By the Rivers of Babylon

by Nelson DeMille

  * * *

  Hausner decided he was not going to make it back to the Israeli lines. It was too open, and the Arab sniper had his position fixed now. Yet from where Hausner lay, he could not deliver effective fire anywhere except to his front. The scope was not being utilized to its fullest advantage, and in any case, he was almost out of ammunition.

  A round knocked off the heel of his shoe, and his leg jerked spasmodically. He cursed as he stuck his head up. He took aim, but the Arab was invisible in his hole. The infantry squad had switched to non-tracer rounds and began firing in his general direction. He spotted the sniper’s teammate traversing the terrain toward the infantry squad—bringing them a definite fix on his position. Hausner fired, and the man, Safar, went down holding his side.

  Murad fired, and Hausner felt a sting on his ear. He swung toward the sniper and fired at his form as it disappeared into the hole. He felt a warm wetness on his ear as he settled back in his shallow concavity. He thought, briefly, irrationally, of Miriam.

  Hausner had had enough. He wasn’t accomplishing anything, and he could sense that the Ashbals on both sides of him were approaching the crest. He called out behind him, above the sound of the shooting. “Haber!”

  There was no answer.

  He called again. “Haber!”

  She looked up. Brin’s bloody and brain-splattered head still lay in her lap. She remembered that Hausner was there a few minutes before, but didn’t know what had become of him. She heard him shout again, but didn’t answer.

  Hausner ripped off his shirt and wrapped it around the starlight scope. He reversed the rifle and gripped its red-hot silencer/flash suppressor. He stood and swung the rifle around his head and released it into the air. It sailed upward and over the top of the ruined watchtower above his head. It fell into the soft dust some distance from Naomi Haber. She heard it fall and knew instinctively what it was and what she was supposed to do. She lowered her head and placed a kiss on Nathan Brin’s shattered forehead.

  * * *

  The order for the final protective defenses had gone up and down the perimeter, and the carefully rehearsed operations began to be set in motion. All the ruses and all the makeshift weaponry that looked so clever and inspired in the daylight were about to be put to the test, and there were many doubts now in the dark.

  An Arab voice shouted loudly a hundred meters to the north of the promontory. “Here! There is a hole in the lines here! Here! Follow me!”

  Two Ashbal squads, eighteen men, converged on the voice. They charged upward, following the commanding voice. No one fired at them. They came within fifty meters of the apparently deserted breastworks. Another few seconds and they would be inside and the fight would be virtually over.

  The voice called again. “Here! Quickly! Over the top!”

  If the Ashbals noticed in the din of the firing that the voice had a slightly metallic quality, or that the Palestinian accent was not quite right, they did not act on that knowledge. One of their commanders must be using a bullhorn. They kept coming on toward the voice which was so close to the Israeli defenses.

  Ibrahim Arif lay in back of the breastworks in a small dugout and shouted into the PA microphone again. “NOW, UP AND OVER!”

  The PA speaker box, thirty meters in front of the breastworks, beckoned the Ashbals forward. “NOW, UP AND OVER! SHOUT! SHOUT! DEATH TO ISRAEL!”

  The Ashbals stood straight, ran forward, and shouted: “DEATH TO ISRAEL!”

  Kaplan, who had checked himself out of the infirmary, Marcus, and Rebecca Livni, a young stenographer who had just acquired an AK-47, opened fire. They each poured two thirty-round magazines into the Ashbal ranks.

  The Ashbals stood in the glare of the muzzle flashes, paralyzed and bewildered. The 7.62mm rounds ripped into them. They collapsed on top of one another like a pile of jackstraws. It was their single biggest loss so far, and it left a sizable gap in their frontal attack.

  * * *

  Esther Aronson had been pleading with everyone she ran into in the dark to listen to her. Burg said to beg, borrow, or steal. And begging wasn’t working. Everyone was too involved with his own survival to worry about the strategic problems of an attack from the rear. Everyone who listened to her sympathized, but that was all she got. She searched desperately for Hausner. Hausner could give a simple order, and she would have what she wanted. But no one knew where he was. Missing, presumed dead.

