by Herman Wouk
Peled pointed to his private office. “Eli, go in there.”
Eli scampered out, taking the Talmud with him. The air chief dropped in a chair and lit a cigarette. “The situation’s rotten.”
“I thought the plan was snowballing.”
“The snowball has hit a stone wall and smashed.”
“The refueling?”
“No. Motta reluctantly buys the fuel pumps. It’s the landing. Black-dark airport, no control tower, no runway lights, the pilots have never landed there, and they’re coming down from a two-thousand-mile run. He accepts that they’ll find Entebbe. He can’t accept that they’ll land without risking some mishap that’ll cause the immediate murder of a hundred and three Jews.”
“Show him.”
“Show him what?”
“Show that it can be done without a mishap.”
“Brilliant.” Peled peered at him. “How?”
“Stage a black-dark landing at Sharm. No lights, no guidance beam, nothing. Those transport pilots can do it.”
“I know they can, but okay, I stage it and I tell Motta it’s been done, and he’ll only give one of his skeptical shrugs. Nobody can shrug like Motta.”
“Invite him to ride in the plane.” The air chief sat up, his eyes gleaming. Luria went on. “Why not? You go with him, of course. If you’ll risk your ass, and he won’t, then once it works, that’s that. No more shrugs.”
“What are you studying with Eli?”
“Divorce law.”
“Must sharpen the mind.” The air chief called through the door, “Okay, Eli, come back in. Is the general a good Talmud student?”
Eli sat down with the volume beside Luria. “The general has great potentiality, sir.”
“Happy to hear it. What’s the topic, Eli?”
“Whether a divorce written on the horn of a cow is valid, sir.”
“Well, is it?”
“Yes, sir, if the husband gives the wife the cow.”
The air chief ironically grinned at Luria. “So, that’s Talmud?”
Luria nodded. “Law requires husband physically give wife an instrument of divorce. Act, not instrument, decisive. Talmud takes the case to its most unlikely extreme. Pushes the envelope, so to say. Sound familiar? You were a test pilot.”
“Crazy Jews,” said Peled. “Well, let’s see whether Motta’s got the balls I think he has. Sorry I interrupted your learning, Eli.”
“No problem, sir,” said Eli.
The day before the hijacking, Madame Irene Fleg had been scuba diving in Eilat while her husband was attending to business in Tel Aviv. Amos Pasternak had managed to get away from his desk in army intelligence to join her overnight, so she had telephoned her husband at the Tel Aviv Hilton around midnight, to say that it would be a rush for her to get to Lod airport for a departure to Athens and Paris at 9 A.M. Could they take a later flight?
“Of course,” said Monsieur Fleg. He was in Israel with other French financiers, for a meeting with lawyers and bankers on the debt restructuring of a Dead Sea potash plant. “The fact is, our executive board will be lunching with the Prime Minister, and in that case I’ll be able to join them. No problem, we’ll take the evening plane.”
So the Flegs missed Air France Air Bus 139, and once the hijacking occurred they stayed on in Israel to follow the drama. Knowing people in high places, Armand Fleg thought he was well informed, and the decision to deal with the hijackers astounded him, and struck him, as it did nearly everyone in Israel except the families of the passengers, as catastrophic. But after a telephone call he received while at dinner in the grill, his wife thought she noted a change in the imperturbable Monsieur Fleg. “What is it, dear?”
“Let’s go to the suite. I expect a visitor.”
Amos Pasternak arrived shortly in a sweater and slacks, unshaven, pale and puffy-eyed. Armand Fleg told his wife to leave them alone, and she slipped off into the bedroom.
“Monsieur Fleg,” Amos began without ado, “on instructions of the Defense Minister I confide in you the gravest of national secrets.” In brief flat terms he revealed the rescue plan in its entirety, including the refueling problem. “If it were not Friday night, sir, I wouldn’t be approaching you. You’re aware how totally this country shuts down on Shabbat. To insure the return of the hostages, once they’re freed, the flight leader will need seventy-five thousand American dollars in hand. It may prove unnecessary, but he must have it. Can you raise that sum in cash, sir, without disclosing the purpose to anyone?”
