However, mine was solved with surprising ease later that day when the Pygmy rescue party returned. The cannibals had evidently pulled up stakes and left, the Chief told me. While they were looking for them -- and us, Josef Dorembi added -- they had made contact with a Biafran artillery unit. When Dorembi told them he had intelligence information from Lagos, they had agreed to give him an escort to Biafran headquarters far behind the lines. He’d arranged for Aleka and me to go with him.
Three days later we were able to hitch a ride on a UN observer plane leaving Biafra. Josef bade us goodbye at the airport. As we took off, Aleka expressed some concern about her future.
“I hope I’m not too short for the Sheikh,” she said. “You’re just the right height,” I assured her, remembering, “Just the right height!”
CHAPTER NINE
“A genuine sabra33 . . .”
Three little words. They were my next assignment. Simple! All I had to do was convince a Hagganah34 maiden to join an Arab harem. What could be simpler?
Oy! Vey! And like I keep telling my mother, I’m not even Jewish!
Well, you don’t have to go to Sweden for a Swedish massage. You don’t have to go to France for a French kiss. And you don’t have to go to Spain for Spanish Fly. But for a sabra? Let’s face it: you’ve got to go to Israel.
So that’s what I did. I went to Israel. To Jerusalem, which turned out to! be a wrong guess.
There was trouble in Israel. Many of the Hagganah girls normally based in Jerusalem were off in the desert with their units fighting border skirmishes. Those who were left were kept on active duty in the Israeli-occupied Jordanian sector of the city. Trying to meet one of them was something like trying to make a date with a Marine in the middle of a beachhead landing.
Given the situation, I decided the best way to meet a sabra was to go to a kibbutz35 . The Hagganah girls stationed at the border kibbutzim might be easier to get to know -- at least if I could catch one between Arab commando raids. These sabras doubled as farm workers, and when they weren’t militarily occupied, they might be inclined to relieve the tedium of picking vegetables by talking with an American visitor.
So here I was, three days after my arrival in Israel, picking peas in the hot sunlight blazing down on the fields of a kibbutz near the Jordanian border. Have you ever picked peas? Agricultural workers in the U.S. end up in the shape of a permanent question mark after a few years of such activity. After just one day I would have matched my aching back against the most arthritic spine in the geriatric ward of any major hospital. It was agonizing!
The reason for my pea-picking position was named Naomi ben Shik-Zah. Naomi was a genuine sabra, Israeli-born, a sergeant in the Hagganah currently detached from her unit for the dual purpose of helping in the harvesting of the crops and guarding this particular kibbutz against Arab commando attacks. She filled twenty-four hours a day with a maximum of pea-picking, a night-time stint at sentry duty, and a minimum of sleep. If I wanted to get to know her, the best way was to stoop-labor it beside her in the fields.
I’d settled on Naomi as the most likely prospect because she was extremely good looking-—a Junoesque brunette, strong, bursting with health, tanned to a deep, golden brown with white teeth and laughing eyes, full-breasted, round of hip, long-legged with slightly heavy thighs because of the muscles she’d developed there from her agrarian labors, and a sensual face with high cheek-bones and a firm jawline—and because she was one of the few girls at the kibbutz who was both unmarried and eligible for discharge from the army at her own request. I didn’t want to bring Ali Khat a sabra with a charge of desertion hanging over her head. Naomi had completed her term of service in the Hagganah and was staying on at the kibbutz on a voluntary basis.
Trying to keep up with her demon speed in gathering the peas, I gasped my way through a get-acquainted conversation with Naomi. I learned that she was twenty-one years old and had been born in Tel Aviv. She was extremely patriotic, dedicated to the mystique of Israel, and was violently anti-Arab.
“Have you ever heard of an Arab sheikh named Ali Khat?” I asked her casually, huffing the words as I stoop- walked beside her.
“I know of him. He’s an independent ruler-—not directly involved in the Arab government’s plot to wipe Israel off the map. Even so, he is very wealthy and his tacit support of the Arab position is taken for granted.” Her words flowed easily. She wasn’t out of breath at all—despite the fact that she was picking two bushels of peas to my one. “However,” Naomi added thoughtfully, '“he’s something of an enigma. He could have an important influence on events. Quite frankly, our intelligence on him hasn’t been too good.”
I filed that point away in the back of my mind. The rest of that day I spent cementing my relationship with Naomi and fusing my vertebrae. The next morning I had to go to the kibbutz infirmary, where a knowledgeable young chiropractor cracked them apart again.
The sun was well up in the sky when I went out to the fields to join Naomi. She wasn’t alone. Somebody new had taken my place in the row of peas beside her. They were talking as I approached. When I came close enough to make out the face of the newcomer, I did a double take and cursed to myself. It was Hauksho, the Japanese private detective employed by Venugotago Ugotago. The fat Jap (whatever happened to Spiro Agnew, anyway?) seemed to be explaining something very earnestly to Naomi. As I came within earshot, she was answering him.
“Really? But you don’t look Jewish,” she said.
“Ah, so?” Hauksho wasn’t worried about ethnic type-casting. He was inscrutable as hell.
“Of course, Jews have come from all over the world to help in the development of Israel,” Naomi said. “So why not from Japan?”
“Why not indeed?” Hauksho agreed.
“Are you Orthodox or Conservative or Reformed?” Naomi asked.
“I’m Zen-oriented. It’s an Oriental branch that’s rather hard to define by Western terms.”
“Oh. . . . Hello, Steve.” Naomi greeted me.
“Hi.” I turned to Hauksho. “You’re working in my pea patch,” I told him coldly.
“We meet again, Mr. Victor.” He was equally cold.
“Go find your own row to hoe,” I snarled.
“Pick.” Naomi corrected me.
“Your pardon.” Hauksho stood his ground. “I was here first. I shall stay here.”
“The hell you were! I was pea-picking this patch yesterday!”
“That was a different row. Over there.” Naomi pointed. “We finished it.”
“Well, they all look the same,” I grumbled. “Anyway, I was picking with you.”
“But you weren’t able to keep up with me the way Mr. Hauksho does.” Naomi delivered the coup de grace.
“You’d better go over there with the children.” She pointed again.
“Remember Pearl Harbor!” I snarled at Hauksho nastily as I slunk away, defeated.
For the next couple of days I didn’t have much chance to talk to Naomi. She seemed always to be with Hauksho. I was beginning to despair, to think about moving on and seeking my sabra elsewhere. Then something happened that made that impossible. The kibbutz was attacked!
It was the middle of the night when the alarm was sounded. I found myself, half asleep, grabbing my pants and following the crowd to the makeshift wall of sandbags which had been set up around the area of the central compound of the kibbutz. At first it seemed a little late to hold that line. Arab commandos had already infiltrated, and most of the fighting was hand to hand inside the compound.