they wanted you as part of the team, want you to help screw these three, help con them – help kill them. Stupid little bastards.
Too slow! Too slow! What do you think they'll be doing, sitting around chewing beetle? They'll be ready for you. They know what time we come, can set their watches by it. Always we come at dawn. They know and they are ready for you, and you've got to be quicker than them. If not then it is you that are dead, not them.'
He stood watching the soldiers as they trooped sheepishly back to their starting line, the top of the cement staircase. Eight soldiers, all of them deflated by his criticisms, and the air was heavy with the reek of fumes from the flash grenades they had thrown and the blank cartridges they had fired.
'You must remember this for us is a rehearsed drill, simple and straightforward. You will have experienced it many times so that it has no strangeness to you. But for them it will be the first time. However much they are ready if you are fast enough you will have the time. When you hear the machine- gun fire outside then you must explode. You have to be faster, or you are worm-food. We shall now do it again.'
Thirty-one years old, Arie Benitz, and wearing on his denimed shoulder, black against the olive green, the insignia of lieutenant-colonel. He commanded the most specialized force in the Israeli armed services, the anti- terrorist storm squad. Akin with both his predecessors, who had died leading their men on operations, he was a draftee from the Parachute Brigade. One who had held the rank had died in the assault on the beach-front Savoy Hotel in Tel Aviv after Palestinians had sprinted with their hostages to the top-floor rooms, the other from a random sniper during the mopping up stages of the Entebbe rescue mission. Any new commander will insist that the training of his men bears his own hallmark, his own stamp, especially when the expertise called for is the ability to prise out dedicated and determined fighters from the cramped rooms where they had chosen to die, and die if possible in the company of their hostages.
The building that Benitz and his front-line section used for training was a three-floor block of disused sleeping quarters in the big army barracks on the Beersheba road out of Ashdod. They were working on the top floor, because that was where the enemy usually sheltered with their prey of terrified and hushed civilians, where the space for movement of the attack force was limited, the opportunity for varying the direction of assault minimal.
Hand on his stop watch, he gave a blast on the whistle cramped between his teeth. The long hammering chant of the outside machine-guns that would be aimed for the windows of the last bunker the Palestinians would creep to. High fire aimed to pass into the rooms and then impact against the ceilings, fire to make a man hesitate in his desire to win courage, to force him to the floor where he would cringe, to gain the precious seconds that the attackers must Save.
At the first echo of the firing he screamed at the pitch of Ms voice. 'Go, you bastards, go!' First man raking the door, flattening himself against the wall adjacent to its hinges. Number Two crashing into it with his weight, a second's fraction after the firing stopped, Number Three with the grenade pins already pulled and hurling them into the opened space. Fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh and eighth, bullocking through the smoke in the moments after the explosions and firing for the corners as they entered each room, where the man who already knows that he is doomed will hide for an illusion of protection. When the next group came from Fatahland Arie Benitz would be fourth in line, fourth man, but the first through the door. It was traditional that the commander led from the front, not in practice when the men worked on the drills, but when it was for real.
'Better,' he said, as they emerged. Smiles now from proud men who valued his accolade.
'Better. Three and a half seconds from the machine-gun fire to the grenade explosions. Seven seconds till the last of you was inside. At that speed you have a chance, perhaps only two hairy arses shot off.' Low murmur of laughter from the squad. Hard, battle-tested young men all of them, born and raised inside the State of Israel. Helmets covered in camouflage cloth and netting, denims that were not encumbered with any webbing that might encumber the rash forward, and on their backs a weird and incomprehensible series of fluorescent strips, all in varying patterns, the one different to the other, but which told the trained soldier which man was in front of him, what was his job, essential in the demi-light in which they would fight
'We do it once more.'
