Herman Wouk - The Glory

by The Glory(Lit)

  Various ideas were floated short of a raid, like interdicting the uranium shipments en route to Iraq. The Prime Minister appeared to be dozing, he looked more and more glassy-eyed, and, Barak thought, the rumors might be true that he was physically failing. When a clock struck eleven behind Be-gin's desk, he sat up and rubbed his eyes hard. "Rabotai, we have been talking about the life or death of the Jewish State. One way or another, we will stop this thing. Please forget that we have met. Goodnight."

  The little Jewish tailor all at once sounded to Barak like David Ben Gurion, ordering the sinking of the Altalena; and this was the man who had sailed on the Altalena into Tel Aviv harbor to overthrow Ben Gurion.

  On the highway from Haifa to Afula, where he was building high-rise apartments on a government subsidy, Guli Gulinkoff's luck ran out. Careering down the wrong lane to pass a convoy of army tank transporters, Guli had to swerve so as not to pile head-on into a horse pulling a hay wagon, and this time he hit a stone wall. End of a kablan, and of the only silver Lincoln in Israel.

  Numbed by grief, because she had grown genuinely fond of the brutish Guli in two wedded years, Daphna went through the mourning rites in a daze, but in a month or so her mind cleared. She might be a rich young widow, she realized; or she might owe millions of shekels she could not possibly repay. Guli had never said a word to her about his business affairs. Suspicious of the lawyers and accountants who swarmed in on her, and of Guli's office staff too, she turned for help to Dzecki Barkowe, though his lawsuit against Guli was still pending. Dzecki had once loved her, and he knew the law and the real estate trade. Moreover he was an American, not a local shark.

  Dzecki found, to his surprise and Daphna's pleasure, that once he settled several lawsuits, including his own, Daphna was still very well off. As to whether the mysterious Guli had been a fraud or a genius, the answer was, a bit of both. Guli on principle had never paid anybody anything unless forced to. Going to law had been his delight, for it meant long years during which he collected interest on large disputed sums; not to mention that plaintiffs often wearied, or died, or like

  Dzecki's parents left Israel in disgust, or that his Chinese-puzzle contracts sometimes even befogged the courts to find in his favor. In short, there were two beneficiaries of Guli's sudden end; the hay wagon horse had its life, and Daphna had the departed kablan's money.

  Within the year Daphna, widowed at thirty, was coping with her new status in a costly private house with a garden in north Tel Aviv, a favored neighborhood of Israel's beautiful people, and the Haifa villa was for sale. "Haifa has the Tech-nion, the navy, and oil refineries," Daphna said to Dzecki about her decision to move. "Without Guli to liven things up I'll go mad here. As for the view of the harbor, I've had it."

  Just about all the beautiful people came to her housewarm-ing. Her brother Danny showed up at the afternoon garden reception in uniform, and Daphna, svelte, smartly coiffed, and merry in a black cocktail frock from Paris, introduced him around proudly as an F-16 pilot until he couldn't stand it. He broke away to a corner of the garden, where he stood glowering at the authors, artists, journalists, actors, film producers, models, and politicians drinking, talking, and looking at each other. Pretty waitresses passed shrimps and cocktail sausages, steering clear of the scowling aviator. When Don Kishote arrived in an open-necked white shirt, conspicuous among the suits and ties of the smart crowd, his was the first face familiar to Danny. He had recently seen the chief of planning branch on Etzion air base, at the briefing for an abruptly aborted strike. After a while Don Kishote approached him, drink in hand, and said quietly, "Hello, getting over the letdown?"

  "Not yet, sir. We were a long time building up to it, you know."

  "And am I wrong, or are you not having much fun here?"

  "You're not wrong."

  "Why didn't you bring Ruti Barak?"

  "She couldn't come. I asked her."

  "Would you like to go for a drive with me?"

  "Anywhere."

  Kishote took Danny off through the crowded house to his army Volvo, a perquisite of his rank. "Where are we going?" asked Danny, as they started off.

