holy we should thank almighty Allah for your strength!'
'I was captured—'
'Allah be praised!'
'For what?'
'For your having slain the infidels! If you had not you would be in the blessed arms of Allah.'
'I escaped—’
'Without slaying the infidels?' asked the youngster, sadness in his voice.
'They're all dead,' replied Blue with exasperated finality. 'Now, listen to—'
'Allah be praised!'
'Allah be quiet—you be quiet and listen to me! I must get inside, quickly. Go to Yateem or Ahbyahd—run as if your life depended on it—’
'My life is nothing!'
'Mine is, damn it! Have someone come back here with instructions. Run!'
The waiting produced a pounding in Blue's chest and temples as he watched the sky, watched the light in the east about to inflame this infinitesimal part of the earth, knowing that when it did he would be finished, dead, no longer able to fight the bastards who had stolen his life, erased his childhood with blood, taken his and Zaya's parents away in a burst of gunfire sanctioned by the killers of Israel.
He remembered it all so clearly, so painfully. His father, a gentle, brilliant man who had been a medical student in Tel Aviv until, in his third year, the authorities deemed him better suited to the life of a pharmacist to make room for an immigrating Jew in the medical college. It was common practice. Remove the Arabs from the esteemed professions was the Israeli credo. As the years went on, however, the father became the only 'doctor' in their village on the West Bank; the government's visiting physicians from Be'er Sheva were incompetents who were forced to make their shekels in the small towns and the camps. One such physician complained, and it was as if the writing were stamped on the Wailing Wall. The pharmacy was shut down.
'We have our unspectacular lives to live; when will they let us live them?' the father and husband had screamed.
The answer came for a daughter named Zaya and a son who became Azra the Terrorist. The Israeli Commission of Arab Affairs on the West Bank again made a pronouncement. Their father was a troublemaker. The family was ordered out of the village.
They went north, towards Lebanon, towards anywhere that would accept them, and along the journey of their exodus, they stopped at a refugee camp called Shatila.
While brother and sister watched from behind the low stone wall of a garden, they saw their mother and father slaughtered, as were so many others, their bodies broken by staccato fusillades of bullets, snapping them into the ground, blood spewing from their eyes and their mouths. And up above, in the hills, the sudden thunder of Israeli artillery was to the ears of children the sound of unholy triumph. Someone had very much approved of the operation.
Thus was born Zaya Yateem, from gentle child to ice-cold strategist, and her brother, known to the world as Azra, the newest crown prince of terrorists.
The memories stopped with the sight of a man running inside the gates of the embassy.
'Blue!' cried Ahbyahd, the streaks of white in his hair apparent in the growing light, his voice a harsh, astonished whisper as he raced across the courtyard. 'In Allah's name what happened? Your sister is beside herself but she cannot come outside, not as a woman, not at this hour, and especially not with you here. Eyes are everywhere—what happened to you?'
'I'll tell you once we're inside. There's no time now. Hurry!'
'We?'
'Myself, Yosef, and a man named Bahrudi—he comes from the Mahdi! Quickly! The light's nearly up. Where do we go?'
'Almighty God… the Mahdi!'
'Please, Ahbyahd!'
