The Hasten the Day Trilogy

by Billy Roper

  The smoke was worse the next morning, hanging over the city like a fog. His sinuses made his nose leak and his eyes water. He could feel his asthma start to flare up. Connie decided that she was going to her mother’s, upstate, until the air cleared off. Ben was too sick to care, or to say goodbye when she left. Once she was gone, he wondered how she would get past the traffic jams in every direction out of town, but by then she was already gone, and cell service had been down for a couple of days. He thought he would feel better if he took a shower, but there wasn’t enough water pressure. With his fanny pack of precious metals, his gun, and a rarely used yarmaluke tied over his nose and mouth as an air filter, Ben set off to go check on his mother. The elevators weren’t working, so he had to take the stairs. That nearly caused him to have an attack, right there on the steps.

  Normally it would have been a pleasant walk to her loft in the Flatiron district, but with the smoke and the sirens and the group of black looters breaking in storefront windows as if it wasn’t broad daylight, the neighborhood seemed like a war zone to Ben. He hurried on. The power was off, so somebody had just propped the building door open, since the buzzer wouldn’t work. The climb up the four flights of stairs took a lot out of him. His mom was happy to see Ben, but worried by how winded he was. She had been trying to call him all day, but the phones were down. And the t.v. was just showing the Emergency Broadcast System test pattern, the same thing on every channel. She was scared, and didn’t know what was going on. Ben couldn’t tell her, because for once in his life, he didn’t have all of the answers.

  That night they slept in the living room, with the kitchen table pushed up against the door. Ben hadn’t been able to stop thinking about those looters and the propped open door, downstairs. Around midnight, by his watch and the Hannukah candles his mom had dragged out to light, they heard several shots, close by. The sirens never stopped, they just ebbed and flowed, like a continual tide, until the smoky dawn.

  When the sun had risen over the river higher than the thickest smoke, Ben and his mother packed a rolling suitcase full of canned food. His mom insisted on shoving in the family birth records, a photo album, and her mother’s copy of the Torah. By the time they had reached the ground floor, it was obvious that he would have to carry it most of the way. The streets were eerily empty, and for the first time in days, he couldn’t hear any sirens. There were some random gunshots from uptown, though. Despite his mother’s protests that she had to see her own Rabbi, Ben decided not to chance trying to make it to Congregation Talmud Torah Adereth El. That gave her something to kvetch about besides wondering if her fish were going to be okay and whether she had remembered to lock the door.

  Sporadic looting continued, right as they watched. They tried to act nonchalant and keep travelling in a businesslike manner, but Ben’s mom kept having to stop and rest, almost every block. The Chalmad Loft on 5th Avenue was on fire when they reached the corner, so they hurried to the other side of the street and continued towards the old 16th Street Synagogue. Armed men in long black coats and hats stood across from each other in the broken windowed storefronts of the Baby Gap and Zara’s on the other side of Fifth Avenue. Ben shalomed them until they let them through. They ended up staying at the Yeshiva University, along with over 1,800 other Jews from the East 6th Street and 11th Street congregations, that night, as more trickled in. The School ran out of food on the fourth day. Word soon spread that the Rabbis had a plan to get out of the city, and a reason to do so, if they needed one: Nuclear bombs had gone off in Tel Aviv.

  That set off hours of debating and arguing over whether the rumor was true or not, and what it meant, if it was. Most wanted to disbelieve it. Around dusk the armed guards managed to flag down a NYPD cruiser that was passing by. They simply walked out into 5th Avenue and leveled their rifles at it as it approached the intersection. That was one way to ask an officer for assistance, Ben thought, sardonically. The out of uniform cop had his wife and two kids in the cruiser with him, a trunkful of guns and ammunition, and was headed out of the city. He was able to confirm two pieces of information that he had heard on his radio, however. One Police Plaza had been overrun by mobs the night before, and he considered himself retired. But more important to Ben and his mother, he confirmed that the rumor was true. War had broken out in the Middle East. Israel had been invaded, after an unknown number of nuclear devices had gone off there. The U.S. was unable to respond. Israel was on their own. The last he had heard, a nuclear war had started, from it sounded like.

