by Wilbur Smith
Once a week, a driver came up from her publisher’s office in Jerusalem to collect her tapes and her writing was typed out along with her other correspondence.
Weekly also she would go with Ella in the speedboat up the lake to Tiberias to do their shopping together, and each day she swam for an hour from the stone jetty. Often an old fisherman with whom she had become friendly would row down the lake to fetch her and she would go out with him, baiting her own lines and taking her turn at the oars.
Across the lawns from the jetty, in the crusader castle, there was always Ella’s companionship and intelligent conversation – and here in her little cottage there was quietness and safety and work to fill the long hours. And in the night there was the chill of terrible aloneness and silent bitter tears into her solitary pillow, tears which only she knew about.
Debra placed a mug of coffee beside Ella’s chair and carried her own back to her work bench.
‘Now,’ she said, ‘you can tell me what is keeping you fidgeting around in your seat, and drumming your fingers on the arm of the chair.’ She smiled towards Ella, sensing the surprise. ‘You have got something to tell me, and it’s killing you.’
‘Yes,’ Ella spoke after a moment. ‘Yes, you are right, my dear.’ She took a deep breath and then went on. ‘He came, Debra. He came to see me, as we knew he must.’
Debra set the mug down on the table, her hand was steady and her face expressionless.
‘I didn’t tell him where you were.’
‘How is he, Ella? How does he look?’
‘He is thinner, a little thinner, I think, and paler than when I last saw him, but it suits him. He is still the most beautiful man I have ever seen.’
‘His hair,’ Debra asked, ‘has he let it grow a little?’
‘Yes, I think so. It’s soft and dark and thick around his ears and curly down the back.’
Debra nodded, smiling. ‘I’m glad he didn’t cut it.’ They were silent again, and then almost timidly Debra asked, ‘What did he say? What did he want?’
‘He had a message for you.’
‘What was it?’
And Ella repeated it faithfully in his exact words. When she had finished, Debra turned away to face the wall above her desk.
‘Please go away now, Ella. I want to be alone.’
‘He asked me to give him your reply. I promised to speak to him tomorrow morning.’
‘I will come to you later – but please leave me now.’ And Ella saw the drop of bright liquid that slid down the smooth brown curve of her cheek.
Mountainously Ella came to her feet and moved towards the door. Behind her she heard the girl sob, but she did not turn back. She went across the stone jetty and up to the terrace. She sat before her canvas and picked up her brush and began to paint. Her strokes were broad and crude and angry.
David was sweating in the stiff shiny skin of his full pressure suit and he waited anxiously beside the telephone, glancing every few minutes at the crew-room clock.
He and Joe would go on high-altitude ‘Red’ standby at ten o’clock, in seven minutes’ time, and Ella had not called him.
David’s depression was thunderous and there was black anger and despair in his heart. She had promised to call before ten o’clock.
‘Come on, Davey,’ Joe called from the doorway and he stood up heavily and followed Joe to the electric carrier. As he took his seat beside Joe he heard it ring in the crew-room.
‘Hold it,’ he told the driver, and he saw Robert answer the telephone and wave through the glass panel at him.
‘It’s for you, Davey,’ and he ran back into the crew-room.
‘I’m sorry, David,’ Ella’s voice was scratchy and far away.
‘I tried earlier but the exchange here—’
‘Sure, sure,’ David cut her short, his anger was still strong. ‘Did you speak to her?’
‘Yes, Davey. Yes, I did. I gave her your message.’
‘What was her reply?’ he demanded.
‘There was no reply.’
‘What the hell, Ella. She must have said something.’
‘She said—’ Ella hesitated, ‘– and these are her exact words – “the dead cannot speak with the living. For David, I died a year ago.”’
He held the receiver with both hands but still it shook. After a while she spoke again.
‘Are you still there?’
‘Yes,’ he whispered, ‘I’m still here.’
They were silent again, but David broke it at last.
‘That’s it, then,’ he said.
‘Yes. I’m afraid that’s it, Davey.’
