Chariots on the Highway

by Limor Moyal

  He left the room, closed the door and advanced towards the last opening, the one at the end of the hall.

  The voices that came from inside the room made it clear to him that he had reached the final station. According to his calculations, that was the room in which Abu-Mustafa and his guards weresupposed to be in. The room he assumed was connected to the balcony that they’d seen.

  Without any back up, Tom knew he was facing a suicide mission. He took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and saw Dan smiling at him, his blue eyes looked at him with such pride, “I'm sorry, my love. I know that what I'm about to do is completely insane, but you know I have to do this! I hope you’ll be proud of me, and forgive me, I love you!” he whispered quietly in his heart.

  One last breath, eyes open, pupils dilated, beating pulse filling his whole body with adrenaline. Tom clung to the corner, opened the door to peek through, pulled out a grenade and threw it to the center of the room, without looking in and without pulling the pin out. He waited for a few seconds, charged inside, rifle at the front, eye on sight, a quick scan, and he saw a terrorist still staring with panic at the locked grenade. Tom fired a shot at the target’s center and took him down. He kept scanning, another terrorist looking at the grenade started pointing his AK-47 at him. Tom fired two rounds from the hip, and without thinking twice, advanced towards the center of the room while shooting at the close corner.

  A burst of fire by-passed his right shoulder and he sprawled on the ground and shot two more rounds at the figure that hid behind the corner.

  An ‘Allah Hu Akbar!' shout reminded him that it wasn’t over yet. He turned around, pulled the trigger only to come to a block, every fighter’s fear! Just another pull, one after another, made him realize his magazine was empty. He automatically sent his hand towards his vest to pull another one, but it was too late, the figure that came out of nowhere swung a dagger at Tom. He managed to put up his rifle as a block and fell to the floor. The hand holding the knife rose up, Tom laid on the ground, and he turned his legs towards the figure and started pushing him away. His left hand was feeling for a magazine and found one. He took it out of the vest and kicked the figure twice. With a swift motion, he took out the empty magazine and loaded the full one. He stabilized on the floor, knees spread open, two hands holding his gun straightened forward and firing two shots to the attacker’s chest. The man fell to the floor.

  He took heavy breaths, trying to recover from the rush. He was having trouble breathing because of the adrenaline pumping in his veins.

  No coherent thought. It was simply skill and muscle memory that had saved him at the last second. He looked once more to make sure there were no attackers. Finding none, he gave silent thanks for all the training, blood and tears he’d shed during his military course. If it weren’t for those skills, he would’ve surely been dead nine times by now, in a fight that probably took only a minute or less.

  He stood up, still breathing heavily, and did a quick scan. Four bodies were laying on the floor. The darkness didn’t allow him to see their faces, and some of them were wearing kaffiyahs. He quickly ran back to the hallway and shouted to Eitan, “Eitan? Are you okay man?”

  “I'm here, you dickhead! Did you think I kicked it already?”

  When he came near Eitan, he realized it wasn’t good. Eitan was pale as a ghost, laying on his side in a puddle of blood and having trouble moving. “What’s up, man? Where does it hurt? Talk to me!” Tom leaned over him and pulled out his own health kit, preparing himself for the damage he was about to discover under Eitan's blood-stained uniform.

  “Nothing! Just shrapnel,” Eitan answered weakly.

  Tom checked him and recognized the entry wound on the front of his thigh, “I can’t find an exit wound,” he said with worry.

  “Check carefully.”

  Tom took Eitan’s pants and underwear off and left him naked.

  He started scanning the leg inch by inch, and then he saw it, “Found it! Congratulations! You got two assholes, one you were born with, and a fresh one from today!” Tom happily stated. He was relieved to see the exit wound, and knowing that the risk of Eitan insides being a mess were reduced dramatically with that fact.

  “You’re the asshole expert,” Eitan winked.

  Tom put his personal bandage against the wound and dressed it, “If you can still laugh, fucker, there’s no reason you can’t snipe a few shithead terrorists. Come on, soldier, on your feet! We’re going up,” said Tom and helped Eitan to stand up and slowly limp up the stairs. They crossed the hallway, walked by the room in which the fight took place.

