soul.
Ben Arbel inferred rightly; agents of the Mossad had monitored the countdown in Riyadh and Cairo as the AIR set in motion their machinery
Without any question whatever, the combined AIR forces could inundate all Israel in a month of hand-to- hand fighting, or pulverize her in a day if nukes were employed. Once, Israel had intercepted such messages in time to act first; twice she had responded quickly enough to survive without advance warning. This time she would need, not only advance warning — and she had that much already — but a monumental series of deceptions on a scale unmatched in human history, and all with split-second timing.
The jehad, beginning with nuclear-tipped air strikes from desert bases in Iraq and Arabia just before dawn, would be followed by mop-up bombardments from missile-carrying Egyptian and Libyan frigates. Because Allah was merciful there would be no troop thrusts into Israel's debris until the radioactive wasteland had 'cooled' enough for selected motorized infantry advances. It might take a month, but the AIR could wait. They had waited and prayed for years toward this moment, a time when US/RUS and European eyes were focused on their own survival. Their prayers would be answered, imsh'Allah, on the morrow.
At nine-fifteen PM, Israel's television and radio stations broadcast a bulletin to the effect that the bones of the patriarch Joseph had been positively identified. Some stations carried the item with a tongue-in-cheek waggishness—'what, again?'—but all carried it. Because Israelis, even those with deep-cover civil defense jobs, are as fallible as anybody, stations swamped with telephone calls found it necessary to repeat that the bones were indeed those of Joseph. The ensuing uproar down the length of Israel was immediate; citizens spread the salient news from house to house. By ten PM, darkness hid the dust of the first cargo ACV to thrumm west from Hazeva, loaded to its rubbery skirts with the only cargo Israel considered indispensable.
Monitors in the Sinai and elsewhere informed AIR leaders of the activity, but nothing was done with the information. The Jews, it was felt, were only making genocide easier.
Of the one hundred thousand ACV's that massed along the Plain of Sharon between Tel Aviv and Haifa from midnight to three AM, only a few thousand had needed to traverse much more than two hundred klicks of sand. Last-minute maintenance and refueling proceeded with less than the expected attrition rate, thanks to people like Irina Konolev, her mind and fingers flying as she allocated fuel and personnel from her portable computer terminal in Netanya.
Fleetingly, Irina thought of her plain-featured, stolid boss, the family man with the big laugh who was also the colonel with the big responsibility. She hoped he would still be laughing at dawn; she would not have been surprised to learn that Colonel ben Arbel lay in a personnel pod as his vertol flashed over wavetops of the Red Sea. She might have grinned, had she known that the knot of McDonnells had passed muster at the enemy IFF query near Tiran by flawlessly surrogating an Indian Air Force response. Ben Arbel, in the second wave of vertols, arced inland south of Yanbu while the first wave was converging on another target to the south. The targets were wholly insignificant from a strict military point of view; but as political prizes they were crucial.
At three-oh-three AM, a series of temblors was recorded in the shallow Mediterranean southwest of Beirut. Lebanon and Syria braced for tidal waves that would not come, because the temblors had been initiated by sonic generators in rock far below the seabed ooze. On Cyprus, now an island province of Turkey, the wave could be seen approaching on radar. It was very high, and it stretched to the horizon. Cypriots from Limassol to Cape Greco were wakened and warned to abandon the southern coastline. Cyprus had felt tidal waves before; everyone knew that even a low wave could become huge as it mounted island shallows. Cypriot radar was watching something that wasn't there; one operational mode of Israel's most secret weapon, a microwave ghost that could make radar strain at gnats while swallowing camels.
The face of the wave approached Cyprus behind the ghost image at two hundred klicks per hour. It was composed of the fastest fifty thousand Israeli ACV's in close formation, followed at whatever speed they could muster by the remaining transports. The wave did not break against Cyprus's beaches; much of it continued inland for some distance before settling to disgorge literally millions of passengers — most of Israel's population. Israel had given technical aid to Turkey in return for a secret promise that Cyprus would accept refugees, but the Turks had been given no details on just how that exodus might occur.
The code phrase for the operation was entirely appropriate, for the Old Testament specified the precious cargo which Moses had taken when leaving Egypt. The bones of Joseph had formalized one Exodus, and now they had precipitated another.
Before the human tidal wave settled, AIR military leaders were arguing furiously with the civilian
But Islam's spiritual leaders knew the Marxist veneer over their people was barely epidermal. In their bones, devout Moslems might reject their leaders, perhaps question their own devotion, once they saw on television that Medina, Mecca, and Q'om were suffering unspeakable defilements before being turned into radioactive craters.
As one Knesset member put it: 'Given the certainty that we've taken the
The point was well-taken by top-level
Chapter Twenty-Three
Our Atlantic coast sunrise was a many-splendored thing on Monday, thanks to micron-sized hunks of Cape Cod and Bethesda and Cocoa Beach that floated in countless quadrillions toward the dawn. Not many people admired it. Most survivors were too busy retching, or wondering how to filter death-laden air once they figured out a way to pump it into their rural root cellars. Or tallying candy bars and drinkables against the headcount in a few mass transit tunnels. Or cursing our lack of Civil Defense which, like charity, begins at home. Or… but the list was worse than endless; it was pointless. Unlike Moscow and Kiev, American cities had not spent the funds to preserve flesh and blood under firestorms fifty klicks in diameter that consumed every ignitable scrap aboveground.
Raised to kindling temperature by nuclear airbursts, trees and plastic facades contributed to monstrous updrafts that sucked air from suburbs; which grew to two-hundred-klick winds roaring across urban structures at a thousand degrees Celsius, mercifully asphyxiating millions before incinerating their remains. As citizens of Tokyo and Dresden had learned by 1945, the immediate danger was firestorm.
Toward the midwest, Americans fared better. Here we were less centralized, with more rural homes dependent on their own solar power, more homeowners who knew how to cannibalize a car's electrical system and to jury-rig a bellows air-pump with cardboard and tape. Here were fewer prime targets, more well-stocked pantries.
The Pacific coast was a patchwork; rubble from San Diego to Santa Barbara, emulating the Boston-to-Norfolk devastation, and an unchanged, achingly lovely stillness from Point Arena to Arcata where Chinese fallout had not yet reached.
Least affected of the American homeland on Monday was the intermountain region from the Sierra-Cascades to the great plains. Albuquerque and the Pueblo-Denver strip were smouldering hulks, of course. The MX sites in Nevada and south of Minot had taken cannonades of nuclear thunder. But the MX called for ground-burst bombs.