Joe stuck his head around the door.
‘Hey, Davey. Cut it short, will you. Time to go.’
‘I have to go now, Ella. Thanks for everything.’
‘Goodbye, David,’ she said, and even over the scratchy connection he could hear the compassion in her tone. It heightened the black anger that gripped him as he rode beside Joe to the Mirage bunker.
For the first time ever, David felt uncomfortable in the cockpit of a Mirage. He felt trapped and restless, sweating and angry, and it seemed hours between each of the fifteen-minute readiness checks.
His ground crew were playing back-gammon on the concrete floor below him, and he could see them laughing and joshing each other. It made him angrier than ever to see others happy.
‘Tubby!’ he barked into his microphone, and his voice was repeated by the overhead loudspeakers. The plump, serious young man, who was chief engineer for Lance squadron, climbed quickly up beside his cockpit and peered anxiously through the canopy at him.
‘There is dirt on my screen,’ David snapped at him. ‘How the hell do you expect me to pick up a MiG when I’m looking through a screen you ate your bloody breakfast off?’
The cause of David’s distress was a speck of carbon that marred the glistening perfection of his canopy. Tubby himself had supervised the polishing and buffing of it, and the carbon speck was wind-carried since then. Carefully he removed the offending spot, and lovingly he polished the place where it had been with a chamois leather.
The reprimand had been public and unfair, very unlike their top boy Davey. However, they all made allowances for ‘Red’ standby nerves – and spots on a canopy played hell with a pilot’s nerves. Every time it caught his eye it looked exactly like a pouncing MiG.
‘That’s better,’ David gruffed at him, fully aware that he had been grossly unfair. Tubby grinned and gave him a high sign as he climbed down.
At that moment there was a click and throb in his earphones and the distinctive voice of the Brig.
‘Red standby – Go! Go!’
Under full reheat and with the driving thrust of the afterburners hurling him aloft David called, ‘Hello, Desert Flower, Bright Lance airborne and climbing.’
‘Hello, David, this is the Brig. We have a contact shaping up for intrusion on our airspace. It looks like another teaser from the Syrians. They are closing our border at twenty-six thousand and should be hostile in approximately three minutes. We are going to initiate attack plan Gideon. Your new heading is 42° and I want you right down on the deck.’
David acked and immediately rotated the Mirage’s nose downwards. Plan Gideon called for a low-level stalk so that the ground clutter would obscure the enemy radar and conceal their approach until such time as they were in position to storm-climb up into an attack vector above and behind the target.
They dropped to within feet of the ground, lifting and falling over the undulating hills, so low that the herds of black Persian sheep scattered beneath them as they shrieked eastwards towards the Jordan.
‘Hello, Bright Lance, this is Desert Flower – we are not tracking you.’ Good, thought David, then neither is the enemy. ‘Target is now hostile in sector’ – the Brig gave the co-ordinates – ‘scan for your own contact.’
Almost immediately Joe’s voice came in. ‘Leader, this is Two. I have a contact.’
David dropped his eyes to h
is own radar screen and manipulated his scan as Joe called range and bearing. It was a dangerous distraction when flying in the sticky phase of high subsonic drag at zero feet, and his own screen was clear of contact.
They raced onwards for many more seconds before David picked up the faint luminous fuzz at the extreme range of his set.
‘Contact firming. Range figures nine six nautical miles. Parallel heading and track. Altitude 25,500 feet.’
David felt the first familiar tingle and slither of his anger and hatred, like the cold of a great snake uncoiling in his belly.
‘Beseder, Two. Lock to target and go to interception speed.’
