The Glory (50 page)

The black sergeant knocks and enters. “General, pardon me. There is a call for General Barak from his embassy.”

Halliday gestures at his desk telephone. Barak takes it and Motta Gur comes on. “Listen carefully, Zev. Some intelligence
just in can change the whole tenor of your meeting. A Soviet airlift has begun for real. Twenty-five Antonov transports are
heading for Syria via Hungary and Yugoslavia. The CIA’s bound to confirm it, and those monsters are comparable to the C-5A
Galaxy. First flight of eleven, second flight of fourteen. Don’t tell him the rest, but the war cabinet has already approved
bombing the Syrian runways.”

“Understood, Motta.” He is talking Hebrew. “Can I tell this tough nut that we’re back at the Purple Line on the Golan?”

“Just a second.” Murmured talk. “Simcha says, ‘Why not? If it won’t depress him too much.’ ”

“B’seder.” Barak hangs up. First he reports the Russian airlift, at which Halliday soberly nods. “Now, about your paper, you
may want to modify it. As of now the Syrians are pushed back to the armistice line, and our offensive will continue.”

“For that disclosure I’m grateful. What about the Egyptians?”

“Just wait.”

Halliday stares at him with a glint of wary appreciation. “Like to hear some other opinions floating around this building,
about a hurry-up airlift? The Israelis are doing fine, but they’re just singing the blues so as to alarm Congress and the
American Jews, and acquire all the aircraft and tanks they can, to hoard for the next war. Also, you want to throw the onus
of your early reverses on us, for warning you not to preempt, and it’s just a maneuver to lock America in on your side.”

“Hostile nonsense,” says Barak, “not worthy of discussion.”

Halliday gets up. “The Secretary should be told at once about those Antonovs.” He holds out his hand. “Stay in touch.”

“I’m here for that.”

“Perhaps you’ll have time for a drink with us, out at the house. Emily would like that, I know. You’d see our son.”

“Well, thank you. My instructions are, ‘Get an airlift.’ It seems I’ll be here a little while.”

For the second time, Halliday laughs. “That’s a political decision. I’m just an airplane jockey who obeys orders.”

D
initz and Gur are impressed by Barak’s inside glimpse of negative Pentagon thinking, and highly curious about the frosty general’s
candor with Barak, so he describes the business of the captured Soviet P-12 radar, and their contacts since the Six-Day War.
That they have been in love with the same woman for years, which conduces to some informality, he does not mention. They are
all for his going for a drink at the Halliday home. “Just stay in touch,” says Dinitz. “The situation keeps changing.”

“And the more you drink, the better,” says Gur. “The only trouble is, they know how to drink and we don’t.”

“You learn here, Motta,” says Barak.

He betakes himself to a second-rate hotel near the embassy to rest. Utterly disoriented by the wake-up call a couple of hours
later, he has to pull together the threads of his existence. He is lying on a bed in a small shabby hotel room. He is in civilian
clothes. He is in America. There is a war on at home, and Israel is losing. It is Wednesday, October 10, 1973, Sukkot eve.
He is due at Emily Halliday’s home shortly. Weird.

A cold shower restores an everyday mood. On the long taxi ride, Zev Barak’s musings stray to comparing himself to Napoleon.
This peculiar train of thought begins with a trace of guilt over his happiness at the prospect of an hour or so with Emily
before Halliday gets home. How come? What about the war? What about his grim mission? Does the gorgeous Virginia foliage of
October, and the bright vision of Emily Halliday, blot out the fierce reality of Israel’s peril? Well, didn’t Napoleon write
many a billet-doux to his inamorata from the bloody battlefield, with the dead still strewn outside his candle-lit tent? And
come to think of it, didn’t Wellington after winning at Waterloo sit right down and dash off a famous letter to a lady in
Brussels? Pretty good company in a human weakness, Napoleon and Wellington both. War puts an aureate edge on love for women,
and there you are. Enjoy it. Barak fully intends to clasp Emily Halliday in his arms, if only at the moment she opens the
door. Some golden moments weigh against gray years.

It does not quite work that way. Emily greets him at the door with a brilliant bewitching smile. He holds out his arms, and
she sways toward him. But a small shape brushes past them and goes down the porch steps, and her smile vanishes in a yell.
“Oh, Christ, there he goes again! Zev, stop him!” He turns and sees a very little boy toddling rapidly down a lawn sloping
to bracken. “And oh God, there goes Merlin!” A huge black Labrador comes bounding through the door after the boy. “Zev, there’s
a goddamn skunk and four baby skunks down there. Oh, Christ.” They both run in pursuit. He catches the boy and Emily seizes
the dog’s collar.

