Mitla Pass (2 page)

Revolts against the Russians were brewing in Poland and Hungary. The students in Budapest had rioted and the unrest was growing. Israeli intelligence estimated a Russian tank force would enter Budapest in a matter of days.

Herzog reckoned these events could give Israel a slight advantage. Russia and America might be slow to react to the Israeli attack on Egypt. If Israel could stall diplomatically for three days, her forces might reach the Canal and Israel’s part of the war would be over.

But America was certain to be outraged that her two closest allies, England and France, would initiate military action without advising them. As for the Soviets, they had to put on a barking show for their Egyptian clients.

“Is there anything at all we haven’t covered, Yakov? Anything ... anything ...”

Herzog pointed to the document setting Operation Kadesh into motion.

“Your signature,” he said.

Ben-Gurion would not quit, gleaning for the stray, minute detail that might have been overlooked. It all boiled down to the same thing. Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Egyptian president, was on a heady binge. He had seized the Suez Canal and evicted the British and French. He had closed the Strait of Tiran, at the tip of the Sinai Peninsula, to Israeli shipping. He had turned the Gaza Strip into one enormous terrorist base which violated the Israeli border hourly. He had massed a huge army in the Sinai armed with a larder filled with Russian weapons. The bottom line was that Israel had no choice other than military action—with or without the British and French.

He scribbled his name on the paper. His nation was at war!

“Anything else?” he asked.

Herzog put before him a memo requiring initialing.

“What is this?”

“A small piece of business. Permission for Gideon Zadok to go into the Sinai with a forward unit. He has had a standing request that if there was ever to be a major action, to be allowed to join it as an observer. Research for his book.”

“Am I mistaken, or didn’t he go on the Kalkilia raid?”

“He did,” Herzog answered. “Both Zechariah and Ben Asher told me he conducted himself very well under fire.”

“How is his intelligence clearance?” B.G. asked.

“Early during his trip here, we realized he was in a position to gain very valuable information to pass to the Americans. Both Beham and Pearlman fed him false intelligence on the Ramon Rocket and the atomic project at the Haifa North Plant. The kind of data we gave him would be easy to trace if he had turned it over to the Americans. Our boys have no qualms about him as a security risk and I personally give him my vote, but I believe Natasha is in the best position to judge.”

“Natasha?”

“Gideon Zadok is family,” she said. “He’s been on five or six border and desert patrols with units of the Lion’s Battalion. They swear by him, as well.”

“So, why not,” Ben-Gurion said. “He’s a good boy. I like him. He has funny ideas about not settling in Israel. I’ll change his mind about that. But ... who knows, he might write us an important book.” The Old Man scribbled his initials on the memo. “Who are you assigning him to?”

“I believe,” Natasha said, “if Gideon knew about the plans, he’d choose to be dropped with the Lions at Mitla Pass.”

“That’s one part of this I don’t like,” Herzog interjected. “He is an American, after all. If we sent him back to Eisenhower in a wooden box it could create an ugly incident.”

B.G. pondered. “We are entitled to a poor man’s Hemingway. Send him with the Lions. He’s a writer. He should be in the action. God knows he doesn’t write like Hemingway, but I hear he drinks as well.”

“I can vouch for that,” Natasha said.

“Don’t get yourself broken up with this boy,” the Old Man said.

“I already have,” she answered.

GIDEON

HERZLIA, ISRAEL

October 29, 1956

D DAY, H HOUR MINUS NINE

I
COULD NOT MOVE
. My feet felt as though they were encased in cement. My brain was whirling with a mishmash of bloated, horrifying images. Weird-shaped airplanes fell out of the sky ... distorted, terrorized faces of my daughters screamed for help ... Valerie was humping some faceless bastard and screeching venomously and laughing at me ... a band of headless musicians played a military march ... Shit, what was all this about? Baby waves breaking on a beach ... hush ... hush ... hush ...

I blinked my eyes open.

Hush ... hush ... hush ...

Where the hell am I? My mouth was filled with sand. I strained to move. Trapped! Dammit! I can’t move!

I jerked hard and inched up on my elbows. The beach was empty. My face dropped to the sand again. Get it together, Gideon. Think, man. All right, I know. I ... I ... left the hotel and ... uh ... I left the hotel and took a walk on the beach to clear my head. Let me think, now. I must have stopped at the water’s edge and ... I guess I passed out from exhaustion. Where is the hotel? Dammit, I can’t see too well ... sand.

