Firebreak

by Richard Herman

  “More fallout then,” Van Dagens grunted, all business. “We must take that into account. What force do you calculate for the weapon?”

  Tamir looked at the instruments around him. “We’ll have to retrieve the data and …” He was still shaken by what he had just seen.

  Van Dagens walked up behind him and clapped him on the shoulder. “It’s okay. The important thing is that we now have a fully operational bomb.” It was September 2, 1979.

  Shoshana sighed and gazed into the mirror, willing the image in front of her to change. Nothing happened and the round chubby face with the same pair of big brown eyes stared back at her. She shook her head. The twelve-year-old face in the mirror shook and its long black hair flopped back and forth. It was her. In disgust, she fumbled through the wreckage of her aunt’s dressing table and found a pair of scissors. Without pausing, she grabbed her hair and started hacking, throwing the long ringlets that had reached to her waist into a pile on the floor.

  “Shoshe,” her grandmother called, pronouncing her name “Show-she.” “Hurry. Your uncle has gone to get the car.” Shoshana could hear her grandmother complaining to her aunt while she finished the job. “That child, always daydreaming in front of a mirror.”

  “It’s allowed,” her aunt replied, not really arguing. Shoshana liked her aunt and wished she could live with her instead of her grandmother. Everything about her aunt was stylish—her clothes, her figure, this modern apartment in Jerusalem—everything. Unfortunately, her aunt and uncle’s apartment was too small for another person and, Shoshana decided to be honest with herself, she did like her grandmother’s spacious and airy flat on the hillside in Haifa. She dropped the scissors and walked into the living room.

  Both of the women gasped when they saw the girl. Her grandmother kept whispering, “Shoshe, Shoshe,” as tears ran down her cheeks.

  Her aunt took charge. “Mother, it will be all right. She is twelve years old and it is time her hair was cut. Go tell Doron we’ll be fifteen minutes late. Wait with him.” With that, she hustled Shoshana back into the bedroom and set her down. “Well, Miss Shoshana Tamir, it’s time to see the new you.” She deftly cut the girl’s hair even shorter, turning it into a stylish bob.

  “Aunt Lillian, will I ever be thin and pretty like you?” Shoshana asked. Tears were rolling down her cheeks now as she watched her aunt work, sorry she had been so rash.

  “Shush, girl. You’ve got a lot of growing to do yet. You’ll never be thin, but you’ll be pretty. Oh, you will be pretty.” Fifteen minutes later, Shoshana and her aunt piled into the car, all giggles about the girl’s “new look.”

  Doron, Shoshana’s uncle, smiled, reassuring her, and pulled out into traffic. Within minutes, they were past the university where he taught history. The mood in the car turned somber as they neared their destination, Yad Vashem, the museum dedicated to victims of the Holocaust. Doron held Shoshana’s hand as they walked from the parking lot and entered the Avenue of the Righteous, the treelined walk leading to the museum. “Those are carob trees,” he explained. “Each one has a plaque with the name of a gentile that helped our people during the Holocaust. Many of them were killed by the Nazis.”

  Shoshana gave her uncle’s hand a squeeze. “I know. We studied this in school and I remember from the last time I was here.” She was trying to act grown up and responsible now. They joined the line of people filing into the museum, into the first hall where photographs chronicled the twelve horrible years from Hitler’s rise to power to the final cataclysmic days of 1945.

  “One of the ironies of history,” Doron explained to the girl, “is that Franklin Delano Roosevelt was President of the United States when Hitler ruled Germany. One history will remember as a great man and the other as an evil genius. It’s as though they were fated to oppose each other. Both came to power in 1933 and both died in 1945.”

  But it was the art museum that drew Shoshana and she sought out the sketch of the hollowed-eyed children that had been smuggled out of Theresienstadt, the Czech ghetto the Nazis had created as a showplace concentration camp. For a few minutes, she stood transfixed before she let her uncle lead her away. “Why did they have to die?” she asked him.

