TC1

Being a wickie  at St.  Catherine's Lighthouse  on the  Isle of Wight  had its  good points,  Benjamin thought. His wife Edith and daughter  Judith  aided  him  in his  work,  so  it  became a family  endeavor. Also the lighthouse  grounds  doubled  as a  meteorological  outstation. During daylight, the  Margolies family sent  hourly  reports of  temperature,  humidity,  cloud height, cloud formation, wind direction, and wind  force to the Meteorological Office  in  London  by  Teletype. This allowed Benjamin the satisfaction of working within his chosen field.

When Benjamin was paid his salary a small amount  of petrol was delivered to power the engine that turned the lighthouse shaft. He was never tempted to divert a portion of  this petrol to his motorcar, as he had none, but he did have to keep an eye out for neighbors who did.

On weekday mornings Judith  trudged up  from Undercliff  to the village of Niton  for  her primary  school,  and sometimes  her mother accompanied her when she needed to attend to shopping. At sunset on Friday, when it was Shabbat, Benjamin  and his family ceased from all  their  labors and  remained  indoors. On rare occasions Benjamin took  his family  by ferry  and bus  on such modest holidays as they could afford. One time they went to the beautiful Lake District in the northwest of the country, camping in the high,  treeless  hills called  fells  that qualified  as mountains in Eng- land.

The Isle of  Wight  lay  within the  English  Channel, and  the English Channel was  the  chief arena  of  contest between  the United Kingdom and  Germany in  1940. That is not  to say  the Margolies family would have been entirely safe if they had moved closer to the Lake District.

The Luftwaffe had a clear advantage when it came to the quality of their aircraft, but with the new Chain  Home Radio Direction Finding systems providing early warning of  attacks, RAF pilots could rest until scrambled, use less fuel, and put less wear on their own aircraft.

As the Luftwaffe  began to  take  heavy losses  in bombers  and fighter cover  they tried  attacking  some  of the  Chain  Home stations, including  one  that  was  constructed  near  to  St. Catherine's Lighthouse. The Margolies family was  unharmed but they had  their first  taste  of  the War. Towers constructed with an  open  lattice  structure  are  practically  immune  to blasts. The few antennas the Germans did manage  to topple were repaired within days while operators from nearby dummy stations broadcasted signals to make the enemy believe no  harm was done at all.

The Luftwaffe tried flying lower and  approaching England below the sight line  of Chain  Home  stations but  the British  used smaller systems intended to direct gunfire against ships in the Channel and German losses continued to mount at an unacceptable rate. Eventually the Luftwaffe  accepted they would  be spotted electronically and switched to night raids,  thinking the RAF's fighters  could  not see  them  in  actual combat. The British quickly produced even smaller  systems for planes  that rapidly ended German night bombing over England.

The Luftwaffe lost nearly  two thousand  planes and  Hitler was forced to shelf his  invasion plans indefinitely. In hindsight Hitler's 'Operation  Sea Lion'  was  never  realistic. Even if Germany had obtained a lasting command of the air, Britain still had an unmatched Navy.

The United Kingdom  shifted emphasis  from air  defense to  air offense, but during the course of 1941 it became clear to Bomber Command that nighttime navigation to  the correct target  was a serious  issue. In 1942  an electronic  guidance system  called Clarinet was developed. Clarinet used two highly  directional radio beams, one transmitting Morse code dots and the other one transmitting dashes, to be received  by a single  bomber flying point in  the  wave  to  minimize the  chance  of  the  Germans reverse-engineering the system from a downed plane.

The night bombers flew out from England on a straight line along the radio  dots,  and  when  the  lead  plane  encountered  the strongest part of the radio dashes from another angle it dropped a load of  marker flares. Then the whole bomber  wave dropped their bombs on the flares.

Concrete was  transparent  to  the Clarinet  frequency. So an antenna was constructed inside  Benjamin's lighthouse mounted to the  central shaft. That way the structure  of the  lighthouse would hide the antenna and  the Germans, it was  thought, would never suspect a thing. Periodically a targeting order  came to Benjamin Margolies  over the same  Teletype he used  to transmit his weather  information to  London. The message gave  him  a precise  angle to  position the  antenna, a  duration and  start time, and whether he was to transmit dots or dashes.

The Margolies family was kept  busy throughout 1943 as  the RAF focused their  bombing campaign  on  Hamburg  and the  industry centered in the  Ruhr  valley. The next year  a large  number of American,  Australian,  En  Zed, and  Canadian  troops  were transported to the south of England.