Fleg did not answer for almost a minute, sitting and thinking, half-closed eyes on Amos’s face, fingers rotating a diamond ring on his left hand. “By when?”
“Ten tomorrow morning, the absolute latest.”
“All cash, you say?”
“All cash.”
“Can you wait here?”
“For how long?”
“In one hour I can let you know, one way or another. If the answer is yes, maybe sooner.”
“I’ll wait.”
Fleg opened the bedroom door and looked in. “Irene, my dear, I have to leave this minute.”
She returned to the sitting room as he went out, and she had to clear her throat to talk. “Quite a surprise, this.”
“Strictly business, Irene.”
“Amos, I feel haunted. Right now Armand and I should be trapped in Entebbe.”
“Not so. Your passports don’t say you’re Jewish. You’re both totally French in dress, speech, manners. By now you’d be in Paris with the others.”
“No. I’d never have gone without Armand, and he says he wouldn’t have left. One French passenger acting with guts, he says, insisting on staying with the hostages, could have snarled the hijackers’ plans. And he says he’d have done it.”
“Maybe. Sitting here in the Hilton, he may well believe he would have, but —”
“You’ve never really gotten to know Armand, have you? He’s tough, that quiet little man. You could have used him in Beirut. Now listen, Amos, I have to tell you something. We were having too glorious a time in Eilat, and I kept putting it off, but the fact is, Armand and I met your father at a ski lodge in Klosters back in April. He came there with his young wife.” Irene Fleg hesitated, biting her lips. “A dazzler, isn’t she?”
“A former Miss Israel, or maybe a runner-up. Rather simple-minded.”
“To some tastes, the perfect woman, then,” said Irene Fleg nervously. “Now here you are and I’m very shaken up, so I’ll tell you about it. Your father invited me for a drink, and said I’m compromising your army career and any chance you have to become a brigadier general.”
“Pure nonsense.”
“Is it? We’ve been observed wherever we’ve been, he said. Rome, Florence, Vienna, even on the coastal boat we took in Norway, it’s all in a dossier, and —”
With a vexed sweep of a fist, Amos said, “Irene, if romances made that much difference, the whole army structure would collapse. That father of mine! Now that he’s cooled down and been put out to pasture, he marries an old Miss Israel. Good for him, but it’s got nothing to do with you and me.”
“Put out to pasture? He’s in the Knesset. He’ll probably be a cabinet minister.”
“That’s what I said.”
She seized his hand and pulled him out on the breezy balcony overlooking the darkling sea and the golden lights of the shore-front. Here she put her arms around his neck, and kissed him in a motherly way. “Listen to me, my very dear. Because of our overdone craziness in Eilat, Armand and I missed that plane. I’m ready to believe that it was destiny, that it was why we met in Beirut in the first place. Now the circle’s closed. The story’s told. It’s ending in a deliverance, and let’s just thank God for that —”
“My father’s an interfering old worrier, Irene. Forget it —”
“Amos, your government hasn’t really capitulated, has it? Isn’t it stalling, while you prepare to rescue those people?” He turned cold and said nothing. She persisted, “If you’re coming to Armand,
it can only involve money, a lot of money —”
The telephone rang inside. She answered it, then held it out to Amos.
“Hello? Yes, sir. … Well, that’s a start, anyhow. … Of course, Shabbat is the bottleneck, as I told you. … Right. At once.”
He hung up, and swept her into a sudden hot embrace. “Ai!” she cried struggling. “Méchant! Non! NON!” She struck at his straying hands with small fists. “Non!”
With a laugh he let her go. “Discarding me, are you?”
“Where are you going?”
“None of your business, and by your life don’t ask your husband questions when he comes back.”
She straightened her disarrayed dress. “Alors, va-t-en!”
“Je t’aime.”
“Cochon, va!”
The Ramatkhal returned to the Kirya from the landing exercise at Ophir airport near Sharm el Sheikh a changed man. “We have a long way to go in the next twelve hours,” he said to Don Kishote, in a new excited tone, “but those Hercules pilots can do it. They’re real professionals. If the Sayeret Matkhal rehearsal comes off nearly as smoothly — well, I’ll have something interesting to say to the Prime Minister.”
