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Aim True, My Brothers

Page 4

by William F. Brown


  Despite their youthful swagger and bravado, this was a dangerous mission. Al-Bari was ready to die for the cause if it came to that, but succeeding, surviving, and bragging about it was essential to the organization’s long-term goals. They needed success, not more martyrs.

  “If we strike quickly and escape into the hills, there are a dozen villages where we can find refuge with the Hamas underground inside Israel. Then, after things die down, we can infiltrate back into Lebanon or Syria as heroes.” Finally, Al-Bari raised his fist, shouted, “Palestine!” to his young recruits; and they shouted it back to him even louder, “Palestine!” Always more a concept than nation, it remained a mythical place, which none of them had ever seen. Still, in the collective mind’s eye of its people, when they heard the name they saw green fields overflowing with crops, lush rolling hills, flowing streams, ripe orchards, and small, idyllic villages filled with peaceful, happy people. The vision might be mostly illusion and the nation only a dream, but it was theirs.

  For decades, the small fishing village of Ras Awwali on the southern coast lay trapped in a cauldron of violence not of its making. Indistinguishable from dozens of others that dot the shores of the eastern Mediterranean, the lives and customs of its people had changed little in centuries. Their concerns rarely extended beyond the waters they fished and the small farm plots and orchards they tended outside the village walls. It was a tightly packed semicircle of perhaps fifty buildings around a small harbor on the Mediterranean shore. Its narrow streets and alleyways converged on a small market square with a small mosque, several inns, a town hall, and a line of shops. The buildings themselves were built of thick, gray stone that kept out the worst of the summer heat and winter cold. They had tall windows with round arches and bright red-tile roofs. Those roofs were the village’s most distinctive feature, and they could be seen for miles in the bright morning sun.

  A stout concrete jetty ran along the waterfront, and a narrow breakwater of large rocks curved out from it to create the village’s small harbor. Before the troubles began in the late-1960s, their small fishing fleet had moored there, consisting of perhaps two dozen wooden sailboats. Each was a little over twenty feet long, with a shallow draft, wide beam, high curving bow, one lone mast, and a tiny cabin near the aft end. They were well maintained and handed down from father to son. Before dawn, the men went out in them to fish, while the women, children, and elders spent their days mending nets, cooking, or working the nearby fields and orchards. After breakfast, black-garbed grandmothers swept the stoops and streets with tattered straw brooms. Even the children helped, by harvesting the dates, citrus fruit, wheat, and bananas. Later, in the afternoon, the entire village would gather on the beach to unload the day’s catch. When it was good, they sold the surplus on the docks in Tyre. Even when it was not good, the sea and the land always provided.

  Unfortunately, those idyllic days were gone.

  Now Ras Awwali was a base camp for Hamas. The local Lebanese had long since fled, replaced by armed soldiers. The larger homes had been converted to barracks. The old mosque and town hall served as their command center, field hospital, training rooms, armory, and storerooms. The village itself had been the target of numerous retaliatory attacks by the Israelis, and its buildings were battered from decades of artillery, bombs, and rockets. There were bullet holes in the walls and once-proud red tile roofs. Stones, bricks, crumbled plaster, and broken roof tiles now littered the narrow streets, along with an assortment of trash and garbage, making them nearly impassable. In the harbor, a few badly leaking and seldom-used fishing boats rode sluggishly at anchor, and the rotting hulks of still more lay half-buried on the beach or on the bottom in shallow water. Large holes had been blown in the protecting breakwater, and stones had been pried up to reinforce nearby gun emplacements. Even the fields and gardens at the edge of the village had been trampled, and the orchard was long abandoned. Spoiled fruit lay rotting on the ground, and there were wide gaps in the neat rows of trees where many had been cut down for firewood. Like so much of Lebanon, it had become a thoroughly unpleasant place, one with a past, but no present or future.

  As the sun set that night, a cold, gray mist lay on the water. The entire Hamas detachment turned out to give a triumphal sendoff to the small fleet. Standing on the concrete jetty, as his men stowed the last of their gear under the gunnels of their rubber boats, Ibrahim Al-Bari motioned to his two younger brothers, Jamil and Ahmed, and took them aside. He put his arms around their shoulders and pulled them close.

