By the Rivers of Babylon (32 page)

. . . All the good should count and not the evil.

And for the memories of our enemies,

we should no longer remain their victims
,

no longer their nightmare and their shuddering ghosts,

but rather their help, so that they may cease their fury.

That is the only thing that is asked of them,

and that we, after it is all over,

may be able to live as humans among humans,

and that there may be peace again on this poor earth

for the men of good will

and that this peace may come also to the others.

Hausner only half-listened as the last sounds of Miriam’s voice died in the darkness. It was a senseless prayer—a dangerous prayer for people who were going to have to live with revenge and hate in their hearts if they were to survive. Miriam, Miriam. When will you learn?

The funeral service was ended. Hausner realized that
everyone was gone and he was alone. He looked out across the Euphrates, out across the black mud plains, out to where the black velvet sky met the black horizon, out toward Jerusalem. He fancied he saw the lights of the Old City, but it was only a star setting on the horizon. It disappeared, and in that moment, he knew he would never go home again.

BABYLON

THE ISHTAR GATE

Go ye forth of Babylon,

flee ye from the Chaldeans,

with a voice of singing declare ye, tell this,

utter it even to the end of the earth;

say ye, The Lord hath redeemed his servant Jacob.

And they thirsted not when he led them through the deserts: he caused

the waters to flow out of the rock for them:

he clave the rock also, and the waters gushed out.

Isaiah 48:20–21

They came soon after the funeral service was ended. They did not come on line as they had the night before, but in small squad groups and fireteam groups—in threes and sixes and nines. They moved quickly and silently from one area of cover and concealment to the next. They picked out the best avenues of approach, having found them the hard way the previous night. They were surprised to find the low walls built across the gullies, but they crawled up and over them like snakes and continued in the erosion gullies upward, toward the crest. Noise control and light discipline were excellent, equipment was taped down, faces were blackened, and the death penalty was in force for any breach of orders.

Ahmed Rish crawled with his lieutenant, Salem Hamadi, some distance behind their advancing army. Both of them knew that this might be their last effort. If they failed, it would mean humiliation and eventual death at the hands of their own men or at the hands of a tribunal made up of other Palestinians. Worse yet, they might be hunted for the rest of their lives by Mivtzan
Elohim. They might spend the remainder of their lives at Ramla. The irony was that the head of Mivtzan Elohim, Isaac Burg, was within their grasp, as was fame, fortune, and glory. For Rish and Hamadi this was the most important night in both their lives. Rish covered his eyes as a swirl of sand blew in his face. He put his mouth to Hamadi’s ear. “The ancient gods are with us. Pazuzu has sent us this wind.”

Hamadi wasn’t sure
whom
the wind was sent for. He spit some sand out of his mouth and grunted.

Nathan Brin rubbed his eye and looked again, then shut off the scope. He put his arm around Naomi Haber, who was nestled next to him. “My eyes are strained. I’ve been seeing things since sundown.” He pushed the rifle sideways across the earth wall. “Here. Take a look.”

Naomi ran her hand through his hair and wiped the sweat and camouflage dirt from his forehead. The inevitable had happened, after hours of forced company and a high state of nervous tension, combined with the fact that neither of them knew if they would be alive very much longer. She doubted if she would look twice at him in a café in Tel Aviv. But this was Babylon, and perhaps some of the wantonness of the place hung in the air like a vapor.

Their lovemaking, accomplished between sunset and the end of the funeral service, had been as hurried as Hausner’s and Bernstein’s, but much more frantic. It was interrupted whenever either of them had had a premonition or a panicky moment and they had stopped to scan the slope. They had laughed over the clumsy affair. But that was before, when there was little chance of the Ashbals being in the area. Now they were dressed, and the threat of attack was very serious.

Naomi Haber put the scope to her eyes and scanned. This was much different from match shooting. Much different. She could hit moving and still targets with uncanny accuracy, but she never was much good at picking out targets from a cluttered background. She was not yet familiar with the night view of the terrain. The eerie green glow further confused her.

