The Last Israelis - an Apocalyptic, Military Thriller about an Israeli Submarine and a Nuclear Iran (31 page)

“I was in shock too,” Sanbeto added, “mostly because I had no idea who this crazy but sexy woman was or how she was planning to be my roommate without even introducing herself properly first.” The three broke into some laughs. “Wait, it gets better. Go on, Orly, tell her the rest.”

“OK, so then this idiot tells me that Sanbeto can’t be my roommate in his building. So I go up to him and I say, ‘You know my Moroccan mother had to go through this kind of shit, even after she married my Polish dad. But she didn’t have what Sanbeto here has.’”

Sanbeto couldn’t resist pitching in to the story: “And the manager looked a bit confused then, so he asks Orly, ‘What does Sanbeto have?’ And I was curious too because I had no idea what I had at that moment.”

Orly continued: “Sanbeto has a litigator who graduated valedictorian from the Hebrew University, clerked for the Israeli Supreme Court, and is now working for a top civil rights organization. So Sanbeto – who was originally just going to be my roommate – is now also my client. And we’re going to make so much money suing your asses for racial discrimination that maybe we’ll just buy the building from your stupid landlord at some point. The manager’s jaw was so wide open by then that when I went to his desk to rip up my rental contract, there was no way to open his mouth any further.”

“That was our first date,” Sanbeto added between chuckles. “And, after we talked for a bit more about family and things, she said to me in total disbelief, ‘Yardena Mekonen is your sister-in-law? Wow. I love that woman’s articles. You have to introduce me to her, because she and I are going to raise some serious hell together.’ And I said to Orly, ‘Do you really need anyone’s help raising hell?’”

Yardena laughed. “Wow, that is a great story. And a great first date! We are definitely going to raise hell together. It’s an honor to meet you! And I would love to write a story about th – ”

Suddenly Haifa’s citywide emergency siren began blaring.

“Oh my God. What’s going on?” Orly asked, as Yardena suddenly rushed towards her children’s bedroom, calling after them.

“Adi! Tikva! Come out! We have to go down to the shelter.”

Moments later, Yardena came back to the living room with her children in tow. “Hurry!” she said to their alarmed guests, as Tikva hastily picked up her family’s barking puppy. “We have 90 seconds to get to the basement.”

****

A little earlier and a few miles away, on the sandy beach of Haifa, Daniel’s wife was sitting in a beach chair next to their eldest daughter, Hila, while watching over her son, Amir, and youngest daughter, Esty, who were putting the finishing touches on their sand sculptures.

“Mom, can I go to Amsterdam next month?” her 17-year old daughter asked. “There’s an international competition for solar power innovation.”

“For high school students?”

“No. But my science teacher said that he would go with me so that I can participate and enter my patent into the competition.”

“Mommy, look at the sandy captain we made!” Esty cried out. “And there’s his submarine,” she said, pointing at a nearby mound of sand that reasonably resembled a submarine. “Look, he even has the captain rank,” she added, proudly gesturing towards her father’s military insignia, which was popping out of the torso of their submarine commander made of sand. “I let him borrow it from me so that he can be captain for a while.”

Sivan laughed and reached for her camera. “That’s great, honey. Let me get a picture with you and Amir for daddy. Give me a salute, like you’re saluting the captain.” Amir and Esty stood up in their bathing suits, with sand falling from their knees and elbows as they stood at attention, with faces of exaggerated seriousness, saluting their arenaceous masterpiece. Sivan smiled in amusement as she captured the image.

“Very well done, children,” she said, putting her camera down.

“So Mom, can I go?”

“I don’t know how I feel about you traveling alone with your science teacher.”

“He’s fine, Mom. You’ve met him. He’s taken students on trips before.”

“Yes, but that was a whole group of students. Not just you and him.”

“Mommy, can I go in the water with Amir?”

“OK. But Amir, don’t let her go in past her knees.”

“OK, mom,” he replied, as he took Esty’s hand and led her towards the water.

“I really want to go to this competition, Mom.”

“I know. Let me think about it.”

“That means I can’t go.”

“No it doesn’t. It means I want to think about it a little more.”

“But whenever you say that, it’s always no in the end.”

“Why don’t we discuss it with your father when he comes back?”

“And when will that be?”

