What he sees on the narrow black ribbons of road twisting through the high dunes and ridges discourages and confounds him. Long long lines of machines are still backed up for miles, clear out of sight, where a sharp turn, or a crossroads, or a broken-down heavy vehicle has halted traffic both ways. At these ganglions of delay traffic-control officers are now posted, trying hard to unsnarl the massive blockages. But General Adan's division has been rolling down from the northern sector to its assembly point for crossing after Sharon; nearly three hundred tanks, with hundreds of APCs and supply vehicles. The situation is actually worsening.
"I'll take the wheel, Sarak."
Kishote goes tearing back to Tasa, at some points climbing up high dunes and plunging down them at roller-coaster angles, cutting off long stretches of blocked traffic and giving the journalist stomach butterflies. Yoram Sarak has learned to be silent as he rides with Brigadier General Nitzan, who can be genial one moment and frighteningly stern the next. Sarak is keeping a daily war diary which he counts on publishing in magazine installments, and afterward as a book. In his job as driver-signalman for Nitzan, he is getting a valuable inside view of Sharon's campaign.
But after a very long silence, as they speed back to base, Sarak cannot hold his peace. "Sir, it isn't going to happen."
Not looking at him, his face abstracted and gloomy behind dust goggles, Kishote says, "What isn't?"
"The crossing. Not tonight." Nitzan is silent. The jeep jolts speedily along. "Sir, I wrote an article about the crossing problem back in May for Yediot. It's not just that bridge. They'll probably get it repaired. It's the crocodiles and pontoon rafts. There's no way in the world they can get to Deversoir tonight."
Nitzan's silence chills the journalist, and he regrets opening his mouth, a rare feeling.
At Tasa, the division is already drawn up in hot afternoon sunshine for the night assault; three brigades of about a hundred tanks each, stretching far and wide over the sands with their APCs, half-tracks, self-propelled artillery, AA guns, and support trucks and busses. Surveying the panorama, hands on hips, Sharon sees Kishote and beckons. "Quite a sight, Kishote, eh?"
"Yes, sir. Quite a sight."
At the sober tone Sharon gives him a sharp look. "Well, come along." Back in the caravan he slices some yellow cheese, and with it eats dried apricots from a bowl. "So? Your report." Tersely Kishote gives him the picture. Silent moments pass before Sharon speaks. "The crocodiles are the critical element, Yossi. I know the pontoon rafts are hard to move on those enormous transporters, but the crocodiles run on their own wheels. Why can't they make it?"
"Sir, I know the location of all the crocodiles. You can't hold to your timetable. None of them will be here by midnight."
"No? How about by dawn?" Kishote shakes his head. "By mid-morning, then?"
"Half a dozen or so, possibly. Most of them later."
Sharon picks up the telephone. "Connect me with General Bar-Lev... Yossi, three crocodiles lashed together can ferry a tank. We've done it in exercises."
"Yes, sir. In exercises. If the landing is a surprise, well and good. In an opposed landing if a shell or even shrapnel hits a crocodile's rubber float, down it goes, and the tank with it."
"Bar-Lev? Sharon here. I'm reporting with regret that the timetable I gave you for the crossing tonight turns out a little optimistic... Yes, I know. But Yossi Nitzan himself has been out on the roads, and the bottlenecks that have since developed, what with Adan's division... The roller bridge? Minor breakdown. It's being repaired. But the traffic problem..." A long pause. Sharon darts a glance at Kishote. "I see. Let me give that some thought. I'll ring you back shortly." He hangs up. "Predictable, that Bar-Lev! He says Southern Command recognizes the problems and is sympathetic. If I request a postponement for twenty-four hours, it will be approved. He didn't say 7 told you so,' but it was in his voice. The cat that ate the bird." Sharon regards his deputy through half-closed eyes. "What do you think?"
Don Kishote is slow to answer. "Sir, today you have a green light. Tomorrow there may be a red light, from the UN, or Southern Command, or Kissinger. If you go tonight, the army will follow. You can commit this army to a crossing, nobody else."
