The Glory

  “They smell blood, Minister.”

  “Whose blood? Mine?”

  “To tell the truth, Dado’s. He had a bad press conference after Golda’s speech.”

  “Well, he was caught unawares. So was I, God knows.”

  “Eva tells me,” Pasternak says, “of all kinds of rumors going around here. Our bridgehead’s been smashed, Dado’s had a heart attack, you’ve fired Arik Sharon —”

  Dayan’s sallow face freezes. Quickly Eva stands up, saying, “I have to get back to my desk,” and hurries away.

  Rubbing his eye, Dayan mutters, “Still another disaster at the Chinese Farm last night, Sam. Word just coming in.”

  “Elohim, what now?”

  “A paratroop brigade from the south sector was thrown into a night fight without briefing, to help clear the road for Tallik’s bridge. They were stopped cold, pinned down in the ditches. Tanks had to go in to rescue them and take out their dead and wounded. Second terrible fiasco there. Ready to go? Come along.”

  Outside beyond the portico it is raining hard. Dayan’s dripping car drives up, the doorman salutes him, and people waiting for taxis stare at the famous one-eyed hero. “Amos is all right?” Dayan asks as they get in.

  “Well, he’s still out there in Syria with his battalion.”

  “A son of his father. My God, Sam, the price, the price of this war. Already nearly a thousand dead, and no end in sight. My telephone never stops ringing, my closest friends have lost sons or they’re missing.” He leans on an elbow, glumly looking out at the drumming rain.

  “Where are we going, Minister?”

  “Dado has called a meeting of senior officers down south at Kishuf, to decide how to continue the war, now that Golda has cut off our retreat.”

  Gloomy silence, slap-slap of windshield wipers.

  “Minister, the airlift news this morning is great.”

  “Yes?” Dayan rouses himself. “What’s the latest?”

  “Eleven Phantoms coming today, eleven more, on top of the fourteen that have arrived. Twenty-six Skyhawks due tomorrow. Tanks rolling off the Galaxies like an Independence Day parade.”

  “And I had to push Golda on the airlift!” Dayan shakes his head in wonder. “Where would we be otherwise?”

  “Minister, most of the stuff won’t reach the front before it’s all over. This is mainly resupply —”

  “Nonsense. The Phantoms can fly tomorrow, and we’re right at the red line on them. Those fighter-bombers refuel in the air, you know. American carriers are strung across the Mediterranean to protect them. All organized in five days, Saturday to Wednesday. They’re phenomenal, the Americans, once they get going.”

  “Moshe, they simply woke up to their own national interest, and high time,” the hardened Mossad skeptic retorts. “They can’t let the Russians win a surrogate war here —”

  “Easy to say! Shallow! This will cost them a damaging oil embargo, and who can say whether their ‘surrogate,’ as you put it, will win? Can you? Can I? They’re being magnificent.”

  Two Phantoms are overflying the Suez Canal more than sixty thousand feet up, on a mission rendered urgent by Golda Meir’s disclosure. Benny Luria in the lead plane has already heard on the morning news Cairo’s dismissal of the “token raid for television.” Aerial reconnaissance of Egyptian troop movements is now mandatory, and the flight is testing a gap reportedly blasted in the missile wall by Sharon’s tanks. The pilots and navigators in oxygen masks are peering down tensely for the flash of a missile launch. So far, as the Canal and its lakes slide slowly under their wings, nothing. Thrumming engines, azure peace of the stratosphere.

  Benny Luria is courting disciplinary action, for base commanders have now been forbidden to fly missions. But Dov is in the other plane, and on hearing of this he preempted the lead plane. Let come what may! He has been drilling hard with Dov on an antimissile tactic he read about in an American air force journal, developed in Vietnam. Benny knows it works, because earlier in the war he saved his own life with it.

  Five minutes into Egypt air space, and still nothing. Breathing easier, Benny wigwags his wings to signal Commence photography. He and Dov fly flat ever-widening circles over the assigned areas, while automatic cameras capture copious photographs. The landscape below is blotchy with the shadows of drifting clouds, and from this altitude, troop concentrations are only more vague blotches. But the pictures taken by these CIA supercameras will show the hairs on the mustaches of the Egyptian tank commanders.

  “All right, we’ve done it, Dov. Let’s go home.”

