By the Rivers of Babylon

by Nelson DeMille

  * * *

  Dobkin knew what was happening. With cool detachment, he weighed the possibilities of success. The idea behind a primitive screaming counterattack was to strike fear into the hearts of the attackers. If it were done with enough élan and conviction, and if it were spontaneous like this one, it could make the enemy’s blood run cold. They would turn, first the most cowardly among them, then even the most stouthearted would be caught up in the panicky flight as the attackers became the attacked. Lacking prepared defenses, they would run until they dropped.

  But would that happen here? What would happen if the Ashbals had another force on the river side? If they attacked on that side, Dobkin could no longer send any reinforcements there. They were all halfway down the eastern slope in an unauthorized counterattack. That’s what happened when people didn’t obey orders. Dobkin ran toward the crest of the eastern slope.

  * * *

  Hausner took the M-14 from Brin and watched through the starlight scope. For a moment, everything hung in the balance. If the Ashbals did not break ranks, there would be a massacre. The attacking Israelis were outnumbered five to one and lightly armed. They were within fifty meters of the Ashbals and were firing into their ranks with increasing accuracy. Joshua Rubin had gone completely crazy. He ran and fired his Uzi in a long burst that Hausner thought would melt the barrel. Hausner could hear his primeval war cry above the din of the shooting.

  Hausner began firing the M-14 at targets around Rubin to try to protect him. He saw what be thought was the first man to break ranks and run. Then two young girls followed. Then others followed. He could hear the Arabic word for retreat shouted by the fleeing Ashbals. A few leaders, officers, and sergeants tried to turn them around. Hausner put the cross hairs on one who was having some success and fired. The man fell. It was already apparent to the leaders that someone with a very good scope was causing them an inordinate number of casualties. Now that they were more conspicuous by trying to organize a stand, they were virtually committing suicide. Hausner aimed again. He had trained with every weapon that his men were issued, but this wasn’t his job, and Brin was becoming impatient. Hausner fired, hit another leader, and passed the weapon back to Brin.

  Finally, amid the shouts for medics and stretcher bearers for the leaders who were hit, the other Arab officers became disheartened and joined in the flow of retreat.

  The retreat became more orderly as the Ashbals put distance between themselves and the Israelis, who by now had lost the madness born of desperation that had made them counterattack.

  The Ashbals gathered up fallen equipment, picked up their dead and wounded, and organized a rear guard to allow them more time to get away. As they made their way down the slope, earthslides toppled them over and caused dead and wounded to be dropped.

  The Israelis followed close on the heels of the rear guard but finally stopped when a runner sent by Dobkin ordered them back. They gathered what fallen equipment they could find in the darkness and climbed back to the crest of the hill, dirty, sweating, and exhausted. Rubin and a female stenographer, Ruth Mandel, were hit, but not seriously.

  There was still no word from the river slope, but Dobkin sent two men with AK-47’s there to be certain. A silence fell over the hill and the smell of cordite hung in the still air.

  Hausner took the M-14 from Brin and, with the scope, took a last look at the retreating Arabs. They were out of range of the M-14 now, but he could see them clearly. Standing alone on a mound of earth with the body of a long-haired woman slung over his shoulder was a solitary man. He remained motionless as the last of the Ashbals filed past him. The man looked up at the hill that had cost so many of his brothers their lives. He made some sort of movement with his arm—a salute or a motion of damnation. Hausner could not be sure which. He couldn’t identify the face at that distance, but he knew for a certainty that it was Ahmed Rish.

  14

  The Prime Minister of Israel walked, unannounced, into the Operations Room of The Citadel in Tel Aviv. The Air Force personnel allowed themselves one quick glance, then returned to their work.

  The noise of telephones, teletypes, and electronic machinery was loud—louder than the Prime Minister remembered it on Yom Kippur, 1973.

  The Prime Minister instinctively scanned the big room for General Talman. Then he remembered and walked over to Talman’s replacement, General Mordecai Hur. His entourage dispersed throughout the room to gather information and pass on orders.

