The place is too hot to fly.
I’m filing reports, working on my timeline, and logging onto every Hebrew and Arabic political site I can find.
Ben-David’s return to Israel is front-page news. Not only is he the leading climate activist in the Jewish state and in fact the world, and thus the go-to talking head for the mounting eco-catastrophes, but also his involvement in the “LV murders” (called in Israel the Tzadikim Nistarim Killings) makes him above-the-fold fare and clickbait on every site on the web and social media. Among the Haredim, the ultra-Orthodox, this story is the only news.
I pull up a video on Israel Channel KAN 11. It’s Ben-David from two days ago, disembarking at Ben Gurion International. Reporters mob him, frantic to hear what he has to say about the imminent global climate calamity and to learn why he has returned now to Israel. “Are these extreme weather events the result of ‘natural’ phenomena?” a female journalist asks Ben-David. “Or is God’s hand behind them all?”
BEN-DAVID
Trust me, all such distinctions are irrelevant at this point.
The correspondents press Ben-David, demanding to know if the apocalyptic floods and firestorms are “real” or “biblical.”
BEN-DAVID
The concepts of “God” or “the devil” are not necessary to grasp the catastrophe that’s looming. That, the human race has produced all by itself.
The news cuts to insert-video of a massive drilling project amid melting glaciers.
BEN-DAVID
The Greenland ice cap, as we all know, has been functionally eradicated since 2031. What’s there now? A twenty-two-billion-dollar petroleum extraction effort financed by ExxonMobil.
The segment switches back to Ben-David.
BEN-DAVID
Baghdad hit 141˚ Fahrenheit yesterday. In Central Asia, temperatures are being recorded that have not been reached since the Cretaceous Period two and a half million years ago. We’re talking about an extinction-level reordering. Sub-Saharan Africa has virtually emptied out. Twenty-seven million dead in famine and war. Ninety million migrants on the move. The world knows all this. It’s on the news every night. Four hundred thousand are camped at Megiddo, here in Israel, right now, waiting to witness the End of Days. Believe me, we don’t need “God” or “Satan” to see that the curtain is coming down.
Our plane finally appears at dawn of the third day. After a six-hour delay due to atmospheric instability, Manning and I take off at last, but are compelled by a “weather anomaly” to set down barely three hours later at Narsarsuaq Airport in Greenland.
There we witness, on a scale even more dispiriting than Ben-David’s description, the harbor-, housing-, and road-construction operations of the ExxonMobil drilling enterprise preparatory to tapping the petroleum deposits beneath the vanished ice. Tens of thousands of roughnecks are pouring in to work this new field. Temperature in April is 93° Fahrenheit, twenty degrees above records from a decade earlier. Up this close to the Arctic Circle you can see the carbon accumulation in the upper atmosphere. It looks like a dirty windshield.
The jet stream as well looks and feels different at this latitude. It’s gray-brown. You can see it. West-to-east tailwinds that used to add 50–150 knots to a liner’s airspeed now jack it up by 350. Planes don’t even try to buck headwinds. Permitted altitude maxes out at twenty-four thousand feet. Rides are rough, and the abuse passengers take from eco-demonstrators for contributing to upper-atmosphere destabilization is worse. Protests are permanent outside every airport. Passengers are assaulted with stones and bottles, even bags of excrement.
FLYING IS EARTH DYING
PLEASE . . . CRASH
Narsarsuaq Airport had been until eighteen months ago, we are told, nothing more than a pit stop for private jets and an emergency landing field for commercial liners, with no passenger facilities beyond restrooms and a snack bar. Now it’s the third-largest airfield in the world. Bulldozers and earthmovers are everywhere. Diesel stink saturates the air. While we lay over, I grab my laptop and camp directly under the Wi-Fi hub.
Finally we get through on WhatsApp to Ben-David.
MANNING
Where are you, Amos? Are you safe?
