The Hadassah Covenant by Tommy Tenney

Author:Tommy Tenney
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Women—Israel—Fiction, Women—Iran—Fiction, Israel—Fiction, Iran—Fiction
ISBN: 9781441211743
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group

Chapter Twenty-eight

OUTSIDE MAYDAN SARAY, DIYALA PROVINCE, IRAQ—NINETY MINUTES LATER

Abadi, the youngest son, saw it first, coming fast and low across the valley below him.

Kicking his soccer ball out on the mountain farm’s only flat patch of ground, he stiffened, distractedly letting the ball strike his shin and bounce away down the slope. This sort of mistake on most days meant an hour-long descent to correct—but Abadi wasn’t concerned. He’d always found the ball before. After all, he was the only boy this side of Maydan Saray, and who else would risk life and limb astride a thousand-foot clifftop for an inflated piece of leather?

At that moment, the eight-year-old didn’t care about the ball, anyway. He was too preoccupied with the object flying toward him along the twenty-five-mile-long Zagros Mountain valley. The high cleft in the range separating eastern Iraq from Iran was his home—where his family eked out a meager living, yet experienced a relatively safe existence, as high-altitude sheep farmers.

It was late afternoon, Abadi’s favorite time to get outside and escape Momma’s constant vigilance. At that hour in early fall, their home site’s merciless winds usually subsided to a cool kiss upon the forehead, while the dwindling sun filled their valley with infinite hues of burnt orange and turquoise and a thousand gradations of alpine detail.

Abadi knew the panorama well enough to realize that the growing speck with the flat glide path was no eagle. He could also tell it was not native to his part of the world.

Despite ever-present drop-offs and assorted mountain perils, living here was far less frightening than his old neighborhood far away in Baghdad. Back then, every single vehicle driving down their tiny street, every car horn’s echo, was grounds for an anxious pause or a sweeping glance out the window. He had grown up in fear of the sniper and the car bomb, learning from his youngest years to slam windows shut and stay indoors.

Living out here in the country wasn’t perfect. There was still need for some vigilance; over in the next valley, local Kurds had once exchanged small-arms fire with Hussein’s Republican Guard, back before the coming of the Americans. Today, the Sunni insurgency still persisted, and they had few friends down in the closest town of Maydan Saray. And now, since the overthrow of Saddam, there were the sonic booms, the high bomber contrails and the Predator drones cruising past on their way to Iran.

But that was nothing. At least that’s what Poppa always said. That is the price of freedom. In Baghdad, Abadi never once played outside the front door. It had never even occurred to him.

So now he called out, in the best alarm voice his older brother had taught him. A wordless cry, simply meant to echo as loudly and as far as possible.

Owwwweeeeeeeeeeweeee!

He had never let one go that loud and bold before—he hoped he didn’t get spanked. But the black shape was growing larger, more quickly than he’d ever seen. Even in his nightmares.

Suddenly an arm encircled his waist and yanked him back into the house.

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