  The Prime Minister stood close to General Hur. “Any survivors from 01?” Hur was a copy of his former boss, British-trained, reserved, correct, well-spoken, and well-dressed. The Prime Minister was none of these things, but he had gotten on well with Talman and he hoped for the same relationship with Hur.

  General Hur shook his head almost imperceptibly. “No, sir. But we’ve recovered about half the bodies.” He paused. “There won’t be any survivors, you know.”

  “I know.” He looked around at the electronic displays. “Where’s 02, Motty?”

  Hur was slightly taken aback by the diminutive of his name. “I don’t know, sir. And every minute that we don’t know increases the area where they could be if they have refueled and are still airborne. We’re at the limits of our resources now.”

  The Prime Minister nodded. “How about that American satellite photo in the Sudan?”

  Hur took a sheet of paper from a long counter. “Here’s a report from our agent on the ground there. The object on the photo turned out to be sheets of aluminum lying on the sand. General size and configuration of a Concorde.”

  “Ruse or accident?”

  “There’s a difference of opinion on that. I say a clever ruse. Some people think it was just coincidence. But we’ve got three or four more photos like that to follow up. We’ll have to try to verify with infrared heat pictures and spectrograph analysis if we can’t get a reliable agent on the spot. Also, we have radar, radio, and visual reports which seem more like red herrings than anything else.”

  “This was a well-planned operation. But it needed an inside man, didn’t it?”

  “That’s not my area, sir. Ask Shin Beth.”

  The Prime Minister had had Mazar on the carpet for over an hour, but Internal Security was just as surprised at the whole thing as everyone else. Mazar, however, unlike a dozen other people, had not offered his resignation. The Prime Minister had to admire a man who said in effect, “Screw you, my resignation is not going to help matters.” But he knew that Mazar would have to go eventually.

  An aide carried a telephone to him. “The Secretary General of the United Nations, sir.”

  The Prime Minister took the receiver. “Yes, Mr. Secretary?” He listened as the Secretary General gave the situation report that he had asked for earlier. The Secretary General spoke in guarded terms. The Arab peace delegations were still in New York. No one had been recalled. The mood was apprehensive. Would Israel overreact in some way and put the Arabs in a difficult position? The Prime Minister would not make any statements one way or the other. They spoke politely for several minutes. The Prime Minister looked at the chronometer displays on the wall. It was midnight in New York. The Secretary General sounded tired. “Thank you, Mr. Secretary. Can you have me switched to the Office of the Israeli Mission? Thank you.”

  He spoke to his Permanent Ambassador to the UN, and then to the advance personnel of the peace mission who had been working for months to prepare for the Conference. Many had friends and relatives with the lost peace delegation. There was a mixture of outrage, despair, and optimism among them. The Prime Minister could hear his own voice echoing on the amplifiers in their offices. He addressed them all. “You have prepared fertile ground for peace to grow.” He was a farmer and he liked these metaphors. “We will plant that seed yet. Keep the ground ready. But if it becomes necessary to plow the earth with salt—” he paused. The line was unsecured, and at the very least, the FBI and the CIA were listening and he wanted them—and everyone else—to know, “—then w
e will plow it with salt and it will lie dead for a decade.” He hung up.

  He turned back to General Hur. “It will take a few minutes before the American State Department hears the tape of that call and rings us up. Let’s have some coffee.”

  They walk over to the coffee bar and poured mugs for themselves. A nearby counter top was becoming piled with foreign and domestic newspapers showing the same front page picture of a Concorde with El Al markings—the Prime Minister recognized it as an old public relations photo sent out on the occasion of the inaugural flight of 01. They all carried headlines announcing the same news in different ways and different languages. The Prime Minister looked cursorily through a few of the newspapers. “Sometimes I feel we are very much alone on this big planet. Other times, I feel that people care about us.”

