By the time it is light, the entire administrative structure of the State of Israel has been decapitated. The list is so thorough that even the director of the Israel Museum is wiped out.
29
TWO MILES FROM THE Jordan, a column of two hundred Jordanian Challengers grinding up the winding road westward encounters its first resistance.
Six Israeli Chariots crest an embankment concealed by a turn in the road and, opening fire, destroy the first five Jordanian tanks, causing the column to stop dead. The IDF commander has chosen his spot well. The Challengers attempt to move off the road, but on one side there is a sheer stone wall and on the other a severe drop of several hundred feet. Dazed, a dozen Challenger commanders attempt to descend rather than remain sitting ducks. Their vehicles lose traction immediately on the loose stone and tumble down into the abyss.
The Chariots keep picking off Challengers until drones appear overhead. They dive. As the Chariots burn, the most forward of the Jordanian tanks bulldoze their own incapacitated armor off the road and proceed westward. There are no more Israeli tanks. Around the next turn, a sign in Hebrew, English, and Arabic reads JERUSALEM 5KM.
All in all, the Islamic Liberation Force—so the Arab and Iranian invaders have styled themselves—will utilize no fewer than six thousand drones, their warheads constructed of depleted uranium from the nuclear reactors Iran convinced the world were limited to peaceful use.
The drones, a product of the People’s Republic of China, whose need for oil is all but unlimited, are used on every front within the first hours of the war to wipe out Israel’s first line of defense. Planners in the Iranian equivalent of the Pentagon studied Israel’s defense profile from all angles and discovered what the Wehrmacht discovered in preparation for its invasion of Poland: only a thin line protected the interior of the target country. Once that line is shattered, any reserve units would not have a line to defend, and could then be picked off by conventional means, which in the case of armor means overwhelming force of numbers. Thus the Iranian planners demanded full commitment, not one drone held back, and made sure of it by concentrating control of the drone force in Iranian hands. In the twenty-first century, the blitzkrieg is reborn.
30
AT THE ISRAEL AIR Force base adjacent to Ben Gurion International Airport, bulldozers push aside the still-burning jets that litter the field, allowing three surviving IAF F-16s to take off in the direction of Northern Sinai in an attempt to head off a massive Egyptian mechanized infantry force headed to Tel Aviv.
From his bunker in what is left of IDF headquarters in the Kirya, the Chief of Staff orders the Air Force to stop the Egyptians at all costs.
“Jerusalem is lost,” he tells the head of the Air Force. “We must save Tel Aviv. Throw everything you have at them.”
The head of the Air Force, whose heart will give out within hours, victim of a cardiac condition he concealed for a decade, gives the order.
“Roger that,” answers the wing commander as three planes break the sound barrier. His face is still adorned with traces of lipstick.
31
AT AN ARMORED CORPS base thirty miles from the Lebanese border, Misha Shulman finds most of his fellow tankists, the majority from northern Israel and thus closer to the base, in manic disarray. The headlights of his Mercedes reveal the same scene repeated at Armored Corps bases across Israel. Inside the reinforced concrete structure that holds the brigade’s ninety-two tanks and six jeeps, all is ready. The vehicles are gassed up and loaded with ammunition, spare parts, medical equipment, and food rations for two weeks. Trickle-current has kept their battery banks charged. They are ready for action, but for one minor detail. The six-inch-thick sheet-steel gates of the bunkers are locked.
Through the kind of snafu that is common to all armies, even one so well organized as the IDF, the base’s regular-army maintenance crews have been rushed to the front, and with them the keys.
Misha assesses the situation in an instant.
Before him, his fellow tankists attempt to pry open the locks with tire irons from their civilian vehicles, but the tire irons bend and the lock hasps remain rigidly in place. An officer attempts to shoot off a lock with his sidearm. It makes a big noise.
There is a certain absurdity built into the structure of the IDF that is not found in any other army. All armies but the IDF are organized in a top-down command structure in which the best trained, most capable personnel command and those less qualified carry out those commands. But Israel’s defense system is dependent on reserve soldiers who may be corporals in the IDF but run huge businesses in their civilian lives. In order to concentrate on their civilian careers, many leaders of Israeli society avoid taking on the honor of high rank in the reserves because that honor carries the burden of extra months of training and maneuvers every year. The head of a company employing a thousand workers may thus find himself under the command of a schoolteacher whose leadership experience is confined to a classroom of fourth-graders or a farmer whose civilian responsibility is a herd of dairy cows. In times of peace, these differences are swept away in a kind of gentleman’s agreement. But in times of war, leader-ship tends to occur organically.
To wit: Reserve Staff Sgt. Misha Shulman, whose formal education ended before high school, whose military training outside of ten years in the IDF reserves consists of five years on the streets of Moscow, seven years in the Siberian gulag, and twelve years running Israel’s principal criminal organization.
“Get the fuck out of the way,” he shouts to the lieutenants and captains attempting to pry open the locks.
In response, the lieutenants and captains who are in theory his commanding officers melt away from the gates.
Misha is already in his Mercedes: the heaviest model made, two tons of German automobile powered by a five-liter engine so over-engineered it will outlast the car itself. At speed he backs it up thirty feet, then throws the vehicle into drive, flooring it. The car hits the gates so hard the steel gives way with a sound like an enormous hammer pounding a reinforced concrete wall.
The gate remains on its hinges, but one of its doors is bent sufficient for the bright lights of the tank bunker to shine out into the early morning dim.
Misha backs up again, now to fifty feet.
This time, when the vehicle hits, the sound of metal on metal is accompanied by a hiss from the car’s crushed radiator. Beyond the escaping steam is an opening wide enough for a man to slip through.
In a moment the man is in, and in another comes the sound of a Mk IV Chariot tank’s enormous 1200cc diesel starting up. As the other reservists run to the side, Misha among them, the tank snaps open the steel gates of the bunker and pushes Misha’s steaming Mercedes out of the way like a cheap toy.
Brigade 112 is off to war.
32
YIGAL SEES THE CLOUD of dust from half a mile away. The brigade is heading north at speed, probably hitting sixty-five miles per hour and tearing the roadway into a mulch of pulverized asphalt. In moments he catches up to the rearmost tank, whose commander spots him on his 360-degree video screen. Almost immediately, the entire column slows to a halt, moving off the roadway to give the red BMW a chance to reach the column leader, which is just behind the brigade’s reconnaissance jeeps. When he gets there, Yigal dumps the car by the side of the road. The tank’s hatch opens and Ephraim, his driver, pulls himself out.
Ephraim is one of six Ethiopians in the brigade: three drivers, one loader, one gunner, and one commander. For unknown reasons Ethiopians are drawn to the armored corps. These are the sons of immigrants whose lives in Africa centered on subsidence agriculture, whose most advanced technology is the ox-drawn wood plow—the low-tech model is pulled by a man. These are people who in one generation have leaped from pre-history to computer-guided fire control. As a driver, Ephraim is responsible not only for maneuvering sixty-five tons of war machine but for keeping it operational. He is twenty-eight years old, and like most Israelis has mastered the art of aggressive understatement.