The Hope Page 17

  Sam Pasternak appeared unworried. “No use just hanging around,” he said to Barak, who sat sweating and fretting in the plane, drinking Coca-Cola. “Why don’t you do some sightseeing? The Canal’s worth a look.”

  “But what’s happening? When do we leave?”

  “Pretty soon. Have no fear, we won’t go without you.”

  “Sam, the truce is over. The war may be on already.”

  “Impossible. They’ll hold the war for you.”

  A cabdriver took Barak to view the immense locks, and he had the good luck to observe an American aircraft carrier being towed into a lock, then slowly starting to sink as the water was let out. On his return late in the afternoon, the Constellation’s engines were roaring, the wheels straining at the blocks, but the truck still barred it from moving. Sam Pasternak greeted him by handing him his passport. “B’seder, glad you’re back. It won’t be long now.”

  “What about that gasoline truck?”

  “Yes, that’s the problem. We’re just testing the engines.”

  They were standing in the open door of the plane, at the top of the ramp. “What problem? You’re cleared to go, aren’t you?”

  “Well, yes and no. It’s a strange place with strange regulations. Ah, there we are.” A stout man in overalls was approaching the gasoline truck. “Quick, come inside.”

  Pasternak slammed the door shut and twisted the air lock. The plane began to move. Looking out a window, Barak saw the truck driving off the field. Amid much English and Hebrew shouting in the open cockpit, mingled with garbled high-pitched radio transmissions in Spanish and English, the plane gathered speed, whirled onto a main runway, and went to full throttle. A police car raced onto the tarmac, its siren screaming over the noise of the engines. It drew almost alongside the accelerating aircraft, and through an open car window a uniformed man was brandishing a rifle, but in seconds the Constellation left the car behind and leaped into the air.

  “Well, that’s that.” Pasternak was at Barak’s shoulder, peering out the window as the plane climbed and banked over a lush green plantation. “Next stop is in Brazil to refuel, then Dakar. Parlez-vous français?” He gestured at the rows of vacant seats. “The boys will have to rip up all this camouflage before we get to Czechoslovakia. Pity! It cost us a fortune to install. When we land in Zatec, it must be ready to dump, so we can load up with airlift cargo, refuel, and go home.”

  “What did that driver of the gasoline truck cost you?”

  “Actually, the police car cost more.” Pasternak crinkled his eyes in a grin. “But I have plenty of that ten thousand left. Good thing, too. No telling what we’ll run into in Natal and Dakar.” He dropped into the soft seat beside Barak, and tilted back. “A shame to get rid of this classy interior, isn’t it? Best quality. The fact that the U.S. Embassy didn’t have the plane impounded—also the return of our passports an hour ago—we owe to Christian Cunningham.”

  ***

  “Sam, is all Czech cooking this abominable?” Barak inquired, wrinkling up his face over smelly boiled fish and watery potatoes served on chipped old plates.

  “This isn’t Czech cooking, this is Marxist cooking, and like everything else about that system, it stinks,” Pasternak replied, and went on joshing the stocky, heavily painted waitress in fluent Czech.

  The plates were marked Hotel Masaryk, though the new sign outside read Hotel Stalin. Clearly this fusty hostelry near the Zatec air force base had been shut down for years, and reopened just to isolate the personnel of the Israeli airlift. All the airlift activity was quarantined in one corner of the base, well removed from the Czech air force hangars. Though the world press had long ago written up the “secret” operation, it still did not officially exist for the Czech government.

  The waitress was decidedly flirtatious, delivering the dreary victuals in a clumsy inexperienced way. “Listen, Zev, she has a friend,” Pasternak said, “and she’s very interested in having some fun this evening. She volunteered that she likes Israelis, we’re cute. Her apartment isn’t far from here.”

  “Sam, I’m not interested in Czech whores,” said Barak.

  “Now, that isn’t nice. Why whores? They’re just spies. Don’t talk politics or airlift with them, that’s all.”

  “Enjoy yourself, Sam.”

  In the crowded smoky dining room the language was generally English, with a scattering of Hebrew. After dinner Barak joined some aviators in the lobby to drink imitation coffee and bad brandy. Like Pasternak’s stories, their reminiscences were eye-openers. All Barak’s recent fighting had been within the Yishuv, where battle plans and movements were measured in tens of miles. This airlift spanned the earth, he gathered, its reach if not its tonnage exceeding even the colossal Berlin airlift that was making all the headlines.

