The Hope

by Herman Wouk

  ***

  The news about Mitla was much worse than anybody who wasn’t there knew.

  The hills at the entrance to the defile looked like all the others in the Negev and in Sinai: brown, barren, wind-eroded, boulder-strewn, and void of visible life, except for here and there a tough clump of scrub brush. The trouble was with the invisible life. From these silent dead shallow heights were bursting great volleys that had caught the advance combat unit by surprise, sent its ammunition truck exploding sky-high, ignited the fuel carrier in a tower of flame and billowing black smoke, knocked out two tanks, and shut a trap on the force commander and his troops. Behind, burning vehicles and unseen guns; ahead, unknown surprises; from the hills of the defile killing cross fire, whenever the trapped soldiers moved out of the cover of their halted vehicles, or raised their heads from the shelter of wadis, the foxholes of nature. On the wireless, garbled frantic overlapping communications:

  “Uri, Uri, cease fire, you’re firing on us—”

  “Negative, Motta, negative, negative, we’re not firing—”

  “…Yes, yes, we’re trying to come back and help you”—this from a half-track company that had outrun the commander—“but we’re taking a shit rain of bullets—”

  And so on, a continuous jumble of harsh voice signals drowned out now and again by crackling whistling bullets, roars of mortars, and thin cries of the wounded.

  Out of range of the enemy fusillades were the strung-out vehicles of two parachute companies, sent in by Sharon to rescue the ambushed unit. Sharon was staying outside, preparing to fight an enemy armored force reported approaching from the north. The parachutists who had come to the rescue were setting up a battery of heavy mortars; the question was, where to fire them? In the bright afternoon sunlight, and the drifting smoke and dust of the entrapment, the enemy gun bursts seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere.

  How then, to counterattack this invisible ambuscade? The commander of the rescue force decided on the desperate expedient of sending a jeep ahead through the defile, to draw fire while spotters watched the hills with binoculars to pinpoint the firing positions. At his call for a volunteer, Don Kishote was one of several who responded, and Raful Eitan, who was there to observe the rescue, himself offered to drive the jeep. The one chosen was Yehuda Kan-Dror, the commander’s own driver. Kishote hated to see him go, for he knew Kan-Dror had lost a brother in the War of Independence.

  It was all over in a few minutes, but very long minutes they were, as the jeep bounced along the rough track into the defile, leaving a plume of dust and drawing down a deafening continuous drumfire from the hills. Through his binoculars, when he should have been watching the hills, Kishote could not help following Kan-Dror’s weaving course. He could see dark bullet holes appear all over the vehicle, could see the wince of the driver’s helmet as he was hit and hit again. The jeep halted at the turn of the defile, the engine smoking. Kan-Dror lurched from the driver’s seat, staggered some paces, and vanished from sight into a wadi.

  “Gibor hayil [Man of valor],” someone said in a hushed voice, and he spoke for all who watched. But the valor was in vain. The far-spread shallow hills to the north and south were pitted with caves, and there was no telling—so the spotters claimed—from which of them the voluminous all-around fire had come. Kishote wondered how many of them had really been able to take their eyes off the ride of Yehuda Kan-Dror.

  The rescue units were under orders to bring out all the casualties, at any cost. This was the rule of the Israeli army, dating back to Palmakh days, when the squads had been made up of boyhood friends. A soldier like Yehuda Kan-Dror, setting out with the white rigid face of a man who believed he was going to his death—Don Kishote would never forget his glimpse of that face as the jeep started off—knew that if wounded he would probably reach a hospital; and if killed, he would have a grave in Israel for his parents to visit. But the caves still commanded the defile, and the casualties could not be retrieved under their guns. There remained only a single laborious and perilous alternative: to clear out the gun pits one by one with small-squad attacks.

  This process began after Kan-Dror’s ride, and went on all afternoon and into the twilight, when locating the guns by their fire became easier. Squads climbed the hills to the ridges by roundabout routes, crawling through areas that might be exposed to the enemy guns, plodding by the hour up steep rocky slopes that took them to the caves from below, above, or the side, but out of the lines of fire. As the dusk deepened to a few stars above, it became clear that the southern ridge had the most and the heaviest weapons; they were raking the squads moving along the north ridge with long-range fire and piling up the Jewish casualties.

