Dobkin spoke quickly in a low voice. “For God’s sake, Hausner.” He grabbed his arm.
There was a very long stillness, during which time Hausner knew that Rish was trying to overcome his urge to murder them. But Hausner knew, as Rish knew, that to murder them was to end all chances of a surrender.
Rish got his emotions under control with considerable difficulty, then spoke with an even voice. “I can only repeat my guarantee and my ultimatum. You have until dusk. Not one moment longer. After dusk, as we both know, radio reception is better. So don’t ask for an extension at dusk.” Rish moved a little out of the alcove. “Also, as we both know, it is only a matter of time before the Iraqi authorities discover our little problem here. But don’t count on them to act for at least twenty-four hours after they learn we are here. They will hesitate before they move. I can assure you of that. I have friends in the government. They will delay any move and notify me of all decisions. And when the Iraqi Army does move, it moves with painful slowness, Mr. Hausner. Still, I must consider them in my calculations. And so, again I say—at dusk, if we do not hear from you, we attack.”
Hausner and Dobkin remained silent. Rish held out his hands in a gesture of solicitation. “Think of the consequences of a defeat. My men are all Ashbals. You know this from your captive?”
There was no answer.
Rish went on. “Well, I cannot be responsible for what might happen in the heat of battle. If my men take the hill tonight, they may be carried away with the madness of killing. They lost many friends last night. They would want revenge. Then there are your women to consider . . . you understand?”
Hausner used one of the most offensive Arabic profanities he could think of.
There was silence except for the sound of men murmuring along the walls.
Then Rish stepped a little further out of the shadows. He smiled. “Your command of the more colorful parts of my native tongue is interesting. Where did you learn that?”
“From you—in Ramla.”
“Really?” He moved out of the alcove and stood in the middle of the throne room about two meters from Hausner and Dobkin. “Once I was your prisoner. Now you are about to be mine. When I was in Ramla, you could have had me murdered by my fellow Arabs in exchange for a pardon or an extra privilege. It is done. I know it. But as much as you wanted to have it done, you did not. You had a sense of fair play. Yet I swore to kill you for the insult of slapping me. But really, in a way, I owe you my life. I will be fair with you if you surrender to me now.” He looked closely at Hausner, then stepped to within a meter of him. “You know that I still burn with that blow, don’t you?” He swung at Hausner and hit him across the face with an open palm.
Hausner was taken aback for a second, then lunged at Rish. Dobkin grabbed him and held him firmly.
Rish nodded his head. “Now that is over. The insult is canceled. Al ain bel ain al sen bel sen. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. Nothing more. Nothing less.”
Hausner regained his composure and pulled away from Dobkin. “Yes, I agree, Rish. But there’s still the small insult of blowing up a planeload of fifty people.”
Rish looked away and spoke. “I won’t discuss that. You have an opportunity to save the other fifty.” He looked at Dobkin. “From a military point of view you must know it is hopeless.”
Dobkin moved closer to Rish. He could hear the sounds of rustling garments in the shadows. Rish made an imperceptible movement with his hand and the shadows retreated back into the walls. Dobkin came within a few centimeters of Rish. “Last night it was indeed hopeless from a military standpoint. Yet we beat you. Tonight the odds will be better.”
Rish shook his head. “Tonight we take the hill, General.”
Hausner grabbed Dobkin’s shoulder. “I’ve had enough. I want to get back.”
Rish nodded. “You will be democratic enough to let everyone vote, I hope, Mr. Hausner.”
“Yes. We do everything by vote up there, Rish. I’ll let you know before sundown. In the meantime, I’m sending our prisoner down to you. He needs medical attention. Are you equipped?”
Rish laughed. “That is a clumsy way of finding out about our medical situation. But we will take the man. Thank you.” He looked slowly from one to another. “Again, I must warn you that if my men take the hill in the dark I cannot control them.”
Dobkin spoke. “You’re either a bad commander or a bad liar.”
Rish turned and walked back into the shadow of the alcove. His retreating voice echoed through the throne room. “I am a realist, gentlemen. Which you are not. Save those people, General. Save their lives, Mr. Hausner.”
“I’ll do that,” said Hausner. He turned to leave.
“Oh. One more thing,” said Rish. “This might help you reach a decision. I have some information that some of your people might find interesting.” He paused.
Hausner felt a cold chill of apprehension run up his spine. He did not turn around and he did not respond. Dobkin stood with his back to Rish also.
“Some of your people have members of their families—loved ones—who are in Arab countries. I know the fates of those people. Would you like to know them? If you surrender, I will give your people true accounts of each one of them. It would end so much suffering and uncertainty for them. The knowledge of their whereabouts, if they are alive, might help their families to secure their return to Israel.”
Silence.
“Abdel Jabari’s family, for instance. Or Rachel Baum’s brother, missing in action since 1973.”
Hausner began walking away. Dobkin followed.
“Wasn’t one of your wife’s cousins missing in the Sinai since 1967, General?”
Dobkin continued walking without a falter in his step.
“Miriam Bernstein’s husband, Yosef. He was in a Syrian POW camp until six months ago. Then one night they took him out and shot him.”
