The Glory (20 page)

“You know! I want to get engaged.”

“And I don’t. Not yet. God knows what you’re going to France for, or when you’ll return. You won’t tell me, and I’m not asking,
but that doesn’t mean —”

Noah roared, “I can’t hear a word you’re saying. Daphna. To all the devils, once for all why don’t we get engaged? Let’s go
back right now and tell your parents.”

“What?”

“
LET’S TELL YOUR PARENTS
.”

“Tell them
WHAT
? About us? Have you lost your mind? My father will
KILL
me.
And
you.”

“Your father will? I’ve heard things about your father, but never mind. Let’s announce our
ENGAGEMENT
, I say. I bought this in Haifa.” He took out a little purple box, and showed her a ring with a small sapphire.

Daphna opened huge eyes, glanced here and there, then passionately embraced and kissed him. “
THERE
. Enough. This is no way to do it. Keep that ring for now. We’ll talk when you get back, and maybe then — but meantime, you
stay away from those French girls! Those mademoiselles from Armentières! You’re all mine, hear?”

Aroused and shaken by the kiss, he pulled her close. “You’re impossible.” He kissed her long and hard, then leaped into the
jeep. “Sure, I’ll write. But about the French girls — tough!” With that, he screeched into gear and drove off.

And he did find a French girl, if not exactly a mademoiselle from Armentières.

She was Mademoiselle Julie Levinson, the dark-haired daughter of Samuel Levinson, the president of the Jewish community and
Cherbourg’s most prosperous wholesale dealer in fresh fish. Julie was decidedly no oo-la-la girl, and no Daphna Luria, either.
Businesslike and plump, she was dressed in a heavy old sweater and rubber boots when Noah first saw her, for she worked in
her father’s waterfront fish market. But that evening, when he came to the Levinsons’ surprisingly large and elegant house
for dinner, she had been at pains to beautify herself for the Israeli officer, and looked slimmer and prettier.

After dinner they walked out together. Nothing could come of the romancing that ensued, since he was in Cherbourg for only
a few days and Julie was a nice Jewish girl, if not averse to limited carrying-on in the dark. But Daphna had wounded Noah
with the damnable blue Porsche apparition at her birthday party, and her refusal to take his ring, so the quick-won affection
of this warmblooded French Jewish girl was very welcome. The eighty Israelis who had stolen into Cherbourg in small groups
were under orders to lie low, but Noah managed to see a lot of Julie in that brief time he had.

On the morning of Christmas Eve they were walking along the windy quay, where gulls banked and screamed, and the oily harbor
water slapped hard against the pilings. The weather forecast concerned Noah; it was bad and getting worse, especially down
in the Bay of Biscay. “Julie, I won’t be coming to dinner tonight.” Noah’s grade-school French was adequate for this friendship,
and was even somewhat improving. “I’m sorry.”

She swung his hand. “Oh, listen, Noah, I’ll never see you again. This is the end. I realize that.”

“What? Why?”

“My dear, Papa
knows
. People here know. Your supply officer has been buying up all the food in town, bit by bit. Forty more of you have arrived
in the last three days, in civilian clothes, but of course they’re sailors. The oil company knows, for sure, from the way
you’ve been taking on fuel. Why, I’ll bet the harbormaster knows. The only question is
when
.” She looked at him with tearful eyes, and her hair blew around her sad face. “You’re charming and I’ll miss you terribly,
but
c’est la vie
.” In reply Noah just tightened his hand.

For a fact, the Israelis were counting heavily on the discretion and good will of Cherbourg’s people. The town had decayed
with the passing of the great ocean liners, and its brief glory as the pivot of D-Day was dusty history. The missile boat
construction program had brought the somnolent port to life, creating hundreds of jobs for years. No less than the small Jewish
community, the other townspeople thought the protracted embargo on the boats was an outrage. French honor was sullied, they
maintained, by Pompidou’s continued craven crawling to the Arabs after De Gaulle’s resignation. Certainly in Cherbourg’s officialdom,
from the mayor and police chief down to the lookouts on the breakwater, Israel had only friends.