They went supersonic and David looked up ahead at the crests of the thunderheads that reared up from the solid banks of cumulo nimbus lower down. These mountainous upthrusts of silver and pale blue were sculptured into wonderful shapes that teased the imagination – towers and turrets embattled and emblazoned, heroic human shapes standing proud or hunched in the attitude of mourning, the rearing horsemen of the chessboard, a great fleecy pack of wolves, and other animal shapes of fantasy – with the deep crevasses between them bridged in splendour by the rainbows. There were hundreds of these, great blazes of colour, that turned and followed their progress across the sky, keeping majestic station upon them. Above them, the sky was a dark unnatural blue, dappled like a Windsor grey by the thin striation of the cirrocumulus, and the sunlight poured down to shimmer upon the two speeding warplanes. As yet there was no sight of the target. It was up there somewhere amongst the cloud mountains. He looked back at his radar screen. He had taken his radar out of scan and locked it into the target, and now as they closed rapidly he could appraise their relative positions.
The target was flying parallel to them, twenty miles out on their starboard side, and it was high above them and moving at a little more than half their speed. The sun was beyond the target, just short of its zenith, and David calculated his approach path to bring him into an attack vector from above and into the target’s starboard quarter.
‘Turning to starboard now,’ he warned Joe, and they came around together, crossing the target’s rear to put themselves in the sun. Joe was calling the range and bearing, it showed a leisurely patrol pattern. There was no indication as yet that the target was aware of the hunters behind and far below.
‘Two, this is Leader. Arm your circuits.’
Without taking his eyes from the radar screen, David pressed the master switch on his weapon console. He activated the two air-to-air Sidewinder missiles that hung under each wing-tip, and immediately heard the soft electronic tone cycling in his earphones. That tone indicated that the missiles were dormant, they had not yet detected an infra-red source to excite them. When they did they would increase the volume and rate of cycle, growling with anticipation, clamouring like hunting dogs on the leash. He turned them down so he could no longer hear them.
Now he selected his cannon switch, readying the twin 30-mm weapons in their pods just below his seat. The trigger flicked forward out of its recess in the head of the joystick and he curled his forefinger about it to familiarize himself with the feel of it.
‘Two, this is Leader. I am commencing visual.’ It was a warning to Joe to concentrate all his attention on the screen and feed David with directional data.
‘Target is now ten o’clock high, range figures two seven nautical miles.’
David searched carefully, raking the billowing walls of blinding white, breaking off the search to look away at a ground point or a pinnacle of cloud to prevent his eyes focusing short, and to sweep the blind spot behind them, lest the hunters become the hunted.
Then he saw them. There were five of them, and they appeared suddenly out of cloud high above and were immediately outlined against it like tiny black fleas on a newly ironed bedsheet. Just then Joe called the range again.
‘Figures one three nautical miles,’ but the targets were outlined so crisply against their background that David could make out the delta-winged dart shape, and the high tailplane that identified them beyond all doubt as MiG 21 J.
‘I have target visual,’ he told Joe. ‘Five MiG 21 Js.’ His tone was flat and neutral, but it was a lie, for now at last his anger had something on which to fasten, and it changed its shape and colour, it was no longer black and aching but cold and bright and keen as a rapier’s blade.
‘Target is still hostile,’ Joe confirmed that they were within Israeli territory, but his tone was not as well guarded as David’s. David could detect the huskiness in it, and knew that Joe was feeling that anger also.
It would be another fifteen seconds before they had completed their turn across the enemy’s stern, and David assessed the relative positions and saw that so far it had been a perfect approach. The formation sailed on serenely, unaware of the enemy beneath their tail, creeping up in the blind spot where the forward scanning radar could not discover them and rapidly moving into a position up toward the sun. Once there, David would go to attack speed and climb steeply up into a position of superior height and tactical advantage over the enemy formation. Looking ahead now, he realized that chance had given him an added bonus; one of the huge tower blocks of cloud was perfectly placed to screen his climb into the sun. He would use it to cover his stalk, the way the Boer huntsman of Africa stalked wild buffalo from behind a herd of domestic oxen.
‘Target is altering course to starboard,’ Joe warned him, the MiGs were turning away, edging back towards the Syrian border. They had completed their taunting gesture, they had flaunted the colours of Islam in the face of the infidel, and were making for safety.
