They lay in the dark that stretched behind open dormitory windows facing down on the hostage dorms.
They lay in vacant alleyways, under jeeps, and harmless-looking road cars.
The sharpshooters viewed the dormitories through a hundred deadly infrared nightscopes. They very patiently searched out the terrorists.
Meanwhile, two important-looking cars—shiny, seventy-thousand-dollar Zil limos—drove at 55 mph in the eerily deserted tunnels directly underneath Olympic Village.
Nearing Yuri Gagarin Square, the Russian-made luxury cars emerged from a wide service ramp. They were like two giant but cautious lizards peeking up from underground.
As the sparkling limos were escorted through peripheral crowds, the Russian people and some tourists suddenly began to shout the names Brezhnev and Podgorny.
The rumor was instantly spread worldwide by the “live” TV announcers and commentators.
“In a surprise move, Russian leaders are going to meet with the terrorists holding 682 athletes in Olympic Village,” TV stations announced, interrupting all varieties of other programming. “Suddenly there is hope in Moscow.”
Benjamin Rabinowitz sat with his glazed gray eyes looking down on Yuri Gagarin Square. The rest of Rabinowitz was off in another world entirely. He was satisfied that a fitting revenge for the Holocaust of the forties was now guaranteed. He was convinced that this day would prevent another terrible extermination.
Go and smite the Amalekites, Rabinowitz thought to himself. Destroy all that they have and spare nothing, the Lord God had said. Slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, camel and ass. Begin Dachau Two.
The door to his suite opened suddenly and the Führer just had time to raise his pistol.
Dr. David Strauss hesitated dangerously, then he fired the Stechkin machine-gun pistol. The bullets tore into Rabinowitz at more than eight hundred miles an hour. This time, Rabinowitz wasn’t likely to rise from the dead.
“That one is for Elena,” David whispered.
CHAPTER 85
Douglas Attenborough was to write in the London Times:
“The Dachau of Nazi Germany had been quiet, almost bucolic, quite peaceful to the eye. Seventeen kilometers from Munich along the still and beautiful Amper River, the German Konzentrationslager was a strange, secret village of low-lying, gray-concrete, and wood-slat barracks built on what could have passed for a quaint Scottish dairy farm.
“Thirty-five years later—last night—something horrifying called Dachau Two was a very public, visual, and aural spectacle. It was the worst scene I’ve witnessed since I was a small boy, living through the Luftwaffe bombings of London.”
Tense and frightened Russian Army snipers listened to carefully enunciated babble through their headsets.
The brilliant KGB attack plan was suddenly looking rather ragtag and almost unprofessional to them. The Soviets’ lack of experience in dealing with terrorists was showing through badly. Thus far, only two of the Jewish men and women had appeared in the dormitory windows.
In the meantime, some of the American women athletes were escaping out the front door. What in hell was going on in there?
The Russian ground-attack forces were jammed triple file into the darkened alleyways separating sections of the village.
Down in the underground tunnels, more soldiers waited like thousands of stone pillars. They smoked their Papirosis down to the cardboard filters, lighting cigarette with cigarette.
11:46.
11:47.
11:48.
The scene inside Olympic Village went completely, irrevocably mad at 11:49.
The Russian Army snipers fired on order at the front windows, glass balcony doors, and rooftop escape hatches.
The Housewife was struck twelve times in the face and chest. As the crowd gasped in horror, the woman dropped straight down from a fifth-floor window.
The twenty-two-year-old Medic was cut up like a paper target on a practice shooting range.
An American assistant swimming coach was killed by mistake.
The crackling SKS automatic rifles sounded like a huge bonfire made from dry pine limbs.
Inside the kitchen, meanwhile, Colonel Ben Essmann was lying in a secure sniper position. His own rifle was trained on the swinging doors leading out to the dormitory corridor.
The Soldier’s eyes were wide and his mouth was hanging open.
The former Israeli paratrooper, former intelligence agent, former commando, was counting down.
