Free Jacob's Oath by Martin Fletcher Page A

didn’t last long.
    The beauty and the serenity of the ancient town had lulled him. It was picture-perfect
     down there, but that’s all it was, an image, like a postcard mailed the day before
     an earthquake. He had been duped by the flowers and the birds and the view.
    His back straightened as he walked and it all came back. Why was he here? To find
     family? He wished, but no chance. Friends? No. Property? No.
    No.
    His oath to Maxie as he died in his arms.

 
    SEVEN
     
    Twisted around with his arm over the passenger seat, Yonni Tal reversed the darkened
     jeep into a stand of pine trees. He came to a halt at the edge of a shaft of moonlight,
     walked to the back, pulled out two long wooden planks, and wedged them beneath the
     two front wheels, to give them a firmer grip. Heavy rain that afternoon had turned
     the grass into mud. He didn’t want any surprises; they needed a clean getaway. He
     leaned the heavy spade against the spare wheel, to grab it quickly just in case they
     did get stuck.
    Ari Levinsky unzipped a kit bag and pulled out two gray German army combat jackets,
     which he and Omri Shur put on. They adjusted their steel helmets, more for disguise
     than protection. They didn’t want to be seen at all but if they were, they didn’t
     want to be recognized later. In one pocket Ari put his jackknife, and in another,
     two thin steel cords with knotted rubber ends. Just in case, he slipped a seven-inch
     commando knife into the top of his boot. His stomach turned. He hated the rancid smell
     from his bag of raw meat and bones.
    Omri detached his Colt .45 from the shoulder holster, which he didn’t need, and checked
     all seven rounds in the magazine. He’d need only one, and hopefully not even that.
     He’d bought the gun from an American G.I. and liked it for his private work. He snapped
     the magazine inside the butt, double-checked the thumb safety, and pushed it in his
     belt. Ari looked around, pointed with his chin at the row of small houses at the end
     of a country lane. “One, two, three,” he said. “The third house on the left. With
     the two lights.”
    “You don’t say,” Omri said. They’d cruised by six times in two days.
    “Ready?” Ari said.
    Omri nodded. “If you are.”
    Omri, as he always did before a kill, slid his hand under the German jacket and tapped
     his British army shoulder flash with two fingertips, kissed them, and again tapped
     the golden Star of David on blue and white stripes.
    “Yallah,” he said. “Let’s go.”
    *   *   *
    Omri Shur was a legend in Palestine, at least among the fighters of the Haganah. Born
     on Kibbutz Ashdot Ya’akov in the Jordan Valley, at twenty years old he had been a
     strategist and instructor for the Jews’ endgame, code-named Maoz Haifa. It would be
     another Masada, the final fight of the Jews in the Holy Land. In 1942, with German
     Panzer divisions storming across North Africa, led by their greatest general, Erwin
     Rommel, the Jews in Palestine understood that if his Blitzkrieg crushed the British
     in Egypt, they would be next, and if the reports from Europe about the Jews were correct,
     there would be no mercy. They would all be slaughtered. But here it would be a different
     story. Here, the Jews would fight to the last, and the last redoubt of the last Jews
     would be in the hundreds of linked caves and thick forests of Mount Carmel—Maoz Haifa,
     the Haifa Stronghold. On these slopes, Elijah defeated the prophets of Baal. Omri
     Shur didn’t expect to defeat the Nazis, but he would make sure he would be among the
     last of the last.
    He was trained to kill Nazis at any price.
    As for Ari Levinsky, he was born in Hamburg and left for Palestine in 1933 when his
     prescient parents took Adolf Hitler at his word. He was thirteen years old, newly
     bar mitzvahed, and thanks to generations of intermarriages with prototypes of Hitler’s
     racial fantasies, grew into a powerfully built young man with blond hair