For all of that encumbrage, the unit made good time and with no mishaps. The outskirts of the city were barren and burned—a landscape somewhere in composition between Galilee and the face of the moon. The city itself—located forty-six-and-a-half miles inland from the Mediterranean Sea—was now the populous commercial center of an important agribusiness area of vineyards, market gardens, orchards, and grain fields. It was formerly surrounded by a wall with four gates, but all that was left for the commandoes to see and to stumble over were some small piles of rock rubble. They silently passed the university which served as a landmark. Wide boulevards and squares replaced the traditional quarters, causing the town to lose much of its former character beginning in 1962. It was still completely dark when they arrived at the northwestern gates of Sidi-bel-Abbès—the side opposite the location of the Foreign Legion headquarters–giving the city something of a desert ghost town quality. Once again, Jacob ben Amsallem was waiting in the shadows.
“Following me, please, sirs,” he said, looking down to minimize the possibility that it could appear that he was giving orders.
The commando unit fell in behind the sayanim, and they moved like shadows. The sky was overhung, making it a moonless and starless night—perfect for the task at hand. They walked quickly and cautiously to avoid brushing debris on the streets but in what were obviously semicircles; the commandoes presumed it was for the purpose of security. They circled the Sidi Bel Abbès Domestic Airport and the Metropolitan Police station—which was a decaying remnant of the colonial era—before splitting into two groups and focusing on the EMT station. Jacob led one arm of the commando unit and Lev led the other. Their objective was the BOQ [Bachelor Officers’ Quarters].
§§§§§§
BOQ [Bachelor Officers Quarters], EMT [État-major tactique, Tactical Command Post], La Légion Étrangère, Sidi-bel-Abbès, Algeria, early morning
“It’s the dark romance of the French Foreign Legion: haunted men from everywhere, fighting anywhere, dying for causes not their own. Legionnaires need war, certainly … [and] there’s always the hopeless battle…. The real lesson here was not about combat tactics. It was about do not ask questions, do not make suggestions, do not even think of that. Forget your civilian reflexes. War has its own logic.”
-William Langewiesche
Antoine cursed the time of day—not yet 0500—his insistent bladder, his arthritic joints, his insomnia, and his old age for not allowing him more than four to six hours of sleep a night. He was too old to be a soldier, he thought. He was too old to be still sleeping in a narrow utilitarian bed in a Spartan room, in a godforsaken desert, among dark-faced strangers he detested. Otherwise, he loved the Legion and the safety and the anonymity it provided. He pushed his creaky bones up out of bed and began to curse the heat—the omnipresent heat. He was already sweating by the time he made it to the narrow veranda overlooking the now rarely used parade grounds. His bladder forced him to hurry. He unzipped and leaned out as far as possible and let flow a narrow and frustrating stream of urine down onto the walkway in front of his building.
He cursed his fellow Gebirgsjägers—now Legionnaires—his real friends, Hugues Beauchamp and Serge Rounsavall, and all the rest of the sleeping Legionnaires. He cursed all of the men in the unit, indeed all men everywhere who were not rapidly going bald like him. He was just in a foul mood. He needed to stretch his limbs and to get his blood flowing; so, he threw on a blouse and shoes and walked down to the walkway he had just besmirched to go for a walk. The command post was empty of people. If there were sentries, they were likely asleep—the lazy good-for-nothings. Such conduct would never have been tolerated in his old unit, the 33rd Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS Charlemagne (1st French) Regiment. During the war, such a miscreant would have stood before a summary court martial and been shot the same day. He missed the glory days in the SS, the absolute power, the adventure. He missed being important. His regiment had been personally assigned to be the last defenders of the Führer in the final Battle of Berlin.
He had to admit that now he was somewhat awake he enjoyed the early morning quiet. It was peaceful. He tallied the positive aspects of his life as he slowly walked around the streets of Sidi-bel-Abbès and tried to imagine—there in the dark—what the place had been like during its glory days as the international headquarters of the French Foreign Legion. Nothing like Berlin with the SS regiments marching down the Ku’damm in perfect order; but still, the Legion had its own pomp and tradition that could still make an old Frenchman’s heart swell.
