Refiner's Fire (63 page)

It would have been dark, but the altitude and the snow made for a bright bluish tinge and a strange dreamlike visibility. On a flat overlook above the path of two trails, he unrolled a heavy ground-sheet and lay prone upon it. It was comfortable at first, because of the thick snow. He pulled a white tarpaulin over himself, and arranged his equipment. The carrier would return in twelve hours.

He was watching for As-Saiqa, the Palestinian guerrillas with links to the Syrian Army. Unlike the cowardly domestic terrorists operating in milder regions for Al-Fatah, they were not insane revolutionaries and did not frolic in massacre after massacre. They only massacred occasionally, and were hardened soldiers, lifelong, much more professional than Marshall, and better experienced. Operating in winter and in storms, they had come to the very gates of the fortress, and their reputation kept the swaddled night patrols from sleeping.

It was terribly cold. The wind was intermittent, sometimes arising to play with swirling blue chains of glassy snow, sweeping it into mesmerizing breakers and rounded waves in the air. These mountains were Eastern. The Alps are noted for the feeling they convey of the absence of men, even in crowded valleys. The Eastern mountains suggest the presence of men even when there aren't any, and the history of ancient empires endows the thin air passes with uncelebrated mystery.

Utterly alone in the cold air and dim confusing light, Marshall had been watching for only fifteen minutes when he saw a form moving toward him on the trail. He remembered High View, and the Rastas pacing like a tiger. But that had been in daylight and in another time. Here, whatever it was moved in the silence of the snow, in spite of night and mountain spirits.

He opened the breach of his gun, took it off safety, and laid out clips of ammunition on either side of him in places to which he could roll for a change of position in a fire-fight. He put the grenades in front of him, building a little ridge of snow so that they would not be seen. He pulled the white cover nearly over his head and clutched his gun.

His breathing came fast and hard, and he sweated. His face was flushed with blood. It
was
something, and it went along steadily. It seemed to be three or four men, as in Jamaica, moving in a group with the grace of a single animal. Though it came closer, reciprocal darkness obscured it. He could not believe that this strange creature which moved in sidling steps was real and of the world. It passed silently under the ledges. Clouds of breath issued from the head in white plumes, and it seemed to change shape before his eyes.

He was so frightened and so hot that someone might just as well have been in his thick clothes with him. For an instant he imagined Lydia caught up within the padded vestments, her rose-and-peach-colored skin hot and steamy against his own. How magnificent.

He heard muffled steps. It could not be. The light played tricks, but he could see that something in front of him was about fourteen feet tall, with many legs and three sets of eyes, one of which flashed like a cat's.

It stamped its feet and bellowed. Marshall was so frightened that he wanted to scream. He tried, and no sound came from his lips. He thought that he was mad when he heard a beating of wings and saw black flashes against the leaden sky. The wings circled above him while the body of the creature advanced. Then they fell upon him and sharp talons ripped into his clothing. A flashing beak struck and tore. He rolled, and the eagle kept above him. Soon its talons began to touch his skin. But a shrill whistle echoed in the valley, the eagle lifted, and Marshall was released.

Then he saw. A Druse chieftain sat high upon a white horse, and the eagle rode on his shoulder. Angry, ashamed, and still frightened, Marshall jumped to his feet as best he could, aimed the submachine gun at the hunter, and commanded him to dismount. The old man, who sat as straight as a steel rod, did not move or blink an eye. He was so perfectly still that it was hard to tell if he were living.

He wore a white robe crossed with bandoliers of bullets; a scimitar was tucked into his waistband; a shotgun was slung over his shoulder; a British pistol hung from his belt. His eyes were blue, or appeared that way in the deep blue haze. Perfectly impassive, he measured Marshall with his stare.

When Marshall had passed the point at which he might have killed him, the Druse said, “A boy does not order me off my horse. A Jew does not order me off my horse. A foreigner does not order me off my horse.”

“Goddamnit!” said Marshall, enraged.

The Druse answered in English. “You may shoot the eagle if you wish.” He spoke an Arabic command so ancient that it was Persian, and not Persian but Sanskrit. Almost as if it knew what lay ahead, the eagle hopped to the ground and began to brood in sad depressed circles.

