By the Rivers of Babylon (52 page)

“Roger the river, 02, but negative outside your window. Too close.”

Kahn was shaking Becker by the shoulder. He was shouting in English, their native tongue. “Didn’t you hear me, goddamn it? The fucking APU is fixed.” He liked the American idiom and couldn’t reproduce it in Hebrew. “Get this big-assed mother-fucking bird fired up and let’s haul ass out of this shithole!”

Becker was speechless for only a split second. “Fixed?”

“Fixed. Fixed.” Maybe, thought Kahn.

Becker’s fingers went to the APU ignition switch. He didn’t believe there was enough battery charge left to turn the APU over, but it didn’t hurt to try. He hit the switch and looked at the instruments. He tried to listen above the wind and explosions that poured into the cockpit through the shattered plexiglas. The APU was definitely turning over, but it wouldn’t ignite. Becker turned off the aircraft lights. Did the batteries have enough remaining power to keep motorizing the APU until the
fuel ignited? Without a word between them, Becker and Kahn watched the APU temperature gauge. Their eyes searched for any hint of motion from the needle that would indicate the beginnings of a successful start. The white needle continued to sit rigidly on the bottom mark of the temperature gauge. Becker tried the familiar “Just this once, God. Just this once.” But nothing happened.

The two huge C-130 cargo craft came in low over the western desert. They had left Israel well before the F-14’s, but at a top speed of only 585 kilometers per hour, the flight had taken nearly two hours.

The King of Jordan had quickly given permission to use Jordan’s northern air corridor to the Iraq border. It was not until the Baghdad government was presented with the
fait
accompli
of the F-14’s already in Iraq and the C-130’s approaching their border that they reluctantly agreed to let the unarmed cargo craft in. The alternative was to refuse the C-130’s entry and to order the F-14’s out, which would have necessitated an embarrassing explanation of how they had reached so deep into Iraq in the first place.

After a lot of ominous pronouncements had traveled over the circuitous telephone lines, Baghdad had agreed with Jerusalem that it was a joint operation, and the Israeli Prime Minister and the Iraqi President had prepared a joint news release to that effect. To give credibility to that news release, Baghdad sent a
small river unit of the Iraqi Army from Hashimiyah up the Euphrates and ordered the Hillah garrison to stand by, although both governments knew that the unreliable troops were in fact not standing by but standing down. It was felt that many of the troops were in the pay of Ahmed Rish, and their Iraqi officers kept a very close watch over them. Both governments knew that the river unit from Hashimiyah would not make it to Babylon in time to participate in the operation, but the gesture of support was important.

Other Iraqi Army officers from Hillah, plus civil servants and personnel from the small Hillah airstrip, went by motor vehicle north toward Babylon. At a spot somewhat south of where the Concorde had touched down, they secured the Hillah-Baghdad road and set out flares to mark it in the dust-swept dawn. Another contingent crossed the Euphrates by motor launch to mark off a landing strip with flares on the mud flats. Neither action was absolutely necessary to land the C-130’s, but it cut down considerably on the risks involved in the procedure.

The Iraqis had made their contribution and the Baghdad government settled back to watch the outcome. An Israeli military disaster wouldn’t be viewed as a tragedy in some Iraqi circles, while a successful operation would obviously be the result of the Iraqi participation. Baghdad could not lose. They might come in for a lot of censure from Palestinian groups and perhaps some Arab governments, but the times were such that many Arab governments would officially applaud the move on humanitarian grounds, and Baghdad would reap some goodwill from the West—goodwill that could be turned into something more concrete at a later date. On balance, it seemed the thing to do—especially since Israel had already done so much that was irreversible.

Captain Ishmael Bloch and Lieutenant Ephraim Herzel, piloting the first of the two C-130’s, saw the flares along the Hillah road and banked left as they pulled off more power. Three of the F-14’s assigned to cover the landings shot past their windshield and dove in along the intended landing approach.

The big cargo craft dropped in very quickly as it was designed to do in a combat situation.

In the cabin, fifty Israeli commandos tightened their straps and braced themselves for the jolt that came with an assault landing. The tie-downs on the two jeeps, one mounted with a 106mm recoilless rifle and the other with a dual .50 caliber
machine gun, were checked and tightened.

