TCL

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.

After Paul von Hindenburg, President of the  Wiemar Republic of Germany,  died  in 1934  his  powers  were  rolled up  with  the existing powers of the Chancellor, Adolph Hitler, making him the absolute ruler of the country. And since Hitler had always had it out for  the Jews,  things  began to  go badly  for them  in Europe. Jews were systematically stripped of their rights on the Continent. They lost their jobs  and homes and were  moved into work camps  that eventually  became  great  factories of  human death.

But nothing  similar  ever  happened  in  Britain. There were even Jews   in  Parliament. 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 consider me 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.

Soon they were 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. Lilith 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. They were already acquainted with Michael and on good terms.

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, perhaps it was even the real Michael, the holy  guardian of the children of Israel. The settlers refused to speak  of Michael, and that first morning  began to  seem like  a dream. But much fighting lay ahead, and it was much more like a nightmare.

For the balance  of 1945,  only  eight small  ships carrying  a thousand  Jewish war  refugees reached  Palestine from  ports in Italy and  Greece. For the first half  of 1946,  another 10,500 immigrants arrived on eleven ships. From August 1946 to December 1947, 51,700  Displaced Persons  tried  to  make their  way  to Palestine on thirty-five ships, but were captured by the British and taken to  new camps  on the  island of  Cyprus, where  they languished behind barbed wire. Many of the armed guards of these camps in Cyprus had liberated  some of the very  same prisoners from the  extermination  camp at  Belsen-Belson  only  eighteen months prior, and they were fully aware of this.

In 1947 the UN proposed the creation of  two independent states in Palestine, one controlled by the Arabs and  one Jewish.r The Jewish side of  the  partition  was to  have  500,000 Jews  and 400,000 Arabs. The Arab side  was  to have  700,000 Arabs  and 10,000 Jews. Jerusalem was  to have  about  100,000  of  each ethnicity. The Jews would get the blasted wasteland of the Negev desert, and  the Arabs  would  get  the fertile  upper  Galilee region. The UN thought  all these  arrangements were  entirely fair. So fair, in fact, that after Israel declared Statehood and the UN realized the Displaced Persons were  being handed rifles as soon as they got off the boat at Haifa, another SC resolution was passed to prevent immigration of males from age 17 to 45.

David Ben-Gurion, the head of the Jewish Agency whose authority had been established by  the League of  Nations, knew  the Jews would have to fight even for the lousy territory  they had been assigned. He ordered every Jew in Palestine  mobilized for war, both men and women alike.

On the day after Partition, a bus carrying  Jewish civilians to Jerusalem  was  attacked  by  Arabs with  rifles  and  grenades, killing five people,  including  a young  bride named  Shoshona Mizrachi Farhi  on  the  way   to  her  wedding. The war  for independence had begun, It would claim the lives of 6,000 Jews, or one percent of the total population.

Armed Bedoin nomads surrounded a number of isolated settlements in the south,  including Judith's  collective farm. Ben-Gurion swore that not one single settlement would be evacuated. Armored cars produced  in  Tel  Aviv  were used  to  secure  the  water pipelines that  these  settlements  depended on,  and  to  send weapons and reinforcements through the Bedoin lines.

A convoy  of  armored  buses  was attacked  on  April  15,  and seventy-seven Jewish doctors, nurses, and patients were killed. Only twenty-eight survived, and  only eight  of these  were not wounded. King Abdullah of Transjordan offered the Jews autonomy, but only if they remained under his sovereignty. A Jewish Agency negotiator named Golda Meir was  pained to disappoint  her good friend the  king,  but  she  had to  reject  his  offer. After everything the Jews had suffered it was simply not enough to be represented in a foreign parliament.

This led directly to the declaration of the State  of Israel on May 15, 1948. Eleven minutes later, the American President Harry S Truman officially recognized  the state  by cable,  before he even knew what the name of the country would be.

Britain opened  the  camps  on Cyprus  and  thousands  of  Jews streamed into Israel by  ship.r The  first Egyptian  attack was against the  kibbutz  of  Kfar  Darom,  seven  miles  south  of Gaza,  where thirty  settlers held  off elements  of the  Muslim Brotherhood with little more than grenades. When their grenades ran out, they put  explosives in  bags and  hurled them  at the attackers. When Egypt  rolled  in their  tanks,  the  settlers fired their British-made anti-tank  weapons at the  lead tanks, destroying them, and causing the other tanks to withdraw.

Then Egypt bypassed Kfar Darom and moved to kibbutz Nirim, five miles away. Twenty defenders were killed but they  held on. Not even a brutal air attack the next day broke their will.

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 Margolies' 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 a nephil.

The ambe said, "Peace be with you, Judith Margolies. I am called Elin. I serve the  one 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."r A rat line was a kind of undergrounbd railroad for Nazis.

