by By Jon Land
“I see.” Giott looked at the picture again. “So you have connected this man to Levy.”
“And Levy to you. By your own admission.”
“I was confessing a friendship.”
“You called Levy and Levy dispatched this man to my hospital room.”
“And if this were true . . .”
“How was he going to help me?”
Giott thought for a moment. “What would you say if I told you the answer to that question has nothing to do with this case?”
“That I’d like to make that determination for myself.”
Giott looked like a man trying to choose his steps in the darkness.
“Rav Nitzav?” Danielle prodded.
“That tape I gave you, Pakad,” Giott said suddenly.
“Yes.”
“You did not ask how I came by it.”
“Because it doesn’t matter how.”
“You trust my judgment. You know where to draw the line between relevance and necessity. You are a professional and a professional understands the way things must sometimes be done.” Giott’s small, sharp eyes bored into hers. “I’m asking you to trust my judgment again now when I tell you that this man’s appearance in your hospital room has nothing to do with this case.”
“Personal, instead of professional, is that it?”
“Judgment, Pakad. Let’s leave it at that.”
“But you did send him to me, didn’t you?”
Again, Giott did not bother to deny it.
“You sent him to help me. But why? What could he have done?”
“Something that no longer matters.”
“Even though it’s connected to Levy ...”
Giott narrowed his gaze, scolding her. “I took you back, Danielle. I didn’t have to, was advised against doing so in fact, yet I did.”
“But you knew Levy.”
“Yes,” Giott said reflectively. “I knew him.”
“Can you at least tell me how?”
The commissioner of the National Police finally took his chair again. “What did Max Pearlman tell you?”
Danielle summarized Pearlman’s tale of the four friends and their early days in the Haganah as quickly as she could.
“Very well then,” Giott said when she had finished, nodding in concession. “But be prepared, Pakad: you might not like what you’re about to hear. . . .”
* * * *
CHAPTER 21
July 1948
K
eep your heads down! Wait until this wave of firing passes!”
The order was repeated down the Haganah lines. The battle to retake Fort Halev had been raging for hours and Jewish casualties had been very high. This would prove to be one of the most costly battles to take place during the first of Israel’s many wars. But the fort’s strategic location, perched on a hillside overlooking a valley road accessing Jerusalem, made taking it a must, no matter the cost. Otherwise Jerusalem would surely be lost.
Through the long hot day that had come two months after Israel declared her independence, Haganah fighters fought for every inch of ground up the narrow slope, each inch precious. Mortar and light artillery fire rained down on them, killing indiscriminately.
By nightfall, though, the front lines of the Haganah fighters had reached the final ridge. If nothing else, they were close enough to actually hit something with their old rifles and at least consider using some of their precious few artillery shells.
Hyram Levy, Max Pearlman, Jacob Rossovitch, and David Wollchensky were among those who had waited beneath the last ridge, having followed a trail of blood and bodies to reach it.
“The fucking British,” Wollchensky sneered. “They promised this fort to us before they left and then gave it to the Arabs. I wish they had stayed so we could have killed them, too.”
“We’re going to take that fort,” Levy said suddenly, peering up over the ridge.
“Of course we are,” Pearlman agreed routinely.
“No, I mean we are going to take the fort. The four of us.”
The friends looked at each other.
“After the sun goes down,” Levy continued.
“And just how are we going to do that?” the massive Rossovitch asked him. Unshaven, his skin dark with grime and his long hair matted, he looked like a huge ape.
“I don’t know,” Levy confessed.
“I do,” said Wollchensky, standing straight up to tempt the Arab fire from the fort.
Rossovitch dragged him back down. “You’re mad.”
“No, I have an idea, a plan.”
But the Haganah commander was not too keen on Wollchensky’s plan when he heard it. He grimaced in pain the whole time, a bullet having shattered his arm and left it dangling bloody by his side.
“The back side of the hill? It’ll never work. Too exposed, even at night.”
“For an entire force, yes,” Wollchensky acknowledged. He looked at his friends one at a time. “But not for four men.”
“Four men with four rifles . . .”
“Or four men with two mortars.”
The Haganah commander couldn’t believe what he had just heard. “Carry those overweight dinosaurs all the way around the hillside?”
“That’s right.”
“And risk the futile loss of half our artillery complement?”
“We won’t lose it. You draw the Arabs’ attention with a skirmish and we’ll shell them from the rear, opening the way for a full frontal assault.”
“No,” said Pearlman, “a skirmish won’t work. Send half our force back down the mountain.”