  “I am so very proud of both of you,” he told them. “Countless nights, lying in those cold, mountain caves in Afghanistan I dreamed of going on a mission with both of you — the Al-Bari brothers striking a blow together.”

  “It has been our dream too, Ibrahim,” Jamil beamed.

  “Yes, our dream, too,” Ahmed chimed.

  “Now make me proud. Make me proud, and aim true, my brothers, aim true!”

  The Al-Bari brothers ran back to the jetty and jumped into their boats. Soon, all four motors were started and their crews pushed off. In minutes, they passed around the breakwater and disappeared from sight. Once beyond the shelter of the harbor, the rising swells of the open sea soon greeted them. The farther out they went, the harder and harder the waves slapped against the sides of the boat, spraying them with cold salt water. Ibrahim Al-Bari’s small boat led, with him at the tiller, while the others spread out behind. He looked at each man with pride. He had trained them well, and he knew a glorious victory would come with the rising sun.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Haifa, Northern Israel, Thursday, September 19, 5:00 p.m.

  Captain Yitzhak Navon was Operations Officer of the Israeli Navy’s Patrol Boat Squadron 914 headquartered at Haifa with the rest of the Northern Fleet. Navon was responsible for the in-shore hot corner from Haifa to the Lebanese border and beyond. This was lonely, night work. As he prepared to brief his boat commanders, Navon had a formidable array of weapons at his disposal, but the Israeli coast was full of juicy targets from one end of it to the other. It only took one mistake or piece of bad luck for disaster to strike, and that heavy responsibility would eat at Navon’s guts all night long. In that respect, he was a child of his country. His parents met in the Army during the glory years of the 1967 War, and he was born in a kibbutz that lay in the path of a Syrian armored column that rolled into northern Israel from the Golan Heights in 1973. The Syrians were finally stopped and thrown back a scant two miles east of his house, but at a heavy cost. That left scars on every man, woman, and child in Israel, and a grim determination that they would never allow it to happen again.

  In the early days, the Navy consisted of one cast-off Italian destroyer and several battered American PT boats. Even to this day, the Navy remained a far distant third behind the Air Force and the Army in the nation’s priorities. Still, their equipment had become respectable and quite lethal, and they needed it all. While CNN and the other American press cheered for the ‘Arab Spring’ and the destabilization of so many other moderate Arab regimes, thinking that would make the Middle East a safer place, the Israelis could only cringe. How naïve! And the American White House was no better. First, they waged three half-hearted wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which only gave field training to a whole generation of Arab youth. Then, as with Iran before, they undermined and helped overthrow a series of sectarian despots like Mubarak, Saddam Hussein, and Gaddafi, with no thought to the Islamist regimes that would inevitably follow, all in some nonsensical pursuit of democracy in the streets of the Middle East. Democracy? In the Arab countries? As the characters on American sitcoms like to say, “What were they thinking?”

  Navon looked at his operational plan, noting that he had four of the new, 25-meter Super Dvora class patrol boats and two of the older models to work with that night. Both carried 20 mm. cannon, .30 and .50 cal. machine guns, Hellfire missiles, searchlights, and state-of-the-art radar and electronics. They could easily take out any intruders dumb enough to take
them on, provided they could find them, and that was the problem. They patrolled over three hundred square miles of ocean from Haifa to ten miles north of the Lebanese border, going out 15 nautical miles into the Mediterranean. The usual threat came from innocent-looking ‘fishing’ boats and high-speed inflatables. The latter had low profiles and very few metal parts, which normally kept them below the radar. They could be put over the side of a passing freighter far out to sea, or race down the coast hugging the shoreline virtually unseen. When it was dark or overcast, when there was only a thin quarter moon, or when the sea was rough, like tonight, you could hide an entire fleet of them out there. Navon did have a few aces up his sleeve, however — two ancient American PBY Catalina seaplanes and lots of backup. Rehabbed and loaded with night optical gear, larger fuel tanks, flare guns, and muffled engines, the Catalinas were reliable and durable. Their large Plexiglas waist bubbles were perfect for observers.