“See anything?” asked Brin.

“I don’t think so. That damned wind.”

“I know,” said Brin. The
Sherji
was picking up dust and sending wispy shadows across the land that could only be seen in the powerful scope.

She cursed silently and handed the rifle back to Brin. “I’m not good at this.”

Brin took the rifle and pointed it straight into the air. He scanned for a full three minutes before he spotted the Lear overhead. He estimated its altitude at better than two kilometers. Well out of range of his rifle. Hausner had told him to look for the Lear and to try to knock it down. He considered sending one round at it, but decided against wasting the ammunition. They were jammed, and that’s all there was to it. He switched off the scope and sat back. “Let’s give us and the batteries five minutes rest.” He lit a cigarette in his cupped hands.

The Ashbals took their time, resting between areas of concealment, then moving quickly to the next. They knew that the Israelis would have put out early warning devices and outposts, and they were on the lookout for both. In addition, they were under orders not to return any probing fire. But had they practiced the tactic of the quick, silent run just then, they might have been over the Israeli breastworks and into the Israeli trenches within minutes. But they continued to move in short, silent rushes.

Far ahead of the main body of Ashbals was a two-man sniper-killer team. One man, Amnah Murad, was armed with a Russian Dragunov sniper rifle. Mounted on the rifle was an infrared scope. Murad cradled the rifle carefully in his arms as he moved. The other man, Moniem Safar, carried a compass and an AK-47. Murad and Safar had trained as a team since they were five years old. They were closer than blood brothers. They were bound by the brotherhood of the hunt and the kill, and each could anticipate every move and every emotion of the other. They could literally communicate without speaking. A touch, a raised eyebrow, an imperceptible twitch of the mouth, a breath. The Lear had flown them in that afternoon from the desert base camp.

The two young men followed a compass heading that they were told would bring them to the promontory where the suspected Israeli night scope was located.

The two men looked up the slope and picked out the outline of the black ridge against the star-studded sky. They estimated the distance at half a kilometer. Murad knelt down, turned the
scope on, and sighted through it as he adjusted the knobs. The hillside appeared red-glowing, and it reminded him of blood or of hell and made him uneasy for a moment. He scanned and spotted the promontory. He looked for the telltale light of a night scope, but saw nothing. He lay on his belly and rested the rifle on a small rise in the ground. He relaxed as he continued to stare.

Outpost/Listening Post, OP/LP No. 2, was located in the central section of the slope, almost a half-kilometer down from the promontory. It was manned by Yigael Tekoah, the Knesset member, and Deborah Gideon, his secretary. Tekoah thought he heard something to his front, then to his left, then, with a frightened start, to his rear. He touched the girl’s shoulder and whispered into her ear. “I think they’ve gotten around us.”

She nodded in the dark. They had both been too frightened to move when they first heard the noises, and now they were behind the enemy lines with no way to get back to their own. They were lost.

Tekoah knew that in a real military unit he would have had sound-amplifying devices, night-seeing devices, weapons and radios or line phones to speak with the main body. But here, OP/LP was tantamount to suicide. They were sacrificial lambs. Still, it had not been difficult to find six volunteers for the three posts.

Tekoah felt he had failed. He had not done his duty of alerting the others. There was still no fire coming from the Israeli positions, and he knew that the Arabs were making a successful surprise attack. They might very well infiltrate the Israeli positions before a shot was fired. “I am going to shout and warn them.”

Deborah stayed frozen like a small rabbit.

“I’m sorry. I must.”

She seemed to come out of it. She touched his cheek. “Of course.”

Tekoah could hear footsteps very close now. He stood in their shallow foxhole, cupped his hands to his mouth, and faced the top of the slope. He took a deep breath.

An Ashbal tripped a wire that had hanging from it cans of pebbles and metal filings. The pebbles and metal rattled noisily in the still air. There was complete silence on the slope. Tekoah froze in mid-breath.

