Pursuit (35 page)

“Heroics?” Grossman sneered. “Listen! I'm not a member of your so-called army and I'm certainly not subject to your discipline. If you want me to go to Switzerland for you, fine—but until I go—”

He paused abruptly as the shrill bell mounted at the cave entrance suddenly rang twice. Even before he could come to his feet the bell sounded again, a frantic ringing, and then they could both hear the muffled sound of gunfire. The two men ran outside. People were dashing about, crisscrossing their paths, each running to his assigned post. Rifles were hurriedly being handed out; one man was running toward the community building with an old-fashioned machine gun in his hands while a second ran behind him with a cartridge belt looped over his shoulder, the two of them intent upon setting the gun up on the roof as they had done so often before in practice. Women in charge of the children were herding them as rapidly as possible into the underground shelters and then coming back to claim their weapons and take their places at their assigned posts. Despite the dashing in all directions there was a certain order in the chaos.

Ben grabbed a submachine gun from the hands of a pale young man who looked uncertain as to its use; with the gun nestled familiarly under his arm he ran for the perimeter and the wire. Max, a commandeered rifle in his hand, came close behind. Men from the fields were racing for the wire; the last one in turned and slammed the gate behind him and knelt to bring up his gun. It was Wolf. From the outposts the men were firing steadily down the slope at the wave of fanatical Arabs who trotted toward them up the rocky terrain, yelling incessantly, firing as they came. There were several hundred of them, some in traditional robes, others in discarded or donated British uniforms, all with the kaffiyeh cords set for battle. On the road that edged the sea below the trucks that had brought the Arabs were drawn up beside the water, their officers beside them; next to them were several passenger cars and standing on the road beside them were civilians, men and women, watching through field glasses, come to witness the attack as if it were being staged for their amusement. On the slope between them there were several bodies of men who had been caught in the fields and had not made it back in time; among them was the body of Dov Shapiro, a mine still clutched in his outstretched hand as if he were offering it to the enemy.

Wolf was at the closed gate, kneeling with a rifle he had taken from a dead man beside him, firing it through the mesh. Ben pushed him to one side and swung the gate open to give him freedom of fire. He knelt in the opening, bringing up his submachine gun, sweeping the first echelon of approaching attackers, spraying them evenly with gunfire. He found himself grinning madly, filled with an exuberance he had not felt since the early days on the Polish front, those heady, wonderful days of personal killing before the mechanization of Maidanek. This was battle! The gun chattered comfortably in his hands; how like the Russians the Arabs were, coming into that deadly fire in waves, except that the Arabs were screaming while the Russians had advanced suicidally in resigned silence. The foremost Arabs tried to rush the gate, swinging their rifles now as clubs, only to die before the deadly accuracy of the maniac with the submachine gun at the gate. The second wave of attackers hesitated and then broke in a mad rush down the slope. There was a sudden explosion as one of the land mines went off with a roar and a flash of flame, flinging the body of the unfortunate Arab in the air in doll-like fashion. There was a crow of delight from Wolf, followed by a second as another mine exploded. Ben came to his feet, swept by the passion of battle, and started out the gate after the retreating Arabs, only to be tackled violently and brought down by Brodsky. He felt himself being dragged back behind the wire fence and heard the gate being slammed shut. He turned, furious.

“What are you doing?”

“You idiot! There are mines out there!”

Max was staring down at Ben Grossman with a strange look on his face. In all the time he had known the other man, in all the experiences they had shared, he had had no idea that this mild-looking Jew, Benjamin Grossman, had such fury, such love of battle in him. Ben grinned up at him a bit sheepishly, but the pleasure of killing was still evident on his sweaty face.

“I forgot,” he said.

Men and women were carrying the wounded into the makeshift hospital that had been set up in the most central and therefore the most protected of the caves, but at the moment Ben had no thought of Deborah inside, working on those wounded. He had rolled over and was staring down the slope; the retreating Arabs were back at their trucks, out of rifle fire, leaving their dead scattered about the plain, and were conferring with their officers. Beyond them a trail of dust indicated where the passenger cars had fled; the spectacle had not been as entertaining as they had supposed.