  As his boat and airplane commanders gathered around the chart table that night, Navon unfolded his large area map and looked at each of them. “I hope you got some sleep. We picked up an unusual amount of chatter along the Lebanese coast, and we are overdue. If you see anything at all, check it out and call in some backup. Is that clear?”

  He glanced around at each of them again, thinking how young they looked. “We will focus on the border area until midnight. Stay no more than five miles out. We’ll have the airplanes up around 9:00 p.m. At midnight, everyone drops south and starts patrolling three to five miles out. At 3:00 a.m., pull in even closer to the shore and pay particular attention to the Bay of Haifa and the coast around Nahariya. If we’re going to have a problem, that’s where it will be.”

  He watched them gather their maps and papers and leave in small groups, talking among themselves and laughing as they sauntered away down the hall. Finally alone in the operations room, Navon picked up his pipe and lit a match. It flared brightly in the dark room, but his hand would not stop shaking. Lighting the pipe seemed such a simple task, but he could not hold the match over the bowl long enough to get the tobacco to catch. Frustrated, he blew the match out before it burned his fingers. He tried to slough it off, took a couple of calming deep breaths, and lit another match. This time, he was able to control the wavering flame long enough to get the bowl lit. Good, he thought. It only took two matches this time. When it took more than three, it would be time to get out; but he was not there yet, not quite.

  Even in the long, tense hours that followed, Navon knew the odds were heavily in his favor; but he also knew that human error, weather, and just plain dumb bad luck made failure inevitable. When that happened, the result was always the same — a frightful toll of dead and maimed civilians. That heavy responsibility produced a tense, nervous fatalism, like being the oldest man on a bomb squad — you knew your turn was coming and you were overdue. That was why so many senior officers and politicians became archaeologists, watch repairmen, built tiny ships in bottles, or retired to the life of a simple chicken farmer on a small, remote kibbutz. They were desperate for order and sanity in a world that would drive normal men stark raving mad.

  “No,” Navon thought, taking another drag on his pipe. “I’m not there, not yet.”

  Al-Bari led his boats two miles out to sea before he put the tiller into a looping arc south. They were sturdy reinforced rubber, cut low to the water. As the hours passed and the swells grew larger, he soon had his hands full with his own boat and lost sight of the other one in his pair. One moment it was there, thirty feet away; but when he raised his head and looked for it a moment later, it was gone. He cursed his bad luck. After all his meticulous preparations, the sea was something he had no control over. As the rocking got worse and the boat became less stable, he told Ahmed and Haidar to lie in the bottom to lower the center of gravity as he steered through the troughs. Several times, he thought he heard larger boats and airplanes passing nearby. He was afraid to turn the motor off for fear of not being able to start it again, but joined the others in the bottom until the danger had passed.

  The chopping swells came at them from the right front quarter, slapping against the hard rubber gunnels of the boat, splashing them with spray and mist, and forcing them to bail more and more often. Their clothes were soon soaked through with cold, pungent salt water. That was when the glory and romance of the operation began to fade, but their roller-coaster ride did not stop. It went on and on. Three hours later, he saw the first dim lights of the Israeli coastal settlements and he knew they were well past the border. He pointed them out to the others, and that finally brought a smile to their faces. His only hope was that the other three boats were still out there and that their crews also had seen the lights.

  At 2:00 a.m., the wind rose sharply from the southwest and the annoying rolling took on an ominous tone. Waves broke over the side of the boat. It rode higher and higher on the swells and dropped lower and lower into the troughs, making it harder to keep control. The boat began to take in more water, and bailing became a constant job for one man and then for two.

  What Ibrahim Al-Bari did not know was that his brother Jamil’s boats were little more than a mile away when they ran into their first serious problem. They were farther out to sea when one of their motors began to run rough. By 1:00 a.m., it coughed, sputtered, and finally died. Its crew tried to restart the smoking, overheated motor, but to no avail. They checked the propeller, added more gasoline, blew out the fuel line, and put in another can of oil. Even cursing, kicking, and hitting it with balled fists produced nothing. Frustrated, they finally gave up, forcing Jamil to take it in tow.