Marshall let it be. The horse snapped its head, and the golden bridle clicked. Marshall could not but respect the Druse. He was so upright, a mountain lord from an ancient time. Marshall wanted to defer—youth to age, inexperience to experience, a man in soldier's clothes to one in robes, lack of ornament to careful masculine regalia, one who did not know the land to one who did, one who had not lost to one who had, a man on foot to a man on horse. He felt happiness in the ordained hierarchy and wanted to give way, like a son to a father. But it was not possible to allow the man within the lines. The Syrian Druse were not like those in Israel who with the Israelis fought against age-old enemies, but rather were closely allied with Damascus. Despite his nobility and his guise as a hunter, he might well have been collecting information. In running across Marshall, he had already found some. Besides, the soldiers of the mobile patrol—extraordinarily vulnerable in their loud armor with its arc lights—would shoot from a distance were they to see the flash of the eagle's eyes down the road, and the .50-caliber bullets would cut the Druse in half.

“You're not allowed to come here,” said Marshall. “You have to go back. And don't come here again.”

“I will cross the mountain at this point, as I have done all my life. A boy will not tell me that I cannot.”

“First,” said Marshall in Arabic, “you will not cross here. I'll kill you rather than see you cross. Second, you're a liar. You haven't been through this line in five years. I know it. You know it. And then, I am not a boy, but a soldier of the Kingdom of Israel, in its northernmost place, its highest frontier. I too go back in the centuries.” An unexpected chill informed him of his profound connection with the past as he spoke in terms which made the old Druse feel like a newcomer. “
Thousands
of years before you...” Marshall's eyes sparkled and shone, “
thousands
of years, my King, David (it sounded pleasing in Arabic,
malaki, Daoud
), sent me to this high place. And I tell you now to go back.”

Marshall's sense of triumph made it so, and the Druse called his eagle. The horse pranced like a horse in a medieval painting, and then he wheeled it into the enveloping darkness, the white mixing with white.

Marshall gathered his equipment from the churned-up snow and walked for half an hour to take up position in a different place. Before dawn, he played and replayed the scene a thousand times. It took on such colors and sounds and dreamlike qualities that at four, the most difficult hour, when he could hallucinate as easily as think, he was not sure if the Druse chieftain had been real or just an image of the moving snow.

The early morning was always difficult. By that time, he had been still long enough for his circulation nearly to cease. The temperature dropped to its lowest point, and his heart beat so slowly that he thought he would not make it out of the pause. It resounded throughout his body, knocking him each time like a slap on the back. He often had seizures and was locked in one position for an hour, his hands fused painfully about the wood and steel of his gun, his eyes far too wide, staring at an unseen horizon. Had the whole Syrian Army come up the mountain, he would not have been able even to blink.

But the silence and immobility allowed him in those hours to hear and feel the earth as it turned. He was aware of a massy rotation. Facing north, he sensed a steady rightward motion, as surely as he sensed gravity pressing him breathlessly into the snow and his acceleration lifting him away. Forgetting the Syrians and the cold, he felt as if he were being torn apart by elemental forces, as if he would soon crystallize into ice and dust and be flung about at random.

But the earth was spinning into the path of heat and light. The sky would brighten, a wind would arise from the pressure of advancing light, and he would see in the corner of his eye that over darkened Syria the sun came up from somewhere in the East, from a paradise perhaps near India. And from over Iraq a transient sliver would appear to Marshall's fevered eyes, blinding him in warmth and white, firing the ground and his bones, setting the world afire, steaming up the seas. Then he would sit up as if after a dreadful sickness and look out in half-crazed relief at the rising sun. The breezes across the snow were always mild and almost warm at that time of the morning. He was grateful, not so much for lasting through the night, but for the light itself, without explanation or implication. He was shattered by the love he felt for the light.

When the carrier came, Marshall hopped inside, the doors were closed, the heat turned on, and the next he knew he was making his way to his bed. He stripped off the many layers of clothes and, covered with just a towel, ran through a freezing wet gallery to the showers. There he stayed for a full hour under a steaming hot stream in a half-curtained stall. His clothes had indeed been torn, and others of the patrol had been visited by the Druse hunter. The fourth one down the line, a wild insane Georgian, had immediately shot the man's horse, disarmed him, tied him up in his own leather belt, and sent a flare. The hunter had come for the Syrians to find out about the patrols. Frederick the Great rewarded the Georgian with a week's leave and was intensely proud. That winter, 1973, saw an enormous increase in Syrian attempts to gather information. Belatedly, or (in the larger perspective) early, Marshall began to wonder.