“They’re rehearsing now at Sirkin, sir,” said Kishote. This was an unused old British airfield. “The air force is bringing the planes there, and the entire attack will be staged for you, start to finish.”
“When? Time’s getting very short.”
“Whenever you get there, sir.”
“Let’s go.”
Air Chief Peled too had a different look, coming into the room where Benny Luria sat, murmuring over the open Talmud. “So, where’s your haver?”
“Went home for dinner.”
“What are you doing about the Aramaic?”
“Faking it, what else?”
“Ha!” Peled dropped into a chair and lit a cigarette. “Exactly what we did. Lucky Motta Gur’s no aviator.”
“What happened?”
“Hairiest landing you ever saw, that’s what happened. I swear to you, Luria, my heart was in my mouth all the way down. We descended in black dark, but at two hundred feet the tower turned on the lights. No sense killing the Ramatkhal in the remote case of a mishap, Motta had agreed to that, very big of him. Well, by my life, when the lights came on those dumb bastards were way off course, the runway was far to the left, if they’d landed in the dark they’d have killed us all, not just the Ramatkhal. Naturally they sideslipped in slick as water, and Motta never knew the difference.”
Luria closed the Talmud volume, holding his place with a thumb. “Isn’t that serious, sir? Suppose they do that in Entebbe?”
“No, no, no problem, that’s an international airport, the landing strip is enormously wide. They’ll be okay. Luria, the thing is on.”
“Then God bless everyone who’s going.”
With no trace of irony, the air chief said, “Amen. I’ve got to get to Sirkin in a hurry.”
When Peled walked into the crowded command tent at Sirkin airfield, Motta Gur was already there, pelting General Dan Shomron, the paratrooper commander of the operation, and the other leaders with sharp queries. Through the open tent flap, soldiers could be seen under floodlights frantically finishing a mock-up of the old Entebbe terminal, a high wall of sandbags with three wooden-framed doorways. Gur pointed out, on a huge blown-up map of Entebbe airport, the big V formed by the meeting of the new and the old landing strips, and the short diagonal connecting them. B’seder, he said, the transports could land on the new runway. He was convinced of that. But the old terminal was at the far end of the other strip. Suppose a new sewer line, or power line, or something like that, was being dug across that old strip? How reliable was this map? How recent was it?
“It’s very recent, Motta. Jeppesen’s, the best there is,” Peled interjected. “I’ve checked all that. Updated with all supplements and corrections, to last week. Besides, we’ve gotten high-altitude aerial photos of Entebbe, and they show no such obstacles.”
“Pictures taken when?”
“Day before yesterday. More being taken today.”
The Ramatkhal finished his questioning and nodded. The floodlights were extinguished, all was dark night, and the full rehearsal for his benefit began. A Hercules rolled up in the gloom, the ramp squealed and dropped open, and out leaped a black Mercedes simulating Idi Amin’s limousine, followed by two Land Rovers. The vehicles sped within yards of the sandbag mock-up. The commandos jumped to the ground and ran for the three doorways, raising clouds of dust, with much shooting of fiery blanks, confused yelling among themselves, and yells over bullhorns.
“What’s going on here, exactly?” Zev Barak asked Kishote. Sent to the rehearsal as eyes and ears for the Prime Minister, he could make little of all this shooting, yelling, and rushing around in the darkness. Nor did he believe the Ramatkhal could. For those who were not in the know, it had to come down to faith in the planners and leaders, and in the people all the way down the line, to the ground crews now going through the long Hercules maintenance checkoff list, to the very tighteners of screws on the cowlings. Only a divine miracle of errorless efficiency could make this thing come off, Barak thought. Of all the operations he had ever observed, this was one in which the battle could be lost for want of a horseshoe nail.
No reply from Yossi. Barak pressed him, raising his voice over the tumult. “Come on, Kishote, by your life, the truth! Plan of genius, or frightening fashla in the making?”
Don Kishote had seen THUNDERBALL grow with confounding speed from a grotesque notion, and a lot of arguing in stuffy conference rooms, to this mock attack involving hundreds of men and many vehicles of war dashing about an abandoned airfield. Now twelve or so hours remained before THUNDERBALL would go or abort; the slow-flying Hercules transports had to depart Saturday afternoon for a late-night landing. Barak was observing all this, Yossi well realized, for Yitzhak Rabin, who in the end would have to take the responsibility and the consequences.