BEN-DAVID
I’ve got a battalion of paratroopers around me. Does that ease your mind?
To Manning’s concern about Rachel, Ben-David replies, “She’s here. She’s fine. There’s nothing to worry about.”
Finally with a web connection, I continue my search for Instancer. I spend the full delay running passenger queries for every Mideast-bound commercial, private, charter, and fractional flight out of East Coast fields including New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, and Newfoundland.
MANNING
You’re wasting your time, Dewey. Instancer probably passed us half an hour ago. Without an airplane.
Airborne again, I settle in and scan channels for the latest. The top two stories on Israel KAN 11 are migrant wars on the Egyptian border—armed clashes at the Gaza towns of Rafah and Khan Younis—and water riots in Jerusalem.
Coach on El Al is not bad. Because it’s international and overwater, the seats have legroom. You get a pillow and a blanket. When you order a drink, it comes in a real glass.
My seatmate (the best I could get for Manning is across the aisle) is a female ER physician from Medicine Hat, Alberta. She’s part of a travel contingent of twenty-four, seated in a block between rows fourteen and seventeen. Their society is called the Sovereign Light Brethren. The party is bound for Jerusalem, she tells me in a voice fizzing with good cheer, anticipating Christ’s return and the initiation of the Rapture.
SEATMATE
Did you hear? Our plane is the last into Tel Aviv. No more after us. Ben Gurion Airport has become unusable. Ground-level winds are too strong.
According to my new friend, more than two hundred thousand pilgrims are gathered already in camps in the Kidron Valley and on the western slopes of the Mount of Olives, overlooking the Old City of Jerusalem. Hundreds have perished from heat, thirst, and sickness, she says. Still the believers keep coming, driven by the mounting environmental catastrophes and the belief that the hand of the Almighty is behind them. My seatmate shows me pix of the tent city where her group will be quartered. The place looks like Andersonville. But the lady’s eyes shine.
Conditions are worse at Megiddo, she tells me, where nearly half a million have congregated in heat that hits 120° every day. I’ve already researched this in detail. Video of the site shows a tent-and-RV camp that sprawls for miles in all directions.
SEATMATE
They’ve been there, some of them, for four and half years.
I cue up for her a YouTube clip from one of Ben-David’s TED talks:
BEN-DAVID
The world doesn’t end like a Hollywood movie. We’ve been conditioned to imagine an isolated singularity, one cataclysmic calamity like the asteroid cloud that killed off the dinosaurs. The slow-motion extinction we’re witnessing now is far closer to how the process is actually unfolding. A million deaths at a time, five million, ten million. In the last fourteen days twenty million have perished. In eighteen months, a hundred and ninety million. This is how the world ends. It’s not “going to happen.” It is happening.
26
PARATROOPERS
FORTY-FIVE MINUTES LATER, our 797 is on the ground and Manning is clashing with a new antagonist.
A few minutes before landing, the aircraft’s first officer had hiked back from the cockpit to deliver a message, received on the plane’s secure radio and passed now to Manning as a handwritten note.
Manning,
Upon deplaning, you will be met by Lt. Dana Peled.
She is the operations officer of the reserve paratroop battalion
that I command. Lt. Peled will expedite your passage through Security and Customs and will transport you to my location.
B-D.
MANNING
What is this bullshit?
Manning
thanks the first officer but he’s furious. He hands me the note. I can feel the heat radiating from his shoulders.
Indeed Lieutenant Peled is waiting for us at the mouth of the jetway, accompanied by a male soldier, a sergeant. She’s a tall, attractive brunette with long hair pulled tight into a bun beneath her paratrooper’s red beret. She welcomes us (the male sergeant, named Giora, has brought bottled water and trail mix) and apologizes for Major Ben-David’s absence.