  Vaguely he had known of the operation, but here were the men who were doing it, World War II fliers from all over the globe. Mostly American, but not all, mostly Jewish, but far from all, mostly volunteers—Frenchmen, Canadians, South Africans, Australians—the gentile volunteers in it because they sympathized with the Jewish struggle to survive, or for the adventure, or, like the hard-bitten Americans who flew the largest chartered transports, as frank mercenaries. By this motley band the whole planet was being ransacked for arms in any quantity, for no government would openly help the Jews.

  “I tell you you’re in luck, mate, with that Constellation,” a gangly Australian said to Barak. “You can hop straight to Oklahoma, and skip the bloody refueling at Jockstrap. That’s the hell of a nuisance.”

  “Oklahoma? Jockstrap?”

  “Jockstrap is Corsica,” put in an American with a bristly gray haircut, quaffing beer from a big stein. “Only goddamn place in the Med that’ll refuel a plane going to Israel. Oklahoma, that is.”

  Barak sat up late listening to their tales of the adventurous time before the State had been declared; of crashes and near-crashes, of airplanes taking off without clearance or without navigational equipment into cloudbursts and black fog, flown by pilots who had never been in the machines before, and so on. This sort of thing had gone on in the early days, they said; now the airlift was routinized, tame, and relatively efficient. Barak stumbled off to bed past two, much enlightened and encouraged. Pasternak had not yet returned, and whether he ever got any sleep Barak could not tell, for when he woke Sam was shaving, fully dressed and singing a plaintive Czech song.

  A wheezy taxi dropped them at the air base as dawn was streaking the sky. Beside the towering Constellation the fancy passenger furnishings lay piled helter-skelter halfway as high as the wings. A tank truck was rhythmically pumping in fuel, and lined-up working parties were passing crates aboard from open trucks. “Machine guns,” said Pasternak blithely, seeming none the worse for his night out. “Solid machine guns and ammo, this shipment. Good stuff, number-one priority.”

  Noisy workmen some distance away were trying to shove an aircraft fuselage inside another, larger plane. “Messerschmitt fighters,” Pasternak said, pointing to a line of the spindly machines nearby. “We have to take off the wings and ship them separately. The Czechs made these Me-109s for the Germans, and they’re not very good planes, our guys tell us. Very tricky to fly. And on price the Czechs are skinning us alive. Still, we buy what we can get.”

  During the loading Barak walked around the airlift buildings, code-named Zebra, noting for his report to Ben Gurion the vast mounds of crated weaponry, stencilled in Russian, Czech, and French, the busy traffic of trucks and cranes, the variegated aircraft, and the feverish work of mechanics and loaders. Pleasant fields of ripening grain bordered the airfield, where almost a mile away the Czech air force planes were all in their hangars, a dead scene but for a few pacing sentries. When at last he and Sam went aboard the Constellation, it was so crammed with lashed crates that for takeoff they had to stand stooped in the cockpit. The pilots were the same Americans who had flown the plane from Panama, but the radioman-navigator was now an Israeli. The lumbering takeoff required a run
to the very end of the field before the plane lifted into the air, barely above telephone wires.

  “Tell Zev about Dayan,” said the navigator to Pasternak, as the Constellation went soaring toward the rising sun over checkered green farmlands and a meandering silvery river.

  “Dayan!” Barak exclaimed. “He’s back home then?”

  “Back home?” Pasternak grinned. “He’s turned the whole war around.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Dayan pulled off a terrific raid on Lydda and Ramle. I don’t know details, but we’ve got those towns now, and Lydda airport, too! The UN is all screams and twitters, like a ladies’ room when a guy barges in. A week ago the Arabs refused to extend the truce. Now the British are howling for a new truce, which means of course that the Arabs want it. So it’s bound to come soon.”

  “Sam, where did you get all this?” Barak was glad but incredulous.

  “I telephoned our guys in London while you were having your stroll, to tell them we’re loading up and going. The papers there are full of the dashing one-eyed Jew commander. Same thing in America, they say.” Pasternak tapped the navigator’s arm. “Look, do we stand like this all the way to Tel Aviv? We’ll be round-shouldered for life.”