“One hundred nineteen. One hundred twenty. Blast off!” The silent kitchen screamed for Colonel Ben Essmann.
He thought that he could actually feel his blood beginning to boil.
He knew that he was about to become a holy martyr.
In a way, too, Ben Essmann thought, he was sounding a blow against Jewish enemies of all times: Pharaoh, Haman of Persia, the Greek Antiochus, the Muslims, the Nazis, the Arabs. The strange, fiery Soldier silently cursed each and every one of them.
CHAPTER 86
During the first terrifying moments, there was something like the buzzing, hissing noise made by live electric transformer wires.
“It’s originating somewhere on the second floor,” a Russian scientist reported. The white-bearded man was speaking over the West German TV network ZDF.
“But this strange light we all are seeing. A fire would not be possible in this building. No, that would be impossible.”
Nevertheless, an ethereal white light was coming from the second floor. The crowd of nearly two hundred thousand spectators sent up a loud, sustained aaahhh. It was the remarkable collective sound of awe, wild disbelief, bone-chilling fear.
“Perhaps it is a fire.” The Russian scientist was beginning to blanch underneath his pancake TV makeup. “Could they have set themselves on fire?”
Less than sixty seconds later, the third floor of the building began to give off the same queer, white glow.
Grayish smoke rose from the roof like steam rising from a boiling pot of water. No flames could be seen anywhere, though.
A few young women jumped out of dormitory windows, as graceful as prima ballerinas in their falls. A mistlike silver rain began to rise from the building’s sloping gray roofs.
A famous American sports announcer was crying as he spoke. “Our Olympic women are dying. Oh my God.”
“It is 11:52 P.M. here,” stated the announcer for the BBC. “Ladies and gentlemen, young people of England, we in this control booth cannot believe what we are witnessing here in Moscow.”
“Somewhere around our booth, we can hear Pëtr Tchaikovsky playing,” reported the announcer broadcasting back to West Germany. “This terrible scene is overwhelming me. I can no longer speak.”
Great red fire-pumpers had begun to spray streams of whipped foam high up onto the buildings. The snipers continued their rifle fire.
“It is like a sound-and-light show.” An American woman commentator was one of the first to approach some kind of primitive understanding of the event. “I never fully understood the death camps or the Nazi furnaces until today. Not really, I didn’t. My God, I wasn’t even born at the time of the first Dachau.”
No wind was blowing in Yuri Gagarin Square. A three-quarter moon sat over Olympic Village like a chipped white coin.
The huge crowd grew strangely quiet, allowing the ambulance and police sirens to come through like banshee screams in the night.
Americans who were listening to ABC News heard the most poignant, at least the most famous, single statement of all.
“My God, please have mercy on us. Somehow, they’ve set everything on fire. My God, my God, my God, my God, my God.”
CHAPTER 87
Alix and David thought that they were going to die in the next few minutes.
David took a deep breath and dry, gasping gulp. He was imagining another confrontation with Colonel Ben Essmann.
“Those first two men were relatively easy,” he whispered, turning to Alix. “The two guards we surpr
ised upstairs. I wasn’t thinking clearly then. Now I’m thinking. My imagination is working: Also, I’ve already had the hell kicked out of me by that Israeli bastard.”
“I really want you to try and get out of the building.” Alix began to cry. She made an effort not to, but then the tears just came. “No more arguing, David. Please go.”
Just the ironic beginnings of a smile formed on David’s lips. “I think we went through all that already. Isn’t this where I came in on this particular movie? I told you, I’m not leaving you in here.”
Giving himself no more time to think, not sure whether they had any more time to delay, David pushed open the kitchen door.
“Ben Essmann!” Alix called inside through the swinging door. “This is Alix. I have David Strauss here as a hostage. What do we do now, Colonel?”
The large kitchen lay in baffling, scary darkness.
It was full of clicking, whirring machine sounds, though. Electric clocks. Refrigerator motors. The motor of a small walk-in freezer. Ovens.
Alix flipped the light switch, but nothing much happened. The overhead lights wouldn’t yield more than a dull yellow glow.
