by Herman Wouk
Mrs. Barkowe said, “It’s a pity he had to miss that wonderful parade.”
“Somebody has to stand guard in Sinai,” said Shayna. “I admire your son.”
“He didn’t have to reenlist,” complained Mrs. Barkowe. “I tried to press him about that, but he only mumbled nonsense about some stupid bridge. I’ll never agree with my husband. Jack’s crazy. He wouldn’t be missed if he’d go home, and then we all could.”
Irene and Armand Fleg watched the parade in a small section of the main grandstand reserved for the Alliance Israelite Universelle. Glancing around during Golda’s sonorous speech after the Phantom flypast, she caught sight of General Pasternak in a top row. When the ceremonies ended and the government leaders left, people came pouring out of the stand, behind the mounted policemen who brought up the rear of the parade; and Irene Fleg managed to meet Pasternak as he came down the tiers, escorting a dark-haired woman who had the sheen of an actress or model.
“Why, hello, General Pasternak. A memorable parade, eh?”
Astonished and nonplussed, then recognizing her from the brief brush on the missile boat, he grunted a hello.
“How is your son?”
“Quite all right.”
She said hurriedly, “Do you have a card?”
Wordlessly he took one from his wallet. She appeared next day at his shabby little office, and when the secretary asked her business, she just gave her the card. Pasternak rose at his desk, and gestured her to a chair. “What can I do for you?” He had no idea who she was, but at a glance he got the picture: married, from the ring; decidedly well-off, from the clothes; clever and bold, from her direct approach, and the way she looked him in the eye and remained standing. A volunteer just for that one job, he was sure.
“Thank you. You must be extremely busy.” She pulled a sealed envelope from a chic suede purse. “Your son is a brave young man, and he was kind to me. This is a letter of thanks. Will you oblige me by giving it to him? No reply needed.”
He took the letter, and she offered him a bony little hand. “Merci, monsieur. I’ll trouble you no further.” With that she left. He scrutinized the square blue monogrammed envelope, then pulled out a desk drawer. He kept a file labelled Soon, and he dropped the blond lady’s letter into that file.
16
The Concepzia
“There it comes!”
A general shout of the Prime Minister’s entourage greeted the sight of the roller bridge, looking like nothing so much as a gigantic mutant out of the horror films, a black millipede hundreds of feet long crawling on the white Sinai sands. It hove in view humping itself over a high dune, slithered down, and headed toward the viewing stand where Golda Meir, an age-spotted hand shading her eyes from the blazing sun, watched with incredulity. It dwarfed the tanks that towed it, and absolutely looked to be on the move by itself, a flexible living steel nightmare.
“Jewish heads,” exclaimed Golda in Yiddish to Dado and Dayan. “Yiddishe kep!”
The wooden platform stood on an embankment overlooking a huge ditch for practicing crossings, a mock-up of the Suez Canal which Dado had ordered dug in the desert below a dam near Refidim. The flooded trench in the rubbly landscape conformed strictly to the Canal as a water obstacle, in width, depth, and slope of the banks. If this rolling monster could really bridge it without mishap, and a waiting column of Centurion tanks could then cross to the other side, not only would the tactics of a war with Egypt be affected, but the army budget, too.
For May, June, and July had gone by, and the threat at the borders had faded away. The Arabs had marched up the hill and marched down again. They had not dared. General Zeira had triumphed. In the inner command circles the BLUE/WHITE alert, never made public, was being called off. Time magazine quoted Moshe Dayan as stating, “There will be no major war in the Middle East for ten years.” A wave of defense cost-cutting was on, of retrenchment, of plans to cut down the regular army and even the term of reserve duty, so the building of more such bridges was much in question. For the participants in the test, and for the bridge’s inventors, there was the tension of an opening night in the theater. After much rehearsal, would everything go right? Or would one of a hundred possible hitches make a fatal fashla under the eyes of the big decision makers?
