By the Rivers of Babylon

by Nelson DeMille

  Miriam began to say something, then stopped.

  “What is it?” asked Hausner.

  She began again. “Well . . . while we still have the ammunition and while the Ashbals are still some distance down the east slope, perhaps we should . . . withdraw quickly, cross the hilltop, and drop down the west slope—in force and organized—not a disorderly retreat. We should be able to break through whatever small force they have placed at the river bank. We can take to the river and float away in the darkness.”

  Hausner and Burg looked at each other, then at her for a few seconds. Hausner spoke. “Aren’t you forgetting the wounded?”

  “They will be just as lost in an orderly retreat as in a disorderly flight. We have a responsibility to the majority.”

  Burg spoke. “You’ve come a long way. But which way?”

  “Why does it sound so awful coming from me?” she asked rhetorically. “Yet it does, doesn’t it?” She paused. “Anyway, I would stay behind with other volunteers to look after the wounded, of course. I am practically under sentence of death anyway. Aren’t I?”

  Hausner shook his head. “Even when you make hard decisions, you somehow make them sound soft. The hard fact is that if we retreat—orderly or disorderly—or if we are being overrun and are fighting hand to hand—the first thing we do is shoot the wounded.” He put his hand up to quiet her. “Don’t be a fool, Miriam. You heard what they did to Kaplan. God knows what they did to Deborah Gideon.”

  “But . . . they want hostages.”

  “Maybe,” interjected Burg. “But maybe not anymore. Maybe all they want now is revenge. Anyway, if Rish and Hamadi—if either of them is still alive—could stop them from massacring everyone, then the best we can hope for is to be subjected to a slow, more refined torture until we give up whatever state secrets we possess. No, we are not leaving wounded or nurses behind, and we are not going to try to move in the dark. The best trained and most disciplined armies are wary of night maneuvers. If we try it I’m convinced it will be a disaster.”

  “Then what are our options?” asked Bernstein. “You refuse to order a retreat or a surrender, and you are not encouraging mass suicide. What is going to become of us then?”

  Hausner turned away from her. “I don’t know,” he said. “The best ending I can envision, outside of rescue, is that each and every man and woman dies in battle. That won’t happen, of course. There will be surrenders and captures. There will be suicides, and there will be murders. Maybe some of us will be overlooked in the dark and escape. It will be very much like every other siege when the besiegers break through.”

  No one spoke. The sound of battle settled into an orderly pattern. Both sides were tired and both sides sensed that this was the last fight. Everyone moved mechanically as though it were a formalized dance—a ritual whose end would come at a fixed time regardless of what they did to hasten it.

  * * *

  The Ashbals kept a respectable three hundred- to four hundred-meter distance and maneuvered mostly laterally, trying to keep the Israelis off balance and at the same time seeking out their weakest sectors.

  There was still over three hours left until dawn, but actual daylight would come somewhat later unless the wind dropped and the dust settled.

  This was to be a battle of attrition and logistics, and the Ashbals still had a small advantage in manpower and guns and an overwhelming superiority in ammunition, food, medical supplies, and water. They had only to remain deployed and draw fire until they were certain that the Israelis were at the end of their ammunition. They gambled on the principle that even with strict fire discipline the Israelis’ ammunition could not hold out until dawn.

  Burg tried to formulate several plans in his mind. Flee now? Counterattack? Wait until the end and fight hand to hand? Kill the wounded? Kill Hausner? Would they be rescued at the eleventh hour? Not likely. “What happened to Dobkin?”

  Hausner turned and looked southwest, out to where the village of Ummah was supposed to be. He stared as though he were trying to make contact with Dobkin. He turned again, due south, toward the Ishtar Gate. “I have a feeling he is all right.”

  Miriam was holding onto his arm, openly showing Berg how matters stood. “I wonder if he’s made contact with anyone?”

  “Well,” said Burg. “I can tell you this—even if by some miracle he is speaking to some kind of authority right now, I don’t believe help would arrive in time.” He looked at Hausner as if for confirmation, but what he was really inviting now was one of Hausner’s contradictions.

