Firebreak

by Richard Herman

  Moshe Levy was a thirty-six-year-old veteran tank commander who had cut his teeth in combat against Syrian tanks in Lebanon during the summer of 1982. He stood barely five feet five inches high and his stocky frame fitted easily into the M60. He knew how lucky they were to still be alive after throwing a track and then taking a hit in the engine compartment with an RPG.

  Damn, he thought, why can’t I be as lucky with my crew. Nazzi Halaby was the best tank driver he had ever met and it wasn’t his fault the track had come off. But Avner wouldn’t believe it and, as usual, had used the incident to give Halaby hell. Only the tall and lanky gunner, Dave Bielski, had kept the driver and loader from ripping into each other. One of them has got to go, Levy decided. He couldn’t afford to have his crew fighting each other harder than the Syrians. It wasn’t much of a choice, the loader Amos Avner would be the easiest to replace and he would never find another driver like Halaby. Levy did not miss the irony of his decision. He was getting rid of the only Orthodox Jew on his crew and keeping die Druze—an Arab.

  The three Americans were hunched over a light table in the captain’s office at Ramon Air Base studying another set of photos a reconnaissance drone had taken an hour after Matt’s attack on the Syrian headquarters. The high-resolution pictures chronicled the death and destruction the two two-thousand-pound bombs had caused and it reminded Furry of another mission he had flown years before. “Nothing but hot hair, teeth, and eyeballs in there,” he said.

  Gold was going over the photos with a magnifying glass and his face paled. What Furry had said was true and he could see three dismembered, charred bodies. Gold was very vain about his full head of dark hair, beautiful teeth that his parents had spent a small fortune on, and deep brown eyes that women loved. He could see himself in the photos. He shuddered when he realized the two men standing beside him could be so cavalier about the deaths they had caused. The tall colonel’s only flying experience had been in MAC and he had never met the likes of Matt and Furry. Smooth and normal exteriors of the two men masked the rock-hard, highly competitive nature of two professional warriors.

  “I’m going to need the details of all you’ve learned for a report,” Gold said, eager to return to the antiseptic world of reporting intelligence. “There’s a wealth of information here.”

  “I actually learned more on my first flight,” Furry said.

  “You’ve flown twice for the Israelis?” Gold was incredulous as Furry nodded in reply. The air attaché had to fight for his self-control. “No. Don’t say a thing.” He bit his words off in anger. “I’m going to see your ass court-martialed. This is too fucking much. Just who in the hell do you think you are?”

  “What about me?” Matt asked. The colonel spun around to face the young pilot. “Look,” Matt said, “court-martial us both if you want but first, I think you had better find out what we Ve learned.”

  For the next two hours, Matt and Furry briefed the colonel on all that they had observed and done. Furry sketched four pages of diagrams and equations for the colonel on the Gadfly missile and how the Israelis had successfully modified the F-15’s TEWS. At one point, Gold stopped to warn them. “You know all this can be used as evidence against you in court-martial.”

  “So?” Matt answered for both of them. “We’re not going to lie or cover up what we’ve been doing here.”

  “Especially when it can save some other jock,” Furry added.

  The colonel leaned forward over the table, his hands resting on the photos, maps, and diagrams scattered there. “You two don’t have a clue what’s happening, do you?” The two officers were quiet, not following what he was saying. “Because of you two, I have more up-to-date, hard intelligence about the Israelis and their capability than we’ve learned in the previous four years. The information on their hardened bunkers alone is worth an entire squadron of F-Fifteens. Now I have to ask myself why have the Israelis decided to show you two all this? Why is our liaison officer the prettiest, sexiest woman I’ve met here?” In Gold’s world, another type of situational awareness was essential.

  Gold pointed at Matt. “I think the Israelis want to keep you here and would like nothing better than for you to buy it. Think about it, the grandson of the President of the United States killed while flying a mission for the Israeli Air Force. Some headlines.”

  “Then we’ve got to get the hell out of here,” Furry said. “And quick.”

