“Well done, Yossi.” Sharon hands him several sheets flapping in the wind. “Now then. Commit this to memory as you go, then destroy the papers! Understand? You’ll have to tell it all to Dado face to face. He knows and esteems you, and he also knows you have my confidence. Who can figure what nonsense Gorodish is reporting to the High Command? It could even be that they think we’re winning. Read this over, and ask any questions.”
“Yes, sir.”
Arik to Dado. Gorodish is endangering the nation’s survival. Another day like today, and we will be pleading for terms. What has happened to Bren’s division I don’t yet know, but I am en route to help him. I suspect he received confused and contradictory orders. The order I received this morning at 1100 was lunacy. While Bren was still fighting his way south, Gorodish ordered me to abandon the central sector, and head toward Suez City! I pointed out that he was abandoning vital high ground and depriving Bren of his reserve. He shouted at me to obey or consider myself relieved, so I obeyed.
My division has yet to fight. It ran a whole night on its tracks just to get to the front, and now at Gorodish’s orders it will have spent a whole day running south and north in the desert like a chicken without a head. This cannot go on. Kishote will verify every word. I still believe Bren and I can combine forces tomorrow for a winning smash across the Canal.
“No questions,” says Don Kishote. “But will this helicopter pilot wait there to bring me back?”
“He will, because I told him to,” says Sharon, with the sudden hard smile that probably overcame the pilot. “On your way.”
Pasternak and Barak are standing in the lobby of Beit Sokolow, the Journalists’ Hall, talking somberly about the afternoon reports that have now sent the mood in the Pit plummeting. Dado has remained levelheaded. “War is ups and downs, gentlemen,” he comments. “The important thing is, we’re turning the corner.”
Among the journalists streaming through the lobby comes hustling a figure in uniform; Don Kishote, unshaven, unkempt, dusty, hollow-eyed. Barak hails him in astonishment. These are two men with whom Yossi can be frank, so in a few words he tells them his purpose and his news. They exchange appalled glances, and Pasternak says, “Look, Yossi, Dado makes his opening statement in ten minutes. He’s with the army spokesman now. You’ll have to see him afterward.” The three are walking into the packed hall, which resounds with excited talk in a babel of languages.
“Sam, are you sure? Maybe Dado should first hear all this,” Zev Barak argues. “We can still get Kishote through to him. Let these curs wait a few minutes more.”
“Don’t worry. Dado’s no fool, he’s read all the reports, he’ll handle this thing. Anyway, it’s too late, there’s the spokesman now.”
A youngish officer comes to the microphone and reads off the latest veiled army communiqué. During the English translation the noise level keeps rising in the hall, but when Dado strides to the rostrum there is silence. In a fresh uniform, shaved and well groomed, Dado makes a noble figure: his color good, his frame erect, his bearing exuding modest authority. He reads a statement in Hebrew about the day’s developments on the battlefield, illustrating at a map with a pointer. To the relief of Barak and Pasternak, his words are cautious. But when he puts aside the written statement and the pointer he puts aside caution, and speaks with the fighting spirit of the battlefield: of counterattacks on both fronts, of dogfight victories in the air, of full coordination of air and ground forces. “We have the upper hand now,” he concludes. “This is a grave battle, a serious war, but we are at the turning point, and on the advance. I’ll take questions.”
Hands go up all over the hall. Sharp queries shoot at him about the delay in counterattacking, about the failure to mobilize, about the extent of losses, about the Arab victory claims. He fields these well, but with an edge of growing weariness. One Hebrew journalist in front persists with a single question: “Dado, how long will the war last?” Though Dado repeatedly turns him off, the reporter insists and nags that he at least make a forecast. “Forecast? All right, I’ll forecast one thing,” the badgered Ramatkhal retorts. “We’ll continue striking back at them, and we’ll break their bones.”
This brings a burst of applause, and a small groan from Barak. “There’s tomorrow’s headline,” he says. “ ‘We’ll break their bones.’ ”
Pasternak makes his way into the tumultuous anteroom where Dado is taking the plaudits of generals and senior journalists, while Barak brings Yossi through the gloom outside to the Ramatkhal’s flagged car. After a while Dado appears at the car, and his careworn face lights up. “So, Don Kishote, here you are. Ride with me.”
