“Rish is the boss, I take it?” asked Hausner.
“None other. And his lieutenant is a fellow named Salem Hamadi, another old friend. Hamadi is both a Palestinian and an Ashbal. In fact, he was in charge of the Ashbal program. Rish, as you know, is neither an Ashbal nor a Palestinian. He is Iraqi. His village is not far from here. Anyway, some time ago, they joined forces and began culling both male and female orphans from various camps. About twenty of these Tiger Cubs are tigresses. Muhammad says they trained for years in the Shamiyah Desert for special assignments that never seemed to come off.”
“Did they know what they were here for?” asked Dobkin.
“They were told only when Rish’s Lear began to make its final approach. There was some confusion as to whether there would be one Concorde or two.” He paused as he remembered 01. “They were told they would keep us hostage here for a variety of political reasons, some of which were not too clear to Mr. Muhammad Assad. He admits they were pretty shaken up by our antics. I suspect that they were not psychologically prepared to fight and lose men. They were prepared to push around two planeloads of Israeli civilians. Then all of a sudden, they had people getting killed.”
“But they’re crack troops,” said Hausner. “That’s what you said.”
Burg shook his head. “I didn’t say they were crack troops. I said they were well trained. There is a difference. None of them has ever seen combat.” He seemed to be thinking. “You know, this is not the first time that orphans have been trained from childhood as soldiers. There are a lot of cases of that in history. And you know what? They were never really better or worse than regular draftees. In fact, many times they were much worse. These orphan soldiers, like institutional children everywhere, were a little duller than their peers raised in a home environment. That is the case with the Ashbals, I’m sure. They do not make especially good soldiers. They lack imagination and they have virtually no personal goals in life. They lack any experiences outside of military life, and their emotional development is arrested. They have only a vague conception of what they are fighting for, since they have no home outside the barracks. I’m sure they would fight to the death to defend their comrades and their camps, but outside of that, there’s no notion of family or country. Everything is vague when they go beyond their squads, their platoons, and their companies. There are a dozen other reasons why they don’t make ideal soldiers. I could see it in our young friend, Muhammad.” He looked at Dobkin. “Ben?”
Dobkin nodded. “I agree. But there are still over a hundred of them, and they outgun us. They are not going to pack their tents like your proverbial Arabs and steal away in the night.”
“No,” said Hausner. “They are not. Because they have two good leaders.”
Dobkin nodded again. “That is the key. The leadership.” He seemed to be remembering the old fights and nodded to himself several times. He looked at Hausner and Burg. “Here is what I know about the Arabs as soldiers. First, they are romantics whose mental picture of warfare is of men on white Arabian stallions chasing across the desert. In truth, the Arabs of today are not known for their successes on the offensive. The days when they carried the banner of Islam across half the civilized world are long gone.” He lit a cigarette. “But don’t get me wrong. They are not such bad fighters as they are made out to be. They are generally brave and steadfast, especially in a static defensive situation. Like many soldiers from low social and economic backgrounds, they will endure the most extreme hardships and deprivations. But they have flaws as soldiers. They are reluctant to press an attack. They are unable to shift tactics with changing situations. Their officers and sergeants, while not the best, are critical for control and discipline. The average Arab soldier will show little initiative and less discipline when his leader is killed. Also, the Arabs have not completely come to grips with modern military equipment. The Ashbals in particular, from what little I know of them, seem to fit into this description. And further, they are so blinded by hate propaganda that they are not very cool or professional as soldiers.”
Burg nodded. “I agree. And I think they might run off if they lose enough leadership or if the losses in the ranks become unacceptable—which I admit isn’t very likely in this case. On the other hand, we can’t run anywhere. We are fighting for our lives. All losses are acceptable to us. There is no alternative.”
Hausner spoke. “There is an alternative. They’ll ask for a conference.”
“But not before they try one more attack,” said Dobkin. He looked into the sky. “We’ll have a chance to see if we can inflict unacceptable losses on them in a short while. The moon is setting.”
13
Brin saw them first, even before the two-man OP/LP—Outpost/Listening Post—halfway down the slope saw them.
They came like shadows, wearing tiger fatigues and carrying their automatic rifles. The starlight scope amplified the smallest amount of natural night light so that Brin could see things that even night creatures could not see—things that the men could not even see on themselves. He could see their shadows, cast by starlight. He could see the white skin under their eyes, symptomatic of fear. He could see the most intimate movements made in what was believed to be a shroud of darkness—the lips murmuring prayers, the quick urinations brought on by fear, the pulling of hair locks. A girl squeezed a young man’s hand. Brin felt as though he were peeking through a keyhole.
He put down the rifle and whispered to Naomi Haber. “They’re coming.”
She nodded, touched his arm, and ran off to give the alarm.
The long meandering defensive line on the eastern slope of the hill became alert as the warning moved more rapidly than the swift runner.
On the western slope there was silence. The luminescent Euphrates would silhouette anything moving up that slope. Men and women pressed their faces to the ground at the crest of the slope to try to pick out a moving form. But there was only the silver-gray Euphrates flowing silently southward.
