Leon Uris (71 page)

Ari stood up and walked from the cottage.

“Why must you make it a point to hurt Ari?” Sarah said angrily. “You know what he feels for her and she is a fine person.”

“He is well rid of her,” Jordana said.

“And who are you to judge a man’s heart?” Barak said.

David took Jordana’s hand. “You promised we would take a horseback ride.”

“You are on her side too, David.”

“I like Kitty Fremont. Come, let’s go for that ride.”

Jordana strode from the room and David followed.

“Let them go, Sarah,” Barak said. “David will calm her down. I am afraid our daughter is jealous of Mrs. Fremont as well she might be. Someday our girls may have the time to concentrate on being women.”

Barak played with his tea, and his wife stood behind his chair and laid her cheek on his thick red hair. “Barak, you cannot go on like this. You must speak or you shall regret it to your grave.”

He patted his wife’s hand. “I will find Ari,” he said.

Ari was near the orchard looking up into the hills at Gan Dafna when Barak came upon him.

“Does she matter that much, son?”

Ari shrugged.

“I rather liked her myself,” Barak said.

“What is the difference? She comes from a world filled with silk stockings and perfume and she is going back to it.”

Barak held his son’s arm and they walked through their fields to the place where the Jordan River ran past their farm. They could see Jordana and David riding away and they could hear her laughter.

“You see, Jordana is over it already. How are things with the Palmach at Ein Or?”

“As they have always been, Father. Good boys and girls but too few of them and too little to fight with. We cannot expect to win a war against seven armies.”

The sprinklers began whirling in the fields as the sun started its plunge behind the Lebanese hills near Fort Esther. The father and the son watched their fields for a long time. Each of them wondered if there would ever come a day when the only thing to worry about was the mending of a fence or the plowing of their land.

“Let’s go back to the house,” Ari said. “
Ema
is alone.”

Ari turned to go. He felt his father’s giant hand on his shoulder. He turned. His father’s great head was bowed in sadness. “I leave for Geneva in two days. I leave with sorrow as I have never known. For fifteen years someone has been missing from our table. I have been a proud and stubborn man but I have paid the price of pride with torment. It is hell for me now. Ari, my son, do not let my brother Akiva hang at the end of a British rope.”

J
ERUSALEM SEETHED
on the eve of the UNSCOP departure. In the Arab sector inflammatory oratory rang out to the wild chantings of Arab mobs. The city was split into fortified areas, cordoned off with barbed wire, and guarded by Tommies entrenched behind massed guns.

Ari Ben Canaan moved through Jerusalem, crossing from sector to sector to all of the known hangouts of Bar Israel, the Maccabee contact man. Bar Israel seemed to have disappeared. There had been no liaison between Maccabees and Haganah since the capture of Akiva and Little Giora. Ari was not without his sources of information, however, and he found out that Bar Israel was living in a room in the El Katamon district.

Ari went directly to the room and unceremoniously shoved the door open. Bar Israel was engaged in a chess game. He looked up, saw Ari, and returned to studying the chess board.

“Get out,” Ari ordered the other player. He shoved the man through the door and closed it. “You knew damned well I was looking for you.”

Bar Israel shrugged and lit a cigar. “You left fifty love letters all over Jerusalem.”

“Then why didn’t you contact me? I’ve been in Jerusalem for twenty-four hours.”

“You’ve made your dramatic entrance. Now what do you want?”

“Take me to Ben Moshe.”

“We aren’t playing with you boys any more. We have an aversion to Haganah commanders learning our headquarters.”

“You’re not talking to a Haganah commander. You are talking to Ari Ben Canaan, the nephew of Akiva.”

“Ari, I trust you personally but orders are orders.”

Ari snatched Bar Israel out of his chair, spilling the chess board to the floor. He held the little Oriental by the lapels and shook him as though he were a weightless sack. “You are going to take me to Ben Moshe or I am going to snap your neck.”

Ben Moshe sat at his desk at Maccabee headquarters in the Greek colony. Beside him stood Nahum Ben Ami. The two men glared angrily at the bewildered Bar Israel and Ari Ben Canaan.

“We all know Ari,” Bar Israel whimpered. “I took a chance.”