They trained with Tommies  in preparation  for the  invasion of France. To ensure  their  success a  tower  of  deception  was assembled that the world had never seen before nor since. False plans were even planted on a corpse that was allowed to wash up on a  French beach. A world of false radio traffic  was created and maintained to let the German High Command  conclude that US Army General  G. S.  Patton was  gearing up  to lead  the entire force over the narrowest part of the Channel  where Dover could be seen from Calais. The Germans knew it was the smart move.

Admiral Sir Bertrand Ramsay, in overall command of the invasion, left absolutely nothing to chance. On June 4, 1944, just before D-Day, Sir Ramsay actually took  time to visit  St. Catherine's lighthouse. The weather was  quite  murky and  wet  so he  cut his inspection short. Benjamin showed Ramsay  the room  where the Teletype and  Clarinet transmitter  were installed. Ramsay thanked Benjamin personally for  his service  to the  King, and Benjamin, for his part, considered it prudent not to mention the assistance he received from Edith and Judith.

The Admiral seemed to be captivated  by a wall chart  and asked Benjamin to identify it.

"That's my moving five-day weather forecast for Undercliff, sir. That would be this stretch where the lighthouse  is located. We are  in a  rain-shadow, you  know.  And also  a fog-shadow.  The weather  here is  not  nearly as  immoderate as  it  is for  the Overners."

After the War it was Benjamin who coined the word microclimate.

He led the Admiral into the white octagonal tower to inspect the Clarinet antenna and  took  him spiralling  up the  ninety-four steps to the  top. Benjamin showed Sir  Ramsay where  the huge crystal lens had been chipped by a 1943 air raid. They could see thirty nautical miles  out to  sea. The whole English  Channel was roiling with  whitecaps  kicked up  from  high winds  which threatened to derail the immanent invasion.

"And you do this weather forecasting as a sort of hobby?"

"Perhaps more than just a hobby, Admiral Sir Ramsay. I'm trained as a meteorologist, and I'm a damn fine one,  if you don't mind me carrying my own chair. But it's wartime now, and I'm a wickie for the duration.  Now I know we've all got  to pull together to stop Jerry, sir, and I'm sure  other professional men are in the same predicament as  myself, but all the same, one  must use the skills one has been trained to use,  or one's mind gets in a bit of a rut."

"I see," said Ramsay.

"It's not the purely sterile pursuit you might imagine it to be, Admiral Sir. By a strange fluke of geography and wind and water currents, the  weather here  at the lighthouse  has a  very high correlation with the weather directly  across the Channel on the coast  of France.  I've  checked  it for  years,  sir, in  every season, and  the match  occurs more than  eighty percent  of the time, well outside the realm of coincidence. I intend to publish a paper about this after the war."

"Is that  so?   Remarkable!  And  what  do   you  forecast  for Undercliff?"

"A twenty-four hour  break  in this  miserable weather,  partly cloudy, winds drop  to five knots. Then on the  afternoon of the sixth of  June we  return to the  same pattern.  Everywhere else along the English  Channel there will be fog and  rain and winds gusting to thirty knots."

Admiral Sir Ramsay was elated. Eisenhower's chief meteorologist had predicted the same  short break in  the weather  using B-17 aircraft far out over the Atlantic to gather  the data. General Montgomery was willing to take the risk, but Ramsay and Ike were still cautious.

Allied Intelligence said  General Erwin  Rommel, master  of the Atlantic Wall, wasn't  even  presently in  France,  a sign  the Germans were anticipating at least  a week of bad  weather. But now a doughnut hole in that weather was confirmed  by a second, entirely unexpected source. Sir Ramsay had moved over to General Montgomery's camp and was ready to give the nod on the invasion. It might be enough to convince Eisenhow- er, the Supreme Allied Commander, to launch the massive invasion of France just as the Germans were letting down their guard.

The Admiral asked,  "Does  the strange  correlation of  weather between   Undercliff  and   the  French   coast  hold   for  the Pas-De-Calais?"

"Alas, no, I'm afraid that predicting the weather for Dover and Calais is a puzzle, and my reports to the Weather Office are but one piece."

The Admiral sighed, suddenly reluctant to proceed. There was one final duty Benjamin Margolies could perform for England, and it saddened  the Admiral  to  deceive  the man,  but  there was  no choice. It was, in  fact, the  chief reason  for his  visit. He said, "Then it is time to  reveal the real purpose  of my visit here, and why I have attended  to this myself rather than send a staffer. What  I'm about  to tell you  has the  highest possible classification. You  cannot mention  a word of  it even  to your family."

"I understand, sir."

"Mr. Margolies, the following three  weeks will be  very lively ones  for you,  I'm  afraid. You  might be  aware  that much  of southern  England has  become  one large  armed camp  containing millions  of  troops  from  several  countries,  and  all  their supplies. As we get closer to  the moment of the Allied invasion across the Strait  of Dover, which is set for  the final week of June,  you will  find that  your  Clarinet task  orders will  be coming in at a much greater rate than ever before."