He heard a shuffling sound. Rats. The place was crawling with them. It was more than a decent human being’s life to venture into an alley at night. The thought made his skin crawl. He listened again but heard nothing else; so, he moved on, a little more wary now. He stepped into shadows and listened intently. There was a distinct sound—as if a man had brushed against a building or alley wall. Now, Antoine’s antennae went up. He went into reflexive combat vigilance mode. The night became quiet again, but Antoine refused to believe that he was hearing things that were not there. There were bandits—marauding Berbers who would love to kidnap a senior Legion officer—or maybe just a drunk sliding along a wall for balance trying to get home. That thought gave him an immediate goal. He crept silently into a dark alley and made his way quickly back to the barracks.
He tapped first on Serge’s door, then on Hugues’s.
“Quiet,” he said. “Maybe this is nothing, but I am sure I was being watched. At least there’s somebody out there that shouldn’t be. Get dressed. My old defensive prickle is back. I think we need to get ready for something.”
Both men were groggy and a little confused. But they both had been with Antoine long enough to trust his sixth sense about danger.
“What do you want to do, Mein General?” Serge asked, but thought, What are we doing up in the middle of the night?
“This will sound stupid, but I want to overreact. If there’s nothing to this, we can just slip back to our rooms; and nobody will be the wiser.”
In the street below, Lev gave Haggai a withering look. He had stumbled over a bag of trash and bumped into a wall. To Lev in his heightened state of awareness, it sounded as if he had fired his pistol. Lev did not need to say anything; Haggai and everyone else got the message. Moises took five men and made their way through the narrow alleys around to the back of the BOQ. Every man in the unit could remember when a fugitive had escaped out the back when they went in the front. They were determined that this not be another one of those times. A long foot chase would be noisy and would attract a lot of highly unwanted attention.
Antoine, Serge, and Hugues made their way down the connecting hallways of the three barracks buildings until they came to the west facing exit. Serge took point and popped his head out of the door to take a quick look. Nothing there. He was beginning to feel rather sheepish. He signaled, and the other two Gebirgsjägers followed point just as they had done for all their years of combat.
Serge stepped up to Antoine, cupped his hands over Antoine’s right ear, and whispered very softly with careful enunciation, “Where to?”
Antoine did the same thing to Serge. His whisper was terse: “Armory.”
They were less than twenty-five yards away if they had chosen the most direct route, but their instincts pushed them to walk through the darkest alleys and past the broken streetlights they were familiar with. They made their way to the back of the armory, being careful not to fall over the trash strewn back there. Antoine felt a twinge of disgust that he was part of an outfit that permitted such lack of military order. He determined to report this to the CO later that morning … if nothing came of his foray in the night.
Lev and Moises whispered orders into their Bulgarian Radioelektronika handheld radio transceivers.
“Two sentries in the street in front and in back of the BOQ. The rest of the teams get up to the second floor. Jacob says they are in rooms 210, 211, and 212. Be on the lookout for sentries. Radio silence f
rom here on out.”
There were no guards, and the Israelis met no resistance. They lined up two men to each door while the rest stood guard in the halls and stairwells. Lev gave a twisting finger signal, and a man tried the doorknob of each of the three rooms. To no one’s surprise, they were all locked. The locks were ridiculously simple—skeleton keyholes with no bolt locks. The doors were unlocked in less than five seconds and very nearly silently.
“Look for booby traps,” Lev whispered as he pushed his door slowly open.
Ten seconds later, the commandoes returned to the hall and shook their heads.
“At least we didn’t wake the garrison,” Lev whispered.