  General Hur looked down into the blackness of his cup. He sensed, rather than actually saw, the red eyes, the puffy skin, the slightly tousled hair. He had never believed in the Peace Conference while it was being talked about. But now he saw how much other people had believed in it, and he felt some guilt over the fact that he had hoped something—something minor, of course—would cause it to be canceled. He looked up at the Prime Minister. “My experience as a military man has been that people only care about peace at the eleventh hour. By then it’s often impossible to reverse the course of events.”

  “And what time do you figure it is now, General?”

  “I couldn’t say, sir. That’s the thing about the eleventh hour. You never know when it’s a quarter to—you only know when it’s five after, and counting.”

  An aide carried another telephone to the Prime Minister. “Washington. State Department.”

  The Prime Minister glanced at General Hur, then picked up the receiver. “Yes, Mr. Secretary. How is that farm of yours in Virginia? Yes, I know, the Tidewater region has become quite salty since your ancestors settled there. Times change. The tide is relentless. We have similar problems here. The sea has so much room to roam, yet it seems to want the land.” They spoke in a roundabout manner for a few minutes, then the Prime Minister placed the receiver back into the cradle and turned to Hur. “Our reputation for overreacting to terrorism has not hurt us, General. Everyone wants to make certain that we are still in a mood to talk.”

  General Hur forgot his professionalism and his place and asked, “And are we?”

  The Prime Minister looked around the Operations Room. He stayed silent for a long time, then said, “I don’t know, General. We can’t change what happened to 01. But I think the mood of the people will depend very much on what has happened to 02. Why haven’t we heard from their captors, General?”

  “I can’t imagine.”

  The Prime Minister nodded. “Maybe they are not . . .”

  “Not what, sir?”

  “Never mind. Have you seen the report we received from Aerospatiale?”

  “Yes. A classic example of closing the pasture gate after the cattle have gone. There’s no help for us there.”

  The Prime Minister nodded again. “The Palestinian mortar men don’t seem to know anything.”

  “I’d be surprised if they did.”

  “Are we forgetting anything, Motty?”

  Hur shook his head. “No. I don’t think so. We’re doing all we can here. We’ve linked up with other air force operation centers from Tehran to Madrid, and they’re helping. It all depends on an intelligence break now.”

  “Either that, or Mr. Ahmed Rish will get around to calling us and let us know what is happening.”

  “I’d rather we found out what is happening ourselves.”

  The Prime Minister took a last look around the room. “Keep at it, Motty. I’ll speak to you later.”

  “Yes, sir. Where can I reach you if something comes up?”

  The Prime Minister considered. Tel Aviv had far superior communication and transportation facilities. It was also less exposed and safer in other ways. A War Ministry study had reaffirmed that Tel Aviv should be the center of all operations during any crisis. Yet, Jerusalem was the capital—not only the political capital, but the heart and soul of Israel. It was a concept, a state of mind, a spiritual and eternal entity. Even if it were just rubble—or salted earth, as the Romans had left it—it would be Jerusalem nonetheless. “Jerusalem. I am going to Jerusalem.”

  Hur nodded and allowed himself a smile.

  The Prime Minister left.

  * * *

  Teddy Laskov stood alone on the tarmac at the military end of Lod Airport. A false dawn lit up the eastern sky and outlined the hills of Samaria rising up from the Plain of Sharon. He stared into the sky for a long time until the light faded and the darkest hour began.

  He turned away and looked out across the black runways to where the twelve F-14’s stood silhouetted against the lights of the International Terminal in the distance. They stood silent, like sentinels guarding the frontiers of civilization and humanity. People called them warplanes, but they could just as easily have been called peace planes, reflected Laskov. He would miss them. Miss the smell of their leather and their hydraulics. Miss the coffee bar in the ready rooms, the static of the radios. Especially, he would miss the men and women who made the Hel Avir more than just a collection of overpriced metal. From his first aircraft in Russia to his last in Israel—or from chock to chock, as pilots put it—it had been forty years. That was too long, anyway, he thought.

