ACCORDANCE

By Desmond Reddick

This story takes place after Liberty Legion #12

The West Bank, East Jerusalem

Just before dawn, the seed of civilization was at its height of beauty. The rising sun painted a cerulean tint to the sky as the people of this settlement began their day.

It’s too bad, Ruth Bat-Seraph thought, that this beauty is wasted on such human filth.

“Tear it down!” she shouted in Hebrew.

The idling bulldozers roared to life, pushing into adobe brick homes.

“Hear me, people of this settlement! You are here in opposition to Israeli law! You have fifteen minutes to turn over Ahmed Jabara and his conspirators in the murder of two Israeli soldiers last week!”

The voice, shouted through a bullhorn from a woman hovering fifteen feet in the air, stirred late risers into the streets to see her for themselves. The people of this settlement knew her name well. They knew it was the term for a “New Jew”: one born in Israel after their land was stolen. They knew it was the name for a tank. They knew it was derived from a prickly fruit, intended to describe the modern Jew. The people at this settlement had yet to see anything to let them know that Sabra was sweet on the inside.

Kadar ibn Saleh Al-Aazim knew her only to be the oppressor. He emerged from his humble home dressed to meet his fate. His people knew him by one name, a name that simply meant “champion:” Batal. He stood and thought about his actions.

Batal knew that people of his ilk – those with superpowers – had a responsibility to think before they act. But he doubted that anyone had as much of a load on their shoulders when it came to defending the innocent people of his own home. One wrong step and World War Three breaks out.

“Jabara and his men were convinced to flee soon after the attacks. This is a peaceful settlement,” Batal pleaded.

“Then we will tear it down looking for them.”

“On whose authority?”

Batal’s voice was measured and calm, but it was full of weight. Nothing else could be heard above the hum of the idling bulldozers.

Sabra looked to Batal and fumed.

“Mine,” she said. The bullhorn was at her side, but her voice carried without much effort.

“You know as well as I that they were soldiers and they were unlawfully arresting innocent people in their homes. I am not condoning their deaths, but they were hardly innocent victims. Regardless, the perpetrators have fled.”

“Because you build a house somewhere, does not make it your home. This is your last chance: turn them over, or face the consequences.”

“My people are tired of being bullied. We are tired of being pushed around. I will no longer stand for this. I told you they are not here, and I spoke the truth.”

Sabra frowned quickly – revealing respect for the man – before stiffening her gaze once again. She dropped the bullhorn, and, before it hit the ground, jettisoned through the air towards the Palestinian warrior.

Batal dug his heels into the ground and prepared for impact.

But nothing could prepare him for that. Sabra, an immensely powerful mutant, used the technological advances of her costume to propel her superhumanly strong body directly into the solar plexus of the defiant Palestinian with a deafening THUD!

When Batal was fourteen, he tried to stop his cousin Mahmud from launching a mortar at Israeli forces during a raid on this same settlement. During the struggle, the 60mm mortar shell – ironically Israeli-made – exploded in the muzzle. Batal remembered smoke blinding his eyes and filling his lungs. He remembered the wave of wind that tossed his hair. He felt nothing.

When he opened his eyes, the smoke had mostly cleared, and Mahmud and four of his friends had been torn apart in the blast. Batal has felt nothing but heartsickness and a desire to end hostilities since.

After crashing to the ground and sliding through the walls of three adobe homes, Batal could swear he felt it a little bit when the two of them hammered into the wall of a fourth and were buried in the rubble.

“Rahhh!” Sabra growled as she thrust her body to a standing position, throwing the remnants of the home’s south wall into the air behind her.

She looked down as Batal tried to push himself up. She lifted her right foot and began to stomp him back into the ground.

POOM!

Batal felt the wind leave his body. He twisted his body and tried to sit up when–

POOM!

With each stomp, Batal was pushed further into the crater that the impact was creating.

POOM!

POOM!

POOM! POOM! POOM!

