The Siege of Tel Aviv

by Hesh Kestin

  Wolf Pack’s commander need hardly remind his pilots to limit their depredations to their designated targets. The Sukhois carry just enough destructive material to do the job. But he makes sure. “My Indians, avoid the railroad lines and bus station, and protect our holy places. Good hunting! God is great!”

  15

  DANCING WITH GAY MEN is not Alex’s preference. But with women there was a problem. Alex had had a few girlfriends, but in man-short Israel—emigration and war tends to thin out the number of available males—even the most desperate women are not that desperate. Alex’s sexual orientation simply does not correlate with his sartorial preferences. Neither is cavorting on the dance floor with straight men an option. What straight men seek Alex cannot supply. Nor can he take to the dance floor in lesbian bars. The bulge in his pants tends to give him away. Surprise: lesbians are not interested in straight men disguised as women. So when he wishes to dance as a woman he is all but compelled to dance with gay men, which is what he is doing at a beachfront bar called Ema, Hebrew for mother.

  On this particular evening, the hunk Alex dances with follows her back to where she has left her drink and places a large hand around her waist where a bustier just covers her navel. With her own equally large hand, she brushes it away.

  “You don’t find me attractive?” the hunk asks. Clearly unaccustomed to resistance, even in Dutch-accented English his tone reveals equal parts disappointment, resentment, and shock.

  “I’m sure you’re a nice person,” Alex answers, her voice dropping an octave. Sometimes this works.

  The hunk persists.

  “I don’t think you get it,” Alex says. “I’m not into men.”

  “It’s a gay bar,” the hunk says, not without reason.

  “Anyway, I have to be in uniform in three hours.”

  The Dutchman’s eyes light up. Apparently he likes uniforms. “You’re military?”

  One thing about hunks, Alex thinks: if they ever had brains, these early on atrophied from disuse. She is beginning to realize she may have to clock him. “Isn’t everyone?”

  The hunk leans forward but stops suddenly, as if pulled back on a string. In this he is no different from everyone else in the bar. The pulsating music, the lights, the movement all seem to pause.

  Sirens at this hour can mean only one thing.

  Within seconds, the bar is deserted as its customers scramble for the exits, find their vehicles, and take off to report to their units.

  16

  OUTSIDE ON THE PROMENADE, the dog walkers, prostitutes, elderly couples taking the cool evening air, lovers smoking grass and off-duty soldiers of both genders—in fact, everyone but the confused tourists, who have no idea what is happening around them—to them—disappear as if plucked by an invisible hand. But as the sirens continue their incessant bleating even the tourists get the message and hurry back to the shelter of their hotels, but here too there is no one to tell them what precisely is going on. Doormen, desk clerks, bartenders, chamber maids are all gone, vanished as if they never were. For fear of reprisals, even the Arab workers are gone.

  17

  IN THE MASTER BEDROOM of the White House, the president, a slick cracker who has spent his entire political career decrying the same “pointy-headed intellectuals” who, at Harvard and then Yale Law, taught him much of what he knows about the intricacies of the American election process (except how to get around it, which he learned as a congressman), stops doing what he is doing while the First Lady, her head all but shaved in order to accommodate the wigs she wears as a matter of course, keeps on doing it. The president’s bed continues to creak as she works harder to convince him in the only way she knows to ignore the bedside phone with the unique ring: the Star Spangled Banner in blues tempo.

  “Dwayne, honey, don’t you dare answer that.” It is half demand, half plea.

  The leader of the free world rolls off. “Hon,” he grunts. “This one I got to.”

  18

  THE WHITE HOUSE SITUATION Room sits in a bunker whose thirty-inch thick ceiling is fifty feet underground. Guarded by a special detail of Secret Service personnel known as the Paleface Squad because they never see daylight, it is able to function for two weeks without outside power and is supplied with richly oxygenated air, highly filtered water, and sufficient vitamin-enriched food for thirty-six designated individuals whose idea of roughing it is a four-star, not a five-star, hotel.

