By the Rivers of Babylon (29 page)

Burg nodded. “It’s unpleasant.” He reamed out his pipe. “Incidentally, your friend, Mrs. Bernstein, gave me a hell of a hard time about casting aspersions on the loyalty of Jabari and Arif. And also about my methods of questioning our prisoner. She said that we have all turned into perfect barbarians. She’s right, of course. But we don’t think that’s so bad—do we, Jacob?
But she does. Why is it that bleeding hearts refuse to see this world as it is?”

“They see it fine, Burg. They just can’t pass up an opportunity to play the moral superiority game with bastards like us who have to slug it out in the shit so they can go do seminars on world peace and disarmament.”

“Well, I don’t think as unkindly as you do of that type. Anyway, she’s causing trouble and I think you should do something.”

“Like what?” He stared at Burg.

Burg stared back. “That’s up to you.”

Hausner wiped his palms on his pants. “I’ll see.”

As Hausner walked away, he noticed that the ground sunk into a shallow depression near the south ridge. Dobkin thought that this was the courtyard of the citadel and the south ridge was actually the city wall that ran from the citadel along the river to the Kasr mound in the south. The north ridge was similarly a covered wall. If the ridges weren’t so narrow-backed, they would have made likely avenues of approach for the Ashbals. Hausner admitted that neither ridge looked like a natural formation, but how Dobkin could see walls, citadels, watchtowers, and even courtyards was beyond him. It all just looked like dirt. It was much more completely obliterated than anything he’d seen in Israel. Dobkin said to picture a thick shroud over a corpse. If you had a previous knowledge of human anatomy, then it was not difficult to pick out legs, arms, face, stomach, and chest by the rises and falls of the shroud. So it was with cities. Courtyards and watchtowers. Walls and citadels.

The two Arabs looked up at Hausner as he approached. Jabari spoke. “I didn’t have an opportunity to congratulate you on your defense of Babylon last night.”

“That’s rather a dramatic way to put it,” said Hausner.

Arif tried to catch his breath. He was bare-chested, and his stomach quivered as he panted. “I wish to congratulate you, also.”

Hausner nodded. He stayed silent for a long while, then spoke. “Is there any reason for me to doubt you?”

Jabari came close. A few centimeters from him. “No.”

“That’s all you’ll hear on it, then. I suspect Mr. Burg would like to apologize, but his training makes that impossible.” He
looked around. “I have a very important job for you two tonight.”

“Even more important than digging the latrine?” asked Arif.

“I hope so,” said Hausner. He sat with his feet dangling in the unfinished trench. They sat with him as he explained.

Dobkin and Burg called for another work break. They passed the word around to put on a show for the prisoner. Everyone complied, although the dancing and singing took more energy than anyone had to spare. The five AK-47’s and about ten pistols were stacked carelessly in the shepherds’ hut, as if they were extra weapons, and ammunition was left lying on the dirt floor. A security man, Marcus, came into the shepherds’ hut with the Uzi submachine gun slung on his shoulder and gave it to Rubin, who put it ostentatiously under his blanket. He spoke with Rubin for a while and left. Another security man, Alpern, came in to visit with Kaplan and Rubin. He, too, had a Uzi, a little dustier then the other. It was the same one—the only one—passed through the cleft in the mud wall by Rubin.

The M-14 with the daylight scope was paraded into the hut by Brin. Muhammad Assad looked at it. He stared at the scope. Brin saw him staring at it. The only secret weapon they had was the starlight scope, and Hausner ordered that it not be shown. Brin spoke to Assad in Hebrew, which the man couldn’t understand. “No, my friend, this is not the scope that put the bullet into you. We have another. But you’ll just have to wonder about it.”

Assad was given a very big lunch of airline food and packaged delicacies from the luggage. He seemed mystified by some of it, but tried everything. One of the stewardesses poured water from a galley pitcher into plastic glasses for the wounded. They sipped at it. Joshua Rubin drank half of his and threw the rest out the cleft in the wall. If Assad had noticed that they weren’t as careless with water before, he did not show it.

Assad was taken out of the hut by two security men, Jaffe and Alpern. Before he was blindfolded, he saw the dozens of glass jars that held the aviation fuel stacked in a hole dug next to the hut. A steward, Daniel Jacoby, was filling more jars from an aluminum pitcher filled with fuel. One of the aides, Esther Aronson, was fashioning wicks made from strips of cloth. This was no ruse, and Muhammad Assad was duly impressed.

