Isaac's Beacon

by David L. Robbins

  “In a café. Eating lunch.”

  “What would we eat?”

  “Hamburgers.”

  “Could we have beers?”

  “You go ahead. I have to work.”

  “I’d like a beer, then. May I pay? Am I rich in America?”

  “Sure.”

  “Good.” The driver tumbled out of the cab. Hugo called to him, “A beer, please.”

  The driver dove for cover behind the front tire. A Haganah man sprinted their way, bellowing to every truck, dodging through the wrecks and stymied vehicles. In his wake, drivers leaped out of their cabs.

  “Leave the trucks! There’s a building next to the road! Head there now!”

  Hugo pointed at the stranded blockbuster. “What about them?” The Haganah man made a helpless gesture before he dashed away.

  Arab voices in English spilled from the hills, “We will soon cut your throats.”

  Hugo shouted over the truck. “Do shut up.” To Vince, he asked, “Do we die today?”

  “No.”

  “I agree. Stay with me.”

  With Hugo in the lead, they lit out for the stone house beside the road.

  Chapter 96

  Vince

  Hugo and Vince ran in fits and starts. Under fire, they took cover behind buses and armored vehicles, hugged close to trucks that were deserted in the ditch, tipped over, or crippled on puddles of flat tires.

  A dozen drivers and Haganah fighters scurried with them. One at a time they galloped into the open; the Arabs shot at everyone. Bullets drummed on the immobile column; some armored cars still returned fire.

  Hugo, smaller than Vince, had an easier time of it. He drew little fire, but bullets scalded the tarmac every time Vince’s lanky frame popped up. He had several close calls; Hugo, who always went first, watched and rooted for him.

  Five armored cars formed a protective barrier at the approach to the stone house. Vince, Hugo, and the drivers bolted the final distance.

  The building was old and thick-walled. A staircase divided two large first-floor rooms; the weathered floors felt solid. Half the convoy, a hundred men and women, crowded inside. In a corner, a nurse bandaged the wounded.

  Old, cheap furnishings littered the place; a few cots and a desk, forgotten clothing, crumpled papers, and rusted tins hinted at poverty.

  Hugo asked one of the drivers, “What is this place?”

  Still panting from the run, the man said, “In the summers, laborers pick the grapes and oranges. This is Nebi Daniel, one of their squatter homes.”

  As soon as Haganah fighters hustled inside, they manned the attic, roof, and windows. A radio was brought in, the battery to run it salvaged from a truck. Vince and Hugo hurried up the rickety stairs. On the roof, a dozen defenders set up Bren guns and a Spandau to cover all four directions. South of Nebi Daniel, Arab snipers looked down from a rocky ledge and the rooftops of homes left and right two hundred yards away. North, villagers flowed through the brushlands from the hamlets of Dheisheh and Beit Jalla. Five hundred Arab guns surrounded the stone house, a number that seemed to grow by the minute.

  The convoy was too gnarled; it could not resurrect. A few armored trucks tightroped the shoulder of the road to gather up guns and trapped drivers. Outside the front door, fifteen fighters with a machine gun took position in a ditch. Another squad dug in behind a rock fence bordering an apple orchard. Six armored cars girdled Nebi Daniel. More drivers staggered through the door.

  Three hundred yards away, stuck at the head of the dead column, Emile and the blockbuster’s crew fired from every portal. Arabs crept down the slopes.

  One armored car wove through the column to reach the blockbuster. Arabs targeted the wheels; a front tire popped, then the other. The vehicle tried to reverse but couldn’t steer on rims. Six fighters bailed out and ran the hundred yards for the stone house. All made it through the front door which slammed shut behind them.

  By sundown, a thousand villagers and guns teemed in the hills and neighboring buildings. They kept up a desultory fire, pinging the stone house, trading shots with the armored cars. Arabs snuck close enough to call out cutthroat threats. Three times, Haganah vehicles tried to reach the blockbuster. Two overturned under the drumbeat of Arab bullets and needed rescue themselves; the third gave up and rushed back to Nebi Daniel.

