He found Colonel Gold asleep in a makeshift office, his head plunked down on a desk, and Matt was reluctant to wake him. Gold’s head snapped up at the sound of his name. He grunted, shook his head to clear the cobwebs, and took a drink from the cup of steaming coffee Matt handed him. “I’m living on this stuff,” he grumbled.
Matt handed Gold his notes on what he had seen at Ramat David and on the road south. The air attaché scanned them, shaking his head. “Right now, it’s touch and go,” he said. “If the Egyptians come in …”
Matt nodded, filling in the colonel’s thought. “It will be over in hours.”
Gold’s lips compressed into a grim line and his head shook back and forth in tight little jerks. “No. It won’t be over in hours. The Israelis will go nuclear.”
“Oh my God,” Matt whispered, stunned by the sureness of Gold’s prediction. In his preoccupation with the loss of Dave Harkabi, he had forgotten about the Israelis’ “withholding” their Jericho missiles. He quickly filled the colonel in.
The air attaché picked up one of his phones. “I’m laying on a helicopter to fly you to Ramon. Get out of Israel soonest. I Ve got to get a message on the wires.”
The corridors of the command bunker were eerily quiet, as if the inhabitants were holding their collective breath, waiting for something to happen. Avi Tamir followed the guard down to the third level, surprised that he was being escorted. “Two people cracked under the strain,” the guard explained. “One of them got violent and attacked the prime minister.” The people they were passing in the hall were not dirty or wounded but mental strain and emotional danger had made them haggard and gaunt-looking. The guard held a door open for the scientist and stepped back. Yair Ben David was waiting inside — alone.
“Do we have a thermonuclear weapon yet?” he rasped, coming directly to the reason for Tamir’s summons to the bunker.
“No,” Tamir answered, “not yet.” In spite of his misgivings, the scientist had been working furiously on the weapon, driving his staff relentlessly.
“How long?” Ben David demanded.
“Two, maybe three weeks.”
“You’ve been stalling!” Ben David shouted.
“Have I?” Tamir shouted back. “You have no idea… Get someone else to finish it.”
The prime minister sank into a chair. “I’m sorry, Avi. I didn’t mean that. Please forgive me. But the situation is … critical. We’re barely holding on in the north … Iraq is pouring three fresh armored divisions into Jordan, two into Lebanon … I’m pulling our last reserves out of the Sinai… We might be able to hold them. But our latest intelligence reports say the Egyptians are moving more tanks into the Sinai. If the Egyptians attack, I will have to use our nuclear weapons.”
“But why do we need a hydrogen bomb?” Tamir protested. “Surely, the nuclear weapons we have—”
“You don’t understand Arabs,” Ben David snorted. “A tactical nuclear weapon on a battlefield means nothing to them. But if the Egyptians attack, I will repay them for their treachery. One bomb, that’s all, one bomb and Cairo no longer exists. Then the Arabs will listen to reason.”
“Is that a step we want to take?” Tamir asked. He was thinking about the danger when a war leaps a firebreak, crossing the barrier that separates the use of conventional and nuclear weapons.
“Do we have a choice?”
Furry was waiting for the helicopter when it landed at Ramon Air Base. He motioned for Matt to hop in the mini pickup he was driving. “Got to hurry,” he said. “We’re coming under a Scud attack about every twenty minutes and we’re out of Patriots.” He gunned the engine and raced for the squadron’s bunker. “They’re trying to keep the base closed. Ain’t working so far. The civil engineers here do miracles but I don’t know how much longer they can do it.” He slammed to a halt and the two men ran down the ramp to the safety of the underground bunker.
“How’s the jet?” Matt asked.
“It’s ready,” Furry answered. “Our troops did some miracles too. It was damaged more than we thought.”
“You got an extra flight suit handy?”
“Yeah,” the wizzo said. “The captain wants to see us before we split.”
They found the captain packing a mobility locker, getting ready to move. She was dressed in fatigues and moved with near exhaustion. Matt decided that in spite of the weariness that drew her face into a tight mask, she was still one of the most beautiful women he had ever met. “We’re deploying to an emergency operating location,” she said, “a highway strip in the Negev.”
“That bad?” Matt asked.
She nodded and sat down. Slowly, she laid out the entire war. It matched what Gold had told him and painted the same grim picture Avi Tamir had just seen. But she left out all mention of nuclear weapons.
“Why are you telling us all this?” Matt asked.
“I was told to,” she said. “You’ve got to make people understand.”
“Meaning my grandfather?”
Again, she nodded, her brown eyes filling with tears.
“I doubt that I’ll even see him,” Matt said, being totally honest. “But we’ll write an after-action report on what we saw here and I’ll see that it gets to the right people.” He turned to Furry. “Time to go.”
Her soft voice stopped the two men before they left. “Shalom.”
Matt turned to look at her. ."Shalom,” he replied. Then they were gone.
The Ganef sat at his desk, fingering the glossy black-and-white photo. He dropped the photo and pushed his glasses back onto his forehead, rubbing the bridge of his nose, making himself think of other things.
So much, he thought, riding with one young man. Have I played it right? Will the message reach the elder Pontowski and convince him just how desperate we are? God, I hate this nether world of lies, deceit, and indirection I live in. Why can’t we just say to the United States, “Look here, we need your help if we’re going to survive"? No, we have to feed them information, let them discover for themselves what reality is. And for this, I play with people’s lives.
Do I have the Pontowski right? Do I understand the President of the United States? Few people do, he is so clever and complex. Was it pure luck that his grandson was here when the war broke out? And why did the President leave him here? He must know we are feeding information to him, letting him “discover” the reality of our position. Was using the Tamir girl wise? Was it too obvious? The way we held the young Pontowski here and let him see the war through her eyes? Is reality nothing but questions?
The old man pushed his reading glasses back into place and picked up the photo again — a reality frozen in black and white. He looked at the last picture of the only person he felt close to, the nearest thing he had to a family. He closed his eyes, the image now frozen in his mind — Gad Habish hanging by his neck from a rope in a public square in Cairo — swinging in the harsh wind of his memory.
20
The reputation of Brigadier General Leo Cox had preceded him into the White House’s Situation Room, but not a single member of the National Security Council had been expecting the fierce intellect and mastery of facts that made his briefing on the current situation in the Middle East so convincing. Zack Pontowski was more than satisfied with Cox and made a mental note to move him permanently from the DIA to the NSC’s staff and get him promoted. The President pulled into himself as Bobby Burke, the director of central intelligence, tried to poke holes in Cox’s conclusions. The general was most tactful and respectful of Burke’s position, but the result was the same — Cox was eating him alive. A polite form of cannibalism, Pontowski thought. Perhaps we need more of it around here. He made another mental note to thank Melissa for her recommendation.