Free Zion by Colin Falconer

arms and dragged him away. Asher heard the chatter of a Sten as a third covered their retreat.
    He blacked out.
     
     
     
    The trucks were waiting, engines idling, on the road beyond the dunes. The two Palmachniks ran down the sand, their guns slung across their shoulders, Asher supported between them in a chair lift.
    The lead trucks started to rumble away, their headlights switched off, heading for the turn-off road that would take them across the plain to a kibbutz twenty miles to the east. They had to be well clear before the British armored patrols arrived from Haifa.
    Asher was hefted into the back of the last lorry. Strong hands pulled him aboard.
    The woman pulled away from her escort and leaned inside. “Is he all right?”
    “Get away from here!” A Palmachnik grabbed her and pushed her in the back of another lorry, with the rest of the refugees. She saw the man’s face briefly in the moonlight. A shaven head almost concealed by a khaki balaclava, the glimpse of a scar under the blacking.
    She did not recognize Netanel Rosenberg, not even the sound of his voice.
     
     
     
    Tel Aviv-Jerusalem Road
     
    There were perhaps as many as twenty young men and women in the back of the lorry, dressed in blue denims, ostensibly Jewish laborers on their way to a kibbutz . The lorry rumbled past the barbed wire of the British army base at Sarafand, and headed across the coastal plain to the east. They travelled past vineyards and wheat fields and the towering minarets of Ramie to the maw of the Bab el-Wad, the Gate of the Valley, the twenty-mile-long gorge that guarded the road to Jerusalem.
    This was the way that the camel caravans had come in the time of Christ. Titus’s Legionnaires had built their forts along this road, and the Crusaders had passed this way as they rode against the Saracens.
    As they entered the wadi the bell of the red-tiled Monastery of the Seven Agonies reached them on the wind, accompanied by the delicate odor of orange blossom. They could see the Trappists at work in their terraced vineyards, and above them, the grey blockhouse of Latrun Fort where the British sentries would be watching them through binoculars.
    Then the walls of the valley closed in on them and they were inside the jaws of the Bab el-Wad, twenty miles of sinuous curves, the white cubes of Arab houses clinging to the steep walls of rock and pine. The Palmach men and women in the lorry fell silent and stared, and were glad of the Sten gun parts the women carried with them inside their brassieres and taped between their legs, grateful for the grenades concealed inside the potato sacks and the spare rifles taped underneath the boards of the lorry. They could feel hostile eyes watching them from every eyrie and they knew they were inside the lion’s mouth.
    Three hours later they reached the village of Kiryat Anavim and turned a left-hand curve in the road. As they looked down on Jerusalem, Netanel felt the tension drain from his body. He looked up at the glaring white tomb of the prophet Samuel, high on its mountain top. It was from here, legend had it, that Richard the Lionheart looked down at Jerusalem for the first time and wept. Netanel wept also, and he murmured the words of the Passover prayer he had said, a lifetime ago, at a glittering table in Germany.
    But the soft young man who had spoken those words in Ravenswald would not have recognized the hard-eyed Palmachnik who rode the lorry down the Jaffa Road towards the rose-colored walls of the Holy City.
    “Next year in Jerusalem.”
     
     
     
    Kfar Herzl Kibbutz
     
    The farm has come a long way in the last ten years, Sarah thought. Now there are lawns and flowers, swings and sandboxes; the school has Bunsen burners and micro-scopes; there is electric light and machines to milk the cows in the barns; we even have our own hospital. The cottages piled up the slopes in neat rows of red tiles and white walls, the gardens carefully tended.
    Around the, rippling in the heat