The Jerusalem Gambit

by Jack Leman

  The backgammon game stopped, and the six men ran to do their jobs and gather their stuff. They were a well-trained lot, and they knew the drill. They folded the picnic chairs and the table and put them in the trailer. Their belongings were shoved in their backpacks and loaded in the van; the cooking appliances and the crockery stowed in their wooden crate and loaded on the truck bed. They rolled and tightened the insulating mattresses; they folded the bedsheets. The last thing the staff did was put on their short-sleeved summer shirts and put on the ammunition harnesses. Once all the material was on board the van and the truck, the soldiers formed a line, and the sergeant made a gun check to ensure that each assault rifle carried ammunition but was not armed.

  In twenty minutes, they were ready to roll.

  They waited in their seats while Ghassan decoded the numbers on a map and made a last phone call; as he talked, he tightened his fist and, as much as he tried to hide it, he looked agitated. He ended his call, looked at his cell phone for a moment, then turned and walked towards the waiting vehicles. He jumped in the truck’s cabin and the Seles Fruit Juice convoy moved out of the hangar.

  It was dark outside. The curfew was in effect, and the streets empty. Cars parked on both sides of the streets gave the impression that despite the ongoing war, there was no economic crisis in Damascus. Imported cars were a luxury, but second-hand cars were kept in use until their engine died. Having put to bed the children, some families sat at their doors to take advantage of the cooler air of the night. Some mud left from yesterday’s torrential rain still covered part of the streets. It would take days to disappear, and then it would transform into a cloud of dust that would choke the people living on that street.

  Suddenly, the alarm sirens sounded, making a loud wailing noise, and the few inhabitants that had their lights on immediately turned them off, plunging the surroundings into pitch darkness. It was most likely Israeli planes attacking some part of the city. They came and went as they pleased. Ghassan knew they would soon hear the cracking sound of explosions. The people of Damascus were by now used to the attacks of the stealth Israeli F-35. He wondered what kind of technology they used to dodge the Syrian radars, the anti-aircraft missiles, and got so deep into the Syrian territory with such impunity.

  The driver was very cautious. Alerted by the sirens, the driver switched the headlights to black out mode. The intensity of the headlights dimmed noticeably, and they couldn’t see more than a few meters in front of the truck. Trying to avoid scratching the cars parked on both sides of the road, the driver drove South of the Palestinian Yarmouk Camp, and past the Palestinian Martyr Graveyard. They drove downhill when they felt the truck take speed and skid on the muddy grounds. The driver tried to anticipate the sudden changes of directions of the truck and moved the wheel left and right. Fifty meters ahead of the truck, Ghassan watched the van take a right turn between the cars and disappear in a side-street. He told the driver to slow down. They saw the opening of the street on their right as the driver braked. It would be tight. He banked right, but the truck skidded on the mud, missed the turn, went straight and hit the car parked right at the corner. The driver angrily stopped the truck, jumped out of the truck onto the muddy ground to assess the damage and to see a way to maneuver. They were lucky they had been driving slowly, otherwise the big truck could have demolished the refurbished Japanese car that took the bulk of the hit. The truck was sturdy, so there was not much damage except some scratches.

  Ghassan remained in the cabin. He didn’t enjoy dirtying his boots in the sticky mud and then having to clean them himself. After all, it wasn’t the first time they had bumped or scratched cars parked in the streets. The driver came to his side, and he lowered his window.

  “I think it will be difficult to maneuver without lowering the drop axle, Sir.” They were always short on fuel and as the usage of the extra wheels increased the fuel consumption, they avoided as much as possible to use the drop axle. They were very useful when driving cross-country, but unnecessary in the city.

  The driver attempted to clear his boots from the sticky mud, but when he realized it would take a lot of time, he resignedly jumped in the cabin and dirtied his driving compartment. To lower the drop axle, he pushed a lever on the dashboard. The hydraulics came into life, and there was a light tremor when the wheels came in contact with the ground. A green light appeared on the dashboard. The wheels were down and locked, which meant they would now turn together with the front ones, giving the truck an increased maneuvering capacity and a good grip on the slippery alley.