  "An old border kibbutz near Nablus. My son Aryeh lives

  there, he married a kibbutz girl." He glanced at Danny. "That abort was a bad business, but why can't you take it in stride? Your chance will come, and you'll do a great thing."

  "The abort was just as well. I don't think Israel is worth dying for."

  The car stopped at a red light, and Kishote looked hard at the aviator. "You volunteered to fly the F-16, didn't you? You broke your neck to be selected."

  "That I don't regret. The F-16 is a marvel, a rocket to Mars, it's America with wings, the F-16. That Ogden air base where we trained was heaven. But after that we came home."

  "And then what?"

  "And then what? Okay, here's what. Maybe as chief of planning you should hear this."

  A tirade burst from Danny Luria. Fresh from America he had looked at Israel with new eyes, he said, seeing it on a crazy consumer binge, with a hundred percent inflation, people living on bank overdrafts and yet buying color TVs, new cars, luxury furniture, modish clothes, in a pitiful futile mass attempt to live like Americans. Every week a new bank scandal or government bribery case made big black headlines, as did the incessant strikes by doctors, teachers, and bus drivers. Everybody who had any money was gambling on the stock market, where the prices had gone insane, while poverty was getting worse among the poor in the cities and the small towns. The popular music was all ersatz American rock-and-roll. The magazines were all about American movie stars and multimillionaires, or about squalid Israeli crimes and squabbling politicians. Was this what his brother had died for?

  Danny Luria poured all this out for about an hour, as Kishote drove in silence across the country and headed down the highway twisting through the arid brown Judean ridges. "Understand me, General Nitzan, we'll fly the mission. The air chief knows we will. But we'll fly into a hornet's nest of SAM-6s and AA, and some of us won't come back. I feel no reason to give up my life, except group loyalty. You know, at the base they call our unit 'the Chosen.' A graveyard joke! Chosen to die, and for what? For Zionism?" He sourly laughed and broke off, stared out at the vacant stony hills, and after a while went on, "And as for my father's buying the Ezrakh's idea that Israel may be stage one of the messianic

  era, he just loses me. That Ezrakh lived and died in an Old City yeshiva dream. Kol ha'kavod, but dreaming in an F-16 cockpit can lead to trouble."

  "Granted," said Don Kishote, the first word he had spoken in quite a while.

  This break in Danny's impassioned soliloquy made him stop and laugh more naturally. "Well, okay, that's about it. I haven't talked this much since I saw Ruti Barak in Pasadena. I was as high then as I'm low now."

  Kishote said, "In 1974 I left Israel for two years, feeling much as you do. I wasn't sure I'd ever return."

  "So why did you?"

  "I sometimes wonder. How was Ruti?"

  "Too thin. Working, like a horse. She'll come back, all right."

  "You know, Danny, the whole world imitates the Americans. You can't get away from that."

  "Not like Israel. Last Friday night a few of us did the Tel Aviv nightclubs. What a scene! Shabbat shalom! La dolce vita, Zionist style, Jews imitating Europeans imitating Americans. In one fancy club, at three in the morning, we saw half the big Labor politicians with their ladies, busy building the just socialist society."

  Brown, muscular, in a grease-stained shirt and rolled-up shorts, Bruria was changing a bandage on Aryeh's leg when they came into the bleak little cottage. Not my type, thought Danny; sunburned pleasant face, bright brown eyes, thin determined mouth, a future kibbutz chairwoman, or possibly a far left Knesset member. Aryeh exclaimed, sitting up in the double bed which filled the room,' 'Danny! Ma nishma? What a surprise! Bruria, this is my fighter-pilot cousin who missed our wedding."

  "Hi." She gave Danny a hard handshake. "You were training then i
n Utah, I think."

  "How are you doing?" Kishote asked his son.

  "Flesh wound. Doctor says I'll be up and around in a week."

  "Wound?" said Danny. "What kind of wound?"

  "Gunshot."

  "L'Azazel!"

