Masada tore off the gloves and laid a hand on his chest, begging for it to heave. She tried to press down, to force air into his lungs, to bring him back to life.

“Srulie!”

Nothing.

She pulled him up to her, but there was no firmness to his body. His head hung back from his broken neck. His right arm was crushed, a mess of flesh and bones.

Her eyes turned upward, all the way to the top of the cliff. Searing hate filled her. She reached for her Uzi, but realized she had left it in the chopper.

Masada’s fingers closed around a sharp stick that lay on the ground near Srulie. It felt wet. She looked at the object in her hand, her mind fogged up with agony. It was a bone from his forearm, cracked lengthwise, narrowing to a pointy end like a pink dagger.

Abu Faddah knelt at the edge. In the twilight, all the way down, a small figure ran from the foolish boy’s body, around the curved base of the mountain toward the Roman ramp, and out of sight. He wondered how the Israelis had managed to send a man down so quickly.

He backed away from the edge. Behind him, the hostages wept.

Faddah trembled so badly his teeth rattled.

“We’ll be fine, son,” Abu Faddah said, but he knew the Israelis would assume the death hadn’t been an accident. How long before they attacked? He tried to think. Clearly, his plan had failed. The maddening part was that his basic premise had been correct-as proven by the boy, who had yelled “Masada!” at the moment of his imminent death, like a rallying cry that confirmed the enormous mythical weight of this ancient fort for the Israelis. Yet in dying he had also killed Abu Faddah’s chances of regaining the family home in Haifa for his son. In fact, Faddah would be lucky to survive the next ten minutes.