Dayan had been right, Pasternak bitterly realized, to hold back Yoffe until the enemy air had been knocked out, but the British had delayed the bombing too long, and now John Foster Dulles was hell-bent on stamping out the Suez campaign. While up north the Egyptians were in retreat and collapse, the real prize of the war, Sharm el Sheikh, was at hazard, and slipping by the hour beyond Israel’s grasp.
“What do you mean,” Pasternak all but snarled at Yael, “they can’t find Dayan? Has his plane gone down? I must talk to him.”
The Chief of Staff was hopping from front to front, Yael retorted, and no sooner was he located than he was gone and in the air again. His plane’s radio was not working or not answering. Pasternak sat at his desk, unshaven and grim. “I see only one way through this balagan,” he said, munching on a sandwich she had put in his hand, unaware of what he was eating. “Sharon’s brigade is doing nothing now at Mitla but licking its wounds. Raful’s paratroopers are still in good shape. They could get off their backsides, and make an end run around Mitla Pass to the other coast of Sinai. It’s nothing like that terrain Yoffe’s bogged in. The roads are pretty good, some are even tarred. Raful could capture an airfield with a parachute drop, and get heavy assault equipment delivered to him by air. That battalion could roll right to Sharm, and if Yoffe doesn’t get there in time, Raful might. I want to recommend this to Moshe for immediate decision, but where is he?”
“Go ahead and do it,” said Yael.
“What?”
“Do it, Sam.”
He stared at her, and managed a sour grin. “Just like that? On my own? Change the tactics of my superior’s campaign?”
“Is it the right thing? Is it urgent?”
“Urgent? It’s the only thing. Possibly Yoffe and Barak will make it through, but it’s looking worse by the hour.”
“What have you got to lose by issuing this order, compared to losing Sharm el Sheikh?”
Pasternak was used to Yael’s quasi-wifely effrontery, which she was not careful enough to conceal from the staff. She looked drawn and depressed, almost ill, but the brass was all there. “Well, we’ll see. Tell Uri to come in here. And bring me the schedule of reserve airborne armor.”
“All right, and I’ll keep trying to contact Moshe.”
“Do that.” He startled her by harshly laughing. “Do you know what the biggest risk is? If I give this order, and then Raful Eitan beats Avraham Yoffe into Sharm, Avraham will have my liver on a skewer. With onions.”
***
So now it was becoming a strange three-way race: Raful Eitan’s paratroopers making a run for Sharm down the peninsula’s west coast, and Avraham Yoffe’s brigade climbing through the dunes on the east coast, both converging toward the southern point of the Sinai triangle at Sharm el Sheikh; and in New York, Eisenhower’s UN delegation, in unlikely partnership with the Russians, forcing the pace toward an assembly vote for a cease-fire. Red Army tanks at that very moment were bloodily crushing an uprising against the Soviet puppet regime in Hungary, and the Americans were mildly reproving the Kremlin for this disorderly conduct, but reserving their indignation for Israel and to a lesser degree, for their allies, the British and French. To Sam Pasternak, who at the hub of these things was as aware of the whole picture as anybody, world politics wore the surrealistic look of Salvador Dali’s melting watches, but these nightmare watches were recording the disappearing hours of Israel’s opportunity to open the Straits of Tiran.
***
“Keep going,” Pasternak signalled to Avraham Yoffe, who reported around midnight that the brigade had at last struggled over the top of the seventy-mile rise, but was strung far out of sight along the slope up to the watershed, and needed a respite. “I tell you, keep going! The political situation is deteriorating fast. For insurance, Raful is on his way down the west coast to help you take Sharm, if need be.”
This dug spurs, just as Pasternak figured, into the brigade commander. He allowed his troops only two hours of rest and machine maintenance under the stars, while to the rear half-tracks and mechanics labored to extricate vehicles still stuck or disabled. Then the ten-mile line of overtaxed machines and two thousand exhausted men was back on the move, bumping and groaning downhill in the black hours before the dawn, through wadis crisscrossed with kidney-jarring crevices.