Alpern yelled to Esther Aronson to throw him a strip of cloth for a blindfold. She was slow about it—as she was told to be—and Alpern yelled angrily to hurry it up.

In the interim, Jaffe spun Assad around and pointed him toward the perimeter. Assad glimpsed what he took to be a heavy machine gun on a tripod, but was only a broken strut from the front landing gear, blackened with soot and sitting on a truncated camera tripod recovered from the luggage. Spent shell casings tied together with string gleamed in the sunlight like links of belt ammunition. If Assad wondered how the Israelis came to be carrying a heavy machine gun on board, he didn’t ask. He saw all he was supposed to see in those few seconds, then the blindfold was quickly tied around his head. He was led to the edge of the perimeter where he was guided between two big aluminum reflectors and over the trench and earth wall. Halfway down the slope, the blindfold was removed and he was given a white handkerchief fixed to a length of aluminum hydraulic tubing. Jaffe, with the same tone in his voice that the Lord must have used with Lot’s wife, told Assad not to look back. Despite his wound, Assad made good speed down the slope.

Hausner called an end to the festivities and found Burg and Dobkin standing on the high mound—the buried watchtower—that was the previous night’s Command Post/Observation Post. They were looking over the progress of the work. The Tel Aviv waterfront moved slightly as the hot wind picked up the T-shirt flag. “What’s the next priority?” he asked.

Burg suggested, “We should speak with Becker again. He’s on the flight deck.”

They walked back to the Concorde. A flattened platform of earth had been raised up under the collapsed nose wheel assembly, and Kahn was lying on it, supine, with his arms thrust up into the wheel well. He was covered with grease and sweat. Hausner wondered if his energies couldn’t be better spent digging man-traps, but said nothing.

Dobkin called to him. “Any luck?”

Kahn slid out and stood up. “No. Not yet. But I think I’m getting closer.”

Dobkin nodded. “Good.”

“I only hope we have enough batteries and enough fuel left to turn it over and run it if I fix it.” He looked pointedly at Hausner.

“Why?” asked Hausner. “So we can run the air conditioners?” He stepped onto the ramp. “If you two can’t make contact with the radio using the batteries, I don’t think the generator will make any difference.”

Kahn didn’t answer.

Hausner began walking up the ramp. He looked back toward the nose. “Technicians are tinkerers by nature. If something is broken you want to fix it. Your ego is involved with that goddamned APU, Kahn, but what good it’s going to do us fixed is beyond me.”

Kahn was red-faced but remained quiet.

Hausner took a few steps and shouted over his shoulder. “The radio is a quick ticket out of this place, but you two don’t seem to have the touch with it.” He jumped onto the delta wing.

Dobkin and Burg stayed behind and spoke quietly with Kahn.

The cabin was like an oven and Hausner, in spite of having gone without water for some time, began to sweat. There were sounds coming into the cabin from the work being done on the dismantling of the tail. As he passed the galley, Hausner could see that it was stripped bare. The Machmeter was lit, indicating that Becker was using the emergency power. It still read MACH 0.00, which somehow annoyed Hausner. What bright electrical engineer in France had wired the passengers’ Machmeter into the emergency power? Why would the passengers want to know how fast they were going during an emergency situation? It occurred to him that the passengers on 01 must have watched the speed bleed off after the explosion. He wondered how it read in the cabin of 01 when the craft was somersaulting across the sky.

Hausner was assailed by the smell from the flight deck before he reached it. He looked inside. Hess was still sitting slumped over the controls, but rigor had set in and Hess’s body had shifted and looked very unnatural. A hot wind blew in through the hole in the windshield. Becker was listening at the radio with earphones.

Hausner stopped in. “I want him out of here,” he said loudly.

Becker removed his earphones. “He’s my responsibility. I’ll keep him here until they’re ready to bury him.”

Hausner didn’t know what was going on in Becker’s mind and didn’t want even to begin to try and fathom it. What difference did it make where the body was kept? Maybe it was better that the rest of the people didn’t see it. If only that damned rabbi wasn’t . . .

