The Glory (25 page)

Aircraft crisscrossing, rolling, circling, zooming, diving all around in the wide sky, friendly and enemy, oo-wah, a regular
Battle of Britain dogfight. And Benny Luria in the thick of it doing dizzy acrobatics, blue sky and green earth rotating around
him, MiGs and Mirages shrinking to toys, then swelling to flash past his canopy …

The Phantoms!

Here they come, shooting almost straight up into the mass melee from their sneak approach along the ground, and far ahead
a MiG blowing up in a globe of yellow smoky flame. No pilot ejecting, two victories in two minutes. Nothing so hot about the
Russian combat tactics so far, sloppy random shooting of missiles, gunfire at extreme range, cautious flattish maneuvering.
Oo-WAH, how about
that
stupid fool? Diving down on a discarded auxiliary tank … inexperienced, inexperienced … in Benny’s earphones, calm Hebrew
jargon, various pilot voices:
“Avi, check six, he’s coming up on you … I’ve got this guy in my sights, Eli, break off, break off … Hertzel, I’m two kilometers
west of the parachute guy, where are you? …”

Voice of the fighter director, high-pitched: “
MORE OF THEM COMING, LADS, TWELVE MORE HAVE TAKEN OFF, LOOK SHARP
.”

Luria makes a tight circle over the descending parachute, calling and calling his wingmate. “Dudu, Dudu, where are you? Over.”

Fighting in pairs, looking out for each other, is the way to save your neck. Planes tumble and roar in the unquiet sky over
peaceful greenery and glittering irrigation ditches. Wingmate, loud and harsh:
“Benny, Benny, break off, I’m coming in behind you, a thousand feet high. Break off, MiG on your tail. I’m going to shoot
him with a missile, break off, break off.”
Luria veers wide, looks up, sees a Sidewinder smoke past a MiG. Tough! Bad shooting? Malfunction? A Phantom blasts up from
below at the MiG, shoots a smoking rigid metal cobra. Great explosion of orange-and-red fire, end of a third Russian.

Fighter control: “Russian transmissions are getting panicky, hevra. Cursing and babbling, reports of low fuel, one fellow
swears they’re fighting Americans, another yelling for reenforcements …”

This can’t go on much longer. Fuel running out. Benny has one clear thought, get a MiG. Chance of a lifetime. Twenty or more
targets out there, not putting up much of a fight, wandering around at sonic speed. Scared angry Russian youngsters, now that
they’re under fire.
“What the hell are we doing up here, risking our lives for the silly Egyptians?”

“Dudu, Dudu, check six for me. I’m going after this fellow at twelve o’clock low.”

Dive at full screaming throttle, G’s building up, old painful pressure in stomach and balls, keep him in the scope. He’s there,
he’s there. Wait for the whistle of the Sidewinder … there it sounds.

The Russian throws on his afterburner and dives straight down to escape. A Phantom comes zooming up after him, after
my
MiG! Release the Sidewinder quick, get him first … half a second of receding smoke trail. Hit, flame, spreading black smoke,
pieces of the plane flying! But who got him, did the Phantom? Did I?

Returning to base with his fuel gauge needle trembling at zero, Benny does a quick victory roll over the field. Maybe I got
that MiG, maybe not, wait for debriefing, meantime
roll!
Sky, landscape, hangars revolve in the canopy, then he levels off and lands, and as he steps to the tarmac, pails of chilly
water drench his sweat-covered head and body.
Brrr!
Other victors are also doused by laughing ground crews. The pilots, dripping or dry, embrace, punch each other, shouting
in jubilation, never mentioning Russians. Secrecy orders, highest stringency.

After the debriefing, wet and somewhat let down — there’s no doubt that the Phantom got the MiG — Benny trots along the walkways
of the married officers’ quarters. Since taking squadron command he has avoided coming through here by daylight after a mission.
He is the feared messenger, the Angel of Death. But today is different, not a single plane lost. He bangs on the door of his
cottage, and out comes Irit in a shapeless housedress, a dust cloth on her hair. “So, back again. Benny, by your life, you’re
all wet, let me go!” As she yields to his sopping embrace with joy, he sees two women emerge on nearby porches to watch them,
wives of aviators whose parents he visited yesterday; Uri, who spun down and may have been captured, and Mendel, who disappeared
in a ball of flame.

“Got to get out of this suit, Irit. Good mission. All the boys came back.”

“Thank God.”

In a hot shower Luria’s spirits revive, as a sober realization returns of what the day’s work has been.
Shooting down Russians,
driving the Soviet Union out of the Egyptian skies! Well, that was the job, and the boys did it. Now let the politicians
sort out the explosive politics.

