by Hesh Kestin
51
YIGAL AND MISHA FIND Major General Ido Baram sleeping on a camp cot in the shade of a eucalyptus outside the headquarters tent. It is clear this is headquarters because a small hand-lettered cardboard sign so designates it. Otherwise, zip: there is no sentry outside, no adjutant hovering just within to make sure military procedure is followed to the letter. It appears military procedure has ceased to exist. Aside from the fact that the men and women sitting around in the shade as though on vacation are in uniform, or some parts of uniform, Camp Yarkon, as it is called, could be any low-rent holiday retreat in any park on the bank of any polluted river in any starving city anywhere.
“Ido,” Yigal says quietly. “What the fuck?”
The general opens an eye. “Yigal?”
“Get up, man. We have to talk.”
“Talk, then. Me, I haven’t eaten since yesterday morning. I couldn’t tell you what it was but I ate it.” He struggles to sit up. Once an icon of physical fitness in the Armored Corps, said to go to war with a set of barbells in his tank, Ido Baram is now little more than a bag of bones covered in loose skin, his uniform flapping around his torso like so much torn wrapping paper. When he lifts his head, it can be seen that his holstered pistol acted as a pillow. He straps it on. Even this, a compact Beretta 9 mm, seems far too big for him. Once ruddy, his face is pale with a curious yellow underlay that is reflected in the whites of his eyes, whose ochre cast is unmistakable, a sure sign of jaundice. Slowly, he stands.
“See that? On my feet like a proper general officer.” He peers past Yigal to Misha and the troop of big men in too-gaudy civilian clothes who keep looking around as if they expect to be arrested at any moment. “I can offer you water,” he says. “Just you, unfortunately. We rigged a solar still. Not Niagara Falls, but we get by.” He looks again at Misha’s crew. “Friends of yours?”
“I didn’t come for water,” Yigal says. “Can we come inside?”
“Sure,” Ido says, lifting a flap for them to enter. “But we’ll have to speak quietly so as not to disturb headquarters staff, who are diligently planning the counterattack. To your left is operations, field intelligence to the right, over there manpower, logistics, and supply, engineering at the rear. Liaison is in the far corner and of course next to that communications.”
The tent is empty.
“Oh, I forgot to mention medical. Just outside.” Ido laughs, a kind of burp of self-derision. “We’re not exactly staffed to the max, of course, because we have no tanks, no equipment, no ammunition, no planning, no personnel capable of fighting, much less walking around, no food and little water. Did I mention no air force or navy? Also no medical supplies, in case you’re here in search of an aspirin.” He pauses, as though unable to continue. Even to Ido, the joke becomes less funny the longer it continues. “Yigal, you haven’t introduced your friend.”
Misha offers his hand.
Ido pointedly ignores it, replying with a mock salute. “Misha Shulman, staff sergeant. I know you well. In fact, I tried to have you removed from the Armored Corps.”
“I knew someone did. I didn’t know it was you. What, afraid I’d steal a tank?”
“More like introducing hard drugs, selling military secrets, that kind of thing. Yigal, this is your friend?”
“You’re both my friends.”
“Yigal Lev,” Ido says, “As always, a man of many parts. Can we get to the point? I find standing for more than a minute wastes too much energy.”
Yigal squats on the ground. “Gentlemen, please be seated.”
The two look at each other, then squat as well.
“Actually,” Ido says, turning to Yigal. “You shouldn’t even be here. Him even less. This is a closed military area. You’re neither in uniform nor called up. In fact, if I remember properly, Yigal, I personally dissolved your brigade. In consonance with the rest of the IDF, it no longer exists. Also, if I recall correctly, Pinky wanted you court-martialed for disobeying a direct order on the battlefield. But as it happens he’s been busy.”
“Busy ordering a retreat,” Misha says.
“Does he have to be here?”
Yigal nods. “Yes, Reserve Staff Sgt. Misha Shulman does have to be here. And I suggest you treat Misha with a modicum of respect, not only because he is my friend but because if you keep at him he is likely to shoot you in the head.”
“I was thinking of the balls.”
“Yeah, well, stop thinking of fighting amongst ourselves. I’m here because I prefer fighting the enemy.”