  "Yes, I surprised some infiltrators on my night rounds. They left a bloody trail and I may have killed one. I hope so."

  "You have that trouble here still?"

  "Still," said Bruria, "and too often."

  Kishote and Danny visited with Aryeh while Bruria bustled out and after a while bustled back in, inviting them to supper. "Our chairman wants to talk to you," she told the pilot. "Come, Aryeh, I'll get you ready."

  Kishote led Danny on a tortuous path through cottages and blooming fragrant trees to the brightly lit dining hall. "A stagnant little kibbutz," he said. "Nice people, though."

  At the community tables, where the kibbutzniks were already eating, the uniformed pilot caused stares and whispers. Bruria brought Aryeh in a wheelchair. The chairman, a thickset heavily wrinkled graybeard, told Yossi over the chopped vegetables and baked carp that the army was getting slack. The highest fences, the most tangled barbed wire barriers, weren't enough to stop infiltrators. Security meant men and guns! The Arabs were always close by with wire cutters, full of hate and looking for trouble.

  As the meal ended, the old kibbutznik turned to Danny. "Will you talk to my people? They'll be thrilled."

  "That I doubt, but okay."

  With noisy shuffling of chairs and benches when the chairman introduced him, all turned to hear the aviator, weary-looking men and women in farm clothes or shorts, many elderly and middle-aged. The chairman murmured to Danny as he stood up, "Urge the youngsters to stay on the kibbutz. That's our biggest problem, not infiltrators."

  Danny talked in a monotone about the F-16, as though giving a briefing, but the kibbutzniks listened with intent faces and shining eyes. About to sit down, he laughed and said, "Ai, I almost forgot. I'm supposed to tell the young folks not to leave the kibbutz for the big city. That I can't do. Who am I to advise you? But one thing I can say, because it's the truth. I've just driven down here from the big city. There I was feeling terrible about Israel, and here I feel good." He was astonished, and so was Kishote, at the loud applause in which the young kibbutzniks heartily joined.

  As the Volvo rolled out through the gate to a dark dirt road

  lined with tall trees, the aviator said, "Nice people is right. I loved them. But isn't the kibbutz movement finished, sir, an anachronism from the pioneer days?"

  "Well, I used to think so myself, but since Aryeh married that Marilyn Monroe back there, I've been wondering." Danny chuckled. "I mean it. An iron girl! And a sweetheart. These border kibbutzim are important for security, no argument."

  They drove on the moonlit main road to Jericho without talking. Kishote was turning into the highway that climbed to Jerusalem when Danny spoke up. "I really do feel better, sir. Talking my heart out to you helped. You're a good listener."

  "Everything you said was true, and well put. Too well."

  "Look, why was the strike aborted?" No response. "We should have been told why. We're used to scrubs in the air force, but this last-second abort was alarming. It gave us a feeling, I tell you frankly, that the government doesn't know what it's doing. All aircraft were on the ramp, loaded up with bombs, extra fuel tanks full, engines roaring-"

  "All right, Danny. This goes in one ear and out the other."

  "Trust me."

  "The French were having an election then. We've got an election coming up too. At the last minute, Begin came under pressure to wait and see whether a new French government would cut off the Iraqi nuclear connection. He gave in. They got the new government, but went right on supplying that reactor."

  "Okay." The aviator nodded. "Now, confidence for confidence, I'll tell you something. When we unloaded the bombs and checked the time fuses, they had all been set wrong. It's still being investigated. If the mission had flown not only would it have failed, but the mistimed explosions might have killed some of us diving in."

  "My God, you're telling me," Kishote almost groaned, "that the abort was a good thing, for the wrong reasons?"

  "For the wrong reasons, it was a miracle from heaven."

  "At least," Yossi said after a shocked silence, "a very unusual circumstance."

  "You said it. Our level of maintenance is marvellous, but a million things can go wrong in such an operation and it only

  takes one..." He broke off, as Yossi swung swiftly past a bus grinding uphill. "Sir, will the mission ever go?"

  "It will go."