  Everyone was weeping and wailing and grouchy from being hungry and getting on each other’s nerves too much to make any kind of decision right away, but the next morning everybody had calmed down enough to want to hear what the Rabbi’s plan was. Apparently, the Manhattan Cruise Terminal had been taken over by black looters trying to get off the island. They were burning ships in frustration that they couldn’t make any of them operate. La Guardia and JFK were both closed, and a no fly order in place for the entire Eastern seaboard. The Brooklyn Cruise Terminal at Red Hook, however, was being held by a joint contingent of Mossad and I.D.F. security staff from the Israeli Consulate up by the U.N. complex. About half of the Carnival Splendor’s crew, nearly 500, was on board and just as eager to get the heck out of Dodge as they all were. A platoon of National Guardsmen from Fort Hamilton had been assigned to help hold the terminal, after a flurry of diplomatic maneuvers by the Israeli Ambassador to the U.N., who was also on board already with his family and staff. Ben began to see the plan. His mom was really not going to like the idea of more walking.

  The decision was left up to each family whether they wished to join the Israeli Consular and Ambassadorial contingents and make Aliyah to their stricken holy promised land, or to stay and take their chances in New York. After much prayer and discussion and debate, again, only a couple hundred of the oldest and sickest Jews decided not to try to hike out. It was discussed that a good Jewish boy who worked for the city had rounded up ship pilots for ‘special craft’ to get them down to Red Hook, once they got to the Hudson. That was still too far for some to contemplate schlepping. The rest decided that, without food, they should not wait any longer to leave. Ben thought it was like Moses leaving Egypt, just like the old days.

  It took most of the day, with frequent breaks, but all 1,854 of them proceeded to march down 5th Avenue to NYU, where they had to stop for the night. The younger and stronger ones raided the cafeteria and food court on campus for enough to give everybody something to drink and a snack. That was better than nothing. The next morning, the older Jews and the children were tired, but eventually Ben and the other men coaxed them into hiking again, this time West, to Hudson River Park Pier 40. It was a sight to behold, if anybody had cared to watch, but most people had their own problems preoccupying them, that day. None of them had seen or heard any sign of police since they had left the Yeshiva School. There at the pier, half of them had boarded two tourist paddleboats that barely held that many even with standing room only. Two trips back and forth down the Hudson, each way only taking two hours, and they were all staring up at the huge Carnival Splendor cruise ship in south Brooklyn.

  Ben’s mom complained that standing in line m ade her feel like she was in the Holocaust, all over again. Ben gently reminded her that she hadn’t been conceived until her dad had come home from his service with the U.S. Army’s Judge Advocate General’s office after the Nuremburg trials, and that she had been born in Flushing. She gave him a look that could freeze steam in mid-air, but shut up. The inching forward was tiresome, but the I.D.F. people were checking everybody’s I.D.’s, and only letting non-Jews on board if they were crew or immediate family of crew, or family of Jews. If the passengers were Jewish, that is, if their mothers had been Jewish, then the Israeli ‘Law Of Return’ granted them citizenship, automatically. Ben, who had considered having children with a non-Jewish woman, felt that considering the circumstances, they should just be happy to get whoever they could get. But, that was the way it was. T
hree other lines converged with the tail end of the one they were in, from Synagogues and Jewish Community Centers which had made similar exodus’s to their own. Stragglers from all over the city trickled in. Some were Orthodox by their dress, some were Reform, and others were just discovering their ancestry. Counting the ones who finally walked in, the next day, the 3,000 berth cruise ship was almost full, when they pulled away from the terminal in slow motion. It wasn’t a very dramatic escape, but it made all the difference in the world, to Ben Rosenfeldt.

