Authors: Hesh Kestin
Before the second explosion all vehicles and personnel are on the move. Whether or not the drones will have destroyed all six Hezbollah positions on the rooftops of the buildings surrounding the target site, the action has commenced. There is no turning back.
In her cold room at Rosh Hanikra, Staff Sgt. Ruhama watches on live television as her drones do their work. “Smurfs one through eight on target,” she says in the affectless voice of a video gamer with nothing to prove. “Nine and ten standing by.” She zooms the images on her television screens. “Number four marginal hit. Looks like a wind gust.” In the narrow canyons created by the buildings lining the street a sudden gust can knock the tiny aircraft off target by as much as ten feet. “Taking care of that, commander.” With a flick of her joystick, she detaches drone number nine.
As the vehicles converge from both ends of the street the rescue force sprints to its objectives. They could do this blindfolded, and in fact have twice among the forty clocked drills they have carried out in a simulation of the same street, the same buildings, the same potential defenders. Each man carries a Micro Tavor rifle specially adapted for urban warfare, plus seven thirty-round magazines and four grenades, along with hollow-ground commando knives honed so sharp the blade can separate the head of a mature male from his body in one slashing arc. Nurit and Alexandra, having changed into uniform, retain their lipstick and eyeliner, so that with their short hair—their wigs ornament the floor of the limousine that blocks one end of the street—they might well be taken for androgynous marchers in Tel Aviv’s annual gay-pride parade.
The ambulance hangs back at the other end of the street until the invasion force has taken their designated places and find cover in doorways or lie like corpses facedown in the street, clinging to the asphalt with their fingertips.
The ambulance roof slides back, a .50-caliber machine gun rises from within as steel shields lower behind the vehicle’s windshield and windows. A white-uniformed machine gunner in the rear scans four starlight-scope monitors revealing every crevice of the street in ghostly shades of green. On his screens
dozens of Hezbollah fighters scramble into the street from buildings on either side.
Using electronic controls adapted from video-game technology, the gunner sweeps one side of the street and then the other: In a kind of mortal ballet, the Hezbollah fighters are blown back by the force of the .50-caliber hollow-points, which on impact flatten to the size of silver dollars. Upon entering the body these tear through muscle and bone to cause massive internal bleeding and fatal damage to vital organs. Only in exceptional cases is there an exit wound.
From a doorway of the café that only hours before was populated by tea-drinking
shesh besh
players a lone survivor of this sweeping fire kneels to fire a rocket-propelled grenade. Perfectly aimed, the RPG hits the ambulance and explodes.
It makes no impression.
He shoots again.
The result is the same.
“God help us,” the gunner says aloud in finely enunciated Arab, as though speaking in a lecture hall. “It is a tank.”
A bullet strikes the wall just above his head. Reflexively the militiaman swivels in the direction of its source and for a moment a look of deep puzzlement twists his face. The Micro Tavor that fired this bullet is equipped not only with a nightscope but also an eerily efficient integrated silencer.
Col. Gadi, leaning out of the limousine at the other end of the street, fires again. The sound at the source is like a walnut cracking open. At the end of the bullet’s trajectory there is only silence.
The street is now secure. Leaving four men to make sure it stays that way, Kobi’s group enters the target building, taking the stairs two at a time, while Gadi and his men begin searching the ground floor.
Having snaked around to the rear of the building, two naval commandos shoot a grappling hook to the roof three stories above. These are specialists, trained to board fast-moving ships from rubber boats bobbing in the waves by pulling themselves up to a deck as much as one hundred feet above their heads. To naval commandos, successfully making fast a grappling hook from solid ground is hardly a challenge. After securing the other end of the rope to a parked automobile, one begins climbing as the other stands guard. When the first reaches the roof to cover him, the second straps his rifle to his back and ascends so quickly it is as if gravity, in this spot, on this rope, has no dominion.
In the single apartment on the ground floor spaghetti is still cooking on a stove in the kitchen, music plays on a radio in a long room used as a barracks, and a cigarette still burns in an ashtray on a card table whose hands have been abandoned in midplay. The ground floor is otherwise empty.
“Commander, over here!”
