by Wilbur Smith
‘Is something wrong? What is it?’ David tried to pull away, but the Brig held him and steered him towards the door.
‘Nothing is wrong. She will be all right – but she must have no excitement now. You’ll be able to see her tomorrow.’
They buried Hannah that evening in the family plot on the Mountain of Olives. It was a small funeral party attended by the three men and a mere handful of relatives, many of whom had others to mourn from the previous day’s slaughter.
There was an official car waiting to take the Brig to a meeting of the High Command, where retaliatory measures would certainly be discussed, another revolution in the relentless wheel of violence that rolled across the troubled land.
Joe and David climbed into the Mercedes and sat silently, David making no effort to start the engine. Joe lit cigarettes for them, and they both felt drained of purpose and direction.
‘What are you going to do now?’ David asked him.
‘We had two weeks,’ Joe answered him. ‘We were going down to Ashkelon—’ His voice trailed off. ‘I don’t know. There isn’t anything to do now, is there?’
‘Shall we go and have a drink somewhere?’
Joe shook his head. ‘I don’t feel like drinking,’ he said. ‘I think I’ll go back to base. They are flying night interceptions tonight.’
‘Yes,’ David agreed quickly, ‘I’ll come with you.’ He could not see Debra until tomorrow, and the house on Malik Street would be lonely and cold. Suddenly he longed for the peace of the night heavens.
The moon was a brightly curved Saracen blade against the soft darkness of the sky, and the stars were fat and silver and gemlike in their clarity.
They flew high above the earth, remote from its grief and sorrow, wrapped in the isolation of flight and lost in the ritual and concentration of night interception.
The target was a Mirage of their own squadron, and they picked it up on the scanner far out over the Negev. Joe locked on to it and called the track and range while David searched for and at last spotted the moving star of the target’s jet blast, burning redly against the velvety blackness of the night.
He took them in on a clean interception creeping up under the target’s belly and then pulling steeply up past its wing-tip, the way a barracuda goes for the lure from below and explodes out through the surface of the sea. They shot past so close that the target Mirage broke wildly away to port, unaware of their presence until that moment.
Joe slept that night, exhausted with grief, but David lay in the bunk beneath him and listened to him. In the dawn he rose and showered and left Joe still asleep. He drove into Jerusalem and reached the hospital just as the sun came up and lit the hills with its rays of soft gold and pearly pink.
The night sister at the desk was brusque and preoccupied. ‘You shouldn’t be here until visiting hours this afternoon,’ but David smiled at her with all the charm he could muster.
‘I just wanted to know if she is doing well. I have to rejoin my squadron this morning.’
The sister was not immune either to his smile or the air force uniform, and she went to consult her lists.
‘You must be mistaken,’ she said at last. ‘The only Mordecai we have is Mrs Ruth Mordecai.’
‘That’s her mother,’ David told her, and the sister flipped the sheet on her clipboard.
‘No wonder I couldn’t find it,’ she muttered irritably. ‘She was discharged last night.’
‘Discharged?’ David stared at her uncomprehendingly.
‘Yes, she went home last night. I remember her now. Her father came to fetch her just as I came on duty. Pretty girl with eye bandages—’
‘Yes,’ David nodded. ‘Thank you. Thank you very much,’ and he ran down the steps to the Mercedes, his feet light with relief, freed at last from the gnawing doubt and dread.
Debra had gone home. Debra was safe and well.
The Brig opened the door to him, and let him into the silent house. He was still in his uniform, and it was wilted and rumpled. The Brig’s face was fine-drawn, the lines crudely chiselled around his mouth, and his eyes were swollen and bloodshot from worry and sorrow and lack of sleep.
‘Where is Debra?’ David demanded eagerly, and the Brig sighed and stood aside for him to enter.
‘Where is she?’ David repeated, and the Brig led him to his study and waved him to a chair.