Elin said, "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 man of the  B'nei Elohim  named Jashen. He  has been working Wagner  undercover for two months.  Jashen's a polyglot. He speaks  Spanish and German  as though  he were born  to them. Also, he's a native North American,  but he can pass as a native South American.  So can I.  So can you,  Judith, if I  squint my eyes. Wagner prefers a very neat home and Jashen has been coming in to  tidy things up for  him. Along the way  they've struck up something  of a  friendship, much  to Jashen's  disgust off  the record, but  he's very  professional about  it. Recently  he 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, 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. I'm  going to incapacitate  the  subject  so  you  can  deliver  him  to  your government alive and well."

"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."r 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 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."

The next  thing  Lilith  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  the  Red  House on  Yarkon Street in  Tel Aviv.r  Mossad  took  delivery of  Horst  Wagner with all his supplementary  documentation, but there  were many pointed questions  that  Judith  found  impossible  to  answer. Fortunately for her, such was her new fame, both nationally and internationally, that  the  intelligence service  was  severely constrained. When Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion learned of the details, he told Mossad to back  off. In his ancillary role as Defense Minister he brevetted Judith to the rank of Segen in the Israeli Defense Force, equivalent to a junior lieutenant.

For the time being, as a brevet officer, she retained the pay of Samal, or Sergeant, from her service in the reserves. But having fallen officially into the clutches of the IDF officer corps she was compelled to undergo her first physical.

In the main Judith was in excellent condition. The doctors noted the ugly mass of keloid whip  scars on her back,  which limited her movement to a degree. When they noted the six digit tattoo on her forearm they knew how she got the scars.

In 1952 there was a coup in Egypt deposing King Farouk, who had ruled his country  since  1936. One of the  coup plotters,  a leftist revolutionary named Colonel  Gamal Nasser, steadily rose in influence to  become the  usual President-for-life. In 1956 Nasser nationalized the  Suez Canal,  seizing control  from the British. He closed the Straits of  Tirin in the Red  Sea, which effectively put the southernmost Israeli port of  Eilat under a blockade. At the same time he refused to allow  any ships bound for Tel Aviv or Haifa to transit the canal.

The United Kingdom and France laid plans to take the canal back by force. They were interested in  getting Israel  involved in this operation. Israel was already leaning toward a tussle with Egypt, the  question  was  simply when,  not  if. Cross-border fedayeen raids from the Gaza strip had never ceased in the eight years Egypt had occupied it, as Judith could well testify.

Judith skipped from 1951 and arrived in 1956 at the still tender age of twenty-three. For Michael the  only difficult  part was convincing Judith that what hy had done to her was real.

When Judith reported to her unit she explained her absence from all the scheduled drills with a claim that she had been overseas hunting Nazis. That was  entirely  sufficient. Her superior officers knew she was the apple of the Prime Minister's eye.

Seren Judith Margolies's part in the war began at Eilat and ran down the western shore of the Gulf of Aqaba.r The objective was to seize the guns at Sharm el-Sheikh and lift the closure of the Straits of Tiran. Her commander was Colonel Avraham Yoffe, and she was part of  a motorized infantry  brigade of  two thousand soldiers and two hundred vehicles.

Their route was along a camel track that was  never designed to be used by wheeled vehicles. At one point at Wadi Zaala they all had to break out their spades,  dig their vehicles out  of deep sand, and push them uphill.

At Dahab  Oasis they  had  their  first firefight,  at  sunset, against the camel-mounted troops of the Egyptian Frontier Force. Later in the evening the force iwas supplied with fuel in drums from a set of twenty barges  towed down the Gulf  of Aqaba from Eilat. Judith volunteered to  join a  regiment-sized detachment who would board these barges to attack the Egyptians from the

At Sharm el-Sheikh a huge battery of naval guns were positioned to block all shipping making  its way to Eilat. There, fifteen hundred Egyptian troops with  their mortars and  artillery held off the Israelis advancing overland led by Colonel Ariel Sharon.

Judith's amphibious assault arrived  under the guise  of twenty deceptively painted, weathered-looking old barges  slowly towed behind a jumbo tugboat. They were in two parallel trains of ten containers all linked  together by  flexible couplings. At Lt. Colonel Motti Adan'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 40mm mortar fire  from somewhere in the  town but this was mainly just an annoyance. Each landing craft was coated with tank armor and constructed in the best shape for defense.

Judith made her way to the front of her  barge, pushing through the men and women hanging on to straps from the ceiling. Judith raised her voice to  address her  people, saying,  "I've spoken with  Colonel Adan.  He gave  us the  most dangerous  stretch of 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 take out the  big guns that have been turned  inland against the threat of our motorized infantry. You can hear them even now."

