by Jack Leman
The helmet Gideon was wearing was a superb piece of technology; reflected on his visor he saw a computer-generated image of his surroundings, all the flight data, and the weapons system. Thanks to the eight cameras around the fuselage of the aircraft, his helmet gave him a 360 degrees 3D view of the surrounding battlespace with many functions being voice controlled. He did not need to take his eyes off from the outside to look at his instruments or concentrate on a HUD (heads up display) like in other aircrafts. That gave him a net advantage of maneuverability during dogfights because he could keep his eyes on the enemy all the time.
The sensors of the aircraft detected the enemy search radars, projected them into his visor, allowing Gideon to see the Egyptian defense force’s radar beams that were sweeping blindly around the sky.
With his thumb, he scrolled a tiny wheel under his left hand resting on the throttle, switched the radar to attack mode and checked again the status of the weapon system. Everything was perfectly working. His targets appeared on his visor.
He was within range. As soon as the bays opened, he pressed the red button under his right thumb. He felt a slight tremor, and the bomb dropped from the belly of the plane, its engine ignited a few seconds later and it disappeared at three times the speed of the sound. It would hit the target in 15 seconds.
The pilots knew they would bomb some pinpointed empty building, or some deserted rocket launch site, or some empty workshop that produced the rockets. Usually, the Shin Bet telephoned the inhabitants of the building 10 minutes before the attack, telling them they should evacuate immediately. The inhabitants had learned the hard way to comply quickly, otherwise they would be obliterated with the building.
Unfortunately, all these efforts did not deter the PIJ or Hamas from sending, day after day, rockets and mortars to strike Israeli villages. In the last two years, they had fired 2600 rockets from Gaza.
10-Wednesday 3:15 am
Al-Kisweh Industrial Zone
20km South of Damascus
The ride had been slow and long; it gave Ghassan time to assess the situation. A Palestinian group held his family hostage and threatened to murder them. The same group had killed his crew but had kept him and the engineer alive, apparently to operate the systems of the truck. So far they had treated them well, but if things didn’t go as they wished, he knew they wouldn’t hesitate to kill them, just as they had done to his men in the warehouse. The people guarding his family were most likely in the same frame of mind, putting his parents, his wife and children in deadly danger. He had no weapon and no ways of communicating with his superiors. He needed to know their motivation and intention with the cargo of the truck. But first he had to deal with his long-time comrade Fuad, convince him he was no part of the hijacking, and regain his confidence.
Ghassan had seen the surprised look on Fuad’s face when the PIJ guard had taken his ammunition before they left the warehouse. Still, he was not sure if Fuad understood his position and if he would cooperate with him. So far, he had ignored him, avoided even eye contact. He recognized that any attempt to talk was futile anyway, considering the two militiamen sitting across from them. He moved in his place; the two guards looked at him, but he got no reaction from Fuad.
The well-guarded Seles Fruit Juice convoy drove to the south, avoided the M-5 Damascus-Daraa highway, and took the parallel National road towards Al-Kisweh.
Ghassan had been in this neighborhood before. To the left and to the right of the M-5 stretched the officer’s living quarters of the garrisons protecting Damascus. The irony was that, at this time of the night, they were driving through thousands of sleeping army soldiers who could have intercepted the convoy and saved them. The only ones who were not asleep were the air defense troops, but they were concentrating on potential attacks from the sky above, not from land.
Driving through the darkness, they were the only vehicles on the road. The convoy was stopped twice at roadblocks; the driver turned on the interior lights, showed Ghassan’s special pass, whispered something about the foul humor of the Major, and they let them through swiftly. He noticed that the militiamen in front of him grabbed their rifles and tensed surreptitiously when the van halted. They would probably shoot him if he yelled for help. Some soldiers guarding the roadblocks had peeked inside the vans, and were curiously surprised to see military people riding a Seles Fruit Juice truck, but they knew better than to question an Air Defense major.
At some point, Ghassan sensed the convoy slow down. It turned right, passed under the M-5, and entered the Al-Kisweh Industrial Zone (I.Z.).
Everybody knew the story of the I.Z. The Israeli intelligence services got wind that Hezbollah had stockpiled Iranian anti-aircraft and ground-to-ground missiles in a warehouse in the area. Before the Hezbollah could dispatch the missiles to various sites and camouflage them, the Israeli Air Force mounted a night attack with F-35s and used MPR500s, multipurpose 500lbs bombs, to obliterate the place. They shattered an area the size of three football fields into rubble. The fire pillars were visible for an entire night from Damascus, which was about 30 kilometers north. The secondary explosions rattled the windows of the military barracks near the industrial zone for an entire night.
Later on, refugees fleeing the war in the north of Syria, at the border with Turkey and Iraq, took over the ruins. Despite the danger of collapse, they had taken shelter in the shaky buildings and basements, turning the I.Z. into a large shanty town. During daytime, children played around, women cooked, or did the laundry with the meager water they could get from broken pipes. Since there was no sewage system left, a black mud covered the roads and alleys. The stench in the hot, sultry summer could be overwhelming. The heavy rain of the last few days did little to clean the streets.
