SuezWar2

XA0: Judith Gervasi served in  all of the Arab-Israeli Wars until che fell victim to ultra-orthodox Jews playing politics and was sent home in the second half of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, a move that  even  she had to  admit probably  saved  her life. More than probably.

XA1: Resetting the clock to  1972, Judith provided her government with a great deal of intelligence on the Egyptian moves fully a year in ad- vance, information that turned out to be uncannily accurate. Acting on these tips, the  country  mobi- lized to nip Egypt in the bud.

XA2: So there was no Yom Kippur War on that stream and  Judith  became legendary. The Labor Party kicked around the idea of making her Prime Minister. But she was content to be a reservist  in that  force  which when rendered in Hebrew and short- ened to an acronym was ZAHAL.

XA3: After  the near-miss  of  the 1973 crisis the active  forces  of Israel were reorganized into  twen- ty-two battalions designated by the letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Rav Seren (Major) Judith Gervasi  com- manded over two thousand  men  and women in Alef Battalion.

XA4: In times of serious  conflict in Israel hundreds of thousands of reserves  were  called up  and  as- signed to  one of the  twenty  one other battalions,  which   rapidly became full  divisions,  but  Alef Battalion, the elite, was composed of hand-picked army regulars.

XA5: With her head sticking outside of the hatch on the top of one  of twenty  segments of a towed  barge, Judith let the eternal winds of the Gulf of Suez and the moderate roll- ing of  the barge  kick  saltwater spray over her. Judith's tan, mot- tled uniform was impeccable.

XA6: She was invincible in war, but Keter knew she couldn't be in  two places at  once, and if  both  the Moon and Israel were attacked  si- multaneously, he knew Judith would leave the Moon's defense to  Hunky and automatically default  to  de- fending her adopted homeland.

XA7: So when Keter moved to assail Taurus City,  he  ordered  up  yet another Arab-Israeli War, as though it were  room service,  simply  to keep  Judith  and  perhaps  several other important B'nei Elohim  tied up Earthside. The insurrection in America was another distraction.

XA8: Africa was almost  completely surrounded by  water. The  place where it  was joined to  Asia  had been crossed by a  man-made  ditch 200 km long for 200 years, permit- ting ships to travel between Europe and the Far East without detouring all the way around Africa.

XA9: It was not even a particularly elaborate engineering  feat. The land was so flush with  sea  level that the  canal  did  not  require locks. By 1985 fully 23%  of  all world trade was using the Suez Ca- nal, but it was only wide enough to permit one lane of travel.

alleviated with turnout lanes here and there, thus requiring quite an elaborate  traffic  control  setup. For a long time there had been talk of widening the canal, but the pro- posals for dredging it wider always entailed shutting down traffic for up to four years and the predicted increase in traffic was not thought to be enough to justify the loss of government revenues  from  transit taxes,  an  enormously   important source of income for Egypt as  the country approached becoming a  net importer of petroleum and Islamist terrorism strangled  Egypt's  once lucrative tourist trade spigot.

For twelve years Israel had relied on  Judith's   reports,   obtained through Robyn's borrowed power  of precognition,    to     concentrate against any attack well before  it happened. But this new attack was on the initiative of  Belial  hym- self, completely outside the scope of Robyn's foresight, so the coun- try was  caught  completely   off- guard. Egypt punched a hole at one point in the much-vaunted "Ben-Ju- dah  Line" of  fortifications  with artillery. The commander of  the Egyptian 1st  Army knew  that  the Sinai was like a bread with a hard crust that was soft in the interi- or. After breaching the crust  in the  short channel between  marshy, salty Lake  Timsah and  the  Great Bitter Lake, the Egyptians started ferrying over tanks, troops, ammu- nition, and other war materiel  on rafts as fast as they could, build- ing up quite a bridgehead  on  the other side, like an  infection  of bacteria  lodged in a wound. They had a  good three day  head  start before Judith could travel down  from Selene and report for duty, togeth- er with  her  parents  Brand   and Shyla, her  aunt  Ariel,  and  her cousin Victoria. Mike went to Je- rusalem to be a point  of  contact between the  bene elohim  and  the Israeli government.

