The Fifth Horseman (18 page)

The burly former fighter pilot who was the architect of Israel’s Air Force slowly, despairingly almost, moved his head from side to side. “I can see none. We have no resources to mount and sustain an attack across hundreds of miles of open water.”

Begin glanced at his hands, folded on the table before him. “I have lived through one holocaust. I cannot live under the threat of another. I believe we have no choice. I pray God the bomb in New York doesn’t explode.”

“Good God!” General Avidar gasped. “We won’t have a friend left in the world.”

Begin’s face was set in a tragic, melancholy mask. “We have no friends now.

We never have. From Pharaoh to Hitler we have been a people condemned by God and history to dwell alone.”

He called for a vote. Scanning the raised hands, he remembered the May afternoon in 1948 when the leaders of the Jewish people had decided to proclaim their state — by just one vote. That was the margin before himone vote. He turned to General Dorit. “Destroy Libya,” he ordered.

No people in the world were better trained or better equipped to move fast in a crisis than the Israelis. Speed of reaction was a life-or-death reflex in a nation whose principal city could count on only two minutes’ warning of an enemy attack from its northern borders, five minutes’ from the south. As a result, the Israelis possessed probably the most highly perfected command communications network in the world, and on this December morning the speed with which it went into action was dazzling.

As soon as the Cabinet’s decision was taken, General Dorit got up and went to a special telephone in the anteroom. That phone gave him a direct link to “The Hole,” Israel’s underground command post 160 feet below her Pentagon at Hakyria between Tel Aviv’s Kaplan and Leonardo da Vinci Streets.

“The walls of Jericho,” he said to the major sitting at the command console in “The Hole.” His code phrase activated the command net which linked every one of Israel’s twenty-seven senior military officers day and night.

Whether they were jogging along the Tel Aviv waterfront, hoeing their garden, making love to a wife or a girl friend, or simply going to the toilet, each of those twenty-seven men was required to have a telephone or an ultrasophisticated portable shortwave, two-way radio transmitter within an arm’s length of his person at all times. They were all assigned code names that were changed on the fourth day of the month by a computer at Hakyria, the new names being selected at random from an assigned category such as flowers or fruits.

Dorit ran out of the government headquarters, toward one of the two completely duplicated communications trucks which always traveled with his gray Plymouth. By the time he had settled into its seat, all twenty-six of his key subordinates were on line, standing by for his orders. Exactly three minutes had elapsed since Menachem Begin had given the order to destroy Libya.

In “The Hole,” an Israeli female soldier, her khaki miniskirt clinging to her buttocks, unlocked the safe next to the command console. Inside were banks of envelopes, two for every potential enemy Israel possessed. The Israelis well knew there would be no time for planning once a crisis started, and those envelopes contained alternative sets of plans for a nuclear assault on any nation apt to menace her existence. Option A was designed to maximize the effect of the strike on the countries’ population centers, Option B to maximize the effects on military targets. The clerk plucked out the envelopes for “AmberLibya” and set them on the command console before the major who coordinated communications.

He quickly reviewed them by radio with Dorit. Everything the commander needed to know was contained in those envelopes: the radar frequencies; strike times calculated down to the last second; a complete description of Libya’s radar and aircraft defense; the best attack routes to each target; up-to-date aerial-reconnaissance photographs. In addition, duplicates of those envelopes were on file at the Israeli air bases where the pilots who would have to execute the plans they contained waited.

Dorit ordered Option B prepared. It would pose some spectacular problems: the commanding general wanted all targets struck simultaneously to heighten surprise. Because of the length of Libya’s coastline, the planes hitting Tripoli would have to cover 1,250 miles; those striking the eastern borders, half that distance.

As Libya was beyond the range of Israel’s Jericho B rockets designed to carry nuclear warheads six hundred miles, the strike would have to be delivered by her fleet of F-4 Phantom jets. Even more important was keeping the attack off unfriendly radar screens until the Phantoms were over their targets. Libya’s radar was not a serious problem. But the radars of the U.S. Sixth Fleet steaming west from Crete were. Dorit ordered BenGurion Airport to prepare Hassida for takeoff. “Hassida,” Hebrew for “stork,” was the code word for a Boeing 707. From the outside, it resembled a jet of Israel’s national airline, El Al. The resemblance ended at the cabin door.

