“Civilians, your highness. Civilians.”
“And did not your own people in the German war firebomb Dresden, also civilians? I believe you have seen the monument in London to the British air marshal who ordered those raids, one Bomber Harris. A statue, my dear friend. Though we Muslims do not erect statues because it is forbidden to make an image, you and I comprehend its significance. The Americans killed millions—unarmed men, women, and children—in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Why were these acts permitted by Christian leaders who worship every Sunday in a church? In order to save the lives of their own soldiers. It is, in the end, as simple as that. The destruction of Tel Aviv is therefore an act of self-defense.”
“Can we not wait a month—a week, even—for the foreign powers to agree a solution?”
“Any such solution will be temporary. My dear Ticky, I promise you the Jews will come back. They always do.” For a moment, the monarch looks away. “Let any blame then fall upon my head. You may consider yourself absolved of all responsibility. You merely do my will. Let it be so, and let us forget this conversation.”
For answer General Tawfik Ali, soon once again to be Twyford Oliver, and soon to collect his CBE, unsheathes the ceremonial dagger that was presented to him by this same king almost twenty years before, and lays it gently at the monarch’s feet.
97
IN THE SEASIDE VILLA in Herzliya that has become the de facto prime ministerial residence, Yigal draws diagrams on the whiteboard in his office. These are not military calculations. Yigal reviewed Pinky’s plans for the counterattack and accepted them without qualification. Now he is thinking of next steps, the days after, the future.
Outside, the villa is ringed by troops, with two tanks on the beach to defend it from assault by sea. Pinky understands that the enemy’s main thrust will seek the destruction of Israel’s leadership, a lesson from the Nazi playbook, where the invasion of every country on the German march brought with it special forces to kidnap or murder its political, religious, and social leadership. After the fall of Berlin, when the list for the United Kingdom was discovered in the headquarters of the SS, its publication drew two kinds of reaction in Britain: relief from those on the list, and indignation from others that they had not been counted dangerous enough to assassinate. Thus the fortifications surrounding the prime minister’s villa. The State of Israel, such as it is, cannot again afford to be decapitated.
Judy’s concern is more intimate: the health of her husband. It is nearly seven in the morning. Neither has slept. With luck, they can get an hour before the start of the prime ministerial day. “Yigal, please…”
“Almost done,” he says. “If I’m right about this, you are going to really love me.”
“I already do. Come to bed. I can’t sleep without you.”
“A few minutes.” His eyes return to the whiteboard.
“I want you to know I love you.”
“Judy, my Judy.”
“Tell me at least what this is.”
“National secret.”
Still, once back in bed, he tells her. Like all breakthrough ideas, it is as simple to explain as it will be difficult to implement.
“No one thought of this?” she says. “Before?”
“According to Pinky, such a concept does not now exist.” He pauses. “It’s the kind of plan you don’t consider until you are staring into your grave.”
Perhaps it is his final phrase. She has been good about not causing her husband unnecessary grief; she knows he has other matters to deal with, matters of consequence. But there is only so much she can take without breaking down. She doesn’t want to, not in front of Yigal. But she must.
As tears form, she says it. “I miss Cobi so much.”
98
BECAUSE THERE IS NO electric light, the work of the men and women called back to their jobs at Peri Military Industries is limited to the daylight hours—even candles disappeared the first week. When the afternoon sun falls behind the adjoining buildings, it becomes first difficult and then impossible to see. Experienced as they are in the delicate assembly of impact fuses, Alon Peri’s workers fall increasingly behind schedule. There is no way to lengthen the working day.
Peri brings the problem to Yigal, who brings it to his cabinet, which consults professors of engineering, efficiency experts, specialists in workflow. Their analysis is always the same: either find a way to light the factory so that Peri’s experienced employees can work through the night, or bring in more of them.
Unfortunately, these would require weeks of training before turning them loose on technology that could easily blow up in their faces, to say nothing of destroying the entire factory floor. Without Peri’s brass artillery-shell casings fitted with micro-fuses, fully assembled and in working order, the entirety of what is codenamed Operation Davidka will fail.
Named for the original Davidka—Little David—a crudely assembled mortar that became a key weapon in Israel’s War of Independence, the technology is far from that of the homemade weapon of 1948. But the stakes are just as high, if not higher. At least 1200 functioning tubes are required. After three days of full-scale assembly, the total ready for deployment is ninety-seven. Somehow eleven hundred more must be manufactured in six days.
While Pinky’s staff unsuccessfully struggles to devise a Plan B to provide the same results—the efficient transfer of 1200 Jordanian Challengers to Israel’s armored corps, whole, undamaged, fully fueled, and ready to roll—Misha turns up at Peri Military Industries to ask a simple question.
“What exactly does it take to assemble these things?”
Peri had been going twenty hours a day, and now must answer stupid questions from a gangster. But because he was once strapped to a chair on the gangster’s yacht, and certainly because Misha Shulman has proved himself as Minister of Police, he turns from the microscope he uses to examine each fuse before it is assembled in its brass tube, and answers the question with a minimum of visible impatience.
“Weeks of training,” he says. “The assembler is not working with his eyes, because the parts are so tiny, but with his fingertips. He’s like a surgeon doing microsurgery without the benefit of computerized tools and a monitor showing him what he is doing. The best assemblers are not intellectuals, because this is not a job for thinkers. You think about what you are doing, it’s all over, because then you get totally confused. Once the sequence is learned, it’s all in the fingertips.”
“So it can done in the dark?”
“In theory. But most people are not comfortable working in the dark.”
“Correct,” Misha says. “Let me tell you something from my past. As you may know, yours truly spent some time on enforced vacation in several camps in Siberia. At one of them was a special facility for assembling fine electronics. Amazing, in the middle of Siberia. But it turns out my Soviet masters were not entirely stupid.”
“Is this going somewhere?”
“Give me six hours and I’ll have your assemblers.”
“Very good,” Peri says, turning back to his microscope. “I need three hundred of them, maybe four. Even so, it will be tight. And while you’re at it, I’d like a steak sandwich and a draft beer. Goldstar if you can get it, very cold. And lights, and air conditioning. And if you can part the Red Sea, I’ll have some of that.”