N8 - THE BEACH

Judith's amphibious  assault  arrived under the guise of  twenty  decep- tively painted,  weathered-looking old barges slowly towed  behind  a jumbo  tugboat toward the  southern entrance of the canal. They were in two parallel trains of ten contain- ers all linked together by flexible couplings. At Judith's command they all simultaneously broke free from each other and began moving  under their own power toward the assigned beach. All twenty of the  special landing craft began to take sporad- ic 40mm mortar fire from somewhere in the  city but this  was  mainly just an  annoyance. Each landing craft was coated with tank  armor, constructed in the best shape  for defense, a shape  evolved  through more than  a century  of  constant warfare with the Arabs.

Judith made hez way to the  front  of the barge, pushing through the  men and women hanging on to straps from the ceiling of the  barge. Israel was unique among nations. Ever con- fronted with a chronic shortage of personnel,   men  and  women   were drafted equally, trained together, and sent into battle together,  at least when the ultra-orthodox  fac- tions were out of power.

Then Judith raised hez voice  to  ad- dress hez people, saying, ''I have never lied or concealed the  truth from you. They gave us the  most dangerous beach possible. We'll be practically  single file. When you disembark immediately turn to  the right and get off the sand spit as soon as possible. We're the first. Our mission is to seize the  canal operations center and to secure  a beachhead for the forces that  will come a little later. God be  with us.''

The boat officer beached Judith's as- sault craft right up onto the sand close to  the  structures  of  the locks and the buildings that  sup- ported them. The wall behind  Judith dropped down to become a ramp, re- vealing a beach being torn  up  by mortar  fire. Che knew the  heavy shelling was  soon  to  come. She yelled her  grandparent's   motto, "Follow Me!" and led her people out onto the sand, the 1st Platoon  of Gold Company.

Further down  the spit  were  Blue Company, Orange, and  White,  each with five  platoons, all  of  them storming the sand spit  simultane- ously.

The astonishing sight of  a  rusty barge breaking up into twenty  mo- torized landing boats, turning with perfect coordination like a  drill team on  parade, beaching  on  the spit, and disgorging a thousand IDF troops onto Egyptian soil was spot- ted by the alarmed men in the canal control tower, and they called  it in  to a gun battery  somewhere  in Suez City.

Splashes began to fly up in the sea around them  as  the  gunners  got their range. The splashes got clos- er to the beach, and some of  them struck the now  abandoned  landing craft.

Gold Company 2nd Platoon, the peo- ple from the boat immediately next to Judith's, was the first hit with an incoming 155mm shell. Artillery is the  troop killer. Sixteen people lay dead, another twenty lay wound- ed or were knocked off their feet. Of the wounded, eight would  later die. Only twelve people  in  that platoon were unharmed, but some of these  would be picked off in  ones and twos  by  the  random   mortar rounds coming in.

A pair of soldiers in  Judith's  Pla- toon, a male and female, set up on the sand a compact air search radar and tried  to pinpoint  where  the rounds were coming from by tracing their flight-paths back. Blue 5th Plt. took 5 dead and  12  injured before he  got a fix. The female called out the  resulting  coordi- nates over  a portable  phone  and requested an airstrike.

At first Judith wasn't sure what hap- pened next. She found herself wak- ing up with her legs soaked by sea- water. It slowly dawned on her that she was close to an incoming round and had been knocked by the concus- sion a little ways into the water. Judith had no recollection of the last few seconds, minutes? She didn't know. Her only  thought  at  that point was dying was so  easy. Judith had never been obsessed  with  the issue because  she had  lived  for years in the place where dead peo- ple go anyway.

O3 - SUEZ CITY

Judith was  not to die on  that  day. Using his  talent, Brand  had  de- flected the  incoming  shell  from striking directly on her  platoon. Judith's body armor  had  intercepted most of the blast shrapnel, and the overpressure had been enough to put her in a mild state of shock but it was not life-threatening. She was capable of healing herself with her own Talent. Still, Judith was a little dazed, and she no longer  led  the assault, to be sure.