He leans back in the rear seat, nodding and nodding at Sharon’s message. An audible sigh. “Well, Yossi, I approved Gorodish’s order for Arik to go south. I acted on the information I was given, and it’s my responsibility. Dayan and I will fly down there around midnight to confer about what is happening in Sinai. Tell Arik I guarantee he’ll take part in that meeting. B’seder? My car will take you back to the helicopter.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“I’m glad you’re with Arik.” Dado grips Yossi’s shoulder. “He needs you. Logistics never mattered for Rommel, either. He would seize the moment, his staff would go crazy, and the logistics one way or another would follow.” Dado grunts. “That is, usually! And so to Rommel his superiors were sluggish fools who didn’t get the picture. Tell Arik I know we have to cross the Canal to win the war, and I know there are problems with Gorodish. Stand by him. Cool him down when he boils over. He’s a fighter, and it will be all right.”
22
The Black Panther
October 9.
The newspapers are spread on Golda Meir’s desk, as her haggard war cabinet hears Dayan holding forth. On this morning of the fourth day of the war, the Minister of Defense is calling not only for retreat to the mountains, but the mobilizing of seventeen-year-olds, overage citizens, and the physically exempt, to be armed with antitank weapons against a surge of Arab forces into Israel’s heartland. Only an immediate huge American airlift, he warns Golda Meir, will enable Israel to fight on. Golda’s sadly ironic glance goes from Zev Barak to the streamer headlines:
DADO: “WE WILL BREAK THEIR BONES”
WAR HAS TURNED THE CORNER — RAMATKHAL
On the front page of one paper is a grimly smiling picture of David Elazar. She speaks with slow gravity, “It’s so serious, Moshe? So urgent? Overnight? Nixon has already promised to make good our losses. Are you saying I should fly to Washington?”
“Absolutely, Madame Prime Minister, today, if you can.”
“Moshe, what’s happened to you?” Allon exclaims. “Mobilize teenagers, elderly, sickly? Is the enemy at the gate? A levée en masse? We had a bad day in Sinai yesterday, sure. We had bad weeks, bad months in 1948. You drove on like a lion. So did we all, and it never came to a levée en masse.”
“I was right yesterday about the Sinai, Yigal,” returns Dayan, “and with a heavy heart I tell you I’m right today.”
Golda picks up her telephone. “Get me our ambassador in Washington. … Gentlemen, we’ll meet again at the full cabinet.” Zev Barak stays behind as the others leave, still disputing.
“Hello, Simcha? Sorry to wake you. Call Kissinger, and … I know it’s midnight there in Washington. Now you listen to me.” In brief harsh words she recounts what Dayan has been saying. “Call Kissinger,” she repeats, and hangs up. “Nu, Zev, why the long face? We’ve been through worse.”
“Madame Prime Minister, Kissinger won’t agree to your flying there.”
“I’ll handle Henry Kissinger.”
“May I speak my mind?”
“That’s your job.”
“I understand the Defense Minister’s concern, but don’t act on it. You’d be running up the white flag for the world to see. Even more than his resigning would have done.”
Golda scowls. “Why? I can go incognito.”
“Pardon me, Madame Prime Minister, you can
’t. It’s bound to become known. Golda flying to Washington! The Arabs will gloat on TV that Israel is collapsing. What’s worse, they’ll believe it. It’ll pump them up to drive for the kill. Jordan will move in to grab its share, across a border we’ve stripped of forces to stem the Syrians on the Golan. In the UN the Soviets will call for a quick cease-fire, and Nixon will be in a dangerous corner.”
“Dangerous how? To us?”
“To us, exactly. Remember Eisenhower and Dulles after Suez? ‘Gentlemen, be good enough to give up everything you’ve won, or else!’ ”
“Remember? How could I forget?”
“Madame Prime Minister, that’s your exposure if you fly to Washington. Between Watergate and his crooked Vice President, Nixon is in crisis. A foreign policy success like ending a war will be a godsend to him. Give him this opening and he can make snap judgments that will be our sorrow for centuries.”
“Don’t exaggerate.”
“I don’t. You may hand him a knife to cut our throats with.”
“Hm! You’re still Mr. Alarmist, after all.”