"Nightly rather than weekly, then, sir?"

"Twice nightly,  I'm  afraid.  We  will  soon  be  bombing  the potential landing areas continuously,  day and night, and you'll need to get such sleep as you  can when it is light. I wanted to tell you  this, Mr.  Margolies, so  when it  happens you  do not imagine things have gone terribly amiss."

"I understand what I  must do,  sir," said  Benjamin Margolies. "Perfectly."

So after  a brisk  shake  of  their  hands they  descended  the spiralling steps mounted inside the structure of St. Catherine's lighthouse and were parted, but Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay felt thoroughly soiled.

One time a German U-boat captain gazed at the shore of the Isle of Wight through his periscope  and noted that  St. Catherine's lighthouse stopped flashing for hours. It was a small matter but he noted the  start and  stop time. The report wound its  way through Berlin. One clever analyst realized the data matched the start and stop time of the Clarinet signal originating from what they thought was a nearby antenna. A second observation verified the light beam remained lined up on a target in Germany that was taken out by night bombing.

In the early morning hours  of June  5, 1944 a  U-boat surfaced off the Isle  of  Wight. Commandos rowed ashore  to raid  the lighthouse, led by an SS captain named Felix Schaub who doubled as the  political  officer  to ensure  the  crew's  loyalty  to the  gangsters running  Germany. On this occasion  Felix Schaub wore his black pre-war  Schutz Staffel  uniform for  the brutal psychological effect he  knew it  would have  on the  Margolies family.

Judith and Edith  whimpered in  terror when  they were  tied up and  threatened with  pistols pointed  at their  heads. Benjamin demonstrated the operation  of the  Clarinet system  to Captain Schaub, but the Germans neither destroyed the gear nor tried to remove it  to their  submarine. Instead, Schaub identified each member of the Margolies family by  name, and told them  he knew they were Jews.

"Mr. Margolies," Straub  said, "this  is a  matter of  life and death for your  wife and daughter. I do not  make empty threats. The fate of  Edith and Judith will depend on  how you answer two questions.  First,  what  is  the target  area  of  the  planned invasion across the Channel?"

Benjamin stiffened in dismay. He was confronted with the choice of losing his family or betraying the trust Admiral Sir Bertrand Ramsay had given him. To prod him along, there was a slight nod from Schaub. The hammer was pulled back on the pistol pointed at Judith's head.

Margolies capitulated. It was never really a question. "Dover to Calais," he said, letting escape the breath he had been holding for half a minute.

"Goot," Captain Schaub said. "And the timing?"

"I do not know  the precise day.  I know only  that it  will be during the last week of June."

The SS officer smiled. "I am a man of my word," he said. "Your family is safe. But  this is  what I  want you  to do  now, Mr. Margolies. When  you get  your orders  to operate  Clarinet, you will carry them  out, but you will be just  a little sloppy when you align the antenna. Not too much, Mr. Margolies! Perhaps only a fraction of one degree. Just enough to throw off the resulting bombing raid  by a few  hundred meters.  You will do  this until your government returns  to their original wisdom  and no longer prosecutes  its war  against the  Reich.  But this  is the  most important  part: you  must tell  no one  you are  sabotaging the raids, or that we were ever here."

"Or you'll return and kill us?"

"Mr. Margolies, now I am disappointed  in you! What does  a man have in this  world if he fails  to do what he  promises he will do? You have my word that neither you nor your lovely wife Edith nor your beautiful  young daughter Judith will be  killed. But I am not sure that  you are a man of your  word, Mr. Margolies. So at this  time we will take  them to the concentration  camp near Saint-Malo in France."

"No, I beg you!"

"Do not be  alarmed, Mr.  Margolies. Your  wife Edith  and your daughter will  not be unduly  mistreated there, nor even  on the way there. This camp I mentioned  that lies in Brittany is where all the  British Jews  we captured in  the Channel  Islands have been relocated. But if we learn that a future air raid using the transmitter inside  this lighthouse  is successful,  things will not seem so  good. But even then, my word  will hold! Judith and Edith will  be simply be  transferred to  a work camp  deeper in France or perhaps even in Germany."

Judith and Edith Margolies were taken to Cherbourg  by raft and by sub, and by the morning of June 6 they  were inducted into a French farm that had been dubbed a clinic for racial hygiene.

Schuab's report, sent by coded radio from  the U-boat, filtered up to Hitler, and the final piece of deception in the Fortitude element of Operation Bodyguard was in  place. Hitler reinforced the defenses  in  the  Pas-De-Calais region  and  left  only  a skeleton force at  Normandy. Captain Felix Straub and the Uboat at his beck and call only just made it to Cherbourg in time.