The boat officer beached Judith's  assault craft right  up onto the sand. The wall behind Judith dropped down to become a ramp, revealing a beach being torn  up by  mortar fire. She knew the heavy shelling was soon to come. She yelled "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 simultaneously. The astonishing sight of a rusty barge breaking up into twenty motorized  landing boats,  turning like  a drill team on parade, beaching on the spit, and disgorging a thousand IDF troops onto Egyptian soil was spotted by the alarmed men in the fort  control tower. They called it  in to a  secondary gun battery somewhere in Sharm el-Sheikh.

A pair of soldiers in Judith's Platoon, male  and female, tried to pinpoint where the rounds were coming from the puffs of smoke on the beach. Blue 5th Plt. took three killed and seven injured before he  got  a  fix. The woman called  out  the  resulting coordinates over a portable radio and requested an airstrike.

At first  Judith wasn't  sure  what  happened next. She found herself waking up with her  legs soaked by seawater. It slowly dawned on her that she had been knocked by the concussion of an incoming mortar round and ended up a little ways into the water. Judith had no recollection of the last few seconds. Minutes? She didn't know. Her only thought was that dying was so  easy. But Judith was  not  to  die  on  that  day. Her 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. Still, Judith was a little dazed,  and she no longer led the assault, to be sure. With her mind in a fog, she followed her people as quickly as she could manage.

A lieutenant assigned to serve under Judith had taken charge of the  assault when  he saw  her go  down. It was all  handled as seamlessly as possible but the lieutenant no longer really had a coherent  platoon to  lead. There had been  a  total of  three incoming rounds. Five in Judith's platoon were immediately dead, eight were wounded, and four of those would soon die from organ failure or simply by bleeding out. The survivors merged with the other platoons running towards the battery.

At the fort Judith could see the Egyptians were not fighting up to snuff. She could sense a feeling  of little boy  lost among them. The surprise amphibious assault in their rear had been the turn of the tide. It was palpable. It fell over the Egyptians like a shadow and they began to surrender en masse.

The big guns of the  fort were disarmed  by 9 AM  that morning. Then Judith, seeing  the blue  and white  flag of  her adoptive nation raised over  the battery,  fell at  her feet  in a  dead faint. It was only  then that she  received the  proper medical attention that she needed.r Jashen and Judith were both shocked at the ruin of an old man they saw through the one-way mirror. A survivor of the camps, he was  missing his nose and  his entire lower jaw. Still, when the  unfortunate man  saw the  prisoner cuffed to his chair it took two burly Mossad agents to restrain the Holocaust survivor  from  assaulting him  in a  blood-blind rage. Neither Jashen nor Judith  could stand  to watch  it any more. They turned away  to face  their own  interrogator around their own table.

"Sir," asked Judith,  incredulously, "what  was the  meaning of that display? I'm a seren of the Tzahal. I bring in Doctor Josef Mengele, the  Angel of Death, and  you don't believe me?  Do you think that  I fabricated all this  supplementary documentation?" She gestured at all the paperwork arranged on the table.

"Documentation," Commander Gavish of Mossad snorted. He wasn't having any of  what  Judith  was feeding  him. "We were never properly briefed on  the last high profile Nazi  you brought in. You just appeared  in the middle of the night  on the front door of  the  old  Mossad  Headquarters  with  Horst  Wagner  and  no explanation  of  how  you  found him,  no  explanation  how  you captured  him, and  and no  explanation  how you  both ended  up there. How fortunate  for you the founding father  of our nation had a keen sense of the propaganda value of such a stunt."

"Yes sir, Commander Gavish," she said, "as I recall, I even got a  promotion after  the stunt.  The Prime  Minister is  also the Minister of Defense, after all, sir, even now."

"And do you imagine the PM will just walk in here  as a deus ex machina and allow you to carry off a repeat performance?"

"No sir. But as I  reported, I  had outside assistance  on both occasions." Her head inclined slightly toward Jashen.

"Certainly, but that brings  me to the  subject of  your friend with no papers.  You say he's an American. I  realize the United States was  well-disposed toward our  country during the  War of Independence but lately, with  Eisenhower in office, things have not seemed so good. And you, an Israeli army officer with one of the  highest security  clearances in  the country,  have clearly been in long-duration contact with foreigners of unknown status, possibly intelligence agents, without  declaring the contact and all relevant details through official means."

"Sir, please review the security  profile in my  service jacket once  more.  You  will  see  that  I  have  indeed  declared  my association with a  group that calls itself  the B'nei Elohim."r "B'nei Elohim? The  offspring of  God?  That name  was such  an arrogant presumption we thought it to be some disgusting variety of messianic  Christianity. Is it,  in fact, a  religious group, Seren Margolies? Are you member?"

"She is  not yet  one  of  us,  Commander," Jashen  chimed  in, speaking for the first time since helping  Judith bring Mengele to captivity, and speaking in Hebrew at that. "But our leader, Michael, believes Judith  definitely  promises  to qualify  for membership in the B'nei Elohim one day."

