There was a crackle as the radio suddenly came to life. Ben-Levi leaned forward eagerly, listening to the low voice speaking to him in Iraqi.
“Davi—sorry we’re late. There was a roadblock at Yavneh; we had to go around. We should be there in fifteen, twenty minutes. Wait for us to arrive before disembarking.”
“Don’t worry. We—”
Ben-Levi stopped speaking abruptly. A dazzling light had suddenly pierced the fog, enveloping the Ruth, glaring into the wheelhouse, blinding him. A voice boomed out of the night, distorted by a handheld speaker, speaking in English.
“You! Whatever ship you are! Stand by to be boarded! This is a British patrol vessel!” There was a brief pause; then a different voice, a younger less-assured voice, was trying to repeat the same message, only this time in halting Iraqi. “You! Whoever ship you were! Stand up to be landed upon! This is a British patrol—” Wolfson struggled with the word for vessel and ended weakly, “—car!”
Those on the Ruth could now see the patrol vessel moving slowly out of the bank of fog, a silver ghost, edging closer, maneuvering for position to run alongside the stalled trawler. Movement on the Ruth had stopped; the shock of their discovery was too great for immediate reaction. Then Max Brodsky was in the wheelhouse, wrenching the microphone from Davi’s hand, looking down at the man at the radio.
“Who were you speaking to?”
“His name is Yakov Mendel. Why?”
“I know him. Thank God it’s him!” Brodsky spoke rapidly into the microphone, speaking Polish. “Yakov, this is Max Brodsky. We’ve been stopped by a patrol boat—”
The other answered in Polish. “Can you outrun them?”
“Not a chance. Wait—!”
Ben Grossman came running into the wheelhouse and snatched a rifle from the gun rack. Grossman had no intention of being interned in a British camp at Cyprus or anywhere else at this stage of the game. He smashed the rifle butt through the new glass in the wheelhouse window, raised the rifle, and fired. At his side Cellotti groaned.
“You missed!”
“I didn’t miss,” Grossman said grimly as he pumped the bolt action of the ancient weapon. “That was their radar. Now for the light!” He aimed and fired again; over the crack of the rifle came the explosion as the huge vapor-filled bulb disintegrated. Darkness covered them. Even as he heard a curse from the patrol boat’s bullhorn, Cellotti was pressing forward on the accelerator; the diesel responded instantly, roaring, the burble of its exhausts roiling the waters. Brodsky went back to the microphone, grinning triumphantly.
“We shot out their spotlight! We’re running!”
“They have radar—”
“Not anymore!”
“Good.” There was a pause. “Why the Polish?”
“Someone on that patrol boat understands Iraqi. Let’s hope they don’t speak Polish—”
His voice was interrupted by a loud boom as the Bofors 40-mm gun on the prow of the Portland-3 opened fire in their general direction. On the bridge of the patrol ship, Naval Lieutenant Mullins was fuming; in over two years of duty he had never had to fill out a form asking for as much as having a scratch on his ship repainted, and here some miserable bastard had not only ruined a perfectly good spotlight, but was continuing to shoot in their direction. Well, he would teach those bloody bastards a lesson!
“Fire! Fire! Fire!” he screamed into the handset.
And Jonathon Martingale fired as rapidly as he could, although he had no idea where the ship was he was firing at. If he could have stopped firing for a few seconds he might have been able to get some idea of where his target was by their engine noise, but with the old man with a hair across his arse, he had no intention of being scientific about it. He simply fired blindly.
On the Ruth, Ben Grossman had left the wheelhouse; it was too crowded. On deck he was quickly joined by Wolf and the others, all armed with weapons from the gun rack. They knelt at the rail, firing back at the patrol ship, aiming at the flash of the Bofors. They could hear the whistle of the Bofors shells as they passed near the ship to explode harmlessly in the sea. Cellotti swung the wheel hard, heading the ship west, away from the shore. Brodsky crouched in the wheelhouse, speaking into the microphone.
“They’re firing at us blind. Maybe we can get away, at that.”
