Covenant (21 page)

“How far is it to Gaza now?” Ethan asked.

“Two minutes and we’ll be over Sderot,” Aaron replied quickly. “We could try for Yasser Arafat Airfield in southern Gaza but it’s not great for landing. The IDF bombed it years ago.”

“I can’t let them get hold of this footage. Take us as close as you dare to the Gaza Strip and turn north when we reach it.”

“What the hell are you going to do?”

Ethan reached out to the row of parachutes strapped to the rear of the fuselage.

“I’ll get out over the Strip and find my way back into Israel afterward.”

“You … can’t,” Aaron stammered, “it’s dark out there and you’ll have no way of seeing where you’ll land.”

“Nor will they,” Ethan said. “Besides, there’s a lot of open ground on the edges of the Strip near Nahal Oz.”

“Have you ever even used one of those before?” Safiya asked, gesturing to the parachute.

Ethan managed a meager smile that he hoped convinced them where it failed to convince him. “I was a Marine not an airborne soldier, but how hard can it be? Jump, pull, pray.”

From beside him, he could see Rachel watching as he slipped into the parachute harnesses and tightened them over his shoulders.

“This isn’t the best way to protect that footage,” she murmured. In the darkness, her features were lit only by the soft green glow from the instrument panel. “We could end up losing both you and the camera.”

“While I’m in Gaza I can find out if Lucy is being held there, and I know people who can help get me out again.”

Rachel got to her feet, swaying as the aircraft rocked through the night sky.

“Are you sure it’s Lucy who you’re going to be searching for?”

Ethan forced himself to look into her eyes without flinching.

“There isn’t anyone else there,” he said. “If there was, I would have found her before now.”

“How do I know that’s the truth?” Rachel said above the engine noise. “Selby and Woods showed you that photograph of your fiancée, and the first chance you’ve got you’re abandoning me to go running about in Gaza. How the hell is that supposed to help me find Lucy?”

“Israel wouldn’t let me into Gaza to find Joanna,” Ethan snapped, “just like they won’t let us into Gaza to find Lucy. This is the perfect opportunity. Are you willing to throw that away?”

Rachel glared at him, her mouth open to reply but no words coming forth. Ethan turned away and checked his harness before gripping the de Havilland’s interior door handle and looking ahead toward the cockpit.

“Ready?”

Safiya nodded, her dark eyes unreadable in the shadowy cockpit. Ethan turned and yanked the door open.

The night air blasted into his face, the aircraft yawing to one side as Aaron fought to overcome the sudden aerodynamic imbalance. Ethan peered over the edge of the fuselage as Aaron gained control and turned swiftly north. Streetlights flickered three thousand feet below, and out to the west Ethan could just make out the surface of the Mediterranean reflecting the night sky like a vast, shimmering mirror.

Aaron had timed his turn well, and was flying almost directly over the unpopulated wasteland between Gaza and Israel. Ethan shouted to Rachel above the buffeting wind.

“I’ll try to get back into Israel by the morning through Eraz. Inform the Foreign Ministry of what’s happened; they should be able to help me through.” Rachel nodded, her face strangely vacant. Ethan fixed her with a serious gaze, trying to assure himself that she understood him. “You’ll have to close the door behind me.”

Rachel edged across to the doorway. Ethan looked down at the twinkling lights of Gaza far below. He closed his eyes for a moment, taking a few deep breaths.
Get a grip and do it. If you’ve got nothing, you’ve everything to gain.

Ethan crouched and then hurled himself out into the blackened void.

The windblast smashed into him, flailing his body as he spun away into the darkness. The howl of the Beaver’s engine and the shuddering blades of the helicopter vanished as he plunged downward. Ethan gripped the cord of his parachute and yanked hard.

The parachute rippled free as the cityscape beneath gyrated wildly through his vision, and then he heard a dull crack in the sky above and was yanked upright as the parachute blossomed open. He swung in absolute silence for a few moments before checking above him. The broad dome of the parachute glowed faintly against the inky night sky above.

He breathed a sigh of relief, and looked down.

The Gaza Strip beckoned, ten thousand darkened alleys and streets populated by a people who had been persecuted for over half a century. A land and a people he knew well, now less than a thousand feet beneath him. For a few moments, he found himself reveling in the silence of the night air, and realized that he had not slept for at least twenty-four hours. Not the first time, he reminded himself, his eyes itching as he became aware of his exhaustion.

The night breeze was blowing him slightly north and west. He began trying to judge his landing point amid the dense rooftops, perhaps half a mile north of where he was now and maybe five hundred feet below. A distant car horn sounded and Ethan looked out across the city. There, rows of headlights drifted in relative silence, but among them, two sets weaved and twisted through the darkness parallel to his course.

The de Havilland and the helicopter would have been an unusual sight above the Strip. As he had feared, he had been spotted. He would need all of his wits about him in order to negotiate a safe passage and not be abducted as Lucy Morgan and countless others had been, for only insurgents would move to intercept him with such reckless speed.

Ethan looked up to check his parachute one last time before his landing, and as he did so something caught his eye floating in the immense night above him. “Oh, for Christ’s sake.”

A thousand feet above, just visible in the glow from Gaza’s feeble streetlights, another parachute blossomed against the night sky.

R
achel, close the door!”

Safiya’s voice was snatched away on the howling wind as she saw Rachel yank a second parachute from its rack on the fuselage wall, strapping the harnesses over her shoulders in the same way that Ethan had done.

Safiya glimpsed Ethan’s parachute billow open behind the de Havilland as she scrambled between the cockpit seats and rushed toward Rachel, grabbing her by the shoulders and holding her back.

“Don’t be a fool,
sadiqati
! You can’t jump!”

Rachel strained to break free. “My daughter could be down there!”