  She saw and heard the ruse of the PA box and knew that the last desperate tricks and defenses were beginning. On the west slope there was hardly anything of that sort. She needed arms. She ran over to where Marcus and Rebecca Livni were cautiously making their way through the breastworks and abatis to recover the rifles of the slain squads. Kaplan was covering them. Esther Aronson ran past Kaplan, vaulted over the trench and over the top of the breastworks, and slid through the stakes of the abatis past a surprised Marcus and Livni. “Sorry,” she yelled. “I need guns for the west slope. They’re attacking.” She stepped quickly among the carnage, among the dead and still living, and quickly and expertly stripped off bandoliers and web gear that were loaded down with ammunition pouches. She grabbed at the AK-47’s in the dark, more often than not finding their hot barrels instead of their stocks. Her hands and body burned as she slung them one after the other over her shoulders.

  Marcus and Livni had run to Aronson and were helping her. Marcus kept shouting to watch out for live men, but Esther Aronson didn’t seem to care or hear. Marcus shot a man who appeared to reach for his rifle as it was being pulled away.

  Aronson yelled, “Thank you,” and disappeared over the breastworks under that incredible load.

  Marcus and Livni quickly gathered up the remaining rifles under cover of Kaplan’s AK-47. The PA box was screaming, “BACK! BACK! STAY AWAY, COMRADES! THE JEWS ARE WELL ARMED OVER HERE.” The Ashbals kept their distance.

  * * *

  Naomi Haber put a fresh magazine into the M-14 and sighted. The entire slope was covered with crawling, crouching figures. She scanned the area directly below her perch. She spotted Hausner lying very still in his hole. Had he been hit? She couldn’t tell. He must have stood up to throw the rifle that distance. The Arab sniper would certainly have gotten him.

  A bullet brushed the knuckles of her right hand and she let out a scream and almost lost the rifle. She crouched below the earth wall until the shock wore off. She licked at the wound like an animal, and this seemed to have a calming effect on her. She knew that the man who had almost killed her was the same man who had killed her lover. And she knew that for that reason, more than any other, he must die. She got up slowly and peeked over the earth wall.

  Murad realized by now that Safar was dead. Safar, his childhood friend. His only real friend. His lover. And that Jew had killed him. Had he hit the Jew when he threw the rifle up? And the rifle and scope were gone. Who had it? He scanned between Hausner’s hole and the sniper’s promontory. The danger was on the promontory now, but his emotions wouldn’t let him take his eyes off the last place he had seen the cursed Jew.

  Haber sighted slowly as she took a breath. She could see the sniper’s full body lying prone below her about eighty meters away. A shot toward the head area would, with luck, destroy the scope as well as the head, but a shot at the back was more certain. She put the cross hairs over the small of his back and fired twice.

  * * *

  Along the perimeter, the Israelis were setting up the dummies that had taken so long to construct. As they were set up, they drew fire, were knocked down and set up again.

  A dozen unarmed men and women held up aerosol spray cans and ignited their vapor mists in short spurts, simulating muzzle flashes. The Arabs fired at these flashes, which they could see all along the ridge. Their estimation of the number of weapons captured by the Israelis went up considerably.

  Meanwhile, the real AK-47’s, newly captured with sufficient ammunition, were beginning to operate.

  Two unarmed women, who had spent the last half hou
r tape-recording the sounds of battle on the peace mission’s two dozen cassette tape recorders, now began placing those recorders at various points and pushing the playback buttons. The volume of fire from the Israeli lines seemed to increase.

  Things were beginning to function again. Runners were coming to the CP/OP and reporting to Burg and asking for orders. Burg gave orders as though he had been doing it all his life. The final protective defenses were apparently working and morale was going up. But Burg knew that it was still a very close thing.

  * * *

  Esther Aronson staggered in the dark toward the west slope. She called out, but no one seemed to hear.

