Read Online Not For Glory by Joel Rosenberg - Free Book Online Page B

drive up the price, but . . .
    As usual, he was missing the point.
    It didn't just cut toward signing on with Casalingpaesa; it also meant that there was some profit to be made by selling a small bit of historical data to Freiheim. Consulting work can sometimes pay well, and you don't get your young men blown to bloody little gobbets when all you're selling is knowledge. Well, most of the time you don't.
    Zev spoke up. "So. Do we keep it or sell it? And to which side?"
    Ari laughed. It was a full, deep-throated roar, not the hollow laugh that I have.
    " 'To which side?' You stupid shit," he said.
    Zev's expression didn't change, but a vein in his temple pulsed hard; the room suddenly grew colder. My partner had a wicked temper, and my brother has always had a big mouth.
    "Zev." Levine eyed him coldly, his hands resting motionless in his lap. Zev looked at him, then back at me, then shrugged microscopically.
    Rivka had missed the whole byplay. "Go on, Ari."
    He looked from face to face, at all of us. "You all have been thinking the same thing? You think there's a chance that Shimon Bar-El would ever give you something you're going to end up selling to Germans?"
    "Freiheimers," Alon said, less patience in his voice.
    "David." Rivka Effron held up a skeletal hand. "Please. Go on, Colonel."
    Dig your own grave.
    "To you, perhaps they're Freiheimers. But to Shimon, they're Germans. To him, they're Amalek. " He turned to Zev. "Tell me: how would you feel about going up against, say, Amharic?"
    Zev shrugged. His ancestry was largely Beta Yisrael, which accounted for his cafe-just-barely-au-lait skin. The Amharic had ill-treated his ancestors, called them Falasha, enslaved them, murdered them. My ancestors, too, for that matter, although there are no predominantly Beta Yisrael families in clan Bar-El, just adoptees.
    "I find it difficult ," he said, pursed mouth and sardonic tone making it apparent that he also found it boring, "to get excited about what somebody did yesterday, much less about what their grandparents did centuries back. Besides," he said as his smile reappeared, "if my ancestors hadn't taken a right when they should have gone straight, they wouldn't have ended up in Ethiopia. The past is dead."
    "The past is dead," Alon agreed with a nod. "I'm going to try and get a deal on a whole division, and I don't care which side. If it's Freiheim, though, we're going to have to get something ahead of time for the Bar-El information so they can have their tanks retrofitted."
    Ari turned to him. "You never served with my uncle, did you?"
    "Not really." Alon shook his head. "We had companies at the same time under Cohen, but we were in different battalions."
    "I know you didn't serve under him, or you'd know the verses." Ari's eyes went vague for a moment. " 'Write this for a memorial in the book, and rehearse it in the ears of Joshua, for I will utterly blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven.' Not my emphasis; his. Or, 'I—I, Shimon Bar-El—remember what Amalek did to Israel, how he set himself against him in the way when he came up out of Egypt. Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not —' Remember, Tetsuo? Remember?"
    I nodded, and shivered, remembering. It's one thing to hear the words in a typical one-room apartment, suitable for up to three adult bachelors or a single or paired widow with no children at home.
    It's rather another to sit in a circle about a bonfire, the night before a battle, and watch a quiet pre-battle briefing of what had been a battered regiment, a plea for just one more push before we went home, turn into an exhortation that changed what had been fifteen hundred weary, battered men into fifteen hundred killers with ice in their blood, fire in their nerves, and death in their hands.
    Don't tell me it doesn't stand to reason. I was there.
    Ari threw up his hands. "Do I look to you like a religious?" he asked, fingers twirling at where earlocks