Levin was an enigma. Religious people were all enigmas to Hausner. They wouldn’t fly El Al; they wouldn’t eat lizards even if they were starving; they wouldn’t bury bodies on the Sabbath. In short, they wouldn’t come to grips with the twentieth century. They let people like Hausner break The Law so that the water flowed into their homes on the Sabbath and the radar was manned and surgery was performed. Levin was just another version of Miriam Bernstein, Hausner decided. They were sure they were on the way to Heaven, and Hausner was in training for Hell. It occurred to him that either he was making very astute observations or he was becoming a paranoiac. But was there a despot anywhere who wasn’t.

“I
said
, do you want to fool around with the radio yourself?” said Becker.

“What? No. I don’t. Did you hear anything? Did you try transmitting?”

“As I said before, it’s very difficult to transmit in the daytime.”

“Right. Maybe we’ll have more luck tonight.”

“No, we won’t.”

“Why not?”

“Well, I did get one transmission.”

Hausner came closer. “Who?”

“Fellow by the name of Ahmed Rish. Before, when he was flying overhead. He said that he hoped Jacob Hausner considered all the lives at stake and all that. He also complimented me on my flying. Nice guy.” Becker allowed himself a laugh. “He also said that he’d be back at dusk to circle overhead and jam me if we weren’t surrendering.”

“Son-of-a-bitch.”

“He’s certainly full of surprises. All bad.” Becker turned off the radio. “Could you shoot him down?”

Hausner wiped the sweat from his neck. “How high could he fly and still jam you?”

“As high as he wants. He has the power, and it’s line of sight through the clear sky.”

“Then we can’t shoot him down unless you have a SAM on board that you’re keeping under wraps.”

Becker stood and pulled at his wet clothes. “Incidentally, I want final authority concerning what is taken off this aircraft, Hausner. A little while ago two of your men tried to take the goddamned wiring that connects this radio to the batteries.”

Hausner nodded. “All right.” He saw that Becker was sallow
and his lips were cracked. “Get some water.”

Becker moved toward the door. “I think I’m going to dig the grave.” He left the flight deck.

Hausner stared at the radio. After a few minutes he also left.

He didn’t want to run into her, but it was inevitable. She was standing on the delta wing with some other men and women from the peace delegation. He had noticed how all the peer groups had stuck together. She didn’t mingle with the junior aides or the flight crew.

They were all going up to the tail to help with the work. She stood with her hands wrapped in cloth to protect them from the jagged metal. She was covered with sweat and dust. She walked slowly across the unbearably hot wing as the others went on up the fuselage. She stood with her legs spread to keep her balance on the pitched wing. “Everyone seems to think you’re a hero.”

“I am.”

“So you are. No one really likes heroes. They fear—detest heroes. Did you know that?”

“Of course.”

“Have you made amends for the sin of overlooking a bomb planted in that tail section,” she pointed to it, “over a year ago in France? Can you rejoin the human race now?”

“You almost make it sound inviting.”

“Then do it.”

He didn’t answer.

“What else did Rish say?”

“He just wanted to talk about old times at Ramla.”

“We have a right to know.”

“Let’s not start this again.”

“What terms did he offer?”

“Would you consider surrendering under any circumstances?”

She hesitated. “Only to save lives.”

“Our precious lives are not worth the national humiliation.”

She shook her head. “What is it that I thought I found likeable in you? You are a loathsome person, really.”

“Don’t you want to tame the beast, Miriam? Aren’t you a doer of good deeds?” He remembered her warmth on the plane when she thought he needed someone.

She seemed confused. “Are you playing with me?”

He took out a cigarette stub and stared at it for a long time. She suddenly seemed so defenseless. He looked up. “Listen,
Burg is complaining about you. He says you’re bad for morale. So shape up and keep your opinions to yourself until you have the floor in the Knesset. I’m serious, Miriam. If he decides to charge you with causing dissension, I can’t help you.”

She looked at him, but it took some time before the words registered. Her mind was on what he had said before. She suddenly flushed red. “What? What the hell kind of charge is ‘causing dissension’? I won’t be bullied like that. This is a democracy, damn it.”

“This is Babylon. This is where the law of retaliation—the law of an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth—was codified by Hammurabi long before Moses gave it to us. Our origins are brutal and cruel, and there was a reason for that—it was a brutal world. Then we became the world’s professional pacifists, and look what happened to us. Now we’re raising young men and women who are fighters again after all these centuries. We may not like their manners, but they don’t care. They don’t much like our European background and all it connotes. If my parents had stayed in Europe, they would have gone into the boxcars like yours. They were the type. Asher Avidar was a damned fool—but you know what? I like that type of damned fool. People like you scare the hell out of me.”