He went inside the rooms beyond the flapping and damaged door, rearranged the target dummies of beaten straw wound about with sacking and adorned with the grotesque masks that his men had fashioned, moved them from where they had been the last time – placed them under beds, behind chairs, deep in shadow – and lit a candle in the inner hallway that would serve as the only illumination for the soldiers. This was the way it was learned, the killing game. None of the long-range marksmen crap that the Germans had tried at Munich; but close-quarters work, body to body, point- blank range, near enough for the nose to find them, the eyes to see them, the ears to catch the sob for mercy as you fired.
When he came back out of the flat and slammed the door shut behind him he saw the stranger among the troops. Not one of the unshaven, dirt-smeared soldiers gangling and lolling in apparent semi-sleep but a ranking officer in office uniform. Could have cursed the men, not one of them stiffened, not one of them erect, not a salute among them. No recognition of the deputy-commander of the barracks. Because they were paratroopers and had now been elevated to anti-terrorist standby, and the outsider was just an admin man.
'Colonel, my apologies for the interruption. There are men from the Ministry of Defence, from Tel Aviv. They are in my office to see you.'
'We have one more run, then we are completed. My respects and I will be with them in ten minutes.'
' I do not think, Colonel, they would appreciate such a delay.'
Pleasure on his men's faces. Knowledge that the shouting and hectoring was over for another day. Time for a shower and something to eat, time to get out of the sweat-sodden fatigues they had worn through the day and half the night.
'Don't look so bloody lively,' the Colonel snapped at them as he followed his escort to the stairs. 'Tomorrow we're back here, and all day, till we lose at least a second off the entry time.'
But for the men of the storm squad stationed in the Central Military Zone of Israel there was waiting a long sleep, no early call in the morning, no immediate repetition of the assault techniques. From a briefing by two military intelligence officers and a senior official of the Foreign Ministry Colonel Arie Benitz was driven to an Israeli Air Force base. Under the mantle of darkness he was strapped into the navigator's seat of a Phantom fighter bomber and flown at many hundreds of miles an hour to the Royal Air Force base at Akrotiri, Cyprus. At the airfield, denuded of activity by successive Defence White Papers, he was transferred without formality to a VC10 of Support Command. He was sat far to the rear of the aircraft and separated himself from the small groups of service personnel and their families. During the five and a half hour flight to Brize Norton, the transport base in Wiltshire, he would have a chance to mull over, to evaluate, the direction that had been given him, to concern himself with the role that the Prime Minister of his country had asked him to play. No passport, only his IDF identity card, and the uniform still splendid with the twin flashes of fluorescent fight on the back. At Akrotiri they'd assured him that he'd have five minutes in the wash-house at Brize Norton before the helicopter flight to Stansted, enough to change into borrowed and less conspicuous clothes.
At the time that the Colonel was flying out of Israel Aeroflot flight 927 scheduled for Tashkent was beginning its final approach to the Essex airfield of Stansted.
The original course plotted by her navigator had taken Pilot Officer Tashova towards Heathrow, London's principal airport and one of the busiest in the world. Paris, thankful that the ultimate responsibility was not hers, had guided the plane in accented English along Green One, leading her to the fan markers, the radio beacons that drove a high, shrill whistle into her earphones and flashed sharp lights at her control panel. Paris signed off, with gratitude, offering as final consolation the London airways frequency of 128.45. The Ilyushin should begin to call for further instructions. That the navigator had brought the plane south before beginning the short drop across the English Channel was not out of error but deliberate. There was a determination that whatever authorities now had jurisdiction over the plane should have no doubts from their calculations that the fuel tanks were drying out and parched, that the flight time was exhausted.
From the cockpit on the eastern approach to London they saw the distant hazed lights of the lit-up city that merged into the ink-dark horizon, and then the instruction had come for the diversion to Stansted, an airfield that neither Tashova nor her navigator had heard of. There was no reason why they should – it was not an international strip, but dealt with the trade of holiday charters and offered facilities to virgin British Airways pilots and crew on their take-offs and bumps.
The instructions on flight level, squawk ident, course degree numerals, VOR locations were incomprehensible