Lieutenant Peled’s orders are to take us to Ben-David without delay. She has three Humvees waiting outside. Expect a trip, she says, of about two and a half hours. When I address her as “Lieutenant,” she says, “Please call me Dana [pronounced DAH-na].” Her garb is red boots, khaki trousers, and shirt. Over her shoulder, on a sling, she carries a folding-stock Uzi.
MANNING
I don’t mean to be rude, Dana. But where the fuck is Ben-David? He was supposed to meet us here.
DANA
My apologies, sir. Major Ben-David is with our battalion at a place called Ein Gedi on the Dead Sea.
Manning strides beside Dana into the terminal.
MANNING
What has Ben-David told you? Do you have any idea why my partner and I have come from the States?
DANA
Sir, Major Ben-David is assembling tech gear for the Emergency Eco-Conference in Cyprus in six days. He’s under orders too.
MANNING
In other words, you know nothing?
DANA
About what, sir?
Despite his anger, Manning’s expression softens toward the lieutenant. She’s protecting her superior. She’s a good officer.
MANNING
Who’s with Ben-David now? Is his sister there? Are there soldiers around him? Is he secure?
Dana confirms that Rabbi Rachel Davidson has arrived at the battalion’s location. She is sharing quarters with her brother, Major Ben-David.
DANA
I assure you, sir, he’s as safe as the Pope.
Manning’s anger relents. Dana’s defensive posture abates as well. Dana explains that their battalion is a reserve formation, activated only ten days ago for the climate crisis and the migrant emergencies.
Apparently every Jewish male in Israel under the age of forty serves in one reserve unit or another. The entire country is an army and has been since its founding in 1948.
Dana indicates the direction to Baggage Claim. She makes it a point to stride in step with Manning.
DANA
Sir, if you’ll forgive me for asking . . . what happened to your face?
Manning’s jaw and forehead are still blue-black and puffy from his encounter with Instancer.
MANNING
Someone pushed it through a wall.
DANA
The reason I ask is Major Ben-David’s face looks the same.
MANNING
Same someone.
Manning and I collect our bags. The party troops out toward the Hummers. The airport’s plate-glass windows have been boarded up with heavy plywood—not against terrorists, Dana informs us, but because the glass keeps getting blown in by the wind. The terminal itself is an indoor dust bowl. My tongue is coated already with acrid grit. “What is that taste?” I ask Giora, the male sergeant.
“Air,” he says.
“There’s some good news,” says Dana as we stride past the security line. She declares that Israeli-Palestinian relations have progressed over the past two years from “cordial” (her word) to “fraternal” and now even “communal.”
DANA
The end of the world will do that for you.
We step outside into an atmosphere only a few degrees shy of combustion. I actually stop. I can’t believe how hot it is.
Dana, who seems to take the furnace blast in stride, is telling Manning that she realizes he and I are jet-lagged. She advises us strongly to remain awake till our normal bedtimes. We’ll adjust faster that way. Priority one from this moment, Dana says, is hydration. She will be monitoring us and enforcing compliance.
DANA
Carry a minimum of two quarts at all times. If you must choose between a weapon and water, take water.
Our Humvees wait at the curb under the guard of four other paratroopers. The vehicles are dun-colored, desert-camouflaged. All three are armored and topped by turrets mounting .50-caliber machine guns.
A male sergeant standing by one of the Humvees holds up the vehicle’s radio handset and calls something to Dana in Hebrew.
Ben-David is on the line for Manning.
Manning takes the phone.
Ben-David apologizes for being unable to meet Manning at the airport in person. He promises to make up for it. He tells Manning he has ordered Dana to stop en route at an IDF armory.
BEN-DAVID
It’s a candy store. Take anything you want.
Exiting passengers flow past our little convoy, heading for taxis, Ubers, and shuttles. I can’t stop my eyes from searching every face and shadow.
Manning catches me.
MANNING
He’s here. I feel him.
