TCP

Adriel 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 Adriel  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 Adriel 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 Adriel's talent as one  of the  B'nei Elohim  that  she could  confound the  senses of people  around her. In this  case,  she had  made  herself effectively invisible to the human eye.

Adriel 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 Adriel 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. Adriel 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 Adriel 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.r  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.r  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.r  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.r 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.

"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."

Retired major general  Ariel Sharon  was practically  neighbors with Judith Margolies. It took a scant half hour for her to be driven from  her kibbutz  of Yad  Mordechai to  his home  at the Sycamore Ranch a little to the east of Sderot.

She was driven  by Colonel  Yehoshua  Saguy. He was the  chief intelligence officer of  the 143rd  Reservse Armored  Division. Saguy was also the first stepping stone in a bridge that Judith hoped would  lead to  the  Prime  Minister. Certainly she  had exhausted every other  avenue, and  now, on  the very  brink of national catastrophe she was near despair.

Neither Judith nor Saguy were in uniform, as they were not in a duty status, but both had brought  their Class Bs in duffle bags they stored in the boot  of the  colonels car. Judith, who was twenty-six years of age chronologically, chose not  to wear the long-sleeved minidresses that she normally affected. They were quite popular in 1973, even in Arab countries. Instead she wore somewhat more conservative attire, as she was to meet a married military man who was her own age in terms of calendar time. But she would not be  able to  disguise that she  looked to  be two decades younger than she actually was in calendar time.

The Sycamore  Ranch had  all  the  olfactory ambiance  of  your run-of-the-mill sheep farm, but Judith did not even crinkle her nose. After all, there was livestock at Yad  Mordechai too. The general was expecting them. He was sitting on his porch sharing tea with his wife Lily when Yehoshua drove up, and rose to greet his visitors. Despite their non-duty status both the colonel and lieutenant colonel Margolies saluted the general out of respect, then Yehoshua drew near to  shake his superior  officer's hand. There was real  affection  between the  two  men. Sharon said, "Yeshi, you have brought arm candy with you, and you never spoke of her!"

"It is nothing like that, sir," the colonel said with a slightly embarrassed grin. "This is Sgan Aluf Judith  Margolies and she, or rather what she  has to say and to show you,  is the reason I have come."

Judith bowed her  head to  affirm what  the colonel  said. Lily Sharon came down from the  porch to  join her husband,  who was genuinely confused. He said, "I knew you looked familiar, I have seen photos but  I  assumed they  were from  the  Suez War.  So youthful you still are! How do you manage to do it?"

"Time travel, sir,"  said  Judith, with  a completely  straight face, and just for a moment Sharon believed her. Then he decided it was a delicious joke and broke into his characteristic laugh. If Judith was B'nei Elohim she would not have spoken so, even as a joke.

"Lily, We are to entertain a celibrity today," he told his wife. "This is Judith  Margolies." And such was  Judith's fame  as a soldier and a Nazi hunter that Lily could only remain silent and stare in genuine awe. But more soberly, Sharon said, "Whatever you have come to  tell me is for the ears of  Lily also. If not, then you might as well leave now."

Yehoshua assured him,  "Sir, nothing  we have  is from  Israeli intelligence,  because  Israeli   intelligence  has  practically nothing. That, in fact, is precisely the problem."

Judith hefted the briefcase she  was carrying. "If we could go indoors, sir?"

In the general's spacious home Judith saw a  large dining table under an ornate chandelier. She asked General Sharon  for his permission to use it to lay out what she  had brought, which he cheerfully  granted. She reached into  her briefcase  and began laying out documents. As she did this,  Sharon, his  wife, and Colonel Saguy seated themselves, and  Judith began to  speak as she worked.

"I think, general, that despite the fact that you were born here and I came from Britain,  we are very  much alike. We  are both patriots who have fought hard for the continued existence of our small country,  and we both hold  the opinion that lately  it is led by  idiots. And  how very unfortunate  that is,  sir. Within twenty-four hours  you, I,  and Colonel Saguy  will be  in field dress and the country will be at war."