Safiya wrapped one arm across Rachel’s chest, leaning back so that her weight would prevent Rachel from leaping out. “Yes she could, but what good will it do her if you go and get yourself kidnapped, or worse?”

Unexpectedly, Rachel backed away from the opening and turned to face Safiya, gently breaking her grasp.

“You know why Ethan became the way he is?” Rachel shouted above the wind. “He’s half a person, isn’t he? Nothing like he used to be. I don’t want to end up that way.”

Safiya stared at her for a long beat, desperately searching for a reply, but she could find nothing. Rachel turned and without further hesitation hurled herself from the aircraft and plunged into the void.

Safiya watched her vanish into the darkness before hauling the de Havilland’s door shut, cutting off the noise. She staggered back into the copilot’s seat.

“You sure you don’t want to go as well?” Aaron uttered. “I don’t know how the hell we’re going to explain this when we land.”

Safiya shook her head slowly, glancing at the helicopter’s lights flashing in the darkness off their starboard wing.

“We will tell the authorities that nobody boarded at Bar Yehuda, that it is all a mistake.”

“You think they’ll believe that?” Aaron snorted.

“They’re more likely to believe that than the truth.”

Ethan grabbed the guidance cords of his parachute, yanking them sideways as he aimed for a yawning chasm of pitch blackness near a tight knot of apartment buildings. A single, flickering streetlight intermittently illuminated what might once have been a school nearby, now obscured by rubble and litter and hemmed in by two buildings bearing the scars of artillery strikes. On the night air wafted the salty odor of the nearby ocean, tainted with the acrid stench of sewage that ran openly along the gutters of Gaza’s streets as dark, thick, and dangerous as the shadows that concealed it.

The inky blackness loomed up swiftly and Ethan braced himself for the impact, pulling down on the cords at the last moment to slow his descent as he belatedly considered the possibility that he could end up breaking either his legs or pelvis. The unforgiving concrete rushed past as his feet slammed into the ground. He managed to run a few paces and then rolled, hitting the ground hard amid a cloud of dust that clogged his throat.

The parachute fluttered down beside him as he struggled to his feet, unclipping his harness and hauling it in. He turned and looked up into the sky. The second parachute was drifting down toward him but clearly wasn’t going to hit the same spot. He could detect slight movements as the jumper tried desperately to control their descent.

Voices sounded in the darkness, a flourish of urgent Arabic closing in on him from nearby. Shouts echoed from the main road on the other side of the derelict buildings as a car screeched to a halt and its doors slammed. Heavy feet pounded the earth.

Ethan turned and dashed into the first alley he could see that would take him in the same direction as the parachute above him, his own still bundled under his arm. He plunged into the shadows, tossing the parachute through a shattered doorway as he ran through the darkness, praying he wouldn’t break a leg on some unseen obstacle. Something crashed into his shin and he cursed through gritted teeth, staggering onward through the darkness.

The end of the alley broke out into another, larger passage running between two skeletal buildings emaciated by the rigors of war. Ethan checked both ways before sprinting between them. The parachute passed directly overhead, visible barely a hundred feet up in the narrow strip of night sky above, swerving left and right as it plummeted downward.

Ethan ran hard and burst out onto the edge of a dusty wasteland of unused foundations filled with jagged chunks of masonry, razor wire, and abandoned, burned-out vehicles.

The parachute was twenty feet above the center of the clearing, and Ethan knew for sure that Rachel was the jumper. Without real control she would almost certainly break bones if she hit the rocks.

“Rachel! Pull hard on both handles, now!”

He could just make out Rachel’s head turn to look at him, her expression of surprise, and then she yanked down on both of the handles. The parachute slowed rapidly and Ethan heard a thump that made him wince as Rachel hit the ground. Behind him, a fresh chorus of angry Arabic erupted from the darkness.

They had heard him.

Ethan dodged between the ragged boulders of concrete, careful not to catch himself on dense webs of rusting steel braces poking out like lances in the darkness. Ahead, he saw Rachel’s parachute rippling to the ground and a body lying inert in the darkness.

Ethan sprinted the last few meters and skittered down alongside Rachel’s body. To his relief she lay sprawled in the center of a large patch of coarse-grain sand and gravel. She sat upright as Ethan yanked off her harness.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

“I think so,” she murmured as though waking from a dream, and she stared at the soft sand beneath her. “That was lucky, wasn’t it?”

The shouts behind them became louder, and Ethan glimpsed swiftly moving figures obscuring the streetlight filtering through the alleys nearby.

“I wouldn’t call this lucky,” he said urgently. “Can you walk?”

With Ethan’s help Rachel struggled to her feet, and he quickly led her away from the pursuing voices, dodging between the rubble and detritus clogging their way. He kept low and headed for the silhouettes of derelict buildings.

“Where are we going?”

“Anywhere but here,” Ethan replied. “What the hell were you thinking?”

“I told you, there is nothing that I won’t do to find Lucy.”

Ethan didn’t reply, running instead toward another narrow alleyway that cut between the shattered hulks of the buildings ahead. The voices behind them were calling out to one another, short bursts of Arabic flowing back and forth like gunfire through the night. Another flurry of excited exclamations heralded the discovery of Rachel’s discarded parachute.

“Who are they?” Rachel asked.

“I don’t know and I don’t want to.”

“I thought you said you knew people who lived here.”

“I don’t know everyone! Come on.”

They plunged into the safety of the nearest alley, the choking stench of feces overpowering them in the confined spaces and the splash of puddles beneath their feet echoing through the darkness until Ethan slowed. Ahead, a brightly lit road was filled with the sounds of voices. He could hear music playing in the distance from one of the thousands of cafés scattered across Gaza. The figures of people walked past, strangers silhouetted against streetlights.