“It’s nothing,” another voice answered in heavily accented English. “Some Jews playing around.”
Breathing in relief, he resumed his descent.
At the bottom, he used a door on the east side of the building, out of view for anyone in the courtyard. He peeked around the corner of the building. Across the courtyard, two gate sentries sat on white plastic chairs and smoked. He adjusted his blue cap, shouldered the duffel bag, and started across the open area.
A moderate incline toward Antenna Hill formed the east grounds of the UN compound. He looked up and saw the enormous radar reflector rotate atop the concrete station like a giant sail, curved in with a good wind. He kept a calm pace, resisting the urge to run. Anyone walking in the courtyard, sitting at an office window, or guarding the gate, could see him carry the duffel bag toward the radar station. He imagined eyes following him, and his back felt as if ants were crawling all over it.
Across the open area, he approached Antenna Hill without anyone disturbing the sounds of normal activity at the UN headquarters, with which he had grown familiar.
The radar station was half-sunken in the ground. A tall wall of sandbags surrounded it, and the entrance formed a narrow zigzag, barely wide enough for one person. As Lemmy reached it, already panting from the hike, a gray-haired man in UN uniform appeared in the passage. “Good morning,” he said, his g and r throaty.
Lemmy swallowed hard and saluted. “Good morning,” he said, struggling to say it with the same accent. But he had not spoken to anyone in two days, and his words came out hoarsely. He forced himself to smile and repeated, “A very good morning, sir!”
The UN officer paused, blocking the narrow entrance, and measured Lemmy up and down.
Still smiling, Lemmy prepared to drop the duffel bag and reach behind his back to draw the Mauser.
The officer said, “X. Y. Z.”
Lemmy hesitated. What did it mean? He began to lower the duffel bag. There was no time-the whole IDF air force depended on him!
“X. Y. Z,” the officer repeated.
“W eiss!” Tappuzi called from across the parking lot. He stood at the entrance to the IDF command center, tapping on his wristwatch. “Noo?”
Elie shrugged. It was 7:13 a.m. More than two hundred heavily armed fighter jets waited in multiple airstrips across Israel. Any delay meant missing the window of time when all the Egyptian pilots were eating breakfast while ground crews fueled their planes after the early morning sorties. He had seen Abraham’s son emerge from the rooftop shed on Government House two minutes behind schedule and disappear in the south stairwell. The rest of his route to Antenna Hill was not visible from where Elie stood, more than three miles away, but the partial view of the courtyard showed no unusual activity, the UN observers going about their business in customary leisure. Had he been stopped inside the building? Had he been exposed?
General Rabin had said he would go forward with the strike even if Elie’s operation failed to disable the UN radar. But that meant a UN alarm, communicated to the Egyptians, who would have enough time to scramble their planes into the air and hone their anti-aircraft batteries. In other words, it meant the lives of countless Israeli pilots, the failure of Mokked, and possibly the loss of the war before it had even started.
“Weiss! Talk to me!” Tappuzi sounded desperate. The UN radar, once connected to the Jordanian anti- aircraft guns, meant a free range for their cannons and tanks. Such an artillery barrage would result in wholesale slaughter in West Jerusalem, whose defense was Tappuzi’s responsibility.
Elie kept his eyes glued to the binoculars. He could see the radar reflector rotate in defiant laziness. He spat the cigarette and said out loud, “Come on, Jerusalem Gerster! Blow it! ”
T he UN officer repeated: “X. Y. Z.” He was wearing an array of brass symbols on his shoulders and an assortment of war decorations on his chest. A chrome nametag said: O. Bull
Lemmy was desperate. Were the letters some kind of a UN code? What was the appropriate response? He reached behind his back, digging under the khaki shirt for the Mauser. To stall for a few more seconds, he said, “A. B. C.”
“ Ya! Ya!” The officer laughed, pointing at Lemmy’s crotch. “X. Y. Z. Examine. Your. Zipper.”
“Oh!” His face burning, Lemmy zipped his fly, saluted, and grabbed the duffel bag. He entered the narrow passage through the wall of sandbags and heard the officer chuckle while walking away.
A path took Lemmy around the radar station to the rear. Five gasoline tanks were lined up next to a silent generator. In the rear wall of the station, large wooden doors allowed delivery and removal of heavy equipment. The doors were locked, and he was out of sight between the station and the perimeter fence. Above his head, a buzzing sound came from the electric motor that kept the radar reflector turning.
He found the drainage faucet at the bottom of the first gasoline tank and opened it. Fuel began to pour out, flowing toward a depression in the asphalt, where it formed a puddle. From the duffel bag he removed a small device, about the size of a book, and placed it near the growing puddle. The ensuing conflagration was supposed to create the false impression that the destruction of the radar was caused by an accidental ignition of the fuel. It would take time to find traces of explosives, and by then operation Mokked would be over, and the UN observers would be too busy monitoring a raging war to investigate the explosion.
He placed a much larger pack of explosives by the electric board next to the loading doors and pulled the fuse on each of the devices.
One minute.
Running around the corner to the front, Lemmy was about to exit the zigzag passage through the sandbag wall when he heard voices through the open door of the radar station. Someone was talking while a second voice hooted.
In a flash, Lemmy realized the UN observers inside were young soldiers not much different than him, having fun just like he, Sanani, and the other guys back in boot camp.
He turned and ran inside.
The large control room was well lit. Bulky sets of electronic equipment occupied most of the walls. Two UN soldiers sat at the tracking monitors. Three others were busy throwing darts at a full-body poster of a naked Marilyn Monroe, fixed to the loading doors behind which the explosives were about to detonate. Several darts were already stuck in Monroe, primarily around her chest.
One of them turned to Lemmy. “ Ya? ”
“Get out,” Lemmy yelled. “Fire!”
The soldiers laughed. One of them, who seemed Indian, plucked a dart from Monroe’s chest and offered it to Lemmy. “Fire! She’s very hot!”
“Get out!” Lemmy tore the headphones off the two soldiers at the monitors. “Now!” But their expressions told him that they still thought it was some kind of a joke. He wasn’t getting through to these men, who were about to be incinerated by his bombs. He grabbed one by the shirt and shoved him toward the door. “ Out! ”
Finally grasping the urgency, the UN soldier sprinted out. The others bolted as well. Lemmy chased them out through the sandbag passage, just as an explosion pounded him square in the back. It threw him face-down to the ground, and a wave of heat washed over him.
E lie’s hands jerked up instinctively as the fireball leaped into the sky, followed a second later by the sound of the explosion. He stumbled backward, shocked by the size of the eruption. As the initial cloud of smoke and debris began to settle, he looked through his binoculars.
The radar reflector was gone from the skyline. He aimed the binoculars lower and saw the giant steel-mesh reflector in the courtyard of Government House. By now Lemmy must have melted into the hundreds of UN soldiers running around in confusion while flames engulfed the radar station. Lemmy had been instructed to watch for Bull’s Jeep leaving the compound, which would be his signal to wait near the gate for Sanani to pick him up twenty-four minutes later in the fake jeep.
Back at the command center’s front steps, Brigadier General Tappuzi held an upturned thumb.
A group of reservists and staff hurried outside at the sound of the distant explosion and watched the flames across the valley. Someone speculated about a Jordanian attack on the UN compound. Another mentioned old landmines left from the British rule two decades earlier.
At the communications center, Elie phoned Rabin at the Pit. “The sky has just cleared up in Jerusalem,” he said.
“About time.” Rabin hung up.
Replacing the receiver, Elie said, “You’re welcome.”
