by Hesh Kestin
On any other day, the reservists who make up the bulk of Israel’s armed forces would have been scattered and the roads so congested with traffic it would have taken hours for pilots to reach their planes, tank crews their tanks, sailors their vessels. Israel’s telephone system would already have been at peak capacity. The extra usage as parents called their children, as officers and enlisted personnel called their units, would have turned the national communications grid into one long busy signal.
Instead, when the sirens went off on Yom Kippur, there was not a man, woman, or child in Israel who thought it might be a drill. Phone calls were put through immediately. Reservists drove on near-deserted roads at one hundred miles an hour to reach their bases. Tanks and military vehicles used the same wide-open roads to meet the enemy attack and hold it until the reserves arrived to back them up. Were it not for the strategic blunder of an attack on the least effective day of the year, Israel might well have been destroyed in 1973.
General Niroomad’s planners spent months dissecting that day. They concluded that only two modes of approach were possible: a daylight attack that would have the Israel war machine tied up in traffic jams, or a nighttime attack benefiting from surprise. In the end the element of surprise, supported by fifth columnists to neutralize the Israel Air Force, won out. But the Iranians knew a night attack would find resistance from the Muslim armies: by tradition or preference or just fear of the dark, Arabs had never favored fighting at night. Even T.E. Lawrence could not convince his faithful Bedouins to attack before dawn.
Recognizing this lapse, during the British Mandate an officer in His Majesty’s forces sympathetic to the Jewish cause organized the first Jewish commando since the days of the Maccabees. Major Orde Wingate knew what he was doing when he called his outfit the Special Night Squads. In Israel’s War of Independence, IDF units became adept at taking back during the night what had been lost to overwhelming Arab forces during the day. But now the Iranians had a solution: the starlight scope, which sucks in available ambient light from even a moonless night and concentrates it to create a ghostly green-tinged image of what cannot be seen with the naked eye.
Armed with the SLS, not only Arab officers but entire units could proceed as though in daylight. SLS devices could be mounted in Egyptian, Iraqi, Syrian, and Jordanian tanks, on sniper rifles, on mobile artillery, even on trucks and armored personnel carriers. The question was: where could these instruments be obtained in massive numbers?
Though the West maintains constant satellite surveillance of the arms factories of the People’s Republic of China, no Western nation bothers monitoring the center of optics manufacture at Wuhan in Hubei Province—who cares if the Chinese are suddenly a good deal more myopic? In return for the usual guarantees of access to Middle East oil, China provided Iran, and through Iran the Arab armies, with a secret weapon that was hardly secret. SLS devices had been part of every armed conflict since the Vietnam War, but they had never been used strategically.
Now the Arabs are no longer afraid of the dark. What does it matter if the IDF is better trained, better organized, and more intensely motivated than any fighting force in history? Compared to his enemy, the Israeli soldier is blind.
23
THIS DISADVANTAGE IS NOT known to the IDF command as 200,000 Israelis, men and women up to the age of fifty-five, fathers and sons and mothers and daughters, are called to duty. There is no warning: the sirens go off in the cities at the same time as the population hears, sees, and feels the sound and fury of a military attack already in progress.
The primary target is Jerusalem, the seat of Israel’s government, where the first assault is from the air. A second wave of bombing very quickly arrives at Haifa and Beersheba, the country’s third and fourth most populous cities. Aside from carefully chosen targets—the IDF’s headquarters at the Kirya, the Mossad’s operations center in the northern suburbs, and the municipality building on Ibn-Gvirol Street—Tel Aviv is studiously ignored.
Because it is barely touched by aerial attack and has no tanks and infantry at its gates, Israel’s first city responds by the book. Municipal buses make for designated staging areas where they will be filled with reservists to be delivered to their bases, from which they will move as units to the front; police are issued automatic weapons and take to the streets directing headlong traffic traveling without headlights on roads whose lighting is snuffed out; doctors and nurses not in the reserves make for emergency rooms at nearby hospitals, where generators are readied and marginal patients are sent home to make room for a flood of wounded; gas stations are reopened in the middle of the night; the population is warned via television, radio, and loudspeaker to enter the shelters below every apartment house or the hardened concrete rooms in every private residence, to black out all windows, and to make sure that everyone remembers to have his gas mask within reach.