  No matter what hell is breaking loose above ground, if you are not on that list you do not get in. Among those on the list are Admiral Brent Staley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, at sixty-five about to be retired; Prof. Felix St. George, the Hungarian-born foreign policy guru to four presidents, a seemingly ageless hard-head who—having studied under Henry Kissinger at Harvard—has never seen a stable dictator he doesn’t like; and Flo Spier, the president’s thirty-eight-year-old domestic policy advisor, a specialist in assessing the internal political implications of foreign policy decisions whose impact the generals and statesmen surrounding the president tend to ignore. As one political columnist famously put it: “Here’s why the US will never go to war with Poland: Even if Prof. St. George thinks it’s in the best strategic interests of the US and Admiral Staley gives it every chance for success, Flo Spier—upon careful consideration of the Polish-American vote in Chicago—will kill the idea as dead as a swatted housefly.”

  The president’s face is expressionless as he walks in wearing a silk robe with the presidential seal over where most people have a heart. All stand. Admiral Staley salutes his commander in chief, never a tradition outside of ceremonial occasions but the kind of ass-kissing the president normally cannot get enough of. He returns the salute by touching his right forefinger to his brow. “Folks, I hope y’all are aware this is my date night. The First Lady and I get one a week. So I got to assume this is important?”

  Admiral Staley takes the point, and the point position. He is a military man. “Mr. President, I do apologize for interrupting your—”

  “Just get to it.”

  Staley removes his rimless glasses, which causes him to look younger, somewhat innocent, perhaps over his head. He was not the president’s first choice for the job, and he knows it. The admiral has been playing catch-up ever since. “Sir, DIA is picking up unusual activity in the Sand Box. At the same time, other agencies...”

  St. George runs his hand over his shaved scalp, perhaps a vestige of the time he had hair. “Central Intelligence, sir, has reason to believe locations critical to operations of the Revolutionary Guard—”

  “Iran? We were just in the Sand Box.”

  “Indeed, sir,” St. George says. “We’ve been monitoring transmissions between Tehran and Damascus, also Tehran-Cairo, Tehran-Amman, Tehran-Baghdad. In other words, Tehran and every major player, including Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza.”

  “What are they saying, how’s your mom? Get to it, Felix.”

  “Mr. President, as yet...”

  The president’s face is no longer expressionless. “You don’t know what they’ve been saying and you got me out of bed?”

  The guru persists. He is known for it. “Sir, we do know coded traffic has been rising over the last two months. This week it’s intensified.”

  “Yes?”

  “Yesterday it reached a crescendo, sir.”

  The president is not happy. These people never get to the point. “What does that mean, music? Guys, I get one early night a week.”

  At this point Felix St. George displays an impatience of his own. He knows he can get away with it. He learned that much from Kissinger: when dealing with the leader of the free world, show no fear. “Mr. President, all messaging has stopped. Total silence. At the same time, the general staffs of the Revolutionary Guard and the military leadership in Syria, Egypt, Iraq, and Jordan are not in their beds. Ditto Hamas and Hezbollah.”

  The president considers. “The Israelis?”

  “Minutes ago, Israel station clocked IDF Chief
of Staff leaving home. In a hurry.”

  “Mobilization?”

  “Not yet,” Admiral Staley breaks in. When it comes to military matters, he is not going to play second fiddle to some over-educated Hungarian who wore a uniform only when he was a child; in Admiral Staley’s mind, the striped pajamas of Bergen-Belsen don’t count, especially since when he came to the US St. George changed his name to suit his new religion. “But if they’re seeing what we are, you can bet on it.”

  “Are they seeing what we are?”

  “Impossible to say, Mr. President.”

  “Well, at the risk of asking the goddamn obvious, has anyone informed them?”

  The silence that ensues seems to last minutes, but it is only a matter of seconds.