In the early morning hours of June 6 the Channel was filled with 7,000 vessels carrying 160,000 men to the  beaches of Normandy, and not Calais, as Benjamin told his tormentors. Mr. Margolies's weather forecast had tipped  Ramsay into Montgomery's  camp for having a go, and that in turn convinced Eisenhower.

Two Panzer  tank  divisions,  which  might  have  defeated  the invasion, were kept on a tight leash by Hitler because he didn't trust his own generals. Hitler himself slept until noon on the sixth of June, and didn't release the Panzers until four in the afternoon, by which time the beachhead was relatively secure and Allied aircraft dominated the skies to the point of forcing all German tanks to move only at night.

For two months the Allies were tied down in the Normandy region trying to  break out  of  hedgerow  country while  the  Germans attempted to contain  them. When the Allies  did escape,  the breakthrough was very near to the Saint-Malo  area where Judith and Edith were being held. To prevent their premature liberation the Germans moved everyone  in the camp  to another  one deeper in France,  far from  the  front  lines, precisely  what  Felix Straub threatened would happen should Benjamin  Margolies prove faithless in his sabotage, when he in fact never was.

Benjamin continued  to operate  the  Clarinet  system when  the nightly orders came in over  the Teletype, but  he deliberately altered the  requested  target  angle  slightly. He sincerely believed Captain Straub that it was the only way  he could save the lives of Edith and Judith.

The deception came crashing to an end in  September when Judith failed to register  for  secondary school. The constable came calling, and  he found  evidence  of  the  raid by  the  German frogmen. He notified  army  intelligence,  and  they  in  turn squeezed the truth  out  of Benjamin. Sir Ramsay successfully intervened to keep Benjamin out of prison, but Sir Arthur Harris of RAF Bomber  Command  insisted  the man  be  sacked from  his lighthouse job. He was forced to move to a small cottage on the beach nearby and  he  was  not even  permitted  to operate  his weather station  inside  St. Catherine's lighthouse. In his isolation Benjamin gradually began to despair  of seeing either one of his loved ones again.

After breaking out of  Normandy at Avranches,  General Patton's Third  Army  moved  across   France  at  an  unbelievable  pace, performing a right hook  that nearly encircled  Hitler's forces opposing the invasion. Judith and Edith were moved to different camps at  least  once  a month. The constant  relocation  was encouraging in a way, but  things grew progressively  worse the nearer Edith and Judith were taken to Germany itself. Internment camps were abandoned for  work camps,  which were  evacuated in turn for what could only be called punishment camps.

Early in  1945 after  one  more  relocation, Edith  and  Judith reached their final destination,  an extermination  camp called Ohrdruf-Nord deep in the heart of Germany proper. In that place Jews were worked to death  constructing a railroad  center that would never be  finished. Along the way  currency, gold,  and jewelry (of which Judith and Edith had none) were sent to the SS headquarters of the  Economic  Adminstration. Watches, clocks, and pens were  sent  to  the troops  on  the Western,  Eastern, and Italian  fronts. Their civilian  clothing  was  given  to increasingly needy German families.

Judith saw things that pushed far beyond any boundaries of human evil she thought were possible to exist. Ohrdruf wasn't even the worst camp in the hellish constellation. Those were to be found further to the  east,  in Poland. Many men have  a taste  for sixteen year old female flesh. Judith learned to trade her body for scraps of extra food. The longer she could delay taking on the figure of  a skeleton, the more opportunities  he might have to trade her body for food, for both herself and Edith.

This became a huge problem during the terrifying and humiliating appells, or inspections, that followed roll call and lasted most of the day. The guards realized Judith and Edith  were wasting away at a slightly slower rate than  their companion prisoners. They were successful in  feigning weakness,  but it  was almost impossible to hide their extra weight, and suspicion was raised.

When the guns of Patton's tanks could be heard only forty miles away, the twelve thousand inmates of the camp were being loaded onto cattle cars. The prisoners were being rushed to transfer to Buchenwald. Edith Margolies slipped and revealed that she had a little extra food  hidden away. What happened after that Judith told no one but her father,  years after the war,  on his final day of life. Learning the manner  of the  passing of  his wife might have even been the thing that killed him.

Troops of the  89th  Infantry  Division of  the  US Third  Army captured Ohrdruf-Nord on April 4,  1945. Judith was one of the very few prisoners left standing. After the war in Europe when Judith had been  sufficiently  deloused and  scrubbed, and  had demonstrated her status as a British subject to the satisfaction of the Occupation, she was placed on a ship and sent home to her father.

