“Is it like this every night, Yossi?”
“Much worse, before the raiders come over.”
Dayan flung a hand toward the moon. “And can you believe — can you even begin to grasp — that this very minute two American guys are walking around up there on the moon? You know they’ve landed, of course?”
“Yes, we’ve been following that on the radio, Minister.”
“Well, we’ve been seeing pictures on TV. Stunning! The greatest event in history since, I don’t know, the discovery of America.”
“Not the greatest, sir.”
Dayan peered at him. “And the greatest?”
“That the Jews have come home.”
With a somber nod, Dayan turned his face up to the moon. “You know about Green Island?”
“Yes, sir. My brigade’s been giving them some logistical support. I’m still getting reports, but I gather it’s a fantastic success.”
“Fantastic, yes. Successful, yes.” The Minister of Defense gestured at the moon. “No less than that feat, and those boys of ours would have flown to the moon, too, given the wherewithal and the orders. Nevertheless” — Dayan laid a hand on Kishote’s arm, and looked him hard in the face, in the winking lights of the helicopter — “Israel’s not America. We can’t go to the moon, and we can’t afford many more Green Islands. Let’s have a look at your plan, Yossi.”
Green Island was an Egyptian fortress in the sea, an artificial island with high vertical concrete walls rising from the waters of the Gulf of Suez; constructed as a radar warning station, manned by heavily armed defenders, and supposedly impregnable. Israeli frogmen swimming miles at night, much of the way underwater, had assaulted this island, together with elite commandos who came in rubber boats. They had all but wiped out the defenders, destroyed the radar, demolished the fortifications, and withdrawn. Though the objective was the radar, the purpose was shock; a demonstration to the Egyptians that if they persisted in violating the cease-fire, they too would be hit with punishing raids. When the cost in elite fighters killed or wounded came out, the brilliance of the feat was tarnished. Warriors of rare skill and heroism, some critics charged, had been expended for a political stunt. Shanuy b’makhloket is the old rabbinic phrase for unresolved Talmudic disputes; and remarkable as the Green Island raid was for audacity and success, that gallant feat of arms remained shanuy b’makhloket.
In the trailer where Yossi slept and worked, he showed Moshe Dayan a large hanging map gaudy with multicolored operational arrows and symbols. “There it is, Minister, the plan.” As Dayan squinted at it in the harsh light of a naked bulb, an aide dropped two envelopes on Kishote’s cot. Out of the corner of his eye Yossi recognized Shayna’s pink stationery, and on the other letter Arych’s writing.
Dayan gnawed a lip, shook his head, and rapped a knuckle on the map. “Green Island again, Yossi.”
“With all respect, Minister, not so. It’s not an elite coup, but an operation with combined regular forces.”
“You’ve worked this up yourself?”
“I’ve consulted with Bren all the way, sir.” Bren was Major General Avraham Adan, the austere able commander of the armored corps, who as OC Southern Command had built up much of the Sinai infrastructure.
“And he approves? He thinks you can get this kind of air and navy cooperation?”
“He believes it’s feasible.”
“I thought you’d plan a cross-Canal thrust, or a drive toward Port Said over the lagoons.” Dayan rapped the map again. “But crossing the Gulf of Suez into Africa? Landing an armored force on an enemy shore? To be stranded and destroyed to the last man if things go wrong?”
“Minister, as you see” — Kishote ran a finger down a typed chart beside the map — “the plan calls for seven weeks of exercises and rehearsal, including several with air and sea forces, and —”
“All very fine in theory, but in the first place that African coast is solid coral reef. Ha? Thought of that? No opening for landing craft, and blasting openings will alert the enemy and kill surprise.”
“Sir, there are creek and river mouths where silt has worn down and covered the coral. Reconnaissance patrols with frogmen have already been over there.” Kishote hastily added as Dayan frowned, “Approved by Southern Command and General Adan.”
“See here,” Dayan pointed. “You’d land less than thirty miles south of Suez City. Powerful forces will come roaring down at the first alert and trap you. It can be a massacre.”
“I believe not, sir. The road here, where we’ll land” — Yossi slid a finger along the Egyptian coastline — “runs between steep cliffs and the water. Very, very narrow passage, just a few meters between a high rocky ridge and the sea. Once we’re ashore sappers will dynamite the ridge, and create an impenetrable rock barrier —”
“Impenetrable? How can you be sure?” Yossi hesitated, and Dayan’s tone sharpened. “Well? There’s your fatal unknown, right there.”