“Would this be the famous Chris?” inquires Barak, trying to pinion the boy’s arms as he wriggles and kicks, protesting in
shrill gibberish.

“That’s Chris. My father wanted a grandson and he’s goddamn got one. Haul him inside, don’t let him get away. He’s mad for
the skunk, and so’s that damn dog.” Barak catches a whiff of the pungent odor as he drags Chris Halliday, struggling like
a captured alligator, up the slope and into the house, followed by Emily with the dog.

Once released the boy turns tractable, and Emily leads him and the dog off to a nursery, where Barak can hear her rattling
in French with the nanny she has brought back from Belgium. Soon she returns to the sitting room, looking out on a garden
carpeted with fallen leaves. She still wears the gray suit in which she met him at the airport. Now he embraces and kisses
her, but the afterscent of skunk in his nostrils somewhat shades his Napoleonic pleasure. “That kid,” she mutters. “That perisher.
He can be an angel, but oh God what a problem. Here, I’ve got martinis mixed.” She goes to a portable bar. “Oh God, Wolf,
I’d think this was a dream, one of many I’ve had, if not for Chris and the skunks. All too real! How did it go with Bud?”

“Very well. Your boy still doesn’t talk?”

“Not a word. It bothers the hell out of Bud. He hasn’t got around to baby talk on schedule, so Bud worries he won’t get into
the Air Force Academy. But the doctors say don’t worry, so I don’t. I
know
one day he’ll burst out with whole paragraphs, probably obscene.”

They sit down on a wicker couch, clink glasses, and drink. She says, looking out at the green-and-gold trees, “Early fall
this year. Bud bought this place right after the war, seven acres and the house, for next to nothing. Mostly he’s left it
wild. Now the developers are crowding us. The land’s worth a mint, but he chases real estate agents off the grounds like vagrants.”
She sips her drink. “Okay, now straight off, what’s Nakhama’s trouble? Why on earth did you black out our correspondence?
That was a blow, honey, believe me.”

He describes his wife’s changed behavior and erratic health; and how, during the high-fever phase of hepatitis, she talked
incoherently and angrily about Emily. “Israeli army wives learn to be good sports, Queenie, or at least to act that way. But
it was all there inside, and it came out.”

Emily finishes the drink at a gulp. “God, I’m for Nakhama myself. I feel wretched.”

“Queenie, all we do is write.”

“Oh, you — you
MAN
, all we do is
love each other
.” She cocks her head, listening. “Shoot, I have a lot to tell you about me and Bud, a hell of a lot, but I hear tires on
the driveway. It has to be Bud, and he’s bringing my father. Another time.”

“Emily, I’d better check in with my embassy.”

She gestures at a small wood-panelled room. “Bud’s den. You won’t be disturbed.”

The desk is bare except for the telephone, a blotter, a clock, and a writing board with a clean yellow pad. Motta Gur’s direct
line is busy. So are all the embassy numbers. So are Dinitz’s three lines. Something going on! At last he gets through to
Gur. “Zev! L’Azazel, high time you called. Another tremendous development—”

Barak blurts, “Good or bad?”

“Couldn’t be worse. Half an hour ago Brezhnev proposed to Nixon, over the telephone, that the two superpowers sponsor a cease-fire
resolution at once in the Security Council.”

With a very sick qualm at heart, Barak says, “Golda must reject it.”

“We all know that, but will she have the option if Nixon goes along? Kissinger called Dinitz and he called Golda.” Motta Gur
sounds as exercised as Barak has ever heard him. “She was in an all-night conference on where to counterattack, our biggest
decision of this war — whether to hold on the Golan and try to cross the Canal, or hold in Sinai and drive toward Damascus.
Dinitz’s bombshell blew that conference wide open. The phone lines and teleprinters to Tel Aviv are burning up.”

“Motta, it’s unthinkable, a cease-fire now freezes us in a defeat.”

“Well, the next move is up to the White House. Is General Halliday there?”

Barak can hear Halliday and Cunningham talking in the living room. “He just got here.”

“Let us know anything he says that bears on this. He may not even know about it yet.”

“Will do.”

Christian Cunningham’s appearance surprises Barak. He last saw the CIA man wasted, white, and feeble in a hospital gown, recovering
from a heart attack. Cunningham is himself again, erect in his customary impeccable gray suit, gray vest, gold watch chain,
with the old secretive sly look behind thick glasses. Only, he is skeletally lean. His shirt and suit collars stand away from
a neck of cords and bones. His handshake is dank and hard. “Hello, Barak. Your country is in bad, bad trouble. Emily, where’s
my grandson?”

