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. I 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 Em 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 girl 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 allconsuming.
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 afull-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 rounders 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 statter 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 1115 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 under-ground 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 statters showed immediate
results. The engine caught and he ran up his power to one hundred percent.
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