The Siege of Tel Aviv

by Hesh Kestin

  “A bunch of Arabs declare peace? Every time they talk peace, we have a war.”

  “Wouldn’t it be better if Cobi didn’t have to be in uniform until he’s forty-eight? If you don’t?”

  “I like being in uniform. Anyway, it’s just two more years.”

  “Two more years of you disappearing and me never knowing if you’ll come back. And now it’s the same with Cobi.”

  They are speaking English now. His wife has been an Israeli for more than two decades, but will never be at home in Hebrew. Partially it is his fault, he knows, because his English is solid and always at the ready when she pauses to reach for a word. Often they converse in two languages, he in Hebrew, she in English. And sometimes in a third language. His wife taught him Pig Latin. He took to it immediately, especially in bed.

  “Judy, we’re not talking wishes. We’re talking facts. These people want to kill Jews. They’ve changed their minds? Good. But you know what the Romans said. Si vis pacem, para bellum. If you wish peace...”

  “I know, I know: prepare for war. But it’s all over CNN. The Arabs are finally ready.” She steps into the room. “Esidesbay ichwhay, Iway amway ootay,”1 she says in Pig Latin, which she taught him early on when she was too shy to tell him what she wanted in English.

  “Entay inutesmay. Ogay armway upway ethay edbay.”2

  She moves closer and sits in his lap as she used to do before they were married. “Owhay eedsnay away edbay?”3

  1 “Besides which, I am too.”

  2 “Ten minutes. Go warm up the bed.”

  3 “Who needs a bed?”

  8

  IN A FIVE-STORY HOTEL on a dark side street in the Imbaba quarter of Cairo, far from Egyptian military headquarters and the Israeli operatives who, it is thought, permeate every square meter of the capital, a light flashes briefly from a high window.

  Inside, in the war room of Second Division, Special Operations Branch, Lieutenant Colonel Jamil Anwar slaps the face of the young adjutant pulling back the edge of the blackout curtain to peek at the street below.

  “Pitiful lump!” the colonel hisses. “Blackout means blackout. Everywhere are Jewish spies.”

  Though only a colonel, as head of field security for all ground forces of the Egyptian Army, Anwar is one of the most powerful men in Cairo. Modeled on the SS—indeed, founded in the 1950s by German veterans of that organization who had found shelter in the Middle East—the Field Security Office is one of unique prestige and privilege, with the power of immediate arrest and trial of all officers below the rank of major general, and even these may be arrested at any time and the charges against them forwarded to the Grand Military Council. The files of the Field Security Office hold dossiers on every serving officer, up to and including the commanding general.

  Col. Anwar’s brief is brutally simple: Monitor the activities of all enemies of the state who are in contact with Egyptian enlisted men and officers, all of whom are considered targets of opportunity for the Israeli, American, British, French, German, Chinese, Saudi, and Libyan spies who operate with impunity across Egypt. These are said to work incessantly to listen in on military communications frequencies, photograph military installations, and—most damaging—bribe its underpaid and thus inherently untrustworthy personnel.

  Like any good security chief, Col. Anwar often exaggerates the threat of foreign subversion in order to gain leverage for his organization and for himself, but he also knows that the threat, however exaggerated, is real. That is why he set up a war room here, where no one would think to look, and where a curious adjutant peering through a crack in a blackout curtain deserves the back of his hand. If Col. Anwar had his way, the man would be shot, but his adjutant comes from a good family. Besides, the colonel is obese, and the adjutant has been trained to help him into his car, an olive-green 1978 Cadillac Coupe de Ville, without drawing attention to the strenuousness of his efforts.

  9

  ON THE WESTERN RIDGE overlooking a shallow muddy stream, two months before the winter rains will transform the Jordan for a short while into a rushing river, Lieutenant Cobi Lev, at twenty-one already a three-year veteran of the IDF, stands atop a very nice facsimile of an Israeli-made Chariot tank—the IDF is not about to waste a real tank at this symbolic post—peering through an Israeli-made starlight scope at the nighttime landscape on the opposite bank. The SLS presents a ghostly picture, a kind of X-ray in green and white, but so precise Cobi can make out an owl diving at thirty miles per hour to snatch a field mouse.