“Over there,” Ido says, waving airily to the east. “About six kilometers. You can’t miss them. Arabs mostly, with a nice overlay of Iranians. Intelligence, when we had intelligence, also noted a Pakistani unit—imagine that, Pakistan—and a nasty group of rapists from Chechnya, of all places. What do you want me to do, Yigal, conjure up an army? You were sent home. Stay there.”
“Ido,” Yigal says. “I’m taking back my tanks.”
“What?”
“I’m taking back my tanks. That’s why we’re here.”
“Yours?” Ido says. “What did you do, buy them?”
“I don’t have to buy them. They were taken from me without reason.”
“Yours? Oh, I see. I thought for a moment you were sober. Very good. If I live through this I’ll tell my grandchildren. It’s like those an Englishman, a Frenchman, and a Pole walk into a bar jokes. A capitalist and a gangster walk into command headquarters and the capitalist says—”
“The capitalist says he wants his tanks. Why is that funny? You’re not using them, are you?”
“Talk to the chief of staff. Pinky will be amused. He could use a good laugh.”
“You talk to Pinky,” Yigal says. “We’re reactivating the 112th.”
“That brigade is activated, Yigal. It’s just blended into something else, which you have no part of. Pinky took the map with him. When he comes back you can ask him to explain our disposition of forces, including your former tanks, all well dug-in in defensive positions.”
“Look, Ido. I don’t want this to be unfriendly. We’re taking our tanks.”
“You were relieved of command. The gangster too. You can’t just walk in and take tanks.”
Misha has had enough. It does not take much. He reaches behind him and removes the gold-plated .40-cal CZ pistol from his belt and levels it at Ido’s head. Firing at this range will leave nothing of it: torso, shoulders, neck—check. Head? None. “I changed my mind about aiming for the balls, Yigal. This piece of shit has none.”
“Oh, now I understand,” Ido says, showing no fear, a natural consequence of either hopelessness or constant hunger, perhaps both. Doubtless the jaundice does not help. “You’re going to steal the tanks.”
“You’re going to stop us?” Misha says, holding the pistol so level a ball bearing would not roll off.
“Just like that? No permission? No authority?”
“Misha, put down the gun. This is not a matter for guns. Ido, listen carefully. You’ve got a defensive perimeter as effective as a line of clothes hanging in the sun. Fewer than two hundred tanks, most of them immobile, covering a line a hundred kilometers long. On the other side there are a couple thousand enemy cans, maybe double that, maybe triple. To know exactly we’d need a satellite, and I doubt we’re in contact with those. The way we’re disposed, the enemy can break through at any point. You and I could do it with three tanks. We don’t have a defensive perimeter. We have an illusion.”
“We have the best we can do.”
Misha is still pointing the gun at Ido’s head, but now it wavers, perhaps from doubt, perhaps because it weighs almost four pounds. Even a hard guy like Misha cannot hold a weight like that steady forever. “Yigal, let me just put him out of our misery.”
“Misha, put away the gun. It’s an order. Ido is a military professional. He understands.”
“He understands this,” Misha mutters. But like a child deprived of a favored toy, Misha tips up his pistol, then places
it in his lap.
“Very good. Ido, I’m taking my brigade back. But I need more. I need control of all the armor you command.”
“What is this, a coup d’état? We’re what now, Haiti? Liberia?”
“Yigal,” Misha says. “We’re running out of time. And I’m running out of patience.”
“Do you agree, Ido, that this defensive perimeter is a joke? I’m asking for your trust.”
“You’re asking for the keys to half the surviving tanks in the State of Israel.”
“I’m asking for all of them. Look, Ido, we served together over twenty years. There wasn’t a moment in that time, from officer’s training onward, that I didn’t trust you and you didn’t trust me. Comrades in arms to the end, right? Well, my friend, we have reached the end. The State of Israel barely exists, but with your help it will.”
“Yigal,” Misha says. “Let me just shoot the fucker.”
The look on Yigal’s face is no longer one of friendly persuasion. “Sergeant, shut the fuck up. When I agreed to this, it was on one condition. What was it?”
Misha makes a face. “That you command.”