It is an entrance to the basement, not very well concealed behind a kitchen cupboard that crudely slides away, no booby trap, no security, not so much as a latch. A flight of wooden stairs and there it is, just as they had studied it in the video transmissions: a television studio, oddly larger in reality than on-screen. Of course in the videos the twenty or so Hezbollah militia who stood watching with satisfaction the systematic torture of two young Israelis had not been visible. Now they are equally invisible, having fled rather than confront Jews who are not unarmed, not tied, not undergoing torture. The room is as empty as the ground floor.
A moment later, down a dark, damp corridor, Gadi’s force finds a tiny room, its steel door ajar: inside nothing but blood-soaked blankets.
From somewhere above, echoing in the walls, the sound of gunfire.
“Upstairs! On the double!”
In an apartment on the third floor, Tawfeek Nur-al-Din burns papers in a fireplace as two bodyguards open a hatch leading to the roof. A folding ladder drops down. The two scramble up. Their only possible escape is over the rooftops. But when the first bodyguard steps onto the flat roof of the building he comes face-to-face with the two naval commandos.
His inert body drops back into the room. With the rooftop blocked, the remaining bodyguard steps on the chest of his dead companion, pushes up the spring-loaded hatch, and bolts it.
“The corridor!”
Trained to respond immediately to his commander’s orders, the bodyguard flings open the corridor door and is met by heavy fire from Kobi’s unit in the hall. He flies backward, propelled into the apartment by the rifle blasts, dead before his body hits the floor. The door slams shut.
Kobi speaks into his helmet microphone, radio silence no longer necessary. “Skull to Heights, situation.” He listens to the buzz of returned communication from the rooftop, then turns to the door. “Hezbollah, this is Israel Defense Forces!” he shouts in Arabic. “Your way is blocked on all sides. You will not get out alive. Your only chance is surrender.”
From the other side of the door a voice shouts back: “Israel, this is not Hezbollah, only a poor shopkeeper and his family.
There are small children. Please God, all cursed Hezbollah cowards are gone!” Meanwhile, the speaker continues methodically to burn papers in the fireplace.
Kobi kneels to pull on his gas mask as the unit follows suit. Their eyes are fixed on the door. If they must break in, the room will be flooded instantly with tear gas.
“Whoever you are, surrender before we breach the door and come in firing.”
“There are no Hezbollah here. Only family, children. We are innocent Christians. Please leave us in peace.”
Outside in the corridor, Kobi is joined by Gadi and his unit.
“We take them out now,” Gadi says in an undertone. “No delay.”
“I need information, not corpses,” Kobi says. It is the classic battlefield confrontation: intelligence requires prisoners so they can be pumped for critical information; operations requires them dead.
“Ten seconds and we’re inside.” Somehow Gadi’s lisp adds to his authority.
Kobi is not about to dispute the order. In close combat, decisions made on the spot may be wrong, but they are not subject to debate. “This is your final warning!” he shouts. “Unlock the door or we will do it for you! You will not survive!” Into his helmet microphone, he whispers, “Skull to Heights, situation.” He presses the earpiece to his head. “There’s a chimney. He’s burning papers.”
“On three,” Gadi whispers.
“Skull to Heights, on my count of three.” A buzz. “One . . . two . . .”
From inside: “Do not shoot! I am opening the door. Do you hear me? I am opening—”
As soon as they hear the tumblers fall in the lock, Gadi kicks in the door, knocking the man inside to the floor as at the same
time the two naval commandos rappel through the room’s rear windows in a crescendo of exploding glass.
“Do not shoot! I am unarmed! Do not shoot!”
It is all over. Thirty men are now in the room, rifles pointed down at the man on the floor. With a nod toward an interior door, Gadi signals his men to secure the rest of the apartment. He turns to Kobi. “Your prisoner.”
In a quick scan of the room, Kobi has already seen the overflowing ashtray on the coffee table, next to it a pack of Liban cigarettes. This is Heavy Smoker. “What is your name, commander?” he says in Arabic with a mixture of charm and reserve. It is as if the intelligence officer and the man on the floor are meeting at a cocktail party at one of the casinos in the hills east of the city, a couple of princelings from any of a dozen Arab countries out for an evening of the kind of alcohol-fueled revelry that is forbidden at home.