She paused to see  the startled reaction  of the  general, then continued to lay out her evidence. She said, "Aman has nothing like this, sir, because the Egyptians have put the canal under a SAM umbrella that makes aerial reconnaisance quite perilous, and besides, the belief that Egypt will  not attack has taken on the dimensions of religious belief."

"There what is the  source of  this information?" demanded the general.

"The B'nei Elohim, sir."

General Sharon had  been raised  to think  in entirely  secular terms, and he was proud of that fact. "The ones with the crazy white horns? They are religious kooks themselves."

"Kooks, sir, perhaps, but they  are kooks who grounded  most of the Egyptian  air force on the  first day of the  Six Days. They have  aided me  in  every way  to bring  Nazi  war criminals  to justice. And now they have reached  out to me with this imagery, even as I am now reaching out to you, sir."

Sharon began looking at them. The photographs were mostly white, with the Suez Canal running  through them  as a gray  band, and they were speckled with tiny shapes that were quite distinctive: Soviet-supplied T-55 main  battle tanks. To the untrained eye they resembled nothing so much  as a sketch  done in ink  by an atavistic child, but  Sharon knew every kilometer  of the canal. It was unusual, but clearly genuine.

Colonel Saguy said,  "We counted  thirteen hundred  tanks, sir, T-55s, some T-62s,  all nearly flush on the western  bank of the canal. That  is far  more than they've  ever brought  forward in exercises before.  It is more than  they had even last  May, the first time we thought they were going to cross over."

"Thirteen hundred?  That's their  reserves  as  well. But  this photograph, I've never seen the like."

Judith supplied an answer: "It's a negative of  a thermal image taken from a B'nei Elohim platform that...well, sir, it can best be described  as an airship.  It moves fairly slowly  and sounds like a faint whirlwind, but it would not do for it to be seen by day. These images are from two nights ago. No one in Zahal cares to have a  look, but the entire Egyptian Second  Army is sitting on the canal  from Qantara to Deveroir, and  the entire Egyptian Third Army likewise is parked from Suez City north to the lake."

Sharon didn't ask whether the enemy was massed on the shores of Great  Bitter Lake  as well. He knew even the  Egyptians would consider it unfeasible to make a crossing there. And there were no roads to Israel north of  Qantara. But he did say, "This is hard to believe. Certainly  our own high-altitude reconnaissance planes,  flying  out of  range  of  the  SAMS, would  have  seen something."

"No sir,"   said  Lilith. "Everything, everything   is  under camoflage netting,  so you can  only catch them after  dusk with infrared,  and when  you  go thermal  you need  to  fly under  a thousand  mneters  to  resolve  the gun  barrels.  They've  been getting all this  ready since August. But Chief  Idiot Eli Zeira preaches that Egypt isn't confident about going to war and Sadat is doing everything in his power to feed that belief, right down to a flow of pure shit from a double agent."

"How will they breach the sand berm we've piled  up flush along the east side of the canal?"

"With four hundred fifty water cannons, sir,  powered by petrol and  drawing  water from  the  canal  itself. Then  they'll  use ferries and throw over pontoons.  The B'nei Elohim say they will start  at  1400  tomorrow  and  they will  have  at  least  five bridgeheads punched through the berm by dusk. They'll bring SA-6 and  7 air  cover across  the canal  with them,  not to  mention self-propelled triple A."

"I believe her," Saguy said. "The Egyptians have brought forward everything they need for a  crossing. This is no  exercise. And when  they break  through  the poor  fellows  garrisoned on  the 'impregnable' Bar-Lev Line will be fed to a meat grinder."

"Why do your religious kooks say Sadat will start a war he knows he can't win?"

"My kooks, sir, say Sadat thinks he needs this war just to stay in  power.  They  say  the  last  war,  the  Six  Days,  was  so humiliating to  the Egyptians  even losing  another war  will be acceptable if  they can  win back  a piece  of the  Sinai, maybe enough to reopen the canal to  shipping. And we know Syria wants the Golan  back, sir. The  B'nei Elohim say  it's going to  be a two-front war. But  with everyone in our  government buying into Zeira's 'assessment'  we're going to  be caught by  surprise and lose not only the Golan but the whole Sinai peninsula."