  With six picked soldiers of his company, Don Kishote went edging along the south ridge on a narrow outcrop, where poor rubbly footing and deep drops on either side made for slow going, toward an emplacement that was pouring out bright noisy volleys. The ground broadened, he saw vague shapes ahead, and his sharp challenge brought quick shouts in Hebrew. It was Jinji’s platoon, and they pointed out to him the slope falling away below, and a long meandering path toward the gun cave. “He tried to lead us down there. He went first and he got it,” said Jinji’s number-two man, a lean shape with a beard. “I tried to reach him, but they’ve got this path covered. I had bullets screaming past my ears.”

  “Is he alive? Do you know?”

  “For a while he was yelling to us. He’s down on a ledge there. I don’t know whether they shot him again. Lately he’s been quiet.”

  “Did you try to get at them from the other side?”

  “Not possible. It’s a sheer drop. No footholds.”

  “I’ll have a look.”

  In the flickering light of the gunfire from the cave, and the distant glow of a burning vehicle, Kishote saw that on the other side there was in fact a nasty drop. Overhanging rocks concealed the cave itself. Peering here and there, leading his squad with slow care along the ridge, watching the drop in the gun flashes, he thought he saw a way down. It needed a long slide on the almost vertical rubbly slope, a jump to a shelf projecting beyond the cave and then with luck a leap back into the cave. The Egyptian gun crew was watching the other way down, that was sure. From this side they might be surprised.

  Kishote had taken many risks in the night on reprisal raids. But here were soldiers, not fedayeen, armed with powerful weapons and on full desperate alert, for the trappers were becoming the trapped. Without reenforcements, and with Arik’s troops in a grim methodical attack on the caves, these gun crews had to stand to their guns till they were killed, or else take their chances on fleeing into the night. Some had tried to flee and had been seen and shot. Others had escaped. The squads were reporting finding empty emplacements with guns intact and live ammunition piled up. This one, however, was going strong.

  “I think I’ll give it a try,” Kishote said to the others.

  His master sergeant said shakily, “Sir, don’t. It’s crazy.”

  “Well, we’ve got to get Jinji out of there.”

  He placed his men to cover him, and waited for the light and noise of the next fusillade. Not the kind of risk Kan-Dror had taken, but risk enough. Scared, exhilarated, his blood up, he waited for his moment.

  Bursts of gunfire. Light, light, and more light! Down he went, automatic gun swinging on a strap, hands tearing on the rocks. Here was the ledge. A long-legged jump, another jump, and he landed in the cave with a thump, a rattle, and a frightening yell! He was near a dim oil lamp by a heap of automatic magazines, face to face with amazed Egyptians, six or seven of them, cowering at the sight of the tall gun-bearing apparition fallen from the sky. He barely had time to think how much they looked like his own squad, a bunch of young guys in uniform, and to see the soldier with his back to him, who was guarding the path where Jinji had been shot, swing around with his automatic at the ready. Yossi shot him, and then shot them all. As they sprawled and writhed in blood, crying out in strange words, he edged through the emplacem
ent to the path, on the watch for any Egyptians he had missed, his pulse racing. Nobody, and no sound but the screams and groans of the gunned-down gun crew.

  “Hey!” he yelled up the path. “It’s Yossi. The objective is secured. Find Jinji!”

  ***

  Hooded flares marked the improvised landing strip near the Parker Memorial, the only patch of flat ground in the area not hopelessly rough and wadi-scarred. As one Dakota took off with a full load of wounded, the exhaust of its two engines casting a blue glare on the strip, another was circling to land. The air force had sent an engineer to inspect the area, and he had reported that there was no place a Dakota could come down, that nothing larger than a Piper Cub could safely land at the Mitla Pass. But Arik Sharon had “talked down” a Dakota bearing medical supplies and stretchers for the wounded, and now they were arriving one after the other in the small hours to evacuate the casualties: more than a hundred found so far, more than thirty of them dead.