All the dormitory lights were flickering and dimming as if they were going through a brownout. The hallways and rooms didn’t feel warm, but the insulated ceilings were beginning to seep thin wisps of smoke.
“Ben Essmann. It’s Alix. Where are you? Are you in here? Colonel Essmann, can you hear me?”
Both Alix and David took a cautious step into the eerie kitchen darkness.
The door to the hallway suddenly swung shut behind them.
“Benjamin Rabinowitz is negotiating with the Russians,” Alix cried, deciding to try another tack. “The ends cannot justify the means here, Colonel. I know you can hear me!”
Still no response came from the kitchen darkness.
Alix tried to catch her breath, and she couldn’t.
“Oh damn it, David. He’s in here,” she whispered. “He knows exactly what we’re trying to do.”
Enveloped in the creeping darkness, the prickly, electric nothingness of the room, David had become aware that his skin was beginning to tingle. He was starting to have flashbacks of the night in Elena’s bedroom. He recalled the shooting scene at the restaurant in Germany. Then the killing of Michael Ben-Iban.
David decided that they had to take another approach with Colonel Essmann.
He yelled out at the dancing light spots in front of his eyes.
“These are teenage girls that you’re murdering here!”
Once again, no response came from the Israeli man. There was loud noise coming from outside, though. Screams. Gunfire—like popping strings of Chinese firecrackers.
David lowered his voice to a more conversational level.
“So! How does it feel to be a murderer of young girls, Colonel? What is it like to be a Nazi, Colonel? You are a murdering Nazi bastard, you know! You’re betraying everything you claim to be fighting for.”
“David?” Alix whispered.
Then a hoarse voice came from the other side of the room. Essmann was in the kitchen. He called out to David. He called out in Hebrew.
“Yes, surely I am that—a Nazi! Now why don’t you tell me the nice story about the young Israeli boys who died at Munich, Doctor? Then tell me about Auschwitz and Buchenwald! All about Maidanek, where forty in my family died in slaughtering pens.”
“That happened forty years ago!” Alix found herself screaming.
“He’s in the far right corner,” David whispered.
At the same time, he remembered that judging the true direction of sound could be terribly deceiving in the dark. That thought gave David the most awful moment of doubt and panic.
But there really wasn’t any time for doubt now. He’d already made up his mind.
David quickly swept his arm out along a row of hanging pots and pans in front of them.
The resultant loud clatter, the sudden crashing of pots to the floor, was unexpected and disorienting. It was like missing a step in a dream.
At the same time, David’s right hand shot down under the heavy wood cutting table directly in front of him and Alix.
“Here’s something from Heather and Nick!” David called out. He grabbed Alix roughly around the waist. He threw her to the floor.
A bright gold flash illuminated the entire kitchen for a millisecond.
One of the Medic’s white phosphorus grenades ripped a gaping hole of light in the overwhelming darkness.
A flat, thunderous bang pierced the skin of David’s and Alix’s eardrums.
Then they were scrambling to their feet. David and Alix were running to the other side of the kitchen.
Alix pulled open refrigerator doors and they could see Colonel Essmann in a terrible slice of cold light. The Israeli man was dead. A bloody, insignificant heap on the floor.
David ran to the black generator and he reversed each toggle switch. He tried to reverse everything that had been done. As a second step, he turned off the kitchen ovens. Alix turned off the air-conditioning unit in the kitchen. She turned off anything that was electrical.
Then the terrifying room was quiet and still.
Neither of them was sure, but they thought Dachau Two was over.
“Will you please hold me?” Alix whispered, and began to cry softly.
Epilogue
The morning after, Moscow awoke to severe postbattle conditions: a light, sticky drizzle; fog and cardboard-gray clouds hanging over the city like a wet, dripping blanket; thousands of tourists wandering the streets like war orphans. …
In the final accounting of the incident, Tass, Izvestia, and Pravda reported that twenty-four athletes and twenty-nine Olympic security people and tourists died during the thirteen hours of the takeover. All but a few of the casualties were Russians, Germans, Syrians, or Egyptians. All but two of the terrorists—the Russian Architect, and the Dentist—were also killed.
