The Omega Scroll (19 page)

Brigadier General Kovner reached for a slim green file marked ‘Silberman’. ‘His service record, such as it is, and a short biography. He’s not dangerous and very intelligent. He is being assigned to you because he is a master safecracker, one of the best.’

‘You want him to crack the Rockefeller’s vault?’ David ventured quietly.

‘Precisely. The vaults in the Rockefeller are big and heavy and they would take a considerable amount of explosive to gain access. Unfortunately, despite our best efforts, Mossad have not been able to get hold of the combination. I don’t need to tell you that the Dead Sea Scrolls are irreplaceable, and the world would be less than amused if they were damaged in the process of our blowing up the doors.’

‘A locksmith?’

Brigadier General Kovner shook his head. ‘There is no way of knowing how much time you will have. You might capture the museum, only to have the Jordanians put in a heavy counter-attack once they tumble to what we’re after. Silberman is used to working quickly under pressure. Besides, it’s in his interest to get the vault open.’

‘A pardon?’ David asked insightfully.

Kovner nodded. ‘A job working in Mossad for the good guys.’ Defining Mossad as the good guys was equal to assigning a degree of benevolence to the CIA, David thought, but he didn’t comment.

‘You never know, Silberman might be able to teach you a few things.’

‘I can’t imagine when I might next need to break into a safe, but I shall watch him with interest. Is the museum heavily guarded?’ David asked.

‘Heavily enough. Last night Jordanian infantry were deployed around the museum itself and there are more infantry and tanks deployed around the Dome of the Rock and the Western Wall.’ Kovner traced his finger around the remains of the temple the Romans had destroyed in 70
AD
.

‘Think of it, David! We might just get it back. For the first time in two thousand years Jerusalem might again be our capital, and for the first time in nearly two decades Jews will be able to pray at Judaism’s holiest site.’

‘It’s been a long time,’ David agreed, aware of his superior’s strong Jewish faith.

‘Of course it all depends on whether Jordan attacks first, but between you and I, I hope they do!’

Menachem Kovner would not have long to wait.

In the Knesset in West Jerusalem, Israel’s Military Intelligence Chief, Brigadier General Yossi Kaufmann, was winding up his briefing to a divided War Cabinet. ‘Nasser will go to war to shore up his own position in the Arab League,’ Yossi concluded.

‘We have no choice, Prime Minister.’ It was the Defense Minister, Moshe Dayan. ‘If we wait for them to strike first we face the very real possibility of defeat. We are outnumbered by overwhelming Arab strength on the ground, in the air and on the water.’ Moshe paused and eyed each of his colleagues. ‘If we strike first, we will have the advantage of surprise, and that is a critical principle of war,’ he concluded, quoting the great war strategist Von Clausewitz.

The Cabinet fell silent. All eyes turned to the Prime Minister.

Prime Minister Eshkol looked at the faces of his Cabinet ministers sitting around the table.

‘I am reminded of our ancient forefathers and Psalm 27,’ the Prime Minister said. ‘“Though an army encamp against me, my heart shall not fear; though war rise up against me, yet I will be confident.” We go,’ he said sadly, ‘and may God go with us.’

Once again the trumpets of the
shofars
, the ram’s horns, were sounded as they had been sounded so many times before. As they had done under Joshua and King David, the twelve tribes of Israel were once again going to war. This time, instead of the sound of swords being unsheathed, the chilling sounds of war would be those of 105mm Howitzer rounds being slammed into steel breeches.

Opposite the Gaza, in the Negev, and in the Sinai the big guns exploded with a roar of flame and smoke, jumping with the recoil. Before the shock absorbers could fully retract, young Israeli warriors, sweat already beading, sprang at the gun levers. Steel breeches clanged open and smoking brass casings bounced to the ground, to be replaced immediately with another deadly round. Like mini express trains, thousands of rounds roared into the night, each with an Arab life etched on the high explosive casing.

A father, a mother, a son, a daughter.

Death to the Arabs.

A taxi driver, a sales representative, a bank teller. Death to them all. It was time to teach them all a lesson.

