“Informed, excellency?”
“Secret mission. We are exchanging this Jew bitch for an Egyptian officer.” He whispers. “A general.”
“I know nothing of it, excellency.”
“Remove the roadblock, lieutenant.”
Two more Egyptian soldiers approach, looking in at Alex. They appear not to have seen a woman in some time.
“We are required to search the car, colonel.”
Abed is no stranger to the Arab psyche, formed from birth in a top-down society that has not changed in a thousand years. “How dare you doubt the word of an Egyptian staff officer? Name, unit, and serial number! Immediately!”
“Your excellency…”
“Move the barrier!”
The Egyptian lieutenant peers into the backseat in a modest attempt at doing his job before yielding to the presence of higher authority. The backseat is empty. He signals the others to do as the colonel commands.
Abed nods. “Upon my return in two hours, this unpleasantness will not recur.”
The Egyptian lieutenant salutes. “Yes, excellency!”
Abed returns the salute so casually he could just as well be scratching his forehead, and drives on.
The waning light now has reached that moment of Middle Eastern dusk when abruptly it disappears entirely, but Abed continues to drive without lights until the car has turned out of sight. The land here is flat, signaling their arrival on the coastal plain that stretches from central Israel down to Egypt itself. Here there can be no snipers hidden above. There is no above. In the moonlight, a sign appears, bullet-pocked as though used for target practice, a common incidence everywhere armies pass. TEL AVIV, the sign reads, 2KM.
Abed stops the car and with Alex approaches the trunk.
“Cobi,” the Bedouin shouts. “It’s just us. Kindly do not shoot. I am opening the trunk.”
The two help Cobi, still in Bedouin robes, out onto the roadway. His body has been compressed for an hour. The pistol in his hand seems frozen in position along with the rest of him.
“Another hour and I’d be permanently bent.”
Abed begins changing out of the Egyptian uniform into his Bedouin robes, while Alex retransforms herself, both men watching as if they expect a nude woman to appear. She doesn’t. There is only the disappointment of another male body as uninteresting as their own.
“Abed would make a fine Egyptian officer,” Alex says. “Total disdain. Feudal in the extreme. Kid, you should have seen it.”
“I heard it all,” Cobi says. “It was like being inside a loudspeaker. Every minute I was prepared to pull the interior latch and jump out shooting, but the truth is I wouldn’t have been able to. My circulation is just coming back. If this is what getting old is like, I don’t want it.”
“You’ll want it,” Abed says. “One’s perspective changes depending upon where one sits.”
“Yeah, well, from where I was sitting, all I heard was an Israeli Bedouin saving the lives of three Egyptians. Three, right? From the footsteps. Were there more than three?”
“Three only. So you are learning to track then? I am impressed.”
“If your tribe finds out about this, they’ll toss you out on your ass,” Cobi says. “You could just as easily have killed them.”
“Again killing. My boy, these were merely Egyptian peasants, conscripts doing their job. If ever you have a choice, killing is the last option.”
Alex is back in pilot’s uniform, strapping on his sidearm. “How about we concentrate on saving the lives of three Israeli peasants?” He goes to the flag standard on the right front fender, removes the Egyptian banner, and begins attaching a large white cloth of irregular shape. “Guessing from our location, the next barrier we come to is not going to be Egyptian.”
Cobi looks at the white cloth with a mixture of admiration and disbelief. “That’ll get their attention.”
The staff car is now adorned with a huge pair of boxer shorts formerly worn by a very fat Egyptian colonel. The white expanse is marked like an Israeli flag, but its two horizontal stripes and Star of David are in red, not blue.
“Hate the red, but who wears blue lipstick?” Alex says, getting into the Cadillac. “So trashy.”
93
ON A SECOND-FLOOR BALCONY across Ibn Gvirol Street in Tel Aviv, IDF combat engineers secure a quarter-inch steel cable to the concrete building wall, then drop the other end to the roadway, where other soldiers raise it to a parallel balcony on the other side, there to be similarly secured and winched tight. Repeated all down Ibn Gvirol and other broad thoroughfares, the cables are thin enough not to be visible to enemy observers flying high over the city; from street level, they suggest some sort of web, tying the city together two apartments at a time. Few know their purpose, but the civilian population, looking up at the taut cables, surmise the obvious: something is going on, and it cannot be bad. For the disillusioned and disheartened population of Ghetto Tel Aviv, that something is being done cannot be anything but good.
94
WITH THE BEGINNING OF active campaigning only months away, the president is not about to spend his precious time where there are no speeches to make, hands to shake, or babies to kiss—yes, the president has revived that most dust-covered of American political clichés, though his tagline manages to bring it up to date for an economically battered electorate as short on optimism as it is on affordable gas: “Madam, the beautiful child in your arms is the future of America.”
Rather than be seen visiting world leaders like a traveling salesman or bringing them together for an emergency conference whose indeterminate results or outright failure might be attributed to the president himself, not a great idea just ahead of an election, the leader of the free world prefers to work behind the scenes. For this he employs the video conference call in dealing with the individuals he terms his “co-world leaders.” (Flo Spier has given up trying to get the man to say “world co-leaders”—the president would rather be taken for a smart hick than a dumb Harvard grad.) His security people assure him these calls are as private as if all the participants were locked into a lead-lined closet in the White House sub-basement. The stakes are too high to risk public failure. Few nations are just itching to welcome even a small fraction of an estimated six million penniless Jews.
“So what I got here so far, gentlemen—and ladies, of course, mustn’t forget the ladies—is a grand total of, let’s see now, give or take, carry the two, about a million five. Here’s the bottom line. I know the last thing you folks want is a flood of dyspeptic Hebrews in your country. But I got to say, I mean, a great nation like France, offering to take just two hundred thousand, that’s chicken feed. The UK, I see you’re down for half that. Italy and Holland, half that again. Folks, we got us six million starving refugees here, and believe me, these people, they get back on their feet and put their biblical heads together, they gonna spark your industries, your sciences, your technologies, your entire economies. Yeah, I know every one of y’all only wants the smarties, the doctors and researchers and so on, and there’s quite a few requests I got for air force pilots and top-drawer soldiers. But come on, the cream gets spread around with the milk.
“Anyhoo, first I got to get numbers I can live with. Even my good neighbor to the south, Mexico, not the richest country in the universe, is willing to take two hundred thousand. That’s not, you know, the kind of commitment comes easy because my amigos down there are still boot-strapping their nation into the ranks of developed countries. So why are they accepting so many Jews? Because they expect these Jews to help ’em do it. You Scandinavian guys, learn from this. You South American countries, learn from this. Even some of you Asian tigers, think about how a whole lot of Jews can turbo-charge your already impressive success. And my good Russian friend, we got over a million people in Israel just come from your great country twenty years ago. They speak the language, for Pete’s sake—it’s a natural fit. I got you down for fifty thousand? You gotta be yankin’ my chain.