  "Well, and even if it succeeds, what will it accomplish, in the long run?"

  "What do you call the long run? The days of the Ezrakh's Messiah? It will give us ten years."

  When Ruti Barak came home for the summer, it was like having a teenager in the Barak flat. The telephone rang and rang. To her father she appeared to have faded; scrawny, peaked, and for the first time wearing glasses. All the same the young men obviously disagreed. They kept pestering her for a date on Shavuot, until Danny Luria snared her. The one-day festival celebrating the Revelation on Sinai fell on a Monday, so the beach hotels were all booked for a holiday weekend. The day after Ruti said yes to Danny, Amos Pasternak also called, to her visible vexation. But on Friday she showed up all smiles at breakfast, chirruping that Danny had backed out, and she and Amos were going to Eilat together.

  Nakhama said, "Danny backed out of a date with you? Impossible."

  "Well, he did! If you think I did it, you're wrong."

  "Did he say why?" Barak asked.

  "Not a word. Just called it off." Ruti gave her parents a deep dark-eyed look which ended further inquiry into her love life.

  To Zev Barak this was a red light. He had been watching the calendar anxiously as Sunday after Sunday slipped by. A strike on the reactor would go on a Sunday, if at all, when the French and Italian technicians would not be in the structure. The absolute deadline was the first of July. The reactor was scheduled to go critical that month, according to intelligence gleaned from friendly Frenchmen on the project. Once the uranium rods were in and "hot," bombing was out, for it would spew a lethal cloud all over Baghdad. Was the decision then, after all, really to do nothing and let a dictator acquire atomic bombs, a man who openly boasted that he would "burn half of Israel?" The French government had pooh-

  poohed that statement as overheated Arab rhetoric, but Barak took it very seriously. Danny Luria's cancelled date with Ruti was a hint that this Sunday the air force was at last going to strike. It all fitted together.

  But by now Israel's election was only three weeks away. If the strike was a failure, Menachem Begin would fall in execration. The thing would have to be a flawless success, and even so, the voters might simply take it for granted. Wasn't the IAF the most accomplished air force in the world? What else was new? And when the opposition raised the howl - as it surely would - that he had played petty politics with pilots' lives and Israel's world repute in desperate grandstanding for votes, how could he prove in rebuttal that the reactor would have gone critical in July? Zev Barak had never liked Begin as Prime Minister in Golda's shoes, but he had guts. One had to give him that.

  On Saturday night Danny could not sleep, thinking about the morrow, and regretting his missed weekend with Ruti. He put on a quilted jacket and took a walk under glittering Sinai stars. At Ramat David the June nights were becoming warm and hazy, but here in Etzion it was a night of crystal air and desert cold. Ah, this gloomy doomed Etzion base! Ah, his father's melancholy duty to destroy this marvel of underground hangars and advanced avionics which he had helped to build!

  Wandering into the recreation room, he found Mussa, number three in his attack foursome, drinking beer. Mussa was the silent one of the Chosen, short and swarthy, with thick curly black hair. His home was in upper Nazareth, a mixed Arab and Jewish town. Even among the pilots, who tended to reticence except a
bout flying, he was considered taciturn. Danny did not so much as know whether Mussa was married or single. As an aviator, he was professional as the best. Taking a beer from the refrigerator, Danny said, "Tell me something, Mussa. What's our motivation for tomorrow?"

  Mussa looked up at him with veiled brown eyes. "Our motivation? Why?"

  "Okay, forget it. Dumb question." "No, I'll answer you. My mother's a survivor. Both her parents died in Maidanek, and if I can help it, nobody will

  ever incinerate Jews again. That's my motivation. What's yours?"

  "To gain ten more years for Israel."

  "Not all that different," said Mussa. "One decade at a time."

  June 7, 1981, 3 p.m.

  "Okay, Dov, here I come."

  The words break unbidden from Danny as the screaming shaking heavily overloaded F-16 struggles into the air. At once it strikes him that this blurt is a bad omen. Is he really on his way to join his brother in death?