Promised Land

by Martin Fletcher

  Day one passed, warplanes flew high overhead, they heard distant booms, and news filtered through, over Israel radio and military comms, from passing drivers. Israeli paratroopers had landed at the Mitla Pass, deep inside Egypt, only forty-five miles from the Suez Canal. But they had advanced too far and were caught in vicious fighting with Egyptian commandoes. Other paratrooper and tank units were dashing to link up with them.

  Day two and still they had no order to move, even as Israeli troops were reported to be sweeping through the Sinai in a rout of Egyptian forces. The BBC claimed Israeli soldiers had murdered fifty civilians on the Jordan border, in a place called Kfar Kassem. What was that all about?

  Day three and still they sweltered by their tanks. They took dumps in the prickly pears. Maybe it’ll be all over and they could go home safe and sound. All they did was gossip, doze, and suffer the ramblings of their minds.

  You have to hate the enemy or how else can you kill them? Arie wondered again. Or do you kill them just so they won’t kill you? Kill or be killed? In the ring he’d as good as beaten Jews to death. He didn’t hate them. The opposite, he … but no, he stopped himself. He refused to think of it. He didn’t hate the Arabs, he didn’t know any. The workers came and went, Suleiman made the coffee, strong Turkish with cardamom, but he didn’t even know his family name. Abu Shmabu? They were invisible. It can’t be right, Arie thought. When he gets back he must make friends with some. After all, it’s their country too. Well, not really, not in the same way. It’s a Jewish state. Our refuge.

  Not like the Nazis, them he knew. Them he had the right to hate. As quickly as images of the huts, the lice, the freezing cold, the whips, and the boots came to him, he expelled them from his mind. Gone. Done. For every Jew he fought in the ring, he wished with all his soul he could have killed a hundred of those jeering, evil, stinking SS guards clapping their hands and stamping their feet. Even the terror at Latrun, fighting for Israel’s independence in ’48, seemed like paradise after the camps. At least he had a gun, even if he ran out of bullets after an hour. But there was always another magazine lying around, there were so many corpses.

  The others said when they first went into battle they felt they could never be killed. Him—he felt like he had come back from the dead.

  What a horror show his life had been. Peter didn’t have any of that. Lucky him. He’d gotten away, all he knew was how to be on the winning side. It’s easy for him to be holier than thou. Sanctimonious son of a bitch. I know about him and Tamara. I’m not stupid.

  He opened his fly and pissed on a cactus, watched the pee hit the green plant and slide yellow to the ground. He needed to drink more. Easy to dehydrate, with all this waiting around.

  They slept in the sand by their tanks. He closed his eyes and sent love to Carmel and Daniel. He clenched his fists and looked skyward, as if in prayer, but for him, even now, there was no such thing. A bit late for that, after Auschwitz and the death march and the poverty when he arrived in Palestine and then three days of training and the rifle stuck in his hand and the order to go fight. He’d made two good friends, both had also survived the camps, only to die next to him at Latrun. That’s when he swore to himself, over their bodies, that this too, he would survive, and nothing would stand in his way, he would stop at nothing to reach the top. The top? Of what? The shit pile? Because that’s what it is.

  Suddenly the comms went crazy. Booms and crashes of mortars and shells began, close, maybe two miles way. Some from the sea, more from land, the clattering of small-arms fire, like popcorn; what? Half a mile away? And heavy guns too, about a mile, like thunderclaps, their booms rumbled across the desert. But still no order to move. Hours went by, with crackling radio reports that the recon guys were bogged down. Egyptian resistance was fierce from heavily fortified ditches and bunkers. A half-track full of infantry, ours, blew up in a minefield, the fire like a beacon attracted more Egyptian artillery. What happened to the promise the Arabs would collapse and run away? We have dead and wounded. The war had arrived.

  And then, the order. The field came alive with men springing like grasshoppers onto their tanks. Whoops of encouragement, war cries, a roar of engines, and Arie felt his mouth go dry, his heart thump like a drum, as he called to his crew and they fell into line, the fourth tank in a convoy of thirteen.

  Oh, Tamara, forgive me, I have been bad, I will love only you. He looked up again. Oh, whoever you are, whatever you are, let me go home to my wife and children. Please.

  Please.

