By the Rivers of Babylon (35 page)

Esther Aronson staggered in the dark toward the west slope. She called out, but no one seemed to hear.

The Ashbals, temporarily confused by Dobkin’s one-man charge, had stopped moving for a while, but eventually they began crawling up toward the top of the wall again. They could make out the top against the starry sky, less then fifty meters off. Their commander, Sayid Talib, couldn’t believe their good luck. Except for the single pistol shooting intermittently at them, there was no one on the crest. But that wouldn’t last forever. He exhorted his men to move faster. He had believed this to be a suicide mission for himself and his forty men, but Ahmed Rish had calmed him, with a story about an English general who took his army up a cliff more impregnable than this one and captured Canada for the English. And it was true. No one could have expected an attack here.

Talib’s blood flushed his face as he climbed. He could not wait to get among the Israelis. He touched his half-mutilated face. When he had lived in Paris he had received a letter from the French Ministry of Immigration. He had opened it and discovered that it was in fact from Mivtzan Elohim. That carelessness had cost him the right side of his face, and life had never been the same since. Women let out a little cry when they saw his once handsome features. Even men looked away.

Talib prayed that he would find Isaac Burg alive. Of all the torture fantasies he had played out in his mind, he had decided that flaying would be ideal for the head of Mivtzan Elohim. He would strip his skin off over a period of twenty-four hours—maybe longer. He would feed it to the dogs while Burg watched. He looked up. They were less than twenty-five meters from the top.

McClure put his last six rounds in the chamber of his pistol. He turned to Richardson, who was standing very still. “How do you say, ‘Take me to the American consulate,’ in Arabic?”

“You should have asked Hausner that yesterday.”

“You don’t speak any Arabic, then?”

“No. Why should I?”

“Don’t know. Just figured you did.” He leaned out of the foxhole and looked downslope. He could see men, like lizards, crawling up out of the darkness. He aimed at one and fired.

Miriam Bernstein and Ariel Weizman found Esther Aronson crawling along the ground. They took the eight AK-47’s and ammunition without any formalities and ran along the half-kilometer-long perimeter in opposite directions. At each position, they dropped off a rifle and ammunition. Bernstein skipped McClure’s foxhole. At the south end of the perimeter she found herself alone with the last AK-47. An Ashbal girl lifted herself up onto the flat ground and stood five meters away with her AK-47 slung. She saw Bernstein and unslung her weapon, slowly and deliberately.

Bernstein did not have any idea of how to use the AK-47 and didn’t know if she wanted to use it in any case. Was the safety off? Was it loaded? Did it have to he cocked? The previous owner, of course, had it cocked with the safety off for the attack, but she did not think of this. All she knew for certain was that the gun had a trigger. She found it and hesitated.

The Ashbal girl fired a full burst at her at point-blank range.

Miriam Bernstein saw the muzzle flashes and they blinded her. She thought of a blindingly sunny day in a café in Jerusalem. A young infantryman was telling a story of how an Arab had popped out of a house on the Golan Heights and fired a submachine gun at him from a distance of a few meters. The young infantryman had been standing in front of a tree, and the tree, directly behind him, was hit again and again and bark and wood splinters flew off and hit the young man all over his head, neck, and back. Then the Arab disappeared. The infantryman had said, “An angel was standing in front of me that day.”

Bernstein heard another burst of fire and the automatic rifle jumped in her hands. The young girl appeared to leap backwards over the edge.

Miriam Bernstein sank to her knees and covered her face.

In the Concorde, Yaakov Leiber sat and watched an American war movie. He’d seen the movie that afternoon and had made notes. The projector was set on “fast forward.” When a portion with authentic war sounds came on, he returned it to normal speed and turned up the volume. The movie sound
speakers, set up on the perimeter, reproduced the deep throaty sounds of a heavy machine gun. Rumors of this heavy machine gun had run rife in the Ashbal camp ever since Muhammad Assad had been released by the Israelis. Before his execution for treason, Assad had apparently told his guards many stories of Israeli strengths.

The Ashbals were wavering now. Flashes of gunfire twinkled up and down the Israeli line. More and more sounds of increasingly rapid gunfire rolled down the slope. Above the sounds of the small arms came the rumble of the heavy machine gun. It seemed as though the Israelis had more weapons than they had people. The Ashbal fighters smelled defeat in the air. They began throwing anxious glances at their commanders.

