Leon Uris (28 page)

Joab Yarkoni, the Moroccan, reported that all the trucks were in ready condition and could be moved from the 23rd Transportation camp to Caraolos in twenty minutes. He gave the elapsed times of trial runs from Caraolos to Kyrenia by several alternate routes.

Zev Gilboa said that the three hundred and two children would be loaded on the lorries in a matter of minutes after the convoy arrived at Caraolos. He would brief the children as to what was going to happen a few minutes before the trucks departed.

Hank Schlosberg, the American skipper of the
Exodus
, said he would take the ship out of its Larnaca berth at dawn and steam up to Kyrenia and be there at least a full hour or two before the convoy was due to arrive.

Mandria reported that he had a system of lookouts posted along the escape route who could notify the convoy of any unusual British activity. He also had watchmen on a half dozen alternate routes. Mandria said that he would wait, as ordered, in Famagusta in his home. The minute the convoy passed through he would telephone Mark Parker in Kyrenia.

Ari rose and looked over his lieutenants. They were nervous, all of them. Even the usually placid Yarkoni was looking at the floor. Ari did not congratulate them or wish them luck. There was time for congratulations. As for luck, they’d make their own.

“I did not want to make the escape for three more days until the British themselves began moving children from the children’s compound. Nevertheless we have received information that Major Alistair is suspicious of our activities. We even have reason to believe he has gone to London for instructions over Brigadier Sutherland’s head. Therefore we must make our break at once. Our trucks arrive at Caraolos at nine o’clock. By ten o’clock I hope we have loaded the children and are passing your house here in Famagusta. The minute we turn off the Larnaca road we have two crucial hours. We have no reason to believe our convoy will be stopped. Our trucks are well known all over Cyprus. But ... we must act under the assumption that we are under suspicion. Any further questions?”

David Ben Ami, the sentimentalist, could not let the occasion pass without proposing a toast. Ari tolerated the younger man’s frivolity. “
Le chaim
,” David said, raising his glass.

“
Le chaim
,” the rest of them answered.

“I have heard that
le chaim
from you boys often,” Mandria said. “What does it mean?”

“It means ‘to life,’ ” David answered, “and to Jews that is no small request.”

“ ‘To life,’ ” Mandria repeated. “That is nice.”

Ari walked up to Mandria and hugged him in the Palmach manner. “You have been a friend,” he said. “I must go meet Parker now.”

Mandria stood there with tears streaming down his cheeks for he knew that this kind of affection was reserved for one of their own and to receive it from Ari Ben Canaan meant that he had been accepted fully as one of them.

A half hour later Ari, dressed as Captain Caleb Moore, met Mark on the terrace of the King George Hotel. Mark was a bundle of nerves.

Ari seated himself, refused a cigarette, and ordered a drink.

“Well?” Mark asked impatiently.

“Tomorrow. We will be at Caraolos at nine.”

“I thought you were going to wait until the British started cleaning out the children’s compound.”

“It would have been better but we can’t wait. A friend at CID tells us that Alistair is on to something. But relax,” Ari said. “It is almost over. The British still don’t know what they’re looking for. Now you understand everything.”

Mark nodded. He would send a cable asking for an extension of his vacation. Bradbury in London would know by the signature, Mark, that Operation Gideon had been a success and would turn loose the story Mark had sent with a commercial pilot a week earlier.

“Suppose I don’t get a phone call from Mandria at ten.”

Ari smiled. “Then I’d suggest you get the hell off Cyprus unless you want to cover my hanging.”

“That might be nice,” Mark said. He finished his drink.

“By the way,” Ari said, looking out to the water, “Kitty hasn’t been in the camp since we were forced to put Karen on the
Exodus
list.”

“That’s right. She’s with me at the Dome.”

“How is she?”

“How in hell do you think she is? She’s miserable. She doesn’t want Karen to go on the
Exodus
. Do you blame her?”

“I don’t blame her but I feel sorry for her.”

“That’s nice. I didn’t know you felt sorry for anyone.”

“I feel sorry that she has let her emotions get the best of her.”

“I forgot. You don’t know anything about human emotions.”

“You’re nervous, Mark.”