  * * *

  With Arie fighting in the tanks, Peter and Diana deep in their secret world, and Moshe working round the clock at the newspaper, it was left to Tamara and Rachel to gather all the children into Tamara’s spacious home.

  Like all the country, they listened to Voice of Israel every minute. Colonel Ariel Sharon’s paratroopers had broken the Egyptian defenses at Mitla, but with significant Israeli casualties. An armored brigade had fought all the way down the Red Sea to Sharm el-Sheikh at the tip of Sinai. But most baffling, Britain and France had joined the battle. They were shelling Egyptian forces near Rafah, their planes were bombing military targets in Cairo, and thousands of their soldiers were fighting along the Suez Canal. They were helping Israel. The Egyptian army was on the run everywhere—everywhere except Rafah, where there was heavy fighting.

  Tamara gripped Rachel’s hand. “That’s where Arie is,” she said, her voice trembling. “Where is Daddy?” Daniel asked. He’d be six in three days, too old to deceive. “In the war,” Tamara said, as calmly as she could. Daniel pouted. “I feel sorry for those bad people from Egypt, then.” He kicked the sofa and went to sit cross-legged by the window, staring outside. He didn’t stir. The sun fell on his hands, which rested on his bare knees. Twenty minutes later his face was in shadow.

  “Come and play,” Carmel said.

  “No. Not till Daddy comes home.”

  * * *

  Sixty miles south of Daniel’s lookout post, the Queen of Sheba crashed over the debris of an already demolished house and powered through a burning construction yard. The tank behind Arie’s poured machine-gun fire into the upper floors of the homes they passed. Mechanized infantry swept through the streets as barefoot and bare-chested Egyptian soldiers fled the battlefield and hid among the houses.

  At the edge of the city, the tank column’s rapid progress was slowed by volleys of machine-gun bullets that crashed into them. The tank in front stopped dead, to fire a shell at the Egyptian gun position in the lee of a hill. A burst of flame, a rolling ball of black smoke, silence from the hill. Arie passed the hulk of a burning half-track with a charred corpse hanging over the side and, yards away, two more bodies smoldering on the ground. Bitter bile rose to Arie’s throat, he suppressed a vomit: Israeli dead. The rattling of automatic fire made him duck into the tank, he saw paint chips flying where bullets hit. He reemerged just as a hand grenade dropped by the loader’s hatch, he swatted it away, ducked, and felt the tank shake as the treads absorbed the blast. Would the treads survive? They did, and the Queen sped on.

  More rounds clanged into the tank, Arie felt a surge of love for the old warhorse. He shouldn’t have called the tank a smelly firetrap, it was more like a mobile bomb shelter. Everything the enemy was throwing at them just bounced off, even with its thin armor.

  They left Rafah and entered the wider terrain of the sand dunes, better for tanks. Arie peered through his binoculars, half-exposed in his turret, searching for targets, but found none. It appeared all the Egyptians had fled. The line of tanks had become ragged, pressing on to the brigade rendezvous in the dunes north of El Arish. So far, so good. His luck was holding.

  And then it all went to shit.

  Earlier, a grenade or a lucky bullet had severed the tank’s radio antenna, and they had lost comms. They’d been down to visual contact, following clouds of dust, and were falling behind. They were losing more time at a clump of bushes and fallen trees that concealed a gully. Now they were stuck. The tank�
��s front end pointed down into a sandy ditch that gave no purchase, the back end whirled wildly on loose undergrowth. The tank couldn’t gain traction, the treads spun uselessly. From the turret, Arie struggled to aim his half-inch machine gun, but with the tank bucking and rolling like a wild horse as the driver revved and braked, forward and reverse, frantic to escape the desert’s grip, he could barely hold on to the heavy barrel. It pointed at the sky and at the ground and every which way except the one that mattered.

  Two low silhouettes had popped up on the sand dune, and all Arie’s nerves focused on the barrel they were aiming, an antitank rocket, steady as the evil eye. Fifty yards. He felt his skin shrink, as if his bones were suddenly too big. He was a sitting duck. “Down!” he yelled, throwing himself into the tank. “Down!” But there was nowhere to go. At that instant the back end found traction and propelled the front up and out of the ditch and the tank righted itself, treads spinning, and roared away.

  Too late.

