Birthright

by Alan Gold

  Something so small, yet inside a fuel truck it would radiate out to cause immense damage. These thoughts stayed with him as he thought about what would happen on the tarmac of the airfield.

  His fingers slowly and dexterously felt around the explosive for the switch. It was rudimentary, just a break connector that would join two wires and begin a clock countdown. He’d always been told the best bombs were simple. He pressed his finger against the switch, felt its resistance, then pushed and felt a distinct click.

  Two minutes. Not long, but enough.

  From around his neck, Shalman loosened a thin wool scarf and, looping it around the steering wheel, tied the other end to the thick door handle and pulled it tight so the wheel would not turn either way. Satisfied the truck would hold its course, he eased his foot off the accelerator and leaned down awkwardly to feel the brick on the floor. He maneuvered the brick into position to lean against the pedal, maintaining the pressure to keep the truck moving forward, inexorably, slowly, and aimed squarely at the aircraft.

  Shalman had no idea whether the bomb would explode before or after the truck crashed into the plane, but that didn’t matter. It was full of fuel, and there was no way the British could stop it. Double-checking that the truck was driving itself on the right course, Shalman opened the driver’s door and jumped out on the tarmac. The driver’s door faced away from the soldiers on the airstrip, and he was reasonably certain nobody would see him or the truck until it entered the umbra of the lights surrounding the aircraft.

  His feet hit the ground and he rolled as he’d been trained, taking the impact and momentum in the tumble. The truck was moving slowly, but still the force of the jump blew the air from his lungs, and as he came to a crouch in the thin, long grass by the side of the airstrip, he struggled to find his breath.

  Shalman flattened himself further and lay stationary, watching. He took a small pair of binoculars from a pouch at his waist and adjusted the screw until he could see the underside of the plane clearly. There were four British soldiers standing underneath the plane, smoking and chatting. He couldn’t quite see who and shifted the lens to find the other figure. The truck rolled closer. Any minute now one of the soldiers would see the truck and become concerned that it was not slowing. Shalman continued to look through the binoculars, taking in each of the men. He remembered Dov’s words, “No civilians, just hardware.” In that moment he realized Dov’s play on words. Shalman had accepted blowing up a plane but not four soldiers, and his heart sank as he breathed out slowly. Soldiers, not civilians.

  And then he saw the boy.

  A short boy, his distinctly Arab clothes and dark skin visible through the binoculars under the lights of the airfield. Shalman was overcome with dread as he watched the boy hold up a jerry can. One of the soldiers seemed to be laughing with him and patted him on the head. The boy was asking for fuel.

  Shalman had no idea who the boy was, no sense of where he came from, but the simple act forced his mind to race through a narrative—the son of a local farmer, sent to the airfield to scrounge for scarce fuel, a boy known to the soldiers, a familiar face.

  Shalman wanted to scream to the boy to run. He never intended for anyone to get hurt, just for the plane to be destroyed, as the orders stated. But because the soldiers were laughing and joking with the boy, they hadn’t noticed the truck moving quietly toward them, shrouded in the darkness of the airfield, its cabin empty, the bomb’s mechanism slowly moving forward in time and space, on a collision course with the plane.

  Shalman watched in horror. The only way for them to escape would be for Shalman to shout a warning. But he couldn’t bring the cry to his lips. He half stood in a crouch and moved to run away from the tarmac. But he felt compelled to turn back and watch. He raised the binoculars once more. The idiots still hadn’t heard the truck. It was now so close, they surely must—

  But it was all too late.

  Shalman turned and ran toward the outskirts of the airfield. There was only a rudimentary barrier, and it was easy for him to climb over. As he slipped to the other side of the fence, Shalman looked up once more to the distant aircraft. The truck had almost arrived at the target. It had veered slightly to the left but would still collide with the right-hand wheel of the massive undercarriage. It was then that the British Tommies noticed the truck coming toward them without lights, and they began to shout.