  A hundred Palmach and Field Force fighters manned the fortress, the perimeter, and the roof. Eighty unarmed drivers and assistants huddled inside, frightened and hungry; a medical team treated a dozen wounded. A Haganah officer called for volunteers to relieve the gunners for a few hours. Hugo went outside to the dark ditch; Vince joined seven fighters on another attempt to reach the blockbuster.

  The Palmach leader of the team asked him, “Why do you want to go?”

  “I have a friend in there.”

  “Do you know how to shoot?”

  “It’s been a while. But yes.”

  “Who’s your friend?”

  “Emile.”

  The Palmachnik whistled. “He hasn’t got many friends. Come on, then.”

  The young officer took a rifle from one of the window guardians. He gave this to Vince with six ammo clips. Vince worked the bolt and dry-fired the rifle. An armored truck idled outside. He climbed in with the team.

  The truck pulled away; the men muttered, “Go, go,” and held on while the driver snaked through the ruins of the convoy. In the lightless, badly ventilated interior, every round fired through the slits cuffed Vince’s ears.

  The truck dipped and dashed down the knotted road. Bullets beat on the armor. Vince slid his rifle into a firing portal to shoot at an Arab sitting on a large rock. The Arab didn’t jump; Vince missed him badly.

  The truck passed the last abandoned vehicle of the convoy. Speeding into the open, Arab rounds drubbed the truck’s sides; a cataract pummeled the roof, and they came fast and many on the road near the tires. The driver stopped suddenly, jarring the fighters. The hillside blinked with hundreds of flashes; in rapid fire, Vince spent his first five-round clip.

  The driver held his ground, enduring the barrage. The armored truck had stopped fifty yards from the blockbuster, close enough for the crew to run to them, though under intense fire. Vince reloaded. Everyone in the armored car opened up at shadows and sparkles. The interior of the armored truck grew deafening.

  In the darkness, near the blockbuster, a flame flickered. An Arab had skulked close and lit the rag fuse of a Molotov cocktail. He hurled the burning bottle against the cab; instantly, fire spread with the splashed fuel. A second Arab flung another firebomb at the rear wheels.

  The blockbuster ignited front and back. Bullets clobbered Vince’s truck, waiting for Emile and his team to emerge. Vince emptied another clip by the glow of the rising fire; the others did the same while their own truck rocked from bullets pecking at their armor.

  Flames engulfed the blockbuster. Vince’s driver backed away, quitting the rescue. The faces of the fighters around Vince flickered through the portals. “Get out,” they yelled, “get out of there.”

  Vince’s truck spun around to race back to the stone house. Vince lost sight of the blockbuster, but the explosion rocked him off his feet. He scrambled up for a portal. A second explosion blew the blockbuster’s gas tank. The great truck reared to stand on the V-plow in the ditch, then fell back on flaming tires.

  Vince said, “Emile.” The name would be Emile’s only remains; the burning blockbuster would leave nothing else. Vince charged the bolt of his rifle.

  The driver accelerated for the cover of the dead convoy. Every Arab in range turned on Vince’s fleeing, lit-up truck.

  He no longer heard his own gun or the guns around him, nor the pelting against the armor. Vince fired at black shapes and scarlet twinkles; he grew mute and breathed cordite and lost himself through the hot barrel of his rifle.

 
; A bullet broke through the wall, the first to puncture the metal plating. A fighter screamed, “AP!” Armor-piercing rounds.

  Another hole opened over Vince’s head. All the fighters froze. They looked to each other as if there was something the next man could do. Their best defense was speed, away from the firelight of the burning buster. If they could reach the tangled column, they might hide. The next armor-piercing bullet hit Vince in the shoulder.

  Chapter 97

  Hugo

  The landscape of broken trucks, the stone building, the scrub on the hillside, everything shivered under the orange flash of the fireball. As it faded, Hugo and the fighters in the ditch returned their eyes to their guns.

  The armored truck that had attempted the rescue skidded up to the stone house. Arab snipers took potshots; the gunners on the roof answered. Men hurried from the truck, carrying one wounded.