Inside was a forest of electronic equipment.

Israel had pioneered the techniques of “masking” an aircraft’s flight pattern from enemy radar with the material the plane contained. It was thanks to such Israeli skills that the planes bearing Egypt’s commando assault team had been able to land at Nicosia airport undetected by Cypriot radar during their illfated effort to rescue a group of hostages held by Palestinian gunmen. In flight, that 707 would create a series of electronic “tunnels” through which the attacking Phantoms would streak, undetected, to their targets.

By the time Dorit’s truck had reached the Monastery of Latrun, halfway to Tel Aviv, be had finished. In less than twenty minutes, enveloped by the olive groves, the ageless hills of Judea, he had planned the first preemptive nuclear attack in history.

One task remained; choosing a code name for the strike. The major manning the command console proposed one. Dorit accepted it immediately. It was “Operation Maspha,” for the Biblical site where the thunder of Yahweh had routed the Philistines.

On every side the low and level sands stretched far away. Only the black stain of a herd of goats, the bleached white stone of a nomad’s tomb or the bat-wing profile of a Bedouin’s tent intruded on the endless ochre seas. Once the caravans of antiquity had passed by here; so, too, probably had the Children of Israel struggling homeward from their Egyptian exile. And here, under those Negev wastes, in three widely separated underground passageways, the children of modern Israel had stored for more than a decade the terrible weapons that were their nation’s arms of last resort, a score of atomic bombs.

Instants after General Dorit’s first alert had reached “The Hole,” a series of red lights had erupted in a coded burst on the control panel of each tunnel, activating at the same time the wail of a klaxon siren.

At the sound, a score of technicians in each tunnel leaped from desks, bunks and backgammon boards and raced down the brightly lit corridors to the nuclear vaults. On one side of each tunnel, in airless containers, were shiny silver balls not much larger than the grapefruits grown in the orchards of the kibbutzim a few miles away. They were the plutonium cores of Israel’s latest generation of nuclear weapons. As one team removed them from the containers, another was wheeling in the high explosive cladding, the jacket into which each was designed to fit.

Their separation was a strategem. Since an atomic bomb existed only when these two halves were assembled, Israel had always been able to maintain publicly that she had not introduced nuclear weapons into the Middle East.

It was a subterfuge similar to that employed by the aircraft carriers of the U.S. Seventh Fleet whenever they visited Japanese ports. Assembling them was a precise, delicate process, but those technicians spent hours every month rehearsing it until, like infantry soldiers breaking down and reassembling a rifle, they could do it blindfolded.

Only once before had those bombs been assembled with the terrible knowledge that they might have to be used. It was in the predawn hours of October 9, 1973, barely seventy-two hours after the outbreak of the 1973 war. Earlier that night, the Syrians had pierced the last Israeli defenses standing in their path on the northern front. The heartland of Israel, the rich plains of Galilee, lay exposed and undefended before their columns.

Moshe Dayan, in a state of extreme nervous agitation, had warned Golda Meir with an ancient Hebrew phrase that their nation faced a catastrophe comparable to the destruction of ancient Israel’s Second Temple by Rome’s rampaging legions.

Dismayed, dangerously close to suicide, she had responded with the order she had prayed she would never have to give, the order to prepare Israel’s nuclear weapons for use against her enemies. The Syrians did not attack, however, and the crisis passed, but not before the Soviets had rushed a shipload of nuclear warheads from their Black Sea naval base of Nikolaev to Alexandria to be incorporated into their Scud missiles already in Egypt.

CIA gamma-ray detectors hidden along the Bosporus picked them up as they transited the waterway. That knowledge, in turn, led to Richard Nixon’s global alert of U.S. forces.

Now, in their brilliantly illuminated tunnels, Israel’s technicians prepared those bombs once again. In the control room of each tunnel, a high-speed Teleprinter gave the setting for each bomb’s pressure detonator, fixing a few for ground-level burst, ordering the majority primed to explode at medium or high altitude to maximize their destructive radius.

