Mitla Pass Read online

  "The Sinai! Are you sure?"

  "I'm sure."

  "Mother of God, are you sure?"

  "Yes, it's the Sinai. All this rumbling and the threats against Jordan have been a decoy. Egypt has been the real target all along."

  "French and British involved in this?"

  "Draw your own conclusions."

  The ramifications were staggering. These audacious Israelis were going to take the Sinai Peninsula while the Anglo-French snatched the Canal back. This was the whole ball of wax . . . major, major.

  "Where are we going to be dropped?"

  "A place called Mitla Pass."

  I sat in the sand and with my finger drew a map. The Sinai was fairly clear in my mind. "Mitla . . . Mitla . . ." It was somewhere quite close to the Canal and, I think, near the Gulf of Suez as well. Something else occurred to me.

  "Shit! I've never jumped out of an airplane."

  Her white teeth showed. "That's very funny," she said. "No matter. A lot of people here are convinced that nothing is too tough for you."

  "I jumped from a practice tower once. Scared the hell out of me."

  "Oh, I don't worry about you, cheri. You'll bounce right up like a ball. Shlomo says it's easy, like pie. He'll be right in back of you to push you out of the plane."

  "Jesus," I said and dropped my head onto my knees. "It isn't funny." Natasha stood over me—back to bitch again, the master of Hungarian mood swings.

  "You wouldn't back out, Gideon," she said sarcastically. "After all, war is where little boys go to prove they are big boys. You wouldn't miss this for the world."

  She was right. She generally was. I realized my posturing had convinced the Israelis that I was rattlesnake-mean. I'd sold them a real sackful of B.S. Out of an airplane, huh? Well, I hoped I wouldn't make an ass of myself. I didn't make an ass of myself that one time, long ago ... I almost did ... I almost broke with fear, but I held on—barely.

  We were coming into the beach at Tarawa. My boat was in the first wave and I was up front, right next to the ramp. We were hitting one of the smaller islands on the atoll and not expecting much opposition. We'd been circling around for hours and most of us were pretty nauseated as the line of landing craft straightened out and moved for the beach. Just then, Japanese machine-gun fire opened up and raked us. The bullets hit the armor plating on the ramp and their impact nearly shook us out of the water like a wounded sailfish. In a matter of a few seconds the ramp would be lowered and I'd be the first out, into the water. All I could think about clearly was that I couldn't disgrace myself because I was a Jew. I almost fainted with fright. I managed to dare a peek back into the boat. Almost half of the guys, including the major, were puking out of sheer fear. Pedro, the toughest guy I ever knew, was on his knees praying to Jesus, Mary, and an assortment of Mexican saints. And just like that, a miracle happened. I was no longer afraid. The ramp lowered and bashed the water and I leaped in without hesitation. We were pretty near chest high and being fired at as, grunting, we waded forward. Funny part of it is how other things take over. I had a lot of work to do when we hit the

  beach—set up a radio and contact our command ship. Then my mind went to Sergeant Bleaker in back of me. He was the tallest guy in the company so we all gave him our cigarettes to keep dry inside his helmet. . . .

  So, them were the apples. I was going to jump out of an airplane and I couldn't dream or wish it away. Thirteen years had passed since Tarawa, with a lot of fat living in between. I put my face in my hands and sighed away my trepidations.

  Natasha stood over me, her hands on her hips and her legs apart provocatively. Natasha did not assume that stance accidentally.

  "What are you thinking about?" she said.

  "It's been a real shit night," I said.

  "The first destination of your family was to be Athens. They cleared our airspace without any problems. Your wife is probably enjoying an ouzo ..."

  So, finish your fucking sentence . . . with some nice, handsome, young officer from the embassy. . . .

  Hungarian bitch!

  "You love me now or you hate me now?" she persisted.

  "Bitch!"

  I lifted my head, the same instant her skirt fell to the ground and she stepped out of it. Her blouse and bra followed.

  "Come on, Natasha, only a rat could make love at a time like this."

  "That's right," she answered, "we're rats, both of us, so let's do a little rat fucking."

