by Herman Wouk
“You okay now, Lieutenant?” The helmsman was helping him to his feet. Putting a hand to his head, Noah felt warm sticky blood. His vision was misty and his head painfully throbbed. He peered around at the steeply listing wheelhouse, a chaos of overturned instruments, shattered glass, and tumbled books and charts. The wheel was swinging free, unattended.
“What the devil! Get back to that helm, Polski.”
“Sir, it’s no use, the rudder hasn’t responded since we got hit, and —”
“Rocket to port.” A soprano yell full of fright.
Shouts rose everywhere, and staggering out on a wing, Noah saw smoke and flame all over the ship and many arms pointing to a new light in the darkening sky. The Eilat was port beam to this second missile, and the captain stood staring at the expanding yellow eye, eerily reflected on the glassy sea.
“Captain, can’t we maneuver with engines? We’re broadside to again —”
“Ah, good, you’re on your feet, but Elohim, you’re a bloody mess! Maneuver? How? I have no rudder, Noah, only one engine, and I can’t contact them below. God knows how many were killed. Sure you’re all right? You were kaput for quite a while —”
“I’m okay. By God, sir, that thing’s going into its dive.”
“I see it. Hit the deck,” shouted the captain, “nothing else to do now.”
Descending through sparse gunfire, the second missile threw up a towering splash. Noah fell prone on cold metal, an explosion made the whole ship ring like a giant gong, and he felt it as a brutal blow on his chest and arms. Stumbling back to his feet, he saw a smoky column of new red fire rising amidships. Crewmen were running about and yelling, others were picking up the wounded. The power hum that was the ship’s breath of life had suddenly ceased. The Eilat was a dead listing drifting hulk.
Getting up from the deck, the captain said to Noah in a curiously calm way over the clamor of the sailors, “We’ll have to abandon ship.”
“Why? We can call for help, Captain. Helicopters can be here in fifteen minutes and —”
The captain shook his head. “Don’t you know our radio gear is out? Goldstein worked on it and we tried and tried, but we couldn’t raise the army in Sinai, let alone Haifa HQ. The current is setting us toward Port Said, Noah. I’ve dropped the anchors, but they aren’t holding —”
“All the same, we can stay afloat for hours yet, sir, and keep the crew together until —”
“Until what? The magazines can go anytime, and I have a lot of helpless wounded to think about. Look at those fires —”
“Sir, I think Goldstein and I can jury-rig a radio.” Improvising an emergency set had been a classroom problem at which Noah had excelled, in an electronics course for officers.
“You can?” The captain gnawed his lips. “How long would it take you?”
“If we find the components, maybe twenty, thirty minutes. It’s our best chance, sir. Otherwise the navy won’t know for hours, maybe all night, what’s happened to us —”
“Give it a try. But fast.”
Scrounging in the wrecked radio room by flashlight, he and the handy little radioman Goldstein assembled tubes, wires, and batteries into a messy tangled contraption, its range for sending and receiving a total guess. A bright moon shone on the burning ship, down hard by the stern and listing more and more, when Noah commenced calling, “IHS Eilat here. Mayday, Mayday. We are sinking. Request immediate help.”
Low crackling in the receiver, nothing more. Beaming toward Sinai, the radioman kept sweeping the crude antenna from north to south and back to north, while Noah repeated wearily, “All Zahal units in Sinai. IHS Eilat calling. Mayday, Mayday. Does anyone hear us?”
He and Goldstein were crouched by the anchor windlass at the bow, signalling from the highest spot on the foundering Eilat. Smoke still rose from flickering fires all over the ship, though the worst blazes had burnt out. The crew was crowded on the steeply inclined forecastle, where the wounded lay groaning in rows on the deck. Everything that could float — not only rafts but spare life jackets, wooden cupboards, empty oil drums — was piled higgledy-piggledy at the lifelines, for most of the boats were smashed. Any hope short of abandoning ship now lay in the makeshift radio. Twenty minutes, and still no human voice had punctuated the weak static.
Noah had too much time to think, in the long agonizing wait. What a horror this was, his ship sinking under him, so many dead boys in the engine room, the terrible lineup of injured, moaning, crying sailors along the forecastle deck; himself half-numb from the shock of his own still-bleeding head wound, his mind drifting in and out of the nightmare amid dreamy thoughts of Daphna …
“IHS Eilat here. Mayday, Mayday. We are sinking —”
Barks of laughter from the radio. Noah’s heart leaped as he came alert. A harsh tumble of Arabic, then crackling silence.
