“He always takes the easiest job, the lazy bastard,” Avner grumbled as he took another round that Dave Bielski handed him through the turret hatch. Each of the shells weighed over fifty pounds and it was hard work loading the magazine to its capacity of sixty-three rounds. As usual, Amos Avner was complaining about their driver, Nazzi Halaby.
“Refueling is Nazzi’s job,” Bielski grunted and worked faster to shut the loader up. A flurry of activity surrounded the tank as a forward support team refueled and reloaded the M60 for battle. Levy had left and gathered with the surviving tank commanders around the tank that had become the company’s headquarters. The crew was buttoning the tank up a few minutes later when Levy rejoined them, a troubled look in his brown eyes.
Dave Bielski caught it at once and sensed trouble. “What now?” he asked.
“They gave me a platoon,” Levy told the three men.
A stricken look crossed Avner’s face. “They promoted you?” Levy nodded in reply. “A segen mishneh?” Avner asked. Again Levy nodded yes. “Oh, no,” Avner wailed, his voice high-pitched and filled with lament. “Shma Yis-real…”
“Shut up,” Bielski growled at him. “We’re not dead yet.”
Avner stopped his recital of the sacred words Jews uttered at a moment of extreme peril. “We might as well be,” he moaned. “A second lieutenant we don’t need.” The high attrition rates the Israelis were suffering in the war had caught up with Moshe Levy and his crew. Levy had received a battlefield promotion to segen mishneh, second lieutenant, and would lead a platoon into combat. What had Avner so upset was that Israeli officers were expected to lead and they did just that. Second lieutenants experienced an intensely exciting, but somewhat abbreviated life in combat, and Avner wanted no part of it.
“Mount up,” Levy said. “We’re counterattacking.” Loud whistles overhead announced the beginning of an artillery barrage, and in the distance, they could hear the rumble of jets. A carefully coordinated attack was starting that would poke and probe at the Syrians, looking for a weak spot the Israelis could exploit. A wicked grin split Nazzi Halaby’s weasellike face and he blew a kiss in Avner’s direction. The Druze driver scrambled up the face of the tank and lowered himself into the driver’s seat. He was as frightened as Avner but was determined to show the stiff-necked Orthodox Jew that he would not run from a fight. One of Avner’s most deep-seated prejudices about Arabs being cowardly was taking a beating.
The young woman in uniform pushed her way through the crowd of people hurrying in and out of the building in Tel Aviv, pressed by the urgency of war. Occasionally, a male head would turn and follow her progress, hoping that the captain might have business in his office. She was familiar with the building and took the stairs to the second floor, turned right down the corridor, and walked into the end office, the entrance to Mossad’s headquarters in the basement.
The Ganef was expecting her and motioned her to a chair in his office. He tried not to notice her legs when she crossed them and decided the short skirt was very provocative, especially to Americans.
“Well?” he asked.
The Intelligence officer from Ramon gave a slight shake of her head. “Neither of them has made a pass at me. I thought Furry was interested at first, but he’s happily married and misses his twin girls. Why do American men insist on carrying pictures of their children in their wallets to show everyone?” A beautiful, wistful look played across her face. “And Pontowski only asked if I happened to know Shoshana Tamir.”
“What about Colonel Gold?”
“Nothing;” she answered. “He’s all business and would be highly suspicious if I made a pass at him. He knows the game. Gold may look like a pompous ass but he’s not. He’s a tough one.”
The Ganef sat quietly for a few moments considering his next move. “So, we need something more than sex to put the Americans in our pocket. What is the price?”
“More intelligence,” the woman answered. “Pontowski must become one of the Americans’ best sources. The more the Americans learn through him, the more they will believe him when he tells them what we need.”
“Then we must pay the price,” the Ganef decided. “We must convince Gold that his best source of intelligence is Matt Pontowski. He will beg the ambassador to keep him in Israel as an observer.” And perhaps, he thought, the young man might fly another mission for us.
Moshe Levy sensed, rather than knew, that the carefully coordinated counterattack was falling apart as he led his platoon toward their objective, a ridgeline overlooking the coastal road right on the border. It had been an easy advance and his three tanks and four APCs had encountered little opposition. Yet he was certain something was wrong. The two F-4s that he had heard checking in on the radio had not received clearance into the area and were holding when they should have been hitting targets of opportunity. The artillery barrage that was supposed to roll forward of their advance wasn’t and he wondered if the shells falling around him might be their own.
He tried to look through his periscope but the bouncy ride and dust kept him from focusing through the small prisms. Levy wished the tank had the original commander’s cupola with its ring of vision blocks, but the Israelis had replaced it with a low-profile cupola. He had no idea if there were friendly tanks or APCs to the left or right of his platoon. In fact, he couldn’t see much of anything buttoned up in the turret and didn’t even know where the enemy was.
Levy had to make a quick decision if they were to continue. He threw his hatch open, stuck his head out and scanned 360 degrees around him before he hunkered back down in the tank. The hard metallic ping of bullets ricocheting off the turret echoed inside. Tank commanders have a very limited view of the action around them when they are buttoned up and the smoke, haze, and dust that engulfed Levy’s tank had blinded him. The quick peek had confirmed his worst fears: His platoon was rolling along totally unsupported on its flanks. “Nazzi,” he half barked, half coughed over the intercom, “head for that low ridge off to your right and try to find a hull-down position.”
Halaby did as ordered and veered the tank to the right. He could hear the rapid ping of bullets ricocheting harmlessly off the front slope of the tank, the most heavily armored part. Then Halaby saw the machine-gun nest; it was dug in at the top of the ridge directly in front of them. He tuned out Levy’s barked commands as they engaged a Syrian tank and concentrated on where Levy wanted him to go. They were almost under the protective shadow of the ridge. Halaby expected the soldiers manning the machine-gun nest to break and run but they didn’t. Now he could see another man wiggle into place beside the machine gun and aim an RPG at them. The tank was less than sixty meters away from the ridge when he saw the flash of the antitank weapon the Syrians had gotten from the Soviets.
The high-explosive warhead of the RPG-7V was traveling at a thousand feet a second when it hit the front of the tank and the shaped-charged warhead ignited one of the Blazer reactive armor plates attached to the tank. The explosion from the reactive armor canceled out the RPG. Halaby uttered an Arabic curse. The RPG could not have penetrated the front of the tank where the armor was the thickest. Now they had an open patch of armor where a Sagger could hit and penetrate. Halaby twitched on the T-bar he steered with and centered the tank directly on the men shooting at him. He buried his right foot in the big gas pedal and hurtled the tank over the top of the ridge and dropped its fifty tons of steel onto the three men in the machine-gun nest, grinding them into the rocks and dirt.