“Make them think we’re retreating!” Rossovitch realized.
“They’ll let their guard down,” picked up Wollchensky. “Pull out their hashish pipes to celebrate their victory, before we send in the real smoke.”
Hyram Levy simply smiled, as if he had known this all along.
The commander wavered, beginning to weigh the possibilities. “You’ll need to position a spotter to direct your fire. That means taking two of our five radios.”
“We’ll make it well worth it.”
Rossovitch carried one of the ancient mortars himself, the other toted between Levy and Pearlman, while Wollchensky took point. The route around the hillside he chose offered the most cover over the hardest terrain in a long, sweeping half circle. The four friends set up the mortars as close to the fort as they dared draw, its rear watched over by only a token Arab presence.
“Stupid bastards,” muttered Wollchensky.
“This is going to work,” said Levy.
“Only if we can get these blasted things to fire,” huffed Rossovitch, working the second steel monster into position. “World War I leftovers, God help us.”
“How many shells do we have?” Pearlman asked.
“A dozen,” Rossovitch answered, since it was he who had carried them as well. “But I can’t believe the barrels will survive even half that many.”
“They better.”
It was agreed that Rossovitch and Pearlman would man the mortars and Levy would serve as spotter, leaving Wollchensky to coordinate their efforts with the remainder of the Haganah force. At precisely midnight he nodded to Rossovitch and Pearlman and signaled Levy that the false wave of retreat was under way.
Within seconds, the four friends could hear a spontaneous cheer rise up within the walls of the fort. As planned, Wollchensky waited several more minutes, until the enemy celebration was well under way, before contacting the Haganah commander again.
“Sixty seconds,” was all he said.
The mortars were both packed and primed, the ancient mechanisms cumbersome to fire under the best circumstances, never mind perched unsteadily on a hillside.
“Now!”
The first two shells rocketed into the air without a hitch, deafening all the friends except for Levy in his spotter’s role. With his binoculars, he followed one direct hit into the center of the fort and one strike into the rear wall.
“Samuel dead on target!” he radioed down. “Adjust Elijah fifteen degrees rising!”
Another pair of shells thumped out behind deafening roars. Four more followed in rapid succession, the angles carefully readjusted to Levy’s specifications each time. Elijah’s barrel cracked before it could be loaded again, leaving them only with Samuel to handle the chore of firing the remaining four shells.
By then, though, the main body of Haganah fighters had already stormed the fort’s gate and used their other two ancient pieces of artillery to further confound the now desperate enemy. The Haganah commander had actually ordered Wollchensky to cease fire before their final shell could be loaded, because their forces had broken through.
* * * *
T
he battle was one of the many great victories in a war no one outside of Israel believed she could win. But it never truly ended, not with hundreds of thousands of displaced Arabs who had fled or been forced from their homes taking up residence in the West Bank. Their new homes were refugee camps that quickly became dens of famine, squalor, and disease. Their leaders resisted all Israeli overtures to make peace, relying instead on militant leaders from Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria to ready them for another war. Fedayeen fighters, meanwhile, stirred up the masses, especially the young, confronting Israel with the one opponent she would never be able to best:
Terrorism.
The fedayeen would cross over from Jordan and enter the refugee camps. There they found waves of angry, eager recruits who had nothing left to give but their lives. Martyrdom appealed to many, and most of the raids carried out over the Israeli border were hopeless forays conducted by untrained and ill-equipped youngsters who died for nothing.
A few were not.
By 1950 Jacob Rossovitch had settled on a kibbutz outside the village of Sefir on the road between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. He had been the first of the four friends to take a wife, Revkah, who was now seven months pregnant. Pearlman, Levy, and Wollchensky had been the first he contacted with the news, and they all pledged to gather for the birth.
Rossovitch was asleep when the warning siren sounded that night. He jumped out of bed and grabbed his rifle, as he had done a hundred times, each only a bad dream or a drill. But this time it was real. This time the kibbutzniks on guard duty intercepted a contingent of well-armed fedayeen terrorists a dozen strong. The terrorists had crawled their way through the fields before being detected, accounting for the little advance warning the guards were able to provide.
In a strange way, the presence on the kibbutz of the legendary Rossovitch might have been responsible for them letting their guard down. Having a man of his prowess and reputation on the premises imbued all the residents with a false sense of security, a belief that his presence made them impervious to attack.
Under most circumstances they would have been right. This time, though, the Arab raiders were well armed, and half of the twelve had either military or fedayeen training. The terrorists had no strategic purpose other than to kill as many Jews as they could before they themselves were slain. Two of their party fell to the initial response from the guards, but ten slipped through the lines and made straight for the residential structures.