Sharon said, "If  Sadat  and  Assad are  tempted  to cross  the borders of  the country itself the  PM may resort to  the Samson Option. Things are different now than in the Six Days. She could send Cairo and Damascus up in clouds of radioactive smoke."

Judith said, "Yes sir, the B'nei Elohim have also said as much. The Soviets would,  of course, retaliate by taking  out Tel Aviv and  Jerusalem,  and  the  Americans will  sit  back  and  count themselves lucky it ended there. But  it won't end there for us. It will be like the Nazi catastrophe all over again, for us."

In the silence that followed, the general's  wife Lily blurted, "Never again!"

Sharon was on the verge of a decision, but he said, "Tomorrow is Yom Kippur. There are twelve religious kooks in the Knesset who would never assent to a mobilization on our highest holy day."

Judith replied, "Not  even the  National Religious  Party could block  mobilization when  hostilities actually  break out,  sir, which will be, as I said, at 1400 tomorrow. Besides, tomorrow is also Ramadan, which is Egypt's highest holy day. They're willing to set it aside to start  a conflict. The only question, sir, is whether we  take our  own religious principles  to be  a suicide pact."

The general's face grew stern. It was as though he had switched from a retirement mindset to his  old ways as a  commander with the flick of a switch. He said, "I am calling you both to duty status as of this moment, on  my own authority. Are your unforms on hand?"

"Yes sir," they said together.

"Take these documents to Major General Shmuel Gonen at Southern Command  in Be'er  Sheva. By  the time  you arrive  I will  have already spoken  to him by  phone." He looked directly at Judith and continued. "You have proceeded correctly to go from Yehoshua to me, and now you're going from me to Gonen, and  I will do my best to persuade him to send  you on to General Elazar. At best, we can  get a pre-emptive  strike on Syria and  Egypt overnight. The next best  would be a general call-up of  reservists at dawn tomorrow, which would give us half a day to get ready. At worst, someone in the chain from Gorodish to Golda will put your photos in the round file. But you have  to try, because as my wife just said, 'Never again'!"

Judith did brief Lt. General David Elazar but  things went much slower than Sharon guessed. As late as 7 AM  Saturday morning Elazar was still bickering  with Defense Minister  Moshe Dayan. But more evidence was trickling in besides  Judith's photos and her messages from the B'nei Elohim. Army intelligence reported the evacuation of the families of Soviet advisors from Egypt and Syria.

At 8 AM Elazar and  Dayan met  with Prime Minister  Golda Meir, Deputy PM Yigal Allon, and Military Secretary  Yisrael Lior. It was Lior who settled matters by reading a telegram from the head of Mossad that not only supported everything Judith told Elazar, but added many amplifying details.

Only five Egyptian brigades remained in  Cairo, everything else was in the Canal Zone. Syria was expected to attack  the Golan but Sadat would  not call  off his  own attack  if they  didn't follow  through. The Soviets  did not  know  Egypt  was  about to go  to  war,  by  Sadat's design,  but  the  Egyptians  were entirely confounded by Israel's complete non-response  to their preparations.

After that Dayan had no more argument with Elazar, and in fact a new shakiness in his voice betrayed a nervousness and doubt that infected even the PM. Elazar called for a pre-emptive strike on Syria and Egypt  at noon, but this was overruled  by Golda Meir. The United States was the last ally Israel had, she pointed out. "If we strike first, we won't get help from anybody."

Even a full mobilization might be viewed as  an aggressive act. But she was willing to do a partial call-up. Mobilization orders went out to the reservists  and regulars of the  Israel Defense Force while the soldiers were at home,  or attending synagogue, or even living overseas.

Ironically, the country being  more or less  shut down  for Yom Kippur left the roads clear  for the reservists to  reach their units without undue delay.

Egypt’s attack consisted of 100,000 soldiers, 1,300 tanks, 240 warplanes and 2,000 pieces of  artillery. At the same time, at the other  end of the  long axis  of Israel, six  hundred Syrian tanks advanced across the uplands known as the Golan Heights.

In the Sinai, Israel  lost two hundred  of their  three hundred tanks right away, but a pair of extra tank divisions were rushed forward to halt  the  Egyptian advance. Egyptian troops using Soviet-supplied anti-tank weaponry held the Israelis  to a line five miles east of the Suez Canal. Meanwhile more Egyptian tanks and infantry massing on their side of the  canal were protected from Israeli air  attack  by a  tough  shield of  anti-aircraft missiles guided by radar, again courtesy of the Soviet Union.

