As they raced down the stairway to the fourth floor, David and Alix nearly collided with Malachi Ben-Eden.
“They’re preparing to attack us!” the former Shin Beth agent screamed. “They’re coming at the building from all directions!”
David’s right foot flew out like a football punter’s. It caught the Weapons Expert right on the tip of the chin.
David thought he’d broken his foot. The surprised terrorist went tumbling down the steep flight of stairs, then lay in a crumpled heap.
“Not too bad for a broken-down gynecologist,” David said as they collected another Stechkin and more grenades. He was at least as surprised as the Weapons Expert had been.
“I wouldn’t get too cocky,” Alix whispered.
Just then a longhaired woman, Anna Lascher, stepped out of the fourth-floor hallway.
“You traitor!” she said, raising her rifle and pointing it at Alix.
A single shot cracked in the tiny stairwell. Alix had fired her own Beretta. The smell of cordite wafted into her nose like ammonia.
The woman terrorist crashed back hard against the wall. She slipped down to the floor, grimacing in pain, clutching her wounded shoulder.
“We’re not traitors!” Alix bent and spoke to the stunned Jewish girl. “Think about what’s really beginning to happen here. Think, Anna. Don’t you see what’s happening? Don’t you see, brave girl? Don’t you see, Anna?”
Skirmish lines of Red Army soldiers were choking off the tiny cul-de-sacs and side lanes around the hostage dormitory. A regiment of martial-brown uniforms marched down a wider street, like a Red Square parade on May Day. Everything but the towering missiles were on hand.
Red Army helicopters were settling down onto nearby rooftops.
Combat troops were streaming out of stout transport trucks and municipal buses.
Five, seven, nine, twelve, armored cars appeared. Their turret lights were blazing balls of fire in the night. The tanks came forward slowly, at ten to fifteen miles per hour, but they seemed to be moving faster because of the terrible roaring, rattling noise.
A smattering of cheers rose from the crowd as roving tank searchlights swung across the blank, staring faces. Some Russian women patted the armored-steel shells as if they were family watchdogs.
For a whole generation of Americans, it was the first actual sighting of the much-talked-about Russian war machine.
West Germany’s ZDF, the BBC, NBC, the French, and Japanese TV networks filmed the live battle scene from every conceivable angle and perspective.
The TV cameramen shot long lens, zoom lens, and fog lens for a dramatic smoking-inferno effect.
They shot close, extremely close, and closer still.
Nearly a hundred tense Russian Army and Moscow Police sharpshooters stood at the ready.
Outfitted in dark gray sweatsuits and peaked hats, the Russian marksmen lay flat on nearby rooftops.
They lay in the dark that stretched behind open dormitory windows facing down on the hostage dorms.
They lay in vacant alleyways, under jeeps, and harmless-looking road cars.
The sharpshooters viewed the dormitories through a hundred deadly infrared nightscopes. They very patiently searched out the terrorists.
Meanwhile, two important-looking cars—shiny, seventy-thousand-dollar Zil limos—drove at 55 mph in the eerily deserted tunnels directly underneath Olympic Village.
Nearing Yuri Gagarin Square, the Russian-made luxury cars emerged from a wide service ramp. They were like two giant but cautious lizards peeking up from underground.
As the sparkling limos were escorted through peripheral crowds, the Russian people and some tourists suddenly began to shout the names Brezhnev and Podgorny.
The rumor was instantly spread worldwide by the “live” TV announcers and commentators.
“In a surprise move, Russian leaders are going to meet with the terrorists holding 682 athletes in Olympic Village,” TV stations announced, interrupting all varieties of other programming. “Suddenly there is hope in Moscow.”
Benjamin Rabinowitz sat with his glazed gray eyes looking down on Yuri Gagarin Square. The rest of Rabinowitz was off in another world entirely. He was satisfied that a fitting revenge for the Holocaust of the forties was now guaranteed. He was convinced that this day would prevent another terrible extermination.
Go and smite the Amalekites
, Rabinowitz thought to himself.
Destroy all that they have and spare nothing
, the Lord God had said.
Slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, camel and ass
. Begin Dachau Two.
The door to his suite opened suddenly and the Führer just had time to raise his pistol.
Dr. David Strauss hesitated dangerously, then he fired the Stechkin machine-gun pistol. The bullets tore into Rabinowitz at more than eight hundred miles an hour. This time, Rabinowitz wasn’t likely to rise from the dead.
“That one is for Elena,” David whispered.
Douglas Attenborough was to write in the London
Times
:
“The Dachau of Nazi Germany had been quiet, almost bucolic, quite peaceful to the eye. Seventeen kilometers from Munich along the still and beautiful Amper River, the German
Konzentrationslager
was a strange, secret village of low-lying, gray-concrete, and wood-slat barracks built on what could have passed for a quaint Scottish dairy farm.
“Thirty-five years later—last night—something horrifying called Dachau Two was a very public, visual, and aural spectacle. It was the worst scene I’ve witnessed since I was a small boy, living through the Luftwaffe bombings of London.”
Tense and frightened Russian Army snipers listened to carefully enunciated babble through their headsets.
The brilliant KGB attack plan was suddenly looking rather ragtag and almost unprofessional to them. The Soviets’ lack of experience in dealing with terrorists was showing through badly. Thus far, only two of the Jewish men and women had appeared in the dormitory windows.
In the meantime, some of the American women athletes were escaping out the front door. What in hell was going on in there?
The Russian ground-attack forces were jammed triple file into the darkened alleyways separating sections of the village.
Down in the underground tunnels, more soldiers waited like thousands of stone pillars. They smoked their Papirosis down to the cardboard filters, lighting cigarette with cigarette.
11:46.
11:47.
11:48.
The scene inside Olympic Village went completely, irrevocably mad at 11:49.
The Russian Army snipers fired on order at the front windows, glass balcony doors, and rooftop escape hatches.
The Housewife was struck twelve times in the face and chest. As the crowd gasped in horror, the woman dropped straight down from a fifth-floor window.
The twenty-two-year-old Medic was cut up like a paper target on a practice shooting range.
An American assistant swimming coach was killed by mistake.
The crackling SKS automatic rifles sounded like a huge bonfire made from dry pine limbs.
Inside the kitchen, meanwhile, Colonel Ben Essmann was lying in a secure sniper position. His own rifle was trained on the swinging doors leading out to the dormitory corridor.
The Soldier’s eyes were wide and his mouth was hanging open.
The former Israeli paratrooper, former intelligence agent, former commando, was counting down.
“One hundred nineteen. One hundred twenty. Blast off!” The silent kitchen screamed for Colonel Ben Essmann.
He thought that he could actually feel his blood beginning to boil.
He knew that he was about to become a holy martyr.
In a way, too, Ben Essmann thought, he was sounding a blow against Jewish enemies of all times: Pharaoh, Haman of Persia, the Greek Antiochus, the Muslims, the Nazis, the Arabs. The strange, fiery Soldier silently cursed each and every one of them.
During the first terrifying moments, there was something like the buzzing, hissing noise made by live electric transformer wires.
“It’s originating somewhere on the second floor,” a Russian scientist reported. The white-bearded man was speaking over the West German TV network ZDF.
“But this strange light we all are seeing. A fire would not be possible in this building. No, that would be impossible.”
Nevertheless, an ethereal white light was coming from the second floor. The crowd of nearly two hundred thousand spectators sent up a loud, sustained
aaahhh
. It was the remarkable collective sound of awe, wild disbelief, bone-chilling fear.
“Perhaps it
is
a fire.” The Russian scientist was beginning to blanch underneath his pancake TV makeup. “Could they have set themselves on fire?”
Less than sixty seconds later, the third floor of the building began to give off the same queer, white glow.
Grayish smoke rose from the roof like steam rising from a boiling pot of water. No flames could be seen anywhere, though.
A few young women jumped out of dormitory windows, as graceful as prima ballerinas in their falls. A mistlike silver rain began to rise from the building’s sloping gray roofs.
A famous American sports announcer was crying as he spoke. “Our Olympic women are dying. Oh my God.”