  The soldiers scattered away from the plane to protect themselves. The Arab boy was just staring, transfixed, rooted to the spot. Shalman screamed out, “Move!” in Arabic, though he knew he couldn’t be heard from such a distance.

  The British soldier farthest away raised his rifle and began firing into the cabin of the truck. It must have been an instinctive reaction, because all he accomplished was to shatter the windshield and side windows. And then the truck careened into the wheels of the undercarriage, at the same time as the timing mechanism of the bomb counted down to zero. A massive ball of flame erupted out of the truck’s cabin. The momentary inferno spread to the cargo of fuel, exploding with an almighty boom, lighting up the entire airfield, the hangars, the control buildings, and the periphery where Shalman was standing.

  He couldn’t see, but he knew that the fireball had engulfed not just the plane and the truck but the young Arab boy and almost certainly some of the soldiers. He screamed, “NO!” at the top of his voice, but nobody was listening.

  The heat from the explosion hit him and he smelled the heavy, greasy stench of the kerosene. The plane was on fire, and the remaining fuel in its tanks exploded, adding a second fireball to the sky.

  His only thought now was escape, so he turned and ran.

  With the explosion and flame behind him, Shalman’s feet carried him across the grass to where he’d left his bicycle, his only means of escape. As he pedaled furiously away, he saw in his mind’s eye the body of a young Arab child, alight in a pyre of aircraft fuel.

  Jerusalem

  1947

  SHALMAN NOW COUNTED the times of happiness in the house in terms of hours rather than days. He looked at his wife, Judit—beautiful, confident, and calm—and knew that things had changed for them both.

  Since he had come back from the archaeological site with Mustafa, the change in Judit had been subtle yet noticeable. Something had happened to her, and the more she brushed aside his concerns, the deeper they grew. What he had always seen as a deep calm in her now struck him as a certain coldness. She seemed driven and focused in a way he couldn’t understand. And at night she disappeared, returning sometimes by dawn and at other times not for days.

  He loved her still with all his heart and ached for the Judit he’d married only a couple of years ago. Yet he knew that they were growing apart. For he had changed, too. They no longer spoke of Lehi and their objectives. Shalman assumed Judit knew about the mission to destroy the airfield, but she never asked about it, and he never spoke to her of the young Arab boy engulfed in flame. And he never asked where she went or what she did in the dark hours of night. When she first disappeared in the evenings, or for a few days, he’d asked, indeed demanded, to know, but she was evasive and told him that these matters went to Lehi’s secrecy. So he stopped asking and bore resentment at their growing isolation. The house was filled with silence broken only by the occasional tears and tantrums of their daughter, Vered.

  It was this that hurt Shalman the most. Was whatever grand objective or cause she was undertaking more important than being a mother?

  Their beautiful Vered’s attachment was almost exclusively to Shalman. He was mother and father and entire family to their daughter. He fed her, read to her, dressed her, nurtured her. When Judit was in the apartment, she would play with Vered, but even the little girl clearly sensed that her mother’s mind was elsewhere and would seek her father instead. Shalman would watch as Judit asked Vered what she’d like to do, and the child would look at her father for permission. It was heartbreaking.

  He confronted his wife one night in their bed. “Something
has changed in you, Judit.”

  She scoffed and rolled away from him to face the wall.

  “Is the fight so great that it’s more important than your family?”

  “The world is bigger than just this apartment, Shalman. Bigger than just this family,” she said in a detached voice.

  “What does that mean? Where do you go at night? What do you do?”

  At this, Judit fiercely rolled back to face Shalman. “What must be done, Shalman. I do what must be done.”

  “What you need to do is be here, with us, with Vered!”

  Shalman’s voice had strengthened in volume, and as the walls were thin, Judit replied with a harsh whisper. “And what of you and your expeditions into the past? Digging in the dirt—for what? What happened to you out there? The Arabs want you dead, and the British grind you under their heels, and yet you’re scrounging around caves with an Arab!”