“Exactly.” He turns to the general. “Ido, what is IDF doctrine when we are surrounded, outnumbered, outflanked, and down to our last ammunition and fuel?”
Ido laughs. “Attack!”
“Nu, mon general?”
Mon General sighs, then offers a wan smile. “It’s treason, you know. Pinky can have me shot.”
“I know.”
Major General Ido Baram glances up, now to Misha, then to Yigal. “Tell me what I need to do.”
52
THAT NIGHT, SOMEWHERE IN the Negev desert—she is unsure precisely where, having dropped down out of the sky in an all but featureless landscape that might as well be the moon—Alex sits in a dry riverbed by the side of a paved road. She has already changed into female garb, her pilot’s uniform stuffed into the bag that had held her makeup, dress, and high heels. The road is doubtless marked at some point, but all she can tell is that it runs north-south. Her compass is functioning, as is her mind, which seems to go into overdrive under critical conditions. As a pilot, she felt confident in her competence during training flights, or when delivering a plane, but once in combat she is always ramped up, super-capable, her reflexes so quick they operate without her knowledge, eye-to-hand controls moving seamlessly without routing through the conscious brain. In the more quiet moments of her life, and this is certainly one of them, she wonders if her wandering gender identities are in some way connected to the peculiar duality of her abilities as a pilot.
For hours, a dozen lappet-faced vultures have been circling above, even now in the moonlight. These respect neither rank nor politics, gender nor nationality. As far as the vultures are concerned, Alex is just another lone animal that soon, without water, will be weak, delirious, defenseless. The morticians of the animal world, they normally wait respectfully for their meals to die. But unconscious living flesh is the same as dead. Their eyesight is as sharp as that of the local Bedouin, whose appetite for prey is no less refined.
These Negev tribesmen are capable of spotting a lit cigarette a mile off. Alex knows enough about the clans hereabout to know how much danger she is in. In fact, though Israel Air Force doctrine focuses on saving aircraft as well as pilot, in case of an emergency over the Negev a forced landing is never advised. Let the plane crash elsewhere, miles from where your parachute falls. Landing the plane successfully means the pilot will be found in a matter of minutes, because there is no way to distance oneself sufficiently from the aircraft before it will be spotted by enemy reconnaissance from above, enemy ground forces nearby, or by camel-mounted Bedouin tribesman eager for bounty. In this three-dimensional game of chess, it is better to remain a live pawn than a trapped queen.
But this queen does not feel trapped.
Alex is already on the offensive, planning her next moves. First priority: wheels.
Just as she finishes applying her lipstick, a kind of crimson this evening (she prefers earth tones for daytime), a convoy of Egyptian infantry, some twenty trucks, comes into view. There is sufficient moonlight for her to identify the unit number painted on the sides, but of course no one to report it to, and no radio to report it with. Anyway, trucks full of infantry are not what she needs. Within a few minutes, there it is: a ’70s-era Cadillac sedan painted olive green and flying the red, white, and black standard of the Egyptian high command.
She scrambles out of the wadi, no easy matter in four-inch heels, and flags the Cadillac down, showing a bit of leg in the process. As though magnetized, the staff car pulls to a halt, then backs up.
While she stands in the moonlight, the young adjutant driving leaps out to open the rear door. She cannot see inside but hopes there is no more than one passenger. Waving her left hand gaily she approaches the car with the other behind her back until she is close enough: one passenger, struggling to get out of the car. So far, so good. But she is still too distant for certainty. As she closes the gap, the single passenger, an obese colonel, manages with the aid of his adjutant to exit the car. He is grinning.
She takes the adjutant out first, one shot to the head. He is still crumpling when she shifts the barrel of her 9mm Israel Military Industries pistol and drops the obese colonel with two shots. In motion immediately, she kicks off her heels and gets to the car. The colonel is still moving. All that fat. There is less fat around his skull. A third shot does the job.