While the rest of the country reels in confusion and shock, Tel Aviv is awake and responsive.
Right off the beach promenade at the gay nightclub called Ema, the strobe lights continue turning above the abandoned dance floor, drinks stand unfinished on tables, high-decibel recorded music pounds a room empty but for the odd cigarette burning down in an ashtray.
At the nearby marina, the fifty-two-foot Hatteras bobs peacefully at its mooring at the end of a long dock, its lights out, television silent. Boats of all kinds remain tied up, except for a few powerful vessels owned by visiting yachtsmen, who decide to take their chances on the seaway to Cyprus, 230 miles distant.
And in a villa in Herzlia Pituach, seven miles up the coast, a forty-six-year-old industrialist ceases making love to the wife whose passion for him has reignited now that their son is out of the house. As the sirens go off, Yigal Lev reaches for the television remote, sees the face of a somber newscaster before an image of the national flag, and moves immediately to pull his uniform from its special place in the closet. As he straps on his sidearm, he hears his wife whisper their son’s name.
He takes her in his arms long enough to tell her, “Cobi will be fine.” And then, like two hundred thousand other Israelis, Yigal Lev is gone into the night.
24
IN THE WAR ROOM of the Revolutionary Guard, an eerie silence pervades the subterranean space, a silence underscored by the cricket-like keystrokes of ninety intelligence officers bent over their computers before a display wall of coordinated monitors that can show a dozen scenes or be united to display a single image. Right now that image is Jerusalem, burning.
General Niroomad puffs on his second Montecristo. “Knesset,” he says to his technical assistant, a captain trained at Caltech.
The giant image zooms down to show a building destroyed, smoke rising above it in a black column. Earmarked as a prime target, the Israeli parliament has been destroyed not because its legislators might be in the plenum at four in the morning, but because of its symbolic significance, both to the Muslim attackers and the Jews.
“Haifa.”
Built along the sides of Mount Carmel as it flows liquid-like down to the enormous cranes of the container port at its base, the city is aflame. In the harbor, two dozen commercial ships list, some already half-sunk. Farther north, thirty-two IDF Navy missile boats burn in the harbor.
“Tel Aviv.”
Here the picture is different. Because only a few specific sites have been targeted, the city appears as peaceful as it should be this early in the morning, though traffic—running without headlights—has begun to move in the darkened streets
“Airbases.”
The single tiled-together screen devolves into twelve separate images, under which like subtitles in a foreign-language movie are the airbase names in Farsi. Except for these, each screen shows the same scene: IAF aircraft in flames, the tarmac beneath them itself a sea of fire. Here and there explosions erupt as fuel dumps ignite, making the screens go white, momentarily overwhelming the automated lighting adjustments of the satellite cameras.
General Niroomad carefully drops a
half inch of ash into a crystal ashtray engraved with the seal of the Revolutionary Guard. So quietly only his adjutant can hear, he says what he has been longing to say for a year.
“Commence ground.”
25
COBI’S RADIOMAN CLIMBS DOWN off the tank to take a leak. For fear of angering the tank gods, no armored corps soldier will ever piss off the top of a tank, even a dummy tank. The radioman may not be a gung-ho soldier but he knows enough not to do that. He leaves the radio with Cobi.
There are now lights on the other side of the Jordan.
From his position standing atop the tank, Cobi lets his SLS drop down from the strap around his neck, as though somehow what the instrument tells him is false and he must see it for himself, through his own eyes. The far bank is now so well lit he does not need the night-vision device. Before him, a giant operation is in process, one which will change his life and those of six million other Israelis.
And, eventually, alter the world balance of power.
As if they are all controlled by the same switch, the steel rear doors on a hundred tractor-trailers crank open. This takes all of thirty seconds, but to Cobi it seems like an hour, not least because he cannot figure out what he is seeing, or even that he is seeing it. The rear doors on a hundred tractor-trailers are not supposed to be opening simultaneously at four in the morning on the Jordanian side of the Allenby Bridge.