  Rattling roar of the jets, heavy vibration of the plane as it accelerates to Mach 2. Thrust of helmet against headrest, a hard blow. Far ahead the thread of the Canal sparkles, the low sun glares. Watching for landmarks of Sharon’s missile gap, Benny Luria spots a pale flash.

  “Missile, Dov, eleven o’clock.”

  “I see it.”

  The spurt of flame climbs and seems to be locking on Dov’s plane. He jinks and it is after him, veering as he veers, straightening as he straightens, steadily ascending toward him, a visible missile now. L’Azazel, Dov has fought a good war, made a fine record, three confirmed MiGs downed. God help him to evade. Drilling is one thing, staring down at climbing death is another, as Benny too well knows.

  That evasive maneuver he taught Dov is simple but tricky, and the timing is everything. At the last possible moment, you flip over and break downward; a few seconds too soon, and the missile will detect the move and change course to hit. A second too late, goodbye! But if you time it just right, the plane will fall off so fast in the thin air that the rocket, unable to alter its course in time, will fly past harmlessly. No way to help Dov now, either he will save himself or not …

  Now, Dov, NOW, BY YOUR LIFE, over and down.

  Aircraft and fire-spurting pole still converging.

  Dov, Dov, Dov, GO …

  The other plane flips and drops like a stone. The missile flames past it and up into the fathomless blue.

  In Benny’s earphones, his navigator: “He did it, sir, hundred percent.”

  Calm voice of Dov as he straightens out far below: “How was that, Abba?”

  “B-plus. You waited too long,” Benny Luria replies through a choked throat. He hears his son laugh, and feels for the first time the trickling sweat that has broken out all over his body inside the G suit.

  A few minutes before the Ramatkhal takes off for the decisive strategic meeting in the south, the developed Luria photographs arc delivered to his helicopter.

  29

  Goodbye to Glory

  Shells are now falling all around Deversoir. In the enormous brick-paved Yard the tanks and APCs are battened down, in the Canal below an occasional explosive splash drenches the pontoon bridge engineers, and everywhere stinking gunpowder smoke swirls and stings the eyes. Don Kishote is supervising traffic himself, keeping access clear for the nine pontoon rafts rumbling in on huge transporters. Defying the whistling shells and the flying shrapnel, the engineers down at the waterline are linking up several of these rafts into the stub of a bridge, already projecting a third of the way across.

  “Arik, it’s Arik, sir.” A dirty bloody soldier runs up to Kishote. “Arik’s been hit!” Kishote follows him through the crowding machines and sees Sharon down on the bricks, his back to a tank track, bright blood welling into a bandage around his temples. He looks slack-jawed and vacant. Pushing through the anxious officers around him, Kishote asks the medical orderly, “How bad is it?”

  “He’ll be all right, sir. Shrapnel wound, but it’s not lodged in his head. He’s just dazed.”

  “I’m not dazed,” says Sharon irritably. “Kishote, they’re finding the range, the bastards. Pull all the command vehicles out of the Yard right away, before the antennas get knocked off and we lose communications. Then go back outside and keep those pontoon rafts coming, whatever you do.”

  In a little while he emerges from the Yard, his hair blowing over the stained bandage,
his stride somewhat shaky. “B’seder, Yossi, tell Ezra to take over command here, and let’s go to Kishuf.”

  Half an hour later, unshaven and very dirty, Sharon and Kishote mount the path to General Adan’s advance command post, their boots sinking in the yellow sand. As they go up, a grand Sinai panorama unfolds, full of sights and sounds of war; from the Canal direction the pale flashes, delayed thumps, and rising smoke of Egyptian heavy artillery; closer by, in the enemy’s Sinai lodgments north and south as far as the eye can see, broad dust plumes of brigade-scale movements. Directly below the winding path, Bren’s armored division is arrayed on the level desert, a textbook diagram drawn by a thousand machines.

  Yossi is not looking forward to an encounter with Major General Bren Adan, a soldier’s soldier, all business and sparing of talk. Bren must still be smarting under his disaster on October eighth, caused in part by Gorodish’s sending Sharon uselessly south and back north; and he has smarted over the years at being in the everlasting shadow of the flamboyant Sharon. Bren Adan is certainly entitled to be distant and crusty with Sharon’s deputy, but he is no fun. At the top of the path, to Kishote’s delight, he is hailed by Colonel Natke Nir, one of Bren’s brigade commanders, sitting on the sand with two other colonels at a large map. “Kishote, to all the devils!” Kishote springs to seize the extended horny hand and pull Colonel Nir erect, for he cannot get to his feet by himself. The old friends embrace and pound each other, making rough banter.