Underneath the roar of the big shells the huge twelve-cylinder Merlin engines of the centurion tanks snarled into life, forming three separate spearheads. Before the sun rose on yet another bloody Middle East battle, the Israeli armoured divisions roared into the Gaza and across the ancient desert of the Sinai, battalions of young Israeli infantry soldiers lurching crazily in their wake.

Hatzor Air Base, south of Tel-Aviv

Like every other pilot on the giant Hatzor Air Base, Lieutenant Michael Kaufmann had been woken at four in the morning. The waiting was over; the squadron safes had been opened and the sealed orders for the high-risk Operation Moked broken out.

In the past, air superiority had been achieved by operating the Mirages in large numbers to attack the Egyptian air bases. At the same time as the runways were bombed, base installations were attacked with rockets and the anti-aircraft defences were suppressed. Now, the Soviet-supplied Egyptian Air Force was much bigger and the Israelis had been forced into a strategy of operating small groups of three and four aircraft against a greater number of targets. The Egyptian air defences would be ignored, as would the base installations, and more importantly for the pilots, there were no Israeli fighters assigned to provide protection from Egyptian interceptors. The Israeli pilots would have to watch their own backs.

Hatzor Air Base was still shrouded in pre-dawn darkness as Michael found a space and perched himself on a table at the back of the crowded briefing room. The room was noisy, but the laughter was nervous. No one knew what the Soviet-supplied surface-to-air missiles were really capable of and that was every Israeli pilot’s greatest fear. Suddenly the room hushed as their Commanding Officer, one of the Israeli Defense Force’s most experienced pilots, made his way to the front of the room.

‘What we’ve all been waiting for,’ he said confidently. ‘As you can see from the board behind me, H-Hour is in just under three hours at 0745. The strategy is to hit hard and destroy the Arabs on the ground, and given that their reaction is on a par with a wet week, that shouldn’t be too hard.’

More nervous laughter echoed around the room.

‘A total of seventeen air bases will be hit simultaneously. Our task is to destroy the enemy aircraft at Bir Tmada and Cairo West. The first strikes will take out the runways to prevent the Egyptians getting their aircraft into the air. The next waves will target the aircraft on the ground. I will lead the first wave into Bir Tmada with Captain Linowitz on my wing and Major Shapirah will lead the first wave into Cairo West with Lieutenant Kaufmann on his.’

Michael nodded, his face set with determination.

‘Benny and Michael,’ he said, looking first at Major Shapirah and then at Michael, ‘when you have released you are to refuel and return to the navigation turning point here.’ The Commanding Officer turned to the operations map and indicated a point off Bardavil and Port Said.

Michael listened with rising excitement as their Commanding Officer flicked on an overhead showing the enemy deployments and the tasking detail. The Egyptian line-up was impressive: one hundred and fifty MiG-15 and -17s; eighty MiG-19s; one hundred and thirty of the latest Russian MiG-21s; twelve SU-7s; and thirty of the massive TU-16 strategic bombers.

‘We will take off in complete radio silence with our radio sets switched off. Our strategy depends heavily on surprise.’

‘What happens if we have a problem after take-off?’ one of the younger pilots asked. ‘The base will be busy with aircraft behind us and we’ll be on radio silence.’

‘You set course for the coast and eject.’

Several of the pilots exchanged glances. Even under normal conditions the chances of being found in the sea after ejecting were by no means certain. The chances of being found when no one knew where or when you had ejected were almost nonexistent.

Michael had no such fears. Instead he felt a surge of exhilaration. He was in the first wave and a short time later he and the other superbly trained young Israelis strode from the 101 Squadron crew room at Hatzor Air Base into the crisp early morning air. It was still an hour before dawn, and darkness cloaked the quietly humming air base. The bus to take them out to their aircraft was ready, its engine running. Unlike their fellow airmen across the Suez Canal, the Israelis had been careful to disperse all of their precious aircraft in blast shelters and one by one the bus dropped each pilot at his allotted bay.

Michael’s ground crew were waiting. With the exception of the sergeant, every one of them was a civilian and like much of the Israeli Defense Force, they were a ragtag-looking outfit with not a matching windcheater in sight, but appearances could be deceptive. They might have seemed a far cry from the immaculate pit crews of the world’s Formula One racing teams, but Michael’s crew and the other Israeli ground crews would have been employed by any Formula One pit boss on the circuit. They could re-fuel, re-arm and turn an aircraft around in under eight minutes. It was one of the factors that would decide the war in the air. For the first two days of the war, the Israelis would manage to have their jets in the air for 80 per cent of the day. It was a feat that no other air force in the world could match, and certainly not the Arabs.