  On the opposite bank, semi-trailers are lined up on the roadway leading to the Jordanian customs post guarding the approach to the Allenby Bridge—and to Israel, a former enemy state now something less than that, not yet an ally, merely a neighbor. This single-lane commercial link permits dozens of trucks to cross the rickety bridge carrying fruits and vegetables bound for Israel’s open-air markets, along with manufactured items, mostly piece goods stitched together in Amman, for export to Europe and the United States through Israel’s ports. Jordan has only one seaport, at Aqaba in the south, directly across from the Israeli vacation resort city of Eilat, but that port faces the wrong waterway. To reach Europe, the same goods would have to travel south down the Red Sea, whose mouth is infested with Eritrean pirates, then north again through the Suez Canal, whose mouth is controlled by Egyptians comfortably ensconced in arguably the world’s most expensive toll booth. At the end of this journey of five hundred miles, the shipment would be an hour’s drive from the same Allenby Bridge. Through a careful arrangement, Jordan uses the Israeli ports of Haifa and Ashdod as though they are its own—and unless the goods are destined for Israeli consumers, there is no tax.

  It is this example that the United States and its fellow peace brokers have utilized to convince the Arab League to exchange the bomb for the briefcase.

  Cobi’s cell phone chimes the opening notes from Happy Birthday, the ringtone a present from his mother the month before.

  “Mom,” he says. “I told you never to call me at the office.”

  “I was thinking of you.”

  “It’s four in the morning. You should be sleeping.”

  “Your father and I were talking. I can’t wait until tomorrow to know you’re well.”

  “Do we still have hot water?”

  “Hot water?”

  “Then I can’t wait until tomorrow either. Look, Mom, I really—”

  “And with all the good news...”

  “What good news?”

  “The peace.”

  “Yeah, well,” Cobi says, a twenty-one-year-old trying his best to sound grown-up, which to him means cynical, world-weary—his father’s son. “We’ll still need an army.”

  “But no more war, darling. Think about it.”

  “Not my job, Mom.”

  “Stay safe,” she tells him. “At the last minute, always at the last minute, boys die. If they don’t decide to be heroes, if they can just wait on the sidelines...”

  “Love to Dad,” Cobi says. He has heard this before.

  “I love you.”

  “I love you too,” he says, clicking off. He turns to the radioman squatting next to him, smoking a joint. “I’m here nineteen days. I never saw this many trucks.”

  “I’m here nineteen months. Jordan Customs opens only six hours a day. They get backed up.”

  “Still, that’s a lot of trucks.” He considers letting it slide, then: “Get me HQ.”

  “We’re reporting trucks?”

  “Too many trucks.”

  “Your funeral,” the radioman says, drawing in a long toke before he puts through the call.

  10

  IN THE PASSENGER SEAT of a white Volvo sedan speeding south to Tel Aviv from his home in Caesarea, the ancient port that was at one time the Latin-speaking capital of Roman-ruled Palestine, Lieutenant General Pinchas Harari listens carefully to what is being explained to him on the phone. Harari is one of those officers who refuses to delegate but hates being bothered by details, an i
mpossible contradiction that wears him down and earns his staff sleepless nights. If he were the head of a corporation instead of an army, he would long ago have hired a psychologist to help him resolve this conflict, but as chief of staff of the IDF he has no such luxury. If a secret like that ever got out, it would end his career. His predecessor—the most capable officer of his generation, who liked a drink from time to time—was branded an alcoholic and lost his job as a result.

  “Repeat.”

  General Harari listens even more carefully than before. “Coincidence is not conspiracy,” he says. “But I’m on my way. Continue monitoring.” To himself he mutters: “Sissies.”

  “Commander?”

  General Harari turns to his driver. “Gingy, I said something to you?”

  “I don’t know, commander. I thought maybe—”

  “How long have you driven for me?”

  “Six years, sir. Almost seven.”

  “In that time, when I gave you an order, did you ever consider I was asking about your taste in ice cream?”

  “No, sir.”

  “In simple Hebrew,” the general said, pissed off that they awakened him to leave his soft bed and warm wife to fly on a fool’s errand to Israel Defense Forces headquarters in Tel Aviv before four in the morning. He has no one to scold but his driver. “When I have something to tell you, you’ll know it.”

  “I understand, commander.”

  “And stop calling me commander.”

  “Sorry, Pinky,” the driver says. “Pinky, it’s just when you’re in a mood, it puts me on edge.”