“How did the Georgian know? He had no way of telling that the Druse came to each one of us. How did he justify shooting his horse and arresting him?”

“What justify?” asked a soldier in another steaming stall. “He's from Tbilisi. If it had been Golda Meir on that horse he would have done the same.”

“Where's the Druse?”

“They already have taken him to Northern Command. Nobody knows what the hell is going on.”

Even in the hot shower Marshall was gripped by a chill and had to take hold of a pipe to steady himself. Suddenly everything fell into place—the artillery barrages, the air penetrations, the step-up in terrorism, the spying, the constant shifting of troops on the plain below. He knew exactly what it meant. The way was being prepared for a major war. They would make the Jews so used to crises that they could shield the beginnings of an all-out attack. Marshall had been amazed at the complacency of the Israelis. Sentries slept, went out with unloaded weapons, and actually deserted their posts to go to Tel Aviv and fool around with whores. Badly trained reservists with ancient weapons were sent to hold key positions. The network of supply was overloaded and tenuous at best. Morale was terribly poor, the Army divided by class and color. Force levels were down, artillery pitifully neglected. Just in his own peregrinations from base to base, Marshall had seen that the planes were badly maintained (despite reputations to the contrary), ECM was nearly nonexistent, communications were antiquated, and stocks were badly situated in relation to the new borders. He had wondered many times how Israel hoped to hold the Golan against a full-scale assault when only a few roads led to the heights where the battle would be decided—especially if the Syrians were to make determined efforts to cut these roads with their air power and paratroopers.

Everyone was overconfident. The image of efficiency and strength did the work of deterrence more and more, until real power receded and most of what kept the Syrians and Egyptians back was as empty and dry as a rotten tree. Marshall decided to tell Frederick. No, he would tell Arieh Ben Barak, for he was a general, whereas Frederick was only a colonel.

He always thought great worldly thoughts in the shower after all-night patrols when he was giddy and his mind was free. He had discovered that when in the shower, or in a pool, or a tub, he could make brilliant policy, predict the future, and think like a statesman. The trouble was, when he turned off the water and stepped shivering into a puddle of dirty suds, he became once again a miserable private with a toothache, vitamin deficiencies, and dirty linen. Thus he abandoned the idea of informing Arieh Ben Barak of his realization. Undoubtedly the Army chiefs and the political leaders already knew what he knew. After all, he had not even had the sense to arrest the Druse hunter, and had left it to the Georgian—who looked, moved, acted, and thought just like a monkey.

T
HE THREE
Mountain Brigades were an elite force. They took the best recruits; they were multipurpose and thus had experience in everything from mountain warfare to engineering; they had the most alert and intelligent officers; they were forever in the field fighting the real and minor wars; and they shared a special commando force of five hundred soldiers. Despite its small size, this battalion was earmarked for such grandiose schemes as the capture of Damascus, the abduction of Anwar Sadat (they prayed for the green light), destruction of Saudi oil facilities, the assassination of Yasir Arafat, the disruption of Egyptian communications, blocking Iraqi forces at the Syrian border, distant operations in Europe to rescue hostages, the capture of ships from the Soviet Fifth Squadron in the Mediterranean, and other specialized tasks.

Each of these soldiers had to satisfy a set of basic requirements—perfect physical condition, expert marksmanship, knowledge of Arabic, experience in an active infantry command, and a familiarity with explosives. Each soldier had to claim a specialty. There were linguists, engineers, pilots, doctors, mountain climbers, navigators, boxers, actors, miners, architects, physicists, police, demolitions men, sea captains, chemists, economists, hypnotists, locksmiths, historians, political scientists, dialecticians, forgers, Arabic typists, industrial designers, watchmakers, zoologists, weight lifters, tailors, teletype operators, distance runners, linemen, hydraulic engineers, memory experts, meteorologists, photographers, divers, and others.