our starboard quarter, right on our four o'clock, heading for Nimrod. High speed.'
The General nodded, unsmiling. 'As the Iron Duke might have mentioned, this had been a damned close-run thing. Another five minutes in that jail, we would not have made it.'
As the Sikorsky Sea Stallion thundered into Syrian airspace, the Israelis were on their final approach to Nimrod. They could already see the truck blazing in the gateway and the obvious bomb damage in the courtyard. As they drew nearer, they could also see two figures apparently asleep on one of the big artillery pieces.
Soon they would discover a jail entirely devoid of inhabitants. There were no guards, no prisoners, and a total of twenty men dead. All officers of the jail. 'Mother of God,' breathed the Commanding Officer as it began to dawn on him that every single lock on each cell door had been skillfully and professionally blown out. As indeed had the impregnable reputation of Nimrod Jail itself.
Somewhere out there, beyond the rugged landscape of the Golan, there lurked the most dangerous enemies of the State of Israel; men who had proved they were prepared to die in the cause of attacking, killing, and maiming the Jewish populations of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. The young Commander, whose parents had both been killed in the momentous Israeli drive to the Golan Heights in 1973, was not looking forward to making his report.
Twenty minutes later, when he did so, on the helicopter's radio his message sent a frisson of pure anxiety around the Northern Headquarters of the Army. How could this have possibly happened? It was plainly state- sponsored, and brilliantly planned. But by whom?
The CO of the Northern Command requested the satellite be adjusted to photograph Syria's military bases, particularly the ones in which helicopters were parked. Over many days, photographic evidence came in showing lines of the choppers, all painted in grim, functional desert light brown, with insignia. No one knew that beneath two coats of this smart Syrian Army livery, two giant polar bears licked their respective cones, uncaring that they would never be seen again.
It took two days for the Israelis to admit what had happened, that they had somehow been the victims of one of the most spectacular jailbreaks in history. The incident at Nimrod had probably been the most daring raid on any jail in the world, at least since Britain's Great Train Robber, Ronnie Biggs, was 'sprung' from Wormwood Scrubs on top of a furniture van in West London back in the 1960s. But there was only one of him.
Israel had just lost every one of her forty-seven most lethal political prisoners. They were sworn enemies of the State, who had been incarcerated in a purpose-built prison designed to render escape impossible. Where were they all now? God alone knew that. They were surely no longer in Israel, and they were probably beyond the reach even of the Mossad, being sheltered in some country that was innately hostile to Israel and would offer no information or cooperation.
The Israelis were careful with their press release, desperately trying not to look incompetent or, in this case, even ridiculous. It was released quietly, from a Government Department to the Jerusalem Post on the quiet news evening of Saturday, April 30. It was faxed at around eight-thirty in the evening, complete with the name and phone number of the Press Officer, Abe Stillman, who was no more a Press Officer than Arnold Morgan. Mr. Stillman was a Senior Field Officer from the Mossad. He knew how to blockade dangerous questions, and he knew how to lie with absolute impunity.
The release read as follows:
Twenty prison officials have died in a Palestinian terrorist attack on a jail in Northern Galilee. The dead men all worked at the Nimrod High-Security Prison. They were on duty at the time, some of them working outside the walls of the jail.
The terrorists are believed to have rammed the gates open with a freight truck and then shot down the guards in a cold-blooded, cowardly massacre of civilian personnel.
It is not yet known which group was responsible, but Israeli Security Forces are assuming that either Hamas or Hezbollah carried out the raid.
It is also known that certain prisoners escaped by air, in two civilian helicopters. They are believed to have flown into Syria, but the Syrian military has denied all knowledge of the attack.
The names of the deceased will be released when the immediate families have been informed.
Throughout the release, the Israelis played down the overwhelming importance of the escaped men, spinning the story to emphasize the deaths of the guards.
It was a tactic destined to fool no one. David Heyman, the young, gifted night editor of the Post, read the fax sheet with amazement, lasered in on the fact that no one was telling anyone which of the most dangerous convicts in the country had escaped, and hit the wire to Abe 'Stonewall' Stillman.
The man from the Mossad lived up to his nickname.
I'm sorry we have no further information on that… Right now we have a team of investigators at the prison trying to ascertain the facts… It would be wrong of me to give you inaccurate information… Sheik who?… I'm sorry, I cannot comment on the status of individual prisoners… Yes, it was a military-style attack on the prison… I cannot comment on the precise nature of the killings… I understand some of our people did die of gunshot wounds… The telephones? I'm afraid the system is down… I don't know how or why… When we have further information from the government investigators we will inform you.
David Heyman sensed a gargantuan cover-up. He called the night news editor, and told him to get up to the back bench, the hub of the newspaper where the front page is prepared, designed, and edited.
The ex-Fleet Street reporter Eddie Laxton was probably the best hard newsman in the Middle East. He read the fax, listened to the night editor's description of his talk with Stillman, and immediately dispatched a team of six reporters and photographers to the Nimrod area.
He ordered a helicopter to fly them to the small commercial airport north of Galilee where two cars would be waiting for the twenty-mile drive up to Nimrod. He knew the entire area would be cordoned off and that there was little chance of being granted access. But his men were trained tough. If they had to, they'd climb the mountain to observe and photograph the state of Nimrod Jail.
Eddie Laxton was something of a crusader, and he did not think governments should be covering up lapses in security. If this story was what he thought it was, he, Eddie, was going to nail it.
Shortly after midnight, one of his boys nailed it down hard. While the photographers were skirting the roadblock in an attempt to reach the jail, lit up now by big military arc lights, the Post's junior reporter, Ben Lefrak, twenty, decided to place himself in the nearest coffee shop, one which might stay open half the night while emergency teams were toiling into the night.
And at 2:15 a.m. it happened, in the little coffee shop in the Druze village of Majdal e-Shams. Three uniformed members of the IDF, covered in dust, came in and ordered coffee and pastries. And the landlord, sporting the gigantic mustache of his Islamic sect, served them cheerfully.
The place was busy, and when Ben went to the counter to order his fourth coffee, he returned to a different seat, right next to the IDF men with whom he skillfully struck up a conversation.
'Pretty bad up there, eh?' he ventured.
'Tell me about it,' replied the young soldier. 'Boy am I tired.'
'Did they knock the place down?'
'Not really, but they blew the hell out of the guardroom and the office, and exploded a fucking great truck right in the gateway.'
Wow! Any prisoners injured? You know, trapped in their cells and hit by the blast?'
'Couldn't say really. There aren't any prisoners left in there, not so far as we could see. They all got away. The place is empty now, but there may be more bodies. That's what we're digging for.'
'Gotta be hard work, right? The place is made of granite.'
'Yeah. None of us is looking forward to going back up there. But the Prime Minister is supposed to be there sometime in the next hour.'
Twenty minutes later, when Ben Lefrak got outside and dialed the newsroom back in Jerusalem, Eddie Laxton could have kissed him.
David Heyman's front page was a masterpiece. There was a three-column picture, two inches high, of the Nimrod Jail, then three head shots of the Prison Governor, the Chief of Security, and the Military Commander. Captioned starkly, 'All Dead, Gunned Down in Raid.' Beneath was the two-deck headline: HAMAS TERRORISTS BLAST NIMROD JAIL — EVERY POLITICAL PRISONER FREED.