“Good. Head for Tel Aviv. Beach her—”
“Tel Aviv?” It seemed like an insane place to head for; Tel Aviv was the center of British activity in central coastal Palestine; they had to have many troops there. It was also a large city; surely some deserted beach would be better? Haifa, of course, was too far away—but Tel Aviv?
“Tel Aviv!” Yakov said coldly. “Don’t argue. Run the ship ashore as near the foot of Ben Gurion Boulevard as possible, onto Orange Beach. Do you know it?”
“I know it,” Brodsky said desperately, “but in the dark—”
“It won’t be dark. It’s a big city, for God’s sake, and it never sleeps!”
“But if there are people—”
“I said, don’t argue! We’ll be there. Just you be there—”
There was a deafening crash as a shell from the Bofors plowed through the wheelhouse. It killed Davi Ben-Levi instantly before crashing through the deck into the crowded hold below. The shrieks rose in anguished intensity; the men on deck stopped their firing and stared at the hole in the deck apprehensively.
“It didn’t explode …!”
“They moved back from the hole in the deck fearfully; then Wolf went toward the companion way.
“We have to look,” he said simply and started down. Grossman followed. The shell had killed a woman and a young boy, and had then lodged itself in the hull of the ship without detonating. Pincus was bending over the two dead bodies, flashing a flashlight over the shattered corpses, making sure there was nothing to be done. Water was seeping from the edges of the shell, starting to fill the bilges; the bilge pumps sprang into action automatically. The whimpering and screaming increased as Grossman’s flashlight studied the leakage.
“We’ll drown!”
Grossman swung around savagely. “Shut up! Shut up! You’re louder than the engine and that’s loud enough. The British won’t need their radar; they’ll be able to hear us miles away with all your screeching! Shut up!”
The noise slowly abated; people shrank back into their bunks as far as they could from the crushed bodies lying on the deck of the cabin. Pincus covered them with blankets, muttering a prayer as he did so. Grossman swung his flashlight from the wedged shell to Wolf’s pale face.
Wolf shrugged. “We can’t move it, that’s for sure. It might explode.”
“We couldn’t move it anyway; it’s a plug. If we took it out, we’d sink.”
Wolf shook his head disconsolately and attempted a weak smile.
“This is the last cruise I take,” he said. “They can advertise all they want.”
Grossman smiled. “Not even for the food?”
Wolf smiled back at him, a small sour smile. He swished his foot around in the water that was beginning to overtake the efforts of the bilge pumps, washing in little waves over the cabin deck.
“Not even for the swimming pool,” he said, and started back to the deck above.
On the bridge of the Portland-3, commander of the ship Lieutenant Mullins was having a fit. He was bellowing into his handset; at the other end of the connection Seaman-First John Wilburson was wishing he had gone into the submarine service where the worst thing that could happen was not to come to the surface. How did a vicious blithering maniac like Mullins ever make command when he couldn’t understand simple English?
“I said, we have no radar, sir.”
“What do you mean, we have no radar?”
“I mean, someone from that ship shot out our scanner, sir. The radar is not in functioning order, sir.”
“Or you don’t know how to work the bloody thing!” Mullins said angrily. “I knew it was a useless bit of bumph when they installed the bloody thing!�
�� He hung up with a curse and turned to Seaman-Second Wolfson at his side, listening desperately to the conversation being picked up by Enderly in the radio shack and piped to the bridge. “Well? Well? What are they saying?”
“I don’t know, sir. They—they’re not speaking Iraqi any longer …”
“Well, what in bloody hell are they speaking?”
“I—I don’t know, sir. It sounds eastern European, but I don’t know …”
“What kind of a bloody linguist are you, anyway? What are you doing on this ship?”
“I—I was majoring in Mid-East languages at London University when I quit to join the navy, sir.” Wolfson swallowed. “On this ship I’m—I’m the cook’s assistant, sir …”
“Good God!” Mullins stared. “Well, go make some coffee, then. Try to bring it back without spilling it if you can.”