“It is 11:52
P.M
. here,” stated the announcer for the BBC. “Ladies and gentlemen, young people of England, we in this control booth cannot believe what we are witnessing here in Moscow.”
“Somewhere around our booth, we can hear Pëtr Tchaikovsky playing,” reported the announcer broadcasting back to West Germany. “This terrible scene is overwhelming me. I can no longer speak.”
Great red fire-pumpers had begun to spray streams of whipped foam high up onto the buildings. The snipers continued their rifle fire.
“It is like a sound-and-light show.” An American woman commentator was one of the first to approach some kind of primitive understanding of the event. “I never fully understood the death camps or the Nazi furnaces until today. Not really, I didn’t. My God, I wasn’t even born at the time of the first Dachau.”
No wind was blowing in Yuri Gagarin Square. A three-quarter moon sat over Olympic Village like a chipped white coin.
The huge crowd grew strangely quiet, allowing the ambulance and police sirens to come through like banshee screams in the night.
Americans who were listening to ABC News heard the most poignant, at least the most famous, single statement of all.
“My God, please have mercy on us. Somehow, they’ve set everything on fire.
My God, my God, my God, my God, my God
.”
Alix and David thought that they were going to die in the next few minutes.
David took a deep breath and dry, gasping gulp. He was imagining another confrontation with Colonel Ben Essmann.
“Those first two men were relatively easy,” he whispered, turning to Alix. “The two guards we surprised upstairs. I wasn’t thinking clearly then. Now I’m thinking. My imagination is working: Also, I’ve already had the hell kicked out of me by that Israeli bastard.”
“I really want you to try and get out of the building.” Alix began to cry. She made an effort not to, but then the tears just came. “No more arguing, David. Please go.”
Just the ironic beginnings of a smile formed on David’s lips. “I think we went through all that already. Isn’t this where I came in on this particular movie? I told you, I’m not leaving you in here.”
Giving himself no more time to think, not sure whether they had any more time to delay, David pushed open the kitchen door.
“Ben Essmann!” Alix called inside through the swinging door. “This is Alix. I have David Strauss here as a hostage. What do we do now, Colonel?”
The large kitchen lay in baffling, scary darkness.
It was full of clicking, whirring machine sounds, though. Electric clocks. Refrigerator motors. The motor of a small walk-in freezer. Ovens.
Alix flipped the light switch, but nothing much happened. The overhead lights wouldn’t yield more than a dull yellow glow.
All the dormitory lights were flickering and dimming as if they were going through a brownout. The hallways and rooms didn’t
feel
warm, but the insulated ceilings were beginning to seep thin wisps of smoke.
“Ben Essmann. It’s Alix. Where are you? Are you in here? Colonel Essmann,
can you hear me?
”
Both Alix and David took a cautious step into the eerie kitchen darkness.
The door to the hallway suddenly swung shut behind them.
“Benjamin Rabinowitz is negotiating with the Russians,” Alix cried, deciding to try another tack. “The ends cannot justify the means here, Colonel.
I know you can hear me!
”
Still no response came from the kitchen darkness.
Alix tried to catch her breath, and she couldn’t.
“Oh damn it, David. He’s in here,” she whispered. “He knows exactly what we’re trying to do.”
Enveloped in the creeping darkness, the prickly, electric nothingness of the room, David had become aware that his skin was beginning to tingle. He was starting to have flashbacks of the night in Elena’s bedroom. He recalled the shooting scene at the restaurant in Germany. Then the killing of Michael Ben-Iban.
David decided that they had to take another approach with Colonel Essmann.
He yelled out at the dancing light spots in front of his eyes.
“These are teenage girls that you’re murdering here!”
Once again, no response came from the Israeli man. There was loud noise coming from outside, though. Screams. Gunfire—like popping strings of Chinese firecrackers.
David lowered his voice to a more conversational level.
“So! How does it feel to be a murderer of young girls, Colonel? What is it like to be a Nazi, Colonel? You are a murdering Nazi bastard, you know! You’re betraying everything you claim to be fighting for.”
“David?” Alix whispered.