The Glory (63 page)

Well, there’s her answer to Sadat, and plain enough
, thinks Barak.

“Some of these very nations that deplore our
‘inflexibility’
have declared a hypocritical
‘embargo’
on our region,” Golda’s voice rises in anger, “which only means they won’t have to deliver defense materials we’ve bought
and paid for, while the Soviet Union is flooding the most advanced munitions to our foes. Fortunately, to redress this unjust
imbalance, the United States of America alone has stepped in with an airlift —” A standing ovation drowns her out and sweeps
the chamber, and also the whole gallery except for the diplomatic section. “An airlift, I say, that will have the everlasting
gratitude of the Jewish people.

“Moreover, not only have Egypt and Syria, outnumbering us more than twenty to one in manpower, been waging all-out war on
us, with massive resupply and expert guidance of the Soviet Union, they have been openly joined by the armed forces of Iraq,
Morocco, Jordan, and Libya. Yes, we too are now getting help from America,” she looks straight up at the diplomatic section,
“but in fighting to survive
we are doing it ourselves
.” In this round of applause Barak sees a few diplomats furtively clap.

“How well we’re doing, I’m not prepared to reveal. As I say, the enemy is listening. But we have pushed back the enemy in
the north, in the south our forces are operating on both sides of the Suez Canal, and further disclosures —” She has to stop
as a ripple of noise spreads through the chamber. “Further disclosures will come as appropriate, from our gallant army leadership.

“I turn now to the domestic tasks that lie before us …”

She has not proceeded far when Barak feels a tap on his shoulder. At the whispered word, “Telephone call from the Ramatkhal,”
he hurries to a corridor telephone. Dado comes on with a roar of anger. “By my life, Barak, has she lost her wits? The grossest
breach of security! Places in danger the lives of all my soldiers in Africa! Compromises the operation! Why to all the devils
did she do it?”

“Sir, after all the bad news I guess she wanted to say something uplifting —”

“Any uplifting event in the field was for the military to disclose!”

“Also, sir” — Barak is doing his best to sound calm, for Dado in a rage is unnerving — “if Kosygin’s pressing Sadat for a
ceasefire, this may give us more time to carry the fight into Egypt. Now that the world will know we’ve crossed the Canal,
Sadat may well dig in so he won’t seem to be collapsing.”

Tense pause. “She doesn’t think that way,” growls the Ramatkhal. “It’s too subtle. Anyhow, Zev, you just convey to her in
no uncertain terms that I’m furious, and that she has harmed our chances of winning the war.”

Crash of receiver.

E
arly next morning heads turn as the most recognizable Israeli of all strides into the bustling Tel Aviv Hilton in army fatigues
and Vietnam cap. Israel’s plushiest hotel is full up, though not with tourists. Those birds of passage have long since taken
flight, and birds of another feather have wheeled and alighted; foreign correspondents, radio commentators, TV anchormen,
film crews, combat photographers, and the like. The compound bird’s-eye of the media is ever cocked for a fresh episode of
the perils of Israel. Dayan joins Sam Pasternak and Eva Sonshine at a coffee table in the lounge, looking around at the journalists
with one reddened eye. “So, Eva, what are the vultures croaking about today?”

“They smell blood, Minister.”

“Whose blood? Mine?”

“To tell the truth, Dado’s. He had a bad press conference after Golda’s speech.”

“Well, he was caught unawares. So was I, God knows.”

“Eva tells me,” Pasternak says, “of all kinds of rumors going around here. Our bridgehead’s been smashed, Dado’s had a heart
attack, you’ve fired Arik Sharon —”

Dayan’s sallow face freezes. Quickly Eva stands up, saying, “I have to get back to my desk,” and hurries away.

Rubbing his eye, Dayan mutters, “Still another disaster at the Chinese Farm last night, Sam. Word just coming in.”

“Elohim, what now?”

“A paratroop brigade from the south sector was thrown into a night fight without briefing, to help clear the road for Tallik’s
bridge. They were stopped cold, pinned down in the ditches. Tanks had to go in to rescue them and take out their dead and
wounded. Second terrible fiasco there. Ready to go? Come along.”

Outside beyond the portico it is raining hard. Dayan’s dripping car drives up, the doorman salutes him, and people waiting
for taxis stare at the famous one-eyed hero. “Amos is all right?” Dayan asks as they get in.

