other, but without weapons, they had been uncertain at first of how to go about it. They had begun by battering each other about and striking at the obvious places—the head—the chest. Talib had smashed the oil lamp on Dobkin’s head, and blood and fat ran over the big man’s back and neck. But these spots had been protected by nature’s armor. Then the old instincts, buried so deep in the psyche, returned. Each man felt a tingling down his spine, and his neck hair raised and his testicles drew up as each became aware of what he had become. They found the weak spots that nature had inexplicably left exposed.

Dobkin concentrated on forcing his jaws closed and tried to ignore the searing pain. He had missed the Arab’s jugular, but he knew that the cartilage of the windpipe would collapse if he persevered.

Talib was trying to get a better hold of Dobkin’s testicles, but the big man’s knees kept battering at him as they rolled across the mud floor. Talib reached around and poked at Dobkin’s
eyes, but Dobkin squeezed them tight and buried his face deeper into Talib’s neck. Each man was fighting the battle of his life in almost absolute silence. Neither man ever once considered asking for mercy.

In another hut, across the crooked lane, the two appointed attendants made herbal tea over a crackling fire of thistle and told stories to keep each other amused. They heard nothing unusual, just the whistling of the wind and the slapping of the shutters.

Dobkin could take the pain no longer. His thigh wound was open and hemorrhaging, and he felt that he was going to lose consciousness. He found the terra cotta figure in his pocket and brought it down hard on Talib’s ear. The wing of the wind demon shattered as it struck. The Arab’s scream was lost in a sudden loud rush of wind that threw open the shutters.

Talib, stunned, loosened his grip long enough for Dobkin to pull away. Dobkin raised his huge hand and smashed the jagged edge of the Pazuzu down on Talib’s good eye. The man let out a long scream and covered his face. Dobkin took the sharply pointed fragment of the demon’s wing and plunged it into Talib’s jugular. A stream of blood spurted up into Dobkin’s face.

Talib thrashed across the room holding his throat with his hand and making gurgling sounds. The two men collided several times in the small, dark room, each time letting out primal noises as they touched. In his death throes Talib splattered blood across the floor and walls.

Finally, Dobkin fell back into a corner and remained still. He listened until he was certain the Arab was dead, then he lay back, fighting to remain conscious. He spit and spit to get the taste of blood out of his mouth, but he knew he never would.

Laskov and Talman were as surprised as anyone to have been invited back to the Prime Minister’s meeting.

Laskov listened to the photo-analyst, Ezra Adam, as the young man gave his report. The analyst spoke apparently without passion, but Laskov could tell that the man was saying, “I have found the missing Concorde. Believe me. Go and get them.” Laskov had heard too many photo-analysts over the years to mistake the tone. The man went through each of the dozen high-altitude SR-71 infrared photographs that the Americans had taken only hours before at the Israelis’ request.

The various ministers and generals, most of whom could not discern anything from the light and dark blotches, followed Adam with their own set of photographs as he spoke.

Adam laid down another photograph and looked up at the Prime Minister. “So you can see, sir, it’s somewhat difficult to read night photos with the—what do you call it?—the
Sherji
kicking up dust, and the high altitudes and all. We really should have our own low-level shots, but of course I understand there are political—”

“Get on with it, young man,” snapped an air force general. “Let the PM worry about that.”

“Yes, sir. Well, here—photo number ten, then. Similar to the others. I’ve seen this pattern before. Small scattered and random residues of heat. Suggestive of a battle, perhaps.”

“Or a shepherd’s encampment,” said an army general.

“Or a village,” added a Cabinet minister who didn’t know anything about infrared photography an hour before but was catching on fast.

“Yes,” agreed Adam. “It could be any of those. But one gets a feel for these things after a while. First of all, there is no known village on this spot. Please look at your transparent overlays of the archeologist map of Babylon. The village of Kweirish is a kilometer to the south of these heat sources, near the Ishtar Gate. Also, villages look different. And the cooking fires and lamps of a village or an encampment leave a different heat residue. You can see this in Kweirish. Based on a spectrographic analysis of these photos, I have reason to believe that there was phosphorus burned here on this slope. And here, in quadrant one-three—look at the size of that heat source. It’s dim, you see, but it must be large. See? An aircraft whose engines haven’t been running in perhaps twenty-four hours or more. Then a series of streaks here like trucks moving—or a light aircraft taking off. See these spots on each photo? That may be a small aircraft flying over the mound.”

Laskov knew that to the laymen in the room it was all very suspect. But to his surprise, the Prime Minister suddenly stopped Adam in mid-sentence. “I believe you, Sergeant Adam. God knows why, but I do.” Then more surprisingly, he turned to Laskov instead of to his military aides. “Well, Laskov, tell me a story based on these ridiculous smears.”

Laskov looked around the room. “It would appear—that is, we can only surmise—”

“No. No,” interrupted the Prime Minister. “No suppositions. I want one of your divine flashes. What does this—” he waved a particularly cryptic photograph in the air, “—what does
this
mean, General?”

Laskov wiped his face with a handkerchief. “Well, it means, sir, that the Concorde was forced down in Babylon—by the Lear—we know how that was done. There was no hijacker on board, of course, so the pilot of the Concorde—Becker—after a
vote, I’m sure—put the craft down outside of the area controlled by the terrorists, who were waiting on the ground.”

Laskov closed his eyes. He seemed to be thinking. After a few seconds, he opened his eyes again, but they were far away now. He continued. “At that point, the passengers had the choice of fleeing or fighting. No, they didn’t have the choice. The Concorde appears to be against the Euphrates. So they were cut off—unable to flee except into the river. The terrorists would have immediately surrounded them to seal off all escape routes. So they decided to stay and fight. They are on a buried citadel. Not a bad defensive position. Look at the maps. And they had one Uzi and one M-14 with a starlight scope and perhaps a half-dozen handguns. The terrorists would come up that slope, perhaps not expecting anything, and would be fired on. The Arabs would become confused. Perhaps they would leave a weapon or two in their retreat. They would try again, of course. . . .”

Laskov paused. “The Concorde radio is jammed. They can’t signal. We know from our sources that there is a transmitter causing radio interference somewhere near Hillah. That’s not unusual in itself—we have dozens of such reports. But now, that one takes on a special meaning.” He paused again and looked around the room. “So they hang on and wait—wait for someone to come to their aid.” He looked at the Prime Minister.

The Prime Minister looked back at him. “That’s quite a story, General. See if you can get me into that celestial radio net that you’re tuned in to.” He paused and tapped a pencil on the table. “So there are only a few terrorists then? Few enough for the people on the Concorde to defend themselves against successfully?”

The photo analyst spoke up. “Sir, if this was a battle that we see on these photographs, then it was one hell of a fight. The whole slope area for a length of a half-kilometer shows heat residues.”

“Well, then,” said the Prime Minister, “it was not our people. They could hardly have fought a full-scale battle with a large Arab force. Perhaps what we’re looking at here,” he tapped his pictures, “is a local insurrection of some sort.”