In a bleak corrugated iron hut, on the pier where the Cherbourg boats were berthed, Sam Pasternak, clad in a green waterproof parka and baggy pants, was drinking tea. A cold wind off the harbor whistled at the fogged window, and an electric heater by the tea urn gave off a red glow and not much else.
“Ah, there you are, Professor,” Pasternak said, as Noah came in with his uncle. “Now all we need is the Treasury Minister. Everyone else is aboard the boat already. Get the professor some warm clothes, Lieutenant, or he’ll freeze out there. For the Minister, too. He’s very short and very fat. Professor, is the damn thing going to work?”
Michael Berkowitz limped to the urn, and as tea trickled from the spigot he said, “Can’t say. My responsibility has been running checks on the computations. The aircraft people down in Lod built it, and I’ve contributed an idea or two. Live warheads are not my thing.”
“You’ve seen the preliminary tests?”
Michael shook his head. “Just the designs. They’re original and startling. These navy fellows are brilliant, but audacious. It’s a whole new concept —”
“I know the concept, a sort of Tom Thumb battleship, no? A shallow-draft boat a hundred fifty feet long, with the punch of a heavy cruiser —”
“That’s it, more or less.”
“Michael, I’ll ask a dumb army man’s question. How can you throw such a punch from an eggshell boat hull?”
“Well, with a missile there’s no recoil, of course. As for the deck guns —”
A telephone rang by the urn. Michael picked it up. “Yes … All right … The Minister’s car just arrived, General.”
“Then let’s go.”
At the gangway of his Saar (Storm) boat Noah helped the portly little Treasury Minister into foul-weather gear, while Pasternak assisted Michael. “Minister, do you get seasick?” Pasternak asked the cabinet member, an old friend. “I do.”
“Just don’t talk about it.” The nervous politico wrestled a zipper over his bulging paunch, his white hair flying in the wind. “Just don’t think about it. It’ll all be over in a few hours. I sailed from Rumania in 1910, in a boat like a bathtub, and here I am.”
Army and government observers crowded the deck and bridge of Noah’s craft, but there were none on a similar vessel tied outboard, with two strange large gray housings on its deserted forecastle. “That’s the Gabriel,” said Pasternak to the Minister.
“Those two trash cans? Well, this test had better come off, that’s all,” said the Minister peevishly. “There’s been much larceny going on in the defense budget, and Moshe Dayan will stand for no more of it.”
The two boats left the harbor in a bright afternoon. Beyond the breakwater the swells from the west were smoothed out by an offshore wind, and Noah’s craft moved steadily over a calm sea, but not steadily enough for the Treasury Minister, who within minutes was looking very green. The boat’s captain brought him below to his cabin. “Just lie down, Minister, and you’ll be all right. We’ll call you topside for the test.”
Collapsing on the dark bunk, the Treasury Minister groaned, “I was younger when I sailed from Rumania.”
Michael Berkowitz was wedged in the captain’s bridge chair, talking mathematical and ballistics jargon with the father of the missile boat project, Admiral Shlomo Erell, a wiry little man in a thick sweater and wool cap. Now retired, this former navy chief had been relieved early of his command, disgraced by the sinking of the Eilat, and the vanishing of the submarine Dakar on its maiden voyage. But nothing had stopped his indomitable pursuit of the “thumbnail battleship,” and of all the people crowding the vessel, he seemed the calmest at this make-or-break point of his seven-year quest.
“Your nephew’s a good officer,” Erell remarked to Michael, as Noah executed a maneuvering order called down by the captain from gun control. “He should have been decorated for his action in the Eilat disaster, and he’s going places.”
“Can I tell my brother Zev you said that?”
“Why not? I just did.”
“Target, Captain, one point on the starboard bow,” Noah shouted up to gun control. “Range seven miles.”
Visitors all over the small boat began saying, “What? Where? Who sees it?”
Noah passed Pasternak the binoculars. “Straight ahead, General, a little to the right.”
“That hair on the horizon? That’s the Jaffa?”
“That’s her mast.”
Noah gunned the motors, the boat leaped ahead, and the Eilat’s sister ship hove in plain view. With a pang, Noah remembered how glad he had been to espy it coming in sight over the horizon to relieve the Eilat on patrol. Now here was the moment of truth. After today Israel would either have a two-front navy in the Med and the Red Sea, of a strength that would astonish the world, or an insignificant coast guard, once for all.