  “Maybe not,” Gold said. “Two can play this game. The price the Israelis pay for you staying here is information, useful information. I’m going to see if I can get you two assigned to my office as official observers with diplomatic status. But no more flying.”

  “Can we learn that much?” Matt asked. “Is it that important?”

  “Oh yeah,” Gold answered. He bowed his head and stared at his hands. “I think Israel is going to get its ass kicked bigtime and the U.S. has got to know exactly what’s going on if we’re going to stop this shitty war.”

  Moshe Levy was standing in his hatch with a death grip on the turret as Halaby hurtled their tank at full throttle up the coastal road. Like most Israeli tank commanders, he preferred to stand in the open hatch because it have him an unrestricted view and to his way of thinking, that was the difference between being a target and a tank commander. It bothered him that during their first three engagements, many of the Syrian tank commanders were doing the same and not buttoning up until the last possible moment. Ahead of them, he could see and hear a battle going on.

  A sharp bump threw him against the hatch ring but his Kevlar flak jacket cushioned the blow. He thought about telling Halaby to slow down to a more reasonable speed but the urgent commands coming over his radio wouldn’t allow that. Levy estimated they were moving at forty miles an hour, much faster than the design speed of the American-built tank. Israeli engineers had modified the tank by increasing the engine’s output from nine hundred to over a thousand horsepower and taking the governor off.

  A bullet ricocheted harmlessly off the front slope of the tank, a good indication they were getting close. Probably a sniper sent out to pick off tank commanders, Levy thought. He estimated the shot came from the front left and swung the machine gun mounted in front of him in that direction. Another ping. Now Levy had the approximate position of the sniper’s hide. He raked the area with a short burst of gunfire. The sergeant did not expect to nail the sniper, he only wanted to drive him to cover until they were past.

  The radio squawked again, telling him to hurry. Even though it was dark, Halaby didn’t slow down. They had been up this road once before and the mix of Halaby’s natural instincts and excellent memory for terrain gave them a decided advantage. Levy was thankful that the loader, Amos Avner, was keeping his mouth shut about the ride. Avner blamed everything that went wrong on Halaby. Levy readjusted his night vision goggles. He hated night operations.

  The action Levy and his crew were joining was part of the “ongoing battle to stem the Syrian advance coming out of Lebanon. The Israelis had been forced to give ground as the Syrians consolidated on the southern bank of the Litani River and launched a southward thrust toward Haifa. But as the Syrian armored units crossed the northern border of Israel, they moved out from under their protective umbrella of SAMs, artillery, and counterbattery fire and ran into the main force of two Israeli armored divisions, fully mobilized, dug in, and determined not to yield another inch.

  Israeli artillery fire had reached out and suppressed the Syrian SAMs, and the Israeli Air Force had at last been able to pound at the advancing tanks. No longer were the Syrians able to keep moving forward but had to contend with Israeli tanks bunkered down in prepared positions and supported by artillery. Israeli infantry had moved into position and dismounted from their APCs, ready to cover their own tanks and take on the advancing Syrians. The Syrians had finally come within the grasp of Israel’s combined arms.

  Slowly, the Syrian advance ground to a halt and the battle swayed back and forth, turning into a slugfest as the two forc
es punched at each other.

  A shielded light blinked at Moshe Levy and the tank commander ordered Halaby to stop. A soldier scrambled up the front of the tank to the turret and quickly gave him directions to his new position, pointing at a map and gesturing to a nearby hill. Then he was gone and Levy told Halaby to leave the road and head for the hill. Near the top, they found a bulldozer scraping away at a little fold in the terrain, turning it into a wide cut that led to the top of the hill. It was a prepared position a tank could hide in. When the combat engineer was satisfied with his work, he backed his bulldozer down the hill and disappeared into the night, heading for another spot to repeat the drill. Halaby nosed the tank down into the fresh cut.

  A man appeared out of the dark and identified himself as their new platoon commander and quickly briefed Levy and his crew on their situation. Before he left, the second lieutenant gave them new tactical frequencies for their radios, their only link beyond the small world of battle that would soon engulf them.

