“Great.”
As they drove through blacked-out empty streets Barak told Yael that she would act as army liaison with two foreign correspondents, in the first truck convoy to Jerusalem in many weeks. Kishote would be her dogsbody. They would all ride in Shlomo Shamir’s command car, Yael supplying feminine charm to keep the journalists amused. “I don’t know about this Reuters fellow, St. John Robley,” said Barak. “Robley’s one of these tall Englishmen with grayish hair and pink jowls. Reuters has been giving us rather hostile coverage. Naturally, it’s a British service. But it’s worldwide, and very important. The Los Angeles Times man is Saul Schreiber. Little redheaded guy. Jewish, talks Yiddish. Not a heavyweight like Robley, but smart.”
They found Schreiber and Robley waiting as agreed in a dim corner of the lobby of the hotel where the press stayed. Schreiber had with him photographic equipment and an overnight bag. Robley had only a cigar, which he lit and smoked as Barak told them what was up.
“You mention hazards. What hazards?” asked the Englishman, with a skeptical squint at this odd-looking threesome purporting to bring him a major scoop—a young officer with one arm in a sooty cast, a painted-up pretty girl soldier in a bandbox uniform, and a skinny bespectacled youth in very shabby khakis and a Palmakh wool cap.
“Well, sir, there will be a battle in progress in the area. We’ll be travelling safely clear of the firing zone, but that’s one hazard. The road is new, and still being worked on. The convoy will drive without lights. It’s the dark of the moon.”
Robley grunted. Schreiber scratched his head.
“Besides, though the road’s a well-guarded secret—and strongly patrolled—the convoy will be breaking a long siege, and the enemy’s still out there.”
“Major, what do you call a convoy?” Schreiber asked.
“Some thirty trucks,” said Barak, shading the figures in his press relations capacity, “carrying about a hundred tons of supplies.”
Robley raised bushy eyebrows. “A hundred tons? Going to Jerusalem tonight?”
“Leaving in an hour. Arriving in Jerusalem about sunrise.”
“Your government is prepared, then, to give away the secret of this road?”
“Why not? The way to Jerusalem is open now, and will stay open.”
Another grunt, and a long puff on the cigar. In her most charming British Mandate accent, Yael said to Robley, lightly touching his arm, “Sir, Yossi here can help you with your luggage.”
Unsmiling, but his eyes somewhat friendlier, he said to her, “Luggage? What for? If I go, and if there’s a story, I’ll want to get right back here to cable it.”
“We’ve arranged cable facilities in Jerusalem,” said Barak. “A Jerusalem dateline might be interesting.”
“What about the military censor?” Schreiber asked.
“Available in Jerusalem, too.” Barak added to Robley, “Of course, we can also return you at once to Tel Aviv, by the road or by Piper Cub. But we think the relief of Jerusalem is quite a story, and you may care to remain overnight, or even for a day or two. If so, a suite in the King David Hotel will be at your disposal. It’s closed, but special service will be available for you.”
“I’m ready to go,” said Schreiber.
Robley crushed out the cigar, stood up, and said to Kishote, “Come along, young fellow.”
***
The shadowy column of parked trucks southeast of Tel Aviv stretched far ahead into the starlit Jerusalem highway. As Barak’s jeep drove to the front of the convoy, the renewed combat at Latrun threw brilliant flares like summer lightning on the sky ahead. “You truly believe,” Robley asked Barak, “that the Arabs won’t try to stop this convoy? There are Arab towns all along the way! Surely the word will travel fast—”
“We’ve been using the bypass quite a while now, sir, for lighter traffic. That’s how Jerusalem’s held out until now, and the enemy hasn’t interfered. Anyway, our Seventh Brigade is on road guard. I don’t expect to be stopped.” He peered over his shoulder at the back seat, where Yael sat pressed between the journalists. “But frankly, this won’t be a drive through Kew Gardens in lilac time, if you want to change your mind.”
Silence in the back seat. A grunt, and then a high-pitched laugh from Robley. “Actually, Major, in lilac time one walks through Kew Gardens, and talking about hazards, one can get trampled by the crowds.”