  Hausner turned his back to the wind and looked west. He pointed toward the invisible horizon. “I can’t help but think that Teddy Laskov will be as good as his word—that he is out there now with his squadron of fighters, looking for us, getting closer . . .”

  Burg looked at Hausner, pointing into the sky. “That’s a rather optimistic statement for you, Jacob,” he said carefully. “I hope you’re right.”

  Hausner folded his arms across his chest. “You know, Burg, I can’t seem to accept the idea that all those very clever fellows in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem could still be sitting around with their fingers up their asses. I expected more from them. Is that patriotism? I suppose. Well, perhaps I’m expecting too much. After all, I was one of those clever fellows, too, and look how I fouled things up, Isaac. They’re entitled to a few days off, too.”

  Burg couldn’t help but laugh. “Not today.” Whenever he started doubting Hausner’s reasoning, the man showed a flash of insight.

  A runner approached, and Burg walked to meet her.

  Miriam had been standing off a few meters listening silently to Hausner and Burg. She came up beside Hausner now and took his arm again and squeezed it tightly. She thought of Teddy Laskov. She had been thinking of him less and less lately. After they crashed, she pictured him doing just what Hausner had said—swooping down in that big steel charger and rescuing her . . . everyone. But in reality she knew that he was probably in disgrace, and she knew that she was partly responsible for that. At first she refused to make the connection between her influence on him and his actions in the air, but the connection was there for anyone who knew them both, and she had finally faced up to it at about the same time she had faced up to a lot of other realities.

  Hausner made realities real for her as no other man ever would or could. Other men in her life went along with her conception of the world in order to flatter her or be polite. That was the type of man she attracted. Thin men with glasses who sat next to her at seminars and committee meetings. Men who spoke in party jargon and repeated clichés and bromides as if they had made them up that morning.

  Laskov had been different from most of the men she had known, and so had her husband. They were somewhat alike, and in her mind she characterized them both as noble savages. Jacob Hausner was another variation of the type but more extreme. She might have gone through this whole experience in Babylon without having changed her perceptions of the world very drastically. Hausner had forced her eyes open. She didn’t like what she saw, but now she could objectively weigh the pros and cons of a proposal to shoot the wounded without going into fits of moral outrage. Was that good or bad? It was neither. It just was.

  “Do you know Teddy Laskov well?” she asked Hausner.

  “Not well. Our paths cross now and then.”

  She nodded. After a few seconds she said, hesitantly. “Do you like him?”

  “Who?” He let the silence drag out. “Oh. Laskov, I suppose. He’s easier to deal with than you political types.”

  She smiled in the dark. After a while she said, “He reminds me of you.”

  “Who? Laskov? Is that so?”

  She squeezed his arm tighter. Friends her age who remembered the camps were bitter and disillusioned with mankind. Many had psychological problems. She was determined not to be scarred, and she had overcompensated. She was well adjusted and optimistic to the point where a psychiatrist friend had jokingly called it a neurosis. Yet she was scarred, of co
urse. People said they saw it in her eyes, and she saw it herself in the mirror. “I’m certain he thinks this is all his fault.”

  “Well, then, we do have something in common.”

  “You’re both egocentric, and you think that all the good and all the bad that happens around you is a result of your actions.”

  “Isn’t it?”

  “Teddy Laskov and I were lovers,” she said suddenly.

  Burg overheard her as he walked back toward the mound. He was still annoyed at her presence. Now this. It was really too much. He turned his back on them and walked away.

  “And you will be again,” said Hausner.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “The question is irrelevant right now, Miriam.” He sounded impatient.

  “You’re not—?”

  “Not at all. Listen. You go on to the Concorde and see how Becker is doing with his radios. If there’s nothing to report—and there won’t be—stay there.”

  “Why?”

  “Just stay there, damn it! I don’t have to explain my orders to anyone else, and I don’t have to explain them to you.”

  She took a step, then turned. “I won’t see you again, will I?”