  The rocket shot out from a ball of flame and smoke. Its impact was horrendous. It was like a rock fell from a hundred feet on one end of a tin can. The tank was lifted half off the ground and settled again with a crash, hurtling everyone into the metal walls, while shock waves doubled the damage. Hooks, bolts, boxes, and jagged corners smashed into flesh, bone, and skull. The stench of gunpowder, scorched fuel, and blood settled over them. The tank’s nickname flashed through Arie’s mind: Ronson, because it burned like a lighter. Every inch of Arie was trembling, but mostly he noticed, after the bedlam, the silence. “Dudu?” he said at last. “Itamar?”

  “Anyone?”

  He wanted to cry. He tapped his body, felt his legs, his balls, his head, and looked at his hands. They were red with blood. From where? He flexed his limbs. Everything worked. The heat was unbearable. Were they burning? Out, out, Fast. The ammo will explode. He pushed against the turret, and air rushed in.

  A hand tugged at his foot. Arie leaned down and pulled. “No, don’t,” Dudu cried, “my leg, it’s stuck.”

  “Itamar,” Arie cried, “Itamar.” There was no answer. He sucked in air to call out for the rest of his crew but in his panic couldn’t remember their names. There was blood in his mouth, he spat it out. “Dudu, quick, out, before we blow.”

  “I can’t, I’m stuck.” Dudu was sobbing. “You go.” Blood was streaming from his head and his neck. “Mummy,” he cried, “Oh, it hurts.”

  Arie dropped to the floor, feeling for Dudu’s leg, his foot. The electricity was gone, it was dark, a sharp beam of bright daylight lit up one corner, by it there was a head half severed from its body. The loader. What the hell’s his name? Arie pulled at Dudu’s foot and Dudu screamed. It was jammed beneath a steel box, the foot somehow pointing the wrong way behind the metal seat. They smelled escaping fuel and the bitter fumes of fire. He only had moments to get Dudu out. And to save himself. Arie used his knife as a lever but it was too small. He grabbed a rifle and used the butt to lever the box off Dudu’s foot. “Now, pull!” he shouted, but Dudu didn’t budge, he was in shock. “Pull!” Arie screamed and stabbed Dudu’s leg with his knife. Dudu shrieked, “You crazy bastard!” and jerked and his foot was free. The box fell to the floor, and with one movement Arie was above Dudu, his head outside, pulling him with all his might until they both collapsed onto the top of the tank, in the fresh air.

  Bullets whizzed and clanged around them, Arie pushed Dudu over the side of the tank and jumped onto the ground beside him, sheltered from the shooters. Facing them was flat, open ground until a low ridge about thirty yards away. Dudu had fallen badly, he must have knocked his face on the way down, his nose was broken. He was spitting blood and panting. Incredibly, he winked. “If you ever … have … a problem … with a parking … ticket,” he managed through bloody mucus, “let me know.”

  “Yes, corporal.” Arie leaned back against the tank, his heart thumping. They were alone, no comms, just them and, on the other side of the tank, two Egyptians with a rocket launcher and a machine gun. Were there more? Who knew? He’d soon find out, and not in a good way. He felt himself all over. Blood from his ear, and above the eye. Otherwise, good to go. Those bastard Arabs.

  I’m not done with them, he thought. Oh, no.

  “I’m going to get them,” he said to Dudu. “If I don’t, they’ll get us. And we don’t want that, now, do we?” He unlatched a kit bag strapped to the side of the tank and took out his Sten gun and three hand grenades. His pistol was still in his belt holster.

  Dudu winked again, his eyes slowly closed, and his head fell back.

  Suddenly Arie remembered the ammo. He grabbed Dudu under the arms and pulled him backward, leaving two deep grooves in the sand from his heels, keeping the tank between them and the enemy, until he stumbled onto his back behind the raised ground. He lay Dudu on his side, keeping the hole in his head out of the sand. Dudu was pale and sweating, unconscious but breathing. Arie stuffed a bandage into the wound to stem the blood and taped it in place. There was nothing more he could do for him except pray they’d soon be found.