  The navigator showed them a blocked-off space in the crates behind the cockpit, where there were mattresses and water jugs. Barak said as they lay down, “And you were going to get me home ahead of Dayan!”

  “It was the delay at Dakar. Who could figure our fixer there would go off to Tangier with some dame? Frenchmen! Don’t worry, Zev, there’ll be plenty of war left.”

  ***

  “So, this time you did show up,” Yael said sassily to Zev Barak, ignoring Pasternak as they got into her jeep. “What a huge airplane! Shiga’on! Is it ours now?”

  “Not your business, Yael. Drop Sam off at his flat, then take me to Jerusalem.”

  “Pardon, sir, I have orders to bring you both straight to Ben Gurion.”

  “Oh? So do it.”

  Pasternak, sitting beside Yael, smiled and squinted at her as she started the engine. “You know, Yael, it’s been years since I’ve been to Nahalal. How is your family?”

  “All fine, sir. I don’t remember ever seeing you there.”

  “But I was. I remember you well as Nahum Luria’s fat little daughter.”

  “Truly? Well, I’ve lost weight.” With a toss of her head and a swish of thick blond hair, Yael sent the jeep leaping forward.

  “Yes and no,” said Pasternak. His appraising look at her brought to Barak’s mind both Mrs. Shugar and the Hotel Stalin waitress. He thought, however, that if any girl could handle Sam Pasternak, Yael Luria was that girl. As St. John Robley had put it in another context, it was diamond cut diamond.

  Yael delivered them to Ben Gurion’s Ramat Gan office and parked outside. She was primping at a hand mirror when a command car drove up and Moshe Dayan stepped out. She jumped to plant a kiss on his cheek. “Dode Moshe! The hero of Israel! The hero of the world!”

  “Al tagzimi!” (“Don’t exaggerate!”) With a pleased crooked smile, Dayan patted her shoulder and went inside. Only then did Yael notice who his driver was.

  “So, what happened to you?”

  “Hello, there.” Kishote showed her the handkerchief, stiff with black blood. His temple was thickly bandaged.

  “Ugh! How did it happen? Tell me!”

  He had spoken only a few sentences when she broke in. “You? You were in that Tiger? The story is all over the papers!”

  “Yael, your brother commanded the Tiger. He made me the gunner.”

  “Benny actually commanded it? Is he all right?”

  “Not a scratch. Benny was cool and tough and great.”

  She listened with wide shiny eyes to his story, then held out her hand. “All right, give me that silly handkerchief.”

  “By your life, no.”

  “Fool, I’ll only wash it for you.”

  “No. It saved me, and I’m keeping it.”

  “You’re a genuine madman. Is that wound serious?”

  He imitated her, going into falsetto. “Why, I’m driving the hero of Israel! Of the world! How serious can it be?”

  She made a face at him. “I’m glad you weren’t badly hurt, but don’t give the credit to my handkerchief.”

  “Only the handkerchief.”

  Yael hitched her shoulders, looked to the sky in despair, and went back to the jeep.

  ***

  “Ten tons of machine guns!” Ben Gurion’s disordered white hair, blowing in the breeze from an open window, gave him a look as excited as his tone. “In one plane, in one hop from Czechoslovakia! Now that’s an airplane. And for fifteen thousand dollars! Pasternak, it’s a sin about those other Constellations. No way to get them over here?”

  Pasternak and Barak were sitting across the desk from him. Pasternak spread his hands, palms up. “Prime Minister, do you have a friend in the American State Department? State has to release for sale abroad any plane that weighs over thirty-five thousand pounds. We got this one out with a trick that won’t work twice.”

  “A friend in the State Department?” Ben Gurion’s mouth curled. “General Marshall, maybe?” The telephone on his desk rang and as he picked it up Moshe Dayan walked in with Yigal Yadin, whose bald brow was corrugated, his pipe clenched in his teeth. “Ken [Yes] …ken, Yadin just came in with Dayan.” He threw peculiar cold looks at Dayan. “I see. Well, better talk to him.” He passed the telephone to his chief of operations. “For you. Trouble in Lydda. Uprising. Arabs attacking our soldiers.”

  He got up heavily from his chair and paced, while Yadin talked in low tones. “There you have it,” he said to the others. “The people in Lydda surrendered. Mula Cohen gave them the most generous terms. No expulsion, no roundup of able-bodied men, just turning in their arms. They claimed they had done it, too. Now they’re roaring out into the streets with rifles, knives, grenades, mobbing our boys. It’s touch and go right now.”