Hausner slowed his pace.
“Or was that Rachel Baum’s brother? I think Yosef Bernstein is still in a Syrian POW camp. Well, no matter, I have it all written down somewhere. I’ll check on it later.”
Hausner’s body shook with rage and he found it difficult to keep walking. Behind him, Rish’s low, taunting laugh echoed through the throne room.
They were led up and out of the chamber into the full sunlight. The escort was slow in putting the blindfolds back on. Dobkin had a glimpse of the towers and battlements of the Ishtar Gate about a hundred meters to the east. Nearby, there was the verandahed guest house and the small museum. The restored gate area gleamed with its blue-glazed bricks in the sunlight. Gold lions of Babylon and mythical beasts shone on the glazing in bas-relief. The walls of the Hanging Gardens stood close by, dusty and cracked with not a trace of vegetation, not even moss.
In the brief time that his eyes were uncovered, Hausner noticed that the mound they were on was approximately the same height as the one the Concorde stood on about two kilometers away, across a small depression in the land. He could see the Concorde from where he stood and his people moving about on the top of the mound.
The blindfolds were put on and they were led away.
* * *
After the Arabs left them, Dobkin let out a long breath. “You almost pushed him too far. You’re crazy.” He glanced back over his shoulder as the Arabs moved further away. “You know, somehow I expected someone more purely evil.”
“He’s more evil than you can ever imagine.”
“I wonder. He’s insane. I’m sure of that. But during his moments of sanity, I think that he really wants to be liked and admired.”
“He does. And we’ll play on that if we get another chance.” Hausner was breathing hard from the climb. He looked up and waved at Brin, who waved back. He turned to Dobkin, who was making the climb without any effort. “You’re right, of course. To the people up there, Rish is the Devil incarnate, which is fine for our purposes—and theirs, too. But somehow our devils are never quite what we expect when we meet them face to face.”<
br />
Brin called out. “Are they going to surrender?”
Hausner looked up and smiled. He yelled back. “I gave them your ultimatum.” He noticed again how the positions looked from this perspective. He noted the crumbling crust of earth, the treacherous potholes, and the washed-out gullies. In the dark it must be a nightmare. If he were an attacker he would become demoralized very quickly.
The two men reached the crest. Everyone who wasn’t standing sentry duty crowded around them. Dobkin briefly related some of what had happened. There were many questions and the discussion began to become heated. Hausner cut off further comment and promised to take a vote before sundown. He asked everyone to go back to work on the defenses, which indicated to a lot of people what they all knew anyway—there would be no surrender.
* * *
The men and women of the peace mission continued the work of building defenses for the expected onslaught. They improvised and invented on the spot. There were virtually no tools available except the flight engineer’s tool kit, but from this small beginning, larger instruments were fashioned.
The seats and floor sections were removed from the cabin in some areas and the armor mesh was lifted out. The mesh was strung between aluminum braces, like laundry on a line, to absorb gunfire and shrapnel from hand grenades.
A Knesset member recalled the Greek physicist Archimedes’ defense of Syracuse. The legend had it that Archimedes constructed giant magnifying lenses to burn the Roman fleet. In the same spirit, but with a different purpose, aluminum sections were taken off the twisted tail and set between aluminum braces around the perimeter. The aluminum served to reflect the blazing sunlight back into the eyes of the Ashbals if they should decide to attack during the daylight hours. It also made it extremely difficult for snipers to focus on a target. It had still another purpose of being used to send heliographic messages to possible sympathizers on land or in the air. A few men and women took turns manipulating different sections of the aluminum sheets to send out a constant international SOS signal.
More cast aluminum braces and crosspieces were broken from the tail section and stuck into the side of the slope, pointing outward. This line of pickets formed what the military called an abatis. Its function was to make it difficult to scale the breastworks without running into one of these impaling stakes in the dark.
Firing positions became more sophisticated as the day progressed. Holes became deeper and breastworks became longer and stouter. Luggage and armor mesh used on the perimeter were camouflaged with the monochromatic dust that was Babylon. At Dobkin’s urging men and women also covered their clothes and faces with a paste made from the dust mixed with their sweat and, in some cases, urine.
Fields of fire were cleared downslope by pushing the giant clumps of earth and clay down to the base of the mound. Small walls of earth and clay were built in the erosion gullies so that an attacker using the gullies as an avenue of approach would have to expose himself at ground level to get over the top of them.
The sparse thorn scrub that grew on the slope and offered some pathetic concealment was cut away. The thorn, used as a local fuel, was brought into the perimeter for that purpose.
Clay and earth plaques were hacked out of the hard crust of the hilltop. Some weighed up to a hundred kilos. They were balanced atop one another to be pushed over the edge of the slope onto attackers below.
Man-traps were dug into the slope and impaling stakes made from the aircraft’s aluminum braces were set in the bottom of the holes. The holes were covered with fabric torn from the seats, and the fabric was covered with dust.
Early-warning devices made from wire, string, and cans filled with pebbles were improvised and set out at intervals of one, two, and three hundred meters.
