Moonlight was galloping on toward the point of no return, with Itzik as its mad jockey. This was not some midnight rendezvous with a shtinker across the border, but a mission whose outcome would have international repercussions. With his final notification to the cabinet of a green light, events had begun to snowball. The navy’s best crews had been assigned to the boats, the naval commandos had been ordered to supply security. The air force had laid on a squadron of F-16s to fly high cover above Gold Ring after a midair refueling, and finally, Itzik’s own boss, the commander of AMAN, would be joining the chief of staff himself aboard a Boeing 707 monitoring station circling the site.
The churning in his guts was not the result of a volcanic sea. It was the idea that once again, his success, his career, his life, depended on the wherewithal of Baum and Eckstein, who had gotten him into this quicksand in the first place.
If only he had been able to act as he should, to think purely as a soldier, then the predicament of Baum’s daughter could have been ignored, dismissed as a sacrificial casualty for “the good of the country.” However, if Captain Dan Sarel was saved, while Ruth’s life was lost, the newspapers would surely castrate Itzik for his pragmatic cruelty, even if the censors forbade mentioning him by name.
And yet—he was free to confess here before the thundering sea—it was much simpler than all that. Itzik knew the girl, she was a child too much like his own daughter, a fact that drew his heart toward the emotional dilemma he wished he could shun. He often despised Baum for his insubordinate brilliance and purity of motivation. But he simply could not imagine facing Ruth’s grave, with her father’s eyes upon him, if he did not give Baum and Eckstein every chance.
The worst of it was that all of this—Martina Klump, the wayward Minnow, Ruth’s capture, Baum’s desperate efforts—constituted secrets he had kept from his superiors. He stood there on the deck, and as it rolled to starboard he saw a ribbon for valor, and as it rolled to port the tribunal of a court-martial shimmered in the black swells.
“Atah mishtazef, Itzik? Getting a suntan, Itzik?”
Ben-Zion turned to see Ami Machnai approaching from the boat’s Combat Information Center—Merkaz Yidiaht Krav—the MYK. Ami was the colonel in command of the Aliyah, a rank equivalent to captain in Western navies. It was common for missile boats to be piloted by former naval commando officers, and he fit the stereotypical bill with his full red hair, burned freckles, and clear green eyes of a kibbutznik from the seaside settlement of Sdot Yam. He was not as tall as Ben-Zion, but much wider, and Itzik wondered where the Shayettet had ever found a wet suit to fit his trapezoidal physique. True to his impervious commando blood, Ami was wearing light officers’ trousers, canvas Palladium boots, and a sweatshirt cut off at the biceps. A baseball cap stenciled with the ship’s name was pulled backward over his ginger curls.
“I came out for a smoke.” Itzik had to shout above the roar of the sea, even though Ami stood at his shoulder.
“You should switch to a pipe,” the boat commander suggested. “More naval.” He was not holding on to anything, and he grinned as a sheet of spray whipped his face. “The men already think you’re a closet squid.”
Itzik shrugged. Guests aboard a Saar were usually regarded with disdain, but his apparent comfort caused the crewmen to treat him with unusual deference. “I can think out here.”
Ami laughed. “What’s the matter? You can’t think where it stinks?”
Itzik smiled as well. He had spent the early hours inside the MYK as Ami and his deputies plotted the course on a map table. Far from the spacious, climate-controlled CICs aboard American vessels, the Israeli version was as cramped and foul as the brig of a Cuban rum boat. It held the captain’s plotting table, the ship’s navigational radar, three manned fire control stations, a Harpoon operator, a Vulcan operator, two Lamed Alephs (electronic warfare specialists), and a complement of standing officers. Watches in the MYK were long, demanding unflagging concentration, and the atmosphere during a sortie never cleared of stale sweat and the dense cigarette smoke of clashing brands. The deck was often strewn with candy wrappers, and the gas masks in their pouches swung and bumped against the bulkheads like the trophies of a maritime cannibal tribe. Although the crew wore headsets, the officers preferred to shout their orders, further thickening the cloud of tension.