  “No it isn’t.” Yadin was hanging up wearily. “Mula’s got it under control. What happened was, a Legion tank patrol showed up on a hill nearby, so out the townspeople came looking for blood. The patrol retreated, and now they’re surrendering again. The terms this time will be tougher.”

  Ben Gurion turned on Dayan. “You see? What you did wasn’t warmaking. You took no objective, you destroyed no enemy forces. For a while you scared them, that’s all. It wasn’t a conquest, it was a prank.”

  “Prime Minister, pardon me,” said Colonel Yadin, “Moshe’s raid was the most daring action of this war, and the most successful.”

  “A prank, I say.” Ben Gurion jutted his jaw at Dayan. “When you take over Jerusalem Command, I expect you to be more serious. Meantime your commandos are needed in the south. Before a cease-fire comes we must open up a secure corridor through the Egyptian lines. Those Negev settlements can’t be sealed off again. Can your battalion still fight, or did you destroy its combat readiness?”

  “My men are splendid. Tremendous morale,” Dayan briskly shot back. “They believe they won a great victory. Our vehicles, however, are all shot up.”

  “You’ll be provided with vehicles,” said Yadin.

  “Then I await orders.” Dayan’s taut look relaxed in a smile at Barak. “Zev, I hear you made a big hit with the California ladies.” He turned to Yadin. “My deputy was badly wounded. Can Zev come south with me and replace him? Then when I go to Jerusalem, he can take over the battalion.”

  Yadin glanced at Ben Gurion, who said a shade grumpily, “No objection.”

  “I accept,” said Barak at once.

  “That’s settled. Pasternak, you’re going back to Prague?”

  “He’s not, with your permission, sir,” put in Dayan. “I’ve requested him for my deputy in the Jerusalem Command.”

  “That’s confirmed,” said Yadin.

  Ben Gurion looked hard at Dayan. “A good choice. And I didn’t say that what you did wasn’t brave or in
spiring. I said it wasn’t warmaking. We aren’t partisans anymore.”

  “With all respect, Prime Minister, you’re a great politician, and you know a lot about Arabs. What I know is how to fight them. That’s what I’ve been doing, except for farming, since I was a boy.”

  Ben Gurion held out his hand, and after a slight pause Dayan shook it. “You’ll do a job in the Negev, I have no doubt.”

  “I’ll try my best.”

  Coming outside, Barak and Pasternak found the bandaged Kishote sitting on the hood of Yael’s jeep and chatting with her. “Kishote!” said Barak. “You caught it, did you?”

  “Nothing. I’m okay.”

  “I saw your brother in Los Angeles.”

  Yael’s eyes opened wide, and Kishote hopped off the jeep. “Leopold? You did? He really made it there?”

  “Yes, and he says he’s going to stay there.”

  “Then he probably will. Leo does what he wants.”

  “And maybe you’ll join him, eh?”

  “Why should I? This is home.” He touched his bandage. “Look, I’ve already paid taxes.”

  “Next time you’re in Nahalal,” Pasternak said to Yael, “give your father, and also my Uncle Avram, regards from Sam Pasternak.”

  “I’ll try to remember, but I’m seldom there.”

  “Tell you what, Zev,” Pasternak said. “You’re off to the Negev with the commando battalion.” He gestured at Yael. “I’ll want a driver in Jerusalem Command. All right with you?”

  “Highly recommended,” said Barak.

  Pasternak smiled at her. “Like the assignment?”

  Yael gave him a slow calm blink. “Why not?”

  ***

  In her bathrobe, Nakhama was sleepily frying up eggs and potatoes at 3 A.M. while Barak showered. He came into the kitchen in a fresh uniform, saying, “So, do I look like an armored battalion commander?”

  She flashed him an appreciative glance, and gestured with a fork. “Coffee’s hot. You’d have had a battalion command long ago if not for your wound, and then all the running around for B.G., and flying to America and whatnot—”

  “Not an armor command, motek. I happened to be there in the room when Dayan and the Old Man were talking, and Dayan’s eye fell on me. So it’s all turning out for the best, even the running around.” He drank coffee at the table. “It’s a big chance. Armor’s the future, and this mission is crucial.”