"The Lioness"

The painting here is by Frank Frazetta. It's called "Combat."



I'm in something of a whimsical state of mind today. You see, my website's Mongoose Trick Opinion Page absorbed another cyberattack from the feds or their friends recently - the reason I haven't added to it for a couple days. Like the last such sortie against the civil rights of one of its citizens (I hope you're remembering that Mr. Bush says they don't do that sort of thing, and his new snoop, General Hayden, says when they do do that sort of thing, it's all perfectly legal), this one was carefully exposed for what it was by demonstration, and with several witnesses, three of whom didn't know me from Adam before I included them among the witnesses. When you call a President a liar, you want to be careful you can prove it.

You'll be curious, so I'll tell you that the method used to discombobulate my computer was induction. None of the three computers here in the room failed to have its brains scrambled, although two of them weren't connected to the Internet. A technician with whom I was connected by telephone watched what was happening to my computer on his computer, and a witness here in the room watched the computers not connected to the Internet all do the same things. There's only one way to accomplish that, and only one suspect. As you'll note on my website's home page, I've arranged to make further attacks on my computer likely to be very embarrassing for someone in the bureaucracy and among our nouveau royalty elite.

Anyway, glad to have my website back. YOu don't salvage much when the destroyer is the U.S.Government, you know.


I've been digging for this short story ever since my dialogue started with "Greta" and other the Palestine Liberation Organization sympathizers on the Truthout website. I wrote it several years ago, during the time my war with the federals was at its peak and near driving me over the edge (some who know me would tell you that I went to sleep each night then staring at a quote from Friederich Nietzsche; glued to the ceiling of my tent or RV, it said, "He who fights monsters ought take care that he doesn't become a monster, too."). Reflective upon man's almighty penchant for, one, making his fellow man miserable, and two, screwing himself up in the bargain, I wrote as a kind of therapy - to keep my head. The story's entitled, "The Lioness," and I hope you enjoy it:

On a hill near the "Green Line" separating the Palestinian Autonomous Territories and Israel and not far from the Autonomous city of Jenin, there is a winding road from Baka al-Gharbiyeh. There, Sajida Salih al Rayasha, known to her fellow Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine tullab as "Hadat" - lioness - waited, watching. Below on the road, only an occasional car moved, unusual for what was becoming something of a commuter route into Jerusalem since a series of martyr attacks on Israeli buses elsewhere.

Sajida waited patiently, recalling with smiling pleasure her rigorous training at the Soviet KGB camp near Baku on the Caspian Sea. While most would doubtlessly call Sajida Salih al Rayasha beautiful, she was nonetheless a strapping young woman, and not called The Lioness, for nothing. That her tullab classmates at the camp learned quickly. Her five foot, ten inch height included a hundred sixty pounds, and her relentless strength and sombo martial arts training made her the hand-to-hand combat equal of all but the biggest and strongest men in camp. Besides, a fire burned in The Lioness. "Hadat" hated as only a survivor of Nakba, the Cataclysm could. Literally torn from her mother's breast as the Israelis rolled over and destroyed Bayt Jibrin, her village inside the Green Line west of Hebron, she had been handed from hand to hand among seven hundred thousand refugees during al-Hijra al-Filasteeniya, the flight of the Palestinian Arabs, until rescue by one of their number, a Palestinian doctor named Laleh Kahlil.

With the doctor and her family, she lived first in Turkey, then Germany, and finally in Georgia, the Soviet Union. Recruited in Gymnasium, the German secondary school, by members of the PFLP alert for persons with her hatred of the Jews, she arrived eventually in Baku. Today as she lay waiting here in Israel, she was forty five, and she was an experienced and accomplished mujahidat - a woman, but a soldier of god, too.

This would be her sixteenth mission, and the car carrying her team would arrive on the road below any minute now. Easily the best rifleman in her section, Sajida would again make the shot. Her team would cover for her, and she would slip away before anyone knew what had happened. Her rifle, the wonderful Soviet Dragunov SVD, would provide for that. She could shoot from eight hundred metres, even nine hundred or a thousand, then be on her way, escaping before the echoes had so much as died.
Sajida was very excited. It was always this way, the thrill and anticipation of a successful mission for god. Another hated Jew enemy of the Palestinians destroyed.

Today, there was also something like joy. Curiosity, at least. Two hours before leaving for Israel and her newest mission, "Hadat" had learned that she had a brother. Friends in the new Russian Federal'naya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti Rossiyskoi Federatsii Federal Security Service, reviewing her security clearances after the demise of the old Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti KGB had discovered Sajida's family tree. With the aid of a FSB computer wizard, it took her new mentors only a matter of hours to find her brother in Ramalla. With the further assistance of a student at An-Najah, the Palestine National University, and computers there, Sajida had even exchanged pictures with Yousseff. Their sibling resemblance was unmistakable, brother and sister had noted.