“Well, he’s still out there in Syria with his battalion.”

“A son of his father. My God, Sam, the price, the price of this war. Already nearly a thousand dead, and no end in sight.
My telephone never stops ringing, my closest friends have lost sons or they’re missing.” He leans on an elbow, glumly looking
out at the drumming rain.

“Where are we going, Minister?”

“Dado has called a meeting of senior officers down south at Kishuf, to decide how to continue the war, now that Golda has
cut off our retreat.”

Gloomy silence, slap-slap of windshield wipers.

“Minister, the airlift news this morning is great.”

“Yes?” Dayan rouses himself. “What’s the latest?”

“Eleven Phantoms coming today,
eleven
more, on top of the fourteen that have arrived. Twenty-six Skyhawks due tomorrow. Tanks rolling off the Galaxies like an
Independence Day parade.”

“And I had to push Golda on the airlift!” Dayan shakes his head in wonder. “Where would we be otherwise?”

“Minister, most of the stuff won’t reach the front before it’s all over. This is mainly resupply —”

“Nonsense. The Phantoms can fly tomorrow, and we’re right at the red line on them. Those fighter-bombers refuel in the air,
you know. American carriers are strung across the Mediterranean to protect them. All organized in five days, Saturday to Wednesday.
They’re phenomenal, the Americans, once they get going.”

“Moshe, they simply woke up to their own national interest, and high time,” the hardened Mossad skeptic retorts. “They can’t
let the Russians win a surrogate war here —”

“Easy to say! Shallow! This will cost them a damaging oil embargo, and who can say whether their ‘surrogate,’ as you put it,
will win? Can you? Can I? They’re being magnificent.”

T
wo Phantoms are overflying the Suez Canal more than sixty thousand feet up, on a mission rendered urgent by Golda Meir’s disclosure.
Benny Luria in the lead plane has already heard on the morning news Cairo’s dismissal of the
“token raid for television.”
Aerial reconnaissance of Egyptian troop movements is now mandatory, and the flight is testing a gap reportedly blasted in
the missile wall by Sharon’s tanks. The pilots and navigators in oxygen masks are peering down tensely for the flash of a
missile launch. So far, as the Canal and its lakes slide slowly under their wings, nothing. Thrumming engines, azure peace
of the stratosphere.

Benny Luria is courting disciplinary action, for base commanders have now been forbidden to fly missions. But Dov is in the
other plane, and on hearing of this he preempted the lead plane. Let come what may! He has been drilling hard with Dov on
an antimissile tactic he read about in an American air force journal, developed in Vietnam. Benny knows it works, because
earlier in the war he saved his own life with it.

Five minutes into Egypt air space, and still nothing. Breathing easier, Benny wigwags his wings to signal
Commence photography
. He and Dov fly flat ever-widening circles over the assigned areas, while automatic cameras capture copious photographs.
The landscape below is blotchy with the shadows of drifting clouds, and from this altitude, troop concentrations are only
more vague blotches. But the pictures taken by these CIA supercameras will show the hairs on the mustaches of the Egyptian
tank commanders.

“All right, we’ve done it, Dov. Let’s go home.”

Rattling roar of the jets, heavy vibration of the plane as it accelerates to Mach 2. Thrust of helmet against headrest, a
hard blow. Far ahead the thread of the Canal sparkles, the low sun glares. Watching for landmarks of Sharon’s missile gap,
Benny Luria spots a pale flash.

“Missile, Dov, eleven o’clock.”

“I see it.”

The spurt of flame climbs and seems to be locking on Dov’s plane. He jinks and it is after him, veering as he veers, straightening
as he straightens, steadily ascending toward him, a visible missile now.
L’Azazel
, Dov has fought a good war, made a fine record, three confirmed MiGs downed. God help him to evade. Drilling is one thing,
staring down at climbing death is another, as Benny too well knows.

That evasive maneuver he taught Dov is simple but tricky, and the timing is everything. At the last possible moment, you flip
over and break downward; a few seconds too soon, and the missile will detect the move and change course to hit. A second too
late, goodbye! But if you time it just right, the plane will fall off so fast in the thin air that the rocket, unable to alter
its course in time, will fly past harmlessly. No way to help Dov now, either he will save himself or not …

Now, Dov, NOW, BY YOUR LIFE, over and down.

Aircraft and fire-spurting pole still converging.