Think. The tide has washed over me. My legs and feet are sunk in the wet sand. I worked my feet and legs loose and wobbled upright, then staggered to the water and plunged my face into an oncoming little wave. Shit! Sand washed out of my face, ears, mouth, nostrils, hair. My eyes stung from the salt water. I plunged in, took a mouthful, rinsed it, spit it out. Phew!

I looked about. Not a soul, not even a bird. Nothing more empty than an empty beach.

Oh, Jesus! The past twenty-four hours flooded in. The evacuation and watching Valerie and the girls fly off. How’d I get here? I remember now. I went home but couldn’t stay there alone, so I went to the hotel. It was deserted.

Our dog, Grover! Come on, Gideon, get a handle on it. I went home, decided to go to my office in the hotel. Grover had a fever. I took him with me and had to carry him up four flights to my room. The hotel was dark and empty, scary.

Where was Grover? Yeah, okay, that’s it. I put him into the car to wait for me. I was going to take him into Tel Aviv to the vet. Then I took a walk on the beach to try to clear my head. I sat down for a rest and must have dropped off. Lucky I didn’t drown myself.

Oh, dear Lord, where were Val and the girls now? What a mess I’ve made! I began once more to replay the evacuation scene. Blow the trumpets. Gideon has just made a triumphal entry into shit city.

“Gideon!” a voice called from the distance. “Gideon!”

Now I’m hearing things.

“Gideon!” it repeated.

If that voice isn’t real, I’m in big trouble.

“Gideon!”

I squinted, tried to clear the sting from my eyes, and brought into focus the figure of a woman standing on the bluff near the hotel, shouting and waving.

“Natasha!”

I sprinted down the beach along the waterline, where the sand was hard, stopped and caught my breath, then cut over the soft sand toward the hotel. A path led up to the bluff. I grunted and growled as sharp little pebbles and shells nipped hard at the soles of my feet, and then I stood before her nearly doubled up.

Natasha clawed so hard at my back I felt and heard my shirt rip. She bit at my shoulders, weeping crazily. She pulled at my wet, salty, sandy hair and I came back at her squeezing the breath from her with my embrace.

After a time we stood holding each other up like a pair of fighters who have punched themselves out and are clinched and staggering. Our bodies became still, only wavering a bit as we fought to control our breathing. A puff of wind blew her hair into her face where it joined her tears. I pushed free and hobbled off the path to where the sand was soft in a patch surrounded by high spiky tufts of dune grass.

“They’re gone,” I managed to blurt.

“I was with B.G. all day,” she rasped. “I heard about the evacuation, but didn’t dare try to telephone out. Everything goes through the switchboard. I was crazy out of my mind. I thought—I thought you had left with them.”

I flopped my arms.

“You wanted to go with them, didn’t you?”

“I’m here, aren’t I?”

“But you wanted to go.”

Her eyes mirrored her hurt.

“I’m here.”

“Why?”

“I guess I was more scared of evacuating than I was of staying. I wanted to stick around for the raid, or the battle, or the war ... whatever the hell is coming.”

She turned acid. Unmistakable, vintage Natasha.

“You stayed because you weren’t going to show yourself to be a coward in front of the whole country. After all, everyone knows what a tough Marine you are. Your blessed novel is the bible of the army of Israel. Prophets don’t flee.”

“Come on, get off it. I’m here.” I reached out and touched that fine silky red hair of hers and brought her against me, this time softly. “Maybe I stayed for you.”

“For me? Why? I’m poison. You’ve told me I’m poison a dozen times.” She turned sharply out of my grasp and walked away, off the little path and into a wave of small dunes that formed part of the bluff. She relented for a moment as I put my arm around her shoulder and we stared at the unearthly emptiness below.

“So quiet around here now,” I said. “You okay?”

She sighed and leaned against me. “My head is spinning like crazy. It’s been chaos. Everything is crazy. Ben-Gurion fell sick last night. He got up out of his chair and just collapsed. Jackie Herzog set up a hospital room for him right in the cottage. It’s got twenty guards around it.”

“What’s the matter with him?”

“I don’t know. He’s running a high fever. Two hundred people are trying to get to see him. He’s—he’s—throwing up. He’s sick like a dog. We’re spreading the story that he’s out of the country on a secret meeting. I’ve only got a few hours. I’ve got to get back.”