  The radio crackled with commands and Levy recognized the voice of the lieutenant he had just spoken to. Numerous tanks supported by armored personnel carriers were advancing up the slope toward the platoon’s position. Levy counted them lucky that there had been no artillery barrage and spoke into his intercom. “Take her forward, Nazzi. Hull down.” The driver inched the tank forward up the rut. Now the turret was clear of the rut but Levy still could not see over the crest of the hill directly in front of him. The sharp crack of a tank’s main gun to his immediate left deafened him. Incoming whistled over them and exploded behind them on the lower slope.

  “Go to the berm,” Levy ordered. Halaby gunned the engine and shot the tank forward right up to the crest of the hill. The ‘dozer driver had done his work well and now Levy had an unrestricted view of the slope in front of him with only his tank’s turret and half of its hull exposed. Coming up the slope in front of him were at least twelve tanks in a rough V formation with eight or nine tracked armored personnel carriers—Levy identified them as BMPs—spread out among them. The point of the advancing V was off to his left and a Russian-built T-72 tank was twenty-five hundred meters directly in front of them.

  He dropped down into the turret and banged the hatch closed over him, buttoning them up and yelling at the same time. ‘'GUNNER—IMI—TANK FRONT!”

  He had just warned the crew that they were engaging, that he wanted Avner to load with an antiarmor round they called the Imi, and that the target was a tank in front of them. Before he could get his eye to the sight at his position, Avner had rammed a round into the British-designed 105-millimeter gun the Israelis had mounted on the old M60 and the breech had slammed closed. Automatically, Avner moved clear of the recoil and made sure the safety was off.

  “UP!” Avner shouted.

  Less than five seconds had elapsed since Levy had seen the tank. The gunner, Dave Bielski, had reacted on pure instinct and had traversed the turret, aligned the cross hairs of the thermal sight on the tank in front of him, and mashed the laser range finder switch as Avner loaded. He could see the T-72's turret swinging onto them. The computer solved the ballistics problem in milliseconds and aimed the gun. Three quick yells echoed through the tank that sounded like one word, the syllables shouted by a different voice:

  “IDENTIFIED!” (Bielski)—“FIRE!” (Levy)—“ON THE WAY!” (Bielski).

  Little of the gun’s crack-boom penetrated inside the tank, but the heavy recoil served as punctuation.

  “BACK UP!” cried Levy.

  Halaby had the tank in reverse and immediately backed down the ditch to safety. The abrupt motion jammed Levy’s eye against the rubber eyepiece of his sight and he saw the muzzle of the T-72 flash in front of him. It had been a race between the quick and the dead as the Syrians’ shell split the empty air immediately above the hatch. They heard the sharp crack of their shell as it hit home but didn’t see the flash of explosion as the T-72 brewed up. Moshe Levy’s crew may have been torn apart by internal bickering and personal hates, but in combat they were very quick.

  “FORWARD!” Levy yelled. “LOAD AND CARRY IMI!” This time the gun would already be loaded with the best projectile they had for killing another tank. Israeli Military Industries had developed a superlethal, hypervelocity, armor-piercing, fin-stabilized, discarding sabot that could knock out any tank it hit. They called it the Imi for short after its developers.

  Halaby slammed the tank to a halt in the same spot as Bielski slued the turret to the right, in the general direction where he had seen another tank moments before. Again, the commands sounded as one word.

  “GUNNER—IMI—TANK RIGHT!” (Levy)

  “UP!” (Avner—he reconfirmed what he had already loaded)

  “IDENTIFIED!” (Bielski)

  “FIRE!” (Levy)

  “ON THE WAY!” (Bielski)

  Again, they heard a muffled crack-boom followed by a heavy recoil that rocked the tank.

  “BACK UP!”

  Their total exposure time had been less than fifteen seconds and they were still alive. “Not again,” Halaby warned from his steel foxhole in the front of the tank. Levy paused, considering what his driver had just said. In combat, the driver is a microtactician and must constantly be attuned to positioning of the tank. While Levy and Bielski had been preoccupied with firing the gun and killing other tanks, Halaby had been surveying the battlefield and was convinced that the Syrians had them pinpointed and would expect them to pop out of the same hole.

