Mitla Pass - Leon Uris [137]
PART FOUR
ARISE, YE PRISONERS OF STARVATION
TEL AVIV
IDF HEADQUARTERS
October 30, 1956
NOON, D DAY PLUS ONE
DAVID BEN-GURION’S Tel Aviv office had been converted into a makeshift hospital room.
Exhaustion and tension, the black knights of battle, had taken a toll. Ben-Gurion was ravaged by inner fires. He appeared helpless, more like a needy cherub than a national leader.
The doctor took the thermometer from the Old Man’s mouth and read it with concern. “You’re still running a high fever,” he said. “We don’t want this spreading to your lungs.”
Ben-Gurion chose not to hear the doctor. “Where is Dayan?” he grunted.
“On his way over,” Natasha Soloman answered.
“What’s going on?” B.G. asked.
“It’s the American ambassador again,” Natasha said. “He demands a meeting at once and he’s getting nasty about it.”
“You have to hold him off until I speak with Dayan.”
The doctor rolled a portable stand to the bedside.
“What are you doing?” B.G. demanded.
“You’re dehydrating again. I’m giving you another intravenous.”
The Prime Minister’s wife, Paula, entered with a fresh pot of tea, wearing her patented expression of combat.
“I don’t want the needle,” B.G. protested feebly. “Take it away.”
“Do what the doctor tells you,” Paula commanded sharply.
“Who let her in here?”
“Here, drink,” she said, feeding the tea to him.
“What are you poking?” he said to the doctor.
“I’m having a bit of trouble finding a nice juicy vein ... ah, here we go. Now then, are we comfortable?”
“No, I’m not comfortable. Why don’t you go back to South Africa?”
“I might just do that if we get out of this mess alive. I’ll be grabbing forty winks in the next room.” He took Paula aside, beyond B.G.’s hearing. “Paula, he’s very sick. He should be in the hospital.”
“How can he leave?” she asked. “He’s conducting a war.”
“He’s not going to be any good to us dead.”
“Don’t worry, he’s too stubborn to die.”
The doctor looked heavenward in a gesture of futility and staggered from the room to a cot in the secretary’s office; he was asleep as his head hit the pillow.
Jackie Herzog, the Old Man’s confidant, entered. “Natasha,” he said, “a coded message is coming in from Paris. You’d better get over to Communications and translate it. It could be extremely urgent.”
Natasha nodded, then tugged at Jackie’s arm and motioned for him to come out into the corridor.
“Any word from Mitla Pass?” she asked hesitantly.
Her reddened eyes probed his. Jackie fidgeted with the kipi on the back of his head. “Apparently, some Egyptians crossed over during the night in rubber boats and are inside the Pass. We don’t know how many. The Lion’s Battalion is coming under both air and mortar attack.”
She closed her eyes a second. They stung from weariness. “What else, Jackie?”
“Gideon Zadok was injured during the jump. We don’t know how serious it is. He’s refused to evacuate. Look, Natasha, the man is a former Marine. He knows what he’s doing.”
“No, he doesn’t,” she answered in a shaky voice. “Gideon is a little boy being driven by some kind of demon.”
“He’ll get back. He’s got a book to write, remember?”
“Oh Jesus, what did we let him go out there for?”
“You’d better get over to Communications and get that message translated.”
General Dayan, the flamboyant one-eyed Chief of Staff, turned the corner and moved crisply down the corridor toward them just as the Old Man shouted, “Where is Dayan!”
Dayan stopped for an instant and he and Natasha exchanged the wizened glances of former lovers. Dayan said nothing, but his strange, Cyclops-like expression told her the story. The situation at Mitla Pass was now in doubt. She turned quickly and made haste to the Communications center.
Paula Ben-Gurion helped prop her husband up, surrounding him with pillows, as his Chief of Staff arranged some pins on a large wall map, denoting the progress of the four sectors of battle. The Sinai was a huge tract of viciously hot desert, pocked with treacherous mountain defiles and little habitation except