Aim True, My Brothers

by William F. Brown

  He swung the patrol boat to the right to allow his .50 cal. machine guns on the port side to bring the second terrorist craft under fire. In seconds, the streaking red lines of tracers held the small rubber raft in their grip and didn’t let go, sending large chunks of wood, metal, equipment, and bodies flying into the nearby water. One of the tracers hit a gasoline can and the small boat suddenly ignited like an incendiary bomb, lighting the night with its own bright orange flash that showered the deck and bridge of his patrol boat with debris.

  Suddenly, the cannon and heavy machine guns fell silent as the gunners realized there was nothing left to shoot at. Lashov cut back the engines and the only sound he heard was the rumbling engines of the two Israeli patrol boats. After several long seconds, his crew slowly rose from behind the bridge’s armor plate and stared at the dying flames. The entire engagement had taken less than a minute, but after hundreds of gunshots, muzzle flashes, streaking tracers, the smell of gunfire, the billowing black cloud from the burning gasoline, the shock wave from the exploding boat, and the roiling orange flames, their senses were simply overloaded and exhausted. They could only stand and gape.

  Groping for his microphone, Lashov pressed the button and said quietly, “Clear from action. All sections report casualties and damage,” then wiped the sleeve of his jacket across his forehead. Slowly his subconscious took a quick inventory. His muscles were tense and sore and his heart was pounding, but nothing appeared to be broken, shot, or bleeding. Quickly composing himself, he realized he was bareheaded. Glancing nonchalantly around the deck, he saw his cap lying against the far bulkhead. His legs were stiff and unsteady, but he forced himself to walk over and pick up the cap, dust it off, and put it on. My God, he thought, I feel like I have just boxed ten rounds and lost badly.

  Still, anyone who had ever been in combat, no matter how brief the battle, knew it was a terrifying but incredible high, which nothing else in life could ever come close to matching. That was why there was an instant bond between combat veterans, regardless of when or where they served, because the high put a perspective on every other thrill or experience that life had to offer. Like a drug, however, it could become an addiction that might one day kill them.

  Lashov’s men combed the dark waters with their searchlights, but they found no survivors. He did not expect them to. Such were the rules both sides played by in this desperate game of cat and mouse. The winner lived; the loser died.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The North Coast Road, Israel, Friday, September 20, 5:00 a.m.

  A half mile back, Ibrahim Al-Bari watched the short, sharp battle in stunned silence. With his own boat bobbing and rolling in the rough seas, he could only catch brief glimpses of the one-sided exchange. However, from the explosions, he knew two or perhaps all three of his other boats were involved. The ones that were involved had undoubtedly been destroyed, and his brother Jamil with them. As the booming cannon fire and explosions faded away into the night, he realized that he and his two companions now represented the last hope of his rapidly failing mission. He loved his brothers, but failure was something Al-Bari could not tolerate. At best, there could be one other boat out there somewhere, but the odds of the mission succeeding were getting longer by the minute.

  As he watched, a new string of flares lit up the area around two Israeli patrol boats and the wreckage. Worse, he could hear airplanes and still more boats approaching rapidly from several directions and that was bad. “Ahmed, Haidar,” he said, “stay down! They will be expanding the search area any minute now. We must get as much water between them and us as we can, before they trap us here. I am heading for shore. It is our only chance now.”

  Turning the boat east, he opened the throttle as far as it would go, but Haidar suddenly grabbed his arm. “What are you doing, Ibrahim? You cannot take us back to Lebanon. We will be disgraced,” he said as his voice grew louder and he looked at Al-Bari in rage.

  “Shut up, you fool!” Al-Bari hissed. “We cannot return to Lebanon now, even if we wanted to. The sun will be up in an hour. We cannot make it through to Haifa, either, not with all those damned patrol boats blocking our way. We would never stand a chance.”

  “Then what will we do?” Haidar slumped down in the bottom of the boat in defeat.

  “What we trained for! We’ll head to shore and find a new target,” Al-Bari said as he turned his eyes toward the dark coastline. “We can die here, or we can die there. Those are our only choices now.”

  “With no plan, no target, and no escape routes?” Haidar sputtered.

