NEVER AGAIN
a novel
HARVEY A. SCHWARTZ
Never Again
by Harvey A. Schwartz
© Copyright 2018 Harvey A. Schwartz
ISBN 978-1-63393-731-4
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means – electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other – except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior written permission of the author.
This is a work of fiction. The characters are both actual and fictitious. With the exception of verified historical events and persons, all incidents, descriptions, dialogue and opinions expressed are the products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.
Review copy: this is an advanced printing, subject to corrections and revisions.
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DEDICATION
Sandra, merci for giving me the time, space, love and encouragement to make it through this process, and for Nana Ida, who taught me endlessly why “never again” is so fundamental.
Table of Contents
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER 38
CHAPTER 39
CHAPTER 40
CHAPTER 41
CHAPTER 42
CHAPTER 43
CHAPTER 44
CHAPTER 45
CHAPTER 46
CHAPTER 47
CHAPTER 48
CHAPTER 49
CHAPTER 50
CHAPTER 51
CHAPTER 52
CHAPTER 53
CHAPTER 54
CHAPTER 55
CHAPTER 56
CHAPTER 57
CHAPTER 58
CHAPTER 59
CHAPTER 60
CHAPTER 61
CHAPTER 62
CHAPTER 63
CHAPTER 64
CHAPTER 65
CHAPTER 66
CHAPTER 67
CHAPTER 68
CHAPTER 69
EPILOGUE
AUTHOR’S NOTE
PROLOGUE
Ben Shapiro’s flying was sloppy. Downright dangerous. Flying his high-performance sailplane was instinctive, a twenty-first-century remnant of seat-of-the-pants aviation. Sometimes he shut his eyes and imagined his arms spread wide, hands cupped, catching rising air currents under his wings.
The sailplane veered side to side as Shapiro floundered through rising air currents. He should have sensed the lift, banked his wings and circled like a hawk. Instead he bumped through the air, consumed by what he’d heard on the radio as he pulled into the Plymouth, Massachusetts, Soaring Society parking lot.
“An apparent atomic bomb has detonated in Tel Aviv, Israel’s second largest city.” The NPR news reader struggled to speak calmly. “No nation or organization has claimed responsibility . . .
“The mushroom cloud was visible in Jerusalem, thirty-five miles away.”
Never even been to Israel, Shapiro thought. Wonder if I ever will now.
What he heard next cut deeper.
“Egypt, Jordan and Syria offered to send emergency aid, accompanied by troops,” the radio reporter said. “There is no word on deaths, but the population of Tel Aviv is more than 400,000.”
News analysts speculated that the atom bomb that destroyed Tel Aviv might have been manufactured in Pakistan, North Korea or Iran. Maybe it was smuggled out of the former Soviet Union. It could even have been made in Israel itself and been the bomb the Jewish state secretly traded to South Africa before the Afrikaner government gave way to black majority rule.
American specialists estimated the device was in the twenty-five-kiloton range, almost twice the strength of the Hiroshima bomb. Satellite images showed a crater 370 feet across and nearly 90 feet deep. The detonation ignited a firestorm fueled by ruptured gas lines, gasoline tanks, every object that could burn within a half mile of ground zero.
The enormous fireball, with a surface temperature of 10,830 degrees Fahrenheit, created a glare bright enough to burn out the retinas of people ten miles away. Half a million people, most of them Jews but also tens of thousands of Palestinians, were estimated dead, or they would be within a couple of days. Cool Mediterranean breezes spread the radiation cloud inland and north through Israel’s best agricultural region, an area created from desert by generations of Jewish settlers during Israel’s brief life span. The bomb split the country in two—literally—creating the next chapter in Jewish history.
Perhaps in a hundred years Jews would memorialize the thousands who died fighting to their last bullet rather than give up their homeland. Or the million who were slaughtered by one uncontrollable army or another. Or the millions more herded into Palestinian concentration camps. If there were Israelis in a hundred years, however, they would be descendants of those who managed to flee to the port of Haifa, where every craft that could float was crammed with hysterical people old enough to remember the last Holocaust or young enough to fear the next. The eastern Mediterranean swarmed with ships with no destination except “away.”
CHAPTER 1
Three days after the bomb, only the depths of the Negev Desert remained under Israeli control. A half dozen aging F-16 fighter-bombers provided support for a tank battalion training there. Colonel Gideon Hazama ordered a defensive ring formed around a concrete dome rising out of the desert at a spot known as Dimona, the location of Israel’s intentionally worst-kept secret.
Hazama, two air wing commanders, and the minister for cultural affairs, Debra Reuben, who had been on an inspection tour of southern Negev settlements, gathered in a conference room buried fifty feet below the sands.