Clanking and squealing past the stand, the giant millipede plunged into the water with a towering muddy splash. It seemed to be going straight down, down, down! Fiasco already? But no, the hollow rollers performed as planned, the bridge heaved to the surface and, with one tank riding it, eerily swam straight across. As it struck the far side this tank rolled to the front, pushed over a flexible ramp curled like a scorpion’s tail, and climbed up the sandy slope into “Egypt.” Some onlookers applauded. All this time not one soldier had been visible in the exercise, only the machines.
Next the long column of tanks, their motors running and warmed up, headed for the bridge in an enormous noise, raising plumes of dust mingled with dirty exhaust, One by one they nosed down the embankment and groaned out on the steel surface, and the onlookers saw a sight certainly not before observed on earth. Under the weight of each tank, sixty tons or more, the bridge sagged deeply. Between the tanks, however, the very buoyant rollers popped upward. Soon the tanks filled the bridge a few yards apart, forcing it into the strangest shape, a series of curves that travelled along between the tanks like the wavy lines on an oscilloscope. It seemed impossible that this weirdly wiggly bridge would not come apart, one way or another, under such peculiar stresses. Tank after tank after tank, the column streamed across the preposterous contraption and mounted to the far side. When all had passed over, the bridge straightened itself out, floating with a gentle up-and-down motion.
Golda turned to Moshe Dayan. “Unbelievable. Wonderful.” The inventors, Generals Laskov and Tal, breathed easier and beamed. The tank column that had crossed the bridge began heading back westward to the Canal. The soldiers of the bridge demonstration lined up for a cooked meal at a field kitchen, while jeeps brought the VIP observer party to a luncheon tent nearby.
At the command truck under a canvas awning, where Yossi Nitzan was barking orders and assistants were making colored scrawls on transparencies over maps, Barak jumped from the jeep, strode to him and grasped his hand. “Kol ha’kavod, Don Kishote. Kol ha’kavod.”
Army insiders kept score on front-running officers like Yossi Nitzan, and Barak knew that this morning he had scored high. Such an unwieldy ballet of complicated machines and experimental tactics, performed under the eyes of the biggest of big brass, did not come off without superb planning, command, and control. Not bad for a refugee lad from Cyprus who had showed up twenty-five years ago at Latrun on a mule, at the height of a battle going very badly, and had plunged into the thick of it like a lunatic; in fact, like Don Kishote.
Yossi’s hard businesslike look relaxed in a puckish grin. “Hi! How did they like it?”
“Outstanding success.”
“Great. I’ve been fired.”
“What!”
“Talk about it later.”
In the breezy tent Golda put Gorodish, the new Southern Commander, on her right hand; a bullet-headed thickset general, radiating pleasure in the exalted company and the morning’s success. Dayan sat on her left with Dado. The others took folding chairs at random at the long plank table, and all fell to. “Madame Prime Minister, this is Colonel Nitzan,” said Barak, entering the tent with Yossi, “the commander of the exercise.”
“Ah. Well done, Colonel. I know they call you Don Kishote,” said Golda, “but if you’re crazy, I need more crazy officers like you.”
“Kishote is crazy only during full moon,” said Dado. “Or when a girl goes by.”
“A fine officer,” said Gorodish stiffly. “I’m sorry to be losing him.”
Amos Pasternak came in with Dzecki Barkowe, for Golda had asked to meet soldiers from the bridge project. Both were so sweaty and dust-covered that it was hard to tell the major from the sergeant. “And who are
these?” inquired Golda. She peered at Amos and smiled. “Hmm, I seem to have met this one recently.”
Barak said, “Major Pasternak, commanding Armor Battalion Seventy-seven. A company of his tanks moves the bridge.”
“Amos, how do you manage not to pull it apart,” Dayan put in, “with ten tanks hauling at it this way and that?”
“They’re all on one wireless network, Minister, and they move only on signal.”
“And this young fellow?” Dado asked. Dzecki was standing at rigid attention.
“A sergeant on the bridge, General,” Amos said.
Golda asked, “Did you have problems, Sergeant?”
“Nothing we couldn’t handle, Prime Minister,” said Dzecki.
Her heavy eyebrows shot up at the accent. “By my life, an American. Like me.”
