TCP

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 really ceased since the War of Independence, as Judith could well testify.

Judith was taken from 1951 and  debouched in 1956 at  the still tender age of twenty-three. Beleth had told her skipping through space was  Michael's  second  most-impressive  trick. Clearly, slipping through time was the most impressive one.

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. 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 was 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 sea.

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.

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."

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.

* * * * *

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.

But Egypt didn't have  things all their  way. Israel also took delivery of cargo, courtesy of the United States, to replace the ordnance and equipment being consumed by the war.

After the first  shipment Golda  Meir and  Moshe Dayan  stepped aboard one of the empty transports as it was being made ready to fly back to the United States. Judith Margolies was seated alone in a chair  that folded  down from  a bulkhead. She was under arrest, but not under restraint, other than a  seatbelt she was free to remove. They were relying on her honor as an officer of the IDF not to try to escape.

Dayan sharply called  her to  attention but  such was  Judith's anger that  she merely glared at  the two ministers and  made no move  to remove  her seatbelt  and  stand up. Meir cleared her throat and snapped, "Do you know who I am?"

"The real question, Madame Prime Minister, is do you know who I am?"

"Oh yes, Sgan aluf Margolies."

"Doctor Margolies, please,"  Judith  insisted. "I resigned my commission  the instant  I reported  to General  Eleazar and  he informed me  I was  under arrest.  So you must  forgive me  if I don't stand up."

"Doctor Margolies it is,  then. We are  still far  from winning this war,  but I well  know I have you  to thank for  keeping it from turning into a complete rout at the very beginning. And I'm well aware of your crucial role  in every conflict going back to the War of Independence."

Judith guestured at  herself,  the sole  piece  of cargo  being returned to America on  the plane. "This is a strange  way of showing your gratitude, Madame Prime Minister."

"The Americans have been demanding your extradition  for over a year now. The  exact reason has never been made  clear to me. It has  something  to  do  with your  association  with  the  B'nei Elohim Historical Institute. Heretofore  I've held them off with repeated inquiries for  more information, but now  I find myself at the end of my rope."

When Judith remained defiantly silent the defense minister Moshe Dayan spoke for the first time since ordering her to stand. "The country is in desperate need  of resupply to avoid  losing this war. The American President came through with the first shipment but he has conditioned further aid on your extradition."

Judith rolled up  one sleeve  of  her field  uniform to  reveal the six  numerals hastily  tattooed  there  by the  Germans  at Ohrdruf-Nord. "And what awaits  me in America,  Minister Dayan? Will I get a matching tattoo for my other arm?"

"The President assured me  you will  not be  mistreated," Meier told her. "From the information I have, you are to assist in the investigation of a member of this Institute."

"Then the President is wasting his time, Madam Prime Minister. I am a subject  of Her  Majesty  and more  the the  point, I'm  a citizen of this country. I am  not to be made to assist anything in America at  gunpoint. I will, in fact  refuse this assistance in retaliation."

"Only the initial contact is mandatory," Dayan said. "If, after hearing them out, you agree to help the Americans,  you will be given a  salary and a  car and  most important, your  freedom to move about,  and even to return  home at any time  afterward, if you wish.  If you  refuse, again after  hearing them  make their case, you will  be returned home with the next  aid shipment and no harm done."

"I will return home," Judith solemnly assured him,  "and if the mismanagement  of this  war  haven't driven  you  and the  Prime Minister from your current positions,  the court cases that will follow my illegal abduction will do so most assuredly."

Dayan allowed himself  to  smile. "Doctor Margolies, everyone knows you are a woman with an  indomitable will. If it down to a choice of  arresting you  to ensure  the continued  existence of this country and letting you run  free and holding on the office of Defense Minister the path is quite clear. Never again!"