She met him on a dock  at Portsmouth. Judith gazed upon him as though  across  a  great  gulf  which  was  the  memory  of  the unspeakable ordeal she  had somehow  survived. They were utter strangers to  each  other. When he  took  her  home  Benjamin tearfully begged his  daughter  to tell  him  what happened  to Edith. The girl said nothing. Every time he pressed, she would only shake her head. But the beach bungalow was very small, and it was not very long before Benjamin caught a  quick glimpse of the mass of whip scars on his daughter's back.

The Margolies   family  had  been royal subjects for  many  generations. Benjamin Margolies was a meteorologist  with  a  specialty in  'numerical  methods  of mesoscale forecasting'. He lived, unfortunately, just before the proper tool for his work, the computer, had been invented.

But Jews were very rare in the United Kingdom, which might have explained why, during the Great Depression,  Benjamin Margolies could only find work as a lighthouse keeper  at St. Catherine's Lighthouse  on the  Isle  of Wight,  just a  few  miles off  the southern coast of England. Still, Benjamin faithfully served the crown in what capacity he  could, even operating  a directional transmitter hidden inside the lighthouse which guided bombers on nighttime raids in Germany.

Ultimately he was compelled, without his fully-informed consent, to become part of the disinformation campaign leading up to the invasion of Normandy in  1944. Just prior to the  invasion his wife and daughter were abducted by German commandos as surety he would sabotage the raids. His wife Edith never returned to him.

Judith Margolies  was  an  eighteen-year-old  survivor  of  the Holocaust. She did not  sleep nights anymore,  not even  a full year after the War. Instead she stayed wide awake on  the back porch of her  beach cottage,  watching the  coast with  her war surplus Lee-Enfield bolt-action rifle for Nazis who would never come. She suffered terribly from something 20th Century doctors called shell shock  and 21st  Century doctors  would call  Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

One instant Judith was scanning the beach below St. Catherine's lighthouse  on the  Isle  of  Wight. The next  instant a  giant appeared. The manner of the man's appearance was entirely out of the ordinary, Judith thought. Then again, so was standing watch all night every  night. Judith realized it  was possible  she wasn't entirely sane.

In the feeble light of the full moon in the west and the hint of dawn in the east the giant's face seemed too dark to be a Nazi, but he could have applied camouflage to his skin  just like the frogmen who whisked her  mother and  herself to  France. Judith wasn't taking chances,  not after  what she  had suffered,  not after what she had seen  her mother  suffer. She fired a round into the air  from fifty  yards  to get  the giant's  attention before he advanced closer.

The strange man loomed  higher than anyone  she had  ever seen, perhaps a full eight feet tall. The man watched Judith draw near with the rifle. At ten yards hy said, "You have no need of that weapon with me. I will offer no threat to you."

"Who are  you?" Judith demanded. "You don't  sound  remotely English."

"My name is Michael," hy said. "And you are correct, I am not from your country at all. I am from somewhere very far away."

Judith's rifle dropped a bit  from its sight-line  on Michael's head. It was now aimed at hyz heart. She said, "So what are you doing here? And how did you get here?"

"I am here  to  speak to  you,"  Michael said. "As for how  I arrived,  I could  explain it  to you,  but you  would think  me entirely balmy, rather than just yourself."

Judith lowered the rifle to  point at the ground  between them, and there was the faintest glimmer  of a smile. She said, "And what would  you, having come  from so far  away, have to  say to me?"

"I would  ask whether  you  would  hunt  real enemies  of  Jews throughout the  world, rather than  ones you imagine  might come here."

Judith unchambered the round and slung the rifle over her back. It was just before dawn, and in the light that was beginning to gather, Michael could take a better look at Judith. The girl had just reached adulthood, but there was an aged look in her hollow eyes, as though she  had already lived  four lifetimes,  and it haunted hym. Obviously a kind of Darwinian process in the camps had produced a girl who was able to outwit, bribe, or intimidate anyone to get  what  she  needed to  survive. Michael saw the results on Judith's face. He asked, "Do you live here,  at the lighthouse?"

Judith shook her head. "We used to live there, but my father was sacked, for reasons that were entirely unfair. After the war he was allowed  to resume  work at the  weather outstation,  but we must live here."

The work camps had  emaciated her body,  but when  she returned home to the Isle of Wight and was fed by her father, the weight came back in the form of strong, wiry muscles. She was eighteen but looked twice that.

"I should like to meet your father," Michael said.

Judith spat at the ground. "He has sold his life to the Goy and betrayed the  promise of God  that our people should  rule Eretz Yisrael."