Dobkin, Burg, and Hausner stood on a small knoll—one of the covered watchtowers—near the middle of the eastern crest, about fifty meters in back of it.
The knoll had been designated as the CP/OP, the Command Post/Observation Post. From that vantage point, they hoped to direct the fight along the five-hundred-meter eastern slope.
A long aluminum brace from the Concorde’s tail section, bent and twisted, was stuck in the hard clay earth atop the knoll. From the top of this unlikely standard flew a more unlikely banner, a child’s T-shirt, salvaged from one of the suitcases, an intended gift for someone in New York. The T-shirt showed a cityscape of the Tel Aviv waterfront painted in day-glo colors. The purpose of the CP/OP was to establish command control in the dark—a place where runners could go to impart information and collect orders. It was also to be the last rallying point, the citadel within the citadel from which the last stand was to be made in the event the line was broken or penetrated. It was an old tactic, one that belonged to an age before radios, telegraphs, and field phones. The three commanders took their places on the high knoll, under their flag, and waited.
The two men from the OP/LP, halfway down the slope, fell breathless at the foot of the knoll and reported what was already known from Nathan Brin and Naomi Haber. “They’re coming.”
* * *
Brin watched as the Ashbals continued their silent movement up the hill. They didn’t come in file as they had done the last time, but they moved on line along the whole width of the five-hundred-meter slope, approximately a hundred of them, men and women, well-spaced at five meters apart. They kept their line straight like well-trained infantry of another era. There was no wavering and no bunching up. They didn’t linger or congregate around areas of natural cover and concealment as their instincts cried out for them to do. They held their AK-47’s with fixed bayonets thrust out in front of them. It was an awesome sight to anyone who could see it. But to Brin, it was all show. Parade-ground training. He was interested to see how they would react when the bu
llets began flying down at them. Then, he suspected, they would quickly revert to their modern training. They would find what little cover and concealment was available and burrow into it. They would move from rock to gully to pothole. But for now, in the dark, they were putting on a show of the classic infantry attack—more for themselves than for the Israelis who could not see them.
The knowledge that he was the only one who could see them brought Brin to the verge of panic several times. Sweat formed on the rubber eye guard of his scope and ran down his cheek. They were still very far. About five hundred meters. Then four hundred meters.
* * *
General Dobkin and Isaac Burg disagreed on tactics. Dobkin wanted to engage them with heavy fire as far out as possible with the idea of keeping them out of assault range of the thin defensive line. With luck, that would precipitate a panicky flight down the hill. The prisoner had said that they had no hand grenades, but Dobkin couldn’t be sure of that. He didn’t want them in grenade range in any case.
Burg wanted to engage them as near as possible—within handgun range—in order to cause heavy casualties with as little expenditure of ammunition as possible.
Hausner wasn’t consulted, but he thought that Dobkin’s arguments were more realistic, considering their situation. In the end, however, he knew that Dobkin, soldier to the core, would defer to a civilian government official. It was a subjective type of decision that had to be made, and rank would always carry that type of argument.
Hausner excused himself, jumped from the hillock, and walked the fifty meters to where Brin was kneeling.
* * *
Brin was visibly shaking as he watched the wave of Ashbals approach. Hausner couldn’t blame him. He spoke softly. “Range?”
Brin didn’t look up. “Three hundred and fifty meters.”
“Deployment?”
“Still on line. Most are in the open. Bayonets fixed.”
Naomi Haber was sitting on the ground breathing heavily from her exertions. Hausner turned to her. “Go to an AK-47 position and tell him to begin the firing.” She got up quickly and ran down the line. He turned back to Brin. “Range?”
“Three hundred.”
“Commence firing,” he said softly.
Brin squeezed the trigger, swung the rifle, squeezed again, swung, and squeezed again. The silenced muzzle coughed faintly again and again. Then the first AK-47 cut in, a signal to begin firing at will. Up and down the line, along the crest of the hill, came gunshots. The hollow popping of the three AK-47’s drowned out the small handguns. Above all the other sounds could be heard the sharp staccato of the little 9mm Uzi submachine gun.
The Arabs immediately replied with heavy fire from their own AK-47’s. The noise quickly rose to a deafening pitch. Hausner could see the incoming rounds digging away at the improvised Israeli breastworks. He couldn’t tell if anyone had been hit yet.
Brin’s assignment was to try to identify unit commanders and eliminate them. He swung the rifle and spotted the antenna of a field radio, carried as a backpack by a radio operator. At the end of a corkscrew wire coming out of the radio was a radiophone. A young man was crouched down, holding the radiophone to his face. Brin aimed at the young man’s mouth and fired. The phone and the man’s face erupted into a scatter of disjointed pieces. He swung the rifle back and shot the radio operator through the heart.
The Ashbal’s return fire ceased as their long line broke up quickly into small groups centered around natural areas of cover. Their progress was slowed, but they still moved forward. Brin scanned the area behind the Ashbals, looking for the senior leaders. He thought once that he saw Rish, but then the head disappeared, replaced a second later by that of a young woman. Without hesitation, Brin fired. He could see the head jerk sideways. The beret flew off and the long hair swirled as the girl spun to the earth.