While the dogfight with the Soviet pilots was raging, Colonel Yossi Nitzan stood with a border patrol team on the Jordanian
boundary south of the Dead Sea, peering at a trail of footprints leading through raked sand, severed rolls of barbed wire,
and a dug-up patch of minefield. Evidently the infiltrators returning to their hideouts had passed through hours ago, for
the prints were half-filled with grit blown by the hot wind. “A small gang, maybe half a dozen,” he said.

From open-top command cars the trackers, heavily armed Bedouins in yellow kaffiyehs, were pulling their camels off dung-splattered
wooden platforms amid much Arabic cursing and nasty camel noises and stink. One balky camel, spitting and roaring, caught
his driver with a lashing kick that laid him out on the sand.

“New camel. Bad camel,” the leader of the trackers, a master sergeant with an iron-gray mustache, observed to Kishote. These
Bedouins, loyal to Israel, were invaluable for some army tasks.

Far down the ruler-straight tarred road that bisected the arid flat Arava to a shimmering horizon, a dust cloud was drawing
near. It ground noisily to a halt and a bulky figure, tousle-headed and dust-covered, heaved out of a jeep. General Ariel
Sharon, the new southern front commander, had recruited this camel corps and installed the hundred-mile barrier of minefields,
barbed wire, and raked sand from the Dead Sea to the Red Sea. On his orders terrorists were now being tracked far inside Jordan,
and killed in their mountain retreats.

“So, Kishote, what’s the delay?”

The recalcitrant camel was bellowing and biting the air, as his bloodied rider tried to seize his bridle.

“Camel insubordination, General.”

“L’Azazel, are you serious?” Sharon climbed up on the platform behind the plunging beast, and bellowing a foul Arabic curse
he shoved it stumbling off the platform. The Bedouins yelled appreciation. “Get these trackers going,” he said to Don Kishote,
jumping down, “before the trail is stone cold.”

“Sir, suppose I go along with them and see how they operate?”

“You?” Amusement sparkled in Sharon’s eye. “Can you ride a camel?”

“How different is it from a horse?”

“Shh!” Scanning the sky with binoculars, Sharon held up a hand. Overhead sound of many jet engines, a throbbing rumble, the
noise seeming to come from far behind the planes.

“Phantoms,” said Kishote. “Lots of them. Returning home.”

“Yes, but also Mirages. Something big went on over there.”

Kishote shouted at the master sergeant, “Well,
yallah!
” The camels went striding through the wire and the minefield in single file, the yellow kaffiyehs of the drivers fluttering.

“Phantoms and camels,” remarked Sharon. “Some war. Now listen, Kishote, you’re an armor brigade commander, not a baby-faced
paratrooper. No adventures on camels. Report to my headquarters at 2000, for some serious business, and by the way, I’m coming
to your son’s bar mitzvah.”

“Marvellous, sir.”

I
n the Hilton’s lower lobby, under a wooden arch lettered in gilt
NEW YORK DELI
, Yael Nitzan and Lee Bloom walked in through the double doors. “Well! At least it’s air-conditioned,” said Lee. “I’m sweating
buckets, and this is a tropical suit!”

Growl of a familiar voice. “Hello, there, Yael.” Sam Pasternak sat in a booth with Eva Sonshine, who twiddled fingers at Yael
with a bright smile. Obviously Sam had picked her up at her desk as she was: open-necked white shirtwaist, blue jacket with
Hilton insignia, no makeup on that perfect pale skin of the professional beauty. Yael despised Eva for a lightweight, content
to be her brother’s longtime doxy. What was that confounded Pasternak doing with her? He said, “Say, isn’t this Kishote’s
plutocrat brother from Los Angeles?” The men exchanged tart grins. “What brings you to Israel, Mr. Lee Bloom?”

“Actually, General, Aryeh’s bar mitzvah.”

“I see. Yael, did you get my message? I’m coming.”

“Oh, you are! Lovely.”

“D’you mind if I bring Eva along?”

Yael said to Eva, with shaded grace, “Well, how nice. By all means, you’re invited.”

“I’ll have to change plans,” said Eva. “But I’ll try to come.”

“Do. Eva, this is my brother-in-law.”

“Oh, who doesn’t know about Lee Bloom,” smiled Eva, “and Sheva Leavis, the California real estate geniuses?”

Lee gave her an admiring grin, which irked Yael. Men were such idiots. The headwaiter greeted Yael by name, and scraped and
bowed them through the clatter and spicy smells of the crowded deli to a rear booth. “A knockout, that receptionist,” said
Lee Bloom, with a humorous leer. “Think she’d like to work in Las Vegas? We could use her.”

