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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." P1

"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 eliminate  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."                              P2

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?" P3

"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."

Shyla drew a shift on the evening of June 4, 1967 that went past midnight and even a  bit past  dawn on  the following  day. The Egyptian air force possessed seventeen airfields and she worked every one of them. Fortunately, the idiotic way  the Egyptians parked their bombers and fighters made her job much easier than she feared it would be.

The fools  literally  arranged  their ready  aircraft  in  neat squares with impressive military precision, if not  much in the way of  military  wisdom. When Shyla saw  the  situation  she realized she could accomplish her mission by simply working the perimeter of the squares rather than bagging every plane.

The charges she used were  about the  size of the  clay pigeons used in shooting practice, and they were even made of clay, with a magnet embedded in it. Every time Shyla said, "Pull!" one of them would  appear  at  her  feet. Sometimes the  guards  who patrolled the parked  planes would  hear her  say that,  but of course they would see nothing,  because it was Shyla's talent as one of the B'nei Elohim that she could be invisible to the human eye.

One time Ithuriel pointed out that when Shyla was invisible she must also be blind, but  this wasn't the  case, and she  had no idea how Bat-El arranged that it should be so, assuming Ithuriel was not just pulling her leg. P4

Shyla took the charges and put them on the pylon of the forward landing gear of each fighter  where it emerged from  two hinged panels on the front of the plane. Only a thorough inspection by a pilot or a mechanic would have revealed them, certainly not by untrained guards. The idea was to render the  planes nose-down after detonation.

With twenty planes prepared in this way, a square of thirty-six would be taken completely out of action. The ones that were not disabled would be trapped in  place by  the ones that  were, so closely were they positioned.

When Shyla said, "Reset!" she was whisked to another airfield to evaluate the layout  and  repeat her  performance. A half-hour after sunset on the 5th of June she had completed the set parked at the Arish airfield, the final airfield, the one the Israelis wanted to  leave with  its  runways  intact  to use  after  the immanent war.

From a  safe  distance  she  gave the  order  to  detonate  and witnessed the two long rows of planes immediately  go nose down on the tarmac. Shyla knew that the  same scene  was repeated, simultaneously, at sixteen other bases across Egypt.

Rav seren Judith  Margolies  received the  phone  call she  was expecting from her contacts in the B'nei Elohim and reported the sabotage of the Egyptian air force to the other officers in the Kirya, the sprawling IDF headquarters in Tel  Aviv. Orders were given to four Israeli air  force fighters flying on  Combat Air Patrol (CAP) to turn north  in the Mediterranian until,  it was estimated, they had disappeared from Egyptian  radar. They were already hovering on the edge of view. Then the planes descended to just sixty  feet  "off the  deck" to  avoid  radar and  SA-2 missiles and turned south  toward Egypt. Their mission was to evaluate  the massive  damage  that Judith  had assured  Defense Minister Moshe Dayan, in the final four days of planning for the war, would be inflicted by the B'nei Elohim.

When the fighter pilots saw what Shyla had done they were quite satisfied. They had been briefed  that should the  B'nei Elohim prove successful they were to  fly to the airfield  holding the greatest number of large bombers, the ones  capable of striking Israeli cities, and inflict as much damage as possible. The rest of Israel's entire air  force, just two  hundred planes  to the Arab's five hundred, were then scrambled for the first wave.

In just a quarter of an hour on the morning  of June 5 hundreds of Egyptian warplanes were mortally crippled. P5 A new type of bomb produced in collaboration with France tore up the airfields where the planes were parked. The bombs descended by parachute until they were  pointed nose down, then  a rocket engine drove them into the  concrete of the runways. When they exploded they shattered the runways right to the foundations and made them useless without time-consuming repairs.

When the first wave returned  to Israel, ground teams  had been trained to refuel the planes and get them back  into the sky in under  ten minutes. So a second wave  followed hard  after the first attack. A third wave of fifty sorties were sent to polish things up.

When this aerial blitzkrieg was over, Egypt had lost 293 planes to Israel's nineteen. President Nasser called King  Hussein of Jordan but told him nothing  of the sudden and inexplicable loss of his entire air force. He told the king it was the Israeli air force, rather, that had been completely destroyed.

Proceeding on the basis of this misinformation the king ordered his troops to cross the border and his planes  to begin bombing targets in Israel. Syria and Iraq attacked at precisely the same time. Within two  hours,  Israeli  warplanes  drove  back  the invading forces and destroyed the bulk of  Syrian and Jordanian air assets with aerial dogfights and ground attacks.