  She hurled herself atop me, grabbed two handfuls of sand, and ran them up and down my back, hard.

  "I make it raw. I want to see blood from you. I want it to hurt so bad that when you jump out of the airplane your shirt will stick to you from blood and you'll be thinking of Natasha!"

  Natasha did have a nice way of getting your mind off your troubles.

  If you considered things from Natasha's point of view, she'd been waiting for a long time to make tartare out of my back. For the better part of six months I'd been chastising her.

  "For Christ sake, stop wearing perfume!"

  "Look what you've done. I've got a bite mark on me."

  "Easy with the fingernails."

  Those times we soared, and they were often, restraint was not one of Natasha's commendable qualities. From time to time she'd deliberately leave a calling card in the form of a high-visibility mark, a bite bruise, scratches, which obviously didn't come from wrestling with the family dog. ("The platoon was scaling some rocks and I slipped and tore the hell out of my back.")

  Valerie's response was always double-edged. ("Poor baby. These Israeli rocks do have teeth in them.")

  Now the family was gone, and Natasha jumped me in the sand dunes. She had me as she used to have me, before Val came to Israel. Natasha went ape. She was the only woman who could make love while cursing you in seven languages.

  An hour or so later we went to my hotel room to survey the damage. Natasha was filled with remorse. Scrubbing very gingerly, it took over a half an hour to get the sand cleaned out of a lot of unlikely places. As she examined my back, she chastised herself but reckoned I could get by without stitches.

  In the shower, she started up again. Natasha adored making love in the shower ... or out of the shower . . . or in bed . . . or locked in a public rest room . . . or on the desk in the Prime Minister's office after he had gone for the day.

  "Oh, poor baby, look at what I've done. Natasha, you are an animal," she said of herself.

  There was a Swedish mouthwash in my cabinet that could peel the paint off a battleship or make a leper aseptic. The tenderness with which she dabbed it on my wounds was the flip side to her character.

  From the rape in the sand dunes, one would hardly get the notion that Natasha Solomon was also the most gentle, patient woman and lover I had ever known. She could play with my eyelashes for an hour with her whisper touch and lips and make every moment of it

  new.

  She cried as she patched me up. All I could manage was to hang on to the bedposts, clench my teeth, and fight off the tears.

  The alarm clock woke us up a bit later. She went out onto the balcony as I dressed and she read my new pages. I couldn't help myself, but it felt good—damned good, wonderful—as I laced up my old Marine boots and strapped a .45 pistol on my belt. I wondered why it should be feeling good . . . khaki shirt and trousers . . . fatigue jacket with an IDF logo . . .

  I came out to the balcony. Her white knuckles gave her away as she gripped the railing like a vise. I put my arm about her shoulder as she slowly calmed, and we watched the sea as we had watched it from there in fifty stolen rendezvous.

  "You're writing beautifully," she said.

  "I wonder how it sounds in Hungarian."

  "Don't worry about the dog," she said. "I'll take him to Dr. Klement. Grover will keep me company. Put him in my car. I parked right next to you."

  "Natasha . . ."

  She broke. Seeing someone off always terrified her . . . since she had seen her mother sent to the gas chambers at Auschwitz . . . God almighty!

  "See you around," I said.

  Slow transports always "lumber." Our formation of twenty Dakotas lumbered over the Negev Desert toward the Sinai Peninsula. The twilight was fading fast. This military version of the DC-3, the famed Gooney Bird, was built for neither speed nor comfort. Twenty-five of us were crammed into miserable bucket seats along either bulkhead.

  First time I flew in a Gooney Bird was to cross the States returning from furlough. The trip from Philly to

  L.A. took almost twenty hours. I had to transfer to four different airlines. From L.A. it was a train to San Diego, because there was no air service.

  On the other hand, there was something comforting about the Gooney Bird. I used to read a bedtime storybook to the girls called The Little Engine That Could. This little engine was a small-time train and found itself in a rough situation. It had to huff and puff its tiny heart out to make it over a mountain, in order to take candy and toys and food to the kids on the other side. I acted out the story with nail-biting suspense a hundred and one times, but in the end the little engine always made it. So did the Gooney Bird. Sometimes it landed with one engine out, or half the tail assembly shot off. But the Gooney Bird was the mainstay of the lift over the Hump, the Himalayas, and it carried the Berlin Air Lift.

