by Herman Wouk
“Hebrew, lady!”
“Ah, yes, yes. Sorry.”
“Where did you say your room was?”
She blinks. “I didn’t say. What does clay smell like?”
“Mud. Drying mud.”
“Don’t you have to go back to your boat?”
“My crew’s taking on missiles, ammo, and fuel.” He glances at his watch. “An hour and a half.”
“Actually, it’s just around the corner, but it’s a dismal hole.”
He jumps up, beckoning to the waiter. “Doucement,” she says, seizing his fingers. “Can’t I finish my coffee?”
“Panter Shakhor!”
A few hours earlier, in the bone-chilling starless gloom and clanging racket of the replenishment area, Amos Pasternak has encountered another battalion commander and impulsively embraced him, exclaiming again, “Panter Shakhor!” (“Black Panther!”) Short, squat, with a bristly growth of black beard, and thick unkempt hair hanging below his helmet, Major Kahalani, like Amos, has been fighting for three nights and two days, and he is acquiring a Neanderthal look. Between them these two battalion commanders hold a crucial stretch of the front, a low saddle in the ridge that blocks the enemy advance into Israel.
“Some panther!” Kahalani’s voice is hoarse and cracked from shouting over the combat networks. “No claws left, hardly.”
“Black Panther” is a bitter joke Kahalani made over the brigade network at his own expense, during the worst of yesterday’s Syrian onslaught. “Don’t worry, Yanosh, I’m a Black Panther. They won’t get past me.” Actually the Black Panthers in Israel are Tel Aviv street toughs, Moroccans and other dark-skinned Jews of the so-called Eastern community, or “Second Israel,” from Arab countries. But Kahalani is a Yemenite, a proud different group of ancient lineage, which nevertheless endures similar disadvantages in Israeli society, and in the army too. In the heat of battle fury Kahalani lashed out with that defiant jape, and Amos loves him for it.
“How long does this go on, Avi?” Amos says. “How can the Syrians keep it up?”
Except for a few gun flashes to the east, the third night battle has at last died off. Tanks are parked higgledy-piggledy at the ammunition trucks, and unshaven crews stumbling with fatigue are loading shells by the glare of headlights. All night the embattled defenders of the saddle were unable to drop back and replenish, and some tanks have shot off their last shells and held their ground with machine guns and grenades. En brera! If the Syrians once break through this gap they cannot be stopped short of the main Golan roads, and the highway to Haifa. In the terror-stricken stories Julie Levinson has heard from the wounded soldiers, that much is grimly accurate.
“As long as they keep coming, we hold!” says the Panther. “You’re doing brave work over there on Booster, Amos.” Booster is the southern hill of the saddle. Kahalani holds the commanding northern Hermonit Hill, the highest ground, which has been taking the brunt of the artillery and tank assaults.
“But where are the reserves, Avi, to all the devils?”
“Raful must be sending them all to the other sector to protect Tiberias.” General Raful Eitan is commanding the Golan battle. “It’s a shambles down there, Amos. Colonel Ben Shoham’s dead.”
“My God, Ben Shoham!”
“Yes, and God knows what else is happening. For all we know the Syrians are in Tiberias already.”
Miraculously, the Syrians are not in Tiberias.
On the first night and the first full day of war, the brigade defending the southern Golan Heights was shattered by two Syrian divisions, the commander, Yitzhak Ben Shoham, was killed, and the way down the escarpment into the Galilee — and on to Tel Aviv, for that matter — lay open to a large unopposed Syrian armored force. Why that force halted remains a mystery to this day. Granted this marvellous respite, General Raful Eitan has been throwing all the reservists as they arrive straight into the worst gaps in the southern Golan. That is why Yanosh, defending the northern sector, has had to fight with the troops and tanks on hand. Drastically decimated, his Seventh Brigade is barely hanging on, and its weakest point is the saddle between Hermonit and Booster, manned by Kahalani and Pasternak.
“Look, havivi [my friend],” Kahalani tells Pasternak as they part, “when the battle’s hard for us, it’s hard for the enemy, too. We’re fighting for our homes and families. For our land. What are they fighting for? Just obeying orders. They’ll break first.”