A grand total of four  hundred Arab aircraft were  destroyed in the  first  single  day  of fighting,  leaving  them  with  only a hundred  operational  planes,  but there  remained  very  few operational runways from which to launch them. That fact alone decided the ultimate outcome of the brief war.

On June 6th Nasser made another  phone call to King  Hussein to tell him  American and British  planes had destroyed  his entire air force on the first day. Nasser half-believed it himself. He still had no  idea it  was the  B'nei Elohim  who prepared  the attack. Nasser had no  idea the B'nei  Elohim even  existed. To admit the Israelis had somehow decapitated his entire air force would imply that mere Jews  were militarily superior  to Arabs, which was, of course, utterly unthinkable. So it must have been the Anglos, or so went his thinking.

On the 8th of June the officer commanding Alef Battalion, Third Company, Rav seren Judith Margolies,  lay atop a sand  berm and looked across the Suez Canal at the former  British airfield of Deversoir, or Duweir Suweir as her enemy called it, which lay on the northwestern  shore of  the Great Bitter  Lake at  the place where it narrowed to form the canal once more. P6

The canal-crossing operations originating on there were intense. Poor planning had caught up to the Egyptians and  they now knew the fragility of the thread on which the entire war now hung. It turns out that troops need to drink water, oddly enough, and in the scorching desert  of the Sinai Peninsula,  doubly so. Judith took aim at a water tower with her Anti-Tank Guided Missile and fired. The trick  was  to  keep the  target  centered  in  the crosshairs until  it hit. This could  be difficult  with  the intense pressures of  combat,  but Judith's  people had  earned their reputation by their steely  cool under fire. Her missile hit, becoming one of five to hit that tower. Judith dropped the firing mechanism  and turned  south  to  reach the  prearranged marshalling point in the rear.

Captain Shaul Ben-Elissar  found a  parked water  truck in  his sights, and successfully took  it out before  following Judith. The truck was not armored, certainly not to  the 30 centimeters of steel which the ATGMs were capable  of penetrating. Sergeant Binyamin Gafhi fired and hit a raft returning  across the mouth of the canal where it entered the Great Bitter  Lake, making it unavailable to pick  up one of the parked  water trucks. Private Marina Merom  fired  her  missile. The rocket  screamed  away, spooling out a  fine  guidance command  wire  behind it. Using electrical signals sent down  that wire, Marina  carefully kept her crosshairs on target and  struck a steel aqueduct  pipe. It would soon be field-repaired, but not quickly enough to help the Egyptians trapped on the other side of the canal.

By that time the Egyptians realized the threat was coming from a levee bordering the lake and directed fire southeast.

Private Uzi Herschson advanced closer to Deversoir to get inside the 2,500 meter range of  his weapon. There he struck a large raft with a  water truck  on board. Lieutenant Noami Meridor, rattled by shrapnel dinging the sand nearby,  couldn't keep her target centered and missed. Her missile struck the ground inside the old airfield and exploded, but still she contributed to the fog of war and served as suppressing fire to keep the Egyptians from retaliating effectively. Captain Maxim Shahal wiped out a large crane  truck which  was busy attempting  to right  a water truck overturned by an earlier blast.

The ATGW attack fell silent. Nearly a thousand wires lay on the sands. Judith's raid was  complete. In roughly one half-hour's work, she had ensured a swift denouement to the war. Not all the water supplies were destroyed, but  enough to ensure  that only the Egyptian officers  would taste  fresh water  in the  desert tomorrow. What would follow was full-scale mutiny. P7

After the war Michael  came calling to  Yad Mordechai  to visit Judith before  she  could  exchange  her  Major's  uniform  for clothing more appropriate for a collective farm. He said, "Your father Benjamin will not live forever."

Judith lost her smile. She knew what Michael had come to ask her to do. It was something Judith had dreaded for  years. "I'm not ready to tell him everything," she said soberly.

"No, but you are, I think, ready to tell him something, and that is a vast  improvement." He held  out his  hand. "Come." Then Michael whisked Judith back to St. Catherine's lighthouse on the Isle of Wight in the same manner hy had whisked the girl to the kibbutz twenty-one years prior, as the calendar ticked, but only six years as Judith's life went.

For years after the war her father was only  allowed to work in the lighthouse  weather station,  but now,  as Michael  told her before they left Israel, he was back to living in the lighthouse and maintaining it, as Judith remembered from her childhood. She stopped walking and asked of Michael the question she had asked so many others: "Will you tell me what you really are?"

"You will know  everything about  me," Michael  assured her. I "swear this to you. But only after you have first spoken to your father of your life since you were first taken from him."

Judith stopped in her tracks. "Why must it be so?"