The men left the shanty town early in the morning to go north to the city, to find menial jobs, usually in construction sites. They returned from work before sunset, bringing with them some food bought with their meager earnings. By the time the curfew went into force, the streets were deserted, and darkness fell on the industrial zone. The people living in the ruins retreated into their shacks to gather their strength for another day of back-breaking labor.
The white van led the convoy among ghostly buildings and stopped in front of a demolished building. On the side of the road was a hole-ridden sign that named the place the “Al-Kisweh Textile Factory.”
They had cleared the rubble from an access ramp leading to a basement. The convoy drove carefully down the ramp and entered a vast hangar. Despite the wreckage of the building on the surface, the basement had held up well. When it was still a fully functioning textile factory, the hangar must have been clustered with hundreds of noisy fabric looms. Now, all the machinery and the looms were piled up by the north wall in an immense heap of rusted metal, and a dismal silence reigned in the hangar.
Once in the hangar, the truck made a U-turn and parked facing the exit. The white van stopped beside the truck, and silence engulfed the group as the engines were turned off. Ghassan saw militiamen converging to the truck. There was a reception committee waiting for them; the place had been prepared before their arrival and secured by troops. The surrounding militiamen were smiling, enjoying their victory, and they hugged their friends as they jumped down from the truck. Their guards in the van were all excited by this buoyant mood and smiled widely, and some soldiers slapped them on their shoulders from the open sliding door of the van.
They waited in the van until someone came and made a sign to Ghassan and Fuad to descend and stand by the van. Their two guards, who had hardly spoken during their journey from Damascus, kept them within their sights. It was almost 4 am and soon the sun would rise. The militiamen established a camp by the vans and got ready to get some sleep. Ghassan and Fuad sat by their van in silence, waiting to be told of their future. Their leader was walking around nervously with his cell phone stuck between his chin and his shoulder; he was talking and chain smoking at the same time while his troops feasted on their victory of snatching a
weapon under the nose of the Syrians.
Ghassan and Fuad were told to lay their sleeping beds by the van and get some sleep. Any plan he could have on sneaking outside in the dark was stopped short when the commander of the group placed a guard on a folding chair facing them. In silence they laid their pilfered insulated camping mattresses on the floor when some militiamen who were more curious than the others came to look and touch the luxurious mattresses with envy. Fuad looked at Ghassan and lifted his chin, as if asking for permission to give his mattresses to the soldiers. Ghassan shook his head, discreetly dissuading Fuad. If they wanted something, they would have to ask, and then he would consider. He knew they wouldn’t dare take by force something from a major.
It was too dark to count the militiamen, so Ghassan laid on his mattress and turned to look at Fuad, who had fallen asleep as soon as his head touched his pillow. Some people are lucky, he mused, and he realized they had not talked since leaving the warehouse.
Ghassan trashed around to find a comfortable position, but he was too tense to sleep. He observed the guards by the entrance of the hangar, then the sleeping soldiers. They slept hugging their rifles. Not a chance to grab a weapon! The reality of his situation slowly sank in, and he closed his eyes.
11-Wednesday 11:00 am
Israel Air Intelligence Group (IAIG) HQ
Tel Aviv
Naama had finished her shift. Her replacement would be here in a moment. She closed her files and cleared her desk. It was enough for today. She stretched wearily, pulled her right arm over her head, touched her left shoulder, and felt the aching in her muscles. Her neck was painful. She had been sitting and concentrating on her screen for over six hours.
She replayed in her mind the events of the night. Something in the flow of the images didn’t fit, something was nagging at her. She realized she couldn’t leave her desk without having cleared that irritating thought away from her mind.
She sat back at her desk and fumbled with her keyboard. The recording of last night’s flight of the UAV over Damascus appeared on her middle screen. She ran the recording on fast forward at four times the normal speed. Not much movement was visible at that time of the night in Damascus, except for some civilian pickups, probably using the curfew to smuggle some much-needed goods. Here and there, some military patrol SUVs lazily made their rounds in the streets. Then she noted the van with the red delivery truck driving slowly down a narrow street.
The van turned right into an alley boarded by parked cars, but the truck following the van missed the turn and stopped, kissing one of the cars lining the street. The truck started maneuvering, but it was too large for such narrow streets. The driver got out of his truck to assess the situation, toured the truck, and climbed back into his cabin. The truck took a surprisingly brief turn to the right and entered the narrow alley.
“Wow!” exclaimed Naama, “Good driver! That was a brilliant maneuver…”
The truck advanced slowly in the narrow alley and caught up with the van that had been waiting for him during all that time. After a brief drive, the truck and the van entered what seemed to be a hangar. A few delivery trucks were parked in the hangar’s courtyard; but that red truck arriving early in the morning seemed to be much larger than those parked outside.