The doctors and nurses again checked the fastenings on their mobile operating unit and their surgical supplies.

Captain Bloch cut the power again and watched the speed bleed away on his indicator. He turned to Lieutenant Herzel. “When we flipped a coin for the road or the mud flat and I won and picked the road, why didn’t you say something?” The giant aircraft seemed to float a few meters above the windswept road. Bloch tried to keep the nearly powerless craft lined up between the flares, but the strong crosswind pushed the plane to the left of the road, and when Bloch tried to slip it back, it yawed badly.

Herzel kept his eyes on the instruments. “I thought you picked the road because you
knew
it was more challenging.”

Bloch thought for a moment that he would have to pull up and come around again, but the wind dropped for a few seconds and he lined the craft up over the road and came down hard.

The underinflated tires hit the crumbling blacktop and sent tremendous sections of it flying off at all angles. The wind pushed the high-profile aircraft left, and as Bloch compensated, the craft fishtailed, causing the C-130 literally to eat up the road as it taxied north, leaving a sand trail in the place of what had been a paved road. “My wife is a challenge. My girlfriend is a challenge. Why would I want another challenge?” He reversed the engines and stood on the brakes. The noise of the screaming engines and wheels was deafening, and the men and women inside the cabin covered their ears.

Herzel looked back out of the side window as the aircraft made a small turn to follow the road. He shouted. “Leave some blacktop so we can take off, Izzy.”

“Take off, my ass. We’re taxiing into Baghdad after this is over.”

Outside, by the illumination of their landing lights and the flares, they could see a few Iraqi vehicles sitting off the side of the road at long intervals. A few of the men in them waved as the C-130 lumbered by, and Bloch and Herzel waved back. “Are the natives friendly?” asked Herzel.

“As long as we have fifty commandos back there, they will be very friendly.”

The big craft began rolling to a stop at almost the same spot where the Concorde had first touched down. Bloch could see by his landing lights where the Concorde had begun chewing up the road. The C-130 was built for that type of thing. The Concorde
was built for wide expanses of smooth runway. He admired the damned fool of a pilot who brought it in. Bloch looked up. He could see the high mounds of Babylon in the distance, silhouetted against the brightening sky. “Babylon.”

Herzel looked out the windshield. “Babylon . . . Babylon.”

The rear gate was down before the aircraft came to a complete halt, and the commandos began jumping out and deploying on both sides of the road. A group of Iraqi officers and government workers eyed them curiously from a cluster of khaki-painted vehicles on a small hillock. The commandos were jittery, and so were the Iraqis. Both sides spent some time waving and making other friendly gestures.

The two jeeps rolled down the ramp and squeezed by either side of the C-130, keeping to the roadbed as they passed under the huge wings. One squad of commandos formed a perimeter to secure the aircraft. The medical personnel on board began preparing for the casualties.

Three rifle squads, each commanded by a lieutenant, with the overall command under Major Seth Arnon, fanned out on either side of the road, jogging to keep abreast of the jeeps. They headed toward their first objectives—the Ishtar Gate area and the guest house and museum.

Captain Bloch watched them from his high vantage point in the cockpit of the C-130. “It’s no fun being an infantryman.”

Lieutenant Herzel looked up from his landing checklist. “They slept all the way here, and they’ll sleep all the way back. Feel sorry for your copilot for a change.”

Captain Bloch looked from the cockpit of the C-130 off to where the Northern Citadel was erupting in orange, yellow, red, and white flames. The sounds of the thunder rolled down from Babylon onto the roadway. “It’s those poor bastards up there I feel sorry for. You know, Eph, when they took off Friday afternoon, I said to myself, lucky sons-of-bitches, going to New York all expenses paid for as long as it takes to bring home a scrap of paper that says peace.”

Herzel glanced up and looked out the windshield at the light flashes on the far mound. “I guess it’s no fun being on a peace mission, either.”

