Exodus - Leon Uris [292]
“Let her go,” Yarkoni ordered in a shaky voice.
Remez jerked and a strange thing happened. The Little David fired.
The handle hissed out of the tube and the bucket of dynamite arched and spun, handle over bucket, up the hill. As it hurled through the air, growing smaller and smaller, it made a hideous swishing sound. It crashed into some Arab houses near the police station.
Sutherland’s mouth hung open.
Yarkoni’s mustache went from down to up.
Remez’s eyes popped out.
The old Cabalists stopped praying long enough to look in astonishment.
The shell exploded like a thunderclap, shaking the town to its foundations. It seemed as though half the hillside must have been blown away. After moments of stunned silence there was an eruption of shouting and hugging and kissing and praying and jubilation.
“By jove ...” was all Sutherland could say. “By jove ...!”
The Palmachniks formed a hora ring and danced around the Little David.
“Come on, come on. Let’s fire another round!”
In the Arab quarters they could hear the Jews cheering, and the Arabs knew why. The very sound of the flying bomb in itself was enough to frighten one to death, to say nothing of the explosion. No one, Palestinian Arabs or irregulars, had bargained for anything like this; each time the Little David fired, a scene of havoc followed. The Arabs quaked in terror as the Jews revenged some of the hundred years of torment.
Joab Yarkoni got word to Ari that the Davidka had the Arabs in a turmoil. Ari sensed an opportunity and decided on a risky attempt to exploit it. He took a few men from each settlement and was able to scrape together two companies of Haganah. He got them into Safed at night with more ammunition for the Davidka.
Swish ... whoom!
The bucket of bolts and its hissing bomb was devastating the town. Swish ... whoom!
The third day after the Davidka had come to Safed the skies opened and it poured rain. Ari Ben Canaan then made the greatest bluff of the war that counted bluffs as part of the arsenal. He had Remez call all the Arab spies together and he gave them a briefing.
“In case you didn’t know, brothers”—Ari addressed them in Arabic—“we have a secret weapon. I am not at liberty to disclose the nature of the weapon but I might say that you all know that it always rains after a nuclear blast. Need one say more?”
Within minutes the spies spread the word that the Little David was a secret weapon. Within an hour, every Arab mouth in Safed had repeated the appalling news: the Jews have the atom bomb!
Swish ... whoom! The Little David roared and the rain turned to a deluge and the panic was on. Inside of two hours the roads out of Safed were clogged with fleeing Arabs.
Ari Ben Canaan led the Haganah on an attack with three hundred men. The attack was more spontaneous than calculated and Ari’s men were thrown off the acropolis by irregulars and a handful of angry Safed Arabs. He lost heavily, but the Safed population continued to run.
Three days later, with Safed nearly empty of Arab civilian population and with hundreds of the irregulars deserted, Ari Ben Canaan, Remez, and Joab Yarkoni led a better planned, three-pronged attack and took the acropolis.
The tables were turned. The Jews were on the high ground above the Arab police station. Now those who had for decades tormented and murdered the Cabalists in wild mobs had their chance to stand and fight, but they fled in the face of the Jewish wrath. The police station fell and Ari immediately headed outside of the town to block off the huge Taggart fort on Mount Canaan, the strongest of the Arab positions. When he arrived he was astounded to discover that the Arabs had abandoned the Taggart fort, a position it would have been impossible to take. With the fort in his hands, the conquest of Safed was complete.
The victory of Safed was staggering. The vulnerable position thought impossible to defend had not only been defended but the defenders had conquered the city—with a few hundred fighters and a weird weapon called the