Hadassah Covenant, The (27 page)

But that was nothing. At least that’s what Poppa always said.
That is the price of freedom
. In Baghdad, Abadi never once played outside the front door. It had never even occurred to him.

So now he called out, in the best alarm voice his older brother had taught him. A wordless cry, simply meant to echo as loudly and as far as possible.

Owwwweeeeeeeeeeweeee
!

He had never let one go that loud and bold before—he hoped he didn’t get spanked. But the black shape was growing larger, more quickly than he’d ever seen. Even in his nightmares.

Suddenly an arm encircled his waist and yanked him back into the house. It was Momma, of course, but suddenly Poppa’s face and shoulders filled the doorway, and his older brother, Jalaal’s, behind him. They were panting heavily. The two couldn’t have heard his warning and arrived here so quickly from the upper pastures, the boy calculated. They must have seen the thing for themselves and run like an ibex.

“What is it?” Abadi shouted.

Poppa ignored him, barking the old orders to huddle in the corners and stay quiet. His father hopped in the air and in one quick swipe, grabbed their old rifle from over the kitchen cabinet. Cracking the gun open to check its ammo, he snapped it shut and took up his position beside the doorframe, holding just the tip of the barrel out into open air.

The chopping sound grew ever closer, deafening now. Its vibration became more of a throb in their bodies than a sound in their ears. Atop the room’s small kitchen table, plates and glasses began to rattle and shake.

Abadi turned back to his family. Momma was crying again, by herself in a corner. Poppa had once told him that when she was a little girl, his mother had seen her own momma and poppa shot dead in front of her eyes, and that as a result she did not have the inner hardness to keep quiet. Abadi had no such handicap. He tightened his lips and willed himself not to cry as a huge shadow descended over the house. A roaring wind hurled dirt and bits of grass through the doorway, threatening to blow Poppa back into the far wall.

Poppa winced, frowned, and turned to Momma with a question twisting his face, an overly puzzled look oddly akin to the one he parodied every year on the night of
Pesach Seder
, when Abadi asked him the
Mah Nishtanah
, the first of the Four Questions: “Why is this night different from all other nights?”

He shouted at her, over the noise of the rotors, “They’re American!”

Now Abadi could no longer contain his curiosity. He edged his toe into the mortar crack below the front windowsill and, as he always did for a view, scrambled up on the edge. And there it was—now so close that it obscured the mountains behind it. A military helicopter complete with bristling gun barrels, mist curling under its rotor wash, and a pilot’s smoked-glass bubble reflecting their house at an odd, cockeyed angle.

It was landing right in front of them.

Then Abadi saw brand-new things, quite different from the Arabic markings and symbols he’d always seen on military equipment.

He saw, painted along the nose, a flag with red and white stripes
and a blue corner scattered with stars.

Then motion caught his eye from the helicopter’s flank; a door flew open and a tall man in long green coveralls was running toward them with his head bent, holding the arm of a stooped man in a long black coat whose gray beard flapped sideways in the wind.

Abadi and his brother recognized the second, older man at once.

He looked over at the front door—the rifle was leaning against the wall, and Poppa was already out the door, running toward the old man with his arms open.

Behind the approaching pair, an American commando in full combat gear, brandishing an automatic rifle nearly as long as he was, hopped down and, without even pausing for a look around, sprinted out to the edge of the slope. Another, then another, and a third followed him. All four threw themselves on the ground in succession, propped their weapons from their elbows and began lensing the surrounding mountainside and valley below with wide sweeps of their targeting scopes.

His father paid no attention to them. He was throwing a strong embrace around the Rabbi of Baghdad, the same beloved septuagenarian who, three years before, had driven to their apartment home in the middle of the afternoon with a truck and a driver to move them out to safety. To take them here, out of harm’s way.

That long, long horrible day had begun with a massive explosion knocking out their windows and jarring them from their dawn slumber—
a car bomb, right there on their street, not three doors from their own
! Then had come a day-long procession of police and ambulances and morgue trucks and well-wishers and idle bystanders gawking at the bloodstains running down the cracks in the street.

The morning had turned into an unbearable afternoon until the rabbi, the very same man now in front of their house—the last rebbe in the country, if rumor was true—entered their apartment all out of breath and full of warnings about further violence and emergency plans.

They had not seen him since late that afternoon, so long ago, when he had walked away from their loaded truck, waving three fingers of his right hand as sole acknowledgment of their shouted
thank-you’s
. As though saving whole families from murder was a
feat akin to retrieving a lost puppy.

And now here he was, having emerged from an American helicopter like some geriatric paratrooper. The strangeness of it certainly didn’t trouble Poppa, who still held the old man locked in a fervent hug.

Finally, the rotors began to slow, and the inferno of noise abated. The two men backed apart. Rabbi Mehl pointed to the man next to him.

“Ebrahim, this is Ari. He is a special emissary from our brothers and sisters in Israel. On a very important mission. My friend, I fear another crisis has overtaken us.”

“And after all this time. . . . ”

“It seems there is another killing campaign under way. Another farhod.”

“Yes. We heard about the al-Feliz girl over the satellite. It is a horrible escalation, is it not?”

“It is indeed. And now you must move. Fast. We have reason to believe they aim to kill or kidnap every remaining Jew in the country.”

Abadi’s father breathed in deeply and slowly so that his chest seemed to hold the air eternally before exhaling again. He took a long look at the mountain landscape before him, as though already bidding it farewell. This had been a difficult, forbidding spot to take his family, but it had proven a successful refuge as well. It had kept them alive. The shine in his eyes betrayed a sudden realization that he had come to love the place more than he had known.

