By the Rivers of Babylon (21 page)

The two men from the OP/LP, halfway down the slope, fell breathless at the foot of the knoll and reported what was already known from Nathan Brin and Naomi Haber. “They’re coming.”

Brin watched as the Ashbals continued their silent movement up the hill. They didn’t come in file as they had done the last time, but they moved on line along the whole width of the five-hundred-meter slope, approximately a hundred of them, men and women, well-spaced at five meters apart. They kept their line straight like well-trained infantry of another era. There was no wavering and no bunching up. They didn’t linger or congregate around areas of natural cover and concealment as their instincts cried out for them to do. They held their AK-47’s with fixed bayonets thrust out in front of them. It was an awesome sight to anyone who could see it. But to Brin, it was all show. Parade-ground training. He was interested to see how they would react when the bullets began flying down at them.
Then, he suspected, they would quickly revert to their modern training. They would find what little cover and concealment was available and burrow into it. They would move from rock to gully to pothole. But for now, in the dark, they were putting on a show of the classic infantry attack—more for themselves than for the Israelis who could not see them.

The knowledge that he was the only one who could see them brought Brin to the verge of panic several times. Sweat formed on the rubber eye guard of his scope and ran down his cheek. They were still very far. About five hundred meters. Then four hundred meters.

General Dobkin and Isaac Burg disagreed on tactics. Dobkin wanted to engage them with heavy fire as far out as possible with the idea of keeping them out of assault range of the thin defensive line. With luck, that would precipitate a panicky flight down the hill. The prisoner had said that they had no hand grenades, but Dobkin couldn’t be sure of that. He didn’t want them in grenade range in any case.

Burg wanted to engage them as near as possible—within handgun range—in order to cause heavy casualties with as little expenditure of ammunition as possible.

Hausner wasn’t consulted, but he thought that Dobkin’s arguments were more realistic, considering their situation. In the end, however, he knew that Dobkin, soldier to the core, would defer to a civilian government official. It was a subjective type of decision that had to be made, and rank would always carry that type of argument.

Hausner excused himself, jumped from the hillock, and walked the fifty meters to where Brin was kneeling.

Brin was visibly shaking as he watched the wave of Ashbals approach. Hausner couldn’t blame him. He spoke softly. “Range?”

Brin didn’t look up. “Three hundred and fifty meters.”

“Deployment?”

“Still on line. Most are in the open. Bayonets fixed.”

Naomi Haber was sitting on the ground breathing heavily from her exertions. Hausner turned to her. “Go to an AK-47 position and tell him to begin the firing.” She got up quickly and ran down the line. He turned back to Brin. “Range?”

“Three hundred.”

“Commence firing,” he said softly.

Brin squeezed the trigger, swung the rifle, squeezed again, swung, and squeezed again. The silenced muzzle coughed faintly again and again. Then the first AK-47 cut in, a signal to begin firing at will. Up and down the line, along the crest of the hill, came gunshots. The hollow popping of the three AK-47’s drowned out the small handguns. Above all the other sounds could be heard the sharp staccato of the little 9mm Uzi submachine gun.

The Arabs immediately replied with heavy fire from their own AK-47’s. The noise quickly rose to a deafening pitch. Hausner could see the incoming rounds digging away at the improvised Israeli breastworks. He couldn’t tell if anyone had been hit yet.

Brin’s assignment was to try to identify unit commanders and eliminate them. He swung the rifle and spotted the antenna of a field radio, carried as a backpack by a radio operator. At the end of a corkscrew wire coming out of the radio was a radiophone. A young man was crouched down, holding the radiophone to his face. Brin aimed at the young man’s mouth and fired. The phone and the man’s face erupted into a scatter of disjointed pieces. He swung the rifle back and shot the radio operator through the heart.

The Ashbal’s return fire ceased as their long line broke up quickly into small groups centered around natural areas of cover. Their progress was slowed, but they still moved forward. Brin scanned the area behind the Ashbals, looking for the senior leaders. He thought once that he saw Rish, but then the head disappeared, replaced a second later by that of a young woman. Without hesitation, Brin fired. He could see the head jerk sideways. The beret flew off and the long hair swirled as the girl spun to the earth.