The fish market was crowded and clamorous with holiday buying and selling, when Julie’s father came out in his proprietor’s
coat, tie, and wing collar to shake Noah’s hand, his gray mustache aquiver with emotion. “Well, Noah, we’re bound to come
to Israel, my wife and I with Julie one of these days, now that we’ve got to know you. But just on a visit, my son, my business
is here, and I’m too old to learn the new Hebrew. I can read the Bible, so can Julie, but I don’t understand a word you boys
say. God bless you. Good luck.” He looked deep into the naval officer’s eyes, leaving the rest unspoken, and walked off with
bowed head.

Noah said, “Well, so there, you’re coming to Israel. That’s good news.”

With a shrug more Gallic than Jewish, Julie said, “Oh, you’ll be married to that Daphna by then.”

When Noah returned to his Saar boat, the hard-bitten submariner commanding the Cherbourg operation, Hadar Kimche, was in the
wardroom studying a weather chart. “Ah, there you are, Barak! What about the
certificat de visite?
” He was a dark lean officer who had already led an escape of two Saar boats months ago, and he was not popular with the French
authorities.

“The customs agent will come aboard at two, sir, with the document. It’s just a French formality.”

“Yes, the final one, and it can stop us from going,” snapped Kimche, “if the weather doesn’t. Look here. Force nine gale expected
in the Bay of Biscay! An American aircraft carrier wouldn’t sortie in such weather.”

But at half-past two in the morning, the five boats did sortie, navigation lights brightly burning. The good people of Cherbourg,
all involved with Christmas festivity, failed to note the furious clangorous last-minute activity at the Israelis’ dock, or
their departure with loudly snorting diesels. At least, that would be their story later on. According to the legal papers,
which Captain Kimche had in hand in case of challenge, down to the certificat de visite, the boats were bound for an oil-drilling
company in Norway, which had bought them to run supplies to offshore oil rigs. Israel had waived title, the papers showed,
for a refund of the money paid down. All true, if not the whole truth. But no French vessels were out in that wild dark night
to challenge the flotilla’s departure; and the lookout on the breakwater, who had been given several bottles of champagne
to cheer his lonely Christmas vigil, somehow failed to see them go.

T
hat same night Zev Barak left Washington for France. The call from Pasternak had come just as Nakhama was putting dinner on
the table. The Norwegian cover story might unravel, Sam conveyed by hints, and Zev had better go at once to Paris. He could
help the embassy manage the brouhaha; also, he was needed there for something even bigger.

“Are the boats all right?” Barak’s query to Pasternak had reflected Nakhama’s anxious stare when the phone rang. She had stood
frozen, with a soup tureen in both hands.

“So far, fine, though they’re running into a bad storm. Right now the problem is the media. There’s a huge headline in tomorrow’s
London
Telegraph
— the whole front page, and it’s already on the streets — ‘
FIVE ISRAELI GUNBOATS VANISH
.’ ”

“Oo-ah. Very bad.”

“Could hardly be worse. Our London embassy is already being swamped by reporters and TV cameras. It’s black midnight there,
two o’clock here. The ambassador woke me up.”

“How did the story get out?”

“God knows, but Golda’s duty officer just turned down a call from the
New York Times
.”

“Sam, I’m not in the picture anymore.”

“Mocca Limon will give you an update in Paris.” Admiral Limon, a former chief of the navy, had been in France for months masterminding
the caper.

“What’s my mission, exactly?”

“First, help Limon keep the Norway story going until the boats are through Gibraltar. Second, try to put out media fires,
and stop the embassy people from idiotically starting more fires. Third, you’ve heard of Brigadier General Bradford Halliday?”

“Air chief of NATO?” Barak’s pulse quickened. “Sure, sort of an acquaintance of mine.”

“Right, right, I forgot you know his wife, Chris Cunningham’s daughter.” Ironic Pasternak overtones. “Well, he’s over there
in Belgium.”

“I know he’s in Belgium. What about him?”

“More later. You’ll get a telex in the Paris code room.”

“When do the boats transit Gibraltar?”

“Probably late tomorrow. That’s a flash point. The British can halt them. The French fleet can even come out and block them.
Have a nice flight.”

It was not a nice flight. The plane ran into the huge storm system tossing the Cherbourg boats off Brittany, and it bucked,
plunged, shuddered, and groaned to Paris. Barak arrived at the embassy bleary-eyed and fuzzy-headed. The European headlines
on the press room table woke him up like a whiff of smelling salts.