Sabra gasped for breath as the dust and sand settled around her. The rest of the fourth house had crumbled to piles of dirt during the beating. Sabra bent over, hands on her knees, and coughed.

Tired of being stepped on, literally and figuratively, Batal squeezed his hand, now full of dirt and sand, and threw it into Sabra’s wheezing face.

“Ak!”

Sabra brought her hands to her face, and Batal leg-swept her to the ground. Batal’s body ached on the inside. He wondered if he could be bleeding internally and worried a little. It was also the first time he’d felt pain in almost ten years. He was charged as a result.

Batal pushed himself to his feet and climbed onto Sabra as she lay on her back. He laid across her body and grabbed her free left hand with his right hand and put his left forearm across her neck.

With her subdued, Batal was able to notice that her soldiers – elite Mossad agents and mercenaries, mostly – had moved in and were engaged in a firefight with his people. He did not know who fired the first shot, but he wanted it to stop. Beyond that, he scanned the area for innocents at risk when he zeroed in on a child.

The boy was no more than five years old. The grandson of Aaqib, that much Batal knew. Aaqib was a good friend of his father’s when he was alive. Batal never liked him. That was not a reason – for there was no reason great enough – to let a child die in a battle he doesn’t understand.

And as quickly as his eyes found the boy, a man ran by in the space between the houses behind the boy. Batal could swear the man was naked. In a flash, the child was gone. In his place, a man, no older than nineteen, wearing a black bandana over his mouth and brandishing an AK-47 stepped out and began opening fire on the Israeli forces.

Not too far away from where the boy was, a woman cradled another child up against one of the buildings left standing in the area. Batal did not recognize either of them, for the woman was swathed in a burqa and the child was clung so closely to her that he couldn’t tell whether it was a boy or girl. But he could see the grave wound on the child’s leg, and the bone beneath it.

With bullets tearing through the air above him, Batal was a thought away from leaping off of Sabra to the rescue of the innocents when another man, this one shaped like an eel, snaked across the ground perimeter of the wall and carried them to safety seconds before the wall erupted in bullet holes.

“Stop them,” Batal said through gritted teeth.

“You first.”

Batal pushed himself to his feet and stood in the open area between the two warring factions. He stood for a moment, put his arms out to the side and waved. The Palestinians stopped immediately, their respect for Batal held deep in their hearts.

Several soldiers on the Israeli side flinched for a second, thinking that Batal was going to unleash some, as of yet undetermined, new superpower on them. Others fired a few more volleys before stopping. Peer pressure can be a powerful thing even for the trigger happy.

Sabra stood and brushed the dirt off of her white and blue jumpsuit. She waved off the men who had stopped firing and yet still aimed their guns. They lowered them cautiously.

The bulldozers backed off the houses they pressed against and rolled away from the scene. The hum of their motors died out, leaving only the sound of crying children filling the air.

“Surely the pigs would have joined the fracas if they were here,” Sabra said as she walked towards her men. “We will look elsewhere. Their…champion was telling the truth.”

Sabra looked back over her shoulder and added: “This time.”

Silently, the black-clad Israeli forces collected themselves and left, led by the dejected Sabra.

Batal watched and wondered if perhaps, it wasn’t dejection, but shame that she felt.

He turned back to survey the area. There were injured, none dead luckily. Several houses were destroyed in his personal battle with Sabra, and, for that, he would work hard to help rebuild.

The moment of realization shocked Batal into action. Two strange men flitted about the warzone. Batal knew they weren’t from this settlement, and they appeared to be helping, so he was sure they weren’t Israeli.

“You handled yourself very well, Batal. She’s a tank.”

Batal spun to see a man garbed in green and yellow over his whole body and another man naked but for a fur loincloth and a wolf’s head sitting atop his head.

“American, why should I care to talk to you? You have supported my enemy in the enslavement and vanquishing of my people since you cared to step into international politics.”

“Because,” Thin Man began, “we’re here to offer you the opportunity to change international politics. To help end the oppression of your people for good.”