“Besides,” says Amos, “we’ve got a Black Panther on our side.” Kahalani’s teeth gleam through his whiskers in a big smile, and his tank snorts away, leading his column of Centurions.
Sinking into battle exhaustion as the first streaks of dawn show ahead, Amos leads his depleted force, now down to eleven tanks in all, back toward Booster. His ears are still half-deafened by gun blasts, his whole body is sore from getting thrown around as his tank pounds over bad terrain, his spirit is darkened by what he has seen of dead and wounded friends — guys with shell splinters stuck in their faces, gushing blood, guys disoriented with shock and pain, guys weeping from exhaustion and fear, guys sprawled in pallid death. As he rides erect in his turret, scarcely awake, Amos Pasternak now has an experience he will never forget.
He is all at once overcome by a weird feeling of disembodiment. It is as though he is rested, happy, well, and floating ten or fifteen feet above the rumbling Centurion, above his own physical self that is standing in the turret and peering through the darkness, with the persisting battle stink of gunpowder and burning in his nose.
He is down there, yes. But he is also up here, thinking calmly and philosophically about the Yemenite Black Panther, and about the way Jews have returned home from all over the world in response to the colossal German slaughter, and have tightened themselves into the hard fist that is Israel. Amos’s own parents are from Czechoslovakia and Germany. His gunner is a South African, the driver a Persian, the loader-radioman an Iraqi. Yanosh is a Pole, the division commander Raful a native-born sabra, the Ramatkhal himself a Yugoslavian. Even the Prime Minister was born in the Ukraine and grew up in Milwaukee. What a country, what a people, what a fantastic Return, how good it is to be fighting this battle! It is all he wants of life, right now. If he has to die doing it, why not?
So he floats in hallucinatory exaltation, all the while conscious and giving orders to the driver, far below in the tank. The mood, or feeling, or waking dream, whatever it is, begins to fade when his tank arrives at the ramp, and he sees again the flaming town of Kuneitra, and the fires of burning tanks and APCs winking all over the Emek Habokha, Vale of Tears, as the Israelis are already calling it. He descends into his body, as it were, and is himself again. But the memory of that disembodiment keeps haunting him as his tanks range along the ramps, and he recalls where each tank captain comes from: Rumania, Iran, Hungary, Canada, Tunis …
“Kahalani, Yanosh here.”
“Kahalani here. Good morning.”
The words break the silence in Amos’s headset and jerk him out of a doze. He climbs up in his turret. The east is growing light. The wind is brisk and frigid. Yanosh is ordering Kahalani to move from a reserve position back to the Hermonit, for the Syrians are coming. The sky brightens, the nerve-shaking artillery salvos resume; fire flashes far off, CRUMP! of guns, shells exploding all along the saddle. In Amos’s binoculars long columns of tanks come crawling forward, bumper to bumper, winding around and through the hundreds of wrecked smoking machines in the valley. For the third straight day, more of the same, more than ever. God in heaven, how many tanks do they have? Or are these now the Iraqis? A blinding sun is rising over the Damascus Plain, and the defenders must wait until it climbs high enough so that they can see to fight. Dark glasses are no help, nothing blots out the glare that doesn’t blot out the enemy as well. Heart-pounding wait, then after a while he sees a crowd of tanks looming through the dust and glare nearby, on the long shallow slope up to the saddle.
Battalion network: “Kahalani to all units, keep the battle thrifty.
Short ranges. No spotting shots. Fire to hit.”
Amos to his tanks: “Pick your targets and shoot.” He seizes his turret handle and swivels it at a monstrous approaching tank, massive and ugly in Soviet style, must be a T-62. First encounter with one of those. A shout to his gunner: “Fire, point-blank range.”
BAMM! Heavy jolt of the recoil. The T-62 bursts into flame, and the crew comes jumping out and scurrying down the slope. So, the Russians can build them bigger, but they are still firetraps. Across the saddle Amos sees that the Panther is already in trouble. The enemy columns are pouring toward the Hermonit. Kahalani’s tanks are backing off from their hull-down positions on the ramps, for the Syrian artillery has them pinpointed, blasting fountains of dirt and fire among the machines. Kahalani can only retreat, let the enemy come over the ramps, and try to pick off tanks as they appear.