  During the briefing earlier today, we had been told that at the same moment, a pair of World War II F-51 fighter planes were crisscrossing over the Sinai Peninsula, cutting the telephone lines with their propellers. For that dandy little maneuver, the pilots had to fly ten feet off the ground. Amen!

  We had been sequestered in a hangar on the military side of Lydda Airport. Colonel Zechariah, the founder and commander of the Paratroop Brigade, briefed us. Zechariah was a comforting sight, a
sort of Hebrew-speaking Marine-type commander, working diligently on becoming a living legend.

  The plan was simple enough. The Lion's Battalion —four hundred paratroopers under the command of Major Ben Asher—had been given the "honor" of dropping deep into the Sinai Peninsula to open Operation Kadesh.

  The actual site was called the Parker Monument, a marker in honor of a former British military governor. From the Parker Monument to Egypt proper, on the other side of the Suez Canal, was a distance of thirty miles. Sixteen or seventeen of those miles was Mitla Pass—a treacherous, narrow defile of mountain, rock,

  and cliff. An Egyptian force of unknown size was inside the Pass in fortified positions. Fortunately, we would not have to go in and try to take the Pass itself.

  The Lions were to seal the eastern end of Mitla to stop reinforcements from getting through to the Sinai. Meanwhile, the balance of the Para Brigade under Zechariah would cross a hundred and fifty miles of desert track, capture three fortified positions, and link up with us sometime around D day plus two.

  There were a thousand What ifs in my mind. I'm certain Dayan and the Old Man and Jackie Herzog and the rest of them had already What if'd themselves to death.

  Israel wasn't going to initiate a war unless she was forced. She was undermanned and underarmed against Egypt alone. What if we were jumped by Jordan, Syria, and Iraq as well?

  And What if the Egyptian Air Force caught us in the open ...

  And What if Zechariah didn't link up with us ...

  And What if—forget it, Gideon.

  The nonchalance, the downright boredom of the Lions had to be partly playacting. We did it in the Marines before battle. In fact, my dog Grover was probably the best in the world at fake macho.

  The Lions were sprawled about, seemingly oblivious of the bouncing and rolling. The sergeant major checked his Uzi gun as though it were a sweetheart he never got tired of caressing.

  Shlomo Bar Adon, my assistant, who had been lent to me by the Foreign Ministry, was dead asleep, his bearded angry-looking head bobbing on my shoulder, unresponsive to my elbow whacks into his ribs. I don't know whether I could have gone through a parachute jump without Shlomo. I loved him like a brother most of the time and some of the time hated him twice as much.

  I didn't want to think about Val and the girls right at that moment. If a writer can't block bis family out of his thoughts, he can't go to war. During years of long research trips I had mastered the art of not thinking

  about them. I'd get maudlin ... I'd cry at bars . . . I'd never get my work done if I couldn't get my family out of my mind. Or so I made myself believe. Val says writers are the total masters at suffering. She says everyone suffers just as much, but writers can say it better.

  For a time I thought my decision to bring my family to Israel was going to work. I'd been there four months when they arrived, and was already heavily involved with Natasha. All three of my girls adapted and seemed happy. We lived in a lovely neighborhood near the sea and I had an extra hotel room a few miles away to work in. Our neighbors were mostly affluent South Africans who were bedrock Zionists and had come to settle.

  Life wasn't easy in Israel in 1956, but what was lacking in comforts was more than made up by an explosion of spirit and a lust for life and a purpose for living and a feeling of brotherly love that I never would have believed could exist in an entire people. For me, being here was reaching nirvana.

  The government had shown a lot of confidence in me, and the armed forces loved my early novel on the Marines. I had finished most of the research on my new book. Writing was going extremely well. To be the first Jew in centuries to write about Jews as warriors was more than an obsession, it was Me itself.

