Tamir followed Harel the HTA-IAO down the bunker. At the bottom, a strange and glorious underworld revealed itself before him, luminescent with a permanent florescent glow. Under the white light, a swarm of people with strange complexions buzzed around. Later, Tamir came to assume that the greenish color of their skin was the result of spending weeks on end in the bunker, from dawn to the small hours of the night. Their pigments must simply be fading away. He looked around at his surroundings. The people looked industrious and busy, their gazes focused on screens in stations scattered all around the compound, their faces clenched in concentration and exhaustion. The priests of the temple, Tamir thought to himself, keepers of the eternal fire.
Harel briefly explained the communication protocol in the bunker, and then took Tamir outside to show him the massive field of antennas sprawling down the mountain. He explained at length the different types of antennas, their models, where they are pointed, and what they receive, but Tamir’s eyes wandered off to the mountains in the distance, basking in the warmth of the low afternoon sun and caressed by feathery clouds. Suddenly, he saw a couple of old station-wagons bouncing along the rough dirt road adjacent to the base, right beneath the antenna field. He looked at Harel curiously. Harel shrugged his shoulders and said that there are a few graves of tzadikim4 scattered around the base, and that people come to venerate them. Tamir was surprised. He thought that this was a highly classified area, the kind that civilians were barred from entering. It is, Harel replied, but there’s an order to let these observant people in. No one wants to confront them. In the beginning, the army used to stop them, but then they’d sneak in through the forest and it was a real mess. Finally, they just gave up. Orders from above.
They went back down the bunker and made their way to the reception rooms. The rooms were filled with audio analysts— known as ‘producers’5— sat in neat rows, earphones to their heads, hunched over their panels and stations. Team commanders and shift managers walked around the rooms, leaning in occasionally to peek at the screens, listening in and helping decipher particularly unintelligible sound bites. The rooms bustled and buzzed, but all Tamir saw were the tired, hollow gazes in the producers’ eyes. A round, giggly producer looked over at him. Her eyes reminded Tamir of the fertile muddy earth which clogged up the Hilazon stream during winter; her lips appeared as if they were conjured up by the pen of an old scribe who used to ply his trade in Jerusalem. Ophira! the team commander scolded her, though with a certain softness, or so it seemed to Tamir. Stay focused! We’re off in fifteen minutes, let’s give it one last push… The shift manager looked over at Harel and his new intelligence analyst. His American field uniform shirt was unbuttoned, and a large golden chai pendant dangled from his neck over a white cotton t-shirt. He reprimanded Harel for distracting his producers. Alright, Zaguri, alright… Harel uttered grudgingly and snuffed his nose.
At the center of the bunker was a broad room which all of the reception rooms led to. It was empty, completely silent but for occasional whispers and the dull drone of screens. There were several stations there, with numerous computer screens alight with a toxic-green glow. A broad desk was situated in the center of the room, covered in desk trays containing neat stacks of paper. Behind the desk, an officer with the rank of captain sat leisurely on an impressive executive chair, typing something on his keyboard. Occasionally, someone would walk up and place something on his desk; every couple of minutes, one of the three phones on the desk— white, black, and red— would ring. In the adjacent room, behind a large glass divider, three people sat hunched over some documents and dictionaries. In a far corner of the same room, two seemingly older soldiers were sat, earphones on their heads, and a look of concerted effort on their faces.
This is the intelligence analysis room, Harel said, and over there is the translation room and the transcription station. Our intelligence analysis room? Tamir asked with a certain awe, and in his heart thought— the Holy of Holies. The IAO sat in the center of this micro-universe, relaxed and authoritative, overseeing everything and governing all, seeming to Tamir at that moment like some kind of legendary giant. He differed in appearance from Harel significantly: Harel was reserved, constantly snuffed his nose, slightly awkward, and covered in reddish spots, but the IAO, who sat on his throne in a pair of army-green cargo pants and a loose-fitting American field uniform shirt, exuded poise and strength of character, with a head full of light-colored hair and an air of incisiveness in his demeanor.
No, not ours, Harel said, the Syrianists’. Ours is there. He pointed towards an extension of the room which Tamir hadn’t noticed until that moment. It wasn’t much more than a small niche with a desk and two simple office chairs. There were two computer screens on the desk, one small and one large; four phones— a plain black phone; a white phone called gecko, Harel explained; a red phone called amethyst; and an SB phone used to communicate with different operational bodies. There were also two trays with stacks of small papers. Later, Tamir would learn that these papers were communications summaries provided by the reception room. The intelligence analyst— that is, him— was to go over these communications and determine which of them were routine and which were worth paying attention to. The routine communications were filed and transferred to headquarters where they were studied as part of an ongoing process of familiarization