He shook his head in disgust as Wolfson made his escape, and returned to staring from the bridge into the night. At the prow the Bofors continued to blast the fog, but Mullins had a cold feeling it was all in vain. The intruding ship was lost. Lost! What a black mark on his record! Could he swear the men to silence, pretend they never ran across the ship at all, give them shore leave more frequently as a bribe? Not very likely; his men were probably not as fond of him as they should be; and besides, there was the smashed spotlight to explain, and, if Wilburson was correct, a smashed radar scanner as well.
He sighed, picked up the handset, and instructed Martingale to cease his bloody useless waste of ammunition; he then instructed Chief Enderly to report the incident and advise all beach patrols and other patrol ships in the area of the presence of the intruder. He then advised the man beside him on the bridge to return to Yafo and the base, and tramped back to his cabin. Maybe when they got back Mustafa would have a girl who enjoyed being beaten—or who did not enjoy being beaten. That might even be better. He was just in the mood.
In Tel Aviv the Mossad was putting into effect an audacious scheme they had long since developed for just such a critical situation as faced the Ruth at the moment. The ship, Brodsky had informed them, had been badly damaged; Davi Ben-Levi, a woman, and a boy had been killed by a wildly fired shell from the patrol boat. They had escaped, at least for the time being, but water was rising in the cabin and morale was low. They would do their best to reach Tel Aviv and Orange Beach, but that was the absolute maximum distance their captain calculated they could hope to sail in their precarious condition. Yakov recalled the trucks and then put into effect the alternate plan for saving the people on the Ruth.
Each member of the Mossad had long since been assigned ten telephone numbers to call in just such an emergency, and each of these ten also had a list of ten numbers, as did the last ten. Thus, even with the limited telephone facilities of Tel Aviv at the time, there would be no duplication of calls, and a minimum of ringing busy numbers; and within thirty minutes over a thousand members of the Haganah were on their way to Orange Beach by tram, by car, by bus, or walking. They came from as near as Arlozoroff Street to as far away as such suburbs as Bat Yam and Petah Tikvah, from Ramat Gan, from Ramat Hasharon and Bnei Berak, from all corners of the sprawling, growing city.
They came in colorful clothes, as if to celebrate, carrying picnic baskets which, though hastily packed, contained boiled eggs and pickles and fruits and cakes; they came with guitars and violins, with mandolins and balalaikas; they came with sticks and other kindling, with small logs and paper for beach fires. They came equipped for a beach party on a grand scale. And they also came with surfboards and small, tightly packed inflatable boats, and swimming suits to enjoy the water. And some of them also came, under their fruits and cakes and napkins and their bathing suits in their wicker baskets, with guns.
The two British soldiers patrolling along Hayarkon Street, shook their heads, partly in admiration, partly in wonder.
“Crazy people,” said one, watching the fires being kindled all along the beach, watching a group nearest the road start to build sand castles at regular intervals, watching the baskets being unpacked, the musical instruments being tuned. “A picnic at this hour. I wonder what they’re celebrating now?”
“These Jew holidays always start at night,” said the other out of his greater knowledge. “Anyway, who cares what they’re celebrating? They’re having fun. I envy them.”
“At one o’clock in the morning?”
“At any hour,” the second said, and shifted his submachine gun to prevent the strap from biting into his shoulder.
They paused in their patrol to listen to the music rising from the various groups, watched the girls alternate with the boys as they began to dance the hora around several of the many fires. The water of the warm Mediterranean splashed in the distance as young men paddled out strongly on their surfboards, drifting farther and farther out, accompanied by laughing men and women hanging onto the sides of inflatable boats.
“They got it made, them Jews,” the first one said enviously, and the two resumed their march along the edge of the beach area, sweating in their heavy uniforms.
In approximately the center of the beach, well hidden by the group around him, Yakov bent over the huge picnic basket that concealed his battery-operated two-way radio. He appeared to be selecting a sandwich.
“How are you doing?”
“Well, we’re still on top of the water, although the boat is getting sluggish,” Brodsky said. He was seated on the deck inside the wheelhouse, staring dully at the blood of Davi Ben-Levi coagulating a few feet from him. Davi’s body had been taken outside to join those of the woman and boy on the deck, out of the way of any possible action, covered but not forgotten. “We have to be careful. The fog is lifting.”