  “He saved my life,” said Shalman flatly.

  Judit tilted her head and raised an eyebrow. It was a look that once upon a time he found so alluring. Now it just seemed jaded.

  “If it wasn’t for him, I’d be dead.”

  “So it’s guilt. You spend time with this Arab because you feel guilty?”

  “No!” Shalman had raised his voice again but quickly lowered it. “No. It’s feeling indebted. It’s a debt I can repay.”

  “How?”

  “I’m teaching him. What I’ve learned at the university. I’m teaching him.”

  “So he can be an archaeologist like you? You have to be kidding me, Shalman! If there is to be a nation of Israel, it will need builders, workers, engineers, not people who play in the dirt looking at an irrelevant past.”

  At other times there would have been so much to say, so much to argue, but Shalman had not the words or strength.

  “You’re more interested in the fight than you are in your family. We’re almost there, Judit. Israel will soon be declared a new nation. Can’t you come back home and be a wife and a mother again?”

  “And when Israel is declared, you think there’ll be doves of peace flying through rainbows in the sky? Don’t be naive, Shalman. When Israel is declared, war will follow. Your Arab friend will quickly be your enemy. Where will you stand then?”

  “And what of you, Judit?” Shalman shot back. “Where will you stand? You fight for Lehi, but I know your heart. I know there is something else in you. Who do you really fight for? I’ve seen you when you’re with people from Russia and the way you speak of Moscow and Stalin with nostalgia. Sometimes I think you’d prefer to be back there than here.”

  Judit suddenly sat up. “How could you say that? Have you any idea what those Russian bastards—”

  “What else can I say? It’s like I don’t even know who you are anymore. I’m not sure I ever did.”

  Judit’s face showed no emotion. But inside, she trembled. She looked at her husband, a man who lived his life with a transparency she didn’t have and never would. He said what was on his mind; she said what she had been taught to say to avoid telling the truth.

  She remembered her mother, brutalized by a drunken and violent husband; her own life as a child, always in fear; then Beria and Anastasia and the power they had given her over her life. They made her capable of anything, and the fear of being that girl under the table again had hardened her.

  “There’s so much I want to tell you, Shalman. But I can’t.”

  Peterhof, the Palace of Peter the Great

  Leningrad, Russia

  October 1947

  RUBBLE-STREWN, DILAPIDATED, LITERALLY a shell of its former self, Peterhof, the once proud summer palace of Tsar Peter the Great, somehow remained standing. Despite the attempts by the Nazis to destroy all that wasn’t German, and despite the cost of tens of millions dead, Mother Russia had triumphed over the Germans.

  Since his incarceration as a rabble-rouser in Landsberg Castle, since his rise to chancellor, and since his Nuremberg speeches spitting hatred, Adolf Hitler had defined any race east of Germany as subhuman: the Slavs, the Russians, the Asiatics. Not the Japanese, who were useful allies in the war; but Stalin often speculated how long it would have been before the madman Hitler tried to exterminate them, had he won.

  It was only during the relative equanimity of the opening months of the war, when the pact between Germany and Russia held fast, that the Nazi leader refrained from defining the Russians as subhumans. But since he’d instigated Operation Barbarossa and invaded Russia, laying a murderous siege to Leningrad and a scorched-earth policy in the rest of the western territory of the nation, his visceral hatred of everything that wasn’t Hunnish and German had been evident to all.

  It had taken years and the bodies of more than twenty million Russians, but the invading German armies had been repelled. From that time, the might of the Soviet army had slowly ground down Nazi Germany. Despite the victory, the pride of Russia’s greatness had been badly damaged, and Stalin had promised himself that the palaces that once belonged to the privileged classes would be rebuilt and used as Soviet offices and for museums. One of the most pressing was the palace that Peter the Great had built for himself, over the water from Leningrad on the shores of the Gulf of Finland.