Brand, with the rank  of  Captain, had taken  charge of  the  assault when he saw his child go down. It was all handled seamlessly. Judith no longer  had a coherent  platoon  to lead. Seven were immediately dead, twelve were wounded, and  four  of those  would  soon die  from  blood loss, missing limbs, or other seri- ous injuries. The rest merged with the other platoons running north. The Orange 3rd Platoon was the last to be hit, six dead and ten wound- ed, three mortally. A single Arch- angel flew to the location  called in from the ground and let loose a cluster  bomb, which broke up  into many bomblets  and  saturated  the area of the offending gun  battery with many small explosions,  disa- bling the guns and killing all the personnel manning the weapon.

Now Judith's people were free to hurry off their vulnerable  position  on the  beach, plagued only by  mortar fire,  which  claimed   thirty-one lives. Total killed in the landing phase was just eight percent of her force, and  another  12%  injured. This was very bad, but not  nearly as bad as the forty percent casual- ties Judith had anticipated after she understood her orders.

Judith rammed home a lightweight clip of laser ammo. The cartridges were clear Lucite vials. When the trig- ger was  pulled,  the  firing  pin broke a seal in the cartridge, mix- ing nitrous oxide and carbon monox- ide which gave a brilliant flash of light. This light pumped  the ruby rod and laser  light  flashed out from the  half-mirrored  front end. Fully 40% of the chemical en- ergy in the cartridge was  put  on the  target  as  a  burst  of  pure light.

In city the defenders were well dug in. Lasers flicked all along  the front hoping to catch  an  unlucky head. But Judith could see the Egyp- tians were  not  fighting  up   to snuff. She could sense the feeling of little boy lost among them. Return fire was mostly ineffective but a  few  enemy  soldiers  stood their ground, aimed carefully  and took out a few of Judith's people. Ex- pendable nitrous/carbon   monoxide shell casings popped away  as  Judith called on the best within  her  to put thumping 50 millisecond  bursts of light on target. This was  the turn of the tide. It was palpable. It fell over the Egyptians like  a shadow, like the blackness of  mass hatred overtaking a mob. They were already in retreat, moving north on the road  home to Cairo,  and  the Israeli Army was sweeping over the city in a general rout.

By the time she caught up to Brand in the canal ops center the build- ing was largely secure. Judith's imme- diate objective had been achieved, and she ordered her people to  fan out into Suez City to  prepare  to greet  the rest of the Israeli  De- fense Force  soon  arriving,  less clandestinely, in waves of lightly armored  hovercraft. There  were fights for the railroad station and the Al-Gaysh Causeway to Port Tew- fiq, and a very hot  struggle  for the Governorate  building  on  the waterfront that was quickly wrapped up.

With hez successes of the  opening hours, with  Judith's  empty   barges abandoned on the sand bar  swaying with the tide and not likely to be needed  ever again,  Colonel  Motti Adan parked his ass safely in that Governorate building. Eager to gain the credit  for  the  victory,  he separated Judith's troops from her and reassigned them to the main thrust on the road north to Ismailia. As for Judith herself, he called her out on the  carpet. Judith's  assigned beach had been a dead-end sand spit with only one way off yet  somehow she refused to fail and he  wanted to know why. Adan had an affinity for  tidiness  which  Judith   didn't share. The Colonel was less inter- ested in  killing  the  enemy  and seizing land than he was in making the change of watch into a regular and orderly process complete  with pass-down logs. He put a lot  of time crafting the Scimitar plan and Judith went off script.

O6 - BUTTREAM

Judith caught up to Brand in the canal ops center when the  building  was largely secure. Judith's  immediate objective had been  achieved,  and che ordered hez people to fan  out into Suez City to prepare to greet the rest of their people soon  ar- riving, far less clandestinely, in waves  of  lightly  armored  hover- craft. There were fights for  the railroad station and the  Al-Gaysh Causeway to Port Tewfiq, and a very hot struggle for  the  Governorate building on  the  waterfront   was wrapped up with a sharp cost in IDF casualties.