Engines started with roars all along the line, and the convoy rolled out on the highway, winding without lights through the Ayalon valley, a vague long shadow creeping in the night, except when gunfire flashes lit the trucks with brief lurid glare. At the Hulda kibbutz Barak’s party joined Shlomo Shamir and his driver in Shamir’s shielded command car, all but Kishote, who followed with the jeep, now filled by soldiers with tommy guns. The two correspondents kept scrawling notes by flashlight as they passed huge earth-moving machinery, herds of cattle, and porters and mules loading up from massive trucks. This approach part of the bypass was now wide, level, and well graded. Artillery pounded and thundered beyond the high ridge, and the sky in moments turned to fiery day. The ingenuity of the bypass was self-evident here, and Schreiber said as much with open admiration. Not a word out of the Englishman.
The one patch of the bypass that was really worrying Barak was the first plunge at the steep descent. “Hey! Roller coaster!” exclaimed Schreiber, watching the armored vehicles ahead of the command car vanish one by one over the edge.
“Exactly, shoot-the-chutes, hang on and enjoy the ride,” said Zev Barak with shaky jollity. At Hulda, headquarters’ early reports about the third attack had not been good. All might well depend now on the road.
The command car went over the edge and dived down groaning in low gear, rocking and bumping, the steel netting squealing beneath the car. Barak’s advice to hang on was no joke; the hood seemed to be plunging straight down into blackness, though he knew the angle was within a calculated safety limit. They all clung to some projection. Schreiber kept saying, “Ee-yow! Ee-yow!” Yael merrily laughed, clinging to both journalists in mock terror, and Robley yielded a grunt or two. As they dove they could see porters and mules scuffling dust up and down the long hairpin turns of the trail. The engineers had been unable to make that trail ready for trucks, and had cut instead a very short steep temporary roadway which they had covered with steel netting. Barak had made it up and down the netting several times in the jeep, although once he had needed rescue by the winch. This part was touch and go, especially on the climb. He was gambling that the two correspondents would go back to Tel Aviv by plane, or maybe via Latrun after the cease-fire. Finally, the command car bounded out on the wadi bottom, where the armored cars waited. “Hell of a ride,” said Schreiber, somewhat breathless.
Robley inquired, “Trucks can manage that drop?”
“Of course.”
“Shall we stand by and watch a few?”
“Why not?” said Barak, forcibly reminded that some Englishmen tended to be too damned astute.
One after another, trucks poked their hoods over the brink and came screeching and grinding down. Each truck traversed the steel netting alone, with another waiting at the top to follow, and each descent was a suspenseful show. One top-heavy truck going too fast tilted on two wheels and teetered for scary seconds before righting itself and plunging to level ground.
“Well,” said Robley after half a dozen such hairbreadth displays with happy endings, “I suppose we should proceed.”
“Done,” said Barak, and the command car with its escort ran bumpily to the head of the convoy.
“And all this, I gather,” remarked Robley as they drove on in choking dust from the armored cars, “is the doing of that American general.”
A long awkward silence. “American general?” Barak said with blank wonderment.
“Yes, one hears that a West Point general, a Jew, under an assumed name, has secretly taken charge of your war, which is why it’s going better.”
“It’s going better,” snapped
Colonel Shlomo Shamir, from the front seat—he had been silent until now—“because our soldiers are whipping their soldiers. The enemy’s been outfought, though we were invaded on five fronts, and far outmatched in numbers and weaponry.”
“I’ve read your despatches, sir,” said Barak more genially to Robley. “You’ve reported that generalship has little to do with this diffuse war, and you’re probably right. It’s being fought on the platoon and company level. If we’re doing better, and that remains to be seen, it’s because we’re fighting for our homes, our farms, and our families, with our backs to the sea. Not too unlike your country in 1940 facing Hitler.”
“No truth at all then”—cool persistence—“to this report of an American general?”
“Oh, it’s true,” Yael spoke up, “so why not admit it? An American general is running the whole war.”
“What!” Schreiber exclaimed, while Barak turned to stare at her.
“Yes, David Ben Gurion is really an American general. He’s fooled everybody for years.” This went with a silly little girlish giggle, and a nudge of an elbow in the Englishman’s ribs.