* * *
Dobkin could see the fiery bursts as the Arabs moved up the hill. He shook his head. They may have been well trained, but he gave them a low grade on tactics. The approved method of night attack, developed in large part by the Israeli Army, was quite different from what the Ashbals were doing. It was known now that night attacks should begin silently, not with the sound and fury of artillery barrages and screaming men, as in the past wars. The Ashbals had done that at the beginning, but they had moved too slowly and returned fire too soon. The Israelis had, in past engagements, shown that a quick silent run was the most effective method of night attack. The enemy was generally only half-alert, and when they saw what was coming at them in the dark, they only half-believed their eyes. By the time they reacted, the attackers were within hand grenade range, then a second later, they were in the trenches. Even a fully loaded infantryman could cover half a kilometer on the run in less than two minutes.
Dobkin watched as the flashes moved in the darkness. These Ashbals fired on the run and fell behind cover afterward, the exact opposite of what was good sense. The defenders on the hill fired at the flash of the muzzles while the attackers were running. As far as Dobkin could see, the Ashbal’s fire was so far without effect on his concealed positions, except for one casualty reported to him. Looking downslope, Dobkin could see what appeared to be muzzle flashes cut short by what he hoped were hits.
It had taken a lot of battles over a lot of years for him to be able to stand on a high place and tell how a fight was progressing by flashes and noises, by sounds of men and the smell of the night air. And most of all, some kind of warrior instinct told him when everything was all right and when it was lost.
In total, despite all the noise, Dobkin knew that casualties would be very light on both sides until the battle was joined up close. That’s the way it had always been in the past. This time, however, he felt it was not going to be a victory. He turned to Burg. “They’re very sloppy troops. But very determined. We will probably be out of ammunition very shortly. Maybe we should give the order to pull back to this knoll.”
Burg shook his head. Long before he had entered intelligence work, he had been a battalion commander in the War of Independence. He had a sense for these things also. “Let’s wait. I have a feeling they will break off the engagement.”
Dobkin didn’t answer.
“At sunrise we will court-martial Hausner,” said Burg matter-of-factly.
“We can’t be sure he gave the order to fire,” said Dobkin.
“You know he did.” Burg stood with one hand grasping the twisted aluminum standard. He seemed mesmerized by the flash of weapons and the incessant whistling of bullets. He realized that what was missing was the sound of the heavy weapons that gave a fight a distinctive military flavor. This fight sounded like an American gangster movie—all pistols and submachine guns. “Well, General? Do you think Hausner gave the order to commence firing against our orders?” asked Burg.
Dobkin didn’t feel like arguing. “I suppose he did. It doesn’t really make a lot of difference, does it?”
“It makes a great deal of difference to me,” snapped Burg. “A great deal of difference.”
* * *
All along the defensive line, the volume of gunfire remained constant, for to begin conserving ammunition was a signal to the attackers that the end was near if only they would persevere. But the number of rounds left to the Israelis dwindled rapidly and, in fact, a few handguns were already without ammunition. The AK-47’s kept up a three-piece symphony of short bursts, while Joshua Rubin with the Uzi fired continuously, stopping only to let the barrel cool. Brin, firing a relatively small amount of ammunition, was the most deadly with ten hits.
The Ashbals were within a hundred meters of the line now, but their casualties went up geometrically with every ten meters they gained.
Someone was running toward the command post from the direction of the west slope. Burg and Dobkin waited for the bad news that the Ashbals had launched a secondary attack up the slope on the river side. The entire line there was held by McClure with his pistol and a dozen men and women with bricks and pieces o
f aluminum braces fashioned into spears. The runner jumped onto the knoll and caught his breath. “All quiet on the western slope.” He grinned.
Dobkin grinned in return and slapped him on the back. “That’s the only good news I’ve had since a lady said yes to me last night in Tel Aviv.”
* * *
Hausner, kneeling beside Brin, estimated that the end would come within the next few minutes. There simply wasn’t enough ammunition to keep up that rate of fire.
As though the defenders read his thoughts, they began increasing the rates of fire in a last desperate gamble to panic the attackers. Hausner watched the oncoming Arabs, who were partially visible now through the darkness. The Ashbals wavered as the increased volume of fire tore into their ranks. They slowed but held firm. The momentum of their attack was stopped, however, but while they were afraid to go forward, they weren’t falling back, either. Their commanders yelled and kicked at them and tried to regain the initiative. Some groups moved forward again, reluctantly.
Brin took advantage of the commanders’ increased visibility and took two of them out in less than thirty seconds. The others began taking cover when they realized what was happening. Brin then began to search desperately for Rish. He had studied the photo from Hausner’s identikit so intently for the past hour that all he could see in his mind’s eye was Rish’s face on every Arab. But he knew that when he actually saw that face, he would be certain of it.
The Israelis heard the Arabic shouts and could see some of what was happening. They deduced that there was a problem in the Ashbals’ ranks. The veterans among the Israelis knew what to do. As Hausner watched, amazed, without any orders from anyone, about twenty men and women began running and screaming down the hill.