Naomi Haber watched as the Arab sniper’s body bounced. Her whole body shook as she realized that she had actually put two bullets into the man’s back. She called out, trying to keep her voice even. “Mr. Hausner! He is finished. I will cover you!” She looked down on Hausner’s still body below her. “Mr. Hausner! He is finished! I will—” She saw his arm move slightly in a wave. She turned the rifle downslope and began firing at the targets. Forward-moving target at eighty meters. Fire! Hit! Stationary target at ninety meters. Fire! Hit! Right-to-left at fifty meters. Fire! Miss. Adjust for range. Fire same target. Hit! Next target.

Hausner clawed at the steep sides of the overhanging watchtower, but there was no way up. He moved to his right where the slope was gentle and began running uphill. Ahead of him, to the left, he could hear the metallic operating rod of the M-14 slide back again and again. To his front, the Israeli breastworks rose up. There was not supposed to be anyone there—the M-14 was supposed to cover the entire area—but he could see an incredible number of muzzle flashes along the defensive perimeter. Where the hell had they found all those rifles? Or were they all aerosol cans? Flashes appeared in front of him, and he knew they were not aerosol cans. Bullets went buzzing past his ears from behind as well. He yelled out above the gunfire. “For God’s sake, stop firing! Hausner! Hausner!” The sand gave way under him and he crawled and stumbled directly into the Israeli guns, shouting at the top of his lungs between gulps of air. Then he found himself at the bottom of a trench. A young man and woman with AK-47’s looked down at
him curiously. Hausner stood up. “You’re the worst goddamned shots I have ever seen.”

“Lucky for you,” said the girl.

The unarmed fighters began pushing the stacked plaques of clay over the side. The heavy plaques tumbled down the slope, breaking off the hard crust as they went and picking up more mass and energy. The earth slides tore into the Ashbal ranks and snapped legs and crushed ribs as they hit.

Suddenly, torchlike flames illuminated the Israeli lines as dozens of Molotov cocktail wicks were lit. The incendiary devices arched high into the air and began landing among the Ashbals. To make sure that they burst on impact, the Israelis used half bricks, tied with thongs onto each device, to act as clappers. The jars and bottles broke on impact and the kerosene or the more deady crude napalm ignited, splattering flames over the side of the slope.

For greater distance, brassieres were used as slings to hurl the bombs down the slope. The side of the slope lit up, and the Israeli gunfire became more accurate as the Ashbals stood revealed against the flames.

The Ashbals became confused and milled about. Some ran for dark areas where the burning kerosene would not illuminate them. Occasionally, a man would be splattered with burning fuel, and his screams would carry above the other ghastly sounds of battle.

The last few man-traps that had not caught anyone were soon occupied. A half-dozen young men and women screamed and squealed their lives away when the impaling stakes drove deeper into their rumps, their necks, their bellies, and their genitals as they squirmed to get off of them.

The sappers, who were playing dead directly beneath the Israeli breastworks, knew that they were in fact dead men. Their own army’s fire had already killed some of them, and the chances of their men assaulting the Israeli lines were diminishing. They were caught almost in the jaws of the enemy. But their training had provided for almost every contingency. Slowly, a few at a time, they rolled downhill, stopping every few meters and playing dead again. They knew that the defenders’ attention was riveted elsewhere. Meter by meter, they closed in on the main body of their comrades. It was slow and torturous,
and almost every one of them was hit at least once, but half of the twenty-man elite team eventually made it back to their comrades. They were by no means out of danger there, however.

The fight on the west slope was over within sixty seconds of the time the first Israeli AK-47 opened up. Molotov cocktails incinerated the entire line of castor oil bushes, silhouetting the climbing Ashbals. Clay plaques and AK-47 fire swept the flat, steep slope clean. The glacis was as unassailable as when Darius first saw it over twenty-five hundred years before, or when Alexander remarked on the defenses some years later. Almost every man was killed outright or burned to death in the castor oil bushes below. The few who fell into the Euphrates, like most Arabs, could not swim and drowned in the deep, muddy waters.