  “Flo,” the president says. “You hear that? In an election year.”

  “We can turn this around, Mr. President,” Flo says in a voice as raspy as a nail file. “But not in a vacuum.”

  “I hear you, Flo,” the president says. “I hear you loud and clear. Now, will someone get that Israeli bitch on the phone?”

  19

  THE PRIME MINISTER IS deeply asleep when the red phone on her night table rings with its special buzz of angry bees. It is only minutes since Israel’s air force has been destroyed. She turns on the light to check her face in the hand mirror before picking up the receiver, thinking: Good the man can’t see me. I look like hell. “Good evening, Mr. President,” she says brightly, an acquired skill. After all, it is only 9 p.m. in Washington. “I must say this is an unexpected pleasure.” At 4 a.m. it would be, she thinks. But it wouldn’t be a precedent. When first in office, she got a call at 2 a.m. wishing her a happy Yom Kippur. What was she supposed to do, lecture the leader of the free world on the solemn significance of Judaism’s principle day of mourning? Was there no Jew on the White House staff aside from that horrid Flo Spier?

  “Madam Prime Minister, if this call is truly unexpected, it might not be a real big pleasure.”

  Absurdly she thinks, It’s not my birthday, is it? She has just been awakened from a deep and peaceful sleep. She switches into what she thinks of as Amerispeak, a form of discourse that reflexively puts the spotlight on the other person, his life, his interests, his needs. “Mr. President,” she says. “If there is anything my government can do, please let me know.”

  The president’s voice takes on the dramatic timbre that got him elected, and may again. “Madam, according to our sources, still unconfirmed—”

  A tremendous explosion rocks the building, then in rapid succession six more, the last of which blows in the windowpanes, fragments flying into the room like shrapnel. A two-inch shard slices into her arm. Shula rushes to the window. She is thinking of the children, upstairs with her mother. What she sees causes her heart to stop.

  Lit by exploding bombs, a cloud of black-clad paratroopers fills the sky. Even on this moonless night, she has no trouble seeing them. The sky over Jerusalem is on fire.

  With her heart now pumping so hard she can feel it, Shula picks up the white phone, which is attended twenty-fours a day by a security liaison in the basement. The system was established by her predecessor, who proudly showed it off when he walked her through the prime ministerial residence. In its weekly tests it always operates faultlessly, connecting her at once with the IDF chief of staff, the chief commissioner of the Israel Police, and the heads of the Mossad and Shabak, which correspond roughly to the CIA and the FBI respectively. In addition, there is an optional link to the head of the Israel Broadcast Authority, so that if need be she can address the nation from her bedroom or kitchen, or toilet. In every case, should the primary contact be unreachable, a connection is made immediately to his second in command. In test mode, the system never failed.

  Now all she has is a mild and distant static.

  She moves to her personal cell phone, where the same numbers are on autodial. Silence.

  20

  IN THE WHITE VOLVO flying south down the near empty coastal highway, the chief of staff reaches for his cellphone at the precise moment he sees the southeastern sky light up as though it is Independence Day. Later he will not be certain the phone rang at all. He may have picked it up to call headquarters. Or perhaps they were calling him.

  “Skull Prime here. Report.” He listens, then responds. “Code blue. Repeat: code blue.” He turns to his driver. “Gingy, drive like your life depends on it.”

  The driver floors it.

  “Because it does.”