“I’ll fetch him. Bud, there’s lots of martini there.”

“I’ve got news, Barak,” says Halliday, pouring drinks. “We may charter some aircraft, after all. A response to the Soviet
airlift, which is confirmed, though so far going only to Syria.” Halliday glances at Barak’s unsmiling face. “Not what you’re
here for exactly, but it’ll speed up the shortfall items. Motta Gur is pleased, or says he is.”

“Well, it’s a start.” Not much of a start, Barak thinks, against twenty-five Antonovs.

Emily leads the boy in by the hand, shining clean, hair brushed, clothes neat. Halliday’s face lights up as Chris runs to
him. “Say hello to your grandfather, son.”

The boy approaches Cunningham, babbles happy nonsense, and kisses him. The beaming CIA man takes him on his lap.

“He has to eat, father. The girls are at the table.”

“In a minute,” says her father, and Emily goes out.

“You know,” Halliday says to Barak, “that the Vice President resigned at last this afternoon? The media are all in a tizzy.
You’d hardly know there’s a war in the Middle East.”

“How will that affect policy?”

“Well, the President will be preoccupied, picking a successor. I’d guess he’s out of the equation, more than ever.”

“That leaves Kissinger in charge,” says Cunningham. “Worse yet for the Jews.”

“My other news, and I don’t think the media have it yet,” says Halliday, “is that Brezhnev wants Russia and the U.S. to cosponsor
an immediate cease-fire.”

“Good grief, Bud, when did that happen?” Cunningham exclaims. “It’s unthinkable. That sells the Israelis out before they can
counterattack.”

Halliday asks Barak, “How will your government react?”

“Depends on the terms. We’ve craved real peace since 1948, on almost any terms.”

“Don’t talk diplomatic boilerplate,” snaps Cunningham. “You’re in a private house. The Arabs have you on the run right now,
and they’ll force you back behind the 1949 lines. In those boundaries your country will wither and collapse in ten years,
if another attack doesn’t finish you off sooner.”

Emily comes in. “All right, Grandpa, give up the boy genius.”

“He is one, you’ll see,” says Cunningham, putting little Chris off his lap.

“Why doesn’t he talk, then?” says Halliday.

“Well, Einstein didn’t talk until he was four.”

“That’s all malarkey,” says Emily, “people kidding themselves about their slow darlings. I bet when Einstein was born and
the doctor slapped his little bloody behind, he yelled,
‘E equals me squared!’
In high German, yet.” She takes the boy’s hand. “Come eat your mush, Einstein.”

Halliday pours himself another martini, his third, and offers the large sweating pitcher to Barak, who waves it off with a
murmur of thanks. “I tell you what, Barak, if you people are wise you’ll grab this cease-fire. I was thinking about your recovery
on the Golan. You’ve got brave soldiers, and they’ve bought you a chance to quit with honor, if Brezhnev can deliver the Arabs.
That’s what’s dubious, and you’d better hope he does. Why should they let you off? They’ve got you on the ropes.”

“You think so?”

“Do you mind my speaking freely? We’re not in the office.”

“Hair down,” says Barak. “Go on.”

Cunningham is looking from one to the other with a crafty expression.

“Just so.” Halliday drinks. “Well, the Arabs fight by the Soviet book. That’s how come you’ve recovered on the Golan. Soviet
doctrine doesn’t permit initiative to exploit. Your enemies achieved surprise and had the war won in two days, but they
stopped
. Stopped, north and south, to bring up forces according to plan and await further orders. They could have finished you off,
but they have no Rommels or Pattons, so they lost some time. All the same they’ve got you on this round.”

“Is that your view, or the Pentagon’s?”

Cunningham strikes in as Halliday hesitates. “That’s so much poppycock, Bud. Those Israelis can overcome prohibitive odds
in the field. What they need now is
time
. Their greatest danger isn’t in the field but right here on the Potomac. I mean this détente President and his détente Secretary
of State, with their détente openings to China and Russia.” The old CIA man all but spits out the word
détente
. Emily has written Barak long ago that her father’s views on the spirit of détente may cost him his CIA job. Cunningham growls
on. “Watergate and Agnew are just symptoms of the fog the President’s in. If not for détente, d’you suppose Sadat would have
dared to start this war? We’ve been snookered, so has Israel, and its fate now hangs on that court Jew, Kissinger. I’ve never
been more alarmed.”