“Minister, I went over with the second patrol myself to reconnoiter that choke point, so I know —”
“You went yourself to Africa?” Moshe Dayan interrupted, glaring at him. “You, a brigade commander? Bren didn’t approve that. He couldn’t have.”
“Sir, I just went and did it, so I know I can block that road.” The telephone buzzed. Yossi pulled it from its bracket. “Yes. … L’Azazel! … One moment … Minister, raiders are attacking Matzmed outpost in force, and Amos Pasternak’s tank patrol is counterattacking.”
“Let’s go there,” said Dayan.
Taking off in a whirl of dust, they flew straight and low along the moonlit sand. Starshells were floating over the distant desert ahead, and the whole horizon was ablaze. The helicopter landed at the paved yard of an outpost dug into the rampart. A soldier on guard waved in welcome. Inside the yard lay many scattered weapons, two abandoned flamethrowers, and a sprawl of bodies in Egyptian uniform. Near the yard entrance an Israeli tank was on fire, pouring up flame and black smoke.
“That tank of ours got them all,” said the soldier hoarsely, gesturing with his Uzi at the Egyptian corpses. He showed no deference whatever to the high brass. “But then it went out to fight the other raiders and it got hit by grenades.” He jerked a thumb at the sandbagged doorway to the outpost. “The tank crew’s inside. The driver got it bad, the others are okay.”
Dayan and Kishote entered the stronghold, a bleak warren of low arched rooms of corrugated iron, smelling of cooking fumes, unwashed men, and tobacco smoke. In an alcove two soldiers were giving plasma to the groaning tank driver. The young lieutenant commanding the outpost, bewhiskered and shaky-voiced, said that Pasternak’s patrol had arrived just in time to chase off the raiders. “A narrow escape, Minister! We aren’t equipped to resist those bazookas and flamethrowers they brought. They’d have slaughtered us.”
Dayan said he would climb out on the rampart and have a look at the Canal. “Minister,” protested the lieutenant, “the Egyptian sharpshooters are very good at night. They’re not two hundred meters away, and there’s a moon.”
“I know there’s a moon.”
The lieutenant went first, followed by Dayan and Kishote, who thought it a damn-fool exposure for the man next to Golda, but just like the Minister of Defense. The fortified roof was level with the sands of the rampart, only vents showing. Dayan wriggled on his belly to the edge, with Kishote beside him. There far below was the long ditch fading northward, and off to the south, the moonlit Great Bitter Lake stretching out of sight.
“Quiet now,” said Dayan.
“They can open up at any moment, sir.” The lieutenant was audibly nervous.
“Can you survive a direct hit?”
“We got one ten days ago. It was a mess. Even the overhead steel rails caved in.” General Adan had reenforced the outpost roofs with torn-up steel rails from the coastal railroad. “We lost one dead, three wounded and evacuated. But we’ve repaired the damage.”
“So I see. Very well, too.”
“
Minister, what else have we to do out here?”
At the bitter note, Dayan peered at the lieutenant, and slapped his shoulder. After a silence, he said to Yossi, “Well, as an obstacle, it’s no Great Wall of China. Let’s go and find Amos.”
They took a jeep and set off northward on the road below and behind the rampart. A short drive brought them to three tanks sunk in muck, and two other free tanks chained in tandem, hauling one out with metallic groans and roars. On firm ground mucky soldiers were cleaning off a mud-coated tank. Dayan and Kishote did not recognize Amos Pasternak until he answered to his name. When he saluted, mud flew from his arm. “This is a great honor, Minister.” Even in these straits he managed to sound cheeky. “Sorry I can’t parade my unit for inspection.”
“What happened here?”
“We were chasing the raiders, sir, and a half-track of ours went up on a mine. Nobody killed, but three guys in bad shape, so we got off the road to pursue, and that’s how these tanks bogged down. It’s swampy terrain. I went ahead with the other tanks and we caught and killed all the raiders. At least I think we killed them all. Now it’s a question of pulling my tanks out of the mud, and it’s a job —”
Like a thunder-and-lightning storm, the night suddenly erupted: distant artillery blasts, starshells floating down, and shells exploding around them, shaking the ground, deafening the ears, and throwing up sand, smoke, and fire. Arms akimbo, Dayan calmly watched the renewed barrage. It occurred to Yossi Nitzan that he looked happy. Pasternak went on extricating his bogged unit, the doubled-up tanks slowly dragging a muck-dripping tank onto dry ground.