Michael greeted his crew with his customary smile and sprang up the aluminium ladder propped against the fuselage of his aircraft. He eased himself into the narrow cockpit and gave the ground crew the thumbs-up.

The Mirage IIIC was coiled in its nest like a giant three-legged bee with sand and brown coloured camouflage and a touch of green that on low-level runs made the Shahaks very hard to pick up from above. The Star of David was emblazoned on the starboard and port air intakes of the fuselage; some things were not meant to be hidden. The trademark delta wings were swept back at sixty degrees and external fuel tanks were suspended under each wing like two giant cigars. Under the fuselage were 150-kilogram runway-piercing bombs along with two 30mm cannon on either side that could fire over a thousand rounds a minute. In Michael’s case, his aircraft’s wing racks were also fitted with Matra ‘Diamond’ air-to-air missiles.

Michael flipped open his pre-flight checklist and commenced his pre-start checks. He could have done it blindfolded:

Ignition/Ventilation switch – ignition

Pre-heat switch – off

Low-pressure fuel pumps – off

Afterburner cock – on

Speed brake switch …

Halfway through his pre-start he pressed the rudder trim light to test it. He grinned as he glanced at the next check. Radio sets – on. Skip that one, he thought wryly. One after another he tested the armament master light, the speed brake light, the incident warning lights and the undercarriage flasher. Satisfied, he looked to his flight crew sergeant and gave him the thumbs-up for an engine start. Checking that the fuel cock and pumps were both on, Michael depressed the starter button and confirmed the ignition light. When the engine reached 700 rpm he moved the throttle to idle. Automatically his eyes flicked across the instrument panel, monitoring the fire warning lights, and the oil and hydraulic lights. With the rpm stabilised at 2800, he gave the thumbs-up again to his crew chief and when the wheel chocks were away he moved slowly out of the blast shelter to join the first wave of aircraft, sashaying down the taxiway to the far end of the runway – navigation and anti-collision lights extinguished, dark menacing shapes, engines with wings. The faint glow of the instrument panels reflected on the visors of the young Israeli pilots.

Death to the Arabs.

The Jordanians started shelling the Jewish sector of the Old City a few hours after the Israelis launched their attacks in the south against the Egyptian forces in the Sinai. At first the Israeli Cabinet was unperturbed. The High Command had expected that King Hussein would show a measure of loyalty to the Arab cause, but when the shelling got heavier and spread along the whole of the eastern front, the Cabinet began to realise that war with Jordan was inevitable.

As a lieutenant, David was not accustomed to attending even battalion orders, much less brigade, but these were not ordinary times and he took his place alongside his Commanding Officer and waited for Brigadier General Menachem Kovner to begin.

‘Last night the Jordanians machine-gunned innocent civilians on the Jaffa Road. This morning they captured the United Nations Headquarters at Government House and they have started shelling the city. Over six hundred buildings have been damaged including the Prime Minister’s residence, the King David Hotel and many of the holy sites, including the dome of the Church of the Dormiton.’ The Church of the Dormiton was just south of the Old City, close to King David’s tomb, and reputedly the place where Christ had presided over the Last Supper.

‘Mount Scopus has also been captured by the Arabs.’ Menachem strode over to the operations map. ‘The Jordanian presence south of the Old City threatens to outflank the entire city, including the Knesset. As a result, the 19th Armoured Brigade is now moving from its positions east of Tel-Aviv and has orders to re-take Mount Scopus and the Hebrew University to the north of the Old City. The 6th Brigade has orders to advance in the south and re-take the Mount of Evil Counsel. From there they will turn north towards the Garden of Gethsemane and the Mount of Olives. We have possibly the most difficult task of all. The American Sector and the Rockefeller Museum.’ Kovner paused and looked at his commanders. ‘It has taken nearly two thousand years, but a little over an hour ago, Cabinet approved plans to re-take the Old City of Jerusalem.’