"Have you not discerned by now that I am healing your soul?"

After a pause Judith nodded her head, then she resumed her walk.

Michael said, "Good! Then what I have been doing is working."

Somewhere between the  place where  Judith had  paused and  the front door  of the  lighthouse  Michael  somehow slipped  away. Judith was quite alone when she knocked on the door of what had been her girlhood home. A woman Judith did not know opened the door. "Yes, what is it?"

"Is my — is Benjamin home?" '

"Who are you?"

Judith's father hobbled up behind the woman to see who had come calling. At first, when he  saw the Israeli uniform,  he didn't recognize who it was. Benjamin thought he was in trouble again. P8

But he carried within his mind the memory of his daughter's face and she hadn't changed nearly as much in the twenty-one years of chronological time that he did. Tentatively, he asked, "Judith? Are you Judith?"

His daughter's face crinkled up in a way that Benjamin could not mistake, and this time there were tears, perhaps the first tears she had shed over all that time. Judith sobbed, "Father, I'm so sorry!"

Benjamin pulled his daughter indoors. They embraced for a long time, and Judith wept as she had never done so in her life. She realized that her father had done nothing,  nothing, to deserve the silence she had inflicted on him all those years. Judith had rationalized to herself that she  was punishing her  father for refusing to emigrate to  Palestine, but  that was  nothing more than a huge lie she had made herself believe all that time, and Judith marvelled at her own capacity for self-deception.

When Benjamin and Judith separated from their long embrace, the strange woman held out her  hand to  Judith. "I am Laura," she introduced her self. "I am your father's wife."

"Life goes on," Benjamin offered, as though in explanation.

Judith was mildly shocked by the news. "Father. We have so much catching up to do, it seems."

"Then let us do  so, beloved  daughter, over  a cuppa." So the three shared afternoon  tea in  the  large common  room of  the lighthouse. It was the  place  that once  held  a Teletype,  a machine that gave the family their orders directing the Clarinet antenna for a strategic bombing run by the Royal Air Force.

Benjamin told Judith he was old enough to retire, but operating the lighthouse was not so physically demanding. He said he still enjoyed making his  meteorological observations  and publishing articles from his  field in  various professional  journals. At certain hours during the day he and Laura  would guide tourists about the lighthouse  grounds and  even take  them to  the top, something Benjamin  forced  himself  to do  despite  a  bit  of arthritis in his knees.

Judith, for her part,  was necessarily  vague on  answering her father's questions about how she  managed to travel  to Israel, since she  herself  didn't  know the  mechanics  of  that. But everything else she related, in reverse order, starting from the recent Six Day War back to the birth of her adopted nation. P9

"And all this time, daughter,  were there no gentlemen  in your life? Have you never considered being married?"

"How shall  I proceed  father?  The  thought of  physical  love inevitably takes  me back to  the camps.  You may draw  your own conclusions, but  that, I think is  a mental scar far  more long lasting than any of the physical ones I bear."

"I am so sorry, Judith!"

"It is I who must apologize to you, father. At  no time did you do or say anything to earn silence from your own daughter."

"Once,' he tentatively  said, thinking  of Judith's  mention of physical scars,  "just once, I  saw the terrible damage  on your back. Will you say anything about what happened to you?"

Judith lowered her head for  a rather long time,  gathering the painful memories into a narrative  for the first time  since it happened. This is it,  she thought,  and I  dread  it so,  but Michael insists that I do this and I owe him so much.

"One time," she  began,  "near  the very  end,  before we  were liberated by the American army, the survivors — and this was a death camp so  there were not very many of  us — the survivors were  mustered together  for a  roll call,  or what  the Germans called an  appell. We all  wore very  thin clothing, and  it was very cold, as mornings often are in late March. The commander of the camp gave an order to flog the entire first row of prisoners simply  because  the  exhausted  and  freezing  women  had  poor posture! And I was in the first row.

"Listening to the screams of the prisoners being whipped before my turn was  almost worse than the actual  punishment. Almost. I vowed that  I would  not scream  when it happened  to me,  and I begged God  for the strength to  make that vow hold  true. I was stripped naked and held by two  female guards over a table while a  third laid  on  the lash.  The agony  of  this punishment  is indescribable. I will not even  attempt to describe it. But from the first stroke I completely forgot my vow, and I did scream.

Both Benjamin and  Laura gaped  at her  with horror. "Please," Benjamin begged, recovering just a  bit. "I must know. Please. What happened to your mother?"

But Judith shook  her head  firmly. "You're not ready  to hear that, father. It would kill you.  I'm not even ready to remember it yet, and I was there."