Sayid Talib, his dreams of flaying Isaac Burg now forgotten, ran screaming through the burning bushes. The searing pain of two bullets almost made him lose consciousness. He stumbled and crawled and finally saw the Euphrates below him. He threw himself in. Swimming was one thing he had learned in Europe, and he let the river carry him southward. A few of his men splashed and shrieked around him and finally drowned. He believed be was the only survivor.

Hausner walked up to Burg who was standing on the CP/OP. “You are either the best commander since Alexander the Great or you had the good sense to stand here and do nothing.”

Burg was surprised to see Hausner alive but didn’t remark on it. “A little of both, I think.” He could see that Hausner was bare-chested and missing both his shoes. Blood was smeared across his face. “Where the hell were you?”

“Downslope.” He stood on top of the rise and looked out toward the perimeter. “Brin was killed by a sniper.”

“I see.” Burg lit the pipe that had been hanging dead in his mouth for some time. “We took a lot of casualties. The outposts are done for, I’m afraid.”

“I suppose they are,” said Hausner. Two girls approached the CP/OP from the direction of the west slope. They each had several rifles slung on their shoulders. One of them was Esther Aronson. She spoke. “It’s all over for them over there. No casualties for us. One missing, though.”

“You did a marvelous job,” said Burg.

“I think these rifles could be put to better use on the east slope,” she continued.

“Yes,” said Burg. “Who’s missing?”

“Miriam Bernstein. They’re looking for her.”

Hausner didn’t seem to react.

The two young women hurried off into the darkness.

Hausner put out his hand. “Give me a pull on that damned thing.”

Burg handed him the pipe. “Was this a miracle?”

“It doesn’t qualify,” said Hausner. His hands were shaking.

“Why not?”

“Because I didn’t hear the voice of the Lord.”

“
You
have to hear it? Only
you
are supposed to hear it?”

“That’s right.”

Burg laughed.

Hausner handed back the pipe. “Dobkin?”

Burg shrugged. “There’s the miracle—if he’s alive.”

“Right. Listen—I’m going over to the west slope.”

“No need. It’s all over there.”

“Don’t tell me how to run this battle, Burg.” He jumped down off the rise and walked very quickly west.

Burg stared after him.

Ibrahim Arif spoke into a PA microphone. He pitched his voice to carry above the deep bass sounds of battle and at the same time made it sound mocking. “Go home, little children. You have been soundly spanked. Now, go home and hide your faces! Salem Hamadi! Can you hear me? Go home and go to bed with your young boyfriend! Who is it this week? Ali? Abdel? Salman? Or is it Abdullah? Muhammad Assad said you were making love to Abdullah this week!”

Arif went on, taunting in that high wailing manner peculiar to the Arabs. As he spoke his heart thumped heavily in his chest, and his mouth, already dry from lack of water, felt like the sands of the desert. Between him and Rish’s cruel, mutilating knife was a handful of Jews whose weapons were again running out of ammunition. And even if, by some miracle of Allah, he did get out of this alive, he would be hunted for the rest of his life with a renewed vengeance by the people he had once called brothers and sisters. But that was tomorrow’s worry. Tonight’s worry was staying away from Rish’s knife and carrying out the orders of Jacob Hausner. “Or is it a camel or an ass for you tonight,
Salem? Or perhaps it is your lord and master, Ahmed Rish?”

The young Ashbals, in their confusion and misery, shouted back. Two got up and charged the crest and were shot down. Some held the triggers of their weapons like a man in a helpless rage clenches his fists, and the barrels of the AK-47’s overheated and the weapons exploded.

Ahmed Rish squatted in a gully with his radio operator. Salem Hamadi sat a few meters off. He appeared, in the dark, to be weeping or praying, or perhaps just muttering to himself. Rish called to him. “Get up! We must make one last effort. Their ammunition must be low. The moon is not yet risen. One last effort. Come! We must personally lead it.”

Hamadi stood and advanced alongside Rish. Most of the remaining Ashbals followed mechanically.

Molotov cocktails rained down on the stalled attackers and bullets ripped their ranks. Earthslides knocked their feet out from under them or covered their prone bodies.

Finally, the call to retreat came loud and clear from behind them. “Back! Back! It is finished! Fall back!”