  Hugo learned the names of all fourteen in the ditch, everyone a student and smarter than him. They were sabra; to them he was a survivor of Europe. They didn’t ask about the camps because they faced people who would, if they could, kill them.

  With midnight, the Arabs came closer. They didn’t sneak up but announced themselves in Arabic, Hebrew, English, even German, calling for the Jews to lay down their arms and surrender. The Arabs set fire to some abandoned vehicles near the stone building, then a silence descended. In the glow of these flames, the Arabs began their assault.

  They raked the stone building with Brens and rifles. Palmachniks in the armored trucks responded. The night jittered with fires and sparking guns. The boys in the ditch and Hugo made a firing line but held back on their triggers. Hugo had seen this before, these Arab charges. He said, “Make everything count.”

  Wild shrubs flecked the slope, and each flicker of the blazes made a shadow shift on the hill like a running man. Then, with a high-pitched battle cry, a horde of Arabs rushed forward, firelit. They came as they had at Massuot Yitzhak in waves of hundreds, relying on numbers. Not all had weapons, yet they advanced as though they might swarm over the defenders of Nebi Daniel. Hugo and the boys in the ditch mowed them down with one machine gun and thirteen rifles. The bravest villagers made it near enough to die by grenades the boys lobbed. Hugo was unsure that he hit anyone with his bullets and didn’t care. The Arabs dove for the ground when he shot, and that was enough.

  One boy in the ditch took a wound, yelped, but held his post. Hugo measured the assault not in minutes but bodies. The shooting howled from the roof, from the ditch, from behind the orchard wall, and from the armored cars around the stone house; the fight peaked, then slowed. Hugo had the chance to shoot a man stumbling away but didn’t. The attack was done. Hugo and the boys lowered their hot guns, with no more grenades at their feet.

  The trucks burned to the axles. In the waning flames, the Arabs took away their many dead and wounded.

  Hugo stood for the first time in hours. He ached in his legs from pent-up nerves. Leaving the rifle and ammo behind, he walked the length of the ditch saying each boy’s name. Hugo took the arm of the wounded boy to help him back to the stone house.

  Chapter 98

  Hugo

  “It hurts, doesn’t it?” Hugo asked this not out of sympathy but to say, see?

  A nurse said, “He’s in shock. Keep him still.” She left to attend to more of the injured.

  Vince asked, “How many did we lose?

  “Twenty wounded. Six dead. Let me see it.” He peeled apart the sheaves of Vince’s cut-open shirt.

  Vince said, “I passed out in the truck.”

  “I imagine so.”

  “I woke up on the floor in here. I passed out again when someone shoved gauze into the hole. I was awake for the attack.”

  “Stop talking. Roll over.” Hugo helped Vince lift his right shoulder enough to see the exit wound.

  “I can move my fingers.”

  “Good. You’re still a reporter.”

  “Emile’s dead.”

  Hugo rested a hand in the center of Vince’s chest, the place where a lily would be if he were dead, too. “I know.”

  “How do I tell Rivkah?”

  Hugo patted his palm over Vince’s heart. “I’ll tell her.” He smoothed Vince’s hair. Hugo wagged a finger. “Remember. You’re not allowed to die among the Jews.”

  The wounded groaned terribly, too many for the medicine. Eighty drivers and the wounded had to look on the bodies brought inside. Hugo went to the roof.

  Up there the fighters granted him a spot and a shared canteen. One offered him a rifle, but Hugo passed. “I can’t hit anything.”

  Only stars broke the spring night; no one lit a cigarette, no Jew on the roof or the perimeter, not among the thousand Arabs skulking about the stone house. The fires on the jumbled road had all burned low, the blockbuster reduced to embers. Every few minutes some villager on the hillside or in the orchard fired off a round to keep the pulse of the battle beating.

  Two miles off, Bethlehem did not sleep. Behind it, Jerusalem brooded. The men on the roof whispered guesses how this would end. Hugo rolled on his back to see the highest stars, the ones not blotted out by the cities.