“Get out,” Ben Moshe snarled at the sweating man. “We will settle with you later. Now that you are here, Ben Canaan, what do you want?”

“I want to know what you plan to do about Akiva and the boy?”

“Do? Why nothing, of course. What can we do?”

“You are a liar!” Ari said.

“Whatever we do it is none of your damned business,” Nahum said.

Ari smashed his fist on the desk so hard it splintered the top. “It is my business! Akiva is my uncle!”

Ben Moshe remained icy. “We have had enough co-operation with traitors.”

Ari leaned forward until his face was inches from Moshe’s. “I hate your guts, Ben Moshe, and I hate yours, Nahum Ben Ami. But I am not leaving until I know your plans.”

“You are asking for a bullet through your brain.”

“You shut up, Nahum, or I’ll dismantle you,” Ari said.

Ben Moshe took off his glasses, wiped them, and put them back on. “Ari, you have such a pleasant way of persuasion,” he said. “We are going into the Acre jail and take Akiva and Little Giora out.”

“That is what I thought. When?”

“The day after tomorrow.”

“I am going with you.”

Nahum started to protest but Ben Moshe held up his hand to be quiet.

“You give your word the Haganah does not know about you being here?”

“You have it.”

“What is his word?” Nahum said.

“I take the word of a Ben Canaan.”

“I still do not like it,” Nahum said.

“That is too bad then. You know what this means of course, Ari. We have mobilized our greatest strength. You have been in the Acre jail ... you know what it is like. If we can do this thing it will break the British backs.”

“Acre is an all-Arab city. The jail is the toughest stronghold they have in Palestine. Let me see your plans.”

Ben Moshe opened the desk and took out a sheaf of blueprints. Everything in the Acre area had been covered: there was a layout of the town, the exterior approaches to the prison, the escape roads. The diagrams of the prison’s interior were perfect as far as Ari could judge. They must have been drawn up by people who had been prisoners. The guard stations, the arsenal, the main communications center were all pinpointed on the maps.

Ari studied the timetables of the attack. They were masterpieces. Heavy explosives, grenades, and land mines, all manufactured by the Maccabees, were ingeniously employed.

“What do you think, Ari?”

“Everything is perfect—up to a point. I see how you are going to get in and get them outside but the escape from Acre”—Ari shook his head—“this will never work.”

“We cannot hide conveniently at the nearest
kibbutz
,” Nahum Ben Ami snapped.

“We know the chance of complete escape is very slim,” Ben Moshe agreed.

“It is not very slim. It is nil. Of course I know you Maccabees pride yourselves on being dead heroes. Unless you set up better getaway plans, that is what you’re going to become.”

“I know what he is going to suggest,” Nahum said. “He will suggest we co-operate with the Haganah and the
kibbutzim
...”

“That is exactly what I am going to suggest. If you don’t you’ll have a lot of new martyrs. Ben Moshe, you are brave but you are not crazy. As the matter stands now you have possibly a two-per-cent chance. If you allow me to set up more complete escape plans your chances will become fifty-fifty.”

“Watch him,” Nahum said, “he talks too slickly.”

“Go on, Ari.”

Ari spread the master map out on the desk. “I suggest that you take an extra ten or fifteen minutes inside the prison and use that time to free every prisoner in the place. They will scatter in twenty directions and force the British to chase them all and thereby cut the British strength.”

Ben Moshe nodded.

“Now, our own groups should also break up into small units and each unit head out a different way from Acre. I will take Akiva with me and you will take the boy.”

“Go on,” Nahum Ben Ami said. As he listened he realized Ari was making sense.

“For my route I will break for Kfar Masaryk. There I will change transportation to throw them off and use back roads to go up to Mount Carmel south of Haifa. I have trusted friends in the Druse village of Daliyat el Karmil. The British won’t even begin to look up there.”

“It sounds good,” Nahum said. “The Druses can be trusted ... better than some Jews I know.”

Ari ignored the insult. “The second unit carrying Dov Landau will go up the coast road to Nahariya and split. I can arrange sanctuary in a half dozen
kibbutzim
in the area. I suggest that Landau be taken to Mishmar
kibbutz
on the Lebanese border. I was there at the building of Mishmar; the area is filled with caves. Your brother David was with me at Mishmar in the second world war. We have used it for years as a hiding place for our leaders. Landau will be absolutely safe there.”

