The Uvalde Raider by Ben English (great books for teens TXT) 📕

Both of the older men shot quizzical looks at the younger one. Micah did not say anything else, he only nodded in affirmation to confirm his words.

“Can we help?” asked Max.

Micah shook his head slightly from side to side. “Not now, but be ready if that guard happens to wander off.”

Ezekiel Templar spoke again, a driving earnestness in his hoarse voice. “Whatever it takes, Micah. Qassam is a monster, and a very intelligent and fervent one. He’s dangerous and his zealotry makes him that much more so.”

Micah nodded his understanding. “Tio, will his plan work?”

Ezekiel Templar looked up at his nephew. “It can and it will, unless we do something about it.” The older man stared intently into his eyes, and Micah understood without another word how much depended on that small handcuff key secreted in his trousers.

“Okay” Micah replied. “Try to get some rest, it’s the best thing you can do for right now.”

“The pain killers should let you sleep awhile” murmured Max. “Let them work, Ezekiel.”

It was Ezekiel Templar’s turn to nod his head in affirmation. He fixed his gaze on the two other men, each in turn. His facial expression still bore the evidence of pain but it was also furrowed with the lines of an intense determination. “We have to stop him. We have to stop him cold.”

The older Templar leaned back against the wall, searching for a position in which he could rest a bit. Max Grephardt and Micah Templar looked at each other for a moment, and then wiggled away from Ezekiel to find their own spots. When they began to move, Micah noted they had the guard’s full attention and it held to the point their movement ceased.

‘Not now, not yet,’ Micah thought to himself. ‘But soon. We need to make our move soon.’

CHAPTER EIGHT

A few minutes had passed, and Ezekiel Templar’s breathing smoothed out and grew deeper. As Max Grephardt had predicted the pain pills were taking effect, giving his friend respite from the quarter inch hole in his left thigh. The former Luftwaffe hauptmann sat in the half-lit gloom, wiggling about while trying to find something remotely akin to a comfortable position. When he did so, their unwanted chaperone gave the German his full attention. Max ignored the extra scrutiny and instead fixated on the opposite wall.

Micah was correct, the guard was far too alert at present for them to try much of anything. In the meantime, their cause was best served in resting as they could and being ready to move fast when the opportunity arose. Max was not sure of what Micah had in mind, but the younger man seemed confident that he could free himself if allowed just a few minutes of not being observed. When that time came, everything that followed would be happening at tremendous speed and coming from unexpected directions. Of that much Max was sure of. The three of them would have to make the most of their attempt as it happened, there would be no second chance.

As the minutes crept by, his mind went through a hundred different scenarios and ways he might respond to each one. After a while it became a mental jumble of ‘ifs’ ‘buts’ and ‘maybes,’ until Max shut it all down and distracted his mind on to other things. It was something he had learned to do long ago, and it called for a good deal of inner self-discipline and experience.

His father had often said that life was a matter of courage and faith: one used his personal courage to carry him as far as it could and then relied upon a trusted faith in God to do the rest. As he had grown older and seen the ironies of life mostly for what they were, Max Grephardt had found that advice a source of both strength as well as solace when facing the difficult times of his past.

And that was where his mind was now returning yet again, to his past. To another time and place, and of a world long gone and of people long dead. When Yahla al-Qassam had spoken derisively of a “pious old Christian holy man,” Max had thought of his vadi, his father.

But the kind of man the Hezbollah leader had dismissed with nary a second thought had been just the kind of man one needed to remember. A gentle and loving husband and father, who viewed the world and those in it through wizened and knowing eyes. He had been a man whom Max had never learned to fully appreciate until it was too late. Max Grephardt knew that he was far from being alone when it came to fully understanding such men in their own time, but that knowledge did not take away any of the regret for not doing so.

Vadi had been the minister of a small rural Lutheran church near the medieval town of Meiningen, located in the central part of Germany along the Werra River. Meiningen was then considered the cultural, judicial and financial center of southern Thuringia, and the surrounding area was steeped in the traditions and philosophy of what was to become known as the German Enlightenment.

Famous personages such as Goethe and Schiller had walked along its picturesque streets only a century before, conversing with each other on subjects pertaining to history, poetry and philosophy. Together in Meiningen they would work on their collection of short satirical epigrams known as Xenien, an artistic form of thought attributed to the Roman poet Martial.

Not too far away, in the neighboring city of Weimar, Germany’s first democratic constitution had been signed following what was then known to mankind as ‘The Great War.’ Few would have guessed during that historic event they would be fully engulfed