She knows she has mere minutes before more Egyptian traffic appears, every one of their vehicles running with full headlights, sign enough that for the Egyptian Army the war is over, the area secure. She leaves her pistol by the car, not the best thing but she needs both hands and her dress affords nothing to tuck it into. The fat colonel’s uniform will do her no good, but after cutting through his trousers with a small, sharp IAF-issue emergency blade, she relieves him of his huge boxer shorts—a white flag may come in handy later. After rolling the huge corpse into the wadi, she turns to the adjutant. In a moment she is out of her clothes and into his, not a bad fit at all, though she will have to adjust the pistol belt holding up his, no longer her, pants. The adjutant’s Colt Commander, a .45, looks so new she wonders if it has ever been fired.
“Shit,” she says aloud. She should have done this before.
Climbing down into the wadi, she removes the colonel’s brass insignia of rank and his pistol, another Colt, but this one gold-plated. She climbs back to the road, wraps her heels in her dress, tosses the adjutant’s shoes into the front of the Cadillac, and takes off, leaving the bodies of the adjutant and Lieutenant Colonel Anwar, head of Egyptian Special Operations Branch, for the lappet-faced vultures.
In this there is the irony of rough justice. Col. Anwar has just come from setting up a “relocation camp” for the Hamas leadership of Gaza. Allied to the Muslim Brotherhood that for decades has been a thorn in the side of Egypt’s secular leadership, Hamas has long been at the top of the Egyptian army’s hit list.
Relocation is of course a euphemism. Just outside of Beersheba, Col. Anwar personally supervised the mass burial of twelve hundred Palestinians identified as Hamas, many of them accurately. Though Col. Anwar would have preferred to spend a bit more time on each one of these enemies of Egypt, this is hardly practical: wholesale torture in a war zone might leak out of even the most hermetically sealed area. The only choice was machine gunning them into mass graves and then bulldozing tons of sand to cover the bodies deep enough so that the ever-present vultures, whole flocks of which had migrated to feast on the victims of this war, would not spread their bones across the desert floor to become a diplomatic embarrassment and then, later on, a problem for tourists. For tourists, there can be nothing worse that coming across a pile of human bones before lunch.
Col. Anwar’s engineers had identified a spring close to the burial spot, which is why it was chosen. In a matter of weeks, Egyptian peasants are to be brought in to plant date palms over the mass gra
ves, whose decomposing bodies will provide excellent fertilizer and the spring adequate water. A meticulous planner, Col. Anwar early on filed a claim for the site, together with a thousand acres surrounding it, more than sufficient for a village. Given a bit of luck and special investment from Cairo, one fine day the village might become a city. Upon maturity, the palms alone will provide an annual profit sufficient to ensure a wealth stream to generations of Anwars, to say nothing of rents from the village, and then—Allah willing—the city into which it might grow. According to the Egyptian proverb: Plant today, feast tomorrow.
But according to another Egyptian proverb: Because we feared the snake, we missed the scorpion.
In her adjutant’s uniform, adorned with Col. Anwar’s rank insignia, Alex reaches the first of what will be many Egyptian checkpoints. Half a dozen vehicles are lined up. Alex drives the Cadillac briskly around them, taps the horn, and takes the salute of the four infantrymen standing guard. Having removed her makeup and blond wig, Alex returns the salute with the casual ennui of a staff officer and drives on through, barely slowing down as the barrier is lifted.
53
THE NEXT MORNING, BARELY a hundred miles distant, two dozen Chariot tanks with the markings of the 112th armored brigade roll south down the Tel Aviv beachfront, passing the startled residents of the tent city that runs almost the entire length of Tel Aviv’s once pristine seafront. These are not tents precisely, but mere shelters strung together from sheets and blankets over whatever wood or metal could be scavenged from the beachfront hotels. Hotel mattresses provide the beds, each laboriously carried down dozens of narrow flights of stairs and then dragged to the beach. In a mélange of pragmatism and desiccated whimsy, most of these tent neighborhoods are marked with signage liberated from the hotels. In this way, one can say he now lives in the Herzl Suite near where Frishman Street meets the beach, or in the Presidential Ballroom at the end of Dizengoff Street. At the encampment marked King Solomon Conference Room, the tanks, led by a convoy of ten jeeps, turn east into the heart of the white city, rattle across a now brown public park, and come to a stop before the Tel Aviv Hilton. Compared to the massive armor the luxury hotel seems now blurry, faded, shrunken.