‘Why don’t you answer me?’ David was becoming angry, and the Brig slumped into a chair across the large bare room, with its severe monastic furnishings of books and archaeological relics.
‘I couldn’t tell you yesterday, David, she asked me not to. I’m sorry.’
‘What is it?’ David was fully alarmed now.
‘She had to have time to think – to make up her mind.’ The Brig stood up again and began to pace, his footsteps echoing hollowly on the bare wooden floor, pausing every now and then to touch one of the pieces of ancient statuary, caressing it absently as he talked, as though to draw comfort from it.
David listened quietly, occasionally shaking his head as though to deny that what he was hearing was the truth.
‘So you see it is permanent, final, without hope. She is blind, David, totally blind. She has gone into a dark world of her own where nobody else can follow her.’
‘Where is she? I want to go to her,’ David whispered, but the Brig ignored the request and went on steadily.
‘She wanted time to make her decision – and I gave it to her. Last night, after the funeral, I went back to her and she was ready. She had faced it, come to terms with it, and she had decided how it must be.’
‘I want to see her,’ David repeated. ‘I want to talk to her.’
Now the Brig looked at him and the bleakness in his eyes faded, his voice dropped, becoming gruff with compassion.
‘No, David. That was her decision. You will not see her again. For you she is dead. Those were her words. “Tell him I am dead, but he must only remember me when I was alive—”’
David interrupted him, jumping to his feet. ‘Where is she, damn you?’ His voice was shaking. ‘I want to see her now.’ He crossed swiftly to the door and jerked it open, but the Brig went on.
‘She is not here.’
‘Where is she?’ David turned back.
‘I cannot tell you. I swore a solemn oath to her.’
‘I’ll find her—’
‘You might, if you search carefully – but you will forfeit any respect or love she may have for you,’ the Brig went on remorselessly. ‘Again I will give you her exact words. “Tell him that I charge him on our love, on all we have ever been to each other, that he will let me be, that he will not come looking for me.”’
‘Why, but why?’ David demanded desperately. ‘Why does she reject me?’
‘She knows that she is altered beyond all hope or promise. She knows that what was before can never be again. She knows that she can never be to you again what you have a right to expect—’ He stopped David’s protest with an angry chopping gesture of his hand. ‘Listen to me, she knows that it cannot endure. She can never be your wife now. You are too young, too vital, too arrogant—’ David stared at him. ‘– She knows that it will begin to spoil. In a week, a month, a year perhaps, it will have died. You will be trapped, tied to a blind woman. She doesn’t want that. She wants it to die now, swiftly – mercifully, not to drag on—’
‘Stop it,’ David shouted. ‘Stop it, damn you. That’s enough.’ He stumbled to the chair and fell into it. They were silent for a while, David crouched in the chair with his face buried in his hands. The Brig standing before the narrow window casement, the early morning light catching the fierce old warrior’s face.
‘She asked me to make you promise—’ He hesitated, and David looked up at him. ‘– To promise that you would not try to find her.’
‘No.’ David shook his head stubbornly.
The Brig sighed. ‘If you refused, I was to tell you this – she said you would understand, although I don’t – she
said that in Africa there is a fierce and beautiful animal called the sable antelope, and sometimes one of them is wounded by a hunter or mauled by a lion.’
The words were as painful as the cut of a whiplash, and David remembered himself saying them to her once when they were both young and strong and invulnerable.
‘Very well,’ he murmured at last, ‘if that’s what she wants – then I promise not to try and find her, though I don’t promise not to try and convince her she is wrong.’
‘Perhaps it would be best if you left Israel,’ the Brig told him. ‘Perhaps you should go back to where you came from and forget all of this ever happened.’
David paused, considering this a moment, before he answered, ‘No, all I have is here. I will stay here.’
‘Good.’ The Brig accepted the decision. ‘You are always welcome in this house.’
‘Thank you, sir,’ said David and went out to where the Mercedes was parked. He let himself into the house on Malik Street, and saw instantly that someone had been there before him.