But they are.
They remain open long enough for the young lieutenant to realize that what he is seeing is not only real but unaccountable. He checks his watch so that when he gets to company headquarters later in the morning, he will be able to make a precise report before setting off on his way to three complete days of leave, starting with a shower so long and so hot the water in his home’s solar boiler will begin running cold, and then a nice meal with his mother—he is partial to her macaroni and cheese, and she adores him for it, even if he does ruin the subtlety of her recipe with ketchup. Then he plans to go down to the beach, swim out a couple of hundred feet before returning to the sand to check out the girls. His father will be home by the time he rinses the sand off in the outdoor shower by the pool. His dad always comes home early when Cobi gets leave. The two will talk tanks for a while, which will almost certainly lead to his father asking him about the future: what does he really, really want to do? There is a certain inevitability in his going to work for his father’s huge enterprise, but like all Israelis who are conscripted into the military upon graduation from high school, Cobi faces beginning university at twenty-one or twenty-two, with three years ahead of him just to get his bachelor’s degree, and then maybe business school or law school or something he can’t know now, some mysteriously hazy and possibly dreary profession. Or he could stay in the military and take his degree as an officer, with any luck reaching his father’s reserve rank of major before he is thirty, and after that—
Abruptly this reverie is shattered. Bats? Bats in trucks? Then: A thousand bats with buzzing motors?
He sees them, but doesn’t believe what he sees until one drone peels off, making straight for his tank, a dummy but a convincing one.
26
HEADING NORTH ON THE coastal road, traffic thickening around him as more reservists head for their units, Cobi’s father shoots the BMW sedan to 130, then 140 miles per hour. As he drives, Yigal buttons his uniform shirt, then slips on his dog tag in its leather pouch, which most Israeli soldiers wear so that the metal won’t reflect light.
His pistol is on the passenger seat. All of this he keeps prepared: his field uniform hanging in the closet, IDF identification card in the placket pocket over his heart, a ballpoint pen and a yellow map marker in the right-hand pocket, along with a tiny steel jar, not much bigger than a thimble, in which he keeps the present his own father gave him on his induction into the IDF. “In case you fall into captivity,” his father told him. “They’re not like us.”
His father was a hospital orderly for forty years. One day during that time he must have liberated the pills in the steel container. Yigal never opened it. He is certain there is nothing left after so many decades in his pocket other than fine powder, and maybe even that has disappeared. He carries it for luck, and to remember. He taps the cellphone in his lap.
“Call Noam,” he tells it.
Busy circuit, a series of short buzzes.
He taps the phone again, this time pressing down heavily.
“Call No-am!”
The circuits are still busy. They will be all day and into the night. He knows why. After all, Yigal does control the second largest of Israel’s four cell phone companies, a gold mine really, but as with any gold mine, its proprietors—he is thinking of himself—are reluctant to invest when profits are easy, and equally reluctant when they seem like a distant goal. Why spend the profits when things are good? Why add to the losses when they are not? These are business decisions. But in times of emergency he is one of millions paying the price of his own investment strategy.
He presses his foot down on the accelerator pedal: 145, 150, 155. Beyond that, Yigal fears he will not be able to control this beast of a car. Should another automobile swerve into his lane it will be over for him in seconds. The brigade will be leaderless. He drops it down to 150. One-fifty is good, he thinks. I can handle one-fifty.
He turns off to the east before the exits for Haifa. Above the city already he can see the black smoke rising. The port is on fire, he thinks. No, he knows it. The car’s speakers, tuned to IDF Radio, little different from a commercial station in time of peace, are still calling codes: Dry Fish. Hairy Leg. Broken Nose. Dark—
The speakers emit a sound that is the beginning of a boom, then silence.
Yigal has been in three wars. IDF Radio has never been down. He pushes the BMW to 160.
27
ON THE RIDGE OPPOSITE the Allenby Bridge, Cobi lies dazed on the ground, his dummy Chariot literally shot out from under him, burning. He has been thrown fifty feet. For a long moment he thinks he is dreaming, but as his eyes return to focus he can see the lights moving on the far side of the Jordan as the tractor-trailers, performing some sort of brutish ballet, move aside to create corridors. Through these appear hundreds of Jordanian Challenger tanks, which line up like dutiful children to begin crossing the rickety bridge.