With Judith successes of the  opening hours, with hez empty husks of the landing force abandoned on the bar swaying with the tide and not like- ly to be needed ever again, Colonel Motti Adan parked his ass safely in that Governorate building as  soon as it was secured. Eager to  gain the credit for a regional victory, he  immediately  separated   Judith's troops from her and reassigned them to the  main thrust  on  the  road north to Ismailia. So temporarily there was the incredible situation of Israel's best battalion command- er twiddling hez thumbs with noth- ing to do.

When Colonel  Motti  Adan  learned that Judith had deviated from the plan and attacked  with only  half  her force he was absolutely furious. On the top floor of the occupied Gov- ernorate, which had contained  the city's police station, che and hez father stood before him at  atten- tion as he vented the worst of his wrath, which eventually got around to the question that was  foremost in his mind: ''Where are your peo- ple now?''

Judith decided on telling  a  partial truth. ''I loaded the landing craft forty-six percent full, sir. I left the balance of my battalion in the barracks at Eilat.''

''Your battalion? Major, I can as- sure you that it is no longer, and never shall be again, your battal- ion.''

Brand asked the Colonel pardon and explained that the beach would have been too crowded with 2190 troops, and the resulting confusion  would have led to much higher casualties, perhaps even a total rout. He was awarded another stream of  shouted insults, focused  more   intensely directly upon him.

''My father is also my chief staff officer, sir,'' Judith said when there was a pause for breath in the colo- nel's stream of invective. ''He was following my orders. Therefore I will accept the heat, sir. If there is to be any punishment I take  it upon myself.''

''I should throw you  both  behind bars, Adan said, but I think it is far better that you should both sit out the rest of this war. Major Gervasi, you and your father  will do nothing. That is mandatory. I repeat: nothing! Do you understand me?''

Yes sir! they both blurted  in reply.

Now get out of my sight!

There was a very large  black  car parked right in front of the build- ing. Judith cast covetous eyes on it. Brand  saw  the  Colonel's   eagle sticker on the window and shook his head. "No, no, Judith, that is Adan's limousine,  you can't  be  thinking what I think you're thinking."

Judith simply got in on the passenger side of the limo and expected Brand to get in and drive. Che had  al- ready found the keys in the  front ashtray when he  reluctantly  took his place behind the wheel. ''Ever- yone is sitting around,'' che said, disgusted, as they went out of the building onto the streets of  Suez City. ''Everyone is more afraid of the  finger-pointing  that  follows action than in actually being  hit with a round! It is time to get out here, father. To the front.''

That won't be easy.

P5 - TO THE FRONT

The going was slow as Judith and Brand made their  way out of  town. The road paralleled the canal due north through al-Kubri, which was seized on the first night, as well as the town of al-Shallufa, which fell on the second day along with the Ahmed Hamdi Tunnel under the canal, which was a major IDF standing objective in the event of an invasion. With the tunnel  in hand  Israel  could pour troops, tanks,  and  materiel across in a kind of counterpunch to the Egyptian main intrusion to the north. But the highway and railroad to Cairo was still strongly held by the Egyptian Second Army, and  the town of Gineifa was being contested as the key to the whole area.

The forces of Israel were still  a long  way from being able to  seri- ously threaten the main  incursion at Ismailia, at the halfway  point on the canal. Soon it wouldn't mat- ter, according to a  message  from Mike who was the liaison with  the Israeli government. He said Egypt was nearly finished fully supplying their bridgehead in the Sinai east of the Canal.

At the crossing of the Gineifa-Qa- brit road Judith and Brand could go no further. They were flagged down at a checkpoint and forced to give  up their  vehicle on the standing  or- ders of Lt. Colonel David Shazar on the Gineifa front. They could not continue on without a set of papers which they  did not have  so  they soon found themselves on foot with Adan's car confiscated.

Some of the walking  wounded,  the simple first-aid cases, were being detoured onto  the road  that  ran northeast of  the  checkpoint  and across the salt marshes and  flats to Qabrit, at the place where land pinched between the Large and Small Bitter Lakes. Judith decided to follow them. If there was a way around the checkpoint this was as good as any.