Gavish noted that for  an American  Jashen's command  of modern Hebrew was excellent, as though he were secretly  sabra. It was somewhat better, in fact than  Judith's grasp of  the language. She sounded as one  expected a British  citizen to  sound after speaking the revived Hebrew language for only twelve years.

Gavish asked, "And  what is  the nature  of your  B'nei Elohim, Jashen? Christian?  An offshoot  of Judaism?  Certainly orthodox Jews would have nothing to do with you."

"I would say we are more orthodox than even  the haredim. After all, sir, what  you think of as Judaism didn't  really come into existence  until after  the Third  Temple was  destroyed. But  I didn't come here to offend your religious sensibilities."

"Then why did you come here?"

"Because lately the B'nei Elohim have taken on the role of pest exterminators. The  low-level Nazis, the sadistic  prison guards of relatively low  rank who managed to worm their  way back into German society or even smuggle themselves overseas, we just hunt them down  and Elininate  them. No  one escapes,  because 'Never Again', right?  I tell you  this in  case you wonder  why Judith keeps missing reserve duty. She's got a higher calling. But back to  the Nazis!  The notorious  ones, the  unspeakably evil  ones responsible for  tens or hundreds  of thousands of  deaths, they don't get off as easy as a round  to the back of the head. So we bring them in, meaning here to  your headquarters in Tel Aviv. I was part  of the extraction team  for Mengele and I  was also on the team back in '51 for  Wagner. Judith knows all about it, she already reported  everything. It  turns out I  have a  knack for languages, and also I have some experience with undercover work. Michael tells me  I'm  impossible to  intimidate,  but that,  I think, is mostly a Kuwapi tribal thing. Michael also asked me to hang around with Judith for  this latest delivery  because even though he already gave this same speech to  your Prime Minister once before it didn't seem to sink in here at Mossad.

The door to the interrogation room opened just then  and a flag officer blerted,  "Ten-HUTT!" Margolies and Gavish  stood  at attention from where they sat, while Jashen remained seated.

A very short elderly man with a bald head ringed by a wild tuft of white hair walked into the room with the chief of Mossad and two general officers of the Israeli Defense Force.

First he went to the one-way mirror to stare  at Doctor Mengele sitting at a table with his hands cuffed to  either side of his chair. The Prime Minister was  silent for  at least  a minute, looking at the prisoner, before he finally spoke. "So there he is, eh?" Then he turned to examine the room he was in, with his glance settling at last  on the face  of Judith. "Seren Judith Margolies, is it?"

"Yes sir."

"We never met, the last time you made such a delivery."

"No sir, but I am fully aware that you are very busy man."

"Did you find the administrative token of my appreciation to be acceptable recompense  for my  failure to  thank you  in person, Seren Margolies?"

"Yes sir. The promotion was a very welcome surprise, but I would have brought Mengele here today even if I was  still a sergeant in the  reserves." While she spoke she rolled up the  sleeve of her uniform so  the Prime Minister could see the  tattoo she had received in the satellite camp of Buchenwald where her life came very near to being snuffed out.

Ben-Gurion saw the six numerals  there and a dark  cloud passed briefly over his  face. Then he said,  "The same  rate applies today, Seren  Margolies. I brought  these army officers  with me today to take  note you are hereby brevetted to  the rank of rav seren.  And should  the Arabs  choose  to get  into yet  another tussle  with us  I'm certain  you will  distinguish yourself  in battle once more,  which will make that full rav  seren with all the pay and privileges that go with the rank."

Jashen cleared  his throat  and  addressed  Ben-Gurion at  that point. "Sir, I'd like to  inform you that Michael,  whom you've already met once before, is of the opinion the country will have at least ten years of relative quiet."

"I see. And may I ask your name?"

"I am Jashen, sir, of the B'nei Elohim. I helped Judith make the Mengele extraction and also Wagner in '51. But  if Ha-Mossad is worried that we  are working them out of a  job we can certainly step back  for the next decade  while things go quiet.  It seems Josef  Mengele  fancied  himself  a  humble  country  doctor  in Argentina, and when  we fetched him we also fetched  some of his patient's charts. You can see  the documents sitting here on the table. One of the folders is for none other than Adolf Eichmann. It  seems the  very architect  of  the Shoah  didn't much  fancy seeing just  any old  doctor in Argentina.  You'll find  all the contact information you  need to scoop Eichmann  up right there, because  if there's  one  thing doctors  want  to be  absolutely certain of, it's getting paid."

That last bit sent  David Ben-Gurion into  a fit  of hysterical laughter. When he recovered he said, "This is excellent, Jashen. We'll take what  you've given  us and  try to  capture Eichmann ourselves. The day he arrives in the country, living or dead, is the day brevet Rav Seren Judith Margolies becomes a full major."