He walked slowly into the living-room; the books were gone from the olive-wood table, the Kadesh painting no longer hung above the leather couch. In the bathroom he opened the wall cabinet and all her toilet articles had been removed, the rows of exotic bottles, the tubes and pots, even the slot for her toothbrush beside his was empty.
Her cupboard was bare, the dresses gone, the shelves blank, every trace of her swept away, except for the lingering scent of her perfume on the air, and the ivory lace cover upon the bed.
He went to the bed and sat upon it, stroking the fine lace-work, remembering how it had been.
There was the hard outline of something thin and square upon the pillow, beneath the cover. He turned back the lace and picked up the thin green book.
This Year, in Jerusalem. It had been left there as a parting gift.
The title swam and went misty before his eyes. It was all he had left of her.
It seemed as though the slaughter at Ein Karem was the signal for a fresh upsurge of hostility and violence throughout the Middle East. A planned escalation of international tensions, as the Arab nations rattled their impressive, oil-purchased array of weaponry and swore once more to leave not a single Jew in the land they still called Palestine.
There were savage and merciless attacks on soft targets, ill-protected embassies and consulates around the world, letter bombs, and night ambushes on school buses in isolated areas.
Then the provocations grew bolder, more directly aimed at the heart of Israel. Border infringements, commando-style raids, violations of air space, shellings, and a threatening gathering and massing of armed might along the long vulnerable frontiers of the wedge-shaped territories of the tiny land.
The Israelis waited, praying for peace – but gird for war.
Day after day, month after month, David and Joe flew to maintain that degree of expertise, where instinct and instantaneous reaction superseded conscious thought and reasoned action.
At those searing speeds beyond sound, it was only this training that swung the advantage from one combat team to another. Even the superior reaction times of these carefully hand-picked young men were unequal to the tasks of bringing their mighty machines into effective action, where latitudes of error were measured in hundredths of a second, until they had attained this extra-sensory perfection.
To seek out, to recognize, to close, to destroy, and to disengage – it was a total preoccupation that blessedly left little time for brooding and sorrow.
Yet the sorrow and anger, that David and Joe shared, seemed doubly to arm them. Their vengeance was all-consuming.
Soon they joined that select half-dozen strike teams that Desert Flower called to undertake the most delicate of sorties. Again and again they were ordered into combat, and each time the confidence that Command had in them was strengthened.
As David sat in his cockpit, dressed from head to foot in the stiff constricting embrace of a full-pressure suit, breathing oxygen from his closed face mask, although the Mirage still crouched upon the ground, there were four black, red and white miniature roundels painted on the fuselage below his cockpit. The scalps of the enemy.
It was a mark of Desert Flower’s trust that Bright Lance flight had been selected for high altitude ‘Red’ standby. With the starter lines plugged ready to blow compressed air into the compressors and whirl the great engines into life, and the ground crew lounging beside the motor, the Mirages were ready to be hurled aloft in a matter of seconds. Both David and Joe were suited to survive the almost pressureless altitudes above sixty thousand feet where an unprotected man’s blood would fizzle like champagne.
David had lost count of the weary uncomfortable days and hours he had sat cramped in his cockpit on ‘Red’ standby with only the regular fifteen-minute checks to break the monotony.
‘Checking 11.15 hours – fifteen minutes to stand-down.’ David said into the microphone, and heard Joe’s breathing in his ears before the reply.
‘Two standing by. Beseder.’
Immediately after stand-down, when another crew would assume the arduous waiting of standby, David would change into a track suit and run for five or six miles to get the stiffness out of his body and to have his sweat wash away the staleness. He was looking forward to that, afterwards he would—
There was a sharp crackle in his earphones and a new voice.
‘Red standby – Go! Go!’