Overall, though, the deaths and injuries were far less than had been feared and expected. No small thanks to Dr. David Strauss and to Alix Rothschild, it was said. Also to the fact that in one of the three captive dormitory sections, the Architect had refused to kill innocent young athletes. The microwave apparatus had never been turned on.
The worst of it was twelve athletes from the West German team. They were found dead in two adjacent rooms on the third floor of their dormitory. “May these young men and women be the last Holocaust casualties,” the chancellor of West Germany said at the state funeral in Bonn.
In November, agent Harry Callaghan was assigned to a desk job at FBI headquarters in Washington. He left the post after less than six months. Harry is now writing a memoir about the intelligence community, under contract with a New York publisher.
As for Alix Rothschild and David Strauss, the evidence is scattered, vague, and mostly inconclusive.
Their escape from Olympic Village was never completely explained by the Russians—who are not great information purveyors anyway. One version had them getting out through the maze of tunnels and roadways underneath the dormitories themselves.
Another story (Jerusalem Post) was that during the chaos and confusion in front of the liberated dormitory—with American women athletes streaming out onto the streets, with other athletes running up to congratulate them, with joyous spectators and newspeople breaking through the police barricades (and the Russian police doing a bit of rejoicing in the streets themselves)—David and Alix had somehow slipped into the amorphous, unmanageable crowd.
Subsequent rumors (the London Observer and the Times) about their living on a farm outside Eilat in Israel were proven false. So was the story (New York Post) that they were both prisoners in the Potma Labor Camp inside Soviet Russia.
Still another rumor had them going their separate ways after Moscow. In this version, David Strauss is now working as a doctor somewhere inside Israel.
A French photographer recently claimed to have a photograph of the two of them taken in the
Algarve. The shot appeared in an American men’s magazine, but it was difficult to tell if the two swimmers pictured were actually David and Alix.
A California actress claimed she saw Alix in Los Angeles.
Alix was said to be pregnant and “matronly-looking.” She no longer seemed to be Rothschild.
In late November, Nick and Beri Strauss’s movie The Fourth Commandment played to an enormous TV audience across America.
The film is soon due to be seen in Great Britain, Israel, France, Spain, the Netherlands, and Japan.
The movie will also be shown all through South America and West Germany.
As the winter of 1980 settled in, there was a final development. …
Early in December, SS General Richard Glucks, Dr. Ludwig Hahn, and the former Nazi SS commander of Auschwitz, Walter Rauff, were enjoying a choice morning sun and ocean breeze on the white stucco dining porch of the Hotel Mercedes Bleu.
The war criminals were luxuriating over French croissants, over hot and delicious Blue Mountain blend coffee. Dr. Ludwig Hahn was lighting up his first Havana Corona of the day.
Four men in khaki trousers and shirts broke the perfect mood of the peaceful terrace setting.
The intruders fired gas-operated rifles on the casually attentive bodyguards sunning their faces at a table not six feet away from the Nazis.
One bodyguard flipped back over the terrace railing. A second man crashed into a cart, sending rolls and biscuits flying in twenty different directions.
The white-tile floor was stained with blood the bright red color of bougainvillea.
Richard Glucks stood up, screaming at the invaders in Portuguese.
“We have agreements with your government. Does the minister know that you’re here?”
A dark-skinned man who passed for Brazilian, showed his brilliant white teeth to the old Nazis. The man then spoke to the Germans—first in Hebrew, then in stilted German. The man, Benny Netanyahn, was a former major in Mossad; also an “Avenger,” reawakened by the demands of Dachau Two.
“You scaly old bastards, you worms, are accused of crimes against the human race, of which I am a part,” he announced. “You can have no agreement with any legitimate government! Your names are Nazi Richard Glucks, Nazi Ludwig Hahn, Nazi Walter Rauff. Among the three of you, you are responsible for more than two hundred thousand murders.