  Eitan saw the bodies around him, “Good job, ‘Rambo’!” he said to Tom.

  They advanced to the balcony Abu-Mustafa had been standing on earlier, the same balcony which was a great observation point over the entire battle area.

  Down in the street, they saw three dead soldiers, laying in between the houses, and they both shrunk with grief, but didn’t say a word. Hundreds of people from the village gathered around, trying to get their hands on the bodies.

  Tom recognized a sporadic shooting out of one of the houses in the alley, a shooting that told him that there were team mates trapped and fortified, and in the moment they ran out of ammo, they’d be goners. He recognized that these were the last slim shots, shots preventing the fight’s foreseen and terrifying end. They counted the last ammo they had left, counting the last moments they would be alive.

  Tom started collecting all the grenades from both him and Eitan into a pile. He took his radio and opened a long range channel, “This is ‘Pride’. Are the chariots in position? Requesting immediate artillery cover, over!”

  He waited, and the agonizing static turn into speech. “This is command to ‘Pride’. Chariots are in position, ready to fire in three minutes, waiting for coordinates for artillery. Over.”

  Tom took a breath of relief when the tanks arrived and he approached the grenade pile. He started throwing grenades with skill and precision, one after another. He was the pitcher of his high-school baseball team, but he never imagined that this skill would serve him in a life or death situation. The grenades hit with amazing precision. Straight into the terrorist’s Toyotas that were firing on the structure in which the rest of team was hiding. The explosions made both vehicles burst into flames, and the shooting from them stopped.

  Throwing the grenades gave away Tom and Eitan’s position and they started taking fire, they dodged and kept attacking.

  Tom threw a few more grenades to the trench where a few terrorists were hiding, planning to charge at the team’s hiding place. The strong explosions did their job. The damage the grenades made down there confused and scared the fiery riot, and many of the villagers started to flee in all directions, “Eitan! The stage is yours! Start playing your magic instrument!” yelled Tom while shooting bursts downwards at whoever was coming towards the fortified structure.

  That was Eitan’s signal to start doing his thing. He positioned his sniper rifle and started shooting. The first to go were two terrorists holding big machine guns and shooting at the balcony. From there, Eitan went on to the armed guys walking towards the fortified team. He stopped shooting and sent the coordinates to the tanks, which were ready to provide the artillery.

  From afar, they could hear the roar of the tank’s engines and the cannon’s thunder, hearing the tanks shooting was like music to their ears. They looked at each other and on the same second, all of the houses on the far side of the village blew up and turned into huge fires.

  Panic took over the enemies, given the surprise of the tanks approaching their way and firing at them, and they started running for their lives. Tom threw the last grenade he could find into the ditch the last terrorists were shooting from. He waved at the fortified team and his tired eyes saw Shai. A smiled took over his face, Shai was alive and he himself was still breathing.

  The thought that maybe he would get to see Dan once more brought him such happiness.

  But the euphoria d
idn’t last long, the happiness he felt turn into a sudden pain.

  Only then did he realized that there was blood all over him, only then did he feel the pain. He tried to figure out where’d he’d been hit, but before he could come to any conclusion, everything went dark and he felt himself drifting away. Blue eyes were staring at him from the darkness.

  24 In Your Shoes

  Dan couldn’t function after the phone call from Tom.

  Robby’s calming words helped to suppress his anxiety, but just for a short while.

  Tom’s broken voice in their last phone call wouldn’t stop echoing in his mind.

  He came home and called Robby again, to see if there was anything new. Robby hadn’t heard anything, but promised he wouldn’t let it go.

  Robby, again, tried to broadcast calming vibes, but he realized that other than a message from Tom saying he was okay, nothing would calm Dan down.