Silence fell. Guns were reloaded, ammunition brought from the storage areas to be closer to the wire; a young boy came around with coffee and the men drank it eagerly, with one eye always on the slope and the Arabs at the foot. An hour passed in this manner, with each side merely waiting; then a cloud of dust appeared on the far horizon where the passenger cars had disappeared. Perez, standing at the gate, raised field glasses.

“Half-tracks …” He squinted into the glasses, hoping against hope that despite Brodsky's pessimistic statement the British were answering the repeated radio calls that were being sent in a stream from the administration offices at the moment.

“Let me see.” Ben Grossman came to his feet, reaching for the glasses. There was such authority in his voice that Perez handed them over automatically. Ben studied the moving cloud of dust. “Personnel carriers, unarmed. Full of Arabs. It looks as if they're merely adding numbers. I'd judge an additional hundred men.” He turned to Wolf. “How many mines were you able to plant?”

“Only ten,” Wolf said, and shrugged. “Then we saw them jumping down from the trucks and we didn't hang around. One of them got Shapiro with a lucky shot.”

“Ten mines,” Grossman said thoughtfully, “and two are already detonated. Not much of a deterrent.”

“No?” Wolf said sarcastically, stung at this debasement of his efforts. “Did you see those two that went off?”

“I mean,” Grossman said patiently, “their officers have seen several hundred men go through that mine field and return. Only two of them killed by the mines. They won't hesitate to send their men through it again. And eight mines won't stop them.” He frowned at the ground for several minutes, calculating, and then looked up. “How far from the fence to the end of the mines you laid?”

Wolf, mollified, considered. “Maybe three hundred yards. They could come up to the edge of the mine field and be within easy rifle range of us from there, if that's what you mean.”

“That's not what I mean.” Ben turned, singling out a familiar face among the men standing at the wire staring down at the Arabs. It was a young man who worked with him. “Ari, get our mortar.”

Max was surprised. “You have a mortar?”

“We were asked to try and work one up and we have, at least a prototype,” Ben said. “It's a rather small job, no rifling, of course, and it was made from the only decent tubing I could get, but I've also built eight charges for it. It's a copy of—” He had been about to say it was a copy of the Russian 6o-mm mortar from which the enlarged British Stokes 3-inch mortar had been developed, but he bit back the words in time. He would have trouble explaining his familiarity with a Russian weapon that had been developed when he supposedly had been in a concentration camp. “—a copy of the early American mortars from the First World War,” he ended smoothly. “I think it will work.”

“You think?” Wolf said, startled. “You haven't tried it out yet?”

“Not yet.”

“And what happens if it doesn't work?”

“Let's not think of that.” Grossman looked up at the sun, calculating the hours of daylight remaining, then looked down to the dirt road snaking its way beside the sea. The personnel carriers could be seen now with the naked eye, small bugs bristling with smaller bugs, creeping toward the congregation of trucks and troops at the foot of the long slope. He turned to Perez. “How far away are those trucks? The ones parked at the shore. You must have some idea.”

“One point three miles,” Perez said proudly, pleased to contribute to the discussion. “Almost exactly from the gate, here. We measured it; we were thinking of running a sewage line there once, but we decided not to. We didn't want to pollute the—”

He was interrupted by a harsh voice from somewhere in the crowd who had been listening.

“You can't reach any mile and a third with a sixty-millimeter mortar, even with a proper one! I was with the British; they had a couple of Yank sixty-millimeters. We were lucky to reach a mile.”

“I know,” Ben said and turned back to Wolf. “You came in a jeep?”

“We had to,” Wolf said with his usual breeziness. “The bus didn't stop.”