  Their first day out, they saw hundreds of ships of every type and size leaving the coast, as people made their escape. God knew where they thought they were going, Ben observed. Anywhere must seem better than where they were. His mom got seasick and had to stay in their cabin. While the days passed, though, they saw fewer and fewer boats. They passed the time eating their fill from the ships’ stores and planning their vengeance on the enemies of their people. A week later they had passed through the Mediterranean unmolested and were able to see the ominous smoke rising from the Israeli coastline. They could not land at the Haifa terminal, as it was too close to the occupied zone, and vicious block by block fighting continued there. Luckily, they had the Israeli Consul and Ambassador to the U.N. on board, so they were welcomed at Atlit, nearby.

  With the help of the Aliyah seekers, the Israeli Navy was able to hold onto the Atlit Naval base south of Haifa, which was barely avoiding being completely overrun by the Islamic State forces. Fighting continued in Haifa, and even in Tel Aviv, over an hour away, for several months. Tel Aviv eventually fell, and Israel was reduced to a strip of shore twenty miles long and a couple of miles inland. Ben and his mother and a few dozen others of a more pacifistic bent took up residence in Chateau Pelerin, a medieval Crusader Castle on the grounds of the Atlit base, which was home to Shayetet 13, Israel's naval commando unit. The I.D.F.’s surviving attack submarines patrolled the coastline, protecting the Atlit base, and their home base at the Naval Training Center in the unconquered corner of Haifa. After their enraged flurry of nuclear strikes during the first week of the war, Israel’s quiver was empty, but its enemies could not be sure the snake had been defanged. Operation Samson had destroyed Beirut, Damascus, Cairo, Tripoli, and Amman. Because of that doubt, here at least, the Israelis held on, and schemed to strike back. Most of the Mossad agents in European nations had been arrested and deported by the new nationalistic governments there. The likelihood that Israel would come into the possession of any more nuclear weapons was slim.

  Three Saar class missile corvette ships of the Israeli Navy were visible out there, and probably a sub or two lurked underwater nearby, too, Ben reasoned. He knew that a half dozen patrol boats churned back and forth between Atlit and Haifa constantly, as well. He felt reasonably safe, after nearly three years of not hearing a shot. He had heard all of the stories about the American refugees strapping explosives to their bodies and blowing up I.S. patrols, or taking up suicide sniper positions in Haifa’s ruins. He’d seen with his own eyes thousands of unarmed American Jews running at I.S. machine gun nests a few hundred yards from the base perimeter. During the first year after Cinco Day, over a million foreign born Jewish volunteers had thrown themselves against the Islamic State, pushing them back from the coast between the two bases. Twice that many, as hard as it was to believe, had died trying to hold Tel Aviv, before the capital finally fell.

  The human wave attacks were a thing of the past, at least. Mainly, that was because there weren’t that many volunteers left, and every Jewish life was precious. More precious than a few square feet of ground, even in the holy land, Ben had argued. The current total population of unoccupied Israel stood at around a quarter million Jews. A few more boatloads of Aliyah seekers had come in, from time to time, but never enough to make a real difference. After his mom had passed, he had begun to be more vocal, without her judgemental eyes on him all the time. Trying to make a difference, of his own. He worked the plots of land where compost and sewage had turned sand into vegetables, like everybody did, and joined the work details to earn his keep. He even attended Shabat services every week. That part, she would approve of, at least. He taught economics as an elective at the University of Haifa, not far from the front lines that hadn’t changed in 38 months. Very few students were interested in taking a class they’d never use, though, so he only made the trip twice a week, on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Mainly, Ben spent his free time wandering around in his ancient castle, looking out to sea, and wondering if Connie had ever found what she was looking for. He knew that he hadn’t, not even here in the promised land. A shlekhter sholem iz beser vi a guter krig.

  Chapter Four

  "I fully agree with General Washington, that we must protect this young nation from an insidious influence and impenetration. The menace, gentlemen, is the jews. In whatever country jews have settled in any great number, they have lowered its moral tone; depreciated its commercial integrity; have segregated themselves and have not been assimilated; have sneered at and tried to undermine the Christian religion upon which that nation is founded, by objecting to its restrictions; have built up a state within the state; and when opposed have tried to strangle that country to death financially, as in the case of Spain and Portugal.