Mark was angry at Ari’s placidness. He remembered Kitty’s anguish when she returned to Kyrenia and told him that Karen was going on the ship. “What do you want? Kitty has suffered more than one person has a right to suffer.”

“Suffered?” Ari said. “I wonder if Kitty Fremont knows the meaning of the word.”

“Damn you, Ben Canaan, damn you. What makes you think that Jews own a copyright on suffering?”

“Fortunately you’re not being paid to like me and I couldn’t care less.”

“How could you? You see, I like people with human weaknesses.”

“I never have them during working hours.”

Mark stood up to leave. Ari grabbed Mark’s arm in his powerful hand. For the first time Mark saw Ben Canaan shaken from his complacency. There was anger in Ari’s eyes. “What the hell do you think this is? A tea party on the duchess’s lawn? We’re butting heads with the British Empire tomorrow.”

He released his grip on Mark’s arm and regretted the short display of temper. At that instant Mark felt a tiny bit sorry for Ari. Perhaps he had a better way of disguising it but the pressure was beginning to tell on him too.

A few hours later Mark had returned to the Dome Hotel in Kyrenia. He knocked on Kitty’s door. She managed to greet him with a half smile, but it could not disguise her red-rimmed eyes.

“Tomorrow.”

Kitty froze an instant. “So soon?”

“They are afraid the British are on to something.”

Kitty walked to the window and looked out at the pier and the island. It was a crystal-clear evening and she could even see the faint outline of the Turkish coast. “I’ve been trying to get up enough courage to pack up and leave Cyprus.”

“Look,” Mark said, “as soon as this blows over, you and I are going to head for the Riviera for a few weeks.”

“To pick up the pieces? I thought you were supposed to go to Palestine.”

“I doubt if the British will let me in after this. Kitty, I feel pretty rotten about dragging you into this thing.”

“It isn’t your fault, Mark.”

“You read that line well but it’s not quite true. Are you going to get over this?”

“Yes, I think so. I should have known better. You tried to warn me. At least I knew all the time that I was on thin ice. You know, Mark, it’s funny, but we argued the night I met Ben Canaan. I told you there was something different about Jews. They aren’t like us.”

“They have an unlimited capacity for getting into trouble. It’s their favorite sport,” Mark said, spinning off the bed and rubbing his temples. “Well ... one way or the other we might as well eat and I’m hungry.”

Kitty leaned against the doorframe as Mark splashed his face with cold water. He groped for a towel. She handed him one.

“Mark. It’s going to be very dangerous on the
Exodus
, isn’t it?”

He hesitated a moment. There was no use trying to fool her at this point. “It’s a floating bomb.”

Kitty’s heart sank. “Tell me the truth. Can they get away with this?”

“They have a fair chance with that mechanical monster, Ari Ben Canaan, running the show.”

The sun went down and it was night.

Mark and Kitty sat wordlessly in her room.

“No use sitting up all night,” he said at last.

“Don’t go,” Kitty said; “I’ll just stretch out over the covers.” She reached into the night stand and took out a couple of sleeping pills, turned off the light, and lay back.

Mark sat by the window and watched the surf slap against the shore.

Twenty minutes passed. He looked over at Kitty and saw she had fallen into a restless and thrashing sleep. He walked to the bed and stood over her for several moments, then covered her with a blanket and returned to the chair.

At Caraolos, Dov and Karen sat on his cot, too excited to sleep. They spoke in whispers. They were the only ones among the children who knew what the new day would bring.

Karen tried to calm Dov. He kept whispering what he was going to do when he got to Palestine. How he was going to join the terrorists and kill British soldiers. She hushed him up as only she could and finally induced him to lie down.

As he closed his eyes Karen stood up and a strange sensation swept through her body. Odd and frightening. Dov meant more to her than she had realized until this moment. First it had been pity. Now Dov had a hold on her. She did not understand it. She wanted to be able to go and talk it over with Kitty. But Kitty was gone.

“Karen?”

“I am here, Dov.”

The hours of darkness ticked by.

At the 23rd Transportation Company HMJFC three men lay on their cots wide-eyed.

Zev Gilboa dared think about springtime in Galilee for the first time in nearly a year. He thought of his wife and child and of the farm. His baby had been only a few months old when the Palmach sent Zev to Cyprus.