Pasternak went below on a short steep ladder, and found the Treasury Minister supine on a bunk in a darkened cabin. “Are you all right, Minister?”
“As long as I lie flat,” he moaned, snapping on a small bunk light and rolling over to face Pasternak. “Tell me again, Sam,” he said hollowly, “why we have to sink the Jaffa.”
“Nothing else to do with it. Its day is done. We’ll have no more warships three hundred feet long, with two hundred sailors aboard.”
“They could test the missile on a towed target.”
“That’s been done. The question is whether it can sink a vessel with a live warhead on the open sea.”
“If it does, then what?”
“Then — and this is straight from Golda — the navy’s got its twenty-five million dollars to finish and fit out those five Saar boats still stuck in Cherbourg. Otherwise that money will buy a lot of tanks, as you know.”
“Sam, the French have embargoed those boats. We can’t get them out.”
Noah shouted down a speaking tube, “Preparing to fire, General.”
“Minister, be a mentsch. This is why you’re out here.”
“I’m coming, I’m coming, Sam.”
On the forecastle of the other Saar, about half a mile away, one gray pod now gaped open like a crocodile mouth. The Treasury Minister said in a dim voice, “Sam, wasn’t it you who came with me to London when we bought the Jaffa?”
“Yes, it was.”
“Then you know we paid spot cash for that destroyer. Spot cash! A check on the Barclay Bank in Tel Aviv! Now, only ten years later, I have to watch us try to sink her. Could anything be crazier?”
Over the wireless transmitter, the harsh voice of the captain of the other Saar: “Cub One from Cub Two. Missile ready to launch.”
Admiral Erell, up in gun control with a microphone: “This is Lion. ESH! [FIRE!]”
Out of the gray pod a long dark projectile, with four large tail fins and a peculiarly bristly nose, whooshed skyward in a throbbing roar, trailing flame and black smoke. It flew in a long arc high, high into the blue, then suddenly nosed over and went diving toward the sea. All over the boat a general moan rose which changed to a cheer when the missile straightened out and went skimming over the surface toward the Jaffa. From his chair Michael was tracking the missile with binoculars, as it rose and fell just above the water, following the contours of the high long swells. “How to all the devils does it conform to the surface like that?” Pasternak asked him. “It’s eerie!”
“Depth-finder principle, General, adapted to electronics,” said Michael with growing excitement. “Flight path governed by constant rapid measuring of the distance to the surface. Inspired idea, though the mathematics were very complicated —”
“But look, isn’t it off course, Professor? I’d say it’ll miss by half a mile.”
“Wait.”
In a few moments the missile veered sharply, sailed upward, and then dived straight at the destroyer. Smoke, flame, and white water spurted up from the hull amidships, and a reverberating blast came rolling over the sea. Applause and loud cheers broke out from sailors and visitors alike. “By my life, sir,” N
oah blurted to his captain, as the splash subsided and the smoke drifted clear of the Jaffa, “she’s listing already.”
“ESH!”
The second missile sped over the sea, again wide of the mark, again turning toward it. Michael enthused to Pasternak, “How about that control, General? Did you see all that stuff on the nose? Special radar, a Jewish tchotchke. There was nothing that we could buy off the shelf, in Europe or America, to do the job.”
The second missile “did the job” for fair, thunderously tearing another enormous black hole in the Jaffa, quite visible to the naked eye. A third Saar boat had been lying to, well clear of the test area, with the skeleton crew of the Jaffa’s last voyage aboard. As the three patrol boats slowly converged on the listing destroyer, a melancholy silence settled over the onlookers. Slowly, slowly, the dying Jaffa rolled over on its side, wallowed awash for long minutes, then lifted its Hebrew-lettered bow to the sky and slid down into the sea, leaving a boil of spume and a whirling slick on the blue water.
“Cubs One, Two, and Three from Lion,” called Erell, “last salute.” In column, the three patrol boats sailed round and round the bubbly slick in a tight circle, their sirens mournfully wailing. Then the column headed back toward Haifa under a sunset sky.
Admiral Erell approached Noah and handed him a small brown book. “When you get a chance, Lieutenant Commander, have a look at this.”
