“He didn’t turn at Gedera, he went straight through—” There was a degree of puzzlement in the metallic voice. “That leads to secondary roads, I think. Wait—” There was a pause as the agent checked his car map. “That’s right. The road splits into two secondary roads, short ones. They both end up at the Ashkelon-Latrun road.”
In his office Brodsky left his chair and was studying the wall map. The microphone on his desk picked up his voice, relaying it to the men in the pursuit car.
“It’s also the shortest road to Kiryat Gat and Beer Sheba,” he said, and added to himself, and also to Arad and Ein Tsofar. Let’s just hope that’s not where he’s heading! “We’ll be able to tell more when he comes to the Ashkelon-Latrun road. Just be careful when he hits those secondaries. Stay well back. There’ll be less traffic there.”
“Tonight? Less traffic?” said Michael in the trailing car with disbelief. “Tonight there’s traffic everywhere. Why aren’t they all home watching television, or in shul where they belong? I know, it’s Independence Day, don’t tell me.” He added, suddenly realizing to whom his remarks were being broadcast, “Sir!”
“Just stay back,” Brodsky said, unimpressed by the other’s evaluation of the traffic problem. “Don’t take the slightest chance of being seen.”
“No, sir, we won’t.” There was a pause. Then, “Hey! Take it easy! You want to run up his tailpipe?”
Brodsky stared at the speaker. “What was that supposed to mean?”
“I was talking to Ari, Colonel. He’s driving. The general must have stopped, the signal’s steady. It was getting louder; we’re stopped too, now. Maybe he’s got a flat. Maybe something’s wrong with the car. Do you want us to get closer and see?”
“And do what? Help him fix it?” Brodsky said sourly. Good God! All the signals for disaster were ringing in Brodsky’s head; it accounted for his unusually savage tone. “You stay where you are. You’re still receiving?”
“Yes, sir. Steady as a rock. He’s stopped up ahead.”
“How far from you?”
“I’d say about a mile, sir, from the strength of the signal. Say half a mile from the fork in those secondaries. He’s parked, sir.”
Brodsky studied the map with a puzzled frown. The place where Grossman had stopped was about halfway between a place called Hatzor Ashdod and a tiny village called Kfar Akim. Brodsky knew positively there was nothing of a security nature anywhere in the vicinity. So what was Grossman doing there? Maybe he really did have a flat tire; or he may simply have stopped to relieve himself. He spoke up for the benefit of the desk microphone.
“How heavy is the traffic?”
“Heavy, sir, even here and even at this hour. I never saw it so heavy. Everybody and his uncle is out tonight. I’m sure we could get a lot closer to him—”
“Stay where you are!” Brodsky was thinking furiously. “If the car doesn’t move in the next five minutes, get going again. Pass as if you were part of normal traffic. See if he’s inside. And report!”
“Yes, sir. Five—sir!”
“What?”
“The signal stopped!”
“What! Both?”
“Yes, sir.” The agent was shocked. “I switched on the auxiliary at once, sir. Both units are out.” There was a very brief pause. “Sir, do you want us to try and follow him visually?”
Brodsky stared at the speaker on his desk, his mind running through possible scenarios, even as he silently acknowledged that Grossman had led his pursuers into a spot from which it would be virtually impossible to trail him without electronic aids. They were far too distant to catch him, and there were at least six roads going in different directions he could take from within a mile or so of where he was—or, rather, from where he had been when he had managed to dismantle both of the signal broadcasters. Damn! One would think, or at least hope, that with two distinct and separate electronic systems, the man might not have discovered one!
“No,” he said slowly, “you’d be wasting your time. Come back in.”
He studied the map and then made up his mind. He had always feared the possibility that the ultimate direction of Grossman’s defection might be the material or the secret at Ein Tsofar; he remembered all too well the help that Benjamin Grossman had given in the construction of the facilities at Ein Tsofar. Certainly from the point where Grossman had last been located, a move into the direction of Ein Tsofar was very possible. If that was his destination, the man would still have almost an hour and a half driving time to reach the old kibbutz. If he were wrong and Grossman was heading someplace else—
He clicked his intercom for the night receptionist.
“Notify all checkpoints in the country,” he said, his voice expressionless. “They are to report the passage of a brown army sedan, license plate number AR 436 T. They are not to stop or interfere with the car or its driver or to indicate any interest in it; merely to report its passage and the time of its passage to this office. You will then relay any such reports to me at Ein Tsofar. Repeat.”
The receptionist dutifully repeated the instructions word for word, reading from her pad.
“Good. Now order my car,” Brodsky said, “and call the airport. I want a helicopter waiting on the pad when I get there in half an hour.”
He hung up and came to his feet heavily. The problem, of course, was that Grossman might well be taking roads where there were no checkpoints; since the 1967 war checkpoints had been sharply reduced. And a further problem was that not all checkpoints had communication equipment either to receive or to send; they were usually little shacks to which a soldier would be assigned, dropped off in a jeep and picked up in a jeep, and which was merely for the stopping of suspicious-looking cars for illegal arms or contraband—and they would scarcely find an army car driven by an army general to be suspicious.