“What the devil was all that?” the captain asked.
“ ‘Go ahead and drown, Jews, and sink to hell,’ ” said Noah.
The captain cursed.
Noah said, “Sir, sir, now at least we know we’re transmitting. It’s a break —”
Looking around at the jammed forecastle, his eyes puffed half-shut, the captain pointed aft, where dark waves were lapping over the canted fantail. He hoarsely exclaimed, “Noah, I’ve got to get my wounded off, and if we don’t —”
A deep voice, calm and friendly, in clear Hebrew: “This is army unit Aleph Dalet Three in Sinai. We receive you, Eilat. Go ahead.”
“Oh God! Captain, hear that?” cried Noah. Never in his life would anything sound as sweet or dear to him, he thought, as that response in Hebrew.
“I heard it, I heard it, keep talking to him —”
“Sinai, Sinai, do you receive me clearly?”
“Hiuvi, hiuvi [Affirmative, affirmative], Eilat. Go ahead.”
“Sinai, we’re northeast of Port Said, thirteen and a half miles out, clearly visible by moonlight. Hit by two missiles, on fire and sinking. Many wounded and dead. Two anchors down, drifting toward Egypt. Danger of being captured. Abandoning ship.”
“Ruth [Roger], Eilat. All authorities will be alerted. Rescue helicopters will come. Keep in contact.”
With his battery-powered bullhorn the captain roared this news to the crew. Cheers rose on the forecastle.
Taking the wounded off forced terrible choices on the ship’s doctor, Noah, and the captain, as to who should go in the remaining boats, who on rafts, who in life jackets; quick cold-blooded decisions about the seriousness of injuries and the chances of men living through the night. At the order Abandon ship the boats full of the worst wounded were lowered, the crew threw everything floatable overboard, and then began sliding down ropes or leaping into the sea. The officers went last.
Noah’s naked legs were plunging into cool water when he heard yells in the dark around him, “Teel, teel.” Over the ship’s bow, now black and steep against the stars, another yellow glare showed. He remembered to turn on his back. The explosion threw up a black fountain of water that foamed white in the moonlight. The crack! all along Noah’s spine was like being hit by a speeding car. Then he thought he must be delirious, because it seemed he heard singing. Pulling himself up with searing pain on a floating jerrican, he saw shadowy sailors nearby clustered on a raft, raising discordant defiant voices:
Jerusalem of gold,
Of bronze and of light …
Seven time zones to the west, General Zev Barak at this moment was reviewing the navy requisitions for missile countermeasures, which had arrived at the Israeli Embassy in Washington by diplomatic pouch that morning. The military attaché was a prematurely gray officer in his early forties, an older heavier Noah, with lighter skin and bushier eyebrows. Noah had been beseeching his father by telephone for help. Now that the papers were in hand Zev Barak felt he could act. Procurement of such secret electronic gear would be tough at best, but he thought he might argue that countermeasures, being purely defensive gadgets, should not be embargoed as weaponry. The Pe
ntagon was being damned obdurate on major replenishment long overdue. This might be a bone it would throw to Israel.
He pulled a greenish pad from a drawer and began a rapid scrawl in Hebrew of a draft memorandum. Unlike so much of the humdrum paperwork in this assignment, here at least was a labor of love, a way to be of use to his son out on the firing line. Barak was not happy in this job. He had never been. During his brief visit to Jerusalem after the great victory, the Minister of Defense had told him, “What you accomplished in Washington, Zev, was worth two brigades in the field.” Coming from Moshe Dayan that was something, but words were easy. Barak’s army contemporaries who had fought the war had leaped ahead on the maslul, the career track toward General Staff posts, sector commands, and the grand prize of Ramatkhal, Chief of Staff. Nothing Dayan said could change that. In earlier missions to Washington, Barak had earned a reputation of deftness at handling Americans, which now was proving a trap.
Writing up the memorandum absorbed him until his intercom buzzed. “General, your lunch with the Assistant Secretary is at twelve-thirty.”
“L’Azazel, thanks, Esther.” Finishing the draft would have to wait. He slipped on his army topcoat and drove to the Pentagon through the gorgeous autumn foliage along the Potomac.