“Member of my family,” said Barak. “Long Island branch.”
“I’m from Milwaukee, myself,” she said to Dzecki, holding out her hand to him. He showed her his own, black with grease, and she laughed. Soldiers were bringing in platters of schnitzel and steak. Golda invited Kishote to join them for lunch.
“A great honor, Prime Minister, but the cooks know I eat with the men.”
She nodded and smiled. “Smart.”
Barak said, “Yossi, I want Dzecki to show me around the bridge afterward.”
“Why not?”
“It looks better from a distance, sir,” Dzecki said, “and climbing down on it will be slippery.”
“Okay,” said Barak.
After the exciting show the mood at the table was jovial. The desert air had made everyone hungry for a field luncheon, and the VIP fare was lavish, Kishote had seen to that. “Tell me something, Mr. Defense Minister, will you?” Golda said to Dayan. “That was a fine show, but if we’re not going to have a war for ten years, why do we need more of these bridges now?”
She was taking a rare bantering tone with Moshe Dayan, for her usual dry courtesy masked deep political discord. Dayan had once bolted the Labor Party with the Rafi splinter, and Golda never forgot anything.
“I said a major war, Madame Prime Minister,” Dayan coolly replied to this needle about the Time interview captioned “Waiting in the Wings,” which had strongly implied that Dayan aimed to succeed Golda. “I spoke of a general conception. I wasn’t prophesying. Reporters oversimplify, as you know.”
“Oy vay, do I know! Well, so what is your conception?” She spoke the Hebrew word concepzia with faint irony.
“My chief of military intelligence should be here,” said Dayan. “It’s his estimate, which I fully accept, and he has it at his fingertips.”
“He isn’t here,” said Golda.
Dayan nodded and took up the challenge. Neither Egypt nor Syria would start a major war alone, he said. Intelligence had established this. Syria was the weaker power, so everything depended on when Egypt would feel ready to start a war. After the air pounding by Phantoms that they had endured in 1970, this was out of the question, until they had acquired airplanes and missiles that could strike deep enough into Israel to deter or neutralize the air force. That was now basic Egyptian doctrine, and they could not achieve it before 1975 at the earliest.
“That’s two years away,” Golda observed. “You said ten years.”
“We won’t be standing still meantime, Madame Prime Minister. Our qualitative edge will keep increasing. Incidents can occur, possibly serious incidents. Not a major war. It’s a complex analysis, but that’s it in a nutshell.”
Golda nodded and looked around, causing a lull in the clatter of cutlery. “I call on my Reb Alarmist,” she said, “to oppose the estimate of the chief of military intelligence, as the Minister puts it in a nutshell.”
All eyes shifted to Barak, with some smiles. He shrugged, and spoke slowly. “General Zeira’s judgment was proven spectacularly correct in BLUE/WHITE. I don’t presume to challenge it. I’m sure his concepzia is based on hard intelligence, and draws its conclusions with hard logic. My concern is that the enemy’s logic may not work quite like ours.”
Golda turned to Dayan, who smiled pleasantly at Barak. “Well said, Zev. But fear is human, and the logic of fear is much the same for Arab and infidel.”
Chuckles around the table. “Very good,” Golda said. “Anyhow, I’ll settle for 1975, then we’ll see.”
“And returning to your question, Madame Prime Minister,” said Dayan, “we can use more such bridges, because 1975 will come around before we know it, and ten years will also pass.”
“Those are reliable predictions,” replied Golda drily.
When command cars took the VIPs off to the Beersheba airport, Barak remained behind. What struck him most, as he inched down the greasy steel sections of the bridge toward the muddy water, was the gargantuan size of the thing. If he had not seen it scuttling over the sands, he would not have imagined it was movable. Mechanics and engineers swarmed on it, hammering, tinkering, dragging hoses and heavy equipment here and there. Guiding him through the mess, Dzecki said, “Plenty went wrong this morning, sir, but God was good, and we made it.”
“Indeed you did. The Prime Minister was dumbfounded. So was I. Why, this monster is as flexible as a snake.”