The man on the floor looks up with an expression of bemused self-interest. “I trust you will understand about the papers. My superiors would not look kindly upon me if they learned I gave up secrets. I could die by knife in your prisons.”
“Name.”
“Tawfeek Nur-al-Din, lieutenant colonel, Militia of Hezbollah. Identity number 132613.”
“Where are the two Israeli soldiers, colonel? I will not ask this question again.”
“Tawfeek Nur-al-Din, lieutenant colonel, Militia of Hezbollah. Identity number 132613.” He smiles. “By the rules of the Geneva Convention, I demand to be treated properly as a prisoner of war according to my rank as a uniformed officer.”
Kobi steps back. “Your prisoner, Gadi.”
“Medic!”
“I am not injured.”
“Medic, treat this man.”
The medic looks at his commanding officer.
“If you will permit me to stand, I will demonstrate—”
His words are cut off by a muffled gunshot. In the closed room, the efficient silencer causes it to sound like thick fingers snapping. The Hezbollah commander is screaming in agony.
“You have another knee,
habibi
.”
“Tawfeek Nur-al-Din,” he says through his teeth. “Lieutenant colonel, Militia of Hezbollah. Identity number 132613. What you have done is in contravention of the Geneva Accords regarding treatment of prisoners of war! I am bleeding!”
Gadi looks at his watch. “A bit. Meanwhile, as much as it would give me pleasure to do this limb by limb, we don’t have the time.” He kneels beside the man and, with his knife, deftly slices through trousers and underwear in one motion. He holds the man’s genitals in one hand, the knife in the other. “Colonel . . .”
All color drains from the man’s face. “Please, please! Do not do this!” All his bravado is gone. “I know nothing of Israeli soldiers. I am—”
“Madam . . .” Gadi says with a smile.
“Al-Fasi Street!” the prisoner blurts. “The Barbour Quarter!”
Kobi steps forward. “What number?”
“Seventeen. Number seventeen. The first floor!”
“Ground floor or one flight up?”
“No stairs. As you enter.”
“How are they guarded?”
“Two men inside. Two outside. Please!”
Gadi rises. “You can keep your testicles, colonel.”
“Thank you, thank you so much.”
“My pleasure,” Gadi says. “Only one thing more.”
“Yes, please, anything!”
“The Geneva Convention does not apply to terrorists.”
The men holding Lt. Col. Tawfeek Nur-al-Din drop him and move to the side. Gadi does not waste any time. They are not in a position to take prisoners. At this range the 9mm shells are of sufficient velocity to exit the skull and bury themselves in the wooden floor.
As the Mercedes limousine moves through the streets followed by the ambulance, Kobi, Gadi, and three others change into the Hezbollah uniforms that had been stored in the limousine’s trunk. In the tight confines of the automobile, one of the white ritual fringes tucked under Kobi’s combat uniform manages to escape. Six inches descend from his belt at the rear like a horse’s tail. No one notices.
Number 17 Al-Fasi Street is guarded by two Hezbollah fighters
who stand smoking on either side of the double doorway.
“Greetings, my brothers,” Gadi hails them in Arabic. “Is it quiet?”
“Quiet like death. Ten minutes earlier there was much gunfire from that direction. Do we know you?”
“Replacements, courtesy of Col. Tawfeek. There was a bit of trouble with the Christians.” He draws his finger across his throat. “Now no more Christians, no more trouble.”
“We wondered.”
Gadi pulls a folded sheet from his pocket. “Col. Tawfeek sends his greetings. New orders.”
“When then are we expected to sleep?” the second Hezbollah asks. It is the infantryman’s universal complaint.
“Now,” Gadi says.
The silenced Micro Tavors of the two commandos by his side make so little sound the militiamen seem to fall of their own will.
In an instant the unit is inside the building, Gadi knocking quietly on the one door on the ground floor. The dark of the hallway is broken by a shaft of light as a peephole slides open.
“Your relief detail is here,” Gadi says into it.
“Thanks be to God.”
The door opens, revealing a kitchen with a propane cooktop, a small refrigerator trembling on rusted-out, uneven feet, a sink piled high with dishes and a counter cluttered with empty cans of Libni-Cola, and a box of 7.62x39mm ammunition, standard for the two Kalashnikov rifles leaning placidly in the far corner.