The sky brightened and a blinding orange sun rose on the strange iron caravan traversing camel tracks old as Genesis among the precipices. The great question now was, would the landing craft make the rendezvous? Battling the sand and the uphill grade, the column had burned up most of its fuel, as Barak had calculated. Without replenishment from the sea it would sputter to a halt far short of Sharm. So as Barak’s first reconnaissance jeeps emerged from a steep arid brown canyon, he and his troops cheered at the sight of waving palm trees, shining blue water, and three vessels approaching on the sea.
But this exhilaration was brief. Out of small silent oasis buildings under the palm trees came the crack and whine of bullets, and this first encounter with a human habitation brought the first brigade deaths. By the time an organized search flushed out and killed the snipers, Yoffe was arriving with the main body of the brigade, and frogmen Barak had brought were snorkeling off the beach, searching for mines and underwater obstacles. The soldiers swarmed off their vehicles to dive into the water, and Barak allowed his own reconnaissance troops a swim, then summoned them back to the jeeps as the landing craft were easing up on the beach.
“Are we going to beat Raful?” His uniform blackened by sweat, Avraham Yoffe towered beside Barak’s jeep, which was loaded up with jerricans of fuel, the motor running.
“It’ll be close. Wadi Kyd’s our problem.”
“I’ll tell you what,” said Yoffe with an angry half-smile, “sending Raful was a sensible precaution, no argument. But if he takes Sharm, I’ll kill him.” He waved a thick hairy arm at the serried lines of vehicles drawn up for refueling, covering the desert clear to the canyon defile. “Sharm el Sheikh is my objective!”
***
Like the YARKON exploration, Barak’s scouting trek to Wadi Kyd was an awesome passage through Bible wilderness; and his line of vehicles, which made the primeval cliffs echo with mechanical racket, seemed a weird anachronism, as in a time-travel movie. Those brief days in Paris, he was reflecting, those farcical meetings of a few old men in the Sèvres villa, had launched a fantastic turmoil in faraway places. There was no telling how the British and the French would come out of their dilatory operation, with their landings still days away, the Russians dropping horrid hints about intervening in Sinai with troops and using rockets on Paris and London, and the Americans making no horrid counternoises, but rather agreeing with the Soviet position and merely asking for cooler heads, except about the inexcusable Israeli aggression.
Meantime Israel was close to conquering a peninsula three times the size of the sliver of coast that was all its territory. If some things had gone wrong in KADESH, Dayan on the whole had been right, Barak perceived; and if the Old Man with all his weaknesses was a political genius, the one-eyed moshavnik with all his faults was emerging as a military genius. The brigades to the north had already routed the Egyptians and swept all the way to Suez. There remained only Sharm to capture. Barak’s long-range feeling of doom about the preposterously tiny Jewish sandbar in the sullen threatening sea of Islam—a feeling that he never voiced, but that was an unceasing gnaw—was lifting in the dazzle of this triumphant campaign.
The recollections of Paris brought to mind, as Barak’s jeep rocked and jolted under the blazing sun and on into the starry night, memories of the gawky garrulous Emily Cunningham. Ever since his return, flashes of the strange girl had come and gone in his thoughts. The puzzling thing was that he had not quite forgotten her in his hard-pressed, day-and-night toils to get Yoffe’s brigade mobilized, supplied, and ready to roll. He remembered even small things—the impatient quick waves of her long thin hands, the sudden way she widened her eyes at words that struck her, the untidy
brown tumble of her hair, the cheap big American wristwatch she wore—above all, the desire she woke in him, the sort of youthful appetite he had buried under a dozen deep-layered years of happy marriage and fatherhood. The Cunningham girl couldn’t compare to Nakhama in looks or in charm—skinny where his wife was voluptuous, acerb where his wife was sweet, brusque and forward where his wife, however tired or out of sorts, was soft and womanly. True enough, Emily was a clever creature, wholly of the great world outside Zion. War tended to blot out that world, but Emily was managing to intrude on him even here, amid the Sinai crags and dunes. A man was never too old for foolishness, it would seem, or at least he was not.
At Wadi Kyd, as he had feared, the ravine walls narrowed to a defile passable by camels but not by military vehicles. Shrugging off the risk of mines or ambush, he took a small patrol on foot through the bottleneck in the dark, and decided on blasting it open, for there was neither time nor fuel to turn back the brigade and explore another way to Sharm el Sheikh. This was no cow barn demolition, but like that job it had to be done.