  Kishote knows nobody quite like Natke Nir, who once served under him. The man seems to be made of pig iron for indestructibility, and in fact has much metal in him. Both his legs were all but blown off in the Six-Day War. Many operations and a lot of artificial patching have restored his locomotion, but he cannot get in or out of a tank. Yet he has waived total disability pay and risen to lead an armor brigade, always assisted into and out of his command machines. Natke, as everyone calls him, has been in the thick of the Canal fighting from the start.

  “So, what devilry are you fellows up to?” Kishote greets the other two colonels, both as sandy and whiskery as Natke, with a gesture at the map.

  “As a matter of fact, Yossi,” says Nir, “it’s exciting, though it’s probably just a dream. Look here.” Kishote helps him kneel down at the map, and he hoarsely expounds Bren Adan’s op plan in rough army jargon, a forefinger skimming the map and making a quick sketch now and then in the sand.

  “By your life, Natke,” Kishote interrupts him, “it’s Hannibal, that’s what it is.”

  Nir blinks at him. “Hannibal? With the elephants? Why Hannibal?”

  Military history of ancient times is Don Kishote’s hobby, and the great battles are at his fingertips. Crouching at the map, he describes how Hannibal ambushed and annihilated a Roman army in 217 B.C., at the Battle of Lake Trasimene. “Its a classic, Natke, and Bren’s concept here is pretty much the same. The key is the lake. In Italy it was Trasimene, here it’s Great Bitter Lake. An impassable water obstacle traps your enemy when you hit him head-on and from the flanks. He has no room to maneuver, and he’s in a killing ground.”

  From a slumping bald colonel, a dubious grumble. “217 B.C., eh? Quite a while ago.”

  “Bren didn’t mention Hannibal,” remarks the other colonel.

  “No, and maybe he never heard of that lake or that battle,” exclaims Natke, “but we’ve got the code name for the plan, gentlemen, it’s ‘Hannibal.’ I’ll tell Bren. Thanks, Yossi, that’s really interesting.”

  “It’ll never happen,” says the bald colonel. “The Egyptians aren’t that stupid, to march a brigade into such a trap.”

  “We’ll see,” says Natke. “They could be as stupid as the Romans.”

  On the flat summit of the high dune Sharon has meantime joined the top brass. Around a large tactical map Bar-Lev reclines on an elbow, smoking a cigar, Adan sits cross-legged, and Dayan and Pasternak squat on their knees. It occurs to Sam Pasternak, as Sharon approaches with heavy swinging tread, tousled white-blond hair showing above the bloody bandage, that if the crossing succeeds, Sharon and his bandage may become a trademark of the war, as the Six-Day War’s symbol was Dayan and his eye patch. Sharon kneels to peer at the map. Nobody speaks a word to him until Dayan at last says, “Shalom, Arik.”

  “Shalom, Minister.”

  Very long silence, then Bar-Lev utters his first words, slowly and tonelessly. “The distance between what you promised to do and what you have done is very great.”

  Sharon’s reply is composed. “How so?”

  “What can I say? No enemy collapse. No secure bridgehead. No secure supply corridor. And no bridges.”

  “I don’t agree with that judgment. We are across and winning.”

  Bren Adan, his rugged features set in stern lines, jumps to his feet as a helicopter buzzes far to the east. “There comes Dado now.” He goes off to greet the Ramatkhal, and the others walk about and stretch, talking in low tones.

  When the meeting begins Kishote squats by Sharon. The noonday desert sun is scorching, and orderlies bring cold orangeade while Dado passes around the aerial photographs, which clearly show large Egyptian reserve forces forming up, and advance units on the move toward the bridgehead. Sharon plunges to talk first, vehemently pressing for immediate attack, and Dado listens without comment. Half his force is already over in Africa, Sharon argues, so it makes sense for him to ferry the rest across at once, and smash north to Ismailia or south to Suez; objective, to panic the enemy into pulling his armor back into Egypt, which may trigger a general collapse.