Joab Yarkoni thought of his farm too. It was different from Zev’s, for it hugged the sea just a bit north of the Plain of Sharon. His farm was called Sdot Yam and it meant Fields of the Sea, for its main crop was fish. Yarkoni loved to walk for hours through the abandoned ruins of Caesarea and dig for antiquities, and he hoped that the Palmach might let him return there for a while. He would go out on his trawler fishing and he would see his brother and sister again.

... and David Ben Ami thought of his beloved Jerusalem. He loved Jerusalem almost as much as he loved Ari’s sister Jordana. Now he would see them both again until they reassigned him to another mission. The rocky hills of Judea where his six brothers lived and the city rose out of stone. David propped on an elbow and reread the worn letter that Ari had brought him. Jordana! Jordana! His heart raced wildly. Jordana, my love!

The three men knew that their stay in Palestine might be brief because they belonged to the Palmach and Mossad and they might be needed anywhere in the world. But this night they thought of home....

Brigadier Bruce Sutherland had another of his nightmares. He dressed and went out of his house alone and walked through Famagusta in the depth of night. He walked along the old wall of Famagusta and stared into the old city with its hundreds of churches and cathedrals and ruins of castles and memories of past glory. He walked until he came to Othello’s Tower and he climbed it and looked down at the harbor. He was tired, very tired, and he wondered if there would ever be a night again in which he could close his eyes and fall into a peaceful sleep.

Major J. J. Alistair fell asleep over his desk. Most of the night he continued to pore through reports and bits and scraps of information in an attempt to put together exactly what the Jews were up to at Caraolos.

Mandria paced back and forth in the room where the Mossad and Palmach had held so many meetings. Yes, it had been only a few weeks since Ari Ben Canaan and David Ben Ami had stood on that balcony outside and watched a convoy of Jews being taken from their illegal runner,
Door of Hope
. Tomorrow he would stand on the balcony and another convoy would pass. This one would climax Ari Ben Canaan’s fantastic scheme. The imagination of the Greek Cypriots had been tremendously stirred by the daring of the Mossad. Those of them, like Mandria, who worked with the Jews, were beginning to think in terms of an underground movement of their own against British rule on Cyprus.

One man slept soundly. Ari Ben Canaan slept like a well-fed baby without a care in the world.

A ray of light fell over Mark Parker’s face. He opened his eyes and yawned. He had dropped off by the window with his feet propped on the sill. He was stiff and his mouth tasted foul from cigarettes and scotch. He glanced around and saw Kitty in a deep and quiet slumber on the bed. He pulled the window shade down and tiptoed from the room and shaved and spent several moments under an icy shower and he felt better. He dressed and returned to Kitty’s room and sat gently on the edge of her bed and stroked her hair softly. She stirred and opened her eyes slowly. She smiled when she saw Mark and stretched and purred. Then her expression changed to one of fear.

At twenty minutes to nine, Ari Ben Canaan, dressed as Captain Caleb Moore, entered the lead jeep in the convoy of twelve trucks of the 23rd Transportation Company. Each truck had a Palmachnik dressed like a British soldier as driver. They sped out of their camp and twenty minutes later halted before the administration building at Caraolos, outside the barbed-wire compounds.

Ari entered the administration building and knocked on the door of the commanding officer, whose acquaintance he had carefully made during the past three weeks.

“Good morning, sir,” Ari said.

“Good morning, Captain Moore. What brings you up here?”

“We received a special dispatch from headquarters, sir. It seems that they are getting the Larnaca camp ready faster than they expected. They want me to transfer some children today.” Ari lay the forged papers on the officer’s desk.

The CO thumbed through the sheets. “This isn’t on the schedule of transfers,” he said. “We didn’t expect to start moving the children for three days.”

“That’s the Army for you, sir,” Ari said.

The CO bit his lip and meditated and stared at Ari and looked through the transfer papers again. He reached for the phone. “Hello. Potter here. Captain Moore has orders to move three hundred children out of Compound 50. Dispatch a detail to help get them moved.”

The CO picked up his pen and initialed the papers. He signed half a dozen other sheets authorizing entrance into the compound and removal of the children. “Move them along, will you, Moore? We have another load to be transferred in an hour and the roads could be clogged.”