What would Yousseff be doing in Ramalla, she wondered. So excited had she been then that even during their extended conversation, and communication on the Internet, she had not thought to ask. That she would be re-united and know her brother was a thing too filled with wonderment and emotion to permit that kind of triviality. I was enough to know that she would soon meet him. Then they would learn everything of their lives since the Nakba.

What would she tell him? Of her life with the Kahlil family, of course. But what of the rifle, of her life with the Mujahideen? One does not introduce oneself to her long-lost brother with tales of blood and killing. Raising her head from where a cheek rested on the back of a forearm to look from where she lay procumbent in small and shallow cave under a great rock near the crest of the hill, she scanned the road in the distance. Nothing yet. Putting her cheek back on a hand, she ruminated, remembering.

The scream came to her where she had been lying in ambush, much as she lay now. It had been her first mission. Looking down the long slide of broken and tumbled rock on the mountainside, she saw with almost stupefying horror a sight so hideous that it made the soldier of god shrink inside even now.

Somehow, impossibly it seemed, a bear came lumbering into view from behind a ridge in the slide. In its jaws, it dragged a piteously screaming child. Instantly, Sajida raised her rifle. The scale on the telescopic sight told her quickly that the range was just over a thousand meters. Worse, there was no way she could get closer quickly. The rock slide would prevent that, and the bear, hearing, would run off with the child.

Horribly, the great animal began to eat its still screaming prey, its teeth tearing a piece of flesh from a thigh. Facing away from where Sajida lay, the bear's head was down, hidden behind its great body. No choice.

Sajida's rifle cracked and bucked, the shot raising a puff of dust from the bear's chest just behind a foreleg. The perfect shot had no effect whatever. The animal didn't even raise its head. Limaaza? Sajida had no doubt why. The damned rifle caliber! The bullet was 5.54mm, weighed a mere forty grains. Soft lead, too - at a muzzle velocity of 4,300 feet per second it was intended to kill a man by blowing his head off. And the little slug wasn't going anything like fast at the bear's side, probably hadn't penetrated the hair, hide, and fat. The animal's head stayed down, eating again.

The echo of the child's screams filled the canyon. With one more shot, Sajida silenced them.

Sajida shuddered at the memory. Her first shot ever with a rifle had killed a child. She shook her head vigorously, an effort to rid it of the hideous mental picture.

Mercifully, sounds, a car, forced their way into her consciousness. Down on the road, something was happening. A cluster of vehicles had gathered, around which a crowd milled. A Zahal Israeli Defense Force CJ-5 Jeep raced to a sliding stop beside another vehicle, this one a civilian Peugeot. The three soldier occupants leaped out to race to where a man stood backed against the side of the car. Unceremoniously, one of the soldiers knocked the man to the road surface with the heavy blow of an American P-24 nightstick. Seizing her rifle from where it lay near her, Sajida shouldered it to peer through the telescopic sight at the scene below.

The man on the ground was a youth, twenty or so. As the soldiers seized him, he kicked viciously at one, then another. Suddenly, Sajida saw the circle formed by the crowd of onlookers recede, drawing back in fright. Instantly, she saw why. In his hand now, the youth brandished something, his thumb raised and poised. Adjusting her telescope's focus slightly, Sajida recognized the pencil detonator device instantly. Shifting the scope again, she also recognized the man on the ground. Abu Hassan Takay al-Jazaf, one of the team she was to meet here! Sayyi! Bad, bad, bad!

Hassan, she knew, wore twenty kilos of Semtex explosives. Pressing the detonator would kill the soldiers and most of the thirty or more Israelis around them. But even as she watched, the youth lost his chance. One of the Zahal, a big and powerful-looking man, leaped, sprawling full-length, to seize the hand holding the detonator. Al-Jazaf struggled, determined too late to complete his mission. To no avail. The Zahal soldier was, indeed, a powerful man, and he held Hassan's hand in a vise-like grip, the youth's threatening thumb closed in one massive fist.

As they had long ago, the acoustics of the rocky place somehow brought to Sajida's ears over great distance the sounds of someone in torment, this time, the voice of the Abu Hassan struggling with the soldiers, a forlorn wail of frustrated rage. With deftness born of long practice, she focused the automatic-ranging telescope sight again, swinging the cross-hairs of the sighting device to the big soldier's head.

As anyone who has used a telescopically-sighted rifle to kill a man will tell you, there is something very personal about the act. Shooter and his target are somehow joined by the sight, a kind of umbilical. The optic, it seems, magnifies not only the light and the image in It, but the natural empathy of the one human being for the other. Suddenly, the hands holding the rifle can feel the living target at the other end of the beam of light bringing the image to death-aiming eye. Even at great range, shooter can see his target's facial expression, his eyes - almost feel him breathe.

Struggling against certain death the soldier holding Hassan's hand rolled to his back, seeking to apply an arm bar across his chest, and break the arm to acquire the detonator. Through the rifle's sight, Sajida looked the man full in the face.

YOUSEFF!

The right thing is often not the easy thing, you see. "He who fights with monsters . . ."