  “Because many people, good people, did not believe such a thing could happen. No one stopped Hitler when they could. Then it was too late.” It was the best answer he could give a twelve-year-old. The reality was so complicated that even he was unsure of the full truth.

  They joined another line in the courtyard and entered the Hall of Remembrance, the heavy, brooding crypt of basalt and concrete that was a memorial to the six million victims of the Holocaust. And then they were finished, back in the parking lot.

  “Well,” her uncle said. “We have plenty of time to get you two to the station to catch the train to Haifa.”

  Shoshana didn’t answer and only crawled into the backseat where she fell into a deep silence. The three adults marked it up to be one of the moods of a girl entering adolescence. They were surprised when she asked, “That’s what my father does, isn’t it?”

  “What’s that?” her grandmother replied.

  “He makes sure that it won’t happen again.” There was pride in her voice.

  “We don’t know exactly what he does,” Doron said. “But yes, he makes sure that won’t happen again. That’s why he’s gone so much.”

  “I know I won’t ever be pretty,” Shoshana announced. “But-”

  “Oh, Shoshe,” her grandmother interrupted.

  “That’s what I’m going to do … make sure it won’t happen again.”

  “Damn,” the pilot grumbled to himself. “Never seen a reading that high.” He checked the gauge again, confirming that the atmospheric sample he was collecting at seventy thousand feet contained a most disturbing amount of radiation. He duly noted the time and position on his knee pad and checked his flight plan. Time to go home. He tweaked the autopilot and banked the U-2 into a graceful turn back to the north, heading for his recovery base in Australia.

  The pilot retracted the probes and started a gentle descent, still over two hundred miles out. He scanned the horizon in front of him, looking for a cloud to fly through. He wanted to do a little impromptu decontamination while airborne, but he would still call for a decon procedure after he landed. He groaned. That meant at least another twenty minutes before he could crawl out of the cramped cockpit. Well, he decided, the spooks were right about this one; that bright flash a satellite had recorded the day before was a nuclear test. Who in the hell was testing nukes in the South Atlantic? he wondered. The intelligence briefing he had received prior to takeoff hadn’t covered that.

  “So much of this is little more than inspired guessing,” Tamir said, still not satisfied with his latest analysis. He threw the results of the latest computer run onto the neat piles of printouts in front of him and walked over to a porthole. The sea was still calm twenty-four hours after the test but he could see fresh clouds piling up on the western horizon. Another storm was coming through and it was time they returned to port.

  “No more than twenty kilotons at the most,” Van Dagens said. “The force of the detonation exceeded our expectations by a factor of one point three.”

  “It was bigger than that, Harm,” Tamir said, turning away from the porthole. “At least twenty-two kilotons, maybe twenty-three.”

  “So we learn,” Van Dagens snorted.

  “What have we created?” Tamir asked, not really expecting a reply.

  “Only what is necessary if we are to keep our peoples safe,” Van Dagens told him. He had agonized over the same question himself and reached his own answer.

  “I want to believe that you’re right and this is a firebreak we need.”

  “A firebreak?” Van Dagens puzzled. He had never thought of their work in terms of a firebreak before.

  Tamir’s brown eyes sought out the framed photograph of Shoshana, his twelve-year-old daughter, that stood in the corner of his desk. “An man-made barrier that conta
ins a fire and keeps it from spreading and becoming much bigger, maybe uncontrollable.” He paused, thinking. “This is a firebreak the Arabs won’t cross.”

  1

  Gad Habish joined the crowd hurrying to work and pushed into the building with them. There was nothing to distinguish Habish from those around him; five feet eight inches tall, thinning brown hair, brown eyes, slightly overweight, a family man concerned about his kids and paying the bills. He was just another faceless bureaucrat entering another government building in the heart of Tel Aviv. Since he was only going to the second floor, he took the stairs, turned right down the corridor, and walked briskly to the end office. Once inside, the secretary sent him through another door with a smile of recognition. But that door did not lead to an office but to a steep stairwell that descended into the basement.