The telephone rings. “Simcha? What already? Nu, what did he say?” She turns on her rare angry voice. “ ‘Sort it out in the morning’? What’s the MATTER with you? … Well, we also thought it was going well, but the situation has changed. Why does he think I want to fly there, because I like the food on El Al? If America lets us run out of weapons she’ll face her first big defeat by the Soviet Union on the world stage! You tell Kissinger that, and tell him right now!” She slams down the receiver. A total change of voice, a genial smile: “Simcha Dinitz is a good ambassador.”
“Madame Prime Minister, can you afford to leave the war for two days?”
She lights a cigarette with an odd sidewise glance at him, eyes half-closed, mouth corners wrinkling. “Isn’t it fighting the war to get an airlift from Nixon? Simcha can’t do that. I can.”
It strikes him that this is now the woman talking. Her coquettish manner should be grotesque in the grim chunky old lady, but it is not. It brings to his mind Golda Meyerson’s legendary love life among the Zionist founding fathers. She used her charm in those long-gone days, some people say, as a political blunt instrument. Perhaps! At any rate she can still flash that charm from her ruined body and timeworn face.
“And if you hear from the President that you’re not welcome, then what?”
“Then I’ll send you, so be prepared. Why the smile, Mr. Alarmist? Think it’s a joke? Simcha is fine, so is Motta Gur, but I remember what you accomplished there in the Six-Day War.” She picks up a paper on her desk. “The man on the military side handling resupply is one Halliday, Brigadier General Halliday. You had dealings with Halliday, I suppose?”
“I had dealings with him.”
“Is he our friend?”
“No.”
“Did you get results?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“Americans like winners. But they don’t like whiners.”
The wisp of femininity fades. She looks affronted.
“One more point, Madame Prime Minister.”
Cold nod.
“I beseech you to ask Dado under four eyes how urgent an airlift is. He’s the one who knows best. He may not agree with Moshe Dayan.”
“Moshe Dayan.” Leaning her elbow on the desk, she holds her arm up and stiffly fans it back and forth. “One day like this, one day like that. The great Moshe Dayan!” She clumsily gets up. “Time for the cabinet. Is your navy son all right?”
“So far, fine.”
“Good. So far, the navy’s our one pleasant surprise.”
Noah Barak is leaping from his boat to the sunlit wharf in high spirits, though his eyes smart from lack of sleep after another long night battle, this time off Port Said. Result, three Egyptian Styx boats sunk, one escaped, and to the Jewish flotilla no damage. Latakia all over again. On the Syrian coast oil-tank farms flame from offshore bombardments, and the Wasp patrol boats in the Red Sea report knocking out numbers of Egyptian landing craft. In short, success after success at sea.
He has no inkling, strangely, that Israel is not winning just as handily on land. The army communiqués of the first three days have been vague, of course, as they were in the Six-Day War. Now as then the Arab broadcasts boast of huge successes, and now as then, the noncommittal Israeli reports are a strategic deception, he is certain, to stave off a UN cease-fire while Zahal mops up the enemy. From a booth on the dock he telephones the French Embassy in Tel Aviv, and learns that Julie Levinson has volunteered to work in Haifa’s Rambam Hospital. Great news, she is just ten minutes away. He stops the jeep at a kiosk to pick up a morning paper.
DADO: “WE WILL BREAK THEIR BONES”
Fine, situation normal. In the hospital’s crowded entrance hall, he comes upon his Aunt Shayna, pale and sad, who tells him that Uncle Michael had a stroke two days ago. “It happened during Golda’s speech on television,” she says, “of all times.”
“Will he be all right?”
“I don’t know yet. I must wait and see.”
“What did the Prime Minister say, Aunt Shayna?”
“Nothing so shocking, I thought, simply realistic, but he took it very hard. He was saying she looked terrible and didn’t sound like herself, then he sounded awful himself and fell over on the couch.”
“I’m very sorry.”
Shayna wanly smiles. “Well, God will help. How is it going at sea?”
“Not too badly.” Obligatory Israeli taciturnity. But Noah is young at the game, he is fresh from a triumph, and a few words break through. “So far, clean sweep! Can’t say much more.”
“Good for the navy.”