  For two hundred and fifty years, Peterhof had been the honored sentinel of Russian magnificence, positioned as the entryway to Leningrad and from there to the rest of the nation. Its restoration would be a symbol of Russia’s reestablished place in the world.

  Yesterday a thousand workers had been feverishly hammering and sawing and screwing and building and repairing, clambering over the walls and gardens like a frenetic nest of ants. Today only two men stood in the long garden, viewing the damage from the seawall, slowly walking up the vast lawns, lakes, and canals toward the distant bombed- and burned-out palace that stood sorrowfully on the high hill. A hundred guards were strategically placed out of sight in the woods, ensuring the safety of the two most important people in Russia—comrades Stalin and Beria.

  The two men inspected the rebuilding work, taking in the devastation. They walked from the sea to the remnants of the palace as though they were the only people on the land.

  Stalin spat a globule of phlegm on the ground as if that were all that needed to be said of Hitler and the destruction he had wrought.

  The two men continued to walk along the long gardens toward the wreck of the palace.

  “When will this be ready?” Stalin asked quietly.

  “We hope in a year or two. It will be restored, and then we’ll use it as an administrative center for Leningrad.”

  “And the other matter?”

  Always wary, Beria didn’t want to ask what particular matter, but searched his mind for recent conversations so that he didn’t give the wrong answer. “It’s going according to plan,” he said, stretching out the conversation so that a clue might reveal what was in Stalin’s mind.

  “And is the group achieving its aim?”

  Beria still had no specific clue. Of all the myriad plans they had in place, not least the growing difficulty of tensions with the Americans in Berlin, he had no idea what Stalin was talking about.

  The Supreme Leader of all of Russia turned and looked at his second in command. “It has been some years now since they left for Palestine.”

  At last, the clue he needed. Beria’s agile mind slipped into gear. “The natural leader is the Jewess Judita Ludmilla. She’s about to take command.”

  “Is it wise for a Jew to take over a leadership position?”

  Beria thought for a moment, so that it appeared he was considering the great man’s question with utmost precision. “In this one isolated case, comrade, it is wise. This will be the land of the Jew, and to have a non-Jew in control would look and feel wrong. It would raise suspicions.”

  Stalin nodded. They continued toward the palace. “This girl. Will she achieve the objectives of Operation Outgrowth? Much depends on it. The discussion about the future of Palestine will soon be taken up at the United Nation
s. She and the other agents must be ready. When it comes to a decision, we will vote for the partition of Palestine into an Arab state and a Jewish state. And she and the other agents will be our puppets, yes?”

  “Yes, Secretary General. But there are those in Palestine—Jews, of course—who are showing some signs of resistance and leaning toward British and American interests. So strategic targets are currently being selected for extermination. Once their voices are silenced, then the road will be clear.”

  “And do you think this girl is capable of turning the Jewish population in our direction?”

  “Alone, no, Comrade Secretary General. But she has a number of highly trained agents under her, and we are keeping our eye very carefully trained on her. Her handler, Anastasia Bistrzhitska, has been moved to our mission in Jerusalem in order to coordinate the operation. She was one of our top people in Washington, and I ordered her back to be in charge of training the Jews for this mission. She’s done an excellent job.”

  They reached the hill that rose toward the shell of Peterhof Palace. “Good,” said Stalin. “Very good. And who knows, maybe I can get the Jews and the Muslims to love each other. They once did, you know, Lavrentiy Pavlovich. A thousand years ago, in Baghdad. Now let’s see what damage those Nazi bastards did to my building.”

  Acre, north of Haifa

  1947

  THEY ARRIVED AT different times and on different days. They stayed in different boardinghouses, some in cheap dockside hotels, some with sympathetic supporters, and some in lodgings as though they were students here to visit the antiquities of the city. By design, some spoke Hebrew, some French, some Russian, some Yiddish, and some German. They went unnoticed by British security.

  Also by design, thirty-four freedom fighters from the combined Irgun and Lehi forces gathered in order to break their comrades out of one of the most impregnable citadels in the Middle East.