“Plan of genius,” he said.
Visible only as vague running shadows in the night, paratroopers were fanning far out over the airfield to blocking positions when Kishote heard Aryeh’s voice. “Well, Abba, give me a blessing, I’m going.” There he was, Uzi in hand, breathing hard.
“So you are, are you? I didn’t think you would. You’re pretty junior.”
“I was in on all the briefings and rehearsals. A couple of the juniors are going, and Yoni picked me.” Yoni was Lieutenant Colonel Netanyahu, commanding the Sayeret. Aryeh threw an arm around his father’s shoulders. “Don’t worry. Yih’yeh b’seder [It’ll be okay]. I wouldn’t miss this.”
“I know. Go with my blessing. God guard your way.”
Aryeh vanished from the side of a very anxious father. Behind that fierce mustache, Kishote knew, inside that frame now bigger than his own, was a kid not long turned nineteen, hungry for derring-do. Kishote felt that he had done his own rash exploits in Israel’s precarious early years, so that his son would not have to take such risks while he was so young and so raw. But there was as yet no peace, and Aryeh was his father’s son, and the rest was with God.
About one in the morning, the operation leaders reassembled in the command tent. Motta Gur stood in front of the map, his round face somber and tired. “Well, gentlemen, the military option exists. I see that.” (A few handclaps.) “The risk remains very high. But the curse of terrorism must be lifted from mankind, or civilization will break down. If you go, the prayers of the Jewish people will go with you, and the whole civilized world will bless your success.”
Zev Barak left the airfield as a final rehearsal was about to start. In these dark hours of a Sabbath morning, he had observed the top leadership of Zahal reacting like a platoon of good soldiers under attack. The question no longer was whether THUNDERBALL could go, but rather, whether it could be stopped. It had taken on a life of its own. As he was leaving he overheard an exchange between Netanyahu and his deputy, Muki Betzer. “Yoni, by the b
ook we’d plan and game this thing for six months, and then the big brass would probably drop it as too risky.”
“Right, so it’s good we have twelve hours instead of six months,” Netanyahu returned. “Those hostages are our people.”
“I have several nightmares about this,” Yitzhak Rabin said to Barak that morning. The two were alone in his inner office. Barak had just passed through a big conference room where some twenty academic and political experts were gathered, noisily exchanging ideas for advising the Prime Minister. The cabinet was shortly to meet, to vote the operation up or down.
“A couple of thousand people are now involved, Zev,” Rabin went on, crushing a cigarette in an overflowing brass tray. “From the cabinet on down. Just one loose-mouth has to talk to his wife. Just one. She talks to her neighbor. A Soviet spy in this country — and there are all too many, as you know — picks it up. The Russians alert the PLO, they alert Idi Amin, and a Uganda army brigade with tanks meets our planes at Entebbe.” Hunched over almost in a crouch, he peered sidewise at Barak. “Impossible?”
“I hope unlikely, Prime Minister.”
“All right. Next. The airport’s shut down for the night, so a fuel truck is left standing on the new runway. Why not? The first Hercules smashes into it in the dark and alerts the terrorists. They at once shoot all the hostages or kill them with grenades, as they did the schoolkids at Maalot and the Olympic athletes in Munich, and as for the Sayeret —”
“Pardon me, there I have good news, Prime Minister.”
“Oh? Tell me.”
“African international airports take turns as emergency landing fields. It’s Entebbe’s turn tonight, that’s fresh intelligence. The runway will be lit and clear.”
“Really? Excellent. That’s one good omen.” The Prime Minister sat up, with a wan grin. “Zev, have you pictured a failure? One thing going wrong, just one little thing? The hostages all murdered, and Israel blamed for their deaths, for negotiating in bad faith? One more fashla on the world stage, by the Jewish shleppers who produced the fashla of Yom Kippur? It will be more disgraceful than losing a war. My government will fall. My name will be a curse in Jewish history. All this can be avoided, simply by handing over forty or so dirty thugs in our prisons to the dirty thugs in Entebbe.” He gave Barak a long stare. “Nu?”