"When you say your people," Michael  said, "I know you  are not speaking  of  the British,  Judith  Margolies.  You are  also  a member of  a people whose  very right  to exist is  always being questioned."

Judith's eyes narrowed at Michael. "How do you know my name?"

"I know many things about you, Judith. I know  that your father rendered  a  service to  the  Crown  that  went far  beyond  the sacrifices that any other Britons were  asked to make. I know he was used by the government to  help deceive Hitler as to exactly where the invasion  was going to take place.  They planted false information on  him. I know  you and  your mother were  taken to camps on  the Continent  by German special  forces. I  know they tattooed the number 271828 on your  arm and I know that you have come through such suffering and  human degradation and evil that few could ever begin to understand the mere periphery of it, let alone sympathize with the core  of your ordeal and your memories of it."

Judith showed Michael the  six numbers tattooed  to her  arm in Ordruf Nord to affirm her assessment was correct. She said, "The Crown owes a very large  marker to my  father, but he  will not cash it in to obtain a  small thing, a concession of such little import it  could not possibly  disconcert the government  in the smallest way.  The Foreign  Secretary refuses  to allow  Jews to immigrate to the British Mandate in Palestine. Not even Jews who are already British subjects."

"Oil," said Michael.

Judith nodded. One word, but it explained everything. She said, "The admiral who  deceived my  father  is dead.  My father  has resumed his profession and he is willing to let the whole matter go."

"What would you do if I said I could take you to Palestine this very day?"

"What would I do? Please give me a moment."

She went  into her  cottage,  and  returned ten  minutes  later carrying a  small  tote  bag with  clothing  and  her  personal effects. She also carried  her  rifle, but  now  she also  had several boxes  of .303  caliber  cartridges  carried on  little straps. But she had not taken  the time to wake  her father and notify him that  she  was  leaving, and  Michael  knew that  as matters stood the  girl could not be persuaded to  speak to him. Michael also noted, with some satisfaction, that Judith carried in one hand a quantity of unleavened bread. That was the essence of the feast of  Passover, to reaffirm  the willingness  of the children of Israel to respond  without delay to the  command of their God to depart their place of captivity. Perhaps Judith had an intuition of who she was really dealing with.

The crack of dawn in England instantly changed to early morning in Israel. Michael had moved east toward the rising sun. Judith saw the light had shifted,  and the  terrain as well. The cool beach was gone,  replaced  by warm  desert. Astonished, Judith looked into Michael's eyes and asked, "Who are you, really?"

He said, "I will never lie to you, Judith, but  at this point I think were I to  tell you the entire truth you  would hold me to be absolutely barmy. For now, at the very least, I hope that you simply consider me to be a teacher and a friend."

Listening to Michael's words  had an  effect that  Judith could never put into words. She was silent  for many minutes  as her body shook with dry weeping.

Judith was met in the desert by a number  of Jewish farmers who lived a few miles inland  from the Mediterranean, at  a kibbutz founded by Polish immigrants in 1943 named Yad Mordechai. Judith could see the kibbutz near at  hand. The settlement lay on the coast highway only eight miles north of the city of Gaza and in later years  it was  only two  and a half  miles outside  of the border of the Gaza Strip. Judith spoke no Polish, nor  at that point had she even learned Hebrew, which had  been revived from extinction. But all she had to do was brandish the tattoo on her forearm, and it was enough for the pioneers.

In the weeks and months that followed, Judith  began to suspect she had been taken to her new  home by an actual  angel of God. The settlers  refused  to  speak  of  Michael,  other  than  to acknowledge they were on good terms with him. That first morning began to seem like  a dream  to Judith. But much fighting lay ahead, and it became much more like a nightmare.

During the War of Independence when the Israeli defense activity completely abandoned the coastal highway running south from Tel Aviv, Judith's kibbutz at Yad Mordechai was completely cut off. Only two private aircraft maintained contact  between north and south, carrying  newspapers  and  boxes  of  medical  supplies. The pilots of  these  aircraft were  called  Mahal, or  foreign volunteers. Judith herself was part of the  Gahal, or immigrant soldiers. Most of the children in the kibbutz were called sabra. That is, they had been born in Palestine and knew no other home. Judith was their guardian when their parents worked the fields, both before and during the war.

Judith's kibbutz lay just west of the road that  linked Gaza to the  Egyptian beachhead  at  Majdal. Egypt hurled two  infantry battalions, one armored battalion,  and an  artillery battalion against them one dawn for an attack that lasted five days. Much enemy armor was taken out with the  PIAT (Projectile, Infantry, Anti-Tank)  mortar. There was  a subtle  line  about a  hundred meters out where the soil of the desert made a sudden transition to the soil of the kibbutz. Perhaps it was an artifact of the water table. Before the battle the  kibbutzim already  set the elevation of the  PIAT  to  strike this  line  by firing  dummy rounds. Now it was only a matter of rotating  the barrel on its iron pivot sunk  into the  ground  to take  aim at  approaching tanks. When fired each round contained a  shaped charge massing one kilogram, designed to penetrate 100mm of armor.