He was wrong, as it turns out. Before he could ask the obvious question—Where are they?’—two men peeked out of their partly opened doors, one in the first third of the hallway, the other nearer the other end. An IDF master sergeant took down the man at his end, and did it in lethal silence. At the other end, the Legionnaire recognized instantly that he was facing a much superior force and rushed back into his room, threw on pants, and went out through the window facing the front of the building. He jumped to the veranda—which made a serious crashing noise—and got a severely strained ankle for his reward. He leaped off the veranda onto the top of a small Fiat and crumpled the bonnet in with a resounding crash. Micah was one of the guards on the street. He saw the man’s two landings, and was at the Fiat to dispatch him before the Legionnaire could get off the car. Micah cut his throat and did it quietly, but the damage was already done.
Half-dressed Legionnaires began pouring into the street, opening the barracks room doors and rattling sabers and locking and loading rifles and pistols. Micah Freiburg and Rasar Evon Meir were shot dead by men who saw Micah cut the throat of one of their brothers-in-arms. The Legion drilled the Code d’honneur du Legionnaire into every recruit, including officers from their first day in the Legion, and required frequent rote recitation of the men to ensure that it was never out of their minds when Legionnaires came under fire.
“Légionnaire, tu es un volontaire, servant la France avec honneur et fidélité.
[“Legionnaire, you are a volunteer serving France with honour and fidelity.]
Chaque légionnaire est ton frère d’armes, quelle que soit sa nationalité, sa race ou sa religion. Tu lui manifestes toujours la solidarité étroite qui doit unir les membres d’une même famille.” [Each Legionnaire is your brother-in-arms whatever his nationality, his race, or his religion might be. You show him the same close solidarity that links the members of the same family.”]
Then hell broke loose.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-SIX
Armurerie, EMT [État-major tactique, Tactical Command Post], La Légion Étrangère, Sidi-bel-Abbès, Algeria, January 3, 1964, 0715
The battle outside the armory was sporadic, with small arms fire crackling around the barracks buildings for a few minutes followed by men shouting in three or four different languages. After nearly three hours of fighting, no one seemed to have discovered the whereabouts of the Gebirgsjägers. It appeared the commandoes who had invaded the EMT were conducting a guerrilla-type fight with the Legionnaires with alternating running, hiding, and stopping to fire at pursuers. In the darkness and smoke and chaos, men were being wounded and some were dead on both sides; but the chaos made it impossible to determine an accurate and up-to-the-minute casualty count.
“Maybe they’ve forgotten about us,” Hugues said, “and maybe they’ve gotten themselves into too much trouble to be able to concentrate on their mission.”
“Maybe … but I don’t think that will last very long,” said Antoine.
The three men were taking a breather from their work of fortifying the inside of the building for when—not if—the interests of the outsiders shifted to them. They had opened three bottles of rather good Cote du Rhone red wine from the storage racks reserved for officers and were quenching their thirst. There was no water in the armory and no food.
Serge sat looking out of the first floor front windows—the only windows in the building.
“White flag,” he said.
“Whose?” Antoine asked.
“The commandoes. The Jews. One of them is walking out to parlay with Capitaine Duris.”
“Let me have a look,” Antoine said. “It’s the Krav Maga master, Lev Mizrahi. That can’t be any good for us. He has real juice with the Legion, and he’s a smooth talker. My bet is that they are going to try to make the best of out a terrible situation for both of them. Once they do, our time here is over despite all that ‘Each Legionnaire is your brother-in-arms whatever his nationality.’ I can almost hear the reasoning about how Nazis—and especially SS—are the natural enemies of the Legion, and certainly for mother France. The best we can hope for is to get the chance to escape with a head start, and the worst is that we have a small last Battle of Berlin here today.”
“I won’t surrender. No POW camp for me. I’ll never go back to one. So, if we’re going to have a battle, it will be my last one,” said Serge.
“I have no intention of giving up. But I will go down fighting. Hopefully we can take down a few Jews as we go,” Antoine added.
Hugues said, “I hate to be fighting Frenchmen again, but so be it. We are effectively persons with no country. My only allegiance is to you two. Don’t let them take me. Kill me if it looks like I can no longer fight, or if I get surrounded.”
Antoine put his right hand in the air, and all three touched palms in a pact to the death.