27
ZOMBIE KILLERS
ON THE WAY TO EIN GEDI, we stop as promised at an IDF armory at a satellite base in a suburb called Ramat Gan. The site is a converted high school. Israeli-made Merkava battle tanks are parked in rows under camo covers on what used to be the soccer field. The tanks are not for war, Dana says, but to control migrant clashes and civilian water riots.
The armory itself, the locked and guarded weapons repository, is down two flights in a bombproof bunker.
We prowl, watched over by military police, through locked-down rows of assault rifles, heavy and light machine guns, even vehicle-mountable anti-tank and antiaircraft systems.
Manning inquires of Dana what Ben-David has told her of our weapons requirements.
DANA
He said to equip you for fighting in tunnels.
The armory commander appears. He’s a stocky fellow, about thirty, with a shaved skull topped by a knit kippah, a skullcap, that he somehow manages to keep in place even when he bends over. He greets Manning with a handshake and me with a curt bow.
ARMORY COMMANDER
You were not here. You saw nothing.
The commander leads Manning and me behind a security partition and down an additional flight of stairs. We pass through another secure door and cross another floor stacked with weaponry.
The commander stops before a brown steel case about the size of a steamer trunk. He opens it with an electronic code. The Hebrew name for the IDF is Zahal. It’s an acronym, the commander says, that simply means “Israel Defense Forces.” The case is stencil-marked in Hebrew and English.
ZAHAL
XT1—SF/AV–AP
The final letters, the commander says, mean “Shoulder-Fired/Anti-Vehicle–Anti-Personnel.”
Three weapons nest in the case. The commander removes one. It looks like a stubby, fat RPG.
ARMORY COMMANDER
Follow me, please.
The commander leads us down another flight of stairs to an underground firing range. The weapon, he tells Manning, is called in Hebrew machabi, “Maccabee,” but is referred to more commonly as a “tunnel-buster.” Fans blow air. Temperature becomes cool.
ARMORY COMMANDER
These weapons were developed during the fifth and sixth Hamas Wars. The warhead is concussive only. It explodes in a manner similar to a shaped charge, that is, in one direction only, but the blast is concentrated not into a tiny area but dispersed across a wide and high front.
The commander holds the weapon out before Manning.
ARMORY COMMANDER
Would you like to try it?
A range attendant outfits Manning with a helmet, protective glasses, and noise-canceling earmuffs. All of us are issued the same. We are escorted into a sound-insulated, fireproof bunker. The range is visible through a slit of six-inch protective glass.
The range simulates an infiltration tunn
el. Pop-up silhouettes of enemy fighters rise at various distances. In the center of the tunnel at about seventy-five feet squats a Studebaker Lark, the real thing, an old clunker sedan from the sixties.
The range security officer demonstrates how to seat the weapon properly atop the right shoulder. He guides Manning into the proper firing stance. The armory commander indicates two safeties, which Manning unlocks with care, and the trigger, enclosed within a pistol-type grip.
RANGE SECURITY OFFICER
There’s no sight. You don’t need one. A blind man could fire this thing.
He tells Manning not to be concerned about recoil. The rocket-propelled projectile whooshes from the tube under its own power. The weapon’s kick is less than that of a twelve-gauge shotgun.
I’m in the bunker, watching through the armorglass. The commander and range officer step inside this shelter as well. I glance to Dana. She’s grinning, securing her ear protection tight to her head.
The range officer signs, Ready.
Security lights on the firing line turn from red to green.
Manning fires.
The projectile leaps from the tube like a round from a bazooka, spewing a fiery plume rearward. The warhead detonates like a sonic boom. The whole underground structure shudders. I feel the air sucked from my lungs. I nearly keel over.
Overhead lamps blaze in the tunnel. Powerful recessed fans suck the grit and debris clear. The commander and range officer step out from the bunker and cross to Manning on the firing line. Manning has tugged his ear protectors off. His face is black everywhere except where the goggles shielded his eyes.
Little by little, the tunnel becomes clear of dust.
36 Righteous Men Page 18