  * * *

  The Ashbals, temporarily confused by Dobkin’s one-man charge, had stopped moving for a while, but eventually they began crawling up toward the top of the wall again. They could make out the top against the starry sky, less then fifty meters off. Their commander, Sayid Talib, couldn’t believe their good luck. Except for the single pistol shooting intermittently at them, there was no one on the crest. But that wouldn’t last forever. He exhorted his men to move faster. He had believed this to be a suicide mission for himself and his forty men, but Ahmed Rish had calmed him, with a story about an English general who took his army up a cliff more impregnable than this one and captured Canada for the English. And it was true. No one could have expected an attack here.

  Talib’s blood flushed his face as he climbed. He could not wait to get among the Israelis. He touched his half-mutilated face. When he had lived in Paris he had received a letter from the French Ministry of Immigration. He had opened it and discovered that it was in fact from Mivtzan Elohim. That carelessness had cost him the right side of his face, and life had never been the same since. Women let out a little cry when they saw his once handsome features. Even men looked away.

  Talib prayed that he would find Isaac Burg alive. Of all the torture fantasies he had played out in his mind, he had decided that flaying would be ideal for the head of Mivtzan Elohim. He would strip his skin off over a period of twenty-four hours—maybe longer. He would feed it to the dogs while Burg watched. He looked up. They were less than twenty-five meters from the top.

  * * *

  McClure put his last six rounds in the chamber of his pistol. He turned to Richardson, who was standing very still. “How do you say, ‘Take me to the American consulate,’ in Arabic?”

  “You should have asked Hausner that yesterday.”

  “You don’t speak any Arabic, then?”

  “No. Why should I?”

  “Don’t know. Just figured you did.” He leaned out of the foxhole and looked downslope. He could see men, like lizards, crawling up out of the darkness. He aimed at one and fired.

  * * *

  Miriam Bernstein and Ariel Weizman found Esther Aronson crawling along the ground. They took the eight AK-47’s and ammunition without any formalities and ran along the half-kilometer-long perimeter in opposite directions. At each position, they dropped off a rifle and ammunition. Bernstein skipped McClure’s foxhole. At the south end of the perimeter she found herself alone with the last AK-47. An Ashbal girl lifted herself up onto the flat ground and stood five meters away with her AK-47 slung. She saw Bernstein and unslung her weapon, slowly and deliberately.

  Bernstein did not have any idea of how to use the AK-47 and didn’t know if she wanted to use it in any case. Was the safety off? Was it loaded? Did it have to he cocked? The previous owner, of course, had it cocked with the safety off for the attack, but she did not think of this. All she knew for certain was that the gun had a trigger. She found it and hesitated.

  The Ashbal girl fired a full burst at her at point-blank range.

  Miriam Bernstein saw the muzzle flashes and they blinded her. She thought of a blindingly sunny day in a café in Jerusalem. A young infantryman was telling a story of how an Arab had popped out of a house on the Golan Heights and fired a submachine gun at him from a distance of a few meters. The young infantryman had been standing in front of a tree, and the tree, directly behind him, was hit again and again and bark and wood splinters flew off and hit the young man all over his head, neck, and back. Then the Arab disappeared. The infantryman had said, “An angel was standing in front of me that day.”

  Bernstein heard another burst of fire and the automatic rifle jumped in her hands. The young girl appeared to leap backwards over the edge.

  Miriam Bernstein sank to her knees and covered her face.

  * * *

  In the Concorde, Yaakov Leiber sat and watched an American war movie. He’d seen the movie that afternoon and had made notes. The projector was set on “fast forward.” When a portion with authentic war sounds came on, he returned it to normal speed and turned up the volume. The movie sound speakers, set up on the perimeter, reproduced the deep throaty sounds of a heavy machine gun. Rumors of this heavy machine gun had run rife in the Ashbal camp ever since Muhammad Assad had been released by the Israelis. Before his execution for treason, Assad had apparently told his guards many stories of Israeli strengths.

  The Ashbals were wavering now. Flashes of gunfire twinkled up and down the Israeli line. More and more sounds of increasingly rapid gunfire rolled down the slope. Above the sounds of the small arms came the rumble of the heavy machine gun. It seemed as though the Israelis had more weapons than they had people. The Ashbal fighters smelled defeat in the air. They began throwing anxious glances at their commanders.