He goes looking for Julie in the wards, where bloodily messed-up soldiers fill the long rows of jammed-together cots. More are arriving on stretchers or wheeled tables, with hurrying medics dripping plasma into their veins. “The French girl?” says the harassed head nurse. “Try the nurses’ lounge, green door down the hall.”
Julie is alone in the narrow windowless room, crouched on a cot and crying. She springs up and embraces him. “Oh, Noah, Noah! Mon Dieu, c’est toi! Tout est perdu! Les Arabes nous ont vaincus! La guerre est finie! Que ferons-nous, chéri?”
He can barely follow this rapid-fire outburst of anguished French. “Doucement. I thought we agreed to speak Hebrew.”
“Yes, yes, I’m sorry.” She dashes a hand across her eyes. “It’s so frightful! I worked in a hospital in Cherbourg, but I never saw such ghastly things. The boys — the wounds —” She chokes. “I can’t talk about it. Oh, Noah, the hospital is overwhelmed, and still the wounded pile in. The terrible stories from the Golan! We’ve lost the war.”
“Nonsense! What stories?”
“Ten of our tanks against a hundred, fighting day and night without stopping. A tank driver from Kfar Blum with both legs smashed told me it’s all over, the government’s lying, the Syrians and the Iraqis will be in Haifa tomorrow, and it’ll be a big massacre. That’s when I broke down and started to bawl. He said we’ve lost nearly all our tanks, there are no more reserves, nothing to stop them, and—”
Noah is flabbergasted. “Battle-shock talk. Not a word like that on the radio. And look!” He shows her the newspaper. “Our army tells the truth, you know that.”
“Is that the commander-in-chief? He looks cheerful enough.”
“Can you get off duty?”
“I’m dismissed for the day.” Her eyes fill with tears again. “I’m so ashamed —”
“Come. You’ve got to get out of here.”
In a sidewalk café with a view of the harbor, over cake and coffee, he tells her of the victories at sea and she begins to cheer up. “I promise you we’ll win on land too, Julie. The Ramatkhal says it’s a hard war, and it is. The country was caught by surprise. Only the navy wasn’t. But those regulars on the Golan and in Sinai are great fighters. They’ll hold till the reserves come up, and then we’ll drive out the enemy, you’ll see.”
> She is eating her flaky pastry, and he is thinking how pretty she looks in her rumpled nurse’s uniform; no Daphna, of course, but with beautiful honest brown eyes, a creamy skin, and a promising bosom he has yet to explore. “Oh, Noah, everything’s so different out here in the sunshine. That hospital is hell.”
“It was good of you to volunteer.”
“I’ll stick to it. I just fell apart today.”
“Great! And your job at the French Embassy?”
“After the war I can have it back. Meantime I’ve rented a room here.”
“You have? Julie, on the first date we had in Cherbourg, you said nice French girls didn’t go out with sailors. Not seriously.”
“I know.” She manages a weak laugh.
“Do they go out seriously with naval officers?”
“Why do you ask?”
“Well, do they?”
The large brown eyes widen, and she is a girl on instant alert. Her reply in Hebrew is slow and arch. “Well, chéri, nice Jewish girls certainly don’t. Not with the gentiles, and if there are Jewish officers in the French navy, I’ve never met one. L’Affaire Dreyfus, you know.”
He said, “Lots of them in the Israeli navy. No Dreyfus problem.”
“So! What’s all this about, chéri?”
He leans over to embrace and kiss her. At the other tables, drinking coffee and sunning themselves, old people observe this light moment of the war with amused nudges. She murmurs, her mouth against his, “Well, well. My parents have been on the telephone every day, begging me to come home. I truly don’t know why I haven’t gone —”
“Where’s your room?”
“My ROOM? Doucement, doucement!” A wise wary enchanting smile, a new gleam in rounded eyes. “Why, what do you have in mind? What about this Daphna? I never have met her yet.”
“Over. Forgotten. Never worked out. Couldn’t. She likes leftists, and she smells of clay.”
“Vraiment? Vois-tu,” she lapses into evasive French chatter, “a leftist proposed marriage to me just before I came here. I should have accepted, what’s more. He’s Cherbourg’s supervisor of sewage disposal. A nice Jewish fellow. Civil service, very reliable income.”