On October 13 the Egyptians stuck their toe out from under their SAM umbrella to try to break through two mountain passes in the Sinai. What followed was  the  largest  tank battle  on  Earth since the  1943 battle  of  Kursk  between Germany  and  Russia and the second  largest tank  battle anywhere,  ever, involving nearly two thousand  tanks. During the battle  a total  of 264 Egyptian tanks were knocked out, to Israel’s ten. On the 14th another Egyptian attack on the Suez Canal was  stopped with the destruction of  200  tanks  and a  thousand  Egyptian  soldiers killed.

The following day a third battle was fought at the meeting point between the Egyptian Second and Third Armies that  served as an administration  area for  both armies  and headquarters  for the 16th Infantry Division. Tanks fired at practically point blank range. Egypt lost 150 tanks  to Israel’s  eighty. With this action Israel erected a wall of fire between the  two halves of the Egyptian expeditionary force.

Overnight an IDF  parachute  brigade established  a toehold  on the  other  side of  the  Canal. Two forward-deployed Egyptian anti-aircraft missile bases were taken out,  allowing Israel to establish  air superiority  over the  western bank  of the  Suez Canal.

Ariel Sharon, commanding  the 143rd  Reserve Armored  Division, crossed the canal  north of  Great  Bitter Lake  through a  gap spotted by an American SR-71 spy plane where  the extreme right flank of the Egyptian 2nd Army was "in the air".

The 162nd and 252nd Armored Divisions followed  through the gap and turned  south leaving  the  encircled  Egyptian Third  Army stranded on the  east  side of  the  Canal with  no  way to  be resupplied. At that point the war on the southern front was all over but the crying.

Judith served under David Elazar in the Northern Command, where things moved a bit faster. The high tide of the Syrian advance reached nearly to Nafah in  the southern  Golan by 1700  of the second day. Judith arrived  the next  morninbg  in an  armored transport as part of the first wave of reserve forces who began to walk the  Syrians  back north,  inflicting  heavy losses  on them  as they  went. The only moment  on October  9th that  was touch-and-go was  a  Syrian  counterattack  at  Quneitra,  with helicopter-borne troops but  it  was repulsed,  and Israel  had reached the line from which Syria launched their  attack on the first day of the war.

Defense Minister Moshe Dayan wanted to halt right there, thirty miles from Damascus, to avoid drawing the Soviet Union into the war. General Elazar, by  contrast, wanted  to advance  another twenty miles into Syria to set  up a strong defensive  line and stabilize the northern front. Prime Minister Golda Meir, assured by the US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger that Nixon had her back, sided with Elazar.

The Israeli thrust east from the Golan Heights into Syria began on the 11th and pushed the Syrians back  after fierce fighting. Early that evening,  Judith’s brigade  was already  six miles over the border  into Syria. A few days later,  the Christian commander of Syria’s forces in the Golan was executed before a firing squad in Damascus for ordering the withdrawal.

Moshe Dayan went on television  to remind the Syrians  that the road from Damascus to Israel was  also the road from  Israel to Damascus. But the next day  Iraq entered the war,  with fifteen thousand Iraqi troops shoring up the Syrian front. King Hussein of Jordan resisted Arab pressure, however, and  refused to move against Israel in yet another war.

In Syria, all eighty tanks of one Iraqi  brigade were destroyed by Israeli tanks and  planes with absolutely  no losses  to the Israelis. Another Iraqi tank brigade was blocked by Judith and a demolition crew who arrived at two bridges the  tanks needed to cross and  slice partway  through their support  structures with blow torches, letting the weight  of the  tanks do most  of the work. There were no  tell-tale  explosions. When the bridges collapsed, fifty of the  eighty tanks were  stranded on  a dirt “island” with fewer than ten  tanks able to  advance, which the Israeli Air Force quickly took off the board.

