Exodus - Leon Uris [244]
“Go on, Ari ... set up you escape routes. I do this only because your name is Ben Canaan.”
D-Day minus four.
Four days separated Akiva and Little Giora from a rope. The UNSCOP flew out of Lydda to Geneva. Palestine felt the deathly tense, foreboding calm. The Arab demonstrations stopped. Maccabee raids stopped. The city was an armed camp with British plain-clothes men flooding the area.
D-Day minus three.
A last-ditch appeal from the Prime Minister of Great Britain was turned down by Akiva and Little Giora.
D-Day.
Market day in Acre. At daybreak Arab crowds converged on the city from twenty Galilee villages. The market areas were packed with donkeys and carts and produce. The roads were filled with travelers.
Oriental and African Jews, members of the Maccabees dressed as Arabs, drifted into Acre with the influx of the market-day throngs. Each man and woman carried a few sticks of dynamite, caps, wires, detonators, grenades, or small arms under their long dress. The Maccabees dispersed and mingled in the market stalls near the prison and throughout the jammed bazaar.
Eleven o’clock. H-Hour minus two.
Two hundred and fifty Maccabee men and fifty Maccabee women in Arab dress were now dispersed in Acre.
Eleven-fifteen. H-Hour minus one forty-five.
The guard changed inside the Acre jail. Four inside Maccabee collaborators stood by.
Eleven-thirty. H-Hour minus one-thirty.
Outside Acre at Napoleon’s Hill, a second unit of Maccabees assembled. Three truckloads of men dressed as British soldiers drove into Acre and parked along the sea wall near the prison. The “soldiers” quickly broke up into four-man units and walked through the streets as though on security patrol. There were so many other soldiers about that this hundred new people received no attention.
High noon. H-Hour minus one.
Ari Ben Canaan drove into Acre in a staff car dressed as a British major. His driver parked on the sea wall on the west side of the prison. Ari walked out on the big rampart at the north end of the sea wall and leaned against a rusted old Turkish cannon. He lit a cigarette and watched the waves lap against the sea wall below him. The foam swirled around the mossy green rocks worn flat by the waters.
Twelve-five. H-Hour minus fifty-five minutes.
The shops of Acre closed one by one for the two-hour midday break. The sun was getting hot and it blazed down on the Arabs in the coffeehouses, who began to doze as the mournful wails of Radio Cairo blared. The British troops were stifled and groggy in the heat.
Twelve ten. H-Hour minus fifty minutes.
A Moslem caller climbed the long spiral stairs of the minaret beside the Mosque of el Jazzar. The caller cried out in the stillness and the Mohammedans gathered in the courtyard and inside the huge white-domed house of prayer and knelt in the direction of the holy city of Mecca.
Twelve-twelve. H-Hour minus forty-eight minutes.
The Maccabees moved toward their assembly points as the heat beat both Arabs and British soldiers into lethargy.
In groups of twos and threes they moved without apparent purpose through the narrow dung-filled alleys to the assembly points.
Group one gathered at the Abu Christos—Father of Christ—Café. The café sat on the bay and the coffee drinkers watched the Arab boys dive from the rocks for a grush. They could see the entire sweep of the bay and Haifa at the far end.
A second large group came together at the mosque. They knelt at the outer fringes of the huge courtyard and joined the Arabs in prayer.
The third unit went to the Khan, a large square that had been used for more than a hundred years as a caravan resting and trading place. They mingled with the camels and the donkeys and the hundreds of market-day Arabs who lay on the ground and rested.
Group four met on the docks by the fishing fleet.
The fifth group assembled at the Land Gate on the sea wall.
At the same time the hundred Maccabees disguised as British soldiers moved for their positions. They had a greater freedom of movement; they went