  The stairs, the sequence of heavy doors at the bottom, and rigidly controlled access into the basement were the first signs that Gad Habish was not just another paper-pushing bureaucrat. Habish worked for Israel’s Central Institute for Intelligence and Special Missions, the organization known to the world simply as Mossad.

  One of the secretaries was waiting for him. She nodded to the office in the rear and arched an eyebrow. The Mossad’s chief wanted to see him. Habish retrieved a thin file from a safe and ambled into the back office. The skinny, wizened gnome working at the desk did not look up and Habish sat down, waiting for his turn. The casual ways of the office were misleading, for there were strict protocols in dealing with the irascible, stubborn chief. Habish sat quietly until he was recognized.

  “Are you making progress on our problem?” the chief demanded. He was staring at an expense account through the thick glasses perched on his prominent, red-veined nose. From the flush of the gnome’s face and the reddening of his ears, Habish judged that some agent had spent too much money on an operation. Around Mossad, the chief was nicknamed Ganef, the Yiddish word for “thief,” for the way he stole from his agents when he disallowed their expenses and made them pay out of their own pockets.

  “Some. I think this is the key.” Habish handed the man a thin folder from his file. “She’s finished her first six months of training and has been given a field-training assignment with a citrus export firm.”

  “Why is she the key?” the Ganef asked.

  Habish handed over another folder. “Because this young Iraqi male, Is’al Nassir Mana, purchases magazines filled with nude photos of her type.” The silence on the other side of the desk warned Habish to be quiet as the old man scanned the folder. Habish had never heard of Mana until the previous week when the woman running the Baghdad station for Mossad had traveled to India for a routine debrief. One of the operatives she controlled in Baghdad had stumbled onto Is’al Mana and passed his name to her. She had checked on Mana and discovered that the young man possessed three qualities Mossad might find useful. He was from a wealthy and influential family, had a degree in chemical engineering, and was responsible for developing a new chemical plant outside Kirkuk. A tornado of violence and destruction had swept through Kirkuk in the aftermath of the Kuwait war and now the Iraqi government was hiding the plant’s construction amid the rebuilding going on around it. It was all carefully documented in his case folder and included in the new operations file that Habish had opened.

  “He could be a target,” Habish explained. “He has a fixation on European women with big tits and, ah, rather classical figures.”

  “So?” The Ganef stared coldly at his most experienced operations man.

  “He’s going on a working vacation to Marbella on the Costa del Sol in Spain. He’s negotiating for petrochemical equipment the Iraqis claim they need for reconstruction. Some of it is very interesting because it could be used to make things other than insecticides. The tab is being picked up by the German chemical company WisserChemFabrik, which makes that type of machinery. Whoever gets the contract will make a very lucrative profit.”

  The Ganef studied the space above Habish’s head. “It’s amazing,” he said, “how quickly it’s back to business as normal for our Western European allies. They have learned nothing.”

  Habish agreed with his chief. Europe had easily reverted to its old habits of selling war-making machinery and techniques to Iraq once the threat to the Middle East oil had been removed and Kuwait liberated. “Well,” he ventured, his voice tinged with sarcasm, “the Iraqis did promise to never, never do it again.” The Ganef was not amused. “But,” Habish continued, “this does give us a window for an agent to make contact. We have to move fast.”

  “Why her?” The chief was now interested.

  “Besides her obvious physical qualifications, she speaks English with a slight Canadian accent. Her mother was Canadian. We can build a cover around that. Also, her psychological evaluation indicates she is capable of carrying out her assignment properly.” Habish was observing one of the more rigid protocols in the office—the Ganef had to be convinced that the right agents were assigned to a special mission. “True believers” who merely hated Arabs were unacceptable to the old man. He wanted agents who were trained to exploit, betray, seduce, and if need be, kill their target and still harbor a deep-seated aversion to what they were doing. It was his personal formula for what made a successful agent.

  “She also happens to be Avi Tamir’s daughter,” the Ganef said. “It would be difficult if she fell into the wrong hands.”