  For over 1,700 years, the jews have been bewailing their sad fate in that they have been exiled from their homeland, as they call Palestine. But gentlemen, did the world give it to them in fee simple, they would at once find some reason for not returning. Why? Because they are vampires, and vampires do not live on vampires. They cannot live only among themselves. They must subsist on Christians and other people not of their race.

  If you do not exclude them from these United States, in their Constitution, in less than 200 years they will have swarmed here in such great numbers that they will dominate and devour the land and change our form of government, for which we Americans have shed our blood, given our lives our substance and jeopardized our liberty.

  If you do not exclude them, in less than 200 years our descendants will be working in the fields to furnish them substance, while they will be in the counting houses rubbing their hands. I warn you, gentlemen, if you do not exclude jews for all time, your children will curse you in your graves.

  Jews, gentlemen, are Asiatics, let them be born where they will nor how many generations they are away from Asia, they will never be otherwise. Their ideas do not conform to an American's, and will not even thou they live among us ten generations. A leopard cannot change its spots. jews are Asiatics, are a menace to this country if permitted entrance, and should be excluded by this Constitutional Convention."

  - Benjamin Franklin at the Philadelphia Constitutional Convention of 1787

  There's guns across the river aimin' at ya Lawman on your trail, he'd like to catch ya Bounty hunters, too, they'd like to get ya Billy, they don't like you to be so free…

  John always deferred to General Harrison when it came to military matters. That was the division of Executive powers they had agreed to when the Provisional Government had been enacted, three years ago. The arrangement was…extraConstitutional…but then, so was running on a unicameral system where a mix of civilian and military authority appointed and state legislature elected representatives to act with the powers of both the House and the Senate. For the next seven years, until the scheduled national elections, they just had to make things up as they went along.

  That’s why the four Generals, McNabb and Harrison and Smith and Grace, were still up at three a.m., drawing lines and dates on a large map of the Earth. The Speaker remembered when he’d first come to town, doing the same thing with Kip over a map of just the former U.S.. His world had gotten larger. Now, with a new baby on the way, it had expanded in a different way, too. General Grace coughed and waved away John’s cigarette smoke. “I wish you’d quit those coffin nails before they give you cancer!” the oldest man in the room grumbled. “I don’t see why you need me here anyway. I’m just a rubber stamp. I’ll sign off on whatever yo
u agree to do, you know that.”

  “General, you are nobody’s ‘yes man’,” John assured him. “If I’d thought you were, I wouldn’t have nominated you to be the Secretary of Defense. You’re the only surviving member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. We need your experience in planning a multi-phase operation this huge.” He stubbed out his menthol to placate Gen. Grace. Mark Smith smiled at the gesture.

  “It is gonna be downright global in scope.” Smith observed, looking at the distances involved on the map. “Fuel, food, times of travel…it’s a logistical nightmare. We’re talking a four continent operation, gentlemen.”

  “But it can be done. It will get done.” Harrison said quietly. His scarred finger traced a line from Australia to Africa, and then to Southern Europe. “Let’s take it from the top, step by step. Where are we, at this moment?”

  Unable to resist the opening, Mark dived in: “Why, you’re in McNabb’s shiny marble and oak office in the Old Courthouse, in St. Louie, General. Is it Alzheimer’s time already, Sir?” Gen. Harrison made an obscene gesture at his subordinate.

  “Hey, I resemble that remark”, joked Fred Grace. “But seriously…okay, the Sixth fleet and the Gerald R. Ford are doing rescue and recovery in Hawaii. Ugly business, there. Over the last month the Fifth Fleet, centered on the Eisenhower Carrier Group and their Air Wing, has been anchored in the Indian Ocean off of South Africa.” His voice became all business. The operational air strikes began in Durban, but have expanded to include Cape Town, Maputo, Gaborone, and Bulawayo. The ship to shore line has shelled Port Elizabeth and East London, as well.” Gen. Grace tapped spots along South Africa’s coastline.