"It's not necessarily true that the army will follow me." Sharon's ebullience is all gone. His face is graven with heavy lines. "The army may follow, and it may not. The operation may never get a chance. If things go badly in the first few hours - and that's a fifty-fifty shot - Gonen or Bar-Lev or even Dayan may get cold feet and abort it. Just another Arik Sharon brainstorm, that killed a lot of Jewish boys to no purpose."
"Sir, there's no way to win this war except to cross the Canal."
' 'Yes, I've pointed that out once or twice. You're right that after tonight the light can suddenly turn red. Yet you've just told me that I don't have the means to cross tonight."
"Maybe postponement is the answer, then, sir. En brera."
"It's no answer." Sharon shakes his head brusquely. "The whole operation turns on surprise. Our preparations are already visible. A day's delay, an alerted enemy, and the bridgehead may not be an achievable objective." He leans his face on a hand over his eyes.
On impulse Don Kishote says, "General Sharon, release me from other duties and let me go out on the roads tonight and stay there, all night if I have to. I'll commandeer tanks and bulldozers. I'll shove vehicles off the asphalt into the sand. I'll order every kind of unit, including General Adan's tanks, to make way for the crocodiles and rafts. I'll threaten court-martials. I'll draw my gun, if I must. It requires a general, sir, to get this thing unsnarled, and I'll do it."
Sharon looks up. "And if so, what result can I count on?"
His mind running back over the bottlenecks he has seen, Kishote replies - with a very strong sense of jumping off into the unknown, and perhaps taking Sharon's ten thousand men with him - "Sir, six crocodiles in the water at dawn. More at midday, with the first pontoon rafts."
"I said count on, Kishote."
"I heard you, sir."
Grasping the telephone with a swoop of a thick hand, not taking his eyes off Kishote, Sharon calls General Bar-Lev.
"Acapulco!"
In Kishote's headphones, at two o'clock in the morning, the long-awaited signal from the paratroop leader; the first unit has gone over in rubber dinghies and landed on the other side. Near his jeep a bulldozer is pushing a stalled empty tank transporter off the Refidim road in bright moonlight, to break a mile-long traffic jam. Three and a half hours behind schedule, the thing is happening, the Canal has been crossed.
Sharon on the command network, calm and cheery: "Well done, Danny. What's the situation over there?"
Easygoing tones of Colonel Danny Matt: "So far, so good We're cutting the wire fences. Very quiet here. Not so quiet over on your side to the north, I see. Plenty of trouble at the Chinese Farm." Toward midnight the so-called Chinese Farm has erupted like a volcano, and it has been flaming and thumping ever since.
This abandoned Egyptian agricultural station partly blocks the roads on the way to the Canal, so Sharon's forces are battling to clear the entrenched enemy out of the "Farm," where several square miles are crisscrossed with embankments and irrigation ditches, perfect cover for concealed defenders. "Chinese Farm" is a complete misnomer. After the Six-Day War the army found rusting machinery there, with Oriental lettering, probably Japanese. The soldiers dubbed it "the Chinese Farm" and the name has stuck to this widespread and very formidable military obstacle.
From twelve miles away, Kishote can see the fire flashes and starshell glare all over the sky above that area. Sharon's plan is clearly working, for Danny Matt's paratroopers had to run right past the Chinese Farm en route to Deversoir, and the dinghies with their engineer personnel also had to get by there, to ferry them across the Canal. But the laconic reports of the brigade commanders fighting to clear the Farm are grim: many tanks burning, heavy casualties, major withdrawals to regroup.
Sarak says, "Sir, Flagpole is calling you." He fl
ips switches on the receiver. Sharon, level and unhurried: "Yossi, what is your situation?"
"Four crocodiles free, sir, and well along toward the Canal. Now freeing two more. The bridge is on the move. Several pontoon rafts are on their way as well."
"Good. Find a senior officer and delegate that job. I need you at the Yard right away."
"Yes, sir."
Nobody better than Yehiel, thinks Kishote, if all is well with the bridge. He has no trouble finding it in the bright moonlight, a black giant horror acrawl over level sands.
