The war of attrition across the Suez water-way exacted a toll both from human life and from the fragile Israeli economy. New tensions rose along the Egyptian and Syrian borders. And on the day in October 1973 when Sokarev and his family were at prayer, Yom Kippur Day, the Arab armies breached the great defensive lines that lay along the Canal and which bestrode the Golan. The peace was hard-won this time; none of the trumpeting of 1967 followed the cease-fire. Reports filtered through the foreign press of new, far-reaching Soviet rockets, sited on the plains behind Damascus and protected by nests of anti-aircraft missiles, rockets that could reach any Israeli town, either with a conventional high-explosive warhead or armed with a localized nuclear device. To Sokarev and to many of his team it was clear the time had come to consider intensely, if perhaps belatedly, what was called in the common rooms round the world where men specialized in physics, the
'nuclear option'.
The days at Dimona started earlier, ended later. Sokarev and the team that was built around him wrestled with the problems of abbreviations in time and expenditure for the fashioning of the bomb. Extraction of uranium from the phosphate ores of the Negev was increased, as the plant gulped up more than twenty-five tons a year. Some of the ablest men in the department were sent to the United States, and then to West Germany to study at the European nuclear centre. As a result the costly Jericho missile system was developed with a range of more than three hundred miles, the country's own and independent delivery weapon.
The politicians began to talk. 'The possibility of nuclear weapons moving into the Middle East theatre should not be eliminated,' said Moshe Dayan. Israel's President proudly announced that his country had assembled the knowledge and equipment to construct the bomb.
And from the reactor in the desert came the tiny quantities of plutonium 239, at little more than eight kilograms a year, in bulk the size of a fruit from the Beersheba orangeries, yet with the capability to create a twenty kiloton explosion. The bombs, equivalent in destructive capacity to those dropped more than thirty years earlier on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, could not be tested, but at least the stockpile was starting.
It had been a brutal twenty months for Sokarev, of fierce hours, interminable arguments over government money, that never extended to the budgetry minimum he maintained his department must have if research were to continue. He took his papers home at night, but increasingly they were covered with the columns of figures that represented the finances of the programme and were expressed in the currency of the inflated Israeli lira. He longed for the days when his working brain had been overwhelmed only by the horizontal characters of the equations he sought to set up and then disprove, and, if he could not find the flaw, then rejoice in the knowledge of perfection.
That he was tired showed. His face was greyer and had the pallid yellowness that comes from perpetual artificial light, denial of sunlight, and the harassment of worry. His trousers fitted him poorly and had stretched, while his shirt bulged over his belly; the tennis that he had played twice a week, and which had been his principal form of enjoyment, was now denied him.
But the guard who stopped him that Thursday morning at the first of the security perimeter gates and who knew the personnel who came and went at the plant noted that the normally worn face of David Sokarev was a little brighter, a little livelier. As he looked into the scientist's window, waiting for the Polaroid identity card to be produced, he saw almost a spark of recognition in the other man's eyes. Generally there was no acknowledgement, but today there was an inclination of the head, near to a greeting.
'You're looking well today, Professor,' the guard said, as he handed the plastic-coated card back to the waiting hand.
'So I should be. Off out of here for a few days. My last day and then away for a bit.'
'Holidays?' the guard asked, before moving back to swing up the red and white painted 'Stop' barrier that blocked advance.
'Of a fashion. A few days in London, then on to New York and perhaps San Francisco after that. The last isn't finalized. A few lectures, to meet old friends. Something of a holiday, yes.'
Twice more the car was stopped by grey-brown uniformed guards. Each time they swung their sub-machine-guns across their backs, and walked forward to check the card. All three men who spoke to the professor as he arrived that morning were to notice the fractional bounce that had lifted him.
'I'm late in,' he said to his secretary in the outer office.
'Was held up talking to the man on the gate.' She said nothing. It was one minute past eight o'clock.
'What have we today?'
'Mostly meetings. The Director wants to see you as well, preferably in the afternoon. Two sub-committees in the morning, so that will fit well. And there was a call a few minutes ago from the Foreign Ministry. They want to drive down from Jerusalem to see you, but they'd like us to fix a time for the afternoon, and call them back. I would suggest about four, after you've seen the Director.' She was a pretty girl, tall and straight-backed, and wearing an eye-riveting mini-skirt high up on her sun-browned thighs.
Efficient as well, and the office was chaos every time she went for military service.
'What do they want in Jerusalem?' He was behind his desk now, scooping at the papers from his tray, and scattering them over the wooden surface.
'It was the security division from the Foreign Ministry.
Protection Branch. They said they wanted to talk about your trip.'
It was closer to six in the evening, and many of the Dimona workers were already on their way home, before David Sokarev's desk was clear enough for him to feel able to abandon his work for the three weeks of his visit to Europe and North America. There were no more letters to sign, charts to check, scribblings to be made in the margin of reports. No more excuses to prevent him seeing the two men who waited in his outer office.
He saw they were both young when they came through the door. Fit and good-looking. They shook his hand. He neither apologized for keeping them so long nor did they seem to expect it. Joseph Mackowicz had come to talk, Gad Elkin to listen.
Mackowicz said, 'I am glad you could see us, Professor.
We are both to be travelling with you throughout your journey. We will be very close to you at all times. It is best on these visits that we get to meet the people we accompany before we leave, rather than meeting at the airport, just seeing each other a few minutes before departure. I think you have little experience of being escorted on a visit abroad?'
' I have not been away for some years. It was a long time ago and then I travelled only with my secretary.' He saw Elkin smile from his chair. 'Not the one I have now, I can assure you. A rather more formidable lady. When I indented to take Anna to handle my correspondence, type my speeches, things like that, it was refused. Not enough money for her to go, I was told. I did not anticipate that if they could not scrape together the lire for Anna they would be able to send two gentlemen such as yourselves. I had resigned myself to travelling on my own.'
'Your typing will be taken care of; the embassies will find a girl for that.' Mackowicz did not react, was not one to rise to even the most gentle humour. 'We have the places that you will be visiting, and we will supervise your programme. What we want for the moment is a guarantee that you will afford us your co-operation, and take most seriously our advice.'
The professor looked hard at the young man, adjusted his glasses, then pushed them back to the bridge of his nose.
'I would never knowingly not co-operate.'
'That, Professor, is excellent news. Not everybody in a similar position to yours is happy to have us in such proximity. Some talk of embarrassment for their foreign colleagues. I can assure you if there is embarrassment it is something we must suffer.'