As each was readied it was fitted into a special trolley designed to carry four fully armed bombs. The first trolleys were rolling down the corridors just eight minutes and forty-three seconds after the klaxon’s first warning wail.

The atomic bombs speeding toward their elevators represented the final fruits of a program almost as old as the state of Israel itself. The man who had originally proposed it was Chaim Weizmann, Israel’s first President and a brilliant scientist whose work in naval gunpowder for the British in 1914 had helped open Palestine for Jewish immigration with the Balfour Declaration. Over the objections of a number of his colleagues, David BenGurion, the warrior-philosopher who presided over the state in its formative years, had committed Israel to the nuclear program in the early 1950s.

Israel’s first allies in the search were the French, embarked in defiance of their Anglo-American allies on a nuclear-arms program of their own. Cut off from access to computer technology by the Americans, the French turned to the minds of the Weizmann Institute outside Tel Aviv for help in the interminable calculations the bomb project required. The Israelis also introduced the French to a technique they had developed to produce heavy water. In return, the French gave the Israelis access to their program and let them participate in the Sahara tests of their first bomb design, a gesture which relieved Israel of the need to test herself. Finally, in late 1957, the French agreed to sell her an experimental reactor fueled with natural uranium, a reactor that both nations’ scientists knew could one day be used to produce weapons-grade plutonium.

BenGurion himself chose the site for his atomic installation, a desolate strip of desert easily isolated and protected twenty miles south of his home kibbutz of Sde Boker. It was called Dimona, the name of a Biblical town that had existed there in the time of the Nabataeans. When Israeli engineers moved in to prepare the center, the government decided to conceal its real purpose by labeling it a textile plant. Thereafter, as the reactor’s dome gradually began to rise above the desert floor, it was referred to by Israeli cognoscenti as “BenGurion’s pants factory.”

A year later, the arrival of Charles de Gaulle in power in France in May 1958 put an abrupt halt to FrancoIsraeli nuclear cooperation. For the nationalist de Gaulle, France’s nuclear program was no one’s business but France’s. Israel found herself with the theoretical knowledge she needed to build a bomb and, until Dimona was ready, nothing to build it with. She found what she needed in the unlikeliest of locations, a shabby factory complex on the outskirts of Apollo, Pennsylvania, thirtyfive miles northeast of Pittsburgh on Route 66. There the Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation (NUMEC)-found in 1957 by Dr. Zalman Shapiromade nuclear fuel and recovered highly enriched uranium from scraps of leftover fuel from the U.S. nuclearsubmarine program. Between 1960 and 1967 an unbelievable 572 pounds of highly enriched, weapons-grade uranium disappeared from NUMEC. Well over half of it, the CIA later discovered, at least enough for a score of bombs, wound up in the Negev.

That NUMEC uranium fueled Israel’s first generation of atomic bombs. The second generation was made from plutonium separated out of the burnt fuel of the Dimona reactor. Those efforts had left Israel, by the end of the seventies, far more than just the seventh nuclear power on the globe. The bombs rising out of their desert hiding places constituted part of a nuclear strike force which some intelligence agencies rated as good as England’s and superior to China’s.

“Stop here. I want to get some cigarettes.” Yusi Avidar, the director of military intelligence, waved his driver to a halt on Jerusalem’s Jaffa Road. He got out and walked to the tobacco shop just around the corner, where he bought a pack of Europa cigarettes.

When he came out, instead of returning to his car, he drifted up the street to the public telephone booth thirty yards away. No one recognized him there, fumbling through his address book for a telephone number. No one ever recognized Israeli intelligence directors; their faces and functions were carefully concealed from the public.

Avidar was not in fact looking for a number; he knew by heart the number he was thinking of calling. His hand trembled as he lit one of the cigarettes he had just bought. His face paled, and, standing there, pretending to study his address book, he felt his knees shake. His hand, a coin between his fingers, rose toward the phone. It stopped halfway. He turned to leave the booth, then stopped again. Swiftly, in one continuous movement designed almost to reach its culmination before any other impulse could stop him, he dropped the coin into the slot and dialed the number.