"Got it!" Yehiel bares his teeth in a cruel moonlit grin. "On your way, Kishote. Lauterman has this baby under control now, and it's on schedule. The crocodiles will be there by dawn, I promise you, and I'll deliver some pontoon rafts, too. I'm the man for this. You're a gentleman, I'm not. I fuck secretaries. The one officer in this army who does such a horrid thing."
The gunfire at the Chinese Farm battlefield is growing thunderous as Yossi speeds his jeep along the sands, bypass-
ing bumper-to-bumper road traffic. The sky is slashed with all manner of colored streaks and flashes, a colossal fireworks display paling the moon and betokening fearsome carnage below. At a main road junction the fat lieutenant controlling traffic shouts to Kishote, over the vehicle racket and the booming of the guns, that he is diverting movement southward, because the tank battle at the Farm has spilled over across the roads to Deversoir. Evil tidings! The junction is cluttered with ambulance busses heading the other way; wounded being evacuated already, a disheartening sight.
Kishote goes jouncing across the open desert, a very rough ride, but this is terrain he knows well, and finding his way through the seam is not hard. He comes on Sharon standing amid the half-tracks and APCs of his mobile headquarters. Alone among the officers and soldiers he wears no helmet, and his white-blond hair identifies him from far off. He points to the flaring sky over the Chinese Farm battleground. "Picturesque, yes? Our battalions are fighting like lions. It'll be all right." But Kishote knows the man and hears undertones of deep worry in the tranquil words. "Yossi, go over in the next dinghy to the other side, have a look around and bring back a report."
Astonished, Yossi blurts, "Sir, have you lost contact with Danny Matt?"
"Certainly not, all's well over there. I'd go myself but I must stay close to this fight." He gestures at the flame and tumult to the north, takes Kishote aside by the elbow, and speaks hard quick words. "We're at a crisis. It's happening early. Southern Command considers me a liar or a simpleton, and their yellow streak is showing already. They claim we're cut off and surrounded! I assure them over and over that the Chinese Farm battle is difficult but going well, and that Danny Matt is securing his beachhead. Nothing doing. I'm in extremis, they say, and can lose Danny's brigade as we lost the boys in the maozim. Yossi, we've got a triumph developing here, and they're on the verge of cancelling it. Dayan's already suggested pulling Danny back. Call it a night raid, he says, and let it go at that. God knows what's happened to Moshe Dayan."
"Sir, why should Dayan believe me more than you?"
"Dayan told me to send Yossi Nitzan over. Understand? Now get going."
Kishote goes and returns, a brief eerie excursion to Egyptian soil, where Matt's paratroopers are methodically digging in and deploying a perimeter defense in predawn twilight, as though on a night exercise in the Negev. Of the enemy, no sign there, while the inferno blazes to the north. When he gets back the sun is coming up and the Chinese Farm has at last become quiet, no more rattle and crash of guns, and no strange lights tearing the pale sky. At Deversoir tanks and APCs are crowding into the Yard, the enormous brick-paved parking area which Sharon ordered dug into the rampart years ago. Bulldozers are tearing away at the thin sand-and-brick wall which was left after the hollowing-out of the Yard, and Kishote is not surprised to find Sharon driving one of two bulldozers. "I know exactly where to dig," Sharon bellows at him, "and I have to show these shleppers!" As he speaks, another bulldozer breaks through the wall. A cheer goes up from the tank crews, for there across the Canal, misty green in the morning sun, is Egypt, a vision of Eden from the dead Sinai sands.
Sharon wallows down from the bulldozer, and shouts to his operations officer, "Get all those tanks to move aside, so we can launch the crocodiles."
"They're here?" Kishote exclaims.
"Six of them, and more on the way. That Colonel Yehiel is a man of valor. So, what did you see over there? Is Danny Matt being too optimistic? Are we in extremis?"
"By no means. We walked the whole perimeter. There's just no sign of the enemy, sir. Total surprise so far, in fact Danny's begging for tanks, he says with tanks he can roll to Cairo."