•    •    •

Brin grabbed the M-14, turned on the scope, and sighted. Nothing moved downslope, not even the cloud and dust shadows. All along the defensive perimeter the Israelis held their breath, and all across the slope the Arabs did the same. Brin wondered if it was the wind rattling the cans or an animal or a small earthslide. There had been a lot of that all day. He relaxed but continued to scan.

The two-man sniper-killer team came alert. Murad stared intently at the promontory now. He saw the light of the Israeli scope as it went on. He noticed that it was green. An American starlight. He knew it would be. The starlight picture was better than his, but that didn’t mean that the man who had it was a better shot than a man with an infrared. Murad felt confident. He sighted on the green light and waited to see the head behind it.

Brin leaned out further over the small earth balcony. He whispered to Naomi Haber. “You might as well pass the word that I don’t see anything yet.”

She nodded and ran silently, barefoot, back toward the Command Post/Observation Post.

Murad saw Brin’s reddish-white skin where Naomi Haber had wiped the sweat and camouflage from his forehead. Murad fired three times in quick succession. The silencer coughed very gently like a weak old man clearing his throat.

Brin felt nothing but a tap on his forehead, then nothing at all. He pitched backward and lay in the dust, the rifle thrown out and down the slope in his death throe.

After a few minutes, the Ashbals began advancing again. Another man hit another wire, and cans again rattled in the night.

Hausner stood with Dobkin and Burg at the CP/OP.

Naomi Haber had had trouble finding the CP/OP in the dark, but she finally spotted the phosphorescent banner. She ran up to the three men and reported.

Hausner listened again for the rattling, but heard nothing. He turned to Haber and the two other young runners at the
Command Post. “Go down the line and tell them to fire a mad-minute when they hear my whistle. But make the minute only ten seconds,” he added.

The runners took off in different directions.

After a short interval, Hausner whistled. Those closest to him heard the whistle and began firing at full rates of fire, which was a signal for everyone down the line to begin.

The Ashbals froze, then stretched themsleves out on the ground. A few were hit, but they did not call out in pain for fear of being strangled by their officers. The officers and non-coms whispered frantically to hold fire. “It is only probing fire. Probing fire. Do not shoot,” they said through clenched teeth. But as the seconds dragged out, each second seeming like a year, and with the five Israeli AK-47’s pounding automatic fire down the slope, even the most disciplined among them began to feel for their safety catches and triggers. Just as one young man was about to return the fire, the Israeli fire ceased as suddenly as it had begun. The “mad-minute,” ten seconds long for want of ammunition, was over.

The smell of burnt cordite blew away with the east wind, and the last of the gunshots reverberated off the surrounding hills and died in the ears of the defenders. There was not one among them who believed that the Ashbals were disciplined enough to hold their fire under that barrage, or to choke down a cry of pain if they were hit, or to stifle a panicky scream as the earth churned up around their faces.

Hausner turned to Burg and Dobkin. “I think we’re getting jumpy.”

Burg spoke. “I hope the OP/LP’s are not hurt.”

Dobkin answered. “If everyone followed his range cards and the OP/LP’s stayed where they were supposed to, then they should be all right.” He looked toward the eastern slope. “And speaking of outposts, if they haven’t heard anything, then I don’t think there is anything out there. Animals, wind, and earthslides. That’s the bane of trip-wire devices. Once a sparrow landed on a trip flare wire in Suez in ’67 and—but who gives a damn about Suez in ’67?”

“Nobody,” Hausner assured him.

Micah Goren and Hannah Shiloah, typists, manned Outpost/Listening Post No. 1 on the north end of the slope. They also knew, too late, that they had been surrounded. They sat huddled in their small foxhole until the mad-minute ended.
They contemplated their next move. Out of the darkness, three young Ashbals jumped with flashing knives and cut the throats of the two unarmed Israelis.

Reuben Taber and Leah Ilsar, interpreters, sat at OP/LP No. 3 toward the south end of the slope. They also knew what had happened. They moved out of their hole and began making their way back to the top of the slope.