Exodus - Leon Uris [6]
“Remember, Parker, you are on vacation. I’ll give Brigadier Sutherland your regards. Cheerio.”
Mark smiled and shrugged. Then it came back to him. The sign at the airport.... WELCOME TO CYPRUS: WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. The full quote was—“Welcome to Cyprus, goats and monkeys.”
Chapter Two
DURING THE HOURS in which Mark Parker awaited his long-delayed reunion with Kitty Fremont, two other men awaited a reunion of a far different sort in a different part of Cyprus. Forty miles away from Kyrenia, north of the port city of Famagusta, they waited in a forest.
It was cloudy, socked-in, with no light from the sky. The two men stood in utter silence and squinted through the dark toward the bay a half mile down the hill.
They were in an abandoned white house on the hill in the midst of a forest of pines and eucalyptus and acacias. It was still and black except for a wisp of wind and the muffled unsteady breathing of the two men.
One of the men was a Greek Cypriot, a forest service ranger, and he was nervous.
The other man appeared as calm as a statue, never moving his eyes from the direction of the water. His name was David Ben Ami. His name meant David, Son of My People.
The clouds began to break. Light fell over the still waters of the bay and on the forest and the white house. David Ben Ami stood in the window and the light played on his face. He was a man of slight build in his early twenties. Even in the poor light his thin face and his deep eyes showed the sensitivity of a scholar.
As the clouds swept away, the light crept over fields of broken marble columns and statuary that littered the ground about the white house.
Broken stone. The mortal remains of the once-great city of Salamis which stood mighty in the time of Christ. What history lay beneath this ground and throughout the fields of marble! Salamis, founded in times barely recorded by men, by the warrior Teucer on his return from the Trojan Wars. It fell by earthquake and it arose again and it fell once more to the Arab sword under the banner of Islam, never to arise again. The light danced over the acres and acres of thousands of broken columns where a great Greek forum once stood.
The clouds closed and it was dark again.
“He is long overdue,” the Greek Cypriot forest ranger whispered nervously.
“Listen,” David Ben Ami said.
A faint sound of a boat’s motor was heard from far out on the water. David Ben Ami lifted his field glasses, hoping for a break in the clouds. The sound of the motor grew louder.
A flash of light streaked out from the water toward the white house on the hill. Another flash. Another.
David Ben Ami and the forest ranger raced from the white house, down the hill, and through the rubble and the woods till they reached the shore line. Ben Ami returned the signal with his own flashlight.
The sound of the motor stopped.
A shadowy figure of a man slipped over the side of the boat and began to swim toward the shore. David Ben Ami cocked his Sten gun and looked up and down the beach for signs of a British patrol. The figure emerged from the deep water and waded in. “David!” a voice called from the water.
“Ari,” he answered back, “this way, quickly.”
On the beach the three men ran past the white house and onto a dirt road. A taxi waited, hidden in the brush. Ben Ami thanked the Cypriot forest ranger, and he and the man from the boat sped off in the direction of Famagusta.
“My cigarettes are soaked,” Ari said.
David Ben Ami passed him a pack. A brief flame glowed over the face of the man who was called Ari. He was large and husky, in complete contrast to the small Ben Ami. His face was handsome but there was a set hardness in his eyes.
He was Ari Ben Canaan and he was the crack agent of the Mossad Aliyah Bet—the illegal organization.
Chapter Three
THERE WAS A KNOCK on Mark Parker’s door. He opened it. Katherine Fremont stood before him. She was even more beautiful than he remembered. They stared at each other silently for a long time. He studied her face and her eyes. She was a woman now, soft and compassionate