  “I don’t plan on sending her inside at this time,” Habish said. “But if she were detained by, shall we say, the correct people, that might open up some interesting opportunities for new channels.”

  “Your ‘opportunities’ are often too rushed, too dangerous.”

  “They do work if properly developed,” Habish replied.

  “Pursue it for now,” the Ganef told him. “I want to see a proposed budget.” Habish gathered up the file, rose, and left the office. He had just been made the case officer for a new operation.

  The Director Lights on the bottom of the KC-10 indicated the F-15E was in position to hook up for an in-flight refueling. But the visual cues the pilot used to maintain station told him they had to taxi forward and climb a few feet. Close, but not perfect. The boom operator had the boom in trail and extended ten feet—they were ready for contact.

  “Mike, you want this one?” the pilot, First Lieutenant Matt Pontowski, asked.

  “Rog, I got it.”

  Matt could feel his weapon systems office, Captain Mike Haney, take control of the stick. He almost chuckled at his backseater’s eagerness to fly the jet. The lieutenant liked flying with the older captain in his pit for Mike was one of the few backseaters that shared his penchant for bending rules. The Air Force was very careful about the men they selected to fly the super Eagle and known screw-offs were not allowed to even stand close. Both men knew that letting the wizzo, the unofficial name for weapon systems officer, fly the bird during an air-to-air refueling did more than just “bend” the regulations.

  “Wizzos are worse than closet queens,” Matt ragged Haney. “All you want is a chance to come out and tell the world what you really are—something respectable like a pilot.” The lieutenant relaxed into his seat; he had turned Haney into a decent pilot, able to fly the jet if anything should happen to him.

  “Air off, Matt,” Haney shot back. “I applied for pilot training, but when the Air Force found out my mother was married to my father, they made me go to navigator training.” They fell silent and Haney nudged the throttles and stick, rooting the fighter in position. The boomer on the tanker tried to fly the boom into the refueling receptacle located behind the fairing that streamlined the inboard leading edge of the left wing into the fuselage but missed. Matt hummed a few bars of “Try a Little Tenderness” over the UHF radio. On the third try, the boomer slid the nozzle down the ramp into the receptacle. It popped back out.

  “Recycle your system,” a woman’s voice commanded over the radio.

  “Shit,” Matt muttered. “Some broad getting on-the-j
ob training as a boomer.” He reached for the fuel control panel, cycled the Fuel switch from open to close to open, and scanned the receptacle door. It was open. He glanced back at the tanker. All the visual clues were perfect and Haney had kept the fighter in a tight formation. “Not our problem,” Matt grumbled.

  “Cut her some slack,” Haney said, “we all got to start some place.” This time the boomer made contact and six thousand pounds of fuel were quickly pumped into the Eagle. Haney easily compensated for the change in weight and kept the jet in position. Then they were finished and cleared off.

  “Nice goin',” Matt conceded and took control. Haney grunted and went to work, calling up the low-level part of their mission that he had loaded into the navigation computers. The map on the Tactical Situation Display (TSD) in both cockpits cycled and the electronic moving map started to scroll, showing them their position and new route. The command steering bar in the Head Up Display (HUD) in front of Matt slued to the right, showing him the new heading to the first steer point that entered them onto the route that twisted and turned through the desert and mountains of northern Arizona and Nevada.

  Matt dropped the fighter down to two hundred feet above the deck and coupled the autopilot to the Terrain-Following Radar while Haney used the mapping function of the Synthetic Aperture Radar to double-check their positions. Satisfied that the laser ring gyro in the inertial navigation system was not drifting outside acceptable limits, he hit the EMIS switch that limited their electronic emissions and went into silent running. The two men were a loose, but well-coordinated team.

  They overflew the low-level entry point and the system automatically programmed to the next steer point and, again, the command steering bar slued to a new heading. The autopilot followed and loaded the F-15 with four g’s in the turn onto its new course. Matt visually checked their position and calculated they were running three hundred meters abeam of their intended track. He glanced inside the cockpit and checked the TSD. The multicolored moving map on his center screen held them at the same position. The system was accurate.