Dayan shouted, “Amos, get in a tank and button up till it’s over. Tell your soldiers to do the same.”
“Is that an order, Minister?”
“It’s ministerial advice, and very good advice.”
“It’s better to keep working, sir,” yelled young Pasternak, his eyes reddened by the fire of a bursting shell. “My battalion has had thirty percent dead and wounded, and we’re overdue for relief. But while we’re out here, we’ll get on with it.” He bawled at the towing tanks, “All right, well done, hook up to the next one.”
In the intermittent glare of the barrage, Dayan and Kishote drove back to the helicopter, and it returned them to brigade head-quarters, skimming the sand. “You’ve got a good plan, Yossi,” Dayan shouted as the machine settled down in a boil of dust. “Is Bren prepared to go with it?”
“Affirmative, sir. It’s pretty much his plan, you know.”
“You would lead it?”
“That’s up to Bren, and to Southern Command.”
“No, it’s up to me, and you’ll lead it.” Dayan’s good eye protruded in a stern stare. “It’s on. En brera. We can’t leave the Canal, not unless Golda jumps into some very cold political water. Militarily, the Canal isn’t keeping out the Egyptians. As for the Bar-Lev Line,” his voice went faintly sarcastic, for General Bar-Lev had been Golda’s choice for Ramatkhal, not his, “it isn’t delivering the goods, either. Until the politics change, the solution is force.”
Kishote hurried to the trailer to read his mail. Aryeh’s letter-writing was no longer boyish. He gave a clear spare account, in a neat hand, of his scout troop’s visit to a snowbound army outpost on Mount Hermon.
… They let us take turns at the periscopes, Abba. We could see Syrian soldiers moving around, and Syrian tanks and jeeps, too. They look so much like ours, it’s strange. The outpost is very sad, just ten fellows up there by themselves in a hole, nothing to do but watch. Our leader asked what they would do if the Syrians attacked the outpost and they just looked at each other and didn’t say anything.
Shayna’s letter was a single pink sheet. She hoped he was safe, but reports of the Sinai fighting were disturbing. Aryeh’s scout troop had passed through Haifa on the way to the Golan, and he had visited her with some nice friends. The stinger came on the other side of the pink sheet. Professor Berkowitz had asked her to marry him. His divorce was going through and Lena was already in Australia, having decided that Reuven should remain behind and grow up in Haifa with his father, among Israeli children.
An enclosed snapshot showed Shayna in a flowery park beside the pudgy professor, with the crippled boy in her arms. The picture told Kishote that this time if Shayna said yes, she would not back out. He had had a premonition that this might be coming, when he had first glimpsed her at the Barkowes’ villa, holding the child. The penetrating pain he felt would have to be borne in silence. En brera.
So early in September 1969, an Israeli armored force using Soviet tanks and APCs, with Egyptian army markings, crossed the Gulf of Suez and landed at dawn under air cover. The ten-hour surprise operation, code-named REVIV, wreaked havoc along the enemy coast, destroying strongpoints, radar installations, and army camps, and leaving hundreds of dead and wounded. The force withdrew unscathed. On the Israeli side the sole loss was a fighter-bomber pilot who had to eject over the Gulf and was not found.
The raid caused an earthquake in Egypt. The army and navy chiefs were dismissed, Colonel Nasser suffered a heart attack, and the War of Attrition died down, while the army coped with the shocking fact that Israeli armor could land in their country and operate freely. But as months passed the shock wore off, the Egyptians fortified the Gulf coast against another REVIV, and the War of Attrition went on.
8
Noah Departs
A sentinel with extended rifle halted Dzecki’s dusty rain-spotted blue bombshell outside the gate of Tel Nof air base. Airmen loafing nearby, huddled in parkas against the chilly December drizzle, stared in wonder at the Porsche. Recognizing the daughter of the base commander beside the driver, the sentinel dropped the chain, and the car ran a gauntlet of raised eyebrows and dirty grins.
“By my life, Dzecki, you drove like a wild Indian. We’re so early! Turn here, there’s Abba’s quarters. Hm! Noah isn’t here yet, I don’t see his jeep.”