“You’d have to check with my brother Benny. She’s his friend.”

“No kidding, she is? Lucky him. I’m not starting up with the air force.”

“Lee, you’re sweet to have come so far for the bar mitzvah.”

“Well, to be frank, Yael, I’m not here just for that. Sheva’s been offered the President Hotel in Eilat. It’s gone bankrupt,
you know, and we have an idea about it.” He waved for a waiter. “Let’s order first. Will Joe find us back here?” Lee Bloom,
and nobody else, called Yossi Nitzan “Joe.”

“He’ll find us.”

Delicatessen smells made Yael ravenous, but after glimpsing Eva Sonshine she ordered cold sliced turkey breast, no mayonnaise.
Bloom, who was getting plumper and balder by the year, asked for a hot pastrami sandwich with double pastrami. “Now about
that hotel.” Bloom became all business. “You know how well Sheva and I have done in Las Vegas. A hotel with a casino is a
money machine, Yael. Your best guess — chances of putting a casino in Eilat?”

“
Gambling
? Here?”

“Why not? It would bring in tons of foreign exchange.”

“Dear, neon signs and naked showgirls in
Israel
? Unthinkable. The government would fall.”

“Who says we do the glitz? Ever been to a Swiss casino? You could be in a Reform temple. Posh, mannerly, quiet, tasteful,
the croupiers are like ushers or undertakers. Look, the country’s swamped with tourists, and what’s there to do here, once
you’ve rushed around seeing all the holy places? Unless there’s a fun reason to come again, Israel is a one-shot. The Swiss
know that. When you’ve seen one Alp you’ve seen them all, and sooner or later all skiers just break their legs. Casinos, Yael!
I tell you, Israel would never have to grow another orange.” She burst out laughing. “Look, I’m serious. Now, Moshe Dayan
runs the country, and you’ve known the guy forever —”

A hard hand gripped Lee Bloom’s shoulder. “Leo,
ma nishma
[what’s new]?”

“Joe!” He jumped up, and they embraced. “My God, how long has it been? Years and years.”

There the brothers stood, arms around each other, the Israeli colonel and the Los Angeles real estate man, and Yael wondered
that she had ever seen a resemblance between the sand-brown lean Kishote and the pale pudgy Lee. She said, “So, you wouldn’t
talk over the phone, but what’s doing? Why have you left the Sinai?”

Slipping into the booth, Kishote ordered a beer from a hovering waiter. “Sharon has just made me his chief of staff for Southern
Command, and —”

“Oo-wah!”

“Big promotion, eh?” said Lee. “Congratulations, Joe.”

“It’s not a promotion, Leo. I’ll miss my brigade, I love those men. It’s just more responsibility.” He turned to Yael. “And
we’re meeting with the General Staff in an hour, about an outrageous violation of the cease-fire. That’s why I’m here. We
may have to go on to Jerusalem.”

“What cease-fire?” Lee inquired. “Always something going on here, isn’t there?”

Kishote did not know, for very few outside the air force did, about the victory of Luria’s squadron. But a much improved American
cease-fire plan had gone into effect right after the rout of the Soviet pilots, backed by a Russian guarantee of Egyptian
compliance. He described how, in the sunrise that followed the agreed midnight cease-fire deadline, soldiers had come crawling
out of the rampart bunkers on both sides of the Canal, waving at each other. This war was all news to him, Lee Bloom confessed,
mixed up in his mind with the usual terrorist raids.

So with no trace of irony or impatience, Don Kishote sketched Nasser’s War of Attrition for his brother in a few words. “We’ve
licked him,” he concluded. “After eighteen months, he’s accepted a three-month standstill that restores the status quo ante.
He lost half his air force and thousands of dead civilians and soldiers. Mortgaged his country to the Russians, and still
he accomplished nothing. We gave up not one inch of the Sinai, and we never will except for a peace treaty. Maybe now he’s
got the idea —” He broke off. General Sharon was approaching. He wore a dark suit and blue tie, but there was no mistaking
his massive swinging stride.

“Hello, Yael.” A smile dissolved Sharon’s formidable air to charming warmth. “I hate to disturb your lunch, but by your leave,
I want a word with your Don Kishote.”

“Of course.”

Heads turned as Sharon and his new chief of staff started walking out. “By God there’s Pasternak too,” said Sharon. “Just
our man.” With the same warm smile he had shone on Yael, he borrowed Pasternak from Eva Sonshine. The three men sat down in
a gloomy far corner of the lower lobby, on stiff brown leather furniture.