Benjamin Grossman smiled to himself grimly as he got back in the car and stepped on the accelerator. Did the Jew Brodsky really think he was dealing with children or idiots? He had located the signal producers long before the ODESSA man had come on the scene. Good God! Did they all think they were dealing with children or idiots? All right, he had made a mistake by going to the Jew Brodsky when he first came back from Argentina; he had been exhausted. But his brain had begun to work again in a short while. He had simply put himself in Brodsky’s place. Certainly surveillance would have to be placed on a man who had met with ODESSA agents and refused to disclose what their demands had been; and it would obviously have to be the type of surveillance that would cover the condition of a car being driven at night. And that meant a bug. And if that one might be located by a suspicious general named Grossman, obviously the answer was a second bug, better concealed.
He turned into the road for Kiryat Gat, humming lightly to himself, for he was sure there were no voice pickups in the interior of the car. He had searched for them carefully, and he was sure that the man from ODESSA, whatever his name was, had done so as well. His hum faded, replaced by bile in his throat. Whoever the man from ODESSA was, he undoubtedly was the person who had handled the delivery of the explosive that had killed his Deborah. Well, once he was certain that the threat had been removed from Herzl, then he would find this man from ODESSA, whoever and wherever he might be, and he would also find Schlossberg and Mittendorf. The Jew Brodsky wanted to know how to reach these men for his purpose? Well, for once he, Benjamin Grossman, would do the work of the Jew Brodsky, and maybe even take care of the Jew Brodsky, for dessert.
And thinking of the Jew Brodsky, what would he do when his men reported that the signals had stopped, that obviously General Grossman had dismantled them? What he would do would be to instantly contact as many checkpoints as he could reach and tell them to report the passage of a brown army sedan license number AR 436 T. Would the Jew Brodsky tell them to stop that car and hold the driver? Very doubtful; the checkpoints were under the command of the army and such instructions could be overridden by a general, even one in civilian clothing. Besides, the Jew Bro
dsky would gain little by having the car stopped; no, what he would ask is that the passage and the time of passage be reported, nothing more. Grossman smiled in the dimness of the car, because it really made no difference what instruction the Jew Brodsky handed out; the roads he had selected for the first part of his journey had no checkpoints, he had determined that, and the few after that in the desert had no communication.
He grinned to himself savagely and drove on.
Brodsky’s helicopter gave the proper recognition signals, received permission to land, and settled down past the sheer cliffs to touch lightly onto the brilliantly illuminated pad. The lights were extinguished as soon as the helicopter made contact with the concrete; the rotor engines were cut and in the silence that fell the pilot could hear his instructions.
“—into the hangar with the bird, and you too. Stay out of sight,” Brodsky said, and set off at a brisk walk for the command post.
The command post was set in the rear of one of the auxiliary caves, and Brodsky could not help but recall the place when it had been a simple kibbutz, with its plain cement-block buildings, when its products were melons and figs, and when the major problem had been water, the lack of it, or Arab attacks; when its boundaries were the old fence where Grossman had so recklessly knelt with the machine gun during that battle so many years before. Now the buildings were all gone, and the people and the melons and the figs were also all gone, and where the old fence had stood was less than a quarter of the way to the new electrified fence and the new watchtowers that were manned day and night by soldiers, not settlers, and the entire area was restricted. Brodsky sighed at the necessities of defense and security, and walked into the command post.
The majority of the personnel of the Ein Tsofar facility were off duty, spared from labor by the Independence Day celebration; they were either home in one of the major cities or in Arad, thirty miles away, enjoying the celebration that was going on in every town and village in the country, no matter how large or small. A captain was on duty, the result of losing a coin toss to see who would be stuck with the duty; with him was the radioman who had accepted the helicopter’s recognition signal. He was not there as the result of a lost bet; he was there—like the sentries and the soldiers at checkpoints—because he had been ordered to be there.
The captain and his superior shook hands; the captain reseated himself, indicated a chair for his guest, and reached into a drawer for a bottle of brandy. He had always liked Colonel Brodsky, and a little conversation would be a pleasant break in the evening’s dullness, although he was surprised to be hosting the colonel. If he were not a mere captain, he would certainly not be stuck out here in the desert on a night such as this one.
Brodsky checked his watch. If his theory was correct, Grossman still had at least thirty minutes of driving to reach the facility. He sat down, accepted the drink, and sipped from it. He put his glass down.
“Were there any messages for me from my office?”
The captain paused in raising his own glass. “No, sir.”
“Ah …” Brodsky took another sip of his drink. It was possible to reach Ein Tsofar without passing any checkpoints, or at least any with communications, simply by staying with secondary roads, and Grossman would be aware that the checkpoints would be notified. He looked at the captain. “General Grossman will be coming here tonight, I believe. In half an hour or so, if I’m right. Driving.”
The captain looked surprised. “General Grossman is coming here, sir?”
“I think so.”
“Again?”
Brodsky froze. “What do you mean, again? When was he here last?”