Dobkin could see the fiery bursts as the Arabs moved up the hill. He shook his head. They may have been well trained, but he gave them a low grade on tactics. The approved method of night attack, developed in large part by the Israeli Army, was quite different from what the Ashbals were doing. It was known now that night attacks should begin silently, not with the sound and fury of artillery barrages and screaming men, as in the past wars. The Ashbals had done that at the beginning, but they had moved too slowly and returned fire too soon. The Israelis had, in past
engagements, shown that a quick silent run was the most effective method of night attack. The enemy was generally only half-alert, and when they saw what was coming at them in the dark, they only half-believed their eyes. By the time they reacted, the attackers were within hand grenade range, then a second later, they were in the trenches. Even a fully loaded infantryman could cover half a kilometer on the run in less than two minutes.

Dobkin watched as the flashes moved in the darkness. These Ashbals fired on the run and fell behind cover afterward, the exact opposite of what was good sense. The defenders on the hill fired at the flash of the muzzles while the attackers were running. As far as Dobkin could see, the Ashbal’s fire was so far without effect on his concealed positions, except for one casualty reported to him. Looking downslope, Dobkin could see what appeared to be muzzle flashes cut short by what he hoped were hits.

It had taken a lot of battles over a lot of years for him to be able to stand on a high place and tell how a fight was progressing by flashes and noises, by sounds of men and the smell of the night air. And most of all, some kind of warrior instinct told him when everything was all right and when it was lost.

In total, despite all the noise, Dobkin knew that casualties would be very light on both sides until the battle was joined up close. That’s the way it had always been in the past. This time, however, he felt it was not going to be a victory. He turned to Burg. “They’re very sloppy troops. But very determined. We will probably be out of ammunition very shortly. Maybe we should give the order to pull back to this knoll.”

Burg shook his head. Long before he had entered intelligence work, he had been a battalion commander in the War of Independence. He had a sense for these things also. “Let’s wait. I have a feeling they will break off the engagement.”

Dobkin didn’t answer.

“At sunrise we will court-martial Hausner,” said Burg matter-of-factly.

“We can’t be sure he gave the order to fire,” said Dobkin.

“You know he did.” Burg stood with one hand grasping the twisted aluminum standard. He seemed mesmerized by the flash of weapons and the incessant whistling of bullets. He realized that what was missing was the sound of the heavy weapons that gave a fight a distinctive military flavor. This fight sounded like an American gangster movie—all pistols and submachine guns.
“Well, General? Do you think Hausner gave the order to commence firing against our orders?” asked Burg.

Dobkin didn’t feel like arguing. “I suppose he did. It doesn’t really make a lot of difference, does it?”

“It makes a great deal of difference to me,” snapped Burg. “A great deal of difference.”

All along the defensive line, the volume of gunfire remained constant, for to begin conserving ammunition was a signal to the attackers that the end was near if only they would persevere. But the number of rounds left to the Israelis dwindled rapidly and, in fact, a few handguns were already without ammunition. The AK-47’s kept up a three-piece symphony of short bursts, while Joshua Rubin with the Uzi fired continuously, stopping only to let the barrel cool. Brin, firing a relatively small amount of ammunition, was the most deadly with ten hits.

The Ashbals were within a hundred meters of the line now, but their casualties went up geometrically with every ten meters they gained.

Someone was running toward the command post from the direction of the west slope. Burg and Dobkin waited for the bad news that the Ashbals had launched a secondary attack up the slope on the river side. The entire line there was held by McClure with his pistol and a dozen men and women with bricks and pieces of aluminum braces fashioned into spears. The runner jumped onto the knoll and caught his breath. “All quiet on the western slope.” He grinned.

Dobkin grinned in return and slapped him on the back. “That’s the only good news I’ve had since a lady said yes to me last night in Tel Aviv.”