"Then it's working. Thank God. That's what matters." Sharon grasps his arm, and his voice falls. "It's been a terrible, terrible night at the Chinese Farm, Yossi. They're still taking out the dead and wounded. Hundreds of casualties, whole companies of tanks destroyed. Terrible. Fearful." He stares at his deputy, hollow-eyed and sunken-cheeked. "A horrible price, but it's working. Now we ferry the tanks over until the bridge comes. Once it's in place Bren Adan and I can
pile all our power across, and panic the enemy into collapse. We can still win this war today, Yossi. I'm going to call Southern Command. Come with me, and stand by to report on what you saw over there. Bar-Lev is waiting."
Outside the Yard the crocodiles, ungainly wheeled boats with puffed-up floats along their hulls, are lined up in column. Kishote strides to Yehiel, all covered with dust, and embraces him. "Yehiel, by your life, Sharon calls you a man of valor."
Hoarsely Yehiel replies, "Let him tell that to the promotion board. Maybe they'll listen to Arik Sharon."
In Jerusalem Zev Barak is putting on a dress uniform as he listens to the 6 a.m. news. Top story Syrian front, next item American airlift; about the Canal crossing not a word. Good, security is holding. He is bleary from sitting up with Golda most of the night, until Dado's report that the beachhead has been taken, the paratroopers are digging in; and by Sharon's account, while there has been something of a problem in keeping the roads clear past the Chinese Farm, the situation is well under control.
Nakhama is at a mirror in the foyer, clad in a suit she bought in Washington and seldom wears. Fussing with her hair, she says, "You're sure now, Zevvy? Why do I belong at a ceremony honoring the airlift?"
"Golda asked me to bring you, motek. All right?"
As they drive to Lod airport, Nakhama chatters in rare good spirits. Noah's sudden engagement to the French girl has cheered her. They hardly know Julie, but Nakhama has come to dislike Daphna Luria, of elite family but a maddening fickle girl. Also, in the few days since his return from Washington she has been warmer to him, he is not sure why, and as for trying to figure her out, he has given that up long ago.
Parking at the terminal, they can see out on the sunny tarmac a double line of troops drawn up, an honor guard with four large flapping flags: the Stars and Stripes, the Star of David, and the banners of both air forces. In the office of the airport director, Golda is drinking tea as she smokes. "Hello, my dear," she says to Nakhama. "So glad you could come.
This is your husband's doing, he performed marvels in Washington."
"I did nothing, Nakhama," says Barak, "but this is the last time I'll deny it."
"How are your girls, dear, and your navy captain? How proud you must be of him!"
An aide looks in. "Madame Prime Minister, the tower reports the C-5A will be landing in two minutes."
Brushing ashes from her skirt, Golda Meir walks out with Barak, Nakhama, and her small entourage to the microphones on the tarmac, where the American ambassador and his military aide already stand. Shouts arise from spectators lining the fences and terminal roof. "There it comes!" The dot in the hazy morning sky over the Mediterranean is swelling into a giant aircraft. "Look at that, will you?" Nakhama cries. "A flying Empire State Building." Golda smiles indulgently at her. As the Galaxy touches down and taxis to the terminal, and the army band
strikes up "The Star-Spangled Banner," the Prime Minister draws herself up stiffly. "Thank God, thank God we did not launch a preemptive strike," she says to Barak when the music ends, loud enough for the American ambassador to hear. "If we had done it, this would not be happening. We would be friendless in the world. We have kept the faith, and so has the American President."
The ambassador edges toward her. "Madame Prime Minister, I should tell you that through some slipup the pilot has not been notified that there's a ceremony scheduled. I'm sorry."
"So what? Don't worry, he'll handle it."
The Galaxy stops, the nose and tail ramps open out, the spectators cheer. Flatbed trucks roll up the ramps followed by swarming cargo handlers, and the pilot, a gangling blond young man in blue coveralls, emerges from the plane. The ambassador goes to meet him, and escorts him to Golda Meir. "Madame Prime Minister, allow me to present Major Tom Robinson, United States Air Force."
Herman Wouk - The Glory Page 48