“Just this morning, sir. He arrived by helicopter about nine o’clock. He made a brief inspection by himself, just walked through the facility—briefer than usual, but of course no one is working today—and then he left. You say he’s coming back, sir?”
Brodsky’s hand flew to the telephone, and then stopped. Who was he going to call? Any message from any checkpoint would be relayed to him, and tying up the line with pointless calls, especially when he had no idea of who to call, was fatuous. Grossman had gone to his office in his usual manner, had undoubtedly simply told his secretary he did not want to be disturbed for either visitors or phone calls for several hours, had then walked into his office and locked the door, gone out the other door, down the back stairs to the street, and taken a cab to the airport. All very simple. And his men were glued to the car in the garage all the while. Great work!
“No,” he said. “I was mistaken. I doubt very much the general will be coming back.”
He reached for the brandy bottle and refilled his glass. As long as he had to await word from his office, he might as well use the time to get drunk. There was a very good chance he had just seen his future go down the drain, and worse, there was a good chance that the country’s security had been compromised. And then Max Brodsky had a second thought, one he wondered had not occurred to him before, and he pushed the brandy bottle away, reaching for the telephone instead, speaking to the captain as he raised the receiver.
“Have my helicopter brought out and kept ready for instant departure.”
He brought the receiver to his ear and clicked for the operator. There was a call that just might do the trick.
Trailing a car at night, Herzl discovered, was far from an easy job, especially if one was to be careful and keep two or three other cars in between in order not to be identified. It required constant concentration, but even then Herzl had time to wonder that no other car, as far as he could determine, seemed in the least interested in the movements of the man he knew to be Colonel Helmut von Schraeder. Cars between his little sports model and the general’s large sedan would pass the general’s automobile to disappear into the night, to be replaced by other cars that first passed him and then passed the general’s car, for the general seemed to be driving unusually slowly for a man with a temperament of Benjamin Grossman. Well, if nobody was interested in where von Schraeder was going, then he, Herzl, would follow him all night, if necessary. Gasoline was no problem, fortunately; one tankful in his little sports bug could take him from one end of the small country to the other.
He suddenly found himself without an intermediary car and he slowed down precipitously, just as the general’s sedan pulled to the shoulder of the road, and he saw his father get down and bend over as if inspecting the front tire. He flashed past, relieved not to have been seen, drove down the highway a bit and pulled off into a narrow trail leading into the dunes. Had something happened to the other car? He backed around with difficulty in the narrow space, cut his headlights and waited, the engine of the small sports car panting as if anxious to take up the chase again. Herzl wondered if perhaps he had been detected or, even if he had not, if the maneuver were merely a move to do precisely what it had done—put a potential pursuer up some trail waiting while the other car turned and went off in another direction. But before he could worry about this possibility very long the brown sedan swept past his hiding place, no longer at such a leisurely pace, and he barely made it back to the highway in time to see the taillights of the other car disappearing in the distance. From then on it took all his attention and driving skills on the narrow, winding road to just keep up with the car ahead.
Traffic thinned considerably as they passed Kiryat Gat on the road to Beer Sheba. Herzl was now positive there was no surveillance at all on the other man, for now there were no other cars in sight for long distances, either ahead of them or behind them. He realized that in time the man in the car ahead would know he was being followed, but other than keeping the car in sight, he knew of no way to discover where the man was going. But even though the man might eventually suspect he was being followed, there would be no way he could determine he was being followed by his son.
An occasional Egged bus, loaded with passengers, would roar past him and he could see it ahead cutting around the brown sedan; otherwise they seemed to be alone on the road. Where could the man possib
ly be going? There was nothing ahead except desert. And why was von Schraeder being permitted to move about so freely? Herzl was very glad now that he had resisted the temptation to call Max Brodsky; certainly there had to be something very suspicious in the way Brodsky was acting—or, rather, not acting.
At Beer Sheba the streets were bright with streetlamps and he had to drop back, but at least both cars had to move slowly through the people that moved about on the main street, bottles in hand, celebrating. The brown sedan took the road to Dimona, and as they passed that little village, also alive with music and dancing, Herzl knew he could not continue to trail the other man without being discovered, for now, other than an occasional Egged bus no other traffic was to be seen. When the car ahead passed the cutoff to the old road leading down the mountain, Herzl made up his mind. He had to take the chance that the man ahead was going to Eilat; there was nothing on the road before that point. With the extra speed of his small car he could get there first, but it meant taking the old road down what was known as the Scorpion’s Ascent, coming into the Eilat road at the small settlement of Hatzeva Ir Ovot. With a shudder at the thought of the road ahead, he swung into the old road, hoping he was not making a terrible mistake. The taillights of the other car disappeared into the night.
For approximately ten miles the road was paved; then he turned into the trail leading to the Scorpion’s Ascent, his wheels spurting sand, trying to concentrate on the road immediately before him and not on the torturous decline he would soon meet. He had come here with a group of friends one summer vacation in a jeep, and he remembered the frightful descent at a creeping pace; now he intended to take it as fast as he could without sliding from one of the precipitous cliffs into the jagged chasms that lined the snaking road.
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