They were on foot for an hour. Soon they arrived at a  makeshift  camp sprawling among Egyptian homes,  a little  compound snug back off  the road. At least a hundred cots were set up, most exposed to the  winds and dust  with nothing  more  than prayers to Allah for good weather. Judith could see the houses were over- flowing. The three local  couples were working  themselves  half  to death  trying to bandage  up  their guests, scrounge up blankets,  and pass out the white box lunches that had been hastily dumped in a  pile by an  impatient gang  of  Israeli soldiers. One lady, the oldest of the six, took the time to straight- en up and spare Judith a smile.

I didn't think it was possible, Judith said to the woman, using  Ara- bic. ''Why are you supporting your occupiers?''

Grow  up   girl!   the   woman snapped. ''Jew, Arab, we don't even think to  play politics  with  the wounded. Lend me a hand here.''

So that was it. Egypt was no neat monolithic bloc loyal to the Isla- mist theocracy in Cairo but a soci- ety like any other. Big, messy, and out of control. And here were six people trying to put  together  in their  small way what the  war  was tearing down in broad strokes. Was it futile? Absolutely. But Judith felt as if she'd been graciously allowed to help the troops. Which she cer- tainly could do, since her  talent as a bene eloah was healing.

But Robyn intruded on her thoughts just then, communicating by  voice message on Judith's micro that Taurus City was simultaneously under  at- tack by the Navy of Belial, in un- ion with American forces.

Judith replied that she was stuck be- tween two firefights, with no  way to disengage and come  to  Robyn's aid. Judith was still separated from Ariel and Victoria, and even worse, both Robyn and Judith knew Shyla  was flying Binah's avatar in low Earth orbit to come the aid  of  Israel. Even if she abandoned that role and left now,  by the time  Shyla  re- turned to Selene it would  be  too late to make a difference  in  the struggle for Taurus City.

''Almost as though Belial  planned it that way,'' Robyn said ruefully, and Judith could only agree with har.

P2 - AIRBURST

Judith knew everyone in her 2190-per- son battalion by name, somehow. Che said to Brand, ''I recognize a few of our people here. Find out  who isn't hurt too badly. Find out who is with  me and  quietly,  father. Keep it quiet.''

Brand managed to round up eighteen men and women whose wounds had been treated and  who  felt  they  were ready to get back in the fray. See- ing Judith tend the fallen  had  done the trick. No wide-load  sitting back at  a desk in Suez  City  was che, but one willing to share their hard-ships and carry hez own  bur- den. To go back to  Israel  on  a pussy chit now seemed unthinkable.

Brand repeated to Judith the scraps of information he had  obtained  from the wounded. ''They only hold ten grid squares centered on  Gineifa. There is a fragile stalemate on the ground. We surround them on three sides but there is such a build-up in the area it could tip either way very soon.''

A call from Shyla came in for  Judith on her portable micro and she spent a few minutes exchanging  informa- tion. Before che even terminated the connection  the  east  lit  up brilliantly,  like a  camera  flash that extended on and  on. Don't look at it! Judith shouted.

Brand locked eyes with her instead. Nucdet.

''Bigger than that, father. Anti- matter. Nothing but gamma  rays, wavelengths proton  short. That means a pile of  cooked  Egyptians but no fallout and even their tanks might still run after we scrape out their ashes.''  After twenty  sec- onds  the  light  faded   rapidly. There was no mushroom cloud.

What does it mean, Major?one of the walking wounded asked.

''I think now the country is safe. But that doesn't mean the  war  is over. Much blood  remains  to  be shed. And we're way behind sched- ule. We were supposed to be hit- ting Deversoir an hour ago.''

Judith led her little platoon about a mile  east over loose  desert  sand until they  stood on  the  western shore of the swollen Great  Bitter Lake, which was  thoroughly  mixed with the  salt water of  both  the Mediterranean and the Red Sea. With field binoculars she  scanned  the waters. ''This was the  Reed  Sea spoken of in Torah, confused in the popular imagination with  the  Red Sea.''