Colonel Yoffe responded to his urgent report by speeding engineers with high explosives ahead to the site. They went straight to work. The terrific rolling thunderclaps and the pillars of flame that lit up the night gave Zev Barak an even eerier sense that he was living a Bible scene. When the long train of the brigade came winding through the wadi, visible in crimson flashes, the rubble from the explosions lay piled high in the defile, with more crashing down in cloud, fire, and pungent fumes at each reechoing BANG!
He put the entire brigade, as it came up, to clearing the broken rock with bare hands and levelling it out in a makeshift roadbed. Four thousand hands are a lot of hands, and in an astoundingly short time—though Colonel Yoffe paced and bellowed through every minute of it—a half-track and then a heavy tank truck tested the road and got through. Thereupon, Barak ran his scouting unit on ahead, while the brigade started to move again. A mile or so beyond the defile his jeep struck a mine. In a howl of sudden flame he was thrown clear, so was his driver, and heavy random cross fire assailed the patrol in the darkness. Stunned and bleeding, he pulled his men and vehicles together and retreated to await the daylight. He had found out what he sought: ambush ahead needing air attack, mines ahead needing sappers.
***
By contrast Raful’s paratrooper battalion was having a breeze, after a long circuitous desert journey that avoided the Mitla Pass. The convoy stopped long enough to collect heavy guns and ammunition delivered by airdrop at a captured airfield, and from there—at least for Don Kishote, in a jeep at the head of the leading company—the journey down a good tarred road along the deep blue Gulf of Suez was something of a joyride; all the more so, as his exploit in rescuing Jinji had already won him a rough good word and a slap on the shoulder from the taciturn Raful Eitan.
The convoy rounded the southern tip of Sinai in the dead of night. Heading northward to Sharm, it encountered at last a firefight in dark morning hours, at a defile that led directly to the fortress. Here Kishote, whose jeep was near Raful Eitan’s command car, heard him call up Colonel Yoffe to let him know he was within wireless range, and ready to battle through to Sharm el Sheikh.
“Negative, negative! I am attacking now from the north,” came the rough voice of Yoffe, somewhat garbled but the point very clear. “Advance to within one mile of the enemy’s southern gun emplacements and halt! I say again, halt! Let’s not have another balagan like they’ve just had up north!” He was referring to a bad business in which two armored brigades approaching the same objective had started knocking out each other’s tanks.
Colonel Yoffe was senior officer at the scene, a brigade commander. Raful Eitan, a battalion commander, was in theory bound to comply with this harsh growl over the wireless channel, reenforced by a message sent in a Piper Cub that came whiffling to a landing on the flat sands near the battalion. The pilot jumped out and ran to Raful’s jeep with a flapping despatch in hand. Not far off in the dawn light, rapid multiple flashes of heavy gunfire were visible. Kishote overheard Raful and his second in command, a tall bearded major as aggressive as Raful, discussing the despatch. “Well, there it is in writing,” said the deputy. “‘Halt, do not repeat NOT advance.’ So do we still go?”
“Of course! At once! How do we know how the situation’s changed since he sent it?” Raful gestured toward the distant thumping artillery blaze. “Sounds like he’s having a very hard time. He’ll probably be delighted to see us.”
Their white teeth showed in an exchange of grins on brown dusty faces, and the battalion set on to Sharm el Sheikh.
And so the Egyptian commander of the fortress found himself under heavy attack north and south. After a fight of several hours, he sent an emissary to surrender to Yoffe’s more powerful force. When Don Kishote chugged into Sharm el Sheikh in the jeep behind Raful’s, the sight that greeted them was a makeshift blue-and-white Star of David flag and pole being planted atop a fortress building by Yoffe’s soldiers. Riding in with Raful was Moshe Dayan himself. He had flown partway, and then riskily raced alone down the west coast in a command car to be in at the fun of Sharm el Sheikh’s fall, passing through frantic mobs of fleeing Egyptian soldiers who could easily have killed him.
“So, we meet again,” said Don Kishote to Barak, coming on him by chance during the cleanup of snipers in the ruins of the fortress, which the air force had reduced to rubble before the ground onslaught. Bodies of Egyptian soldiers lay sprawled in the sun or half-buried by debris, still oozing blood, and smoke drifted over the dismal sight, framed in wild harbor scenery of blue water and red rocks.
