“Call Noam,” he tells it.
Busy circuit, a series of short buzzes.
He taps the phone again, this time pressing down heavily.
“Call No-am!”
The circuits are still busy. They will be all day and into the night. He knows why. After all, Yigal does control the second largest of Israel’s four cell phone companies, a gold mine really, but as with any gold mine, its proprietors—he is thinking of himself—are reluctant to invest when profits are easy, and equally reluctant when they seem like a distant goal. Why spend the profits when things are good? Why add to the losses when they are not? These are business decisions. But in times of emergency he is one of millions paying the price of his own investment strategy.
He presses his foot down on the accelerator pedaclass="underline" 145, 150, 155. Beyond that, Yigal fears he will not be able to control this beast of a car. Should another automobile swerve into his lane it will be over for him in seconds. The brigade will be leaderless. He drops it down to 150. One-fifty is good, he thinks. I can handle one-fifty.
He turns off to the east before the exits for Haifa. Above the city already he can see the black smoke rising. The port is on fire, he thinks. No, he knows it. The car’s speakers, tuned to IDF Radio, little different from a commercial station in time of peace, are still calling codes: Dry Fish. Hairy Leg. Broken Nose. Dark—
The speakers emit a sound that is the beginning of a boom, then silence.
Yigal has been in three wars. IDF Radio has never been down. He pushes the BMW to 160.
27
ON THE RIDGE OPPOSITE the Allenby Bridge, Cobi lies dazed on the ground, his dummy Chariot literally shot out from under him, burning. He has been thrown fifty feet. For a long moment he thinks he is dreaming, but as his eyes return to focus he can see the lights moving on the far side of the Jordan as the tractor-trailers, performing some sort of brutish ballet, move aside to create corridors. Through these appear hundreds of Jordanian Challenger tanks, which line up like dutiful children to begin crossing the rickety bridge.
He shouts for the radioman and then stops when he looks behind him. What is left of the kid is distributed over a wide arc of perhaps twenty feet. Immediately he scans the gut-spattered ground for the radio, but sees nothing. Then he recalls it was at the top of the tank. He gets to his feet, feels one of them collapse in pain—either his ankle is twisted or gone—and prepares to climb the burning ruin when he sees the radio, intact, about ten feet away. He hobbles to it.
Amazingly, it works. IDF radios are meant to survive the worst.
“Aleph-Bet to Skull, Aleph-Bet to Skull. Skull, we are under armored attack. Urgent request air support. Hundreds of Challengers crossing Allenby Bridge. Repeat, hundreds of Challengers crossing Allenby Bridge. Urgent request for air to knock out Allenby Bridge. Knock out Allenby Bridge! Over.”
Three miles to the west, a radio in brigade headquarters barks out the message. But Jordanian jet fighters have already been here. There is nothing left but the smoking remains of a body-strewn headquarters tent, and Cobi’s desperate metallic voice.
“Aleph-Bet to Skull. Repeat, we are under massive armored attack. Require immediate air support. Knock out Allenby Bridge! Knock out Al—”
Cobi hears a series of explosions through the radio, then silence.
28
OVER JERUSALEM, THE BOMBERS complete their runs and head north and west to secondary targets. Were the city built of anything other than stone, it would be one huge conflagration. As it is, only sporadic fires burn amid the destroyed government buildings. The Knesset is leveled, the Prime Minister’s Office and the Defense, Justice, and Interior Ministries reduced to rubble, Israel Police headquarters adjoining the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood on the border of Arab East Jerusalem a giant hole in the ground. Here and there the Jews of West Jerusalem step out into the streets to peer at the predawn sky, empty now of bombers, only to see waves of transport planes, Dakotas and C-130s, coming in with the gathering dawn.
Propeller-driven, they are announced by the noise of their engines, each wave delivering slow-falling bits of black soot which in a matter of seconds reveal themselves to be parachutes and then, in a heartbeat, black-garbed commandos.
Intensely trained for months, these Revolutionary Guard shock troops know the topography of Jerusalem better than many native Israelis. Though each flight also carries Hebrew-speaking graduates of the Iranian military’s Jewish Thought Institute in Qom, every paratrooper has been schooled in Hebrew sufficient to the requirements of their mission: Yadaim I’malah! [Hands up!] Al ha birkaim! [On your knees!] Nashim v’yiladim smola! [Women and children to the left!]. But that is for tomorrow. Today’s imperative is to hunt down the Jewish leadership and, in the words of their mission statement, to “cut off the head of the rabid dog.” This does not mean take them prisoner. According to the Iranian analysis of Nazi Germany’s campaign to cleanse Europe of Jews, Hitler’s singular mistake was to attempt to do it humanely.
The Revolutionary Guard parachutists expect to encounter strong resistance, but they meet little.
For thirty years, Israel maintained a policy of strict gun control. Civilians wishing to obtain a license for even a shotgun to be used in hunting or a small-caliber target pistol often gave up in the face of bureaucratic barriers. Even a speeding ticket could cause ineligibility. Israelis with gun licenses that were not renewed annually—even in cases where the license-holder was in the reserves or abroad on government business—lost them automatically. When they tried to renew, they found themselves disqualified because they had been found guilty of possessing an unlicensed firearm. In one infamous case, a ninety-two-year-old retired accountant lost his license when some zealous Interior Ministry bureaucrat discovered the old man had been convicted during the British Mandate of illegal possession of firearms when he was a gunsmith working for the Jewish resistance. Even worse, unlike the Swiss, whose reserve soldiers are required to keep their issued weapons at home, the IDF keeps theirs under lock and key in centralized depots throughout the country. Thus, when it comes to armed resistance by civilians, there is none. The tragedy of the Nazi era is now repeating itself: the Jewish population is unarmed.
Entering from Balfour Street, black uniformed Revolutionary Guards guided by officers following step-by-step instructions on preset GPS units rush past the Israel Police kiosk, where the bullet-riddled body of a single cop hangs lifeless, and kick down the door of the prime minister’s residence. Making short work of two security men armed with Tavors and a cook wielding a meat cleaver, the attackers kill the nanny coming down the stairs, then the grandmother and the two children in their beds, before finding the prime minister in her bedroom screaming into a dead phone. Pursuant to orders, she is photographed first alive and then dead, the images transmitted instantaneously to Tehran. There the photos will be matched with file photos of Israel’s leadership on a gruesome checklist where names are crossed off in a relentless tally.
Though rape will become common in the days ahead as less disciplined Arab armies swarm Jerusalem, these Revolutionary Guard commandos work by the book. In a few minutes, they are out the door and on their way to the next target. The Minister of Agriculture lives on the next street.