Here, exactly here, Judith  knew,  El Shaddai  had parted the  waters  of this lake to let her escaping  peo- ple cross to the other  side,  ac- cording to the account in the sec- ond book of Moshe. Hez grandparent Judith said the part about the ten plagues was true, but Pharoah never chased after the Israelites after- ward. In those days this lake was an extension of the Gulf of  Suez, and the Hebrews simply waited  for low tide  and made a  crossing  on foot. And the part about conquer- ing the Canaanites  afterward  was embellished too. It was the cusp between the Bronze Age and the Iron Age when nomads were settling down in permanent settlements across the Levant. The Hebrews slid in there with the rest of the folks. In a sense, the Israelites were  Ca- naanites all along, just ones  who didn't raise or eat pigs.

The Greek cargo  ship  Galatea was just now steaming into the lake but Judith, despite hez reverence for El Shaddai, knew she couldn't count on a parting of the waters to  get to the ship before it passed  them by.

They all stood around  looking  at her. Judith froze for a minute to let the gears of hez  brain-case  turn for a  while. Finally che  began stripping off hez  uniform,  right down to hez black panties and bra, revealing a surprisingly voluptuous but compact body. Che couldn't hide the bulge between hez legs but  it wouldn't  matter anymore, this  was Judith's final campaign. The men and women gaped at her at first,  then came to and followed her example.

Judith said, ''What is watertight? The lasers? Strap them on. Get rid of everything  else, and 'Follow  Me'. We're going for a swim.''

P5 - GALATEA

Salt water is more dense than fresh water, and the very salty water of the  Great Bitter Lake  provided  a good deal of buoyancy indeed. Swim- ming was easy. Nineteen soldiers followed Judith out about a kilometer off-shore, where che flipped on hez back and kicked lazily, waiting for the Galatea  to  pull  up  and hopefully spot them.

The ship, it turned out, was loaded with Israeli soldiers. They fished them out of the water, and  rifles were lowered again when they recog- nized their catch. The men and wom- en with Judith, standing there soaking wet, started to laugh as they  fi- nally understood what was  happen- ing. The 1185 other men and women of Judith's Bravo Battalion, the half che left  behind  in  Eilat,  were aboard this cargo ship.

There were  towels  on  hand,  and fresh uniforms  waiting  for  them below deck. As the ship continued to steam north, Judith retired  to  a stateroom  reserved for hem,  where che showered and caught up on  the message traffic. Che wanted to know what was happening with  the  war. The antimatter burst had destroyed a column  of 680  Egyptian  battle tanks and about 400 Armored Person- nel Carriers which had crossed the 1949 Armistice Line into the Negev Desert, over the old  boundary  of Israel. Shyla had killed  perhaps 8,000 Egyptians instantly. The main prong of the enemy attack had been blunted.

Judith noted that the  Egyptian  boys had gotten  their  fanciest  toys, their tanks and APCs,  across  the canal first on the Ismailia bridge. Then after  the  bridge  was   de- stroyed, again by Shyla, they sent over fuel and ammunition for their toys on  hastily  erected  pontoon bridges south of Lake Timsah. Only now after these pontoons  were  in turn  destroyed  did  they  realize they had neglected the unglamorous but vital  supply  of  water,  for drinking and for  their  vehicles. The latest Israeli  intel  traffic reported that the  Egyptians  were now trying to correct their  over- sight with a  desperate  logistics operation at Deversoir just  north of the Great Bitter Lake.

Judith's officers  gathered  in   the wardroom for evening chow, and she used this opportunity  to  outline hez plan. ''Everyone will be armed with one laser rifle and one  very old, portable,  wire-guided  Anti- Tank Guided Weapon. But they shall not be used against tanks. Do not waste them on ammunition trucks or fuel  trucks either. The Egyptians can't drink petrol. All I want you to do is hit water trucks. Or water tanks. Or water pipes. Thirst is our weapon. That's phase one. Phase two, we run south and raise calami- ty in the Egyptian rear at Fayid.''

What formation  do you  have  in mind for the attack? Brand  asked hem.

''None. Everyone stays in squads. No more of this bunching  up  non- sense. We fight the battle loose, the way we've trained so many times before, with everyone  talking  on their micros.''