He shouts for the radioman and then stops when he looks behind him. What is left of the kid is distributed over a wide arc of perhaps twenty feet. Immediately he scans the gut-spattered ground for the radio, but sees nothing. Then he recalls it was at the top of the tank. He gets to his feet, feels one of them collapse in pain—either his ankle is twisted or gone—and prepares to climb the burning ruin when he sees the radio, intact, about ten feet away. He hobbles to it.
Amazingly, it works. IDF radios are meant to survive the worst.
“Aleph-Bet to Skull, Aleph-Bet to Skull. Skull, we are under armored attack. Urgent request air support. Hundreds of Challengers crossing Allenby Bridge. Repeat, hundreds of Challengers crossing Allenby Bridge. Urgent request for air to knock out Allenby Bridge. Knock out Allenby Bridge! Over.”
Three miles to the west, a radio in brigade headquarters barks out the message. But Jordanian jet fighters have already been here. There is nothing left but the smoking remains of a body-strewn headquarters tent, and Cobi’s desperate metallic voice.
“Aleph-Bet to Skull. Repeat, we are under massive armored attack. Require immediate air support. Knock out Allenby Bridge! Knock out Al—”
Cobi hears a series of explosions through the radio, then silence.
28
OVER JERUSALEM, THE BOMBERS complete their runs and head north and west to secondary targets. Were the city built of anything other than stone, it would be one huge conflagration. As it is, only sporadic fires burn amid the destroyed government buildings. The Knesset is leveled, the Prime Minister’s Office and the Defense, Justice, and Interior Ministries reduced to rubble, Israel Police headquarters adjoining the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood on the
border of Arab East Jerusalem a giant hole in the ground. Here and there the Jews of West Jerusalem step out into the streets to peer at the predawn sky, empty now of bombers, only to see waves of transport planes, Dakotas and C-130s, coming in with the gathering dawn.
Propeller-driven, they are announced by the noise of their engines, each wave delivering slow-falling bits of black soot which in a matter of seconds reveal themselves to be parachutes and then, in a heartbeat, black-garbed commandos.
Intensely trained for months, these Revolutionary Guard shock troops know the topography of Jerusalem better than many native Israelis. Though each flight also carries Hebrew-speaking graduates of the Iranian military’s Jewish Thought Institute in Qom, every paratrooper has been schooled in Hebrew sufficient to the requirements of their mission: Yadaim I’malah! [Hands up!] Al ha birkaim! [On your knees!] Nashim v’yiladim smola! [Women and children to the left!]. But that is for tomorrow. Today’s imperative is to hunt down the Jewish leadership and, in the words of their mission statement, to “cut off the head of the rabid dog.” This does not mean take them prisoner. According to the Iranian analysis of Nazi Germany’s campaign to cleanse Europe of Jews, Hitler’s singular mistake was to attempt to do it humanely.
The Revolutionary Guard parachutists expect to encounter strong resistance, but they meet little.
For thirty years, Israel maintained a policy of strict gun control. Civilians wishing to obtain a license for even a shotgun to be used in hunting or a small-caliber target pistol often gave up in the face of bureaucratic barriers. Even a speeding ticket could cause ineligibility. Israelis with gun licenses that were not renewed annually—even in cases where the license-holder was in the reserves or abroad on government business—lost them automatically. When they tried to renew, they found themselves disqualified because they had been found guilty of possessing an unlicensed firearm. In one infamous case, a ninety-two-year-old retired accountant lost his license when some zealous Interior Ministry bureaucrat discovered the old man had been convicted during the British Mandate of illegal possession of firearms when he was a gunsmith working for the Jewish resistance. Even worse, unlike the Swiss, whose reserve soldiers are required to keep their issued weapons at home, the IDF keeps theirs under lock and key in centralized depots throughout the country. Thus, when it comes to armed resistance by civilians, there is none. The tragedy of the Nazi era is now repeating itself: the Jewish population is unarmed.