The crewmen of the missile boats bitterly accepted their station in life. You did not volunteer for naval duty; you wound up there failing acceptance as a pilot, a paratrooper, or even a tankist. They were the orphans of the IDF, the Lost Boys, bent on proving it with their unfettered cursing, belching, and farting in the MYK. They sat at their stations in office-type chairs with unchocked casters, and often during rough weather they would roll over the toes of an officer and receive a painful head blow from the victim’s hand microphone.
Itzik had visited just about every combat station in the IDF order of battle, but even he was put off by the Roman-galley atmosphere of the MYK.
“I don’t know how you can work in there, Ami,” he shouted as the bow split another high swell.
“Not too glamorous, is it.”
“Far from.”
“All naval vessels are like that.”
“You mean our vessels.”
“Tell me, Itzik.” The boat commander suddenly gripped Ben-Zion’s arm to steady himself, then released it. “Did you see the sentry in port?”
Ben-Zion thought back to the predawn boarding in Haifa. “So?”
“How was he armed?”
“An M-16.”
“And an air rifle. Know why he has an air rifle, Itzik?”
“Tell me.”
“For the rats.” Ami smirked and shook his head. “What can you say about a service that inducts rats?”
“Time to transfer.”
“Hey.” Ami shrugged. “You get too old to dive with the teenagers.” He meant his past glorious days in the Shayettet. “You have to do something.”
“I suppose.”
“And I don’t know about you up there in Jerusalem.” The ship captain poked a finger into the general’s wet shoulder. “But out here, we still see some action.”
“Bull’s-eye,” Ben-Zion acknowledged, for while Itzik fought a silent war of nerves, Ami’s battles were against oceans that gave no quarter and the constant attempts by seaborne terrorists to invade the Israeli coastline and slaughter civilians. Navy tradition held that if an FAC crew destroyed a terrorist craft, the men received a chupar, a gift, usually of the electronic-entertainment sort. The crews’ quarters of the Aliyah had a brand-new color television and VCR, to match the ones already in the officers’ quarters. They also shared a portable CD player.
Itzik heard a high-pitched oscillation from the stern, and he leaned back against the rail to see the rotor of the Dolphin spinning above the landing deck. Four air force crewmen in bright-orange helmets crouched below the chopper’s fuselage, and as they quickly freed the tie-down straps, the vessel seemed to fling the Dolphin into the air. The red-and-white hornet turned, barely missing the main tower array, then scuttled forward past the bow. Itzik wondered how the pilots could hope to land it again in such conditions.
“What the hell is this?” he shouted.
“Vulcan test,” Ami replied.
Itzik looked at the forward turret and its multibarreled 20 mm Vulcan gun. “In this weather?” He watched the Dolphin climb away in the distance.
“We don’t choose the weather,” said Ami. “We leave that to Allah.” He gave an Arabic twist to the consonants.
“Speaking of which,” said Itzik, “how is our guest?”
Sheik Sa’id, the Hizbollah mullah who constituted the Israeli chip of the exchange bargain, was residing in the officers’ quarters belowdecks. He had insisted on recostuming himself in the clothes he was wearing on the night of his capture in southern Lebanon. And so, despite the winter weather, he was now garbed in the gray cotton nightshirt and leather sandals he had hastily donned when the Sayeret Matkal command
os leapt over his balcony.
The man rarely spoke, except for his murmured prayers, and no one was sure if he considered the upcoming exchange a joyful day of liberation or a shameful surrender to which a chance at spontaneous suicide might be preferable. He was not allowed to wander free, for there were many small arms aboard, but the hatchway to the cabin was propped open as a sign of respect. Two recon captains from Sayeret HaDruzim, a battalion populated by Arabic-speaking sect members, were posted in the passageway. The men were not Moslems, but they could comfortably escort a Moslem cleric and feign appropriate deference to his position.
If Sheik Sa’id was pleased with his impending fate, he was not demonstrative. He lay on one of the thin bunk mattresses, holding a spar to avoid rolling onto the deck, while he stared up at the ceiling and stroked his black beard with his free hand.