But this time there are just too many. Groggily Amos surmises that an entire fresh armored division must be pouring into the narrow gap. Almost too bleary to think, firing and firing again, he sees many many tanks aflame below and Syrians scurrying among them, yet on and on the machines come.
“Yanosh to Raful. I am withdrawing Kahalani’s battalion before I lose it. En brera.”
Amos does not know whether to cheer or cry. That Kahalani’s battalion is crumbling he can see for himself. Another half hour of this battering and it will cease to exist, like the brigade in the south. He himself will soon be overrun at this rate, but for the Black Panther to be pulled out of action, after three nights and a third day of such a stand …!
“Raful to Yanosh. Can Kahalani hold on for fifteen more minutes? Help is on its way.”
A new voice on the brigade circuit: “Kahalani, Wake Up here. I’m coming with forty tanks. I’m now at Point Rambam. Yanosh, where do you want me?”
Amos wonders whether he is falling into the dream state again. It is the voice of an old friend, a battalion commander of Ben Shoham’s destroyed brigade, but he knows that that commander, Major Ben Hanan, is in Nepal on his honeymoon. Ben Hanan? Forty tanks?
“Yanosh here. Wake Up, come over Booster and attack the left flank of the enemy.”
“Wake Up here. Coming.”
It has to be Ben Hanan. His father does a morning exercise show called “Wake Up.” How the devil has he gotten here from Nepal? Amazing, but Syrian tanks are breaking through all around the Black Panther, and his few tanks are firing in every direction. Amos himself is in a frenzy of shooting to hold his own ground against the swarming enemy tanks. And here by God comes Wake Up rolling over the hill, not forty tanks but a dozen or so, advancing abreast and firing. That “forty” was surely a deception meant for the Syrians, who copy all the Hebrew signals.
Now Amos hears Yanosh hoarsely telling Raful unbelievable good news. An outpost on the Purple Line, besieged far behind the front, reports that the Syrian supply train stretching many miles eastward into the valley has started to turn back. If true, then Kahalani was right, they are actually breaking first, but is it possible? Below, the hordes of machines are also starting to churn into disarray. Over on the Hermonit, Kahalani’s dwindled force is charging back up on the ramps to blast away at the disorderly tanks milling below in a confused stampede of steel, fire, and smoke.
“Fire! … Fire! … Fire!” Amos keeps shouting at his gunner. There are so many targets down there it is impossible to miss. Before his eyes the chaotic Syrian tank masses are beginning to crowd eastward toward a high sun obscured by haze and smoke, their guns trained backward to fire, and a shell bursts deafeningly close by. He sees zigzag colors and lights, feels piercing burning in his left arm, and his forehead drips warm blood into his eyes. He cannot see. He drops down in the tank, and as the loader and gunner are dressing his wounds he hears on the brigade circuit:
“Yanosh here. Raful says our brigade has saved Israel. Kol ha’kavod, Kahalani.”
“Kahalani here.” Exhausted croak. “Maybe we’ve stopped a massacre. We still have to win a war.”
Zev Barak accompanies Golda to the Pit, extremely uneasy about her planned flight to Washington. The Mossad has declared the incognito precautions airtight, and the negative reactions in Washington are not changing her mind.
For this meeting with Golda, Dado has cleared his underground office of ex-Ramatkhals and assorted high brass. Only his quartermaster general is there, with the array of supply charts Barak knows well. From Phantoms and Centurions to rocket-propelled grenades and small arms ammunition, they are all broken down on the same pattern, Stocks on hand before the war, Average daily depletion, Estimated days of war, Stocks on hand now.
The Ramatkhal offers Golda a chair. Pasty-faced and hoarse, he is all business and does not act downhearted. “I understand you want answers to two questions: what is our supply situation, and how urgent is an airlift?”
“Yes. Let’s hear.” She lights a cigarette, smooths her dress, and regards the Ramatkhal with keen remote eyes in a mottled dour face.
“Madame Prime Minister, the surprise attack has cost us very, very heavily. The quartermaster general’s figures are plain to see.” Dado gestures at the charts, then clasps his hands on the desk, leaning toward her. “The consumption of ammunition is many times our prewar estimates. There’s never been such density of fire in any war on any front, not even in World War Two. It’s a new factor. Tank and airplane losses have been extremely severe. Our armorers are marvellous at sending damaged tanks back into action, but as for Phantoms, when a plane’s gone it’s gone. The air force reports that at the present rate of loss, we’re three or four days away from the red line.”