St. John Robley grunted, the others laughed, and Barak made a mental note to commend Yael. Just right for this job. No more was said about the American general.
***
As the slow ride dragged on, conversation lagged and died. There was almost nothing to see in the darkness and the all-encompassing dust. Yael Luria’s excitement gave way to accumulated fatigue and, joggled and shaken though she was, she dozed off. The car windows were no longer black but violet when she opened her eyes, and found a head resting on her shoulder, the Los Angeles Times man dead asleep. St. John Robley was sitting up straight, smoking a cigar that glowed scarlet when he puffed.
“What happened?” she yawned. “We’re riding so smoothly.”
“We’re on the highway to Jerusalem,” Robley said.
“On the highway? We are?”
Saul Schreiber woke at these words. “The highway? No kidding!”
“We left the bypass a while ago,” said Zev Barak. “I hope you feel rested.”
“By my life,” Yael said, looking back, “this is a sight!”
The procession of trucks in the dawn stretched down the curving two-lane paved road, up a rise and out of view. “I swear to God,” Saul Schreiber said, peering through the rear window, “you people have pulled it off. Absolutely fantastic!”
“Mmph,” said St. John Robley.
It was bright day when the command car rolled into Jerusalem. Barak had no idea how the people had learned the convoy was coming. Such news, he supposed, could not be suppressed. They lined the sidewalks waving at the passing trucks and fluttering Star of David flags; young and old, civilians and army, women with water pails and babes in arms, children gambolling alongside the convoy like dolphins by a ship. The soldiers in the armored cars and Kishote’s jeep perked up and began to sing. Waving back at the people, Yael made subdued weeping sounds.
“What the devil are you snivelling about?” exclaimed Robley, looking unmoved and a touch disdainful at the happy shabby Jerusalem Jews.
“Who’s snivelling? You journalists are expected at the King David Hotel, sir, by the Jerusalem Command. Breakfast will be ready when you get there.”
“I’ll have coffee and go to my suite,” said Schreiber, “to bat off my story. Afterwards maybe, breakfast.”
Robley nodded agreement. “One understood,” he said, glancing up at the facade of the King David when they pulled into the driveway, “that you Jews blew up this hotel and killed a lot of Englishmen. You’ve patched the place up, I see.”
“We Jews regarded that as a disaster,” said Barak, “and condemned the perpetrators.”
“Price of empire,” said St. John Robley. He shrugged and got out of the car. “Nothing like India, you know. Hindus and Moslems butchering each other by the thousands right now, and British Tommies caught between them.”
Kishote’s jeep stopped behind the command car, and he came up to Barak and Yael with another soldier. “Guess what? This is my brother Leopold,” he said. “He’s been at Hulda, doing road patrol. His squad was assigned to the convoy.”
Leopold Blumenthal looked a few years older than Kishote, and he was much shorter. His thick hair was well groomed, his uniform fitted, and he had an alert shrewd air about him. No glasses, sharp greenish eyes, features like Yossi’s but handsomer; a man of the world at twenty or so. Refugee kids matured fast, Barak thought, and he said to Yossi, gesturing at the luggage, “Maybe your brother can help you. These press fellows are in a hurry.”
“Who are they?” put in Leopold.
Yael told him.
“Okay,” he said, switching to Polish-accented English and addressing Schreiber with smiling deference. “Which is your stuff, mister?” Leopold’s English was much better than his brother’s. Picking up Schreiber’s bags and photo equipment, he followed the correspondent up a staircase and into an exceedingly musty room with closed slatted blinds. “You’re really from Los Angeles, mister? That’s where I intend to go.”
Schreiber wrestled in vain with the clumsy antique blinds. Leopold could not budge them, either. Yael came in, inquiring, “Everything all right? Oh, let me.” With no trouble she pulled the blinds rattling up, and caught her first sight in months of the lost Old City, the sunlit ancient golden walls under the blue sky of morning, and the no-man’s-land in the ravine below, full of barbed wire, shell craters, broken structures, sandbags, and other detritus of war. “Poor Jerusalem,” she said after a silence, and went out touching a handkerchief to her eyes.
Schreiber snatched a camera from a leather bag, exclaiming, “What a knockout of a view!”
