That same night Zev Barak left Washington for France. The call from Pasternak had come just as Nakhama was putting dinner on the table. The Norwegian cover story might unravel, Sam conveyed by hints, and Zev had better go at once to Paris. He could help the embassy manage the brouhaha; also, he was needed there for something even bigger.
“Are the boats all right?” Barak’s query to Pasternak had reflected Nakhama’s anxious stare when the phone rang. She had stood frozen, with a soup tureen in both hands.
“So far, fine, though they’re running into a bad storm. Right now the problem is the media. There’s a huge headline in tomorrow’s London Telegraph — the whole front page, and it’s already on the streets — ‘FIVE ISRAELI GUNBOATS VANISH.’ ”
“Oo-ah. Very bad.”
“Could hardly be worse. Our London embassy is already being swamped by reporters and TV cameras. It’s black midnight there, two o’clock here. The ambassador woke me up.”
“How did the story get out?”
“God knows, but Golda’s duty officer just turned down a call from the New York Times.”
“Sam, I’m not in the picture anymore.”
“Mocca Limon will give you an update in Paris.” Admiral Limon, a former chief of the navy, had been in France for months masterminding the caper.
“What’s my mission, exactly?”
“First, help Limon keep the Norway story going until the boats are through Gibraltar. Second, try to put out media fires, and stop the embassy people from idiotically starting more fires. Third, you’ve heard of Brigadier General Bradford Halliday?”
“Air chief of NATO?” Barak’s pulse quickened. “Sure, sort of an acquaintance of mine.”
“Right, right, I forgot you know his wife, Chris Cunningham’s daughter.” Ironic Pasternak overtones. “Well, he’s over there in Belgium.”
“I know he’s in Belgium. What about him?”
“More later. You’ll get a telex in the Paris code room.”
“When do the boats transit Gibraltar?”
“Probably late tomorrow. That’s a flash point. The British can halt them. The French fleet can even come out and block them. Have a nice flight.”
It was not a nice flight. The plane ran into the huge storm system tossing the Cherbourg boats off Brittany, and it bucked, plunged, shuddered, and groaned to Paris. Barak arrived at the embassy bleary-eyed and fuzzy-headed. The European headlines on the press room table woke him up like a whiff of smelling salts.
OÙ SONT-ILS?
LE DINDON, C’EST POMPIDOU
JUDEN BESIEGEN FRANKREICH
PER POMPIDOU, LA PURGA
The British papers struck a note of sheer glee:
CHEEKY ISRAELI COUP!
BOATS, BOATS, WHO’S GOT THE BOATS?
ISRAEL 5, FRANCE 0
And so on.
The ambassador and the press secretary were ruefully contemplating the newspapers. With them was “Mocca” Limon, the tall balding Israeli admiral, a World War II French naval officer who had commanded the infant Jewish sea force in the early days and retired at thirty. “I can’t put off the media any longer,” mourned the ambassador.
Limon said, “Ambassador, we’ll have to stage some kind of conference, the pressure is too great.”
“Mocca, I can’t face them. Maybe Avi can handle it.”
“I can try,” said Avi, the bearded young press secretary, “but what to all the devils do I tell them?”
“What do you know?” Barak inquired.
“Nothing,” said Avi in an aggrieved tone. “Nobody tells me anything around here.”
“That’s just fine,” said Barak. “How are you at acting stupid?”
“Not too bad, if it’s called for.”
“Actually Avi is pretty stupid,” said Limon, patting his shoulder. “He’s a political appointee.”
“That’s true,” said Avi, more cheerfully. “Also I can’t understand Parisian French. They talk too fast.”
“You speak French?”
“Haltingly.”
Zev asked Limon, “When will they transit Gibraltar?”
“Depending on how refueling goes, four or five this afternoon.”
“Ambassador, I suggest you call it for seven tonight,” said Barak. “The Frenchmen will all want their dinners. They may not show up in force.”
