“All life as we know it is quite literally debris, nothing more. Lucy knew this, and understood its connection to what she found out here in Israel.”
NAHAL OZ
GAZA STRIP
The night was a blessing that shielded his movements and deadened the sound of his footfalls. Car horns sounded from a main road nearby, voices responding in a babble of angry Arabic and Urdu, then fell silent as the whisper of a vehicle’s tires faded into the distance. The Gaza Strip slumbered beneath a heavy blanket of heat as Rafael drifted through alleyways and across rubble-strewn ground.
The Gaza Strip was never silent. Voices carried on the warm breeze from the coast, sometimes seeming almost upon his shoulder, as though the entire population were watching him. Sound travels farther at night, and among the densely packed buildings it seemed to turn corners, taunting his movements as idle conversations spilled from darkened houses onto the night air.
It was not the first time that Rafael had been required to infiltrate the Gaza Strip. From time to time he had been paid by Byron Stone to eliminate troublesome figures that haunted this land and the innumerable wretches who scratched out an existence from its unyielding soil. He had few qualms about lancing such abscesses of violence. Men killed. It was not cultural, tribal, or even a family thing. As a young soldier he had witnessed both the horror of conflict and the macabre euphoria of taking a life in the defense of one’s own.
Rafael killed only those whom he judged unworthy of life, and killed silently and quickly no matter how grotesque the crimes of his victims. Once they were dead, that was the end of it. The flatulent wittering of psychologists and philosophers did not interest him, especially since killing had earned Rafael far more money than he had ever earned in the service of his country.
He slowed and crouched like a cat in the darkness as a small knot of Palestinian teenagers sauntered past nearby. The tips of their cheap cigarettes glowed like beacons in the night, flaring into life and illuminating dark faces scarred by years of hardship.
Rafael had earned his battle honors in a dozen conflicts, the last of which had been fought amid the derelict streets of Chechnya. Working as a mercenary in the north of the country, he had been caught in the midst of a brutal firefight between Chechnyan rebels and Russian Spetsnaz forces. Rafael had killed a Russian radio operator and captured his set. Fluent in Russian, as he was in so many languages and dialects, he had quickly called in an air strike against a militant position while giving the coordinates of the Russian forces.
Somehow, the coup failed: the Spetsnaz had foiled his plan, probably possessing a backup radio set within their team. The air strike arrived and decimated half of his fellow fighters. Instantly, the hard-core fanatics suspected betrayal, and the mujahideen were upon him. Overpowered by men of his blood and his lands and yet ignoring his explanations, he was bound and taken to a place in the bleak eastern hills where he learned the true nature of faith and what it made men capable of.
There was no Geneva Convention for those held by men who opposed the very society that created it. Rafael was stripped naked, beaten with hoses and batons, and then drenched with ice water before being locked in a tiny basement cell, the stones in the walls worn smooth by the clawing of desperate fingers from time immemorial. The militants wanted to know for whom he had been working, where they were based, and how to obtain access to them, for they believed that his mind had somehow been violated and that Allah had sent him to them for what they euphemistically referred to as “cleansing.” When Rafael was unable to provide them with suitable answers, they attached electrodes to his genitals and cranked them from the mains, searing his body with white pain that left him weeping. When that failed to bring forth the answers they required, they severed two of his fingers with jagged, rusty knives and abandoned him in his cell, accompanied by crippling cold and the raging infections that coursed through his body.
Somewhere in the bleak hours between life and oblivion he was liberated by a small handful of his captors who opposed his detainment. From within