“If the sea bothers him,” said Ami, “he’s swallowing his bile.”
“He’s been doing that for three years,” said Itzik.
A loudspeaker on the flying bridge suddenly barked a warning.
“Stand by for a weapons test!”
The two men were very close to the forward turret. Ami turned to Itzik.
“Want to go in?” The cannon fire from the spinning barrels would be painfully percussive.
Itzik dismissed the offer with a heavy-browed look. Ami shrugged, hooked the toe of one boot around a vertical rail spar, and plugged his fingers into his ears. The general left his own ears unprotected. He had not yet been punished enough.
Up ahead in the bruised sky, the helicopter released the dot of an object, whose descent was instantly slowed by a white parachute as the Dolphin scampered away.
The forward turret came to life, whining on its gimbals while the black barrels of the Vulcan jinked up and down. The gun suddenly buzzed, and even though it was exposed to an infinite canopy of air, the sound was like being locked in the trunk of a car with a chain saw. Itzik flinched as the rounds spewed into the sky, the tracers forming a red beam like a laser at a rock concert, and the target disappeared in a powder of sparks and spinning debris. The gun had fired for only a second, but Itzik’s head rang and his ears were deadened as if stuffed with dental cotton.
Four members of the naval commando contingent now appeared on deck, moving toward the stern and their black rubber Zodiac. They wore wet suits and BC vests, but aside from their flippers, masks, and snorkels, they carried no elaborate breathing gear. They would go into the sea if the returning Dolphin suffered a mishap.
Ami produced a Motorola mike from a base unit on his belt. He looked up at the sky as he spoke to the bridge.
“Chopper’s coming in. Slow to ten knots.”
“Ten knots, affirmative,” the walkie-talkie crackled.
The boat slowed, but the swell action kept the flight deck flipping up and down like the tail of a beaver. The chopper appeared off the stern, hovering there as if the pilots were considering desertion to Crete. The air force ground-crew gripped their tie-down straps.
“Hold her straight and steady, Zvi,” Ami ordered his driver.
Itzik shook his head. “It’s like a hummingbird trying to ass-fuck a shark.”
The pilots suddenly committed themselves, charging forward over the apron as they cut the power. The tail skid screeched across steel, the ground-crew men dodged and parried for their lives, and then the deck rose up and slammed the landing gear. The crewmen lunged in and captured the bird.
“Metoorafim. Maniacs.” Itzik whistled as he touched the bill of his cap.
Ami was smiling and applauding. After a minute, the four naval commandos came walking back from the stern, looking disappointed at having been robbed of their adrenaline rush. . . .
Itzik’s thoughts returned to the prisoner exchange. He wished the event were behind him, for the affair had already robbed him of enough sleep.
Sheik Tafilli, the negotiating partner for Hizbollah, had nearly scuttled the agreement just two days earlier. He had grown accustomed to dealing only with Benni Baum. At first the colonel’s absence was explained away with a promise by the Israelis that he would reappear to dot the i’s and cross the t’s. Then Itzik was forced to admit that Baum had been hospitalized with a heart ailment, which was only a partial lie. When Tafilli balked, the general scrambled for a suitable replacement, dredging up a retired German-born former chief of AMAN’s European desk. The man did not have Baum’s style, yet he managed final closure on Cyprus. Tafilli was not happy, but he also had masters to please.
There should have been nothing more to attend to now than the operational details. But the specter of an unrestrained female terrorist—formerly, God help us, an AMAN asset—showing up at the party with a lethal gift broke a sweat under Itzik’s arms.
Ami made a move to head for the galley, when Itzik put out a hand and stopped him.
“Tell me,” the general said. “How are we going to work the exchange?”
Ami turned to Ben-Zion and squared his feet on the deck.
“Well, for security, all the commandos will have Snuniyot in the water.” Each of the three missile boats carried a commando contingent, and their high-speed minicraft were mounted with MAGs and RPGs. “They’ll stand off out of range, so we don’t spook our cousins.” He used the colloquial slang for Arabs. “We’ll also have snipers, in case somebody gets careless.”