Captain Baruch Geis and Lieutenant Yosef Stern could not spot the Iraqis’ flares on the wide expanse of mud flats, nor could the three F-14’s that were assigned to them. Geis
considered waiting for the sun to poke over the distant mountain, but as he monitored David Becker’s voice speaking to General Laskov and as he watched the flaming consequences of their conversations, he knew that there was not much time left. In fact they were probably too late already, but be was determined to complete his portion of the mission.

Captain Geis wanted to get as close to the fighting as possible without coming into range of small arms fire from the citadel mound. He gave up looking for the flares and picked an area barely a kilometer south of the fighting—a spot that was marked Ummah on his map. Strange, thought Geis, Arabic was so like Hebrew. Ummah. Community. He radioed to the lead pilot of the three F-14’s that were with him. “I want to land so that my rollout will end somewhere near the spot marked Ummah. Can you give me light?”

The fighter pilot, Lieutenant Herman Shafran, radioed back.

“Roger. Flare on the way, over.”

The F-14 came in on a west-east axis and released a 750,000 candlepower parachute flare. The sky and earth were transformed with a brilliant, eerie glow.

Geis pointed the nose of the aircraft directly into the hard-blowing
Sherji
and began pulling off power. Ahead he saw the outlines of Ummah under the artificial light. He placed the aircraft to the left of the village and put down his flaps. The wind added tremendous lift to the aircraft and it seemed to hover over the mud flats.

Lieutenant Stern looked over his right shoulder out his side window. There appeared to be cooking fires lit among the houses of Ummah. The
Sherji
carried the flare west, and it swung like a pendulum under its sailing parachute, casting distorting shadows across the earth. The flare sailed past the cockpit of the aircraft, and Geis and Stern looked away as it cast a blinding light in the flight deck. The F-14 released another flare over the river, and it too began to float westward toward them.

In the cabin, the fifty commandos listened to the wind blow and the engines whine. In place of the jeeps were a dozen motorized rubber rafts. Everyone in the cabin had a sense of the aircraft hanging, hovering, making no headway at all. Muscles tensed, and as the flare lit up the windows of the cabin, sweat could be seen glistening on brows and upper lips.

The doctors and nurses spoke to each other in whispers. Each
C-130 was prepared to handle twenty-five casualties. But what if there were nearly that many casualties among the peace mission alone? There were bound to be some casualties among the commandos. What if there were wounded prisoners?

Captain Geis was finally able to push the airplane firmly down and hold it down. Thousands of cubic meters of mud flew up and covered the aircraft as it charged through the quagmire and headed toward the village. The parachute flare overhead began to burn out and the land became darker.

A few of the mud houses of Ummah loomed up out of the weak light. Beyond Ummah, Geis could see the Euphrates. He reversed his engines and stood on his brakes. The big craft came to a halt and rocked backwards less than a hundred meters from the nearest hut.

The back gate opened, and three squads of commandos charged out of the aircraft, formed a line, and advanced on the village. A fourth squad fanned out a hundred meters and surrounded the C-130. They immediately began digging foxholes in the mud.

Major Samuel Bartok fired his Uzi into the air, but no one fired back. To the north, across the river, Bartok could hear the sounds of the fight, and he could see flashes of light. He glanced down at his map. If they met no resistance in this village and if they were able to navigate upriver to the hill where the fight was taking place, it would still take them about twenty minutes to get into position to bring effective fire on the Arabs. But even then he couldn’t guarantee that he could keep them from advancing on the Concorde if they were to fight a rearguard action against his commandos. How many Palestinians were there? According to the pilot of the Concorde, there were not more than three dozen left out of over a hundred and fifty. That sounded like an incredible feat of arms for a peace mission. Major Bartok smiled grimly. No, that wasn’t possible. He’d have to be prepared for any number.

The commandos’ line became concave as it bent around the village. To the north, the first Israeli squad reached the Euphrates. The first man actually to stand on the bank of the river, Private Irving Feld, urinated in it.

A few minutes later, the third squad also radioed that they had reached the Euphrates south of the village.

The second squad, with Major Bartok in the lead, advanced up the middle toward the first huts.

An old man appeared in the small crooked street and walked slowly toward them. He looked over the heads of the commandos at the high-tailed aircraft on the barren mud flats, its blue Star of David catching the first rays of the sun. He raised his right hand.
“Shalom alekhem.”