  With the incessant jerks and tugs on the towrope, they lost half their speed and all their patience, riding too heavy on top of the swells and wallowing too long in the deep troughs. That was when they happened upon Ibrahim Al-Bari’s second boat, now thoroughly lost and circling aimlessly as its crew argued over which direction to take. Jamil immediately took charge and had them throw a second towrope to the crippled boat. That helped them regain some headway, but the seas continued to rise, forcing them to bail faster and faster as they shipped more water. Finally, the helpless crew looked up to see a large wave break over the starboard gunnel. In seconds, the boat rolled over and capsized.

  They were exhausted and weighed down by their own clothes and gear; the end came quickly for the crew. Two of them disappeared immediately. One man hung onto the towrope as the others tried to pull him in. Unfortunately, he lost his grip on the rope and the merciless sea claimed its third victim that night. Jamil cursed the sea and his bad luck. In a matter of minutes, twenty-five percent of their men and equipment were gone and they had not even fired a shot. What a disgraceful way to die.

  At 3:30 a.m., Lieutenant Asher Baer’s Catalina had just finished another long, low sweep down the coast from Tyre to Haifa and headed back out to sea. This was tiring and exacting work, demanding patience and concentration. On an overcast night like this, with no moon and no stars, the sea became hypnotic. The horizon line faded to nothing and a pilot could fly into the water without even knowing he was near it. As Baer swung the Catalina back again to the northeast, his intercom suddenly crackled. “Lieutenant, port bubble here. I think I saw something out my side… There!… Ah, damnit, I lost it again.”

  “Okay, first reactions, what did you think it was?” Baer asked.

  “A low, dark shape against the waves, maybe with a small wake.”

  “We’ll check it out,” he said. “Wake up, folks; I’m coming around for a quick sweep. Weapons ready and night vision goggles on, if you please.” Turning to his copilot, he added, “Call it in. Nothing definite, but tell the boats we’ll pop some flares and see what we’ve got.”

  Yuri Lashov commanded one of the Navy’s newest Super Dvora patrol boats. It could run rings around the old boats and had the armament to back it up. They were cruising into the area from the southwest when the Catalina’s first flares lit up the sky ahead with a cold, white glare. He had his night goggles on, and the flar
e blinded him for a moment, forcing him to turn away until his eyes recovered. Trying to focus in the unnatural pale light from a flare always added to the tension. He was still squinting out over the bow when his topside lookout shouted, “Boat in the water. Two of them, dead ahead!”

  Lashov focused on the dark shapes pinned under the harsh light of the slowly descending parachute flares. “Battle stations!” he called over the intercom, but most of the crew were already at their guns, waiting. One target was straight ahead beyond his bow. The second lay farther back and to his starboard.

  “Forward guns, bring the lead target to bear,” Lashov shouted into his microphone. He flicked on the boat’s loudspeaker and spoke alternately in Arabic and Hebrew for the small boats to halt immediately. “You in the boat, heave to! You won’t get another warning.” Over the command net, he heard the PBY calling in the sighting; as he swung his glasses to the right, he saw the crashing bow wave of another Israeli patrol boat closing in from the west. “We’ve got ‘em in the box now,” he said in anticipation.

  The two small black targets were a few hundred meters apart, sitting naked in overlapping circles of white light, when more flares lit them up. The lead boat made a quick turn toward the coast and tried to run, but it was already too late. As Lashov closed in, his patrol boat suddenly came under automatic rifle fire. He could not hear the chatter of AK-47s above his own engines, but bullets suddenly clanged off the bridge superstructure and four round holes appeared in his windscreen. Lashov’s gunners did not need orders. They quickly responded and the thumping of the heavy 20-millimeter bow cannon split the night. It was no contest. A line of splashes dotted a path to the small boat. The explosive shells ripped through its low hull and blew it apart in seconds. They would come around and check the pieces later, but there was another target to attend to.

 

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