“Not really. A snake can wiggle this way and that,” Dzecki illustrated with gestures, “and go around corners. The bridge is flexible only up and down. It will need a straight road to the Canal.”
“And if there’s no road?”
“There is one, and they’re building others.”
“Dzecki, you’re a long way from Great Neck.”
Showing white teeth in a grease-blackened face, Dzecki said, “I’m where I belong, sir.”
Don Kishote appeared on the embankment, waving. “The helicopter’s in sight, Zev,” he shouted, “to take us to the Bar-Lev Line.”
Barak inquired as they walked out to the landing place, “What’s all this about your being fired, Yossi?”
“Well, Gorodish wants his own deputy, not a Sharon man, so I’m out,” said Kishote. “Arik got thrown a bone, command of a reserve armor division. He wants me as his deputy.”
“Careful, Yossi. Arik’s retired and jumping into the October election. The division will be entirely on your back.”
“I look forward to that.”
“Can I give you advice?”
“You’re my army father.”
“When Golda discusses appointments, she always asks, ‘Is he one of ours?’ That’s what has finished Sharon. If you play along with Sharon’s game you’re finished too.”
“I don’t play anybody’s game. And if that’s the criterion for army advancement — ‘Is he one of ours?’ — too bad.” The helicopter was slanting down to them. “Here we go. What can I show you in the Bar-Lev Line, and why?”
“When Golda visits it the press and the brass are there. She can’t really find out anything. Arguments about it keep buzzing around her like bees. Is it an effective deterrent? Should it be held in war, or abandoned?” He glanced at Kishote. “You’ve had to think a lot about that.”
“I have. The Prime Minister is wise to send you on a surprise inspection.”
The helicopter took the Mitla Pass westward. When it began its descent to the glittering blue Canal, Barak touched Kishote’s shoulder, pointed forward, and bawled into his headset phone, “When to all the devils did the Egyptians build those ramparts? They’re higher than ours!”
Kishote’s voice gargled in the headphones. “They started it long ago. So we went higher. Then they went higher. Both sides are up to about sixty feet now. They never stop, though.”
The helicopter jolted to a dusty landing. Across the Canal a fortified tower like a truncated pyramid rose above the Egyptians’ sand wall, and the two prodigious earthworks stretched far out of sight to the north. “Where exactly are we?” Barak asked, as they both got out, faced downwind, and pissed on the sand.
“Deversoir. A likely crossing point, for them or for us.”
“Why?”
/> Kishote gestured southward at a broad shimmer of water. “Great Bitter Lake protects one flank.”
Emerging from a sandbagged concrete entrance under layers of rock and iron, a lieutenant was buttoning his uniform. “Not expecting visitors, Colonel Nitzan,” he said, saluting.
“That’s the idea,” said Kishote.
Most of the soldiers in the bunker were in undershirts or stripped to the waist. One shaggy bearded soldier was giving another a haircut. The outpost was spacious and well lit as Zahal burrows went, only steamy-hot, not like the cramped chilly observation bunkers on the Golan. There was the usual underground smell of earth, sweat, cigarette smoke, and cooking. Tunnels led off the main bunker to pillboxes where half-dressed soldiers on duty lolled at their guns, some wearing slippers instead of boots; reading, smoking, talking, or listening to rock-and-roll music. An air of dreary boredom reigned, and Barak thought, Why not? For three whole years this front had not been under fire, not since the War of Attrition ended, and the worrisome Egyptian maneuvers always subsided without incident.
“These maozim are pretty much alike,” said Kishote when they left, “but this one is special, and I’ll show you why.” He brought Barak out to the back of the rampart, where the packed sand sloped away at an angle that tanks could climb. But here the slope had been excavated, except for a thin bit on the Canal side, to make space for an enormous red-brick-paved yard. “Here’s where a crossing will probably happen if war comes,” said Kishote. “Bulldozers will knock out what’s left of the rampart in minutes, a bridge will be rammed through, and attack forces will head across the Canal. Did you manage to read the DOVECOTE plan on the way?”