  Kishote’s company had the job of bringing the casualties aboard and quickly refitting the Dakotas as hospital planes, pulling out the bucket seats and installing makeshift pallets and safety lines to secure the wounded. In this mournful task, performed by flashlight and flares, Yossi was surprised to find that Yehuda Kan-Dror was alive; white as paper from loss of blood and barely conscious, but alive. Given up for lost, he had managed to crawl out of the deep wadi and collapse in the path of a patrol seeking the wounded. Jinji too was alive, and showing more life than Kan-Dror when he recognized Kishote in the light of the flares. He was heavily bandaged about the head and one leg, and a medic was holding an intravenous bottle over him. “Kishote! They say I owe you my life,” he gasped with a feeble wave, as his stretcher was handed into the plane.

  “Get well, Jinji, and we’ll figure out what you owe me.”

  All around him, stretcher bearers were carrying up the wounded and handing them aboard. On a few of the stretchers the faces were covered; the soldiers had died while being rescued. This Dakota was the same aircraft that had carried his company to the parachute jump; the planes were all more or less the same, but in this one some wag had stencilled a Bambi on the forward bulkhead.

  “So, Bambi,” murmured Don Kishote, “it’s not much fun going home after the party, is it?”

  18

  The Race

  As the morning reports poured in, all the officers in the war room were looking cheerful for a change. Even the dour bone-weary Pasternak was studying the big table map with something resembling a smile. The girls were moving pins and unit symbols far into Sinai, except for Colonel Yoffe’s brigade, which had not yet budged.

  Operation KADESH was finally unfolding as Dayan had foreseen. The laggard British bombing of the airfields had done the job, eliminating the enemy air force from the fast-moving war; and the Egyptian troops that had been pouring into Sinai were in a headlong rush back to the Canal Zone. So at last—and this was why Pasternak was almost smiling—Yoffe’s brigade could start down the track mapped out by the YARKON patrol along the Sinai’s east coast; heretofore it would have been too vulnerable from the air. Yoffe had to go mighty fast, however, to capture Sharm before the United Nations voted on an American cease-fire resolution already under debate in the General Assembly. There were two enemies now, the Egyptians and the clock.

  A soldier at the table: “Sir, telephone for you.”

  “Hello, Pasternak here.”

  “Crazy balagan,” were Zev Barak’s first words. “No use giving you a long story. I want your authorization to buy eighty-seven cows.”

  “Eighty-seven cows? Is this a joke?”

  “Do you want an explanation, or will you just give me an okay? We have a serious problem.”

  “Let’s hear it.”

  Barak glanced out the open farmhouse window at the stumpy white-haired figure keeping the bulldozers at bay. The smell from the barns was oppressing his city-bred nose. “Okay, it seems there’s this old guy whose cow barns extend a few feet into the railroad right-of-way. Actually one very long barn, all along the track. The trains cleared it, so he got away with it for years. There are eighty-seven cows in that barn. He’s one of these old Russian Jews, built like a rock, a demented individualist. He says the rotten socialist kibbutz system is behind all this, he’s made all the rotten kibbutzim look sick with his successful private dairy, and they’re out to get him.”

  “So what? Knock the barn down.”

  “He’s got an Uzi, and he’s ready to shoot the bulldozer drivers.”

  “Well, then, disarm the old lunatic! That’s hard?”

  “Sam, we got to talking. Turns out he knew my grandfather in Plonsk, in fact, he says he was once in love with my grandmother. I feel sorry for him.”

  “Zev, what the devil will the army do with eighty-seven dairy cows?”

  “We can eat them, can’t we?”

  “By my life, you’re as crazy as he is. You don’t eat dairy cows, you milk them. Demolish the barn, I say, and fast. Tell him Solel Boneh will build him a brand-new one.” Solel Boneh was the giant governmental road-building and construction corporation.

  “All right, I can try that.”

  “Zev, you sound light in the head. What about your brigade? Is it on the move?”

  “Definitely. Yoffe has started south, and I’ll catch up with him when I’ve cleared this snag. The landing craft are loaded on flatcars in Haifa ready to go. The other demolitions have been done. There’s just this cow barn.”

  Barak was in fact light-headed, not having slept all night in the hard push to get the brigade ready to roll. He found the barn impasse weirdly amusing, and enjoyed baiting Pasternak with it. Moreover, short of using force on the old man, he really was at a loss.