  “You will. I promise.”

  She looked up at him. “I won’t see you again.”

  He didn’t know what to say.

  She reached up and took his head and pulled it down to her and kissed him.

  He took her hands and disengaged himself. “Don’t leave the aircraft,” he said softly. “No matter what happens, promise?”

  “Will I see you again?”

  “Yes.”

  They stood looking at each other for some time. She reached up slowly, touched his face, then turned quickly and ran off into the dark.

  Hausner watched her until he could not see her any longer.

  He coughed some dust up out of his throat and wiped his running eyes. If there was any divine meaning or message in this senseless ordeal, if there was any secular lesson to be learned here, he couldn’t think of what it could be. It was the same old human circus of bravery and cowardice, selfishness and selflessness, cleverness and stupidity, mercy and heartlessness. Only the clowns were different. How many times did the show have to be performed for whoever was up there watching? And why didn’t it all end quickly? Why did God give them the cleverness and strength to prolong their own suffering when the end was preordained? Hausner had that uneasy feeling again—that it was a great cosmic joke directed at him. He turned toward Burg and shouted. “This is God’s way of punishing me for not giving up smoking as I promised my father I would.” He laughed into the wind.

  Burg put his hand in his pocket and fingered the small .22 pistol there.

  32

  “Are you there, Jerusalem?”

  “Still here . . . General. Stand by,” said the duty operator.

  The Prime Minister tapped his pencil on the table for several seconds and looked down at the note again, then looked up. “I assume many of you could recognize General Dobkin’s voice if you heard it.” He tried to control the edge of excitement in his voice.

  There was a loud outburst of questions and exclamations, and people rose to their feet. The Prime Minister slapped the table for silence. “Be quiet and listen carefully.” He signaled to the communications man in the alcove, and a loud rushing sound came over several speakers in the room. The Prime Minister pressed a button on the console in front of him and spoke into a microphone mounted on the console. “Who is this?”

  Dobkin recognized the slightly mocking voice at once. His senses reeled for a second, then he steadied himself and swallowed. “This is General Benjamin Dobkin, Mr. Prime Minister.” He paused. “Do you recognize my voice?”

  “No.” But it was obvious to the Prime Minister that there were people in the room who thought they did.

  Dobkin tried to bring his voice under control, to sound as natural as possible. “Is there anyone there who can recognize my voice, sir?”

  “You better hope there is.” The Prime Minister looked around the table. A few heads nodded tentatively. A general who had been a colonel under Dobkin added, “Or a very good impersonation.”

  “Go ahead, General,” said the Prime Minister, still not fully convinced, but very excited. “Where are you calling from?”

  Teddy Laskov held the forged photgraphs tightly in his hands. Slowly, he began moving them back toward his attaché case.

  “Babylon,” said the voice over the speaker.

  The room exploded with exclamations and most heads turned toward Laskov and Talman. The Prime Minister hit the table for silence, but he could not quiet the room. He spoke loudly into the microphone. “Where are you calling from, General? The telephone, I mean? Are you at liberty?”

  “Yes, I’m at liberty. I’m calling from the guest house here, sir. Near the museum.” Dobkin tried to control his voice, but it wavered slightly.

  The Prime Minister tried, also, to sound composed, but his voice was becoming tremulous. “Yes. All right. Can you give us a situation report, General? What the hell is going on?”

  Dobkin knew that the entire Cabinet, and most of the important men in the military were listening. He collected his thoughts and gave a clear, concise recapitulation of everything that had happened since they were lost over the Mediterranean.

  A half-dozen aides ran in and out of the conference room with army ordnance maps of the area, facts and figures about flight times to Babylon, ground elevations, weather, time of first light and sunrise, and a hundred other items of input that had been assembled ever since Laskov had made his statement about Babylon. It would all have to be considered before any final operational decisions could be made.