Those tanks which  managed  to breach  the  perimeter were  set alight at close range with  Molotov cocktails or  attacked with hand grenades whose fragments would enter the  tank through the view slit, wounding the crew and forcing them  to retire. Other tanks were taken out with buried mines, and still others simply broke down and were dragged out  of range by armored  cars. But there were  just too  many  Egyptians  and the  shelling  never ceased. After five days the  settler's ammunition  was spent.r Judith and the other uninjured settlers helped carry the wounded through the Egyptian  lines under  the cover  of darkness. Yad Mordechai lay  abandoned,  and  in the  morning  the  Egyptians occupied the place and burned it to the ground. But during those five days of resistance Tel Aviv was saved  from being overrun. The stubborn defense  at Yad  Mordechai gave  Tel Aviv  time to bring in  reinforcements and firm  up the defensive line  on the road between the city and Gaza.

On June 11,  a truce  called by  the United  Nations went  into effect and lasted  until July  9. In nearly one  month of  war Israel had lost  900 soldiers  and 300  civilians. Between the first truce and a second one was ten days of fighting.

The IDF captured Nazareth, the  home town of Yeshua,  which had grown much bigger  than the  original five  hundred souls. The second truce lasted until October 15, and was followed with one solid week of fighting against Egypt. On the first day of that week Israeli warplanes bombed the Egyptian air base at El Arish on the Mediterranean coastline  of Sinai,  and cut  the railway from El Arish to Rafa.

After the third cease-fire took effect on October 22, Judith and the Polish settlers who had  taken her  in moved back  into the ruins of Yad  Mordechai and  began to  rebuild the  town. There would be  a sharp  bout  of  renewed  fighting in  the  winter, followed by a fourth and final cease fire, but Judith judged the continued existence of her new nation was no longer in doubt.

On her collective  farm after  the War  of Independence  Judith Margolies immersed herself in honest toil cultivating the fields and garden crops and poultry. At least once a month she helped defend the  settlement from  gunmen  who  infiltrated from  the nearby Gaza Strip to kill Jews simply for being Jews.

Several times  a  year  these attacks  on  Yad  Mordechai  were followed up by fierce IDF reprisal raids. Throughout 1950 Judith was frequently mobilized as a  sergeant in the IDF  reserves to help carry out these counterattacks. The military pay was small but so were her wants. She turned half of it over to the kibbutz out of gratitude for taking her in.

The children of the settlement  ate and slept apart  from their parents. Judith helped to educate them, even  while she herself was learning from a Polish tutor to speak and read Hebrew.

One day during the following year someone who appeared  to be a very tall boy  of indeterminate race arrived  at Yad Mordechai.r Che said, "I am named Elin, a servant of one who is known to the people of  this farm.  Michael would have  me speak  with Judith Margolies, one of the kibbutznikim here."

Judith was relieved of teaching her class and brought to one of the empty houses in the  kibbutnikiyot section to meet Elin. She saw how the short-haired newcomer  was at least a  foot shorter than Michael, yet che was still loomed like a tree over Judith. And being this close  to hem,  she was  entirely unsure  if the visitor was male or female. It was Judith's first encounter with one of the nephilim.

The jen said, "Peace be with you, Judith Margolies. I am called Elin. I serve the  one named Michael, who met you  on a beach of the English Channel  and asked if you would hunt  the enemies of Jews throughout the world."

"And it is proof of your sincerity, Elin, that you know exactly what Michael said to me on that early morning."

"Michael sent me, first of all, to ask if you were well."

"Apart from my trusty British-made rifle," Judith began, "I have very little in  the way  of  personal possessions.  I own  some clothing, I 'own' a radio I share with the others in the Women's House, and  I have  other such  simple things.  There are  a few tractors and jeeps, but they  belong to the whole community. All the profits of the kibbutz are  pooled together for the needs of the laborers. I have a little pocket money from my reserve duty. I have good health. In fine, apart from the occasional firefight with the Arabs, you may tell Michael I am living in utopia."

"That is good to hear," said Elin, "because it clears the way to my next question. Have you heard of a man named Horst Wagner?"

Judith wanted to spit, but  caught herself as she  realized she was indoors. She said, "What Jew doesn't curse the  name of the German  diplomat  who was  instrumental  in  the deportation  of hundreds of thousands of European Jews to death camps in Poland? I  know he  was  arrested by  the allies  and  testified at  the Nuremberg trials  as a witness.  But what happened to  him after that I know very little."