Hausner, kneeling beside Brin, estimated that the end would come within the next few minutes. There simply wasn’t enough ammunition to keep up that rate of fire.

As though the defenders read his thoughts, they began increasing the rates of fire in a last desperate gamble to panic the attackers. Hausner watched the oncoming Arabs, who were partially visible now through the darkness. The Ashbals wavered as the increased volume of fire tore into their ranks. They slowed but held firm. The momentum of their attack was stopped, however, but while they were afraid to go forward, they weren’t falling back, either. Their commanders yelled and
kicked at them and tried to regain the initiative. Some groups moved forward again, reluctantly.

Brin took advantage of the commanders’ increased visibility and took two of them out in less than thirty seconds. The others began taking cover when they realized what was happening. Brin then began to search desperately for Rish. He had studied the photo from Hausner’s identikit so intently for the past hour that all he could see in his mind’s eye was Rish’s face on every Arab. But he knew that when he actually saw that face, he would be certain of it.

The Israelis heard the Arabic shouts and could see some of what was happening. They deduced that there was a problem in the Ashbals’ ranks. The veterans among the Israelis knew what to do. As Hausner watched, amazed, without any orders from anyone, about twenty men and women began running and screaming down the hill.

Dobkin knew what was happening. With cool detachment, he weighed the possibilities of success. The idea behind a primitive screaming counterattack was to strike fear into the hearts of the attackers. If it were done with enough élan and conviction, and if it were spontaneous like this one, it could make the enemy’s blood run cold. They would turn, first the most cowardly among them, then even the most stouthearted would be caught up in the panicky flight as the attackers became the attacked. Lacking prepared defenses, they would run until they dropped.

But would that happen here? What would happen if the Ashbals had another force on the river side? If they attacked on that side, Dobkin could no longer send any reinforcements there. They were all halfway down the eastern slope in an unauthorized counterattack. That’s what happened when people didn’t obey orders. Dobkin ran toward the crest of the eastern slope.

Hausner took the M-14 from Brin and watched through the starlight scope. For a moment, everything hung in the balance. If the Ashbals did not break ranks, there would be a massacre. The attacking Israelis were outnumbered five to one and lightly armed. They were within fifty meters of the Ashbals and were firing into their ranks with increasing accuracy. Joshua Rubin had gone completely crazy. He ran and fired his Uzi in a long
burst that Hausner thought would melt the barrel. Hausner could hear his primeval war cry above the din of the shooting.

Hausner began firing the M-14 at targets around Rubin to try to protect him. He saw what be thought was the first man to break ranks and run. Then two young girls followed. Then others followed. He could hear the Arabic word for retreat shouted by the fleeing Ashbals. A few leaders, officers, and sergeants tried to turn them around. Hausner put the cross hairs on one who was having some success and fired. The man fell. It was already apparent to the leaders that someone with a very good scope was causing them an inordinate number of casualties. Now that they were more conspicuous by trying to organize a stand, they were virtually committing suicide. Hausner aimed again. He had trained with every weapon that his men were issued, but this wasn’t his job, and Brin was becoming impatient. Hausner fired, hit another leader, and passed the weapon back to Brin.

Finally, amid the shouts for medics and stretcher bearers for the leaders who were hit, the other Arab officers became disheartened and joined in the flow of retreat.

The retreat became more orderly as the Ashbals put distance between themselves and the Israelis, who by now had lost the madness born of desperation that had made them counterattack.

The Ashbals gathered up fallen equipment, picked up their dead and wounded, and organized a rear guard to allow them more time to get away. As they made their way down the slope, earthslides toppled them over and caused dead and wounded to be dropped.

The Israelis followed close on the heels of the rear guard but finally stopped when a runner sent by Dobkin ordered them back. They gathered what fallen equipment they could find in the darkness and climbed back to the crest of the hill, dirty, sweating, and exhausted. Rubin and a female stenographer, Ruth Mandel, were hit, but not seriously.

There was still no word from the river slope, but Dobkin sent two men with AK-47’s there to be certain. A silence fell over the hill and the smell of cordite hung in the still air.