Henry Pearson, one of several Assistant Secretaries of Defense, was a gaunt bureaucrat with a chronic cigarette cough, who fancied military history and liked to chat with Barak about Thucydides, Napoleon, and Garibaldi. Not today, though. Air force colonel Bradford Halliday was unexpectedly there in the office, and he rose to shake hands with the Israeli.
“I believe you gentlemen know each other,” said Pearson.
“We’re acquainted,” said Halliday, cool and unsmiling.
“Nice to see you again,” said Barak. In their awkward previous encounter, Halliday had been in civilian clothes. He looked taller, leaner, and more formidable in a blue uniform with combat decorations. It would have taken a sharper observer than Henry Pearson to discern that these two men were in love with the same woman, and had run into each other only once by chance on her premises, much to her embarrassment and theirs.
They lunched on curried shrimp at a window facing acres of parked cars, for Pearson did not rate an office with a river view. The topic of the lunch was forty-eight Skyhawk light attack bombers, contracted for by Israel some time ago and still not delivered. Pearson explained, coughing a lot, that since the United States was now embargoing all weapons shipments to the Middle East, and urging the Soviets to do the same, delivery of the Skyhawks at present was not feasible. Barak protested with heat that this was highly unsatisfactory, because the Russians, while pondering the embargo proposal, were continuing to rearm Egypt and Syria at an alarming rate. Halliday was at the meeting, it soon emerged, to help the easygoing Pearson stall off Barak. This the airman did with dry authority.
“General, Israel has wiped out all hostile air forces in your region,” he said. “Your air superiority is absolute. You can’t deny that. The urgency of our delivering the Skyhawks just now therefore escapes me.”
“The urgency, Colonel, as I’ve just pointed out to the Assistant Secretary, is Russian resupply to our enemies. Clearly that compels us to start to resupply ourselves. Air superiority isn’t a static thing. When Arab aircraft outnumber our squadrons three or four to one — we project a period of eighteen months from now at the present rate, with newer MiGs, by the way — our position could become awkward.”
“Airplanes don’t fly themselves,” retorted Halliday, forking up curry. “Your air victory decimated their pilot pool, and it’ll be a long time regenerating.”
“With Russian instructors? Why?” Barak disliked shrimp, so he was picking at the bread and butter. “Arab manpower is infinite, compared to ours. Training a quality pilot takes a year.”
“Zev, Russian instructors can’t instill the motivation your pilots have,” Pearson put in.
“True, because we fight for national survival, and the Arabs don’t. Is that a reason to withhold from us the wherewithal to fight?”
Pearson coughed hard, and glanced at the impassive air force colonel. “Zev’s a good arguer, isn’t he?”
Halliday merely nodded. He had spoken his piece, nailing down the undeclared and unpalatable fact that President Johnson and the State Department were mending fences with the Arabs, and that Pearson, though friendly, was helpless. Barak wasted no more words on the Skyhawks, and the meeting ended with sparring about ammunition replenishment and parts for Patton tanks, during which Halliday was silent and Pearson vague.
Barak and Halliday left the office together. In the corridor Barak was ready for a cool curt goodbye, but Halliday surprised him. “General, where’s your car?”
“Parking lot E.”
“So’s mine. May we talk a bit?”
“By all means.”
Halliday told him as they traversed the tortuous Pentagon rings and stairwells that the superintendent of the Air Force Academy, his old wingmate, was eager to invite an Israeli squadron leader to lecture on the great air victory. “He has in mind Colonel Benny Luria. You must know him.”
“Very well.”
“Would you approach Luria? The superintendent wants him for sometime in November.”
“I’m sure Benny would be honored, if he can do it. I’ll have to go through air force channels, of course. Otherwise there’s Avihu Bin Nun, another great squadron leader, also Ron Pecker —”
“The word is that Luria’s an able speaker.”
“That’s the truth. I’ll get on this at once.”
“I’ll be greatly obliged.”
They came outside in a chilly mist, and Halliday surprised him even more. “Have you heard from Emily?”
Barak mustered all his calm to reply, “Not since she left New Delhi.”
Emily Cunningham had in fact written him only once on her round-the-world trip, mentioning that her correspondence with Bud Halliday was getting hot and heavy since his sidetracking from Vietnam to the Pentagon. Whether that had been a prod to elicit jealous regret, or just more of Emily’s rattling candor, it had hurt.