Reuben looked like she would be staggered by the weight of a well-fed sparrow landing on her shoulder. After surviving fashionable high school anorexia on Long Island in New York, she’d grown into the type of woman who could see where on her hips a bowl of Ben & Jerry’s Cherry Garcia took up residence and would then spend the next week exercising it away. Her hair had been colored throughout so much of her life that she’d struggle to name her natural color on the first try. At present, it was a startling red.
Her appearance was deceptive.
Reuben’s obsession with Israel separated her from her girlfriends. From her early days attending Hebrew School at Temple Beth Shalom and through her teenage years as president of the Temple Youth Group, the story of young European Jews fleeing oppression to settle in the desert, learning to farm, learning to fight, creating their own government, triggered awe Reuben found difficult to explain. Compared with what she saw in her parents and their friends, with what she saw in herself and he
r friends, these Israeli Jews seemed larger, stronger, heroic. Mythical super-Jews.
I can do that, too, she’d thought. She was certain her future would be in Israel. Her parents smiled and nodded, confident she would outgrow it if only she’d meet the right boy.
They were wrong. Golda Meir, Israel’s first and only woman prime minister, a woman with features so prominent that she looked as if she’d already been carved in stone at twice life size, would have shaken her head in wonder to see tiny Debra Reuben holding the tattered reins of power over the State of Israel. Golda would have smiled, though, to see the stiff-backed soldiers biting any response to Reuben’s harangue.
Reuben’s rise to cabinet rank was viewed by most Israelis as a fluke, the kind of compromise that pleased nobody but was common in the hothouse of Israeli politics. She’d been a producer for the New York City CBS affiliate until a dozen years earlier, when she vacationed in Israel following a failed engagement to her on-again, off-again college heartthrob. She decided it was time to stop resisting what she’d expected would be her fate all along and stayed in Israel. Reuben found work in Israeli television, where she earned a reputation for integrity with her American brand of investigative reporting.
When a neutral but publicly respected person was needed to round out a coalition cabinet, her name was proposed as somebody few people would object to. To nearly everyone’s surprise, she took her new position seriously, worked hard and earned a grudging respect.
She knew nothing about military strategy and in fact would have been hard pressed to load a simple Uzi pistol. But now the fate of Israel’s nuclear weapons cache rested with her.
That Israel had nuclear weapons was an open secret assumed by the intelligence services of all the major powers and feared by her neighbors and enemies. Israel’s real secret was not that it had nuclear weapons but rather that it had so few. Rather than bankrupt the nation assembling an atomic arsenal, Israel hinted at about a hundred bombs—but stopped at three. Pretend bombs were as great a deterrent as real ones.
Now Reuben played the role of the hard-nosed militant while Hazama and one of the two Israeli Air Force pilots argued against following orders from a nonexistent central government.
“Do I have to repeat the decision made by our government years ago?” Reuben asked the exhausted military officer. “If the end of Israel is inevitable, rule number one is that these weapons must not fall into enemy hands. If all else is lost, they are to be detonated in place. The loss of the Negev is a small price to prevent the future blackmail of whatever Jewish state eventually reestablishes itself.
“Rule number two is that if an atomic weapon is used against Israel, our weapons are to be used, immediately, against the capital city of the country that attacked Israel. And rule number three is that if any devices remain unused, they are to be safeguarded and removed for future use.”
“Of course, we know all that,” said Colonel Hazama “What we don’t know is who is responsible for the Tel Aviv bomb.”
The soldiers ached for revenge. Uncertainty about the target for that revenge left them too frustrated to act. The irony that Debra Reuben prodded them to use the bombs, in some way—in any way—was a miniscule component of the desperation of Israel’s dying days.
“The country is overrun with Arab soldiers. Palestinians are slaughtering our people. Tel Aviv and who knows how much of the rest of the country is a radioactive wasteland. And you, the lions of Judah, the last remaining arms of the nation, can’t decide whether to strike back,” she scolded Colonel Hazama.
Reuben was near hysterical from lack of sleep and too much coffee. From the nightmare that decades of Jewish dreams were coming to a tragic conclusion. And that she alone was responsible for Israel’s final act.
“One serious attack on our airstrip and any chance to deliver these weapons will be lost,” she said. “Another day, maybe two, and we’ll all be Egyptian prisoners. Or dead. I am now the government of the State of Israel. As such, I order you to load two devices onto aircraft and drop them on Damascus and Tehran. The planes are to leave in one hour.”
Reuben rose from the table and walked across the room, gesturing to one of the pilots, the man who had remained silent throughout the lengthy arguments, to walk with her. She spoke with the man in whispers for several minutes, then she returned to the conference table where Colonel Hazama waited.
She sat, rested her head in her arms. She wanted her father to tell her what to do, her mother to rub her back and say that whatever she did was right. Instead, she fell asleep.
The colonel looked at the two air force commanders. “You, Damascus,” he said slowly, as if he were pronouncing their death sentences rather than that of millions of others. “You, Tehran.”