  * * *

  Naomi Haber watched as the Arab sniper’s body bounced. Her whole body shook as she realized that she had actually put two bullets into the man’s back. She called out, trying to keep her voice even. “Mr. Hausner! He is finished. I will cover you!” She looked down on Hausner’s still body below her. “Mr. Hausner! He is finished! I will—” She saw his arm move slightly in a wave. She turned the rifle downslope and began firing at the targets. Forward-moving target at eighty meters. Fire! Hit! Stationary target at ninety meters. Fire! Hit! Right-to-left at fifty meters. Fire! Miss. Adjust for range. Fire same target. Hit! Next target.

  Hausner clawed at the steep sides of the overhanging watchtower, but there was no way up. He moved to his right where the slope was gentle and began running uphill. Ahead of him, to the left, he could hear the metallic operating rod of the M-14 slide back again and again. To his front, the Israeli breastworks rose up. There was not supposed to be anyone there—the M-14 was supposed to cover the entire area—but he could see an incredible number of muzzle flashes along the defensive perimeter. Where the hell had they found all those rifles? Or were they all aerosol cans? Flashes appeared in front of him, and he knew they were not aerosol cans. Bullets went buzzing past his ears from behind as well. He yelled out above the gunfire. “For God’s sake, stop firing! Hausner! Hausner!” The sand gave way under him and he crawled and stumbled directly into the Israeli guns, shouting at the top of his lungs between gulps of air. Then he found himself at the bottom of a trench. A young man and woman with AK-47’s looked down at him curiously. Hausner stood up. “You’re the worst goddamned shots I have ever seen.”

  “Lucky for you,” said the girl.

  * * *

  The unarmed fighters began pushing the stacked plaques of clay over the side. The heavy plaques tumbled down the slope, breaking off the hard crust as they went and picking up more mass and energy. The earth slides tore into the Ashbal ranks and snapped legs and crushed ribs as they hit.

  Suddenly, torchlike flames illuminated the Israeli lines as dozens of Molotov cocktail wicks were lit. The incendiary devices arched high into the air and began landing among the Ashbals. To make sure that they burst on impact, the Israelis used half bricks, tied with thongs onto each device, to act as clappers. The jars and bottles broke on impact and the kerosene or the more deady crude napalm ignited, splattering flames over the side of the slope.

  For greater distance, brassieres were used as slings to hurl the bombs down the slope. The side of the slope lit up, and the Israeli gunfire became more a
ccurate as the Ashbals stood revealed against the flames.

  The Ashbals became confused and milled about. Some ran for dark areas where the burning kerosene would not illuminate them. Occasionally, a man would be splattered with burning fuel, and his screams would carry above the other ghastly sounds of battle.

  The last few man-traps that had not caught anyone were soon occupied. A half-dozen young men and women screamed and squealed their lives away when the impaling stakes drove deeper into their rumps, their necks, their bellies, and their genitals as they squirmed to get off of them.

  The sappers, who were playing dead directly beneath the Israeli breastworks, knew that they were in fact dead men. Their own army’s fire had already killed some of them, and the chances of their men assaulting the Israeli lines were diminishing. They were caught almost in the jaws of the enemy. But their training had provided for almost every contingency. Slowly, a few at a time, they rolled downhill, stopping every few meters and playing dead again. They knew that the defenders’ attention was riveted elsewhere. Meter by meter, they closed in on the main body of their comrades. It was slow and torturous, and almost every one of them was hit at least once, but half of the twenty-man elite team eventually made it back to their comrades. They were by no means out of danger there, however.

  * * *

  The fight on the west slope was over within sixty seconds of the time the first Israeli AK-47 opened up. Molotov cocktails incinerated the entire line of castor oil bushes, silhouetting the climbing Ashbals. Clay plaques and AK-47 fire swept the flat, steep slope clean. The glacis was as unassailable as when Darius first saw it over twenty-five hundred years before, or when Alexander remarked on the defenses some years later. Almost every man was killed outright or burned to death in the castor oil bushes below. The few who fell into the Euphrates, like most Arabs, could not swim and drowned in the deep, muddy waters.