Ben Moshe sat like a statue, looking over his plans. Without these hiding places he knew he had no more than a dramatic suicide mission. With Ari’s help, there was a chance. Could he risk co-operation?

“Go on, Ari ... set up you escape routes. I do this only because your name is Ben Canaan.”

D-Day minus four.

Four days separated Akiva and Little Giora from a rope. The UNSCOP flew out of Lydda to Geneva. Palestine felt the deathly tense, foreboding calm. The Arab demonstrations stopped. Maccabee raids stopped. The city was an armed camp with British plain-clothes men flooding the area.

D-Day minus three.

A last-ditch appeal from the Prime Minister of Great Britain was turned down by Akiva and Little Giora.

D-Day.

Market day in Acre. At daybreak Arab crowds converged on the city from twenty Galilee villages. The market areas were packed with donkeys and carts and produce. The roads were filled with travelers.

Oriental and African Jews, members of the Maccabees dressed as Arabs, drifted into Acre with the influx of the market-day throngs. Each man and woman carried a few sticks of dynamite, caps, wires, detonators, grenades, or small arms under their long dress. The Maccabees dispersed and mingled in the market stalls near the prison and throughout the jammed bazaar.

Eleven o’clock. H-Hour minus two.

Two hundred and fifty Maccabee men and fifty Maccabee women in Arab dress were now dispersed in Acre.

Eleven-fifteen. H-Hour minus one forty-five.

The guard changed inside the Acre jail. Four inside Maccabee collaborators stood by.

Eleven-thirty. H-Hour minus one-thirty.

Outside Acre at Napoleon’s Hill, a second unit of Maccabees assembled. Three truckloads of men dressed as British soldiers drove into Acre and parked along the sea wall near the prison. The “soldiers” quickly broke up into four-man units and walked through the streets as though on security patrol. There were so many other soldiers about that this hundred new people received no attention.

High noon. H-Hour minus one.

Ari Ben Canaan drove into Acre in a staff car dressed as a British major. His driver parked on the sea wall on the west side of the prison. Ari walked out on the big rampart at the north end of the sea wall and leaned against a rusted old Turkish cannon. He lit a cigarette and watched the waves lap against the sea wall below him. The foam swirled around the mossy green rocks worn flat by the waters.

Twelve-five. H-Hour minus fifty-five minutes.

The shops of Acre closed one by one for the two-hour midday break. The sun was getting hot and it blazed down on the Arabs in the coffeehouses, who began to doze as the mournful wails of Radio Cairo blared. The British troops were stifled and groggy in the heat.

Twelve ten. H-Hour minus fifty minutes.

A Moslem caller climbed the long spiral stairs of the minaret beside the Mosque of el Jazzar. The caller cried out in the stillness and the Mohammedans gathered in the courtyard and inside the huge white-domed house of prayer and knelt in the direction of the holy city of Mecca.

Twelve-twelve. H-Hour minus forty-eight minutes.

The Maccabees moved toward their assembly points as the heat beat both Arabs and British soldiers into lethargy.

In groups of twos and threes they moved without apparent purpose through the narrow dung-filled alleys to the assembly points.

Group one gathered at the Abu Christos—Father of Christ—Café. The café sat on the bay and the coffee drinkers watched the Arab boys dive from the rocks for a
grush
. They could see the entire sweep of the bay and Haifa at the far end.

A second large group came together at the mosque. They knelt at the outer fringes of the huge courtyard and joined the Arabs in prayer.

The third unit went to the Khan, a large square that had been used for more than a hundred years as a caravan resting and trading place. They mingled with the camels and the donkeys and the hundreds of market-day Arabs who lay on the ground and rested.

Group four met on the docks by the fishing fleet.

The fifth group assembled at the Land Gate on the sea wall.

At the same time the hundred Maccabees disguised as British soldiers moved for their positions. They had a greater freedom of movement; they went to house tops and blocked alleyways and roads so that they commanded every possible entrance and exit to Acre jail.

Outside of Acre the final unit of Maccabees got into position. These were people with no disguise. They planted land mines and stationed themselves on the highways with machine guns to stop British reinforcements from getting into Acre.