Tactical planning then  turned  to what would happen after  Deversoir. Bravo Battalion never rested on its laurels. After each soldier fired their round,  Judith ordered  an  ex- hausting night-time run north over fifteen klicks  of loose  sand  to capture the crossroads town of Fay- id.

Around midnight the ship came to a halt  on the northwestern shore  of the swollen lake where a long ridge of piled up sand contained the ri- sen lake and kept it from flooding the town. Planks were shoved  out from the ship and dug into the face of the sand, permitting her troops to debark. In the  darkness  the forces of Judith's shrunken battalion edged up over the top of the  dike and surveyed Deversoir, or  Duweir Suweir as the enemy called it. The canal-crossing operations were in- tense. Egypt knew the fragility of the thread on which the entire  war now hung. The neglected supplies of water were now their top priority. But running out ahead now was Ariel as a  brilliant  point  of   white light, like the antimatter airburst but in jen shape, and far ahead of hem was Victoria crossing the night sky like an unseen  bat,  dropping grenades on Egyptians and generally raising hell.

P8 - DEVERSOIR

Judith took aim at a water tower with her ATGW and fired. The trick was to keep the target centered in the cross-hairs until  it  hit. This could be difficult with the intense pressures of combat, but Judith's peo- ple had earned their reputation by their  steely cool under fire. Her missile hit, becoming one of  five to hit that tower. Judith dropped the firing mechanism and turned west to start jogging double-time, bending around the lake towards Fayid.

Captain Brand found a parked water truck in his sights, and  success- fully took it out before following Judith to  Fayid. The truck was  not armored, certainly not to  the  30 centimeters of  steel  which   the Anti-Tank Guided Weapons were capa- ble of penetrating.

With Ariel illuminating all,  Ser- geant Binyamin Gafhi fired and hit a raft returning across the  mouth of the canal where it entered  the Great Bitter Lake, making it  una- vailable to  pick up  one  of  the parked water trucks.

Private Marina Merom fired her mis- sile. The rocket  screamed  away, spooling out a fine guidance  com- mand wire behind it. Using electri- cal signals sent down  that  wire, Marina carefully  kept  her  cros- shairs on target and struck a steel aqueduct pipe. It would soon  be field-repaired,  but  not   quickly enough  to  help   the   Egyptians trapped in the Sinai.

By this time the Egyptians began to realize the threat was coming from the levee and directed fire south. The sand erupted with machine  gun and mortar fire. Private David Zis- mann was  killed before  he  could shoot his ATGW.

Corporal Dalia Bibi  squeezed  the trigger    on     her      missile launcher...and nothing   happened. The weapon was a dud. Cursing, she dropped it  joined  the  flood  of Bravo  Battalion personnel  running toward Fayid.

Private  Uzi  Herschson   advanced closer to Deversoir to get  inside the 2,500 meter range of his weap- on. There he struck a raft with a water truck on board.

First Lieutenant  Noami   Meridor, rattled by machine gun rounds ding- ing the sand nearby, couldn't keep her target centered and missed. Her missile struck the ground and  ex- ploded, but still she  contributed to the  fog of war and  served  as suppressing fire to keep the  Egyp- tians from retaliating effectively. And Victoria kept giving the enemy presents of her own.

Private Shaul  Ben-Elissar  didn't aim  for a water truck or a  reser- voir as he was ordered, instead he directed his rocket at a truck car- rying Egyptian  troops  south   to their position. Scratch twelve ene- my troops.

Captain Maxim Shahal wiped  out  a large  crane truck which  was  busy attempting to right a water  truck overturned by an earlier blast.

Sergeant Yossi Levi, who had  been one of the nineteen men  who  swam with Judith  out to meet  the  ''Gal- atea'', hit the hardest target  of all, a water truck which was moving down a street, attempting  to  get out of Deversoir to cross the canal somewhere to the north.

The ATGW attack fell silent. Nearly a thousand wires lay on the  sands between the canal  and  Deversoir. Ariel's light went  out,  Victoria flew off unharmed, and Judith's  raid was complete. In roughly one half- hour's work,  they had  ensured  a swift  denouement to the  war  that would keep the lives of many Israe- li soldiers out of danger.