  “How the hell do you think it makes me feel?” the general asks. “Interrupted sleep, it’s part of my job.” He laughs despite himself. “Yours too. Forgive me, Gingy. It seems in the entire IDF, bristling with communications devices and computers and who knows what more, no one has bothered to read the papers.”

  “The papers?”

  “The papers. Everyone knows we’re on the verge of peace.”

  “That’s what they say, Pinky.”

  “That’s what they say, Gingy. That’s what they say.”

  11

  AT A ROYAL JORDANIAN tank base only fifteen miles from the Israeli border, which has been quiet for decades, a military band plays Arab martial music, replete with bagpipes—the effect approximates dozens of cats being strangled by uniformed sadists—as Royal Jordanian Army Major General Tawfik Ali, standing in the rear of an open 1956 Rolls Royce Silver Wraith, takes the salute of his tank crews standing at attention before an endless row of Challengers. The rumbling of the powerful 1200-horsepower diesel engines mixes in the night air with the screeching of the military band to create a musical miasma, a symphonic swamp so murky that any hint of melody is lost in the noise.

  General Ali feels at home with this noise. His family estate in the Scottish lowlands was itself awash in the sound of bagpipes, and this continued through his education at Sandhurst, where generations of British officers are trained in the art of warfare to the sound of pipes. There he was known as Twyford (Ticky) Oliver, second son of Baron Allmond of Cleave. As with many British noble families—Lord Allmond was born twenty-third in line of succession to the throne—the non-inheriting sons found careers in the foreign office, the clandestine services, or the military. It was Ticky Oliver’s fate to be employed by all three. Simultaneously. Having gone out to the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan to train and then build up the Royal Jordanian Armoured Corps, then Col. Oliver grew close to the late King Hussein, a tank buff of the first water. When the little king wasn’t flying military jets, he was playing with his tanks as though they were toys in a sandbox.

  One day during maneuvers, His Majesty made the young colonel an offer of no small consequence. Should the Scotsman convert to Islam, he would be given lifetime command of an armored force equal in vehicular strength to half the British tank corps, in effect becoming what he had been robbed of at home by an accident of birth: a baron, not of nobility but of firepower.

  The young colonel begged leave to consult with Whitehall. The Foreign Office saw a nice opportunity to regain influence in the Middle East, to say nothing of huge armaments sales to the Hashemite Kingdom. Whitehall passed Col. Oliver to MI6. Ticky now had three masters, as a result of which, like anyone with three masters, he was his own man.

  Now pushing seventy, Tawfik Ali is well prepared to unleash upon an unsuspecting enemy the full force of his devoted armored corps, whose Bedouin tank commanders are as loyal to the major general as to the king himself. But unlike the men under his command, who love him for having embraced Islam, he has never been comfortable with its ingrained hatred of the Jews, nor does he share the British nobility’s disdain for the Hebrew race: his roommate and best friend at Sandhurst had in fact been one Puffy Bornshtain.

  In truth, it hardly matters to Major General Tawfik Ali whether the opposing army is commanded by Jews, Iraqis, or Martians—only that there is a designated enemy, a military target marked for destruction. This is business.

  12

  IN A LONG DRAINAGE ditch within sight of hundreds of IDF jets on the tarmac of the military field adjacent to Ben-Gurion Airport, sixty Hamas commandos crouch and wait. Though Shia Iran’s military planners see no future for Hamas, whose members are Sunni and Palestinian, and thus doubly irredeemable, these fighters will play a key role in the coming battle to liberate the holy land.

  A day earlier, three trucks painted in IDF colors and bearing IDF license plates crossed beneath the sand dunes from Gaza, which Hamas controls, into Israel proper. The half mile of paved tunneling that permitted this took almost a year to construct. Working at night under the very eyes of the Israelis, Hamas removed tons of sand—a good deal of it in buckets—until they got earthmoving equipment into the tunnel to create a sub-rosa highway just big enough for Ford F-150 half-ton trucks. Though Iranian engineers planned and supervised the operation, there was no question in the eyes of the Hamas leadership that the terror organization would later be seen as key to the success of the entire war. They would be wrong. None of the states involved—Egypt, Syria, Jordan, nor Iran—turned out willing to see a Palestinian state emerge in what they were already calling “Former Israel.” In every detail of post-war planning was embedded the unspoken message “Fuck the Palestinians.”