She looks grave. “Go on.”
“I come to the urgency of an airlift. We can and must counterattack to survive and win this war, and I estimate we can do it with stocks on hand if necessary, depending mainly on how heavily the Russians resupply the enemy.”
Golda Meir raises her thick eyebrows, glancing at Barak. “The Minister of Defense thinks differently.”
“Madame Prime Minister, he bears a heavy responsibility and his worry is understandable. I’ve lived this war in my mind for nearly two years. We’ve thoroughly war-gamed it. It’s a hard war. We’re having painful disappointments, but not to a catastrophic degree.”
“Dado, you say it depends in part on the amount of Soviet resupply. Our intelligence says they’re already starting to resupply by air and sea.”
Dado grimly shakes his head. “Yes. Do the Americans want Russia ruling the Middle East? That’s the real question. An airlift will be insurance for them, as well as for us, so I’m all for it. And as I say, we do need replenishment of unforeseen burn-up of consumables. So far, mainly ammunition.”
The quartermaster general answers some penetrating questions by Golda, then she leaves with Barak. In the car driving back to her office, she sits in a brown study, saying not a word.
“Zev, are my flight arrangements all set?” she says as she sits down at her desk.
“In every respect.”
“And yours?”
“Is that settled? Am I to accompany you, Madame Prime Minister?”
“You’re going. I’m not.” She takes in with sour amusement his nonplussed look. “Do we need a big airlift immediately? I still don’t know. Dado doesn’t like to admit he may run short. Naturally! But I can’t face that risk. And the air force must have planes. I’ve been on the phone to Washington, and you’re right, I’d better stay here. You take the next flight out.”
“My instructions?”
“Get an airlift.”
He ventures a light tone. “ ‘Piece of cake,’ the Brits say.”
Golda echoes it. “ ‘Duck soup,’ the Americans say. For diplomacy I have Dinitz and Eban, but when it comes to takhlis [brass tacks] I want a military man who can talk to Americans. Specifically, to this General Halliday, and those other Pentagon fellows nobody’s heard of, who get things done. You have access, you’ve done it before. Motta Gur’s a fine attaché, work closely with him. Pleasant journ
ey!”
The long lounge beyond passport control at Ben Gurion airport is dark except at one gate. Amid a huddle of passengers Zev Barak sits in a tweed jacket, tie, slacks, and the old Aquascutum topcoat he picked up while at staff and command college at Sandhurst. As he reviews papers from his despatch case, late summaries of the supply situation, there echo in his mind Emily Halliday’s excited tones and happy laugh on the telephone. Unable to resist, he has just called her to say he is coming. Her joy at the surprise call and his own pleasure at hearing her voice, have lifted his spirit. Their romance, whatever its strange origin and fleeting time of passion, is a hopeless thing, yet a fugitive but durable grace of the years and a match flare in the present gloom.
“I’ll meet you at the airport,” were almost her first words. “When do you arrive, and on what flight?”
“Emily, that’s absurd. I’m hoping to make the first shuttle in the morning, but who knows? The weather report isn’t good, and—”
“I’ll be there. If you don’t show up, I’ll go home. Nothing hard about that, love.”
“Okay, I’ll look for you, and thanks.”
“Marvellous. I won’t sleep all night.”
What a contrast to his parting with Nakhama! Her first comment, when he told her he was going, was, “Well, I guess you’ll see Emily Halliday”; all the more rasping for its penetration. He had let it pass, told her what he could of the mission, and packed a carry-on bag while she fretted about the war, the children, and his leaving her. Nakhama’s once hearty good nature is much altered, especially since a bad hepatitis which she picked up on a holiday in Greece. That is why he called off the correspondence with Emily.
Sam Pasternak is approaching him across the nearly empty lounge. All shops and restaurants are closed, and his footfalls echo hollowly. “Ever since you called me I’ve been exploring landing rights for an airlift,” Pasternak says. “It doesn’t look good. Once the Arabs scream ‘oil,’ those European politicians will all fall down kohrim [prostrate]. Even if an airlift goes, the Americans may have to refuel in the air.”