On the 16th the Israelis  held their position just  eight miles outside of Damascus  and Judith's  brigade of  infantry was  an important  part of  this  strong offensive  line. The IDF also halted five miles  west of  the  road from  Damascus to  Amman, Jordan, ready to block any late-minute entry of Jordan into the war with a flank attack. The Soviet Union finally grew alarmed at the setbacks experienced by their Arab client states.

At that point the Israelis begin  to breathe a sigh  of relief, particularly when equally spectacular results started to come in from the southern theater of war. Only after the nation seemed to be out  of  danger did  the twelve  Knesset  members of  the National Religious Party, with none  of their own boots  on the ground and representing a constituency who also evaded military service on religious grounds,  prevailed upon the  female Prime Minister Golda Meir to withdraw Judith Margolies from the front lines of the conflict. In the event she refused they threatened to walk out of the  temporary power-sharing arrangement  of her Alignment party, which would in turn drive her from office. Meir caved in, and Lilith Margolies was relieved of duty.

When she made  formal  protest,  General Elazar,  demonstrating an  extraordinarily  short   memory  of   Judith’s  legendary accomplishments for Israel over the years, angrily refused. She bared her arm with the  six tattooed  numerals, but it  was not enough for Elazar and she was dismissed.

She didn't know it  at the time,  but the  demobilization order saved her life.

As the 1973 Yom Kippur war raged on, President Nixon ordered an airlift of military  supplies to allow Israel  to keep fighting. The Soviets  supplied  their Arab  client  states  continuously throughout the war. A veritable conveyor belt  of Soviet  war supplies move by air  to Egypt and  Syria, while  the Americans supplied Israel from their own endless abundance. But when the Soviet Union saw the Arabs checked in the Golan and later in the Suez, and Nixon refused to pressure Israel to allow the trapped Third Army to escape,  Leonid Brezhnev began  airlifting Soviet troops to Cairo to supplement the Egyptians.

Passing through the  strait  of the  Dardenelles, Soviet  naval forces in  the  Mediterranean  reached a  total  of  97  ships, including 23 submarines,  while the  US added  a third  carrier battle group from Spain for a total of 60 ships. Three carriers in a theater always heralded war.

Nixon took the US to DEFCON 3 and sent  the 101st Airborne into the Sinai to counterbalance the Soviet troops,  but events were moving fast. There was insufficient time to match  the Soviets troop-for-troop. Nixon told Brezhnev that sending any more troop transport planes would  be crossing  a red  line, but  Brezhnev called his bluff.

Fighters from   the  USS   Independence  shot  down   the  next cargo plane  hauling Soviet  troops. Brezhnev replied with  a nuclear-tipped  torpedo round  fired  at  the Independence. The United States  didn’t  even  know  the  Soviets  had  nuclear torpedoes. The weapon didn’t even have to be close. The blast took out the carrier, several support ships steaming alongside, and even damaged the Soviet  submarine that fired it. The Cold War had just gone hot.

Michael met Judith at Yad  Mordechai and  took her on  her last jaunt by fold-door, this time to Robyn's home  inr Nixon orders weapons red and free on all Soviet forces in the Mediterranean, and the two sides slug it  out. Both remaining US carriers are taken out, but the Soviet naval forces definitely come off much the worse.

This hardly matters at all. An exchange of ICBMs takes out the American and the  Soviet  capital cities,  killing ten  million people instantly and many more people after the  fact. Then the two superpowers go back into their own corners to assess what is happening and see if the other side is willing to escalate.

A few more items on each side’s laundry list  are nuked, such as the Hanford site in the  US where Robyn and  Hunky were once held, and the Sevastopol navy base, but Brezhnev  and Nixon are both dead, and cooler heads don’t think  losing more millions of lives would be worth what either side has gained by the war, which is precisely nothing.

Haziel appears to Lilith one final time after  she has returned to America, while the country  is busy tearing itself  apart in the  wake  of  the  limited nuclear  exchange  with  the  Soviet Union.Sha knows  har   own  adopted  nation  of   Israel  is  a radioactive shambles. It is December of 1973. Haziel brings a coat to bundle up Lilith. The yin seems to be sad and listless, and says nothing,  letting  Haziel  whisk the  two  of them  to wherever sha wishes to go.Certainly  the novelty of traveling in this way has worn off.