  But at this stage, the Palestinians are needed. No other fighting force can provide the Hebrew speakers necessary to get through a dozen roadblocks. Most members of this force are graduates of Israeli security prisons, some specially trained by diction coaches in the art of sounding like native-born Israelis (because there is no p in Arabic, the students are trained not to use words like papa, which would come out baba). Some have been trained to speak Hebrew with French or English or Russian accents, as would any group of IDF soldiers. A dozen, Circassians, are blond and blue-eyed. Their uniforms, down to the hand-painted slogans on their helmets and the mud on their brown paratrooper boots, are IDF issue, stolen by Bedouins from army bases in the Negev. For this one performance, they have been rehearsing six months, speaking only Hebrew. Should one unlucky commando fall out of a truck, he will not give the others away. Even the cigarettes in their placket pockets are Israeli. The bandages in their medics’ pouches are marked MADE IN ISRAEL. The orders their commanders carry are beautifully forged IDF documents. They are perfect replicas of Israeli paratroopers moving in perfect replicas of Israeli military trucks through a very real and very vulnerable Israel.

  Having taken up position in the drainage ditches surrounding this Israel Air Force facility, like similar infiltrating forces in place at four other airfields, they appear to be IDF infantry in protective posture, their backs to the F-16s arrayed in ready formation.

  At precisely 3:55 a.m., the darkest moment of the night, they turn around and train their weapons on the planes. A phalanx of TOW missiles sails through the air. At each airfield, the tarmac is a sheet of flames.

  The Israel Air Force is no more.

  13

  IN HIS TE
HRAN WAR room four stories underground, General Niroomad watches on the wall of screens as an orbiting Iranian satellite transmits real-time video of Israel’s F-16s burning on the ground.

  He turns to his operations officer and gives the command. “Launch air.”

  14

  SIX SECONDS NORTHEAST OF Jerusalem, twenty-eight Sukhoi SU-24s fly low in broken formation to avoid Israeli radar. This close to target, it will hardly matter. Israeli countermeasures are already compromised. The Syrian and Iranian pilots own the skies. According to plan and confirmed by Iranian reconnaissance, the IDF ground-to-air shield is all but destroyed. Because the enemy planes fly low, what is left of Israel’s heat-seeking rocket capability must arc down from 20,000 feet to as low as one thousand. Of this they are capable. But Syria’s Russian military advisors, sitting safely in the Caucasus just over the Turkish border, have launched a miasma of heat-producing Yakovlev Pchela drones. As predicted by the theorists in the Nikolai Zhukovsky Air Force Engineering Academy, the Israeli missiles home in on the drones. The Russians call them flying hair dryers. All twenty-eight Sukhois penetrate Israeli air space as though it is undefended.

  Which it is.

  At this point radio silence is no longer necessary.

  The mission’s commander opens communication. “Chief to all Indians,” he says, first in Arabic and then in Persian, which phrase he has memorized. “We have penetration. Combine to wing.”

  For answer, twenty-seven pilots press their speak buttons and howl like wolves. The pilots call their unit the Wolf Pack. The planes move off their random positions and reform behind the lead aircraft, a scattered flock of geese that becomes a series of straight lines and then a wing. And then a flying wedge.

  “Chief to all Indians, home in on Buffalo.”

  As one, each of the pilots logs onto his GPS-based mission profile. Each device holds the coordinates for preselected targets. Except for Israel Police headquarters in Sheikh Jarrah, all are in West Jerusalem: the Knesset, the Prime Minister’s Office, the Defense, Interior, Justice, and lesser ministries, Israel State Television and Radio, the headquarters of a number of specialized security services, secondary military installations on the perimeter, Jerusalem’s Mahaneh Yehuda fruit and vegetable market, and certain symbolic sites, such as the Israel Museum, the Yad VaShem Holocaust Memorial, the Central Synagogue. The entirety of mostly Arab East Jerusalem, including the Old City, is spared, the Jewish and Armenian quarters to be dealt with later, along with the remaining Western Wall of the Holy Temple, Judaism’s holiest site. To attack these targets from the air would risk damaging the Sacred Precinct, the tel upon which is built the Dome of the Rock and the Mosque of Omar, under which lie the ruins of the Holy Temple itself, which according to Islamicist propaganda never existed.