“Mister, we had a real chance to go to America,” Leopold said, as Schreiber shot picture after picture, “when we were in the DP camp in Italy. But no, my father wanted only Palestine, Palestine, so we landed on Cyprus. And here we are.”
Schreiber set aside his camera, opened his portable typewriter and set it on a table. “And you’d rather be in Los Angeles than here? You’re not a Zionist?”
“Plenty of Zionists in America, mister, no?”
“Well, Los Angeles is a tough town. Don’t let the movies fool you.”
“Can I come and see you there at your newspaper?”
Schreiber turned on the tap in a sink. Nothing happened, so he sloshed his face with water from a basin and jar. As he dried with a faded towel, and the chummy youth showed no sign of going, he said, “Look, soldier, I have work to do.”
“I’m not really a soldier,” said Leopold. The correspondent sat down and started typing rapidly, and Leopold left.
Accustomed to urgent deadlines, Schreiber had his story written in half an hour. He sealed it in a large envelope and delivered it to Zev Barak, who was waiting in the lobby on one of the sheeted couches. “Breakfast in there,” Barak said, indicating the dining room, “if you’re interested.”
“Hell, yes. You’ll take that copy on to the censor?”
“Yes sir, soon as Mr. Robley gives me his material.”
“Right. Let me know if there’s a problem.”
Barak sat drumming his fingers on the envelope, tapping his feet, his eyes on the staircase and the elevator. From the dining room, where the Los Angeles man joined the Jerusalem Command staff, bursts of male laughter betokened a good mood, but Barak thought the jollity must be forced. The reports from Latrun were sounding worse and worse. The Arabs had certainly held their ground again, that was already clear, though he did not yet know what exactly had gone wrong with Marcus’s plan.
The flannel-clad legs of St. John Robley came down the stairs, then the tweed jacket, the wool tie, the ruddy face and gray hair. Barak strode to meet him, and was handed a folder of clipped papers. “There’s my article. If the censor passes it, please file it at the cable facility, highest priority. Otherwise bring it back, and I’ll fight your fellow after I’ve had my breakfast. The Tel Aviv chap can be a nuisanc
e, but he and I have been muddling along.” This was as lengthy a statement as Barak had ever heard from him. “By the bye, if you want to read it, you may.”
“I appreciate that.”
“Oh, I daresay you would anyhow.” More laughter from the dining room drew his glance. “Is there anything decent to eat?”
“Kippers and eggs, for one thing.”
“Kippers! Mmph.”
Barak darted into the men’s room to scan the story. At the first paragraph a sense of relief flooded him. He wanted to cheer. He saluted himself in the mirror, ran out to the jeep, and ordered Kishote to speed to headquarters. Kishote’s brother was asleep in the back seat.
“You look happy, Major,” said Kishote, “how come? I hear we lost the battle.”
“Who told you that?”
A thumb jerked to the back seat.
“What the hell does your brother know, and how?”
“Well, he’s wrong sometimes.”
The censor was a long-nosed Haganah major named Podotzur. Barak knew him well, a mediocre platoon leader, then a disastrous company commander. Sidetracked from combat, he felt ill-used and was a crabby censor. Podotzur slowly scanned the stories, grumbling all manner of objections, until Barak picked up the censor’s army telephone. “Operator, this is Major Zev Barak. Do you have Colonel Stone’s personal command number in Abu Ghosh? Good, get him right away.”
“Wait, wait, Zev,” said Podotzur. “What’s all this?”
“Clearing those stories as written is a national urgency, Podotzur. I have to report that you won’t release them.”
Podotzur knew, as everyone in the army now knew, that Zev Barak was close to the Old Man and to Colonel Stone, the oddball American liked by some, resented by many, but undisputed boss of Jerusalem Command. “Hang up. Will you put that in writing?”
“Put what?”
“That national urgency statement. And sign it as Colonel Stone’s deputy?”
Barak seized a pad and a pen and scrawled a chit. Clipping it to a long mimeographed form, Podotzur began methodically to fill in the blanks.
“Look Podotzur, I must talk to Colonel Stone on a secret matter. Will you step outside? I’ll report your cooperation and commend you.” Podotzur gathered up the forms with a defeated shrug and went out.