Naama stopped the image and backed up the recording until the sequence of the truck missing its turn. She gazed with interest at the maneuver of the driver and the way it took the turn. As the truck turned, Naama froze the image. The truck had left tire marks in the mud. The front tires had left four parallel marks heading towards the alley, followed by single tire marks of the rear tires. “Strange,” she thought, and enlarged the image of the truck. On the right side of the truck she saw stacks of soft drink cases. “Must be a soft drink delivery truck… and by the color of the cabin I bet its Coca-Cola…” she smiled. She followed image by image the truck until it turned into the hangar and she froze it again. She saw it distinctly this time. The mud marks showed two pairs of front tires turning at the same time. “Funny…” she thought, and reached to turn the monitor off.
She looked at her watch: almost midday. She would be late for lunch with her friends, better hurry. After lunch she had the entire afternoon for herself, and she made plans to go to the beach and relax on the sand. Going to bed early tonight would be a great idea, because she had an early start tomorrow morning. She looked to her left to check on the pilot crew, but they had already left, and a new shift was taking over the controls.
Walking down the corridor leading to the exit, the image of the truck that managed such a complicated swerve kept on nagging her.
She went out of the office building and faced the breathtaking mid-day heat of the Tel Aviv summer. The offices were over-cooled to compensate for the heat emanating from the computers and the screens, so the difference in temperature was huge. She walked to the open parking lot two streets away from her office and drove her car, which had turned into an oven by now. As she entered the street she lived on, she found a place to park and started to maneuver her car into the tight space. After a few maneuvers back and forth she was sweating and she realized her car would not fit in the parking place, or maybe she was not such a skillful driver. She thought of the large truck in Damascus and how it maneuvered in that narrow space, and she wished she could do as well with her compact car. She put the car in reverse and tried again with the truck in mind, but after a few attempts, she moved on to find another place to park her car. She thought there was something unreal in the way the truck maneuvered. Was she getting obsessed with the truck or what?
12-Wednesday 11:30 am
Ras al-Zayn
30km West of Damascus
She woke up early but had a headache since then. Rashida pushed her sweaty hair into a bun. She was glad to wake up because she was having a bad dream about Ghassan being shot and her children being taken away from her. When she woke up, she checked on her children and relaxed a bit when she saw them sleeping innocently on the floor mat next to hers. After yesterday’s events, she couldn’t let them sleep on their own in another room; she had to be in the same room with them. Now they were sitting in her room with their backs to the wall, and each studying their class books, not that she checked. She had her mind on other things.
She wondered what was happening with Ghassan, and she tried to guess the intention of the PIJ guys. She didn’t trust them for a second. She shivered when she thought about the young beardless boy carrying a gun like the others, looking at her with interested eyes while his boss was terrorizing her family in their living room. She had singled him out from the others because there was a special intensity in the way he looked at her.
The PIJ fighters were now at the coffee shop and were served hot tea. Early in the morning they had gone through the houses to make sure they had missed no telephones. Rashida thought about the telephone in the warehouse and hoped they had not found it; she was almost sure they didn’t check the warehouse, thinking no one would install a landline there when they had mobile phones. She had the urge to see for herself.
The best way to do it would be to go there as naturally as possible. She took a bucket and, having kissed her children goodbye, she walked to the courtyard. She inched open the door and looked into the street: it was empty. She stepped out, closed the door silently as if there were people watching her, and walked to the warehouse. The streets were empty; not a kid playing or even a dog walking by. She walked the short distance to the warehouse while she checked behind her to see if she was being followed. She closed the door of the warehouse and rested against it, taking a deep breath. She had made it.
There were twelve plastic containers, each two-and-a-half meters tall and maybe as much in diameter, which could contain as much as three tons of olives each. That’s where they went through the processes of washing, ageing and pickling. Once harvested, they fed the olives through a vibrating machine which separated the fruit from its leaves and dirt, after which they were collected in fifty kilo met
allic buckets. The buckets were hoisted with a crane and emptied in the containers from their openings at their top, starting the washing and pickling process. When Rashida was married to Ghassan, her job had been limited to helping with the harvest. But now that there was a shortage of working hands, she had to manage the warehouse to the satisfaction of her father-in-law.
She squeezed between two containers, reached the wall and saw that the antiquated phone by the wall was intact. She lifted the handle with a trembling hand and took it to her ear, and she heard the hum of the line. She closed her eyes and thanked God for his gift. Now she had to make a plan to use cleverly the phone.
With her plastic bucket full of black olives, she closed the door of the warehouse behind her and walked towards her home.
“Hello, sister.”
She almost dropped the bucket. She turned and saw the young fighter leaning on the wall, observing her.
“Let me help you, sister, give me the bucket.” He grabbed the handle and took it out of her hand. She froze from fear.
“Come,” he said, “Let me walk you to your house.”
She held herself from running away and submissively walked with him. He was in no hurry to reach her house.
“My name is Said, sister. What is yours?”
“Rashida.” She answered in a trembling voice.
“I was with the team at your house the other day.”
And you just stared at me, she thought.
“Is that so?” She sped up her pace, wanting to reach her house as quickly as possible. If Ghassan was in the village, he would cut this guy down just for having talked to her, let alone courting her.