“Good idea. Go ahead, Avi.” The press officer left and the ambassador went on, “Golda summoned the cabinet at one o’clock this morning, Zev. She gave the green light to this thing very reluctantly, and now she’s worried as the devil about our relations with France and Norway.”
With great strain and half the crews seasick, Kimche’s five storm-tossed boats made it through the heavy Bay of Biscay weather, but more trouble threatened the flotilla at its first fueling rendezvous.
The range of the missile boats was limited, and from Cherbourg to Haifa they had to sail more than three thousand miles; so the plan called for two fuelings at sea, since putting into a foreign port would risk seizure. In a secluded bay off the south Portugal coast, an Israeli freighter crudely modified as an oiler awaited them. The crews of three boats wrestled aboard the heavy flexible pipelines, and the freighter commenced pumping diesel oil. It was a slow tedious exceedingly risky business, for the boats were unarmed, and hour upon hour they lay dead in the water, exposed to detection or attack.
The last two boats were still fueling when a helicopter came buzzing at them over the distant wooded hills. Kimche and Noah uneasily tracked the aircraft with binoculars. Dropping down over a tiny fishing village, the only human habitation in the bay, it headed straight for them and hovered noisily above the freighter, not twenty feet in the air. Uniformed men inside were plain to see, making notes, talking into headphones, and plying cameras.
“We had better get out of here, Noah,” said Kimche. He had been shrugging off coded warnings from Haifa about the media disclosure, preoccupied with surviving in the storm and then making rendezvous. Now he took alarm. “Signal ‘Discontinue fueling.’ It’s rough out there for hooking up again, but we must move to international waters.”
“Captain, the boats can keep taking on oil as we move out.”
“You’re sure? Rupture those fuel lines and we’re kaput.”
“We rehearsed this off Ashdod for a week, sir. It works. It’ll save hours.”
“Let’s do that, then.”
The freighter weighed anchor and steamed seaward, trailing the two boats with the fuel lines. The helicopter followed for a while, then flew out of sight. Fueling completed, the five boats sped south and the slow freighter soon dropped out of sight astern. When the Cape of Trafalgar poked over the gray horizon, Kimche ordered the boats to close up, leave signalling to him, and prepare for radical evasive maneuvers in the Strait of Gibraltar.
“Well, hevra [comrades], this is it,” he said, speaking on the command circuit. “It’s forty miles through the Strait. Maybe the French have asked the British to stop and seize us. Maybe they’ve even sent warships or warplanes to turn us back. We’ll find out in the next hour or so. We go through at thirty knots. Good luck.”
A stiff easterly wind was gusting in the Strait, and the gray swells were immense. The seasick sailors who had recovered during the fueling once more moaned in their bunks. Flying no flags, the flotilla ran in tight formation, a line of three by a line of two, overtaking here a freighter, there a tanker. The shores of the Strait kept narrowing like a funnel, until Gibraltar lay dead ahead. A high signal station on the Rock began blinking the international Morse challenge: What ship?
“No answer,” Kimche told Noah.
The boats ploughed on.
What ship? What ship?
“Well, Noah” — Kimche’s voice was tense and slightly amused — “this blows the Norway story, anyhow, doesn’t it? The Brits can count to five. They know who we are.”
What ship? What ship? What ship?
The cloudy afternoon was fading to evening. The boats entered the n
arrows between the two continents, Africa to starboard, Europe to port, the headlands four miles on either beam. The Gibraltar light ceased its queries, and the Cherbourg boats sped into the Mediterranean Sea. Other vessels were slowly traversing the narrows, but no French warships were in sight.
“So far, so good,” said Kimche, whereupon the Gibraltar light began blinking at the flotilla again. “Now what? Still What ship?”
“No, sir.” Noah read the Morse code as it flickered in the gloom. “Bon voyage. Bon voyage. Bon voyage.”
Kimche burst out laughing. “Translation,” he said, switching to a burlesque British accent, “Jolly good show, lads, fucking the French.”