  The splutter of airplanes stirred the men on the roof. Arabs racked rounds in the night, so many they sounded like crickets. The sounds of the Austers grew closer and circled the road. A Palmachnik next to Hugo worried about having things dropped on him. One engine climbed in pitch; the plane zoomed down unseen to roar across Nebi Daniel at a hundred feet. The Palmachnik wrapped arms over his head. The dark Auster dropped sacks just beyond the armored trucks ringing the house, where the Arabs would get to them first. The plane climbed, chased by gunfire. Muzzle flashes dazzled the hill and road; Hugo refigured the number of Arabs surrounding him to two thousand.

  March 28

  Throughout the night, a string of Jewish planes dropped food, water, and ammo to the Arabs.

  Every attempt out of Nebi Daniel to retrieve the supplies looked like suicide. The Arabs had so many guns around the building that no Jew, not the bravest, could venture more than ten yards before calling down a hail of bullets. By sunup, the Arabs had claimed almost all the sacks and crates. The Austers quit dropping supplies and switched to bombs.

  In the dawn light they flew higher, away from the Arabs’ gunfire. The pilots dropped grenades into the orchard and on the slope. Sometimes the planes flew in low and quick with a Bren gunner in the passenger seat to pepper the Arab positions. The planes were more accurate with weapons than they were with boxes.

  At ten o’clock, the Arabs launched another assault, out of the north from Beit Jalla and Dheisheh. Two hundred villagers tried advancing through the fruit trees behind a smoke screen, but the roof gunners, the boys behind the stone fence, and a pair of strafing Austers beat them back. Hugo spent the attack feeding ammo belts into the Spandau.

  By noon, the battle for Nebi Daniel settled again into siege. Random rounds were exchanged; the Arabs kept shouting promises of either fair treatment or murder. Hugo left the roof with a quarter-full canteen.

  Vince lay among the wounded, now numbering forty. He’d grown pale and sweaty. The doors were shut, windows blocked, so the first floor had no ventilation. Blood and the airless heat added to the misery. Every so often, a bullet pierced the front door, so it had to be avoided.

  Hugo eased a hand under Vince to bring him upright to the canteen. Vince looked drained; he needed food, blood, stitches. Raspy, he asked, “How bad is it?”

  “You, or the situation?”

  Vince coughed; the wracking almost collapsed him. “Jesus. I hope the situation’s doing better than me.”

  “Barely. We’re almost out of bullets. You just drank the last of the water. We’re outgunned twenty to one. Still, and I’m not a betting man, I think you’ll go first.”

  “That’s not funny.”

  “It’s a matter of taste.”


  Vince was already half ghost. “Anyone coming to get us out of here?”

  “Other than the Arabs?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Jerusalem’s trying to put together a strike force. But we’ve got most of their trucks.”

  “How about the British?”

  “There’s an Army convoy two miles north.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Negotiating.”

  Vince coughed again. “Fuck. My life depends on Jews, Arabs, and the British arguing.”

  Holding his right arm, white and weak, Vince lay back on the floor.

  Hugo said, “I’m going to rejoin the Irgun.”

  Even for this, Vince didn’t open his eyes.

  “I thought you were done.”

  “It seems I’m not.”

  “Why?”

  “What I am done with is others making bargains over my life. Someone else’s conditions for me to live. Let them bargain with me.”

  Vince nodded against the floor, his only motion. “They shot me, Hugo.”

  “That was a factor in my decision.”

  He sat with Vince a while. When Vince appeared to sleep, Hugo went back to the roof of Nebi Daniel where the air, at least, was clear.

  Chapter 99

  Hugo

  Into the afternoon, swooping Austers strafed the trees and hillside; Arabs fired at the planes and sniped at the stone building but did not mount another all-out assault. Hugo stayed with the fighters on the roof, listening to them carp about hunger.

  In the late day, finally, a gunshot off the hill was not followed by another or answered from Nebi Daniel. The Haganah’s planes banked away toward Jerusalem. Quiet gained a foothold around the stone house.

  Hundreds of Arabs, with an unnerving shuffle, began to emerge from their hiding places. They came down the long hill, black robes and weapons, and flowed through the orchard like floodwaters. Hugo gaped at their number; they were a horde, more thousands on every side than anyone had guessed.