David felt the blade of anger in his guts burn colder, sting sharper, and with an effort of restraint he waited out the last few seconds before making his climb. The moment came and his voice was still flat and without passion as he called to Joe, Two, this is Leader, commencing storm-climb.’
‘Two conforming.’
David eased back on the controls and they went up in a climb so vicious that it seemed to tear their bowels from their bellies.
Almost immediately, Desert Flower picked up the radar images as they emerged from the ground clutter.
‘Hullo both units Bright Lance. We are now tracking you. Show friend or foe.’
Both David and Joe were lying on their backs in the thrust of storm-climb, but at the order they punched in their IFF systems. Identification Friend or Foe would show a distinctive pattern, a bright halo, around their radar images on command plot identifying them positively even while they were locked with the enemy in the close proximity of the dogfight.
‘Beseder – we are tracking you in IFF,’ said the Brig, and they went plunging into the pillar of cloud and raked upwards through it. David’s eyes darted between the boulé that contained his blind-flying instruments and the radar screen on which the enemy images shone bright and with hard outline, so close now that the individual aircraft in the enemy formation stood out clearly.
‘Target is increasing speed and tightening starboard turn,’ Joe intoned and David compensated for the enemy’s manoeuvre.
David was certain that they had not detected his approach, the turn away was coincidental. Another glance at the screen showed that he had achieved his height advantage. He was now two miles off their quarter above them, with the sun at his back. It was the ideal approach.
Turning now into final leg of attack pattern.’ He alerted Joe to his intention and they began to pitch in. The last-second strike which would send their speed rocketing as they closed.
The target centred dead ahead, and the gunsight lit up, glowing softly on the screen ahead of him. The Sidewinder missiles caught the first emanations of infra-red rays from their victims, and they began to growl softly in David’s earphones.
Still blinded by thick grey cloud they raced in, and suddenly they burst out into the clear. Ahead and below them opened a deep trough of space, a valley between cloud ranges and close below them the five MiGs sparkled silvery in the sunlight, pretty an
d toylike, their red, white and green markings festive and gay, the clean geometrical sweeps of wing and tail nicely balanced and the shark-like mouths of the jet intakes gaping, as they sucked in air.
They were in loose V-formation, two stacked back on each flank of the leader and in the fleeting seconds that David had to study them, he had assessed them. The four wingmen were Syrians, there was an indefinable sloppiness in their flying, a looseness of control. They flew with that lack of polish and confidence of the pupil. They were soft targets, easy pickings.
However, it did not need the three red rings about the leader’s fuselage to identify him as a Russian instructor. Some leery old veteran with hawk’s blood in his veins, tough and canny, and dangerous as an angry black mamba.
‘Engage two port targets,’ David ordered Joe, reserving the MiG leader and the starboard echelon for his attack. In David’s headphones the missiles were growling their anxiety, they had sniffed out the massed jet blasts below them and already they were tracking, howling their eagerness to kill.
David switched to command net. ‘Hello, Desert Flower, this is Bright Lance on target and requesting strike.’
Almost instantly the voice came back, ‘David, this is the Brig—’ he was speaking, rapidly, urgently, ‘– discontinue attack pattern. I repeat, disengage target. They are no longer hostile. Break off attack.’
Shocked by the command, David glanced down the deep valley of cloud and saw the long brown valley of the Jordan falling away behind them. They had crossed over a line on the earth and immediately their roles had changed from defender to aggressor. But they were closing the target rapidly. It was a fair bounce, they were still unaware.
‘We are going to hit them,’ David made the decision through the cold bright thing that burned within him and he closed command net and spoke to Joe.
‘Two, this is Leader attacking.’
‘Negative! I say again negative!’ Joe called urgently. ‘Target is no longer hostile!’
‘Remember, Hannah!’ David shouted into his mask. ‘Conform to me!’ and he curled his finger about the trigger and touched left rudder, yawing fractionally to bring the nearest MiG into the field of his sights. It seemed to balloon in size as he shrieked towards it.
