The Haj - Leon Uris [16]
As darkness crept up, the air on the knoll became scented with hashish smoke from the village square below, and the fighters became braver by the moment. When the daylight was gone, they slipped out four or six at a time, the epitome of stealth.
Ibrahim took his position at the head of the first wave some three or four hundred yards from the barbed wire. Dimly heard shots from the highway signaled that the roadblocks were in place. The second wave positioned itself behind boulders on high ground to give covering fire, in case the Jews shot first.
Ibrahim slipped out in a low crouch, followed by his men. Things started going wrong immediately. The scavenger group in the rear was making too much noise. The older men were relating their moments of fighting greatness; the women and children chattered loudly in anticipation of the loot. The second wave, which was supposed to cover the advance of the first wave, opened fire too soon, destroying the element of surprise. Moreover, they were firing short, right into the backs of Ibrahim and his people. Farouk, who had declared a holy war only hours earlier and who was just behind his brother, threw his rifle down and bolted, and three men followed him.
Then came an awesome and puzzling quiet.
‘Do you suppose they are all killed?’ someone whispered to Ibrahim.
‘Shut up, you son of a donkey!’ Ibrahim snapped.
‘Why don’t they shoot?’
As another of his men began to crawl backward, Ibrahim stood up and raised his rifle. ‘Allah akbar!’ he screamed over and over, ‘God is great!’
‘Allah akbar!’ resounded in the valley.
Everyone poured out behind Ibrahim, storming in confusion toward the barbed wire. They knelt, fired, and ran, knelt, fired, and ran. Their battle cry crescendoed.
Still no return fire from the Jews!
‘To the wire!’ Ibrahim screamed.
When they were within fifty feet, an awesome thing happened. The sound of deafening sirens erupted from the Jewish side, drowning out all other noise. Then the Jews filled the sky with flares, turning night into day, as the Lord had once made the sun stand still for Joshua. Caught in the sudden light and noise, the Arabs froze like deer hit by a spotlight.
Then the Jews poured out a disciplined volley and, although they fired it into the air, several of the villagers went down in fright. A second volley into the air found the second and third wave running into the first wave, which was in headlong retreat.
The battle was done.
The scavengers waiting on the fringe saw their sons, fathers, and husbands tripping, gagging, crawling, running over the highway back into Tabah.
‘What happened?’
‘They slipped in over three hundred Haganah men after dark!’
‘We were hit with machine gun fire!’
‘There were hundreds of British soldiers hiding among them!’
‘They used poison gas!’
‘We were badly outnumbered!’
Dawn found Ibrahim sitting alone on the top of the knoll, looking down on the Jewish camp. His humiliation had been absolute. At first those men who had fallen were assumed to have been wounded, but they had merely thrown their rifles away and fled. When at last he came down into the village, those who had not gone to their homes gathered at the café sheepishly. Strangely, as Ibrahim walked to his own home they broke into cheers.
‘We gave them a lesson they’ll never forget!’
‘I killed at least three of them!’
‘I cut a tongue out with this,’ another said, brandishing his dagger.
Ibrahim turned at his door. ‘You were very fierce, all of you,’ he said. ‘It was a complete victory, spoiled only by the fact that those Jewish cowards brought illegal British help ... otherwise ... well ... don’t ever forget the British did this.’ They cheered again and he went into the house and let the legend take its own course as he collapsed on a bed of weariness.
6
IBRAHIM WENT TO THE knoll atop the village day after day and brooded alone; it was a rather pleasant place to brood. Like most Arab villages, Tabah had a tomb where a saint or a prophet had allegedly preached, lived, or died. Tabah’s tomb, a tiny whitewashed, domed