“Hopefully in a few wee – ”

Sivan’s sentence was cut off by the loud wailing sound of Haifa’s emergency siren blasting across the beach, warning the crowd that they had a minute and a half to find shelter before missiles struck. Sivan collected herself, stood up from her chair, and called her younger children.

“Amir! Esty! Come back here! We have to hurry!” Sivan grabbed her purse as Amir came running back from the water, holding Esty’s hand, as her little legs tried to keep up with him.

After they arrived moments later, Amir started to pick up their belongings and take their chairs.

“Leave that!” Sivan yelled. “Just put your shoes on and let’s go! Come on, we have to run as fast as we can!” She scooped up Esty and started running towards the nearest public shelter, with Amir and Hila running by her side.

Adrenaline coursed through Sivan’s veins in part because she wasn’t sure that they could actually make it to the nearest shelter in the sixty seconds that remained. She sprinted as fast as she could, holding Esty in her arms, as thousands of beachgoers and families struggled to meet the same challenge. Esty burst into tears but Sivan was too busy running to talk much.

“We…we left daddy’s captain badge on the beach,” she sobbed.

“It’s OK, sweetie,” Sivan said between heavy breaths. “Right now…we just need to get…to the shelter.” She saw through her peripheral vision that Amir and Hila were keeping up nearby.

“But…But daddy said it would protect me when he’s away.”

“I know, sweetie…But…the shelter will…protect us…if we can…get there in ti – ”

Chapter 36: One Last Message From Headquarters

The Strait of Hormuz is a busy and complex waterway to navigate. On an average day about 15 tankers carrying approximately 18 million barrels of crude oil transit out of the Persian Gulf through the Strait of Hormuz and into the Gulf of Oman.
The narrow channel is about nine kilometers wide, including two traffic lanes that are three kilometers wide, one inbound and one outbound, separated by a three kilometer-wide water median.
Bottom depths range between 50 and 100 meters, but there is also a narrow depression reaching 260 meters near the northern coast of the Musandam Peninsula.

With so much water traffic in such a small area, the decision to rise to periscope depth in that vicinity was inherently risky. But Daniel felt rather fatalistic about his mission by that point. For the first time in his long career as a captain, he was deferring to his crew to make the single most important decision of the entire mission – and in the history of the Israeli submarine force – without a clue as to what the resolution would be. If rising to periscope depth meant that his seamen would finally obtain enough clarity on a bewildering issue to unite them around a common purpose – whatever it was – then it was worth the risk. And if it meant that an Iranian frigate or submarine would sink them in the process, well, dying in the depths could have already happened a few times, first by an accident and then by a torpedo attack. The captain was doubtful that he even had a country or a family to return to, so being buried in the seabed of the Strait of Hormuz seemed somewhat trivial to him by comparison. Resigned to destiny and ready for whatever might arise along the way, Daniel embodied equanimity.

“Sir, it looks like we have a small opening in surface traffic,” Ambesah reported. Daniel noted that the lull happened a bit sooner than expected, at 0130 hours, but he wasn’t going to argue with circumstance.

“Eitan, what’s our position after rising to periscope depth?”

“26 degrees 36 minutes North, 56 degrees 74 minutes East, Sir.”

“Ambesah, are we clear at a position of 26 degrees 36 minutes North, 56 degrees 74 minutes East?”

“Yes, Sir. For about six minutes. And then – assuming they maintain their present speed and course – some vessels may get uncomfortably close.”

Six minutes wasn’t much, but it might be all they would get that night, Daniel thought. “I’ll take what I can get at this point,” he said to himself. “If by some miracle, we can communicate with headquarters, then it’ll be plenty of time to get more details about what happened. And if we can’t connect with them, then we’ll try to tune in to civilian radio for any news reports. Either way, the crew will know that we made every effort to get the full picture before deciding things on our own.”

“Rise to periscope depth at a position of 26 degrees 36 minutes North, 56 degrees 74 minutes East.”

“Y...Yes, Sir,” replied Zvi.

“Prepare satellite link.”

“Preparing satellite link, Sir.”

“Raise snort for air replenishment as well.”

“Yes, Sir.”

