Zion by Colin Falconer Read Free Book Online Page A

Strugglers became impatient. He saw a puff of smoke and heard a CRACK! echo around the rock walls. Idiots! Izzat thought. They have opened fire too soon! The gleaming windscreen of the bus shattered. Bullets punched into the metal sides from both sides of the gully.
    Izzat joined in, firing, reloading, firing again. The bus swerved off the road and stopped.
    Easy!
    “ Allahu Akbar !” Izzat shouted and he raised his rifle in the air and led the charge down the wadi .
     
     
     
    Something was wrong.
    Izzat stopped in his tracks. His Holy Strugglers streamed past him, robes flying, scrambling down through the pines, firing their rifles as they ran.
    Every window on the bus was smashed. Every window. Of course, he thought, they would have been smashed by our bullets.
    Or would they?
    Even in his most sanguine moments, he did not pretend that there was one of them who could hit a camel with a large melon at a range of three yards.
    Something was definitely wrong.
    Some of the glass had been smashed from the inside .
    Gun barrels appeared at the bus windows. It was trap.
    The air whined like a host of angry bees as someone fired a semi-automatic weapon. Rifles and revolvers joined in the fusillade and the stones around his feet kicked into the air like dust-devils. His Stragglers screamed and fell.
    By the hundred holy names of Allah!
    He turned and fled back up the wadi, followed by the bleeding, screaming survivors of the Mufti’s army.
     

Chapter 5
     
    Jerusalem
     
    It was the evening before Shabbat, and the square around the Damascus Gate was packed: Hassidim in black hats shuffled off to prayer, sidecurls swinging; Arabs in black checked keffiyeh made their way to the mosque to answer the call of the muezzin; nuns with white wimples hurried to evening Mass.
    Majid was early. He was sweating despite the cold drizzle that had stained the shoulders and broad lapels of his suit. He mopped at his face with the purple silk handkerchief that he extracted from the breast pocket.
    “Hello, Ishmael,” Sarah said. “Congratulations.”
    “Six dead,” he whispered in English. “Another three wounded!”
    “They were armed. Unlike the women and children who would have been on the bus if you had not warned us.”
    “This wasn’t meant to happen!”
    Sarah produced a small packet, wrapped with brown paper, from the pocket of her coat. “You’ll find we have been most generous.”
    Majid snatched the package from the table as if it were a pornographic magazine. “This wasn’t mean to happen!”
    “What was meant to happen? The women were meant to be raped, the children mutilated?”
    “I am a good Arab. Four of those men were from my own village.”
    Sarah sipped her coffee. “You haven’t counted your reward.”
    Majid held the package under the table and tore it open. He put the contents in his pocket. He seemed calmer. “That’s a lot of money.”
    “There’s a lot more, if you are prepared to earn it.”
    Majid leaned in. “I didn’t know you were going to kill so many! May Allah burn me on the Day of the Fire if I lie!”
    I have a feeling He will burn you anyway, Sarah thought. I wonder if Rishou knows about this? I doubt it. “What did you think we were going to do? We have a right to defend ourselves.”
    “You could have just cancelled the bus.”
    “Then your friends would have attacked another one. Now they have gone to Allah as martyrs. Think of the innocent women and children you saved.”
    “They were only Jews,” Majid said, and then he realized what he had said and found something of particular interest on the floor.
    “There’s plenty more where that came from,’ Sarah said.
    “I cannot help you anymore. That’s it. I’m a good Arab.”
    Her superiors in Shai had anticipated this. They had told her what to do and it wasn’t pleasant. But what was there in Palestine right now that could be construed as pleasant?
    “I cannot let you do that. . . Majid,” she said.
    The sweat erupted