  21

  ON HIS FIFTY-TWO-FOOT HATTERAS in the marina at Tel Aviv, Misha Shulman is not happy. This Alon Peri is being stubborn. I could pick up his family, his wife, his children, Misha thinks. Or bomb his factory. Or drug him and have pictures taken that would ruin his life. None of these is appealing. Misha has given up this kind of thing, the way he has given up dealing in prostitutes. He sees himself these days as a legitimate businessman with the misfortune of having started out as a criminal. In Russia, what other choice did he have? He had no rich father—in fact, he had no father at all. His mother died when he was twelve. For three years he lived on the streets of Moscow like a feral dog, eating garbage, selling his body, dealing in drugs until he was able to buy himself shelter in an abandoned warehouse near the Promzona metro station, and then to acquire a car—a Moskvich: only sixty-eight horsepower, but not many seventeen-year-olds in Russia drove a car—all the while putting together a group of young thugs who like him had no place in the new Russia. In the old Russia, under the Communists, he would have been sent to an institute for wayward youth, forced to listen to endless lectures on the evils of capitalism, and in so doing at least avoided hunger. But the new Russia offered a different kind of education.

  By the time he was twenty, Misha Shulman was known as Big Misha. He controlled dozens of street prostitutes and a handful of better-quality escorts who serviced the new capitalists of Moscow, along with diplomats and foreign visitors. He had connections with the Georgian mafia and the opium growers of Tashkent. In the power vacuum that was the new Russia, Misha Shulman was a power. Until the bureaucrats tracked him down and demanded a piece of the action.

  When he refused, a smirking judge sent him to the same gulag that had existed since the time of the czars, a prison stockade in Siberia whose name was a number and whose infamy was legend. There, despite his reputation, or more properly because of it, the guards organized their favored trustees to teach him a lesson.

  Instead Misha taught them. Within a month he was on top again, running the prison, and within a year was directing his Moscow operation via remote control, using the guards and their families to send and receive messages. In three years, through the influence of lawyers delivering bags of cash to the same bureaucrats who had imprisoned him, he was out.

  On one condition. He would have to leave the country.

  An unlikely Zionist, Misha found himself in a Tel Aviv that was not so different from Moscow. A million and a half Russians had emigrated to Israel during his years as Big Misha and his exile in Siberia. He did not know the names of these new Israelis, but they knew his.

  “Alon Peri,” Misha says. “How would you like if I break your legs?” Before Peri has a chance to consider this offer, Misha sighs dramatically. “Ah,” he says. “That was the old Misha Shulman. Now and again he pops up and wants to beat the shit out of somebody.”

  “Mr. Shulman,” Peri says from his chair. “You have no idea how—” When silence becomes a noise it can be very loud. The TV music has stopped, the screen blank. The four musclemen watching it look abruptly to Misha, but he is looking to the TV, as if in anticipation. The television issues three long beeps.

  The angst-ridden face of a familiar news reader comes on. “We interrupt our regularly scheduled programming for the following public service announcements.” Then, reading from a list, he carefully enunciates: “Tired Toe; Blue Ears; Rusty Knees; White Eyes...”

  Misha rises. “That’s me.”

  One of his crew shakes h
is head. “Misha, it’s just a drill.”

  “At 4 a.m.? They don’t do drills when everyone is sleeping.”

  As the news reader continues to read code names for IDF units, a siren goes off.

  “Ladies, go to your units.” Deftly, almost magically, a knife replaces the gun in Misha’s hand. He approaches the man tied in the chair. “Alon Peri, you too,” he says as he slices through the ropes. “Looks like we’re partners after all.”

  22

  DETERMINED TO AVOID THE central strategic miscalculation of what the Jews call the Yom Kippur War and the Arabs call the Ramadan War, the planners in Iran early on discovered they must choose from two modes of attack. In 1973, the armies of Egypt, Syria, and Iraq, together with contingents from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Libya, Algeria, Tunisia, Pakistan, Sudan, Cuba, and North Korea, converged on Israel on the holiest day of the Jewish year, when all shops, offices, and businesses were closed, most of the population was fasting at home or in the synagogue, the country’s well-organized bus system closed down, its trains sat in their marshaling yards and no vehicular traffic was on the roadways. On this day even Israeli Arabs made sure not to drive, at least not through Jewish neighborhoods. The IDF whittled itself down to a skeleton force as soldiers and reservists found their way to a day of fasting, prayer and reflection at home.