“What would you know of oppression, American!” Batal bitterly disliked America, even more than he did Israel. It was a case of the devil one knows.

“My friend here is Native American. You two should talk!”

Thin Man jutted his thumb over at Red Wolf, who stood motionless and expressionless.

“Look, you’re an unknown commodity: highly powered and completely off the radar. I’m willing to bet you don’t even have proper identification.”

“You’d be right,” Batal conceded.

“Then you’re the perfect weapon against the people who would scapegoat your people in validating their own tyrannies laid down on citizens worldwide. It all starts in America; I’m sure you’d just love to kick some tyrannical American ass, wouldn’t you?”

The Palestinian was silent. He looked around at the people he lived among as they began to put things back together. They consoled each other and leant each other helping hands. Three boys kicked a soccer ball past him and chased it wildly, commentating on their imaginary game as if they were in the World Cup. A triage tent had already been set up for the wounded, and Batal could see a doctor gently consoling the child with the wounded leg, a girl. Her mother, still looking worried, smiled her appreciation at the young physician.

They were a resilient people. Batal knew that better than anyone.

“This is not about vengeance,” Batal spoke in stilted English, “or about some mad attempt to overthrow the western world. This is about working for better future for these people. The moment that is no longer true, I leave.”

“Understood,” was all Thin Man could say.

The Mossad Headquarters was not an extravagant building. It was functional. As a civilian agency, the importance was placed on action, and not on optics.

That is specifically why Sabra felt as though she was coming home shamed for the first time. She was one of the leaders of METSADA – Mossad’s Special Ops division. It was up to her to keep up a strong front and acting hastily on poor intelligence made her look like a fool.

She stepped up to the Director’s office. His was the only room with a name on it: Tamir Pardo. As Director appointed by the Prime Minister, he was the only active member of Mossad known to the public.

Entering the office, she was met by his secretary, a lithe woman of an age her face would not betray. Sabra placed her between forty and sixty. The gruff woman, busy poring over piles of paper that threatened to overtake her desk, motioned for her to walk through the interior door to Pardo’s office.

“Shalom, Tamir.”

It was as much as a hello as it was an announcement of her arrival.

“Come in, Ruth. Shalom,” Tamir responded. The unassuming, grandfatherly man sat behind his desk with a concerned look on his face.

“I’m sorry, but the intelligence was…unhelpful,” Sabra said. She moved towards the chair opposite the Director when a figure in the corner caught her eye.

He was turned to the side, his body squared off against Tamir, but his face was turned to Sabra. He was an astonishing looking Aryan: over six feet tall, muscular body pressing against the seams of the large brown trench coat, blond hair swept to the side. He was an Adonis from a bygone age.

“Hello, Sabra,” he smiled and said. “I’m not sure if we’ve ever officially met.”

As he stepped toward her with his hand outstretched, she saw, as his trench coat flopped open, a bright red costume underneath.

“Ruth,” Tamir said, “this is Colonel Jim Hammond of the American military, also known as The Human Torch.”

Then Sabra knew. She had fought beside him once or twice for a short time. This was Captain America’s predecessor. The forebearer of the entire superhero era was standing before her.

“Pleasure,” he said as they shook hands.

“To what do we owe your visit?” Sabra asked, all of a sudden very aware of the filthy state of her costume.

“Col. Hammond has come to ask a personal favor of the Mossad to place an agent under his auspices for a mission he will lead,” Tamir explained.

“This is an American military mission?” Sabra asked.

“No,” Hammond interrupted. “It’s actually a private mission. For the greater good of course.”

“I apologize, Mr. Hammond, but, Tamir, since when does the Mossad offer agents to private American citizens? He’s not even Jewish!”

“But, Ms. Bat-Seraph, I have killed one heck of a lot of Nazis,” Hammond answered. “And,” he continued, “we may have to kill some more.”

LIBERTY NOTES: Bet you weren’t expecting both of them! What in the blue hell is Human Torch up to? Why do he and Thin Man need to round up so many misfits? Yadda yadda yadda Liberty Legion.