"Then Judith, allow me to pick up his trail  where it runs cold for you.  Late in 1947 Wagner  was placed in an  internment camp for Nazi  war criminals  called Nuremberg-Langwasser but  it was guarded very  weakly. He managed  to escape to Austria  and made contact with a rat line."

A rat line was a  kind of  underground railroad for  Nazis, and Judith didn't need that explained to her.

Elin went onto say,  "Specifically, he  availed himself  of the Kloster  Line run  by elements  in the  Catholic Church.  He was hidden in a  network of monasteries until a  German bishop named Alois Hudal made arrangements for him to obtain an International Red Cross passport. He then made  his way to Genoa, Italy. Using Vatican funds he  sailed to Argentina to link up  with the likes of Adolf  Eichmann and  Josef Mengele.  We're going  after those last two, eventually, but for right now we're beautifully set up to get  Horst Wagner, and  Michael wants you  to be part  of the extraction."

"Who else is part of this?"

"There's a woman of the  B'nei Elohim  named Adriel. She  has a certain talent, as do each one of us. Adriel can cause others to have illusions. She can make herself appear to be a native South American woman  without this...halo...you see on  my head. She's been working Wagner undercover for  two months. Wagner prefers a very neat home  and Adriel has been coming in  to tidy things up for him.  Along the  way he's  been flirting  with her,  much to Adriel's  disgust off  the record,  but she's  very professional about it. Recently she got Wagner to agree it's time for a major field day  so that's where we  come in. We're going  in as extra cleaning girls."

Elin threw a bundle on the  dining table and said,  "You should change into these. I can step out if you want me to."

"That depends on whether you're a bloke or a bird. I still can't tell which."

"I'm both, actually. I lean slightly to the bloke side but I can turn around  while you  disrobe,  if  you  think that  will  be sufficient."

Judith nodded. While she was changing she said, "Where  do you come in?"

"My code name in the B'nei Elohim is Arc  Flash. Sometimes they call me the Stick. I'm going  to incapacitate the subject so you can  deliver  him  to  your  government  alive  and  fit  to  be prosecuted."

"Why does Michael want me to be involved?"

"Someone has to  make the  actual  delivery of  the package  to Mossad HQ. Michael thinks there  are multiple advantages all the way around if it's you."

In a few more moments Judith was fully dressed  as an Argentine housekeeper. "Go ahead and turn around, Elin."

Che did, and after a quick glance at Judith, the scenery around hem changed from a home in the kibbutz to a back alley in Buenos Aires. They had gone there so no one could  see the transition. Judith marvelled at this once more, but she was  not stunned to totally incapacitation by the  transition. Michael once used the same trick to whisk her away from England.

Judith followed   Elin  out  of   the  alley  to  one   of  the better-looking houses on  that  street. There was  no need  to knock. The door was opened just as they arrived on the portico. Judith assumed it was opened by  Jashen, and she noted  that he seemed to be  of normal height, for once, although  he was still somewhat taller than most men she knew.

They followed him inside. Judith saw Wagner standing in his den and tried to suppress her rage. She had picked up enough German in the camps to know he  called he was asking  "Diego" if these were the housekeepers he spoke of. Immediately after he spoke a miniature bolt  of  lightning  played between  Elin  and  Horst Wagner. He fell to the floor in a dead faint.

Jashen said, "Sit on the floor right next to him, Judith."

She did as she was instructed. Elin sat the unconscious man up in front  of Judith and  propped up  his knees so  together they both had a small profile. Then che said, "I'm sorry about this next  part, it  will  probably disgust  you  more than  Jashen's undercover work did him, but Judith,  you need to hold his knees so he  doesn't spread  back out,  at least  until you  get where you're going."

While they   were  gathering   Wagner  into  an   even  smaller configuration Jashen went through his desk drawers as though he knew exactly  what he was  looking for  and where they  were. He threw a small book down at Judith's side. "There's his fucking ill-gotten Red Cross passport." Then he threw down a thick ream of correspondence right next to  that. "And your Mossad agency should find  that stuff to  be very interesting  reading indeed. But now,  Judith, off you pop  back to Israel. I'm  glad we met, and I hope we work together again."

"Wait! Tell me one thing, Adriel. Who is Michael?"

"More to the point, you should be asking what is Michael."

But she didn't  have the  opportunity  to ask. The next thing Judith knew she was still crouching with Wagner  on his kitchen floor, but the floor  was now  just a circle  of wood  lying in front of Mossad  headquarters at the Red House  on Yarkon Street in Tel Aviv.