“Sir, my rank is lieutenant.”
“Not for long.” The retired admiral dropped down the ladder. The book was Baedeker’s Guide to Cherbourg.
7
The Shocks
“Yossi? It’s Shayna.”
Kishote sat up, wide awake at once. The window of his chilly bedroom in the ski lodge looked out on a vista of twilit Alps, where high snowy peaks were reddening in the dawn. “Is Aryeh all right?” he blurted.
“Aryeh’s fine. Mazel tov, Yael just called, she had a nine-pound girl early this morning —”
“Oo-wah, nine pounds! A big, big girl! Barukh ata …” He rattled off the ancient blessing on good news.
“Amen,” said Shayna, “and they’re both doing well, she told me. Here, Aryeh wants to talk to you.”
“Abba! I’ve got a baby sister! Aunt Shayna’s taking me to the hospital today to see her!” The boy’s voice was breaking with excitement. “I just talked to Imma, and she said it’s all right, I could come. Isn’t that great?”
“Beautiful, but go after school, hamood.”
“B’seder, Abba. Oh, I’m so happy!”
“So am I. Kiss your little sister and Imma for me. Now let me talk to Aunt Shayna. … Look, Shayna, tell Yael I’ll be back tonight or tomorrow, depending on the flights —”
“Yossi, she insisted you’re not to break off your vacation, there’s no need —”
“Doesn’t she think I want to see my daughter?”
“I suppose she knows you pretty well.”
The faintly tart, deeply sad tone scraped Don Kishote’s nerves. A pause.
“How has Aryeh behaved?”
“His father’s son.”
“That bad?”
“Charged up with energy, that’s all. Lovable anyway. I’m going back to Haifa after we see your daughter. May you raise her to Torah, marriage, and good deeds.”
“Amen. Thanks, Shayna.”
“For what? Goodbye, Kishote.”
He was scheduled to go down a racing trail for expert skiers that morning. The instructor had warned him that pluck and skill were different things, that the trail was beyond him, and that he would be in a fair way to break a leg or his neck. He knew that if he went soon to the small local airport, he could make a connection to reach Tel Aviv that afternoon. He mulled it over, and got dressed for skiing, thinking that Shayna was right, Yael knew him pretty well.
Next day Kishote’s driver met him at the bustling Lod terminal and brought him straight to the army hospital at Tel Hashomer, legs and neck intact. He had made it down the trail with only one spill in soft snow on a bad curve, and at the bottom the shaken French instructor had remarked that if all Israelis were that lucky, no wonder they won wars. He found Yael in a frilly pink bedjacket nursing the infant, who looked up blindly at her father with unblinking sky-blue eyes. “Isn’t she cute?” said Yael, looking reasonably cute herself, her face made up, blond hair brushed out over her shoulders, eyes shining with tender pride.
“Not to be believed,” said Don Kishote. They exchanged glances of rueful good will; no love here, but an undeniable new bond. “You have great babies, Yael.”
“I’ve had help. See?” She caressed the baby’s hair, dark like Yossi’s. “Aryeh was crazy about her, but Aunt Shayna upset him by bursting into tears. We had to explain that ladies sometimes cry for joy.”
“Is there anything I can do for you?”
“Motek, I’ve arranged for a nurse, I go home Friday, and next week I’m back in the shop, which I bet is falling apart.” The baby was making loud sucking noises. “Oof! Aren’t you the hungry one? Yossi, I’d like to call her Chava [Eve], my grandma’s name.”
“Chava it is, then. She’s a Chava, all right, Yael, fresh from the Garden of Eden.”
“And in English, Eva,” said Yael. “ ‘Eve’ sounds sort of goyish. But what’s the ceremony for naming a girl, Yossi? There’s nothing to do, is there?” Yael made a wry face. “Nothing to cut off, you know.”
“Ha! No, nothing. I just announce it at a Torah reading. I’ll do that before I leave for the Sinai.”
“Now listen, you take care of yourself. My brother Benny came in yesterday. He’s been doing overflight photography at the Canal, and he says it’s hell down there.”
Yossi bent and kissed his daughter’s forehead. “Goodbye, Chava. Elohim, those eyes. The first thing I ever noticed about you, Yael, so help me, was your eyes.” She was removing her round pink breast from the sated baby’s mouth. “Well, the second thing.”