  “Do whatever you think best,” snapped Pasternak. “Buy the cows, shoot the old guy in the leg by accident, I don’t care. The UN may vote today or tomorrow on the cease-fire. Move!”

  Barak approached the dairyman, who, except for a bristly white beard, rather resembled the Prime Minister in his pugnacious jaw, heavy nose, and fierce eyes under bushy snowy brows. When Barak made the Solel Boneh proposal, the Russian exploded. “Solel Boneh? I worked for Solel Boneh! I quit Solel Boneh! The only thing in this country worse than the kibbutzim is Solel Boneh. Before Solel Boneh gets around to it, the Messiah will build me a barn.”

  “The army will buy your cows, then.”

  “And what will I do without cows? Go back to work for Solel Boneh? I fart on Solel Boneh!”

  Barak took from a pouch his operation map of KADESH. “Look, Reb Shloimeh, here is how things stand.” In quick sentences he sketched the war picture, making as clear as he could the mission of Yoffe’s brigade, the reason for the demolition, and the race against the UN vote. “Without the replenishment by sea, Reb Shloimeh, the boys won’t take Sharm el Sheikh, because the tanks and trucks won’t have the fuel to get them there. And your barn is in the way of the boats I have to freight to Eilat. Zeh mah she’yaish.” (“That’s how it is.”)

  The dairyman listened, looking hard at the map and nodding. “Why didn’t those fellows on the bulldozers tell me all that?”

  “They’re just drivers, they had their orders. We’re racing the UN.”

  “I fart on the UN,” said the farmer, lowering his gun. “Let me get my cows out into the field.”

  “I’ll give you a document, showing that the government will rebuild your barn.”

  “Wipe your ass with the document. I’ll rebuild my own barn.”

  ***

  Colonel Avraham Yoffe, the big burly brigade commander, had requested Zev Barak as his deputy because he knew him from the Jewish Brigade days. As Sergeant Wolfgang Berkowitz, Zev had been adept at coping with the deep sand and balky machines of the North African desert. Also, Barak had been on the YARKON patrol, so he understood that the challenge to the brigade was as much making it down the Sinai coast, as taking Sharm el Sheikh.

  Barak had risen to the job, had drawn up formidable lists of
requirements, and had sleeplessly checked their delivery and distribution, driving Yoffe’s staff to exhaustion and accepting no report except, “Done!” Now, as the long column of the Ninth crawled out of the Negev into enemy territory, there was no lack of spare parts and repair equipment in the ten-mile-long serpentine on wheels, nor of water, food, extra fuel, spare tires, and the thousand small items of a mechanized force on the march through a wasteland, carrying its own means of life support like a fleet putting to sea.

  Miles ahead of the main body, Barak rode with a jeep-mounted company of engineers and mortar troops, scouting the mapped route for ambushes and minefields. As the sun climbed and the level open desert sloped up toward the mountains, the ground became more broken. Next his company ran into the dunes, great rolling waves of sand piling upward to the horizon, and behind him Yoffe’s column came ploughing on into the dunes, where its speed of advance dropped close to zero.

  Spurred by urgent messages from headquarters to make haste, Colonel Yoffe lashed his force onward with a rough tongue and scary willpower. Half-tracks churned grooves through the all-encompassing sand, and the trucks were ordered to drive in those tracks, but still they sank in to the wheel hubs, while the mortars half-buried themselves in the sand thrown up by their own wheels. Under a killing sun soldiers all along the march got off their vehicles to drag and heave at them. Overheating motors steamed and screeched, wheels spun showers of stinging sand, and half-tracks roared up and down the line to hitch up and tow stalled vehicles.

  At headquarters Sam Pasternak got this picture all too vividly from the flimsy Piper Cubs of air communication: the column bogged in the sands, lying baking and inert on the gray-brown sands of Sinai, a dotted line of black machines paralleling the rocky coast along the sparkling sea. Meanwhile the political sands were running out in New York. The delaying tactics of the French and British diplomats could stave off the cease-fire vote at most for another day or so, yet their landing forces were still at sea, a good way from Suez. The London riots were threatening to bring down the Eden government. The chances kept dwindling that Yoffe would get to Sharm on time.