“Small world,” said Barak, whose head and right hand were bloodily bandaged.
“Are you okay?”
“Yes. Hit a mine. Nothing too serious.”
“Better view here than from the Georges Cinq,” said Kishote, looking out at the craggy red-brown islands of the Straits of Tiran, rising out of the purple sea.
“Matter of taste.”
“Who won, Zev?”
“Who won what, the war? What a question! Ask the Egyptians!”
Kishote gestured at the flapping flag. “No, I mean the race for Sharm—Yoffe or Raful?”
Barak did not answer at once, glancing around at the wreckage, the carnage, and the beautiful setting. He had led a failed attack at two in the morning, falling back in the face of a stiff barrage of cannon and machine gun fire. Yoffe had been out to beat Raful into Sharm, no matter what, but for Barak beating Raful had had no such urgency. What mattered was taking the objective with minimum casualties. Still, he had exulted as his half-tracks rolled into the fortress behind the Egyptian command car showing the white flag, and he saw no sign of Raful. Nakhama often accused him of enjoying war games and combat. “You do Luna Park out there,” she would sometimes say. Smart lady.
“Well, Kishote,” he said, “that will depend on who writes the story. As an honest historian, I’d call it a tie. As Yoffe’s deputy, I’ll maintain that we won in a walk.”
Kishote laughed, eyes agleam with triumph, and trotted off. Barak saw Raful, Dayan, and Yoffe in earnest converse nearby, their faces too bearing the grim joy of conquerors.
But for him, the flush of victory was ebbing in the sight and smell of the Egyptian dead. He had encountered such sights and smells before, in North Africa and in Israel’s battles; but this time they came hard upon a supreme lifting of spirit, a soaring sense of mission accomplished. This was a letdown which those three conquerors did not feel, or managed to suppress. Maybe that was because the three were sabras, and had been fighting off the Arabs all their lives. It made Zev Barak wonder whether, after all, he had the makings of a future Israeli general or was at heart a misplaced Viennese Jew.
19
The Foreign Minister
On a small door in a dim corridor outside the war room, a tacked-up hand-crayoned sign read Hayalot (female soldiers). Yael opened the door and very quickly closed it as she stepped in, for the Foreign Minis
ter of Israel was standing there with her black skirt hiked up on one side, displaying capacious pink wool bloomers. “Do you have a safety pin on you?” inquired the Foreign Minister, in her cigarette-roughened voice.
Yael was dumbfounded. She had just returned from Ramat Gan HQ, where she had been collecting some secret documents for Pasternak. He was now conferring with Ben Gurion and other cabinet ministers at the large table map of the campaign.
“Ah, I can get you one, Madame Minister.”
“Many thanks.” Golda Meyerson fumbled at the elastic of her bloomers. “Of all times to have a problem.”
Yael whisked out to the cubby where she kept her things. She was used to important people, but she had never been at such close quarters with “the American,” as she had often heard Mrs. Meyerson referred to. She had heard other epithets, too. Mrs. Meyerson had recently been promoted from the Labor Ministry to the Foreign Office post in a devious political shuffle by Ben Gurion. She had Hebraized her name at his insistence, and people were still getting used to calling her Golda Meir. Golda was Yael Luria’s idea of a woman, handling the biggest men on equal terms in politics and—so the talk went—in bed, and playing as strong a part in Israel’s business as any of them.
“You’re very pretty,” said Golda Meir with a long keen appraising look, as she used the pin, shook down and straightened her long skirt, and touched at her dark braids by a small square mirror nailed to the plywood wall. “You’re Nahum Luria’s daughter, aren’t you? Sam Pasternak’s aide?” Golda had risen through the Labor Party and knew all the kibbutz and moshav leaders.
“Yes, I’m Yael Luria.” Possibly Golda knew about Pasternak and herself; and if so, no surprise.
“Last time I saw you, you were a little girl. I’m hearing wonders about your brother, the aviator.” Golda’s stern worried face relaxed in a brief smile. She lit a cigarette and inhaled like a truck driver. “Sam looks as though he hasn’t slept since the war started.”