  “Be quiet, you dog, Ibrahim is right,” Ahmed silenced him. Haidar might be his best friend, but Ibrahim was his older brother. “If you do not want to come with us, get out and swim. Otherwise shut up and do what he says.”

  Al-Bari smiled, as he realized his ‘baby brother’ was growing up. The boat was bounding up and down now, sending waves of ice-cold water crashing over the bow, but they were putting distance between themselves and the Israeli patrol boats, and that was all that mattered. “If we get ashore and move quickly, we can find a good target and be away into the hills before dawn.” He turned his head and glared at Haidar. “Well? Are you with us, or are you getting out?”

  Haidar looked away, too embarrassed to reply.

  “We still have our weapons,” Ahmed said contemptuously. “And I know they did not get Jamil. He fought his way through and is racing ashore, as we are. I know it!”

  Ibrahim Al-Bari smiled. If only I had a hundred more like this one, he thought, as he looked past them to the dark shoreline. “There!” he said. “That dark spot south of Acre — that is where we shall go, and where you will show us you are a man, Haidar, not an old woman.”

  Twenty minutes later, Al-Bari knew he chose well. He expected machine gun fire and bright flares to greet them, but that did not happen. The spot he selected turned out to be a dark, rocky cove. To the north, he saw the lights of Acre, to the south the distant glow of Haifa. As soon as the small boat reached the shore, he leaped out and whispered, “Haidar, carry everything to those rocks at the top of the beach, while I recon the area. And Ahmed,” he said, locking his eyes on the young man’s, “take the boat into deep water and slash the sides. Sink it to the bottom. We are in the infantry again, not the cursed Navy.”

  He ran to the top of the beach, ducked behind several large rocks, and studied his map of the coast by the dim light of a small pocket flashlight. Acre was still two miles to the north, too far to hike before daylight. Looking more closely, he saw that the Coast Highway was but a few hundred yards inland. Yes, he thought, it would do nicely. The other two joined him, and he motioned for them to follow. When they topped the last low hill, he knelt in the low underbrush and saw the modern two-lane highway in front of him. He studied their position with the eyes of a skilled infantryman, seeking the best kill zone. The road came down a long slope from the left, crossed a small drainage ditch, and then ran back up the hill on their side. Once it reached the crest, it went down the opposite slope and disappeared around a bend.

  “This is a good place for an ambush, isn’t it?” Ahmed asked softly.

  “Ambush what?” Haidar asked nervously. “Rocks? Trees? There is nothing here.”

  Ibrahim sighed and shook his head. “You will know it when you see it. The morning traffic should be starting soon and we shall wait for something juicy, like some army trucks, a small convoy, or a bus. No armored vehicles; we do not have enough firepower for that. If we are patient, though, we will make your trip worthwhile, Haidar.” Not waiting for a reply, Ibrahim went on. “I shall go halfway down the slope. Ahmed, you go farther down to the left. Haidar, you go up to the right, a hundred yards, no more. Get yourselves well hidden in the brush. This way, we can be ready no matter which way it comes.”

  “How will we know what to attack?” Ahmed interrupted.

  “I will decide and begin the attack from here. As soon as I begin shooting, you two close from each end and block. Run as fast as you can.
Empty your rifles and use your grenades, and we will have them caught in the middle on an upslope. Just wait for my signal, is that understood?” he said, staring directly at Haidar. “Good! Now get going and do nothing until I begin shooting.”

  After Haidar disappeared down the hill, Ahmed turned toward Ibrahim and snarled, “He is a coward. Sister or not, if he runs, I will kill him!”

  “If he runs, you will not have to; but he is of no consequence. It is you I am counting on, Ahmed. As I said back in Lebanon, ‘aim true, my brother, aim true.’ ”

  “There were three of us then, Ibrahim. Now there are only two.”

  “And we must aim true, even if there is only one of us left.”

  “Until there are none at all!” Ahmed said as he took his rifle and ran up the road.

  Alone, Ibrahim Al-Bari took up a good firing position and placed his extra magazines and grenades within easy reach. As calm as a mortician, he leaned forward and looked down the dark road in each direction. His fingertips drummed lightly on the gun barrel as he waited. Nothing yet, he thought — no lights, no sounds, and no movement.