Dov, Dov,
Dov, GO
…

The other plane flips and drops like a stone. The missile flames past it and up into the fathomless blue.

In Benny’s earphones, his navigator:
“He did it, sir, hundred percent.”

Calm voice of Dov as he straightens out far below:
“How was that, Abba?”

“B-plus. You waited too long,” Benny Luria replies through a choked throat. He hears his son laugh, and feels for the first
time the trickling sweat that has broken out all over his body inside the G suit.

A
few minutes before the Ramatkhal takes off for the decisive strategic meeting in the south, the developed Luria photographs
arc delivered to his helicopter.

Shells are now falling all around Deversoir. In the enormous brick-paved Yard the tanks and APCs are battened down, in the
Canal below an occasional explosive splash drenches the pontoon bridge engineers, and everywhere stinking gunpowder smoke
swirls and stings the eyes. Don Kishote is supervising traffic himself, keeping access clear for the nine pontoon rafts rumbling
in on huge transporters. Defying the whistling shells and the flying shrapnel, the engineers down at the waterline are linking
up several of these rafts into the stub of a bridge, already projecting a third of the way across.

“Arik, it’s Arik, sir.” A dirty bloody soldier runs up to Kishote. “Arik’s been hit!” Kishote follows him through the crowding
machines and sees Sharon down on the bricks, his back to a tank track, bright blood welling into a bandage around his temples.
He looks slack-jawed and vacant. Pushing through the anxious officers around him, Kishote asks the medical orderly, “How bad
is it?”

“He’ll be all right, sir. Shrapnel wound, but it’s not lodged in his head. He’s just dazed.”

“I’m not dazed,” says Sharon irritably. “Kishote, they’re finding the range, the bastards. Pull all the command vehicles out
of the Yard right away, before the antennas get knocked off and we lose communications. Then go back outside and keep those
pontoon rafts coming, whatever you do.”

In a little while he emerges from the Yard, his hair blowing over the stained bandage, his stride somewhat shaky. “B’seder,
Yossi, tell Ezra to take over command here, and let’s go to Kishuf.”

Half an hour later, unshaven and very dirty, Sharon and Kishote mount the path to General Adan’s advance command post, their
boots sinking in the yellow sand. As they go up, a grand Sinai panorama unfolds, full of sights and sounds of war; from the
Canal direction the pale flashes, delayed thumps, and rising smoke of Egyptian heavy artillery; closer by, in the enemy’s
Sinai lodgments north and south as far as the eye can see, broad dust plumes of brigade-scale movements. Directly below the
winding path, Bren’s armored division is arrayed on the level desert, a textbook diagram drawn by a thousand machines.

Yossi is not looking forward to an encounter with Major General Bren Adan, a soldier’s soldier, all business and sparing of
talk. Bren must still be smarting under his disaster on October eighth, caused in part by Gorodish’s sending Sharon uselessly
south and back north; and he has smarted over the years at being in the everlasting shadow of the flamboyant Sharon. Bren
Adan is certainly entitled to be distant and crusty with Sharon’s deputy, but he is no fun. At the top of the path, to Kishote’s
delight, he is hailed by Colonel Natke Nir, one of Bren’s brigade commanders, sitting on the sand with two other colonels
at a large map. “Kishote, to all the devils!” Kishote springs to seize the extended horny hand and pull Colonel Nir erect,
for he cannot get to his feet by himself. The old friends embrace and pound each other, making rough banter.

Kishote knows nobody quite like Natke Nir, who once served under him. The man seems to be made of pig iron for indestructibility,
and in fact has much metal in him. Both his legs were all but blown off in the Six-Day War. Many operations and a lot of artificial
patching have restored his locomotion, but he cannot get in or out of a tank. Yet he has waived total disability pay and risen
to lead an armor brigade, always assisted into and out of his command machines. Natke, as everyone calls him, has been in
the thick of the Canal fighting from the start.

“So, what devilry are you fellows up to?” Kishote greets the other two colonels, both as sandy and whiskery as Natke, with
a gesture at the map.

“As a matter of fact, Yossi,” says Nir, “it’s exciting, though it’s probably just a dream. Look here.” Kishote helps him kneel
down at the map, and he hoarsely expounds Bren Adan’s op plan in rough army jargon, a forefinger skimming the map and making
a quick sketch now and then in the sand.