Not all  the water  supplies  were destroyed, but  enough  to  ensure that only  the  Egyptian  officers would taste  water in  the  desert tomorrow. When rumor of this  got out, they would have a  full-scale mutiny on  their  hands,  and  the Egyptian army  would  disintegrate before the two-pronged advance  of Israeli   tanks. Racked by  demon thirst, entire brigades  of  Egyp- tians would  willingly   surrender just for the hope of a mouthful of water.

Q1 - RESIGNATION

Brigadier General Shmuel Gavish had taken over  the  Suez  governorate building from Colonel Motti  Adan. An American officer was present, as well as  Colonel  Adan,  who   was briefing General Gavish  on  Judith's misdeeds. ''By her own  admission Major Judith Gervasi Judithiberately de- viated from the  Prime  Minister's Scimitar  Plan, sir. Well speak  of the devil, here she is now.''

Judith stopped two paces  before  the generals desk, and they exchanged a salute. He said, ''Major Gervasi, Colonel Adan says you Judithiberately altered the Scimitar plan. What do you have to say in your defense?''

''The country  is out  of  danger, sir.''

''Thanks to the American nuke. That still doesn't excuse your insubor- dination for the sake of insubordi- nation. You have become  popular, Major, but Israel is asking you to serve  the  country, not  your  own ego.''

''General, that was neither a nuke, nor American. I ordered a  clean Astrodyne gamma ray airburst, tech- nology neither the US  nor  Israel have.''

That had the effect  of  silencing both the General and the  colonel. The US officer present in the room, clad in desert brown,  could  only let loose a slow appreciative whis- tle. He did not contradict Judith.

She looked at all of them in  won- der. ''Oh, I see. None of you offi- cers realized our country needed a political buffer, a space for plau- sible deniability. Imagine the out- cry if Israel had nuked that column herself. This way condemnation for breaking the nuke taboo  falls  on Astrodyne alone.''

The Colonel, General, and the Amer- ican colonel were literally speech- less, so Judith continued her defense.

''Aside from the  antimatter  air- burst which blunted  the  Egyptian thrust into the Negev, it  was  my mother  who tracked the  column  of seven  hundred Egyptian  tanks  and four hundred APCs as they  crossed into the  Sinai and it is  was  my mother  who took out  the  Ismailia Bridge with orbit-to-ground  smart bombs. It is my mother who even now continues to knock out the enemy's pontoon bridges as soon as they put them up, and all of these  actions were planned  and ordered  by  me. The Egyptians had quite a formida- ble system of overlapping SAM cov- erage  around  their   bridgehead. Without support by Astrodyne, which Israel has enjoyed since 1972,  by the  way,  it would have  cost  the country many planes and many lives. So that is what I've  been  doing, sir, and all this besides assailing the enemy at Deversoir and al-Fay- id, which  caused  them  to  abort their bridgehead  operations  over the canal.''

Into the awkward quiet  space  Judith tilted forward and placed a  sheet of paper  on  the  general's  desk smartly, her letter of resignation.

''With all due respect, General, I cannot  continue  to  serve   under Colonel Adan. I consider it  an unpardonable  sin  to  strip  Bravo Battalion from me and force men and women I know and care about into a meat-grinder  of  his  own  making, while I was ordered to  the  siJudithines during what will probably  be the  last  war Zahal will  ever  be asked to fight.''

Sir,  Adan  interjected,   ''I judged   her  alteration  of   Plan Scimitar to be a serious breach of discipline,  and   administratively placed her and her chief of  staff Fon suspension  right  after  Suez City was made secure.''

Now for the first time General Gav- ish was learning that for the crit- ical hours of the war, Judith had been under orders  to do  nothing. He launched into a tirade against Adan intended to bring sufficient satis- faction to Judith that she might with- draw her resignation. In reply Judith simply  pushed  herself  away, rendered her best salute,  removed the major's insignia at her collar, and departed without looking  back once. Outside the avatar of Binah was already landing to take hem and the other bene elohim to Taurus.