Exodus - Leon Uris [310]
Avidan was worried. In the early days of Haganah, it pained him every time he drew a casualty. It was like losing a son or daughter. In a small, close-knit community like the old Yishuv, each loss was a personal tragedy. Now, with the war, the Jews had casualties in the thousands and for a small country it was a devastating number. Most of them were the cream of the nation’s youth, men and women. No nation, no matter how large or small, had David Ben Amis to spare, Avidan thought. It seemed like a suicide task that David was taking upon himself. Maybe David only thought he knew of a route into Jerusalem because he wanted to believe that one existed.
“A jeep and twenty-four hours ...” David pleaded.
Avidan looked at Ben Zion. Alterman shook his head. What David wanted to do was impossible. The burden of Jerusalem weighed every heart; it was the life beat, the very breath of Judaism, yet ... Ben Zion wondered if it had not been madness to try to hold the city from the very beginning.
David’s parents had suffered enough, Avidan thought. One brother dead and another wounded and a third the leader of the Maccabees suicide squad inside the Old City walls.
David looked from one to the other frantically. “You must give me a chance!” he cried.
There was a knock on the door. Alterman took a communique and handed it to Ben Zion. The blood drained from the face of the operations chief. He handed the paper to Avidan. None of them remembered Avidan’s ever losing his composure, but now his hand trembled as he read and tears welled in his eyes.
His voice quivered. “The Old City has just surrendered.”
“No!” Alterman cried.
David sagged into a chair.
Ben Zion’s fists clenched and he gritted his teeth. “Without Jerusalem there is no Jewish nation!” he cried. He turned to David. “Go up to Jerusalem, David ... go up!”
When Moses led the tribes of Israel to the shores of the Red Sea he asked for a man with such faith in the power of God that he would be the first to jump into the sea. Nahshon was the name of the man who came forward. “Nahshon” became the code name of David Ben Ami’s venture.
At darkness David left the town of Rehovot south of Tel Aviv and drove toward Judea. At the foothills, near Latrun, David turned off the road into the wilderness, into the steep rock-filled hills and the gorges and wadis. David Ben Ami was driven by an obsession, but his passion was tempered by his appreciation of the gravity of the mission and controlled by his infinite knowledge of the land around him.
The jeep twisted and banged and rebelled against the torture which no mechanical thing was made to take. In compound low gear David drove slowly and cautiously as he came very close to Latrun. The danger of meeting a Legion patrol was great.
His eyes and instincts sharpened as he saw the fort in the distance. He inched the vehicle down a treacherous slope, in search of the Roman road buried under centuries of debris. He followed the contours of washed-down dirt and rocks, and at the junction of two wadis he stopped and dug up some rocks. Their size and texture assured him that the road was there. Once he had established the general direction of the pathway of Roman legions he was able to move along it more quickly.
David Ben Ami swept in a circle around Latrun, pushing himself and his vehicle without mercy. Many times he cut the motor and sat in frozen silence to listen for an imagined enemy sound. Many times he crawled on his belly in the darkness to feel out the route through the dry, rocky wadis. Those sixteen kilometers were the longest David had ever known. The night passed too quickly for him and with its passing the danger of an Arab patrol increased.
At dawn, Ben Zion and Avidan were drowsy from a night of waiting and filled with apprehension. They now knew the folly of David’s attempt; they felt in their hearts that they would never see him again.
The phone rang. Avidan lifted the receiver and listened.
“It is the coding room,” Avidan said. “They have just received a message from Jerusalem.