Joseph had to concentrate hard to keep his teeth from chattering. It wasn't that it was cold, but, rather, it was because of where Joseph was and what he was doing. Six weeks previously he had been in New York, at Colombia University, studying microbiology. Tonight, he was out on a rocky hillside, facing Israel's volatile border with Lebanon, standing sentry in a world at war.
He was a good Israeli, a good Jew, ever conscious of his heritage and his duty. He had just completed his first year at the university, in the United States, where the street violence in New York didn't faze him a bit. But each summer, starting with this one, he would be returning to Israel to do his duty. And he was struggling with himself, not ready to turn his back on his family.
Joseph had been raised in the fortified and under-siege Israeli border settlement of Ma'alot, well within rocket range of the Hamas positions just across the Lebanese border. He had grown up under siege. He had been raised with a rifle at the ready and the knowledge that just a couple of miles away a people and a militant force lurked that wanted him dead. He took his responsibility seriously. He had trained for combat from his early teens. And, although his parents had sent him to the safety of the United States for his advanced education, he knew his duty was to return when he could to help stand guard.
But the actual duty of standing guard on the rocky hillside within sight of the Lebanese border through the night to raise the alarm in case of invasion or infiltration was completely new and worrisome to him. Having been chosen to do this marked that he was now a man—which was important to someone like him, small in stature and forever trying to look and act like a man. But, even as prepared as he was, he could not help having fears and doubts.
Was that a movement out in the middle of the minefield, he wondered. Would he react as trained if it were? Would he raise the alarm and rush to the defense, or would he fold?
Had his nine months in the States softened him? And had what he had become there, the truths he had learned about himself, fundamentally changed him, made him an unfit defender of the nation and of Judaism? Every Israeli lived as if the whole world was against him or her. Was what he had become in New York and who he had become it with stripped him of the right to claim his place here on the deceivingly quiet, rocky hillside facing the Muslim hordes in Lebanon on a star-filled night?
Yes, that surely was a noise out of the ordinary. That wasn't just some small rodent, unaware of the belligerent political divide running at the base of the hillside, moving through the rocks, searching for food for its brood.
Joseph was alarmed at the sensation of his heartbeat thumping loudly in his chest. He felt a little sick. He ran furiously over the elements of his training in his mind. His eyes darted this way and that way, trying to see everywhere at once. Trying to remember how every rock and cranny looked in its natural state in the shadows of the night—without a lurking figure weaving its way through the terrain.
A sentry had been killed, stabbed and mutilated and left as a message of hate, near this very sentry post two years earlier. Joseph had been here, in Ma'alot, then. He knew the youth, barely older than he was now, who had given his life that night. And that youth had been strong, taller, and more self-assured than Joseph was. And yet he still had died at the hands of a stealthy enemy.
Had that lost youth heard what Joseph thought—or imagined—that he heard? Had he gone through these same, trained steps of checking out what could be happening, separating the normal sounds of the night from the movements of infiltrators—before he had been taken down and killed, silently, without an opportunity to warn the next sentry along the first line of defense in Israel's north?
Where was his mobile phone? Joseph felt around the various pockets and straps of his military uniform without finding the mobile phone. He could call in if he had it. It wouldn't have to raise an alarm. Just hearing another, fraternal voice, might be enough to calm his nerves. It was almost time for him to check in anyway. Perhaps he had left it in the concrete sentry's box, dug into the hillside and camouflaged—although everyone knew that the Hamas had each of them pinpointed. Joseph decided he needed that mobile phone and that surely he had left it in the pillbox.
He turned and melted into shock. The dark-robed figure, wearing the traditional dishdasha of the Arab man, but in a dark, camouflage color rather than the traditional white, rose up before him and snatched his rifle away and wrestled Joseph to the ground. His attacker was older and larger and more powerful—and obviously much more experienced—than Joseph was.
Joseph's mouth and nose were being covered by one strong, silencing hand, while the assailant's other arm was wrestling him to the ground. Not quite strong enough to counter his attacker even without losing the element of surprise, the small, slender Israeli was too busy gasping for breath to put up much of a defense.