  As Dobkin spoke, he could hear men and women passing through the lobby outside his door. The walking wounded going somewhere. A door opened and shut off the lobby. A radio went on in the room where the card game had ended. A woman’s husky voice came out of the radio singing one of those interminable Arab songs. A few of the Ashbals joined in. The noise masked his voice, but it also kept him from hearing if anyone was near the door.

  “What do you suggest, General?”

  Dobkin recognized the voice of General Gur. “Suggest? I suggest, General Gur, that you come and get us the hell out of here.”

  “How are those mud flats on the west bank?” asked Air Force General Katzir.

  “Still wet,” said Dobkin truthfully. “But it looks drier farther from the river.”

  “The road you landed on,” said Katzir, “do you think it would support a C-130?”

  “I can’t say, General. I think we ripped it up when we put down.”

  “We may have to use helicopters,” said an unidentified voice.

  “No,” said Dobkin. “No time for that. They’re being attacked right now.”

  Another voice said something about sending a squadron of fighter craft in first. Dobkin could hear several voices being picked up by the microphone now. He heard Teddy Laskov’s name mentioned. He’d thought that the man would be in retirement by now, but apparently he was at the meeting. Dobkin answered a few more questions as he listened to the debate heat up. Suddenly, he interrupted in a loud voice, “Mr. Prime Minister. I’m afraid I have to go. There are three gentlemen here with AK-47’s, and when they comprehend what is happening, they will surely want me to get off the telephone.”

  In Jerusalem they heard what sounded like a scuffle, then a sharp crack like a gunshot, or perhaps something breaking. Then the telephone went dead.

  * * *

  Miriam Bernstein sat in the copilot’s seat next to David Becker. “You don’t think anyone heard your SOS, then?”

  “No.” He turned the radio down but left it on so that he could monitor. “The Lear is still up there, but I suspect he’s in trouble.”

  “Why?”

  “Why?” The fact that Hausner had sent a messenger to get a report from him and not come himself was an indication of how little faith everyone ha
d in his end of this operation. Miriam Bernstein was, however, the Deputy Minister of Transportation and, therefore, both Hausner’s and Becker’s boss. But that didn’t seem to matter anymore. “Why? Because he can’t land in this dust, that’s why. He will have to land and refuel somewhere where the dust is not so thick. Then maybe I can get a call through.” He glanced sideways at her. “Do you want to go and make your report? That’s all I have.”

  “Later.” She stared out the shattered windshield. “Are you afraid to die?” she asked suddenly.

  He turned his head and looked at her in the glow of the instrument panels. He hardly expected such a question from this very reserved woman. “No. I don’t think so. I . . . I’m afraid to fly again . . . but not to die. Funny . . .” He had no idea why he let himself be drawn into such intimacy. “And you?”

  “Almost everyone I’ve been close to is dead.” She changed the subject. “What do you think of Jacob Hausner?”

  He looked up from the book that he had begun to write in. He suspected that Hausner and Bernstein had become very close. But that didn’t change his public or private opinion of Jacob Hausner. “A Nazi.”

  “He likes you.”

  Becker didn’t understand where the conversation was going or why. Apparently she was overwrought and just wanted to talk. People did funny things when they were staring death in the face. He had just admitted that he was afraid to fly, and he wouldn’t have admitted that to his psychiatrist. “Don’t get me wrong, Mrs. Bernstein. I’m glad we had him along for the ride. Things would probably have been all over for us by now without him.” He kept looking at her. She didn’t look overwrought. She appeared to be . . . happy, excited. He looked down and began writing again.

  “I’m in love with him.”

  Becker broke the point on his pencil. “Oh.” The gunfire seemed to grow louder, and Becker looked up. The night looked more frightening, more hideous and ominous through the glass of the flight deck than it did when he was outside in it. Every frightening thing he had seen he had seen through a piece of plexiglas, and he was increasingly associating horror with plexiglas, danger with plexiglas. Death with plexiglas. When he looked through a car windshield or even a house window, his stomach would churn, and he had never been consciously aware of the reason until now. That was an interesting discovery, but it was a little late. “Oh. That’s . . . I’m . . .”