“How the hell can a sniper work on one of these things?” Itzik wondered.
“They came up with some kind of gimbaled mount at Atlit,” said Ami, meaning the Shayettet’s not-so-secret headquarters. “You clamp it to a spar, then set in your M-21. It’s kind of like that Steadicam rig they use in the movies.”
“What about moving Sarel and Sa’id?”
“Well, you said Hizbollah wanted a flank-to-flank anchorage and a flexible bridge. But unless the water’s still as the Dead Sea, that won’t fly.”
“So what then?”
“We’ll use the Zodiac to take Sa’id over, and another to pick up Sarel.”
Itzik considered this for a moment. “Let’s send over Sarel’s taxi first, so both men can board at the same time.”
“Good idea,” Ami agreed. “That’s why you’re the general.”
Itzik ignored the compliment. “And what if it’s like this?” He waved a hand at the wave crests.
“It won’t be,” said Ami. “Shayettet dropped a team in last week to check the depth and wave action at Gold Ring. Most we’ll get is a one-meter chop.” It was standard procedure to have recon teams precheck the site of any major mission. “But even if it does get rough,” he assured, “we can use the chopper and the 996 people.”
The Dolphin came equipped with a winch, and a team from the air force’s pilot rescue Unit 996 was camped out belowdecks. If need be, Sheik Sa’id could be lowered to the deck of the Hizbollah trawler. Dan Sarel had been trained for extraction by collar.
“I’m not sure Sarel will be able to do it,” Itzik said doubtfully. He had seen the condition of repatriated men before.
“Don’t worry about Dan,” said Ami. Until now, the boat commander had not mentioned the fact that he knew Sarel personally from years together in Shayettet, or that he himself had been captaining the vessel from which Sarel departed on the night of his capture. “When he sees my face, he’ll probably jump in the water and swim for us.”
Itzik did not reply. He doubted if Sarel would even be able to walk.
“Tell me something, Ami.” Itzik tried to conceal his next query as a soldier’s curiosity. “What kind of damage could a missile do here?” He looked up at the tower array of sonar disks and radar T’s.
“A missile?”
“Ship-to-ship, let’s say.”
“Remember the Eilat.” Ami recited the warning of vigilance to all overconfident boat drivers. In 1967, the Israeli destroyer Eilat had been sunk by a STYX missile fired from an Egyptian Komar FAC anchored in Port Said.
“Well, I wasn’t really thinking of that kind of firepower.”
“What kind of missile did you have in mind?”
“Something like a TOW.”
“A TOW?” Ami took off his cap, scratched his head vigorously, and reset the hat again. “Haven’t seen one deck-mounted yet, though they hang them from choppers all the time. A waterline hit could sink us.”
“Quickly?”
“Quick enough. This fucking hull’s like paper.” As protective armor, the body of a Saar was worthless. She relied on her speed, maneuverability, and offensive weapons. “And a TOW usually kills everyone at the impact point,” Ami added matter-of-factly.
“So if you had that kind of threat,” Itzik posed, “what would be the safest station aboard?”
Ami squinted at the AMAN general. It seemed out of character for him to voice concern for his own skin. But then, maybe that was not the object of the question.
“The flying bridge.” He jerked a thumb toward the open station above the MYK. “TOW operators usually go for the mass, in our case the hull, or the foot of the superstructure. The people up above would probably survive it, though they might get tossed into the water.”
Itzik looked up at the row of plexiglass shields lining the forward bulkhead of the flying bridge. He doubted that he could coax Sheik Sa’id into climbing up the adjoining tower array to an even more secure roost.
“When we’re five nautical miles from Gold Ring,” Itzik decided, “let’s put Sheik Sa’id up there. They’ll want to see him anyway.”
He looked down, to find Ami staring at him. The boat commander was not about to accept any further evasions.
“You know something,” he stated flatly. “Don’t you, Itzik.”
The general pulled his eyes away, gazing past the pitching bow. At the horizon, the setting sun was filling the clouds with amber, while above, the blue night pushed it to the west.
The Nylon Hand of God Page 46