“Never mind,” said Yael with a sour grin. “Ancient history.”
Benny Luria had not exaggerated. Things were a lot hotter along the Suez Canal, Don Kishote soon found, than any Israeli who wasn’t there could imagine.
In Tel Aviv, Haifa, and Jerusalem, the flush times of victory were going on and on. Jocund admiring tourists were flooding the big cities and the sightseeing spots, and new luxury hotels were springing up to accommodate them. Among the Israelis themselves, by and large, all was cheery confidence and mounting prosperity. They loved Golda, they trusted Moshe Dayan, and to them Nasser’s one-sided War of Attrition was no more than a distant muttering futile nuisance. But at the front it was something quite different: indeed, as the aviator had reported, an intermittent inferno for the few unlucky reserve soldiers manning the maozim, the strongpoints on the Bar-Lev Line.
To begin with, these fortified outposts were several miles apart; and though Kishote had known about this from maps, the reality of immense empty unprotected miles of sand, stretching as far as the eye could see along his sector of the front, came to him as a daunting shock. Tank units from his and other brigades were patrolling the huge gaps in the hundred-mile line; but the enemy, after laying down heavy artillery barrages, could send raider squads to cross the Canal almost at will, to ambush the patrols and mine the long military roads leading back to Israel. True, the tankists kept trapping and killing the raiders, but they kept coming, for Egypt’s manpower and weaponry, compared to Israel’s, were limitless. Kishote observed that the soldiers in the strongholds, fifteen or twenty to a post, could do little but crouch in their bunkers night and day, when the earsplitting deluges of shells came, and bear them as they might, for they were at a lopsided disadvantage in artillery.
Israeli combat doctrine of “fire and movement” assumed short conflicts, and turned on the air superiority and rapid massed tank thrusts which had won the Suez and Six-Day Wars, so artillery had been a poor third in planning and procurement. But now Egypt was forcing static warfare, in which artillery was the main arm, on Zahal, the Israel
Defense Force. In plain sight on the other bank were heavy batteries of Soviet-made cannon, and aerial photography showed wheel-to-wheel mortars and howitzers positioned all along the hundred miles of ramparts from Port Said to the Gulf of Suez. For this formidable array of firepower, Israel’s meager artillery was no match whatever, and making up such a dearth in a major branch of weaponry would take years and vast expense. Top-secret intelligence put the enemy artillery advantage at ten to one.
So perforce a new doctrine had been improvised, worded as “flying artillery.” Mirages and Skyhawks had been pressed into use to pound the enemy batteries, and the tactic had in fact slowed the attacks. The air force was advocating an all-out campaign using the Phantoms, due to arrive in September, to strike back and once for all stamp out this War of Attrition. These were the most powerful combat aircraft in the world, and with the long reach and heavy punch of Phantoms — so the argument went — Israel could terrorize and if need be strangle Egypt; Phantoms over the Nile, sonic booms over Cairo, would teach the dictator an overpowering lesson, or perhaps even topple him. But Moshe Dayan was prudently dubious about the limits of the flying artillery concept, fearing on the one hand Russian intervention, on the other hand American delay or cancellation of Phantom deliveries if the air attacks were pressed too far.
How much longer, however, could Israel endure Nasser’s one-sided voiding of the UN cease-fire resolution by exploiting his advantage in artillery? The UN itself of course was utterly indifferent, so long as Egypt was doing well. Casualties in the Bar-Lev Line were mounting. Either Israel had to leave the Canal, a policy unthinkable to Golda Meir and her worshipful public, or a decisive counterblow had to be struck to restore the cease-fire. So it was that in June, when Don Kishote had been in his new command two months, he received a terse secret order from the Minister of Defense: Prepare and submit a plan to me for a raid into Egypt in force, using Soviet armor, as per your proposal in October 1967 after the Eilat sinking.
About a month later Dayan’s helicopter came thrashing down near Kishote’s field headquarters, and they talked outside in the cold night while eager soldiers carried off the sacks of personal mail for the brigade which the helicopter had brought. Off to the west artillery thumped, flashes lit the sky, and drifting smoke half veiled the moon and the multitudinous desert stars.