The cannibalization of the aircraft was accomplished with a great deal of difficulty because of the lack of tools. The work went faster when a crude torch was fashioned from the aircraft’s oxygen bottles and the aviation fuel. The aluminum was burnt, ripped, pulled, and twisted from the aircraft. Most of the material came from the blasted tail section. The Israelis crawled over and through the great aircraft much as the workers in St. Nazaire had done. They stood on the same cross struts that Nuri Salameh had when he planted his bomb. They saw the twisted, scorched results of that explosion and used the torn material to their advantage.
Small weapons for close-in self-defense, knives and spears, were fashioned from the hydraulic piping. Glass jars from the baggage and the galley were emptied into other containers and filled with aviation fuel. To some jars were added soap from the lavatories and other soap products from the baggage. The result was a crude napalm that would stick and burn.
The men and women of the peace mission took to the work with a mixture of enthusiasm and desperate urgency. Short and informal idea sessions were held. At times, the classical sieges of ancient times were discussed and ideas and innovations gleaned from those past battles. Archimedes and da Vinci were recalled. The sieges of Troy, Rome, Syracuse, Carthage, Jerusalem, and Babylon were dragged out of the memories of school days. What were the elements of the successful defenses? What were the elements that led to the defeats? It was impossible not to think of Masada. There was a similarity that went beyond the tabletop configuration of the terrain.
The question that began to form in the minds of the defenders was: Could a group of intelligent and civilized individuals, given limited resources, stand off a group of less civilized but better armed attackers? Hausner watched as the long line of defensive works took shape. Sitting as they did on a high piece of ground, with the flanks and the western slope almost too steep to climb, the defenses looked very impressive, he thought. An observer looking down from the air—as Ahmed Rish was evidently now doing in his Lear jet—would have concluded that it was too formidable a citadel to storm if there had been any real firepower behind those hastily formed barricades. But there wasn’t.
The real question, Hausner knew, was not how long they could hold out. A day might be long enough, yet a week might not be long enough. It all depended on when they would be found. Would they be found in time? What the hell was going on back in Isreal?
17
Lod was hot. Almost too hot to bear. Teddy Laskov sat over a glass of beer at a sidewalk table in front of Michel’s. Shops were shuttered and the Sabbath traffic was thin, but Michel’s, Christian-owned, was crowded. The Hamseen showed no signs of letting up. Laskov looked down at the sweating glass. A puddle collected around it, and a stream wound its way across the marble table top and dripped on his leg. He watched it. The blue civilian pants confirmed that he was Teddy Laskov, private citizen. After almost forty years in one uniform or another, it felt very strange. There was a great difference, reflected Laskov, in wearing mufti off duty and wearing civilian clothes as a civilian. The clothes were the same, but they hung differently somehow.
Michel’s brought back memories of Miriam, but he was not there for that reason. It was simply a convenient place to conduct business on the Sabbath. His inactivity and indecision had lasted exactly one hour as he paced the floor of his apartment. Then he had decided to act.
General Talman came down the street with what Laskov thought was his usual jaunty gait. He always looked like an RAF officer in a World War II movie. Even out of uniform, as he was now, he looked as if he were wearing a fifty-mission crush cap and silver wings. But as he approached, Laskov could see that his former boss was in no better spirits than he was. Talman’s mustache twitched slightly as he nodded and sat down. “Damn hot.”
“I noticed.”
“All right, then. Let’s get down to it. Is Mazar coming?”
“He should be here.”
“Let’s begin without him,” said Talman.
“Good.” Laskov pulled some loose notes from his pockets. “I took all the hunches, all the gut reactions, all the possible and probable radar sightings and all the Israeli and American security agency radio reports that I could collect before I packed it in.” He
looked down at his papers. “I think they headed east. Due east from the tip of Sinai.”
Talman tapped his fingers on the table. “I’ve spoken to Hur. Off the record, of course. He tells me that the Palestinians have dragged a number of red herrings across their path. But the final consensus of all the Intelligence people is that they went west. Libya. That would make sense politically. A few men in Operations, however, are convinced that they continued south into the Sudan. That might make sense politically, also. They could have put down in the Sahara, refueled, and gone on to Uganda if they wanted. There’s little radar in that part of the world and a lot of open space with few people who might spot them visually. It all makes sense politically, logistically, and practically. Libya or the Sudan.” He paused and looked Laskov in the eye. “But I don’t think so. I think they went east, also.”
Laskov smiled. “Good. Now I’ll show you why.” He went through his notes.
Talman ordered gin and tonic and listened.
* * *
Chaim Mazar walked past them and continued down the street. He turned and came back. He looked around as if for a table, spotted Laskov and Talman, smiled in apparent surprise, and went over to them. “Do you mind if I join you?” He folded his tall, lanky frame into a small wire chair.
Laskov shook his head. “I’m glad you’re the head of Shin Beth and not an operative. You’re the worst actor I’ve ever seen.”
“I try.” He looked around. “I just came from a press conference. If you think the hot wind is blowing out here, you should have been in there.”
Talman leaned forward. “It’s good of you to do this.”
Mazar shrugged. “Look, I should probably have resigned or been fired myself.”
By the Rivers of Babylon Page 20