“She writes genuinely amusing letters,” said Halliday. “Of course you know that.”
“Yes, we’ve corresponded off and on for many years. She’s an original, Emily. Is she holding to her itinerary?”
“Apparently. Due back from Paris in two weeks. Here’s my car.” Halliday held out his hand. “See here, General, about those Skyhawks, entirely off the record” — Halliday paused, his face a trifle less forbidding than in Pearson’s office — “holding them up is a temporary diplomatic blip. Denying them to you altogether would be bad faith. That won’t happen. We’re not the French, and the President isn’t De Gaulle. Israel will get the aircraft. Meantime fussing by your government doesn’t help. Save your energy — and the considerable political capital that you’ve gained with your victory — for other matters.”
Barak seized the moment to ask Halliday about Noah’s missile countermeasures. The airman listened with a knitted brow. “Well, you can get that so-called chaff on the open market. Window, we term it. It’s a question of seaborne chaff launchers, which I wouldn’t know about. As for the electronic stuff, that’s my bailiwick, more or less, and in the air force it’s highly classified.” He shrugged, shaking his head. “About the navy, I can’t say. Send me a personal letter, not through channels, and I’ll bump it to a good navy contact.”
“That will be very helpful.”
The cold drizzle fogging Barak’s windshield seemed to be drizzling into his spirit as he drove back to the embassy, angered by the turndown on the Skyhawks — though he had more or less anticipated it — and still hungry, for he had eaten nothing all day but that spongy Pentagon bread. Halliday’s few words about Emily Cunningham had raked open a healing scar, bringing all too frustratingly to mind that strange winsome daughter of a decidedly strange CIA official, cut off from him by her own decision; the slender yielding body, the enormous cleve
r bespectacled eyes, the disorderly halo of brown hair, the antic wit of her talk and her letters, the whole snaring presence which she had had even as a girl of twelve. Now she was reaching for a life beyond that of a girls school headmistress, and he could only welcome that, but he was discovering that loving two women — and he loved his wife as much as ever — did not halve the pain of losing one of them.
He had first caught sight of Emily Cunningham as a gamine with a tennis racket, scampering onto her father’s patio, and later presiding gravely at the dinner table in her mother’s absence; then showing him the fireflies on their lawn overlooking the Potomac, and prattling precocious romantic nonsense. Long afterward, in their rare encounters in Paris and in Jerusalem while she was studying at the Sorbonne, she had declared and insisted that she had an unshakeable crush on him. For long he had tried to laugh it off. But her beguiling and hilarious “pen pal” letters over the years had brightened his dogged army career and the constricted life in Israel. Then had come his missions to Washington, and the start of the affair. The unlucky assignment as military attaché had led to his getting in deep with her and — who could say? — perhaps even missing the war on that account …
Never mind, never MIND, stay off that quicksand …
He could more or less forget his breakup with that haunting woman in the drudging workload at the embassy, where the optimistic turmoil of victory still yeasted and bubbled. And why not? The Zionist organizations were happily swelling with members and funds, and clamoring for war-hero speakers like Dayan and Rabin; and these were not readily available, so the military attaché and the ambassador were winging all over the country as tolerable substitutes. That night Barak had to fly to Chicago to address a Zionist luncheon next day, and as he drove he was trying to work up some fresh angle for the talk, and to keep his thoughts from circling back to Emily Cunningham.
What could he say in Chicago that was really new? By now he had a memorized act. Quick review of the victory, to smiles and applause; cautionary words about enemy infractions of the cease-fire, about soldiers manning the Suez Canal line getting killed, about terrorists infiltrating from Jordan to mine and booby-trap the kibbutz fields — not what American Jews wanted to hear, so make that part short; then the exciting windup picturing Jerusalem and the West Bank after Moshe Dayan opened the borders, Arabs pouring peacefully into Zion Square to gaze with wonder at the shopwindows, Israelis thronging through the Old City bazaars to haggle for bargains and taste exotic foods, or joyriding in hordes to Jericho and Hebron, singing “Jerusalem of Gold”; all leading up to his personal anecdote of the graybeard Jew in a fur hat and ear curls, walking beside him through the Old City in a stream of Israelis on the way to the Western Wall, joyously exclaiming, “MOSHIAKH’S TZEITEN!” (“MESSIANIC TIMES!”) He would certainly use that surefire finish again, however far he was from believing it.