At the embassy, Zev Barak was comparing notes with Pasternak in Jerusalem via scrambler telephone. The Arab governments and press were frothing at France and Norway. The French government was in an uproar, and certain high French officials, old acquaintances of Mocca Limon from World War II days, were discreetly keeping the Israelis posted. President Pompidou was on Christmas holiday, and when first informed that the boats had left for Norway, he had commented, “Tant mieux! If the papers were in order, good riddance!” But with the media explosion he was becoming concerned. His Defense Minister, in great rage, wanted to send the air force to sink the flotilla; the converted grandson of a rabbi, he was eager to make clear which side he was on. President Pompidou was not rushing into any action, but he was “requesting clarification” from Israel and Norway, and from Panama; because Norway, in assuring the Arabs that it was in no way involved, had disclosed that a Panamanian company was the purchaser, using a post office box in Oslo for reasons unknown.
At the press conference the French reporters, who had skipped their dinners en masse, fired hard questions about Norway’s denial and the Panama development. Zev Barak, watching and taking notes, was delighted with Avi’s dimwitted performance. The press secretary pointed out in somewhat floundering French that Israeli sources had never mentioned Norway. That was the doing of Cherbourg officials, who had revealed the contents of customs documents to the press. His understanding was that a Panamanian buyer had sent the boats to Norway for refitting, to service Alaskan oil rigs off the Canadian coast. Questions shot at him.
Why to Norway, of all places?
That was a question for the Panamanian embassy to answer.
Which Canadian and Alaskan companies were in the transaction?
The Canadian embassy might be helpful on that point.
Had Israel waived title and received repayment?
Israel was grieved by the unjust embargo, but financial details were not yet available. Israel was anxious to preserve cordial relations with Canada, Norway, Panama, and France, and had only admiration for Alaska.
Where were the boats?
Apparently not in Cherbourg, therefore apparently somewhere at sea.
So it went, and at the end of the conference the reporters left baffled and muttering. Barak heard one say, “C’est tout une blague juive.” (“It’s all a Jewish joke.”) Avi had displayed such virtuoso stupidity, Barak later reported to Pasternak, that he might one day be the government spokesman in Jerusalem.
The tension in the embassy eased when the BBC announced the sighting by a Greek freighter of five small unidentified vessels heading east off the North African coast. “Well, then, they’re through, anyway,” the ambassador exulted.
“So am I,” muttered Barak, and he curled up on the ambassador’s couch and fell asleep. Not for long. When he opened his eyes, the ambassador was shaking his shoulder. “Zev, top-secret message for you in the code room.” He stumbled down the corridor and knocked on a door marked with a red security warning. A yawning coding officer, crushing a cigarette into a tray full of butts, handed him a scrawled decode. By her smoke-shrouded lamp he read the message, and thrust it into the burn bag.
“You have the current NATO directory?” he asked the ambassador, who was in shirtsleeves in his office, shaking his head over huge headlines in three Paris evening papers.
LES BATEAUX ONT PASSÉ GIBRALTAR
POMPIDOU ENRAGÉ
LA NORVÈGE “NE SAIT RIEN”
“Shelf behind my desk.”
Barak found a number for Brigadier General Halliday in the slender blue book. On second thought, he called Belgian information, and obtained the phone number of an address in the town of Casteau. Emily had been writing to him from there.
An embassy girl who had assured him she knew exactly where the restaurant was drove Barak round and round the dark maze of the Left Bank next night for an hour, chirping apologies. Our shlepper factor knows neither age nor sex, he thought, wishing Pasternak had found someone other than himself for this chore. Bradford Halliday was not a man he could enjoy meeting. The shadow of Emily lay across even their casual encounters. That Halliday was now her lord and master, so to say, and the father of her twin girls, would not much allay the awkwardness.
The American general sat at a rear table of the dim little restaurant in a tweed jacket and bow tie. He gestured a welcome, and Barak took a chair, saying, “Sorry I’m so late.”
“Hello there. This is a good family place,” said Halliday. “I think you’ll enjoy the food.”
“I appreciate your coming to Paris. I’d have gone to see you.”
“Better this way.” Brief look at Barak, cool and professional. “Quite a flap about those boats.”
