Sword of Allah by David Rollins Page A

choice did they have? The man and his wife sat on chairs against the opposite wall, where he could keep an eye on them. They were Palestinian, but not all Palestinians were as committed to the fight as he and his comrades were. They had each other and they hadchildren, their smiling faces beaming from framed photos chequering the wall behind them.
    ‘You have a beautiful family,’ said Mushtaq. He wished he still had his family, but a stray round from an Israeli helicopter gunship had pierced the brick walls of his home and exploded, killing everyone and starting a fire. The Israelis asserted in the nightly television news bulletin that the people killed – his wife and three little children – were just more Palestinian terrorists.
    The man and his wife smiled and nodded enthusiastically. They were scared, and they had every right to be. If the Israelis caught him shooting at them from this place they would blast it to rubble.
    Mushtaq tried to recall his wife and children. He had loved then, but now he only hated. The Israelis hadn’t killed any terrorists that day but they had certainly given birth to one. And Mushtaq wouldn’t rest until he had shot a thousand Israelis dead in return.
    He waited for the grey, ghost-like thing to fly overhead once more. His eyes were watering, but not because of the glare this time. He couldn’t see his wife or children clearly anymore, their faces were fading like those on an old print, and it was this realisation that caused the tears to flow.
    A slight movement in the sky caught his attention. Mushtaq knelt and placed the tripod supporting the barrel on the windowsill. He kept both eyes open behind the yellow shooter’s lenses of his glasses so that he could more easily catch the ghost-like craft in the ten-power scope. The wind at ground level was nil. What was it at five hundred metres, he wondered? The unmanned plane danced in the crosshairs. Mushtaq led it, guessing at its speed,matching it in his head with the known velocity of his bullet, mind, nerve and muscle making untold and minute calculations and adjustments. Instinct squeezed the trigger, his index finger exerting no more than a kilogram of pressure, and the weapon’s stock jolted into his shoulder. At last, Mushtaq was rewarded by a small puff of white on the aircraft’s underside. The HEAP round did its job. The wing parted from the body cleanly,just where he’d aimed, and the two sections began their uncontrolled spiral to earth.
    Lieutenant Deborah Glukel lay slumped on the ground outside the building. Medics rushed towards her in slow motion. Something had hit her in the chest with the force of a sledgehammer. The Kevlar plates in her body armour had done their job, but she couldn’t haul herself out of the firing line. She had just lain on her side, waiting for the headshot – there were no Kevlar plates protecting her face. The pain in her chest was intense and she guessed that several ribs and possibly her sternum were broken. Her platoon had done a good job. They’d stormed the building and killed all but one of the terrorists. She watched four men come and drag him away, unconscious. Those men were Shin Bet. They’d lock-tied the captured terrorist’s hands and feet behind him, blood streaming from his nose, ears and eyes. They dragged him across the broken pavement, threw him in a waiting black Mercedes and sped off.
    ‘Horah!’ said the medic kneeling beside her. ‘As your name says, you’re one lucky benzona, Lieutenant. You’ve lost your sergeant and two other men, with three otherswounded, but you’ll live,’ said the medic, yelling in Glukel’s face while they worked on her. Glukel meant ‘lucky’ in Hebrew, but the lieutenant didn’t feel it. The two dead soldiers had been laid beside her. One was her brother, his eyes open, staring, accusing. She cried, not because they had died, but because she had lived.
    ‘Jesus Christ,’ said Samuel Polski. ‘Who called in the fucking