Read Online Desert Fire by David Hagberg - Free Book Online

would never win the struggle against the Zionists, let alone the West. But with a strong Iraq, the region might come back to the law of Allah. The reasonable law of Allah, not the Ayatollah Khomeini’s vision of the Koran.
    â€œI can’t care for myself, let alone anyone else,” she had cried. “There’s nothing left inside of me, can’t you see that?”
    When Leila was ten, her mother had been killed in an Israeli air raid on the camp where they’d lived outside Beirut. Her father, who was often absent for long periods, took over the raising of his only child with the help of his good friend Bashir Kahair and the local camp women. She loved her father, but she realized she’d never really known him. He was, in some ways, even more distant a relative than her Uncle Bashir.
    She opened her eyes. She pushed back the covers and got out of bed. She slept nude. Her skin shimmered in the early-morning light as she padded across the large bedroom to the windows, where she pulled back the curtains and looked out. She was a tall woman with a slight, almost boyish body and long legs. Her complexion was olive, her hair long and jet-black and her eyes wide and intense.
    It had rained heavily in the night and the city looked
fresh and clean. Below, in the cobblestone courtyard, her father’s chief of staff, Lieutenant Colonel Mahmud Habash, was stowing a suitcase in the trunk of a gray Mercedes. He closed the lid and looked up.
    Leila did not move. For a long time they stared at each other. Of the dozen men here on her father’s staff, she liked Habash least. His eyes were cold and dispassionate, yet whenever he looked at her she got the impression that he was imagining her nude body—but clinically, without lust.
    The old Beirut, before the fighting, had never seemed so far away from her as it did at this moment. She shivered but remained where she stood. She would not back down, despite how silly and dangerous for an Arab woman this was. Let the bastard have an eyeful! He answered to her father.
    The happiest days of her life had been when she was a little girl, her mother was alive, and her father would take them to a fancy restaurant downtown, overlooking the water, or perhaps they would stroll along Hamara Street looking in the windows of all the fancy shops. She felt nostalgia for something she’d never had for long: a sense of belonging with another person, shared emotions.
    Habash finally lowered his eyes and disappeared into the house.
    For another minute Leila stood by the window, her eyes drifting to the city and the river that wound its way through the plains and hills. She could not imagine Germany as a place of lightness and contentment, even though this country had been their ally from time to time. Germany for some reason was to her a dark, brooding place.
    â€œThe Germans have their hands full, Uncle Bashir, they’re not the enemy,” she’d argued the afternoon she’d been handed this assignment.
    â€œYou’re not going there to make trouble, Leila. You’re going to make sure there is none. Nothing more.”

    â€œAnd if there is—what then?”
    â€œYou report the problem and we will take care of it. You’re to be nothing more than an observer for us. A little desert mouse in the corner.”
    â€œThe BND will know who and what I am.”
    â€œAlmost certainly. They will have their people watching us. Their efforts will be sophisticated, no doubt. It is to be expected.”
    Uncle Bashir had come to her apartment near the Tariz Air Base, and they went for a walk in the pleasant evening. He’d come not only to tell her about her assignment in Bonn, but to talk to her about her father, who’d been working too hard. A lot of people on the Council were worried about him, at his age.
    â€œHe won’t listen to me,” Uncle Bashir said. “Calls me an old woman.”
    Leila laughed. She could hear her father