She suddenly shivered and walked away from me. Natasha could play deadpan for everyone but me. The color left her face and she bit nervously at her lip.

“Are we at war?” I asked.

Her lack of a reply was answer enough.

“When?”

“Tonight,” she managed shakily. “You can still leave. There’s an American destroyer heading for Haifa.”

I had known it was coming. Everyone had known it was coming. Yet it jolted me. That flash of fear that sends tingles throughout the body. You can’t divide fear up into halves and quarters, but I knew I was more afraid for Israel than for myself ... or Val ... or the girls. I was very afraid for Natasha.

“I want to go out with the troops,” I said.

“It’s been arranged,” she managed. “The Old Man himself gave approval.”

“Who am I going with?”

“The Lions. Your lucky outfit.”

“Where?”

“I shouldn’t say any more.”

“Okay, I’ll find out when I find out.” My mind checked out a number of possibilities over the Jordanian border. Maybe it was going to be a push to capture the West Bank and straighten out the borders along the Jordan River. Maybe Israel would try to capture East Jerusalem. That would be a dream.

“You’re going to make a drop in the Sinai,” she said abruptly.

“The Sinai! Are you sure?”

“I’m sure.”

“Mother of God, are you sure?”

“Yes, it’s the Sinai. All this rumbling and the threats against Jordan have been a decoy. Egypt has been the real target all along.”

“French and British involved in this?”

“Draw your own conclusions.”

The ramifications were staggering. These audacious Israelis were going to take the Sinai Peninsula while the Anglo-French snatched the Canal back. This was the whole ball of wax ... major, major.

“Where are we going to be dropped?”

“A place called Mitla Pass.”

I sat in the sand and with my finger drew a map. The Sinai was fairly clear in my mind. “Mitla ... Mitla ...” It was somewhere quite close to the Canal and, I think, near the Gulf of Suez as well. Something else occurred to me.

“Shit! I’ve never jumped out of an airplane.”

Her white teeth showed. “That’s very funny,” she said. “No matter. A lot of people here are convinced that nothing is too tough for you.”

“I jumped from a practice tower once. Scared the hell out of me.”

“Oh, I don’t worry about you,
chéri.
You’ll bounce right up like a ball. Shlomo says it’s easy, like pie. He’ll be right in back of you to push you out of the plane.”

“Jesus,” I said and dropped my head onto my knees. “It isn’t funny.” Natasha stood over me—back to bitch again, the master of Hungarian mood swings.

“You wouldn’t back out, Gideon,” she said sarcastically. “After all, war is where little boys go to prove they are big boys. You wouldn’t miss this for the world.”

She was right. She generally was. I realized my posturing had convinced the Israelis that I was rattlesnake-mean. I’d sold them a real sackful of B.S. Out of an airplane, huh? Well, I hoped I wouldn’t make an ass of myself. I didn’t make an ass of myself that one time, long ago... I almost did ... I almost broke with fear, but I held on—barely.

We were coming into the beach at Tarawa. My boat was in the first wave and I was up front, right next to the ramp. We were hitting one of the smaller islands on the atoll and not expecting much opposition. We’d been circling around for hours and most of us were pretty nauseated as the line of landing craft straightened out and moved for the beach. Just then, Japanese machine-gun fire opened up and raked us. The bullets hit the armor plating on the ramp and their impact nearly shook us out of the water like a wounded sailfish. In a matter of a few seconds the ramp would be lowered and I’d be the first out, into the water. All I could think about clearly was that I couldn’t disgrace myself
because I was a Jew.
I almost fainted with fright. I managed to dare a peek back into the boat. Almost half of the guys, including the major, were puking out of sheer fear. Pedro, the toughest guy I ever knew, was on his knees praying to Jesus, Mary, and an assortment of Mexican saints. And just like that, a miracle happened.
I was no longer afraid.
The ramp lowered and bashed the water and I leaped in without hesitation. We were pretty near chest high and being fired at as, grunting, we waded forward. Funny part of it is how other things take over. I had a lot of work to do when we hit the beach
—
set up a radio and contact our command ship. Then my mind went to Sergeant Bleaker in back of me. He was the tallest guy in the company so we all gave him our cigarettes to keep dry inside his helmet. ...