“Where are you?”
“You mean you can’t see us? I feel as if every eye in Palestine is trained on us, every shore battery waiting to fire—”
“Max! Where are you?”
“Sorry. I guess I’m tired. We can see Yafo ahead. Cellotti thinks we’re maybe two miles out.”
“You should be angling in pretty soon. We’re not all that far from Yafo, maybe two or three miles at the most. Can’t you spot us, yet?”
“We can see the lights of the city, of course—”
“No. I mean our beach fires.”
“No. Wait, let me get a glass.” There was a pause. “A bunch of fires along the beach?”
“That’s us.” Yakov winked at the others around the fire. “They see us.” He returned to his microphone. “We’re having a picnic. Come join us.”
“If they’re coming to join us, tell them to bring their own food,” someone said. “These sandwiches are awful!”
“My husband,” a girl said, and laughed.
Yakov switched off the set, tucked the microphone into the basket beside the set, and covered the equipment with a beach blanket. He turned and stared out to sea, a swarthy man in his late twenties, with a muscular, hairy body in brief swimming trunks.
“Pretty soon, now …”
He made a motion to the musicians around his particular fire; they stopped what they were playing and broke into a loud, wild Gypsy melody; at the other fires the music stopped slowly as the Gypsy tune was noted, then the other groups also took it up. The men at the sand castles along the edge of the beach beside the road dug in a little deeper, putting their hands on the butts of their guns inside, under the napkins. The boats and the surfboards paddled a few feet farther into the sea and then spread out a bit to cover the greatest area.
From the deck of the trawler approaching the beach under the noise of the music, it seemed the fires there had to illuminate them, to expose them to the view of anyone not totally blind, but on the contrary the fires made it difficult for anyone on shore to see beyond their glow. The ship, in fact, was within a few hundred feet of the shore with the swimmers and the inflatable boats approaching it from every side before one of the patrolling soldiers noted it, and even then he wasn’t positive at first. He tapped his companion on the shoulder.
“Do you see what I see?”
“What?”
“Is that a ship …?” Suddenly the entire beach party made sense. He fumbled for his whistle. “It’s that ship we had a flash about, the one that got away outside Ashdod. What bloody goddamn nerve, bringing it into Tel Aviv right under our noses!”
He blew on his whistle with all his lung power; his companion joined in. A jeep pulled up in seconds; the soldier leaned in, speaking rapidly, pointing. The officer inside the jeep stared incredulously out to sea, unable to believe at first that these people could have been so foolhardy as to attempt landing an illegal ship in the center of the largest coastal city in Palestine; they never had before. But even as he rationalized the lack of reason on the part of the Jews, he knew what he was seeing, and his hand was reaching swiftly for his radio microphone.
People were swarming from the Ruth, dropping over the sides into the inflatable boats, being lowered into the water to grab at one of the many surfboards and clinging to them, four or five to a board, as the Mossad sea scouts guided them toward the shore. Those who could swim plowed through the water, heading for the beach, clambering through the surf when they were close enough, some falling to their knees to kiss the sand before being taken in hand and hustled off in the darkness.
The first army truck pulled up when the ship was almost totally abandoned; soldiers piled down, rifles in hand, and ran for the beach, but the bonfires there had by now been extinguished with sand and water, and the beach was a jumble of unidentified bodies moving about in the dark. The soldiers dashed into the crowd, trying to grab anyone they could, only to have their grip torn loose by more and rougher hands. The men at the sand castles had their guns in their hands but they held their fire, hoping the British would have enough sense to do the same. A second truck roared up, spewing soldiers as it slowed down; they joined the mob on the beach, adding to the confusion. Orders were being screamed through bullhorns by officers; countermanding orders were being shouted back by those bathers who spoke English. It was bedlam, and in that bedlam the illegal passengers of the good ship Ruth were being led away by the picnickers as hurriedly as possible.
Pursuit Page 22