  Zvi Tabenkin had just picked up his last passenger for the early morning bus from Acre to Haifa. They had given him this route six months before, and he hated every minute of it. “Give me the city, even rush hour in Tel Aviv,” he told his wife. “You know how I hate these long country routes with nothing to do, nothing to see, and nothing for a man to spit or curse at.”

  “You mean no young girls for you to honk and whistle at, you old goat.”

  “That too. Nothing but a bunch of olive trees and orange groves. I tell you, Dora; I’m talking to the Union Steward. That damn Shlomo did this to me. You know how he is always crying and moaning about his bad back. ‘Just a few weeks, Zvi, what’s to mind?’ he begged. Well I mind! Twenty years I pay my dues. I got seniority and we’ll see who minds.”

  “Oh, stop your blustering, you big Bulgarian,” Dora said. “Your real gripe is you got no one to talk to death.”

  “Talk? All I’ve got now are those damn foreigners — Greeks, Turks, Koreans — they smell so bad, our own people won’t get on my bus any more. If they do, they stick their heads out an open window, so they don’t have to smell that sausage and all that damned garlic. And that’s just the Greeks and Turks. What those Koreans eat makes you want to puke, I swear it.”

  “You swear too much. The fresh air does you good.”

  “All they do is sleep — Acre to Haifa, Haifa to Acre. I am their morning nap on wheels, that is what I am.”

  “Zvi, you know those poor people put in long hours at the port on the night shift. Twelve hours a day, seven days a week, I don’t see you lining up down there for a job. No, not you. You just kvetch and exercise your big mouth.”

  “I’ll tell you what I’m going to exercise, Dora. If they don’t give me back my old route, some day I’m gonna drive north to Nahariya instead of south and let them all get out like it’s Haifa. I’ll bet they wander around for half an hour before they wake up.”

  “Ah, go, you old fool, or you’ll be late.”

  Like most mornings, Tabenkin’s bus was about two-thirds full. Most of the passengers were on the early shift at the port in Haifa. After they got out, he would wait in Haifa the allotted ten minutes for the night shift workers heading back home. When the last of them got on, he closed the doors and headed south, passing through the last neighborhoods on the edge of Acre until he reached the Coast Highway. Leaving the last few scattered homes behind, the bus picked up speed and rolled on through the dark, open countryside. Accelerating to forty-five miles per hour, he shook his head and resigned himself to the boring twenty-five-minute drive down to Haifa. Reaching the first series of low hills, he glanced in his rearview mirror and looked at his beloved passengers.

  “Look at them, asleep already,” he mumbled in disgust. “When it gets lighter, I’ll find a nice pothole. If I can’t sleep, why should they?” He drove down the first long hill and across the bridge. As he accelerated up the long grade on the other side, Tabenkin wiggled his large rear end into a more comfortable position. “Damned hemorrhoids,” he grumbled, “the bus driver’s lament — the ones I’m sitting on, and the ones riding in the back.”

  It was as he finished that thought that a staccato of automatic rifle fire shattered the quiet night, and bullets ripped into the right side of his bus. Turning his head, Tabenkin saw the bright flashes in the low row of bushes alongside the road. The steady burst of bullets punched through the thin body panels and sent metal and glass flying across the aisle and tearing into seats, passengers, and out the other side, without distinction. Swift and complete, the carnage left terrified, wounded, and dead passengers scattered through the bus.

  Instinctively, Tabenkin stomped the gas pedal to the floor, trying to urge the large vehicle up the long incline; but the bus did not have that kind of power. In agonizing slowness, it grunted and strained. At that moment, a second gunman jumped into the bright beams of Tabenkin’s headlights, pointed an automatic rifle at the front of the onrushing bus and began shooting. Tabenkin could feel the impact of the bullets as they hit the engine block and the bus’s steel chassis. His right headlight shattered and went out. As his large hands tried desperately to turn the steering wheel away from this punishment, a new stream of bullets punctured the windshield. One, two, five, ten — the individual holes laced together and the windshield shattered into a thousand pieces, following the bullets into the bus and into Tabenkin.