  He turned and began walking toward a waiting jeep. He allowed himself one backward glance as he mounted the jeep.

  The driver turned on the lights, put the vehicle in gear, and lurched across the runway toward the airport access road.

  Laskov removed his hat and tunic and laid them in his lap. The night wind whipped around the windshield and tousled his greying hair. He settled back. He thought of Miriam. Her fate had actually been in his hands for a few minutes. In fact, he had held the fate of his nation in his hands while he held the control column of his warplane. Now he held nothing but his hat and coat. He was ambivalent about leaving the pressure cooker of command. It felt good to leave it, but he felt an emptiness as well. And it felt lonely very quickly, he noticed. Without Miriam, it would feel more so.

  The driver ventured a sideward glance.

  Laskov turned his head and forced a smile.

  The young man cleared his throat. “Home, General?”

  “Yes. Home.”

  15

  The beginning of morning nautical twilight—BMNT—was at 6:03 A.M. The sky lightened into perfect cloudless blue. There was a slight chill in the air and the damp morning smell of the river lay over the hill. A mist rose off the water as the air became warmer. Somewhere, birds began to sing in the pale light. At 6:09 the sun rose above the distant peaks of the Zagros Mountains in Iran and burnt off the ground mist.

  Hausner wondered what those ancient valley dwellers of the Tigris and Euphrates must have thought of those mysterious snow-peaked mountains as the sun came out of them every day. And then one day, the Persians had come out of them, semibarbarous and full of blood lust, and they had defeated the old civilizations of the Tigris and Euphrates. But eventually, the conquerors were absorbed into the culture of the ancient valley dwellers.

  Every century or so, a new group of lean and ferocious mountain men would burst out of the surrounding highlands of what was now Iran and Turkey. The ancient cities and towns and farms would absorb the destruction and pillaging, the rape and the massacres, and then carry on under new rulers after the dust had settled and the killing had stopped. Then came the Arabians from the deserts of the south and swept away the old gods.

  But the worst were the Mongols. They had come and wrought such utter destruction on the cities and ancient irrigation works that Mesopotamia never recovered. What was once a land of twenty or thirty million people—the most concentrated population in the world outside of Egypt and China—became a desert with a few million disease-ridden and terror-stricken inhabitants. Land that had been under continuous cultiv
ation for four thousand years turned to dust. Malarial swamps and sand dunes shifted alternately over the land as the twin rivers ran wild over the alluvial plain. Some centuries later with the coming of the Turks, the land and the people declined even further. When the British pushed the Turks out in 1917, they couldn’t believe that this was the Fertile Crescent. The legendary site of the Garden of Eden at Qurna was a pestilent swamp. The Tommies would joke, “If this is the Garden of Eden, I’d hate to see hell.”

  No wonder the modern Iraqis were the way they were, thought Hausner—a mixture of bitterness at their historical fate and pride in their ancient heritage. That was one of the keys to the complex personality of Ahmed Rish. If someone in Tel Aviv or Jerusalem would understand that, then maybe someone would say, “Babylonian Captivity.”

  Hausner shook his head. No. It was easy to come to that conclusion when you were standing in Babylon. It would not be as obvious to Military Intelligence people who were looking at reports of radio traffic and radar sightings, aerial photographs and agents’ memos.

  But still, the Israeli Intelligence services were known for imagination and unconventional thinking. If they looked hard at Rish’s psychological profile—a romantic with illusions of historic grandeur and all the rest—then maybe they would come to the right conclusions. Hausner hoped so.

  * * *

  Hausner began inspecting the thin defensive line. There were two more AK-47’s now and perhaps enough ammunition to hold off an attack such as had been mounted the previous night.

  Everyone was working on the defensive positions except for a small party that had volunteered to comb the eastern slope again for abandoned equipment. They brought with them aluminum struts and sheets to be used as shovels to bury the two dead Arabs that were left behind.