OÙ SONT-ILS?

LE DINDON, C’EST POMPIDOU

JUDEN BESIEGEN FRANKREICH

PER POMPIDOU, LA PURGA

The British papers struck a note of sheer glee:

CHEEKY ISRAELI COUP!

BOATS, BOATS, WHO’S GOT THE BOATS?

ISRAEL 5, FRANCE 0

And so on.

The ambassador and the press secretary were ruefully contemplating the newspapers. With them was “Mocca” Limon, the tall balding
Israeli admiral, a World War II French naval officer who had commanded the infant Jewish sea force in the early days and retired
at thirty. “I can’t put off the media any longer,” mourned the ambassador.

Limon said, “Ambassador, we’ll have to stage some kind of conference, the pressure is too great.”

“Mocca, I can’t face them. Maybe Avi can handle it.”

“I can try,” said Avi, the bearded young press secretary, “but what to all the devils do I tell them?”

“What do you know?” Barak inquired.

“Nothing,” said Avi in an aggrieved tone. “Nobody tells me anything around here.”

“That’s just fine,” said Barak. “How are you at acting stupid?”

“Not too bad, if it’s called for.”

“Actually Avi is pretty stupid,” said Limon, patting his shoulder. “He’s a political appointee.”

“That’s true,” said Avi, more cheerfully. “Also I can’t understand Parisian French. They talk too fast.”

“You speak French?”

“Haltingly.”

Zev asked Limon, “When will they transit Gibraltar?”

“Depending on how refueling goes, four or five this afternoon.”

“Ambassador, I suggest you call it for seven tonight,” said Barak. “The Frenchmen will all want their dinners. They may not
show up in force.”

“Good idea. Go ahead, Avi.” The press officer left and the ambassador went on, “Golda summoned the cabinet at one o’clock
this morning, Zev. She gave the green light to this thing very reluctantly, and now she’s worried as the devil about our relations
with France and Norway.”

W
ith great strain and half the crews seasick, Kimche’s five storm-tossed boats made it through the heavy Bay of Biscay weather,
but more trouble threatened the flotilla at its first fueling rendezvous.

The range of the missile boats was limited, and from Cherbourg to Haifa they had to sail more than three thousand miles; so
the plan called for two fuelings at sea, since putting into a foreign port would risk seizure. In a secluded bay off the south
Portugal coast, an Israeli freighter crudely modified as an oiler awaited them. The crews of three boats wrestled aboard the
heavy flexible pipelines, and the freighter commenced pumping diesel oil. It was a slow tedious exceedingly risky business,
for the boats were unarmed, and hour upon hour they lay dead in the water, exposed to detection or attack.

The last two boats were still fueling when a helicopter came buzzing at them over the distant wooded hills. Kimche and Noah
uneasily tracked the aircraft with binoculars. Dropping down over a tiny fishing village, the only human habitation in the
bay, it headed straight for them and hovered noisily above the freighter, not twenty feet in the air. Uniformed men inside
were plain to see, making notes, talking into headphones, and plying cameras.

“We had better get out of here, Noah,” said Kimche. He had been shrugging off coded warnings from Haifa about the media disclosure,
preoccupied with surviving in the storm and then making rendezvous. Now he took alarm. “Signal
‘Discontinue fueling.’
It’s rough out there for hooking up again, but we must move to international waters.”

“Captain, the boats can keep taking on oil as we move out.”

“You’re sure? Rupture those fuel lines and we’re kaput.”

“We rehearsed this off Ashdod for a week, sir. It works. It’ll save hours.”

“Let’s do that, then.”

The freighter weighed anchor and steamed seaward, trailing the two boats with the fuel lines. The helicopter followed for
a while, then flew out of sight. Fueling completed, the five boats sped south and the slow freighter soon dropped out of sight
astern. When the Cape of Trafalgar poked over the gray horizon, Kimche ordered the boats to close up, leave signalling to
him, and prepare for radical evasive maneuvers in the Strait of Gibraltar.

“Well
, hevra
[comrades], this is it,”
he said, speaking on the command circuit.
“It’s forty miles through the Strait. Maybe the French have asked the British to stop and seize us. Maybe they’ve even sent
warships or warplanes to turn us back. We’ll find out in the next hour or so. We go through at thirty knots. Good luck.”