  The driver crawled the truck backwards and disengaged itself from the car they had run into. He switched gears forward and steered fully to the right. The two sets of wheels swiveled at the same time. The effect was unusual because the truck seemed to turn on its own axis. He continued ahead until the taillights of the van appeared and signaled them to continue.

  It took them ten minutes to reach their new destination, which was another large dark warehouse next to the Aziz Mansour Primary School and 50 meters from the Bulgarian Embassy. Once they entered the hangar, the tension dissipated, and they felt safe again. The risk of being seen and hit by an unknown missile had ended.

  The only light in the hangar came from the truck’s dimmed headlights. They had to find a power source to get the electricity needed to keep the system running. Before shutting down the engine of the truck, Sergeant Fuad searched the walls with his flashlight for a switch-box.

  Chapter 2 - Wednesday

  5-Wednesday 0:15 am

  Israeli Air Intelligence Group (IAIG) HQ

  Tel Aviv

  Sergeant Naama Dwek silently sat in her booth. She intensely gazed at the three extra-wide screens facing her. One reason they had chosen her for this duty was that she could simultaneously watch all three screens. She had grown up with computers and video games, and it had developed her multitasking aptitudes. She was what you would call a nerd. Computer freak. She was at ease with computers like she was with a toothbrush. One other reason they chose her for this job was her mother tongue.

  She was four years old when her parents, Oren and Rina, had died in an accident. The tractor carrying them had overturned and rolled down the slope just below the kibbutz they were living in. Naama did not have any vivid recollection of them, but only the imprint of some blurry photographs they had left in a small album.

  Her mother’s parents volunteered to raise her in the kibbutz. Her maternal grandfather, Dr. Rami Muallimi, was an Arab from the village of Abu Ghosh nestled on the hills between Jaffa and Jerusalem since the time of the Crusaders. He was the son of the famous Aisha, also known as the Mukhtar’s Daughter.

  Her maternal grandmother Nomi’s family were Jews from Aleppo in Syria; they had moved to Israel in 1954 after a brief stay in Turkey. On their arrival to Israel, they had decided they would try communal life and settled in Kibbutz Anavim, established on the hill facing Abu Ghosh.

  Nomi met her future husband Rami while working at the vineyards jointly cultivated by the inhabitants of Abu Ghosh and the kibbutzniks of the neighboring Anavim. After their marriage, she and Rami had moved to Anavim and agreed that they would raise their children in the Jewish faith. At the time, the fact that a descendant of the famous Abu Ghosh family left his Muslim village to live with the Jews drew a lot of criticism. But, as Naama’s grandfather Rami liked to tell, his mother, Aisha, ended the crisis when she gave him her benediction to marry a Jewish woman and move out of his village. She had presented the marriage as a covenant between two villages, one Muslim and the other Jewish.

  Her grandparents had three children, Youssef, the elder son, Rina who was Naama’s mother, and Lea. They grew up in a bilingual house, with Arabic and Hebrew as their native languages. Their grandmother Aisha made sure they were regularly hosted in Abu Ghosh and learned the customs and traditions of the Israeli Arabs.

  After her parent’s death, when Naama was living with her grandparents, they had not been the only ones to speak to her in H
ebrew and Arabic; her mother’s brother, uncle Youssef Muallimi, who still lived in Abu Ghosh, spoke to her only in Arabic and her mother’s sister, aunt Lea, only in Hebrew. Their family reunions were like a deaf people’s club meeting where her uncle refused to speak Hebrew and her aunt refused to speak Arabic. Questions in Hebrew were answered in Arabic and vice versa. As a result, her intimate knowledge of Arabic allowed her to interpret the nuances in the information she received from Syria through the eyes and ears of the UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle). She could even name the dishes being prepared in food stalls as she watched a street with the aerial view. It was also important to read and understand the signs on the military vehicles to find out the commands they belonged to.