They tossed surplus World War II grenades through windows, causing chaos and havoc. It would have been much worse if the kibbutz’s women not and children had not followed their explicit orders to take cover the instant they heard the warning signal. Still, the grenades blew glass and wood shards in all directions, disabling and distracting a substantial number of men who, like Jacob Rossovitch, were outfitting themselves to defend the compound.
Rossovitch himself had two rifles in hand when he came upon the ten remaining terrorists advancing on the children’s dormitories. He opened fire earlier than he should have to keep them from lobbing more grenades, and the fedayeen answered with an intense barrage of fire from rifles that flashed like fireflies in the night.
When both his rifles clicked empty, Rossovitch drew a pair of American ,45-caliber pistols in their place. And when these were exhausted, he resorted to a knife.
Rossovitch killed seven terrorists on his own that night, and an eighth would die of his wounds the next morning in the same Israeli hospital where Rossovitch was taken. Doctors pulled six bullets from his massive steel-skinned frame, three of which should have been instantly fatal. Nonetheless, he hung on to life for four days before finally succumbing.
So when the three surviving members of the four friends finally gathered at the kibbutz, it was for a funeral instead of a birth. Max Pearlman, Hyram Levy, and David Wollchensky stood stoically through the proceedings, though each shared the same grim resolve. In two short months Jacob Rossovitch’s child would be born, and they would now turn their devotion and loyalty from their dead friend to his wife and unborn baby. To honor his memory, they pledged neither his wife, Revkah, nor his child would ever want for anything. That child had been denied the one father God had meant for him.
But now he would have three.
The three friends said nothing of this commitment out loud, said virtually nothing throughout the course of the somber afternoon, until the fall of night left them alone on Jacob Rossovitch’s last battleground.
”The raiding party came from a refugee camp just outside Jericho,” Wollchensky began.
“How do you know this?” Pearlman asked him.
“The bodies of the men Rossovitch killed have been identified. The information wasn’t hard to come by.” He looked at both of them. “We have to do something.”
“What about blowing up the Allenby Bridge the fedayeen use to cross over into the West Bank?” Levy suggested bitterly.
“You miss my point,” Wollchenksy said. “We know where the terrorists came from. They must be made to pay.”
“They’re dead.”
“Their families aren’t. Their friends aren’t. And these camps will remain breeding grounds for more raids unless they are made to understand the price for taking innocent civilian lives.”
“What do you have in mind?” Pearlman asked.
Wollchensky told him.
“Even you could never get approval for that!”
“Who said I was going to ask for it?”
“The repercussions would be—”
“Fuck the repercussions!”
Pearlman and Levy looked at each other, then back at Wollchensky, who stood before them like a statue.
“I cannot do this thing without you,” he said finally.
“Innocent lives will be lost,” Levy noted, his voice cracking a little. “Women, children ...”
“It is the only way to stop this from happening again and again. The youth who strike out at our women and children must know their families and homes will pay for their martyrdom.”
“And if it wasn’t Jacob we buried today?” Pearlman challenged. “If it was a stranger to us instead?”
“Then I hope that man’s friends would be having the same conversation we are. Then the responsibility would lie with them.”
One week later, the three surviving friends entered the West Bank at night disguised as refugees. They reached the camp in question without incident and entered without so much as a question; it was not a place into which people had much reason to sneak.
Pots, pans, and other paraphernalia hung from their backpacks, clacking together as they moved purposefully through the darkness. To those Palestinians who saw them, the three friends appeared to be headed for the tent or shanty of a relative. Displaced persons arrived regularly almost every day, after all.
Inside their three backpacks, though, were crude homemade bombs David Wollchensky had learned to make in the Haganah. Just chopped-up glass and nails mixed in putty affixed to one or two sticks of dynamite. The fuses were the only tricky part. Timer detonation was not something Wollchensky had mastered, which meant lighting the fuses manually. This would make synchronizing the explosions difficult and escape, perhaps, even more so.
But Wollchensky had com
e up with the idea of placing a lit, filterless cigarette against the fuse. Once it burned down to the end, its flame would ignite the fuse. David had tested it ten times before that night and it had worked each time. Four minutes for the cigarette to burn down, another one for the lit fuse to work its way to the dynamite. That meant the explosions would commence five minutes after they began setting their bombs and continue to crack off sporadically over the next four. This left only one minute for the three friends to begin their escape. They intended to use the utter chaos that would follow the initial blasts to make good their flight.