“Sichern und laden [lock and load],” he said, “zum vernichtungskrieg [to a war of annilation, an ultimate offensive].”
§§§§§§
“Watching him watch … I asked how [it] was going. He answered that the boat was sinking normally. It was a figure of speech. He knew from experience that the [men] were doing well enough.”
-William Langewiesche
Lev stepped out of the morning shadows cast by the rising sun. He was keenly aware of the dozens of Legionnaire guns pointed at him and knew he was as close to death as he had ever been, white flag or not.
Captaine Duris glared at him with a mixed look of hatred for an enemy, profound disappointment for having been betrayed by a man and a country he had counted upon as friends, and a face full of quizzical bewilderment. Lev stopped halfway between the barracks and the Legion captain, slowly turned around a full 360 degrees, and opened his hands to show empty palms.
Duris gave a curt jerk of his head to signal Lev to approach. All around him came the sound of locking rifles. Duris turned slowly and gestured with his hands in a downward fashion to signal his men to point their rifles at the ground. All guns lowered and aimed at a forty-five degree angle towards the hard pack of the parade ground.
Lev walked directly to Captaine Duris and stopped two feet from him. His eyes held the captaine’s in a look of courage that he scarcely felt, and a deep conviction that he would not signal anything suggesting aggression, anger, or that he was an enemy.
“Thank you for agreeing to speak with me, Capitaine. I offer no excuses. My commandoes and I came here uninvited and with a military mission. I wish to assure you that we never intended to harm even a single Legionnaire. Our mission is to arrest, detain, and remove back to Israel three mass murderers. We believe them to be common enemies of both of our countries. We are sorrowful that there has been blood shed on both of our sides. We ask that you allow us to deal with the three Nazi Totenkopfverbände [Deaths Head units who specialized in extermination camp duty] who not long ago were murdering our defenseless countrymen, women, and children, and who betrayed France by collaborating—even worse—by forming the infamous 33rd Waffen SS division—the Charlemagne regiment—to kill Frenchmen. They should have been nothing more than scheiss kommandoes [men assigned to latrine detail by the Konzentrationslager].”
“What is it you expect me to do, Lev?”
The question was posed in a manner of resignation fully expecting that his Legionnaires would shortly
be fighting to the death against the elite IDF and Mossad commandoes—a lose-lose situation with unthinkable international ramifications. At the very least, he knew his career would be over; and he would be cashiered out in disgrace.
“Let us reason together, mon ami. We have already lost men we can ill-afford to lose. No matter what happens from this point on, we will lose more. Both you and I and our respective countries will suffer great loss of face if a battle occurs between us. I would like to avoid that if it is humanly possible. I think there can still be a solution, one which may yet allow us to prove our true friendship towards the Legion and to France. Have your Legionnaires back away a safe distance and remain ready to annihilate our men should it even appear that we will do anything other than what I promise.”
“And what is it that you promise, Lev? What possible good can come of what you have already done?”
“Allow us to arrest and take the three homicidal monsters back to stand trial in Israel … or to die trying. Perhaps they will elect to fight to their own deaths. That would be no great loss to you, to the Legion, to France, or to the world if that is their choice. When we finish our mission, we will leave with the same secrecy that governed our arrival. No one outside of this location need ever know what took place here. I pledge you my personal honor that the Mossad, the IDF, and the government of Israel will never breathe a word of it beyond our top secret councils.”
Duris pondered the offer for a few moments.
“We will place a cordon sanitaire around the EMT and all entrances and exits of Sidi-bel-Abbès. We will neither hinder nor help you. You will be on your own to find your way out. You know I cannot speak for the ungovernable Kabyle Berbers. They live by their own law—the kanum—and like nothing better than to kidnap and torture or sell a senior Legion officer. They are wild men but know that they are Muslims to their cores. They would not hesitate for a fraction to kill or torture you or your men or any other Jew they might encounter. I hope you have a plan for your escape; but if you don’t, we will not remember nor mourn you. Are we clear on our agreement?”
The Charlemagne Murders Page 63