  Towards the end of her mandatory two years of basic military service, she had taken part in a track-and-shoot simulation contest. It was on an impulse that her squad had taken part in the simulation, and the winner would get a free dinner at their next outing. In the simulator, in a day-to-day life context, she had to figure out the threat correctly and shoot the targets that sprung up, while avoiding shooting at friendlies. She won the contest and was invited to dinner at the famous Zakim Restaurant in Tel Aviv by her friends. In view of her success at the simulator, the Israeli Air Force offered her to continue her military carrier in the Air Force and start by taking an identification course. She had to learn the shapes of all kinds of military vehicles like trucks, SUVs, missile carriers, armored trucks, tanks, aircrafts and helicopters, and identify them with accuracy. They would show her the shade of a vehicle taken with a zoom camera, and she had to identify it. She excelled in that course. A course of identification of different categories of missiles, artillery pieces followed. They then assigned her to the Israel Air Intelligence Group, also called Lamdan, where she took an Intelligence Imagery Analyst course and graduated first of her class.

  Although she was not a pilot, she was at ease in her cockpit-like workstation. Her unit was in a room divided in two booths by a low panel, about a meter high; the left booth was for the pilots and the right one for the intelligence analysts. Despite being an analyst, her booth was almost a replica of the flight control cockpit the pilots used. A little higher than eye level, three large rectangular screens simulated the front windows of an aircraft that showed the view from the front camera of the UAV. Below these screens were several other wide monitors and consoles used for her job as image analyst.

  The screen on her left showed live pictures of the terrain covered by the UAV flying high in the dark Syrian sky. A day and night high-resolution camera mounted on a rotating sphere under the belly of the UAV gave her the ability to see like a moving eye. A small joystick commanded the rotation of the optical camera lens. It was the most secret instrument on board. Its resolution and its zooming capacity were well-guarded military secrets. The camera had also thermal viewing capacity, allowing a better highlight of the temperature differences. With the help of a special software, they could analyze the smallest temperature differences, resulting in a high definition thermal image.

  The middle screen was used to enlarge and analyze any picture frame captured from the live stream. Every so often, she would point and click on a spot on the first screen, and a still picture would fill the second screen. She could zoom and enlarge the screenshot to an amazing extent, tilt the picture to get a 3D view of the target or use several filters available to get different variants of the zoomed picture.

  The third screen on her right showed an overview of the flight path of the UAV, with its flight details and a moving circle showing the area covered by its cameras. This screen gave her general situation awareness, including the friendly and enemy aircrafts, the air-defense systems and the no-fly zones.

  In front of the screens she had, her computers with two monitors allowed her to research the military databases or, more often, the Google databases and applications, like maps, street view.

  Just behind Naama sat David Berstein, her Executive Officer (XO), and a captain of the Air Intelligence Group. His past training included many years as an Imagery Analyst. He was in charge of the intelligence side of the operation. David had lately been struggling with his duties because his wife needed him at home to help with their newborn twins. Naama tried to fill-in as best as she could during his absences.

  Next to Naama’s booth was the flight control section. Three officers sat in adjustable pilot seats identical to those on board Israeli warplanes, except they had no seat belts.

  The first one, besides Naama’s seat, was the pilot in charge of flying the UAV. A regular fighter plane joystick controlling the flight protruded from the armrest on the right side of his seat. In front of him, a console displayed the flight instruments which showed the airspeed, the attitude indicators, the altimeter, the vertical speed, and the heading indicators. The left side of the same screen was set apart for the auto-pilot control dials.

  If Naama needed to get more details on a site, she could just turn left and ask the pilot to alter the route of the UAV. Normally, she should have suggested to her XO that a change of trajectory was needed for such-and-such reason, and then it would be his decision to do it or not. But soon, a trust relationship between her and the pilot was established, and nobody objected when she asked him directly for the changes. As long as it did not disrupt the operations and increased the general efficiency, the IAIG tolerated personal initiatives. To the left of the pilot sat the Flight Engineer, who controlled the communications, the radar systems, and the weapons system, in case the UAV carried any ordnance. Between him and the pilot was an advanced radar screen that looked more like a GPS map, like the ones you would see in a car, with overlapping layers of detailed terrain maps and the position of the UAV. It also showed the positions of all airborne aircrafts and air defense systems. The map looked like a bird’s-eye view of the whole operational theater with all the players involved in the operation.