  Time passed by with a cruel slowness. He thought of ways to pass the time and tire himself out. He tried watching T.V, but the damn thing just spewed wave after wave of cultural crap that simply shocked him. The Israeli channels, it seemed to him, were descending to chasms of shallowness every time he dared to watch them. For a moment there, it seemed to him as if it had become more horrible with every passing week. And the content, as he saw it, portrayed the slippery slope that the Israeli culture was sliding into with nothing to stop it.

  Dan thought his sanity was sliding down a similar slope.

  He opened a bottle of whiskey that Flora had brought him on her last visit, and poured generously into a ceramic mug. Descending culture? Let’s go all the way, he thought and bitterly smiled to himself. The whiskey wouldn’t mind being poured into the wrong type of glass. It wasn’t going to be there long anyway.

  He dimmed the lights on the lower floor, maybe to see less of the loneliness, and plugged in the lap-top to the entertainment system.

  Marianne Faithful was howling Baby Let Me Follow You Down in her raspy voice, and Dan was singing with her and danced like a crazy drunk man in the middle of his living room.

  Half a bottle of whiskey, two rounds on the punching bag, and two texts to Robby later, he was finally lying in bed, desperately looking at the shadows dancing on the room’s ceiling, wishing for a sleep that would spare him from his misery.

  The phone’s ringing startled him and he woke up from a deep, trippy sleep, it sounded like a war siren. He jumped on the phone and before he hit ‘accept’, he managed to see the name ‘Robby’ on the phone’s screen, “What happened?” he asked in panic, while sitting on the bed with his feet touching the cold floor, preparing himself for impact.

  “It’s not good, Dan! He’s injured, they flew him to Tel-HaShomer hospital. As far as I know, he’s in the OR right now,” said Robby.

  Dan’s heart almost exploded with fear and despair. He stood up and started pacing the room like a caged animal, “He wasn’t killed? Tell me he’s not dead and you’re not preparing me for the truth with a fake story about an injury!” he said to Robby, while in his heart he prayed that the answer would not cut out his heart and kill his soul.

  “If he was dead, Dan, I wouldn’t call you at six in the morning and wake you up. I'd get in my car and personally come to give you the news. As far as I know, he’s injured. What do you think about me picking you up and us driving together to the hospital?” said Robby in the most gentle, calm, and balanced voice he could muster.

  Robby’s logical explanation convinced Dan that it was an injury, and so he took a breath of relief. He pressed the phone against his shoulder and started getting dressed while talking, not to waste a second, “There’s no need for that, Robby, I'll get there by myself. Before you got from Rishon to Pituach I'd already be there. Thanks anyway. How bad is the injury?” asked Dan while shoving his feet into his shoes.

  “I tried to find out, they didn’t really give me any details. It’s not fatal, but he’s suffering from multiple injuries, that’s all I know at the moment. I’ll meet you at the hospital, Dan-Dan.”

  “You don’t have to be there, Robby, you’ve done more than enough, I'm sure you have more important things to do,” said Dan, meaning every word.

  “What’s more important than supporting my best buddy?”

  “Thank you, man. I'll see you there.”

  Ayalon at 06:00 in the morning reminded him of a bowling alley - empty, straight, long, and smooth. The radio was playing placebo's Running Up that Hill, and Dan was wishing that he could trade places with Tom; he’d do anything to make sure his soldier was okay.

  Thirteen minutes of driving well above the speed limit brought Dan to the Tel-HaShomer ER’s parking lot. The place was crawling with people despite the early hour. Tragedies, illness, and death don’t follow business hours.

  Smells of disinfectant, humanity, and medicines flooded the rooms and hallways. Dan hated hospitals, like most people did, only this time he was glad to be there. When the alternative is a military cemetery, suddenly a hospital seemed like a place full of life and hope.

  As long as Tom was only injured, he had to keep his calm and hope.

  It’s true that optimism wasn’t Dan’s territory, but he had to hold on to it for his lover's sake.

  He approached the nurse at the reception desk. Her eyes showed that she was at the end of a long shift, and her look demonstrated how tired of people she was. He didn’t blame her.