“Noah? Noah’s coming? You told me months ago he was going to France.”
“Well, his orders just came through, and of course I invited him. Are you out of your mind? How could I not invite Noah? Why can’t you drive like him, anyhow? Now there’s a careful driver.” Dzecki ignored this devious Daphna talk. Whenever he let her drive he aged by the minute, and most Israeli drivers were like her or worse. If Noah Barak was really different, that figured. Straight arrow, son of straight arrow. “Park here,” she said, outside a row of married officers’ quarters, small semidetached cottages.
“So, this is the famous American with the Porsche.” Her lean leathery mother, a moshavnik farm woman diverted into a life on air bases, looked out of the kitchen. “At last we see him! Does he speak Hebrew?”
“Mama, he’s been here two years. He’s in the army.”
“So? He could be in intelligence.”
“Well, he isn’t. Dzecki Barkowe, meet my mother.”
“I speak Hebrew, ma’am,” said Dzecki, “and I’m very glad you invited me to come.”
“Why, he speaks quite nicely,” Irit Luria said to her daughter, not mentioning that she hadn’t invited him, that it was strictly Daphna’s doing.
“Well, since it’s my birthday party, I guess I should put on a dress,” said Daphna, who wore a dirty sweatshirt and dirtier jeans.
“Is this your brother Dov?” Dzecki peered closely at a framed picture of an aviator standing by a plane.
“That’s Dov.”
“Is he coming?”
The mother said, a shade too casually, “Dov is qualifying in the Skyhawk this week, so he couldn’t get off.”
“Too bad. Him, I’d love to meet. I’d rather have been a fighter pilot, Daphna, than anything in the world.”
“Then why are you a rosh katan? You at least could have been an army officer by now.”
Dzecki’s answer was a shrug. “D’you suppose I could walk around the base, look at the planes?”
“Who’ll stop you? You’re in uniform. Just obey the signs, and stay away from jet en
gines, or you’ll be deaf for a week.”
Daphna went into her old room, which her younger brother Danny now occupied. Half the closet still contained clothes of hers, because in her flat she had only a tiny cardboard wardrobe. She doffed the sweatshirt and jeans and stood in peach panties and bra, contemplating her image in the closet mirror. Not bad, not bad at all. Look at those breasts! Why, she could compete with those zonot (whores) in the dirty American magazines the aviators passed around. Maybe she should try modelling. Oh, poor Dzecki, what he would give to be vouchsafed this sight, and what it promised. He had never gotten past a goodnight kiss, and never would. Noah had his drawbacks — a military right-winger, rigid in his doctrinaire Zionism, scornful of her leftish Jericho Café set — but she couldn’t help herself. He was a wondrous lover, that hot joy continued as gripping as ever, and he could be quietly sweet, too. Probably in time they would marry, because Daphna could not picture herself in any other man’s arms, and she had fended off arms without number for years. But what was the rush?
The white woolen dress Aunt Yael had given her for her last birthday was nice, Noah liked the way it clung to her figure. She knew that Noah and her mother had been in touch, and that Imma was blatantly angling for a betrothal announcement with this party. But Daphna wasn’t about to be pushed into anything, just because Noah was going off to France. She was drifting with the wind, so to say, her mind was quite unsettled, and bringing Dzecki uninvited to Tel Nof was her anchor to windward. Noah would be furious when he saw the parked Porsche, but too bad. She stripped and went to shower, happily singing an American rock-and-roll hit.
Meantime Dzecki was wandering through the air base, which was all a-rumble with planes taking off and landing. It was his first look at the Heyl Ha’avir (air force) from the inside. What a contrast to the army, especially his ordnance battalion on the Golan Heights: those dreary rows of patched tents, the rusty disabled tanks standing in puddles, tracks off, turrets removed, the muddy soldiers gabbling guttural slangy Hebrew laced with Arabic obscenities! Here was the Israel he had pictured when all the world rang with the Six-Day War, and when on impulse he had left his beginning law practice on Long Island and made aliya. Here all was order, all was clean, all radiated glory: spindly Skyhawks and Mirages in their earth-covered hangars, menacing as giant steel hornets, with hairy technicians in coveralls working them over or fueling them; and small older planes, and helicopters, and big transport planes, all in camouflage paint and marked with the Jewish star, all to be flown by Jewish guys his own age. Here at last was ISRAEL.