  Even the madness of my affair with Natasha was controllable. Or so I led myself to believe. She was by far the cleverest person I'd ever met. Far too clever to cross that final bit of no-man's-land and force me into a decision between her and my family.

  So I'd go to my room at the Accadia Hotel every day and write and make believe that Natasha really wasn't going to be a problem. And I had reckoned that by the time I finished the novel and was ready to return to the States, Natasha and I would have burned the affair out—past history. Everything would resolve itself like magic . . . yeah, sure, man. Gideon, you are one stupid Jew.

  An abrupt downdraft got me in the pit of the stom-

  ach. A few of the Lions were annoyed enough to shift positions, grunt, and continue to snore.

  So, Gideon, the best-laid plans of mice and men ... I was an idiot to think I could tightrope between two warring females.

  I did manage to hold everything together and move the book along well and keep our heads above water financially. Then came the border raids, the sudden, swift escalation, and the inevitable conflict. Things started to really become unhinged with the Kalkilia raid. Good Lord, it was only seventeen days ago.

  Major Ben Asher opened the door from the cockpit. This woke everyone up in a hurry.

  "One hour to drop," he bellowed over the engines. "We'll be going down to five hundred feet to get under their radar."

  . . . The Kalkilia raid . . . only nineteen days ago ...

  Herzlia, Israel—October 9, 1956

  It was coming up to six o'clock, time for the English-language news. Gideon never missed the news; he should be back. The whole country stopped every hour, on the hour. Good news was scarce these days.

  The sun played out its daily ritual, drifting downward toward a sea that was mirror-smooth tonight. From the kitchen window Valerie could just about make them out coming up from the beach. She shaded her eyes and squinted toward the path, then wiped her hands at the sink and stepped out onto the rear veranda and waved.

  Penelope enjoyed her royal seat on Daddy's shoulders, while Roxanne walked ahead of them swinging a bucket.

  Val never failed to react every time she caught sight of him. Gideon was on the slight side, but most people thought of him as being larger. It was his bearing, a determined manner of stride, hunched forward,

  pondering. Val loved his looks. Feisty little bastard. Gideon had overpowering eyes that could express a full range of emotions with a glance, and when his look was for you and filled with lust, it always brought on shivers.

  The first time she ever saw him was on a USO dance floor. He was in Marine uniform and she was a student at Mills College, a few miles away from the Oak Knoll Naval Hospital. Gideon just moved right in—cut in and whisked her away from her partner. He was pure driving male.

  And cocky! "You'd better put in your dibs for me now, Val, because I'm going to be a great writer." Hell, he was only nineteen years old when he told her that, two nights after they met.

  "Here's a pair of tickets for a play at the hospital next week." Gideon was a patient. He was also the playwright, director, producer, and star of the show.

  It was frightening meeting someone so strong that early in life, but Lord, he was magic.

  Grover Vandover, their golden retriever, a lollipop of a family dog, flopped up the path alongside them. Roxanne broke away, running toward the house, and opened the back gate onto a lawn of coarse grass.

  "Mommy! Look! Coins!" She opened her palm revealing three bits of irregularly shaped metal, blackened by time, with the image and lettering no longer visible.

  "Daddy says they may be Roman, even Israelite."

  What Roxy didn't know was that when Professor Ben Zohar had been over the night before, he had slipped the coins to Gideon who had planted them at the tel earlier in the day. The Professor was their self-appointed Hebrew teacher and he kept an eye on their school progress. The only English-language school was run by Franciscan Brothers in Jaffa, too far for them to travel. It fell on Val to see to the girls' studies.

  Gideon lowered Penelope from his shoulders and she ran to embrace her mother. She still had a slight limp from the accident three years earlier. It had happened in the blink of an eye. Val had turned her back

  for only a few seconds when Penelope ran into the street as a bus came roaring through the intersection and sideswiped her . . . fractured skull . . . broken ribs . . . wrecked knee.

  It took over two years for Penny to heal. Val, with great compassion and support from Gideon, learned to manage her guilt but would take some of it with her to her grave.

  They looked at her and smiled and said silent "thank Gods." They always did.