In the confined space of the bunkers the jet thunder assaulted the
eardrums, their din only made bearable by the perforated steel baffles
set into the rear of the structure.
The Brig looked across at David, his head enclosed in the garishly
painted helmet, and gave him the high sign.
David returned -it and reached up to pull the Perspex canopy closed.
Ahead of them, the steel blast doors rolled swiftly upwards, and the
ready lamps above them switched from red to green.
There was no taxiing to take-off areas; no needless ground exposure.
Wing-tip to wing-tip they came up the ramp out of the bunker into the
sunlight. Ahead of them stretched one of the long brown runways, and
David pushed open his throttle to the gate, and then ignited his
afterburners, feeling the thrust of the mighty jet through the
cushioning of his seat. Down between the fields of green corn they
tore, and then up, with the swooping sensation in the guts and the
rapier nose of the Mirage pointed at the sapphire of the sky that arched
unbroken and unsullied above them, and once again David experienced the
euphoria of jet-powered flight.
They levelled out at a little under forty thousand feet avoiding even
altitudes or orderly flight patterns, and David placed his machine under
the Brig's tail and eased back on the throttles to cruising power, his
hands delighting in the familiar rituals of flight while his helmeted
head revolved restlessly in the search routine, sweeping every quarter
of the sky about him, weaving the Mirage to clear the blind spot behind
his own tail.
The air had an unreal quality of purity, a crystalline clarity that made
even the most distant mountain ranges stand out in crisp silhouette,
hardly shaded with the blue of distance. In the north the Mediterranean
blazed like a pool of molten silver in the sunlight, while the sea of
Galilee was soft cool green, and farther south the Dead Sea was darker,
forbidding in its sunken bed of tortured desert.
They flew north over the ridge of Carmel and the flecked white buildings
of Haifa with its orange gold beaches on which the sea broke in soft
ripples of creamy lacework. Then they turned together easing back on
the power and sinking slowly to patrol altitude at twenty thousand feet
as they passed the peak of Mount Herman where the last snows still
lingered in the gullies and upon the high places, streaking the great
rounded mountain like an old man's pate.
The softly dreaming greens and pastels delighted David who was
accustomed to the sepia monochromes of Africa. The villages clung to
the hill-tops, their white walls shining like diadems above the terraced
slopes and the darker areas of cultivated land.
They turned south again, booming down the valley of the Jordan, over the
Sea of Galilee with its tranquil green waters enclosed by the thickets
of date palm and the neatly tended fields of the Kibbutzim, losing
altitude as the land forsook its gentle aspect and the hills were riven
and tortured, rent by the wadis as though by the claws of a dreadful
predator.
On the left hand rose the mountains of Edam, hostile and implacable, and