  Now Arie began to crawl, pushing with his feet, belly to the sand, weapon up. He knew the Egyptians wouldn’t approach the tank until it blew up, and until then they couldn’t know if anybody had survived the rocket and the shooting, even if they’d seen him fall out of the turret. He stayed low, behind the ridge, crawling as long as it hid him. If there were more of them, he was sunk, but if he had stayed where he was, he’d be sunk anyway. He kept crawling, waiting for the tank to explode. But there were no flames, it just sat alone in the desert, a useless smoking iron heap.

  The farther he crawled the more the undulating dunes hid him. It was clear now the two Egyptians were alone. They must have got lost or fallen behind, just like him. But instead of fleeing they had stayed to fight. He had flanked them now and, staying low to the ground, sand caking his sweaty face, panting, he wriggled toward them, from their rear.

  He had plenty of time to think of Tamara, and the twins, and Auschwitz, and whatever, but he didn’t. He felt nothing, saw nothing, heard nothing, thought of nothing. It was like he was crawling through a silent narrowing tunnel. Every fiber of his being focused on killing the enemy before they killed him. He had only one thought, over and over: Here I am again—kill or be killed. The sun beat down on him, he was yellow with sand, his lips were parched, but all he thought was: Kill them.

  It was easy. When he saw the tops of their heads he rolled onto his back, pulled out the pin, and threw a grenade twenty yards, a looping high throw like tossing a ball to a child for a simple catch. And then he did it again. One explosion followed the other, muted by the soft sand, like hands clapping. There was no debris, the sand absorbed the blasts.

  A low moaning started, which became high-pitched, like a cat wailing at night. It gave Arie the shivers. The wailing got louder, there were cries in Arabic, but it appeared to Arie it was all one voice. He rose to his knees, body bent double, saw nothing, straightened his back. Still nothing. He waited, then slowly stood, his Sten gun at his shoulder, aiming forward as he took one small step after another. He saw first a destroyed leg and then the corpse. The cannon was smashed. The second Egyptian, silent now, eyes wide in terror, was on his side in a pool of blood, holding his bleeding open stomach. He stared at the looming Israeli soldier as Arie slowly approached, his barrel pointing at the man’s head. The Arab’s mouth began to work but only blood dripped out. Arie stood over him, staring at the defeated man, who was trembling from head to toe, pleading with his eyes. Arie lowered his weapon, extended his hand, pulled the man to a sitting position. The man fell back, began to whine again, to moan, to beg. He pointed to his lips. There was a water canteen nearby, it must have been blown away by the blast but it was intact. Arie picked it up, unscrewed it, and held it to the man’s mouth, watching him drink. Arie tore a sleeve off the dead man’s jacket and stuffed it into the soldier’s stomach wound to stanch the bleeding. The man was whimpering. Arie laid him on his back, arranged his legs, an
d packed the sand into a pillow. His eyes teared in the blinding sun. Arie took the soldier’s cap and covered his eyes from the glare. After all, he thought, he could be me.

  All Arie could do was wait for the next Israeli soldiers to show up, and hope it was before the Egyptians. So here he was with his very own prisoner of war. What should he do with him? For a moment he imagined that he himself was the prisoner. What would he have wanted? He laid an encouraging hand on the man’s shoulder. After all, they were two soldiers, far from home. He made sure there were no weapons around, and walked back to Dudu, keeping a wary distance from the tank.

  Dudu’s breathing was labored. A deep gash revealed part of his white skull, which didn’t appear broken. He seemed comfortable. Arie felt his pulse. Fast, but not too much. He stood, peered at the horizon. Someone will come along soon. He sat and held Dudu’s hand and wondered where his mates were. Would they come back searching for him? No, orders were clear, if anyone falls behind, leave him. This war is all about speed and initiative. The tanks would storm ahead and all he could do was wait and stay calm.

  And then he heard a sound. A thin sound, a cat? A call. A voice? Banging, a metallic knocking. He jerked his head toward the tank. Is someone inside? Alive? There were booms and gunshots a distance away, the whine of a plane … but—“Itamar?” he yelled. He heard a faint voice, “Help!” Dudu’s eyes flickered open, he must have heard him too. Arie took two quick steps toward the tank when flames began to lick from the turret, and smoke seeped through the back. Where the shells were stored. Arie threw himself to the ground.

  There was a thunderclap and flames shot into the air, erupting from the turret like a volcano. The heat singed his hair, his eyebrows, the blast of hot air peppered him with pebbles and debris. His face stung.