And the last one, the little one, we’ll hold onto for now, just in case we need it later, Colonel Hazama thought. He left the room to supervise the loading of the weapons.
One hour later he placed his hand on Reuben’s shoulder and shook her awake.
“The planes are in the air. May God forgive you. May God forgive us.”
Reuben rose from the conference table, feeling removed from herself, as if she were watching from a far corner.
“Let’s load the other device into a truck and get the hell out of here,” Colonel Hazama said. “A boat is waiting in Elath. Where it will take us I have no idea, but I have a feeling we are two Jews who will have few friends in the land of Israel for a long time to come.”
The two jets took off, one north, toward Damascus. The southbound Israeli pilot, who had not said a word, skimmed just feet over desert dunes until Red Sea waves reached up for its belly, flying ten feet above the water’s surface. Rather than turning eastward to cross the Arabian Peninsula, he continued south, following Reuben’s whispered instructions.
“Israel will need this weapon later. Later, when we are ready to fight for our land. Not yet, though,” Reuben instructed him. “One bomb is enough to use for now,” she’d said. “There are still Jews in Ethiopia who will guard Israel’s treasure.”
The United States Sixth Fleet, with the battleship New Jersey and the carrier Lyndon Johnson, rounded up its sailors from the streets and brothels of Tripoli, cutting short its courtesy visit to the latest Libyan government. The fleet steamed east, breaking out its never-used radiation decontamination equipment, preparing its sick bays. Doctors on board hurriedly read the manuals on treating radiation victims, knowing that by the time survivors would be carried on board the ships, the burn and blast victims would already be dead.
America was on the way, if only Israel could hold out for a few more days.
Damascus was obliterated before the Sixth Fleet arrived. The Tel Aviv bomb horrified the world; the Damascus bomb disgusted it. Israel went from receiving worldwide empathy and support to being demonized.
A dozen organizations jostled to claim credit for bombing Tel Aviv, but no one boasted about bombing Damascus. No one needed to claim credit. No one but Israel would have or could have done it.
American Jews made little effort to justify Israel’s conduct. The Damascus bomb was seen an act of desperation, a drowning nation seeking to take an enemy—any enemy—down with it.
Hearts hardened. It was one thing for a crazy religious fanatic suicide terrorist to use an atom bomb, but another for a government to choose to do so. Even American Jews conceded that Israel went too far this time.
Tel Aviv no longer existed by the time the Sixth Fleet arrived. The fiercest fighting was between the Syrians and the Egyptians, each claiming sovereignty over what had been Israel. Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, Gaza and the West Bank emptied as four million people thanked Allah for the miracle and rushed to claim what was theirs by divine right. Or at least as much of it as did not glow in the dark from radiation.
The Sixth Fleet was met by an Egyptian patrol boat whose nervous captain politely informed Admiral Jameson Barons on the Lyndon Johnson that the situation was well in hand, that the best medical teams w
ere on the scene and that while the American offer of help was appreciated, the situation was not nearly as serious as first thought. So many armed groups were on the scene, however, that it would be best for the fleet to withdraw before a tragic accident took place.
Admiral Barons, who had lost his son, a Marine lieutenant, in Afghanistan, and his daughter, a Navy SEAL, in Yemen, waited for orders from Washington. He was commanded to exercise restraint and to act in his best judgment based on the local situation.
Enough young deaths, Barons thought. Enough Americans dying in wars where we can’t tell the good guys from the bad guys. The Americans withdrew.
CHAPTER 2
The white glider banked steeply, its forty-five-foot, carbon-fiber right wing pointing at Plymouth Rock 6,000 feet below. Ben Shapiro lay under the blue-tinted canopy nearly flat on his back, craning his head for the telltale wisp of forming cloud that indicated a thermal, warm air rushing upward, that would float his engineless aircraft higher yet.
Good lift over the shore would make this flight a special one. Shapiro needed a special flight to take his mind off the events in Israel.
He’d spent the morning sitting in front of the television monitor in the conference room in his Boston law office, staring at coverage of refugee ships forced out of harbors in Greece, Italy and Albania. Europe had learned that once such refugees enter, they never leave.
From Israel itself there was no coverage. Newscasters speculated about what was happening when four million vengeful Palestinians backed by three armies swarmed over the sick and dying remnant of those Jews who had neither the will to resist nor the strength to flee. The total ban on foreign journalists—for their own safety—by the occupying powers fueled the worst fears. Al Jazeera’s Damascus coverage showed children’s burned corpses, block after block of leveled buildings, demolished schools and hospitals. In contrast, it reported that bomb damage to Tel Aviv, although serious, was miraculously limited to Jewish neighborhoods. Troops provided relief aid to the Jews who had wisely chosen to remain in Palestine.
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