“Unfortunately, yes.”
“Can you talk about them?”
Policy from Pasternak: be as open as possible with the guy, but use your head. “At last report they’re being shadowed by a Russian spy ship.”
“Trawler type?”
“Yes. They’ll change the fueling rendezvous and alter course at midnight, to try to shake him.”
A stout black-clad woman brought handwritten menus, with a smile at Halliday. “Bon soir, Monsieur le General.”
“I recommend the veal here,” said Halliday.
“You order for both of us. But you’re my guest.”
“Doesn’t matter. Government business.” After a brief colloquy over the menu, the proprietress brought a dusty bottle, and poured for them. “Try this wine,” Halliday said, sniffing it and holding it to the light. “It’s rather special.”
“Very nice.” Red wine like any other, to Barak’s discernment. “Let me drink to the health of your little twins. Are they well?”
“Thank you. Emily is well, too.”
(Try a smile.) “She writes that they’re ‘ugly as sin.’ I don’t believe a word of it.”
No smile in return. “Yes, I know you correspond. Well, that’s Emily, warding off bad luck, like the Chinese. They’re very pretty girls. The Russians won’t stop your boats, General, but what about the Egyptians?”
“We already have several missile boats in Haifa. Also Phantom air cover.”
“Well, then the mission should succeed.” Judicious pause. “A real coup.”
“Much too much publicity.”
“Yes, the press is a big pain in the ass.”
“It sure is.” (He said “ass”! Progress. Human informality.) Very long silence, the two generals looking at each other, Halliday evidently waiting for Barak to state his purpose. The proprietress brought warm crusty bread and a thick soup. They fell to. After a while Halliday said, “Incidentally, though it got no press, your waterborne armored raid across the Gulf of Suez, back in September, was a greater coup.”
“As it happens, Colonel Luria’s brother-in-law, Colonel Nitzan, led that raid.”
“Is that so? Hmm. Well done. Our intelligence was that not only did Nasser fire his Chief of Staff and chief of the air force, but that it gave him a severe heart attack.”
Barak’s turn to nod without words. When they finished the soup he asked, “Do you know about Green Island, too?”
“Green Island?” Halliday wrinkled his broad brow. “Not offhand.”
“There’s a raid we didn’t publicize at all.” Barak described the operation in some detai
l, concluding, “We lost too many elite fighters, but that stopped Egyptian cease-fire violations for a while.”
“When was this?”
“July.”
“Your special units are first class. But the effect didn’t last, did it?”
At this conversation-stopper the veal arrived, and they ate. “You’re right,” Barak said. “Good food.”
Halliday put down his knife and fork and leaned back. “Well, General Barak, here I am, at your service.”
“Okay.” Barak glanced around the restaurant; a few elderly couples at other tables, none within earshot. Still, he dropped his voice. “This is about the Soviet P-12 radar.”
“Yes?” Noncommittal as a computer response.
“I’m sure your intelligence on it is good.” Not a word from Halliday. “But to be sure we’ll be talking about the same thing — I mean the new low-level mobile system, range something like two hundred miles, top of the Soviet line.”
“Very well. That’s the P-12 radar.”
“We have one.”
“You have one what?”
“We have a P-12 radar. It’s at an air base in Sinai. My government has instructed me to tell you this, and to invite a secret inspection. American inspection only, not NATO, no disclosure to the Europeans whatever.”
Halliday took the wine bottle and poured for himself, since Barak’s glass was still full. “Let me understand you, Barak. Are you telling me you people have captured a P-12 radar from the Egyptians?”
“Well, we have it, as I said.”
“Now, we’re not talking about a Green Island operation — or are we? Is this the wreckage of a destroyed radar?”
“No. The Green Island radar was a much older system. This is the P-12, the Soviets’ newest and best. It’s undamaged, intact, and complete. Except of course for the undercarriages. Those were just extra weight, and were detached.”
“How in God’s name did you get hold of a P-12 radar?”
“Well, that’s pretty sensitive.”
“I’ll withdraw the question.”