  “Which side?” Levy asked. They were communicating in their own special shorthand and reconsidering their tactical position.

  “To the left,” Halaby said.

  “Do it,” Levy ordered. He could hear Avner grumbling loudly as Halaby backed out of the ditch and back down the hill. Almost instinctively, die driver worked his way back up to the crest in the dark, picking his way over boulders and through a ravine.

  “If he throws a track now …” Avner groused.

  “Shut up,” Levy said. “LOAD AND CARRY IMI!” They were nearing the top and the tank commander obviously expected to take on a tank again. They crested the top of the hill sixty meters from the ditch and again the firing sequence repeated itself. This time, a Russian-built Sagger antitank missile flashed over them as they backed down the hill, paying out the thin wire that guided it. “They were looking for us in our old position,” Levy told Avner. “Halaby just saved our lives.” Avner snorted in disbelief.

  The next few minutes seemed like hours as the tank fought along the crest of the hill, rushing up, taking a quick shot, then backing back down to relative safety on the lee side of the hill, away from battle. The first light of dawn was diffusing through the haze and smoke drifting up the slope when a cease-fire order came over the radio.

  Levy halted the tank at the crest of the hill and scanned the slope through his sight and periscope before he popped the hatch. He had to push a thick patch of crisscrossed Sagger wires off the turret to free the hatch. How many of the missiles had been fired at them? Then he stood up and surveyed the carnage around him. He counted nine burning hulks of T-72 tanks on the slope in front of him and numerous destroyed BMPs. The smell of burning fuel and flesh drifted over him and he wanted to throw up. To his left, he could see two burning Israeli tanks, one a new Israeli-made Merkava and an old M60 like his. No survivors there.

  He keyed the radio, trying to raise the platoon’s lieutenant. Finally, a voice he did not recognize answered. “What happened to the lieutenant?” Levy asked. “I lost contact with him when the Syrians broke through.”

  “Killed,” came the answer. “He led the counterattack. It was touch and go. Say your remaining ammunition and fuel state.”

  “Avner,” he asked over the intercom, “how many rounds do we have left?” Silence greeted him. He glanced down into the turret and saw that both Avner and Bielski were sound asleep. He counted the rounds left in the ammunition locker just behind the breech of the big gun. Four rounds, he thought, and all high-explosive a
ntitank. None of the more desirable Imis, the hypervelocity armor-piercing shells that could kill a T-72 with one hit, was left. It had been a close thing and he wondered if he would have been able to disengage and pull back to reload. The radios had been a madhouse during the battle but he had been able to keep most of it sorted out and follow the action going on around him. “Nazzi,” he called over the intercom, “how much fuel left?” Again silence greeted him. He decided the driver was also asleep. Rather than disturb him, he reported the ammunition he had counted and told headquarters that they were down to their reserve fuel.

  Then Moshe Levy fell asleep, still sitting in the open turret.

  The men surrounding the prime minister were worried, for Ben David had not slept in over seventy-two hours and the strain was telling. His decision-making capability had to be seriously weakened. Still, he seemed fully alert as the latest reports from the north filtered into the command post. The reports from the Northern Command were encouraging and it looked like the Israelis had finally stopped the advance of the Syrian First Army just inside their northern border. One analyst pinpointed problems the Syrians were having with command and control since their command post near die Litani River had been destroyed. Both sides had taken horrendous losses. “I can’t accept much more attrition like that,” Ben David grumbled and immediately asked for the situation on the Golan Heights.

  “Very quiet,” came the immediate reply. “The Syrian Third Army on the Golan is remaining behind its fortifications and not venturing out from under their protective umbrella of SAMs and artillery.” But the news was not all good. “However, we have monitored a forward movement of their SAMs, bridging equipment, and artillery batteries. We think an attack in the Golan is imminent. Probably within twenty-four hours.”

  “And the situation in Jordan?” Ben David asked. For a moment, absolute silence filled the bunker.