Daniel turned on the intercom in every compartment of the submarine. “If I can have the crew’s attention. We’re about to make one final attempt to reach headquarters. I’m going to connect the intercom to the satellite link so that all of you can directly hear whatever there is to hear. This is completely contrary to protocol, but so is the decision-making process for the most important part of this mission. We are obviously in an extraordinary situation, so bringing you into the satellite link is fully warranted. Standby.”

A few minutes later, there was a scratchy sound like a radio being tuned and then suddenly a clear voice came on.

“Is this Daniel, the captain of the Dolphin?”

“Yes, Sir. Who is this?”

“This is Gabriel Cohen, in the emergency communication backup center located in Karpathos, Greece…Your…Your satellite link was re…rerouted to me…I…” His voice started to choke up. “I…I didn’t think I would hear from you.”

“Sir, I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to reach anyone. Our communication buoy hasn’t picked up any signal from headquarters for about 37 hours now.”

“Nobody could send you a message,” his voice choked up again, trembling. “There is no message. Except that you shouldn’t come home.”

“What – what do you mean? Where are we supposed to go?”

“I don’t know.” Gabriel’s voice shook. “But there’s nothing left for you in what used to be the State of Israel.”

“Can you give me more details, Sir? What exactly happened?”

“Whh…Whh…What happened?” Gabriel struggled to hold his voice steadily enough to speak. “Ther…Th…There is just an eerie…Si…silence throughout the country now. There is no television signal or anything transmitted on any rr…radio frequencies.”

“Sir, I need to know exactly what happened.”

The crew could hear Gabriel gradually regaining control of his emotions enough to speak properly.

“Well…thousands and thousands of missiles from Lebanon, Syria, Gaza, and Iran fell all over the entire country. They hit every population center in huge numbers. Many of the Syrian missiles had chemical warheads containing Sarin, Tabun, VX, and mustard gas…A few Iranian missiles were tipped with nuclear warheads. Israel’s anti-missile defenses were totally overwhelmed. There were countless direct hits that completely destroyed the country’s population and infrastructure.”

Daniel was silent for a moment as he struggled to accept everything he had just heard. In 2011, Israel’s military intelligence chief had warned that there were about 200,000 missiles pointed at Israel by its foes, some of which held weapons of mass destruction. But the captain feebly tried to linger in denial for a bit. “So Iran launched nuclear missiles at Israel’s cities, Sir?”

“Yes. And there were two Iranian Kilo Class submarines that launched ballistic missiles with chemical warheads from the Gulf of Aqaba and those hit Tel Aviv, on top of the thousands of other missiles that hit Tel Aviv and every other major city…It was a massive, coordinated attack…The nuclear reactor in Dimona suffered a direct hit from a missile, causing additional radioactive waste to spread throughout the country…Wi…With about 95% of the population concentrated in the 7,000 square miles affected by the nuclear and chemical blasts, there are an estimated six-and-a-half to seven million dead.”

“Sir, did naval command get you the updated emergency contact list for the crew, including the visitors from the picnic a few weeks ago?”

“Ye…Yes…I got that list…Um…Let’s see, that was about twenty-four days ago they…They sent me the updates and they even called it the picnic list because…because there had been some new names and numbers from the visitors that day that were added to the emergency list.”

“Sir, were you able to reach any of those people?”

“You…you don’t know how many times I tried…Almost as many times as I tried to reach my own relatives…But – like with my relatives – there was nothing…Only an error because there is no longer any phone service in the country, after its entire infrastructure was wiped out.”

“Sir, what about survivors hiding in shelters?”

“Most of those who made it to a shelter will be buried there because so many buildings collapsed. The lucky few who survived in the shelters, and the few thousand people who were far enough from the nuclear and chemical impacts to survive the initial blasts and their immediate after-effects will soon be desperate for food and water. Most will need medical attention for the radiation burns all over their bodies. And there will be no facilities, resources, or people to help them…They will soon die an ugly and undignified death…Or they will choose the last act under their control and kill themselves.”

“So what is left, Sir?”

“You. You and your crew of 34, Daniel. You are the last Israelis. You are what is left. But you have no home. You must go somewhere else.”

“Sir, we needed to contact headquarters to see if we could receive a valid authorization from the Acting Prime Minister to launch a nuclear strike against Iran – or from the Prime Minister himself, if he came out of his coma since we last heard from headquarters.”