Max Brodsky, listening, watched as Ben Grossman effectively took charge. Perez, as director of the kibbutz, was normally responsible for the defense of the settlement; Max, as senior Palmach man there at the time, might have asked for and received that responsibility. But Grossman was taking it into his own hands and those listening to him seemed to be prepared to let him do so. Max decided to let the matter ride for the moment and see what happened. Grossman was studying Wolf's face.

“Wolf, do you know where those other eight mines are?”

“Of course. They're—”

“Could you drive that jeep through the mine field without hitting one?”

“Of course,” Wolf said, his newly acquired professional pride stung, but he could not help but add sardonically, “that's if the Arabs don't mind all the traffic while they're trying to kill us, of course.”

“Could you do it at night? Without lights?”

“At night without lights?” Wolf stared. “Grossman, you're crazy!”

“Could you?”

“No. Anyway, what would be the purpose? How many could you get on one jeep? And if you want someone to go down there and surrender, you don't need to wait for night to do that. Those Arabs would be very happy to massacre us all, white flag or no white flag, in broad daylight.” He tried to explain. “Look, the mines were laid mainly in the road, to prevent their vehicles from reaching the fence. And if you get three feet off the road you can break an axle on the rocks. This isn't a tank we're talking about!”

“But if you had light you could do it?”

“With light I could try it. I don't say I could do it.” Wolf realized he was partially contradicting himself. “I think I could do it, driving carefully. And I mean
carefully!
”

Grossman looked down at the personnel carriers that were just coming to a halt beside the other trucks.

“I have a feeling the Arabs will wait for dark after their last attack,” he said. “By that time we should be ready.” He looked at Wolf. “I'll see to it you get light. After that all you have to do is to drive. Carefully.”

Colonel Manfred Fitzhugh, commander of the Hebron garrison of the British Armed Forces in Palestine, looked up in annoyance at the appearance of the sergeant at the door of his office, requiring his attention. The colonel was in the midst of composing a letter to his wife explaining that although the departure of the British from Palestine had been widely announced to take place on the fifteenth of May, he was being routed home by way of Port Said and Cairo, which unfortunately would delay his arrival home by several additional weeks. “A nuisance, my dear, but you know the army—” Fortunately for the colonel his wife did not. And he still had to write the girl in Cairo as well as the one in Said before the mail went out, because the postal services in those bloody countries was simply ghastly.

“Well?” he said, scowling blackly. “What is it?”

“Sir,” said the sergeant, standing at attention very properly and aware the colonel was not pleased about something, “the Arabs are attacking Ein Tsofar, the settlement just south of Masada. They are radioing for help.”

“Who? The Arabs?”

“No, sir. The Jews.”

“Well, be a little more explicit in the future!”

The colonel knew full well who was attacking and who was radioing for help; the ploy had been made simply to gain a bit more time for thought. Colonel Fitzhugh drummed his fingers angrily on his desk, cursing inwardly. Why did those bloody Arabs have to attack two days ahead of schedule? They would probably later claim they did it because they suspected a leak in his security, but the real reason was probably because the damned wogs couldn't read a calendar! He was supposed to have most of his men off to Jericho on passes to watch a soccer game against the team of the Jericho Garrison when the attack took place, not sitting in barracks, scrubbed and shining and waiting for afternoon tea. What to do! Well, one thing he did not intend to do was to risk the life of one single British soldier just two weeks before they were bloody well scheduled to leave! He glowered at the sergeant.

“Send Captain Wiley in.”

“Sir!”

Captain Wiley was equally irked at the interruption. He had been trying to trim his mustache, which had been cultivated to an impressive if slightly unwieldy four inches either side of his bulbous nose-he hoped that people, especially girls, would mistake him for RAF—and the scissors were dull, the light poor, and the bloody mirror wavy. He sighed mightily at the colonel's demand for his presence, but put the scissors away and duly made his appearance.

“Sir?”

“The bloody Arabs are attacking Ein Tsofar settlement!”

“Oh, no, sir, that's the day after tomorrow—”

“Don't argue! They're doing it right now! Right this minute! Don't ask me why. What are we going to say if headquarters asks why we didn't do something about the bloody affair?”