  General Adan coldly objects. The original plan calls for him to cross while Sharon seizes and holds the bridgehead on both banks. Why change? The photographs only confirm the urgent need for Sharon to secure the bridgehead before anyone sallies out on the offensive. After almost an hour of abrasive talk — which to Sam Pasternak is obviously all about who will lead the assault into Egypt — Bar-Lev proposes a compromise: a brigade each of Sharon’s and Adan’s should start the breakout together.

  Now Dado takes charge. His bloodshot eyes are puffed half-shut, the heavy brows contracted in dogged resolve. His deeply lined face is gray from the days of unrelieved tension, sleeplessness, and polluted underground air. Among these desert-bronzed officers his pallor is almost pathetic, yet he speaks with all his accustomed clarity and authority. No compromise with the original plan. It is all right. Once the bridgehead is secure, Adan will cross. After that Sharon will bring over the rest of his forces, and the two divisions will exploit north and south to force a decision. “The only real question that’s open,” says Dado, “is whether to resume crossing at once with pontoon rafts and crocodiles, as Arik suggests, or wait until the roller bridge arrives, or at least until one pontoon bridge is up, before we commit major forces.” He looks around at the others.

  “Wait,” says Bar-Lev.

  “Wait,” says Adan.

  Dado glances to Dayan, who waves a hand to pass the question. “Sam, what do you think?” Dado says to Pasternak, who sits beside Dayan on the sand.

  “I’m not entirely in the picture down here, sir,” Pasternak replies.

  “I’d like your view, all the same.”

  “Then, I say, im kvar az kvar [if we go, we go]! Those photographs show the Egyptians still off balance but starting to react to the crossing. Let’s send everything over now, by any and all means.”

  Dado peers around, polling staff officers and deputies and getting varying views, until he comes to Don Kishote. “So, Yossi? Let’s hear from you.”

  Kishote hesitates, glances at the poker-faced Sharon, then around the senior circle. General Bren Adan is regarding him fixedly and skeptically.

  “Sir, yesterday General Pasternak would certainly have been right, but the situation has changed, hasn’t it? The surprise has been blown” — he leaves unspoken by Madame Prime Minister, but their faces show they understand and agree — “and today the Egyptians are alerted. We’re being heavily shelled at Deversoir, and we can see big mov
ement in the lodgments. If they try an attack on this side today, we’ll crush them as we did on Saturday, providing we still have the forces here. But if they engage us on the other side, we’ll need assured fuel and ammunition resupply over there. Therefore the factors —”

  “Plain language, Kishote,” Bar-Lev cuts in. “Go or wait?”

  Pasternak is watching Sharon, who shows no tension or concern in the momentary pause. In such Zahal discussions juniors are allowed to speak up with candor, though the yes-men play it safe. Don Kishote is not one of those, yet the stakes here are very high.

  “Wait.”

  Pasternak’s are not the only eyebrows raised at Yossi’s temerity.

  The talk continues round and round until Natke Nir comes hobbling up to Bren Adan and speaks in low rapid tones. “Well, there it is,” Adan says to the others. “Scouts report a tank brigade from the south heading along the lake toward my sector.” He turns to Dado. “With your permission, sir, I should attend to this.”

  “Go ahead, Bren, the meeting is over,” says Dado. “We wait for a bridge. Good luck.”

  Natke Nir stumps by Kishote, and punches his shoulder. “Hannibal,” he says and goes off, his eyes agleam.

  Pasternak comes to Kishote and mutters, “You had your nerve.”

  “Dado asked me, so I spoke my mind.”

  “Kol ha’kavod. Yael keeps calling, to find out how you are.”

  “Yes, I managed to talk to her once. She had to stop Aryeh from lying about his age and enlisting. Amos’s influence. Hero worship.”

  “Father worship,” says Pasternak.

  “Is Amos okay?”

  “Still fighting.”

  “Good.”

  In the seven-mile drive back to Deversoir across sunbaked wastes, Sharon says not a word to Kishote. Dayan rides with them in the command car, also silent. At the Yard there is a lull in the shelling, but the stump of pontoon rafts has not progressed far. A shell-hit damaged it, the chief engineering officer explains, killing two of his men, but it will be ready by four o’clock. Dayan walks out among the machines, talking to the amazed and awed crews.