The rabbi put a hand on his shoulder. “Some of the records stolen from our hiding cache several years ago have surfaced in the wrong hands. They know who you are, where you are, where you live. It is only a matter of divine intervention that you have not been attacked already. I am sorry to be so abrupt, as I was with you so many years ago. But we have to move quickly.”

“I understand, Rebbe. And I am very grateful. I will gather my family now.”

“We’ll need to hurry,” Ari spoke up, “because it’s entirely possible you’re being watched right now. And if so, our arrival in this big helicopter would likely trigger an attack.”

“Oh, and another thing, Ebrahim,” said the rabbi. “Do you remember the three cases of old records I sent with you? We’d like to take a look at them right away. First. Even before we leave.”

Ebrahim nodded to his right, toward a flimsy barbed wire fence strung thirty yards away to keep precocious young mountain climbers from straying too close.

“I buried it over here,” he said and walked over toward the enclosure.

Just then, the soldier in the middle held up an arm and barked something. The two men flanking him adjusted their sights—a flat, sharp sound drifted up to them on the wind—and just as he reached the fence line, Abadi’s father jerked backward so sharply it seemed he’d been slammed by an invisible battering ram. A fine red spray filled the air beyond him and he fell to the ground with a moan.

Chapter Twenty-nine

A
badi’s mother screamed
.

The boy yelled for his father as loud as his lungs would allow him. He started to run for him, but his older brother leaped on top of the boy and drove him to the ground. “Abadi! They’ll kill you!” he shouted into the younger boy’s ear. “Let the soldiers!”

The Americans rose to a kneeling position, shouldered their weapons, and all at once their rifle barrels filled the valley with the roar of gunfire, glints of ejected cartridges, and ribbons of bitter white smoke.

Abadi heard a metallic popping sound, saw the rotors start to move, and realized that the helicopter had also been struck on its side.

Then came a thump and a
whoosh
! as a rocket-propelled grenade shot away from one of the commando’s shoulders, trailing a thin line of smoke. Across the valley, where a smaller peak met the flatness of his father’s grazing pasture, a tongue of fire and smoke shot upward. A moment later, the sound of an explosion popped in his ears.

Taking advantage of the rocket’s diversion, two of the commandos rushed over to Abadi’s father, picked him up, and began to carry his
prone form toward the chopper. All around them, incoming bullets lofted tufts of grass and dirt.

The rotors were rapidly picking up speed. The American officer stood and pulled Abadi to his feet.

“We have to go! Now!” the officer shouted to Ari and Rabbi Mehl.

Ari turned and shook his head.

“I’m not going without those documents!”

“What about you, Rabbi?”

Unable to shout over the noise of the now-spinning rotors, the older man merely grasped his friend’s shoulders, as if to say,
I’m staying, too. But thank you . . .
.

The American looked over at Ari and shook his head in dismay. “Just how much do you folks want these papers, anyway?”

“They’re as important a part of this extraction as the family! Maybe more . . . !” Ari shouted over his shoulder as he ran a jagged line toward the place where Abadi’s father had fallen. With the intensity of a man under fire, he began to scoop up large handfuls of dirt, glancing back with a scowl.

And that’s when Abadi felt a mad idea burst into his head, and he did something more rash, and more manly, than anything he had ever done before.

He fixed the Israeli with a stare, willed his legs into action, and began to sprint across the open ground toward the bent form. Above the drumming of his own heart and the pants of his breathing, he heard the whistle of incoming bullets, and in that instant knew they were coming for him. Hundreds of yards away, grown men were holding his silhouette in their sights and trying to shoot him just for crossing his front yard. The brief thought made him clench his teeth, seethe with rage, and run more fluidly and swiftly than he ever had in his life. He heard, even felt, the rounds striking the earth—once, just off his right foot, so he swerved this way and that, and when another impact just missed his left ankle, he feinted, changed course, imagining himself Maradona, dribbling the soccer ball through the German defense in the closing seconds of the World Cup, with the roar around him merely chants from his fans instead of automatic gunfire.

And before he knew it, he was upon Meyer’s position.

He practically threw himself upon the older man. Then he heard commotion behind and turned to see his older brother Jalaal weaving a jagged course along the same route he had just taken. Trying to catch his breath, Abadi winced at first to see his brother diminishing what he had done, stealing away his solo glory. Then he realized that for the first time in his memory, he had seen his brother imitate
him
. Abadi had set the standard. He swelled with pride and turned back to the task at hand. At once all three were tearing so furiously into the soil that it became impossible to distinguish one digger’s hands from the other.

Abadi forced himself to concentrate on the task and ignore everything else taking place around him—the chopper, now at lift-off rotation, flinging a stiff wind across everything in its path, the roar of large-caliber bullets bursting from the soldiers’ machine guns, the whining ricochets of incoming fire, his mother’s screams. Most of all, the thought of his strong, capable father being carried away bloodied, as helpless as a child.

He told himself
I don’t hear any of it
, and made himself concentrate on clawing out as much as possible with each pull of his arms. But then a bullet whizzed past his ear so close that he could almost hear the projectile’s rotation, like an insanely rapid twirling sound. Another bullet struck dirt and sent clods into both of his eyes. Jalaal’s shirt sleeve seemed to jerk forward of its own accord, and Abadi realized his brother’s arm had been nicked. Somehow, the snipers had them sighted in.

Meyer reached up and yanked the boys as hard as he could down into the small depression they had just dug. He turned back toward the American squad leader and shouted.