  The gunman in front leaped aside to avoid the careening bus. As he did, the first gunman let loose another burst from behind as he ran to catch up. This new onslaught hit the gas tank and roiling black and orange flames enveloped the rear of the bus. Like a rolling torch, it ran down the centerline of the road, leaving a twisting trail of flaming gasoline on the black asphalt.

  Two bullets had struck Tabenkin in the chest and shoulder. Like twin hammer blows, they slammed him back in his seat. Numb from the bullets and the flying glass that had peppered his face like a swarm of angry bees, he slumped against the sidewall, conscious, but in shock. His eyes saw what was happening, but his brain could not possibly absorb the onslaught of bullets, screaming passengers, the cold wind blowing in his face, orange flames behind him, and the choking, acrid smoke. They no longer registered.

  The bus continued to roll a short way down the road before it ran off the pavement and plowed into a shallow, muddy drainage ditch. Everything inside pitched forward, including Tabenkin, who crashed into the steering wheel. The painful jolt brought him back to semi-alertness. Turning his head to look out the side window, he could see another figure running around the side of the bus, shooting at it, illuminated by the dancing orange light.

  “He should not do that,” Tabenkin moaned. “Look what they did to my bus. No! He should not.” From instinct alone, his hand groped under the front seat and his fingers found the butt of the old British .455-caliber Webley service revolver he kept hidden there. Bus drivers were not supposed to carry weapons, but most did, especially ones who had been around for a while. “Should not do that!” he growled again. As he pulled the Webley out and looked up, a wild man suddenly rose up before him in the large hole in the windshield. Like a creature from Hell, it was colored in burnt orange from the glow of the burning gasoline in the back of the bus. Tabenkin slowly raised his right arm. From inches away, he squeezed the trigger. The Webley was a small cannon. His arm jumped, and then dropped back down, as he pulled the trigger again, again, and again, until the revolver clicked empty and the hellish scene before him slowly faded to a washed-out orange, to gray. Tabenkin’s chin dropped to his chest, and everything turned to black.

  Ibrahim Al-Bari had been waiting anxiously in the rocks for twenty minutes when he finally saw a pair of large headlights coming down the far hill. A truck? No, from the dim shape and engine noise, he saw it was a bus. This would have to do, he thought. They had allowed several trucks and a line of cars to go by unmolested, like li
ttle fish thrown back into the sea. “You may continue in peace,” he whispered, until he saw a thin, pale line spreading along the hills to the east. Dawn would be here soon, and the bus will have to do, he realized.

  The action moved swiftly once the bus came abreast of Ahmed’s position. Instead of waiting for Ibrahim to start the attack, Ahmed could wait no longer. He stood and began shooting, raking the side of the bus as it rumbled by. As his Kalashnikov finally clicked empty, he reloaded and ran after the bus, feeling as if he was one of Sal-a-din’s blessed archers, trying to bring down a heavily armored Crusader knight on his huge war-horse. The beast might be mortally wounded, but it could still run a long way before horse and rider crashed to the ground. He unloaded the next magazine into the rear of the bus. His bullets must have hit the gasoline tank. Its rear end was engulfed now in black smoke and orange flames, but it continued up the road. Ahmed slammed in a third magazine and raced after it.

  As the bus came abreast of Ibrahim Al-Bari, he ran down the dune and stepped into the road. He also emptied his Kalashnikov into the bus, so intent on getting off a good burst that he almost let the bus run him down before he jumped aside into the muddy ditch. By the time he got back to his feet, Ahmed had run past him still shooting into the flames.

  Haidar was the last of the three to engage. Calm and remarkably clear-headed, he held his Kalashnikov at his waist as he stepped into the road, feet planted like a big cypress, and waited for the bus to come to him. When he began shooting, he aimed all his shots at the engine and front windshield. As the bus began to heel to the left and run into the ditch, his automatic rifle clicked empty. Rather than reload, he pulled two grenades from his pocket and charged the bus. Screaming “Allahu Akbar” at the top of his lungs, he pulled the pins on the grenades with his teeth and jumped onto its front bumper. Leaning through the gaping hole where the windshield had been, he raised both arms and stared into the flaming Hell of the bus’s interior. His forward momentum was suddenly stopped as a .455 caliber bullet punched him hard in the center of his chest.