The command was repeated over loudspeakers in the underground bunker, and the ground crew boiled into action. With all his pre-flight checks and routine long ago completed, David merely pushed his throttle to starting position, and the whine of the starters showed immediate results. The engine caught and he ran up his power to one hundred per cent.
Ahead of him the blast doors were lifting.
‘Bright Lance Two, this is Leader going to take off power.’
‘Two conforming,’ said Joe and they went screaming up the ramp and hurled themselves at the sky.
‘Hallo, Desert Flower, this is Bright Lance airborne and climbing.’
‘Bright Lance, this is the Brig,’ David was not surprised to find that he was in charge of command plot. Distinctive voices and the use of personal names would prevent any chance of the enemy confusing the net with false messages. ‘David, we have an intruder approach at high level that should enter our airspace in four minutes, if it continues on its present course. We are tracking him at seventy-five thousand feet which means it is either an American U2, which is highly unlikely, or that it is a Russian spy plane coming over to have a look at our latest dispersals.’
‘Beseder, sir,’ David acked.
‘We are going to try for a storm-climb to intercept as soon as the target becomes hostile in our air space.’
‘Beseder, sir.’
‘Level at twenty thousand feet, turn to 186 and go to maximum speed for storm-climb.’
At twenty thousand, David went to straight and level flight and glanced into his mirror to see Joe’s Mirage hanging out on his tail.
‘Bright Lance Two, this is Leader. Commencing run now.’
‘Two conforming.’
David lit his tail and pushed the throttle open to maximum afterburner position. The Mirage jumped away, and David let the nose drop slightly to allow the speed to build up quickly. They went blazing through the sound barrier without a check, and David retrimmed for supersonic flight, thumbing the little top-hat on the end of his stick.
Their speed rocketed swiftly through Mach 1.2, Mach 1.5.
The Mirages were stripped of all but their essentials, there were no missiles dangling beneath them, no auxiliary fuel tanks to create drag, the only weapons they carried were their two 30-mm cannons.
Flying lightly, they drove on up the Mach scale, streaking from Beersheba to Eilat in the time it would take a man to walk a city block. Their speed stabilized at Mach 1.9 just short of the heat barrier.
‘David, this is the Brig. We are tracking you. You are o
n correct course and speed for interception. Prepare to commence climb in sixteen seconds.’
‘Beseder, sir.’
‘Counting now. Eight, seven, six … two, one. Go! Go!’
David tensed his body and as he pulled up the nose of the Mirage, he opened his mouth and screamed to fight off the effects of gravity. But despite these precautions and the constricting grip of his pressure suit, the abrupt change of direction crammed him down into his seat and the blood drained out of his head so that his vision went grey and then black.
The Mirage was standing on her tail still flying at very nearly twice the speed of sound and, as his vision returned, David glanced at the G-meter and saw that he had subjected his body to nearly nine times the force of gravity to achieve this attitude of climb without loss of speed.
Now he lay on his back and stared up at the empty sky while the needle of his altimeter raced upwards, and his speed gradually eroded away.
A quick sweep showed Joe’s Mirage rock steady in position below him, climbing in concert with him, and his voice came through calm and reassuring.
‘Leader, this is Two. I have contact with target.’
Even under the stress of storm-climb, Joe was busy manipulating his beloved radar, and he had picked up the spy plane high above them.
In this manoeuvre they were trading speed for height, and as one increased so the other drained away.
They were like a pair of arrows aimed directly upwards. The bowstring could throw them just so far and then they would hang there in space for a few moments, until they were drawn irresistibly back to earth. In those few moments they must find and kill the enemy.
David lay back in his seat and watched with fresh wonder as the sky turned darker blue and then slowly became the midnight black of space, shot through with the fiery pickings of the stars.
They were at the top edge of the stratosphere, high above the highest clouds or signs of weather as known to earth. Outside the cockpit the air was thin and weak, insufficient for life, hardly sufficient to keep the jets of the Mirage’s engines burning – and the cold was a fearsome sixty degrees of frost.