  Behind them sat the Wing Commander, Aaron Dana, the highest ranking officer in the room and a decorated Air Force major who was in charge of the entire operation.

  The Wing Commander, the pilot crew and the intelligence unit made up the 94th Air Reconnaissance Unit, or in short, 94ARU.

  In the rooms next to theirs, were identical setups of crews, each specialized to run distinct types of UAVs. Sometimes they removed the dividing walls so that they could fly missions with multiple aerial vehicles.

  Naama moved her mouse on the screen and froze an image. She moved it frame by frame. On the periphery of her vision, she saw something moving. She enlarged the picture and a red truck moving in some narrow streets appeared. She immediately saved the coordinates and noted the time when the image was taken. The truck stopped at a crossroads but seemed to have bumped into a parked car. Naama smiled inwardly as she imagined a firefighter breaking the curfew to run to his mistress. She played with the infra-red sensors and the screen changed to a red and green blotched image. The only heat emitting sources were the truck and a van 50 meters further ahead, apparently waiting for the truck to arrive. She switched back to an image of the Damascus area and focused on the attack of the F-35s.

  She looked at her watch and yawned; she decided it was time to go home and rest.

  6- Wednesday 1:20 am

  Hangar number 2

  Damascus

  While Ghassan lit another cigarette and walked up and down in the hangar, he took out his map and studied it under his flashlight. They were in a suburban area just southwest of Damascus. It was the first time they were hiding in this warehouse. Before they moved in, the Air Force Intelligence (AFI) teams inspected and prepared the hangars. It was AFI’s job to discover as many possible usable hangars and visit them. But sometimes the hangar was in use. A little persuasion was necessary to get the staff away from the hangars for a few days. To the best of his knowledge, there had not been a warehouse owner who had refused to cooperate with them up to now. Ghassan was not naïve; he knew the persuasion practices used by the AFI teams. Once the hangar was made
available, they would lock the gates with a coded padlock, send the code to Major Ghassan who would use it on his arrival.

  After two years of moving from one hangar to another, the work of the AFI teams became more challenging because they had already been in almost all the hangars in the suburbs of Damascus. But instead of deploying more efforts to discover new hangars, they had become sloppier and carelessly scouted previously used hideouts. Although it defied the Rules for Stealth Edict proclaimed by the Air Defense Intelligence Directorate, two years after its enactment the importance of abiding by its rules had waned. The intelligence inspectors and the commanders of the AFI teams had become buddies, and the flouting of the rules was largely overlooked.

  The stand-down sirens sounded, and the men sighed with relief. They knew they were a target of choice and that enemy intelligence units were constantly looking for them. They had made it to safety tonight.

  Sergeant Fuad found the fuse box and pushed the buttons to get some light in the hangar. But there was no light. He tried the other buttons, but still no light. He checked with a special screwdriver to see if the power arrived at the box.

  “Sir! We have no electricity in the hangar.” he shouted to his preoccupied boss.

  Ghassan threw his cigarette butt on the floor and swore loudly. They needed electricity to keep the systems running. This was his nightmare: he would get the command to launch the missile, and he would be out of order, unable to fulfill his duty.

  An hour passed, and they were still in the dark. They gathered around a kerosene lamp. They complained little because Ghassan had promised that, while it was still too dark to move in the deserted streets, warm meals would be delivered to the warehouse from some barracks nearby. When the hangar was not too far from the headquarters, the Sergeant-Major of the Brigade liked to treat them to decent dishes specially cooked for them. Rumors had it that on some occasions, he even sent cold beers with the food. None of them had ever had that experience, but every delivery of food was open for speculations. Otherwise, the soldiers received standard rations intended to be warmed up on improvised burners. They were dull, not of the best quality, and lately they had enough of eating always the same canned foods. Sometimes, if their location was close to food stalls, or to a marketplace, they would discreetly sneak out of the hangar and bring some warm foodstuff to the crew. That was the best treat, but the problem was they had to pay out of their own pockets, shrinking their meager salary. The soldiers made arrangements with the army treasury so that part of their salary was directly paid to the families. Otherwise they risked spending it for food or for betting during the interminable days they spent playing backgammon in the hangars.