  “A soldier named Tom Freeman arrived here. As far as I know, he was flown here in the last few hours and he’s in an OR.”

  “And who are you to him?” she asked with apathy, barely sparing him a glance.

  “I'm his partner,” he answered and was surprised to find out how he suddenly had her full attention.

  “One second, let me check the computer,” she said, looking at her screen. After what felt like an eternity she looked at him again, he thought he recognized pity in her eyes, and for a moment he got scared, “Well, according to what I'm seeing here, a Casualty Officer notified the parents in the U.S, and the aunt in Israel; those are the only people the soldier declared as family members when he was inducted. There’s no record of a partner. I'm sorry, but I can’t give you any details about someone hospitalized here without a validation certificate.”

  Dan believed she really was sorry. Not that it helped him in any way, “I understand, I know that there are rules and procedures, I also appreciate the fact that you protect the patient’s privacy… But, you have you understand, he filled out the ‘family members’ details almost three years ago, and, as of now, I'm his partner. He’s laying here in the OR, I know nothing about his condition, I'm worried and I want to see him. What am I supposed to do?” he made an immense effort to keep his calm and not to flip the desk over.

  “I understand, I really do. But these are the rules and right now I can’t give you any information. What I suggest you do is wait for the family members to come and then, hopefully, you’ll get some answers.”

  That was the moment when Dan lost it, “Call the head of the department, please. NOW!”

  Dan spoke in a threatening and authoritative tone. She looked at him, checking to see how much of a threat he really was, and she probably saw he was leaning over the edge, because the next thing she did was to pick up the phone, “Please call Dr. Zuckerman to the reception desk.”

  “Stat!” Dan shouted.

  “Stat!” she repeated after him into the phone.

  Another round of nerve-wracking waiting, until a young, red-haired doctor came to the desk, wearing the beginnings of baldness and thick glasses. Dan, who was sitting nervously in front of the desk, managed to see the doctor and the nurse talking and when he approached them, the doctor turned his head toward him.

  Dan opened with all the authority he could summon and fire in his eyes, “I assume the nurse explained to you what this is about,” he said, “so I'm telling you now, if I don’t get updates as to what’s going on with my partner, you and your superiors will be very sorry.”


  Dr. Zuckerman looked at Dan, trying to figure out what he was being threatened with, trying to categorize the man, to put him in some sort of recognizable box that might help him get a proper response, but with no luck. Dan’s air of authority, the fact that he had a partner, and the threat that was delivered in polished high Hebrew and threatening calm made it hard for the doctor to establish a strategy.

  “I understand your concern, I really….”

  Dan interrupted him and raised his voice. “I don’t need your sympathy! I need information and access to my partner! You have one minute to provide me with those two things!”

  “What will you do, exactly, if we don’t fulfill your request?” asked the doctor with a scared look, which he tried to mask with an indifferent tone.

  “Do you see that defibrillator behind the desk?” asked Dan and the doctor looked at the device as if he didn’t understand the connection between it and the matter at hand, “That defibrillator was supplied to you by GreenTech industries along with a lot more medical equipment. Equipment you’re getting for ridiculously low prices. If, in thirty seconds, I don’t get what I'm asking for, all of your purchasing agreements with GreenTech will be cancelled immediately and you and this nurse here will be held responsible!”

  The doctor choked for a moment, “Who are you, exactly?”

  “Dan Green, the owner of GreenTech, the one telling you that you have ten seconds left to tell me what’s going on with my partner!” Dan roared.

  Dr. Zuckerman was confused, but simple math told him that if there was ever a good reason to break the rules, it was standing in front of him.

  He checked the computer, scanning the screen, glanced at the defibrillator to see that there was indeed a GreenTech sticker on it. He whispered to the nurse and then got up, “Come with me please, Mr. Green.”

  He left the desk and lead Dan to a hallway toward the ICU, he turned right to another hallway, opened the door of one of the rooms and invited Dan inside. It was an exam room; bed, desk, computer, chairs, and a lot of medical equipment. Dan sat down, angry, still wearing an aggressive look.