Hesh Kestin - The Siege of Tel Aviv

While she stands in the moonlight, the young adjutant driving leaps out to open the rear door. She cannot see inside but hopes there is no more than one passenger. Waving her left hand gaily she approaches the car with the other behind her back until she is close enough: one passenger, struggling to get out of the car. So far, so good. But she is still too distant for certainty. As she closes the gap, the single passenger, an obese colonel, manages with the aid of his adjutant to exit the car. He is grinning.

She takes the adjutant out first, one shot to the head. He is still crumpling when she shifts the barrel of her 9mm Israel Military Industries pistol and drops the obese colonel with two shots. In motion immediately, she kicks off her heels and gets to the car. The colonel is still moving. All that fat. There is less fat around his skull. A third shot does the job.

She knows she has mere minutes before more Egyptian traffic appears, every one of their vehicles running with full headlights, sign enough that for the Egyptian Army the war is over, the area secure. She leaves her pistol by the car, not the best thing but she needs both hands and her dress affords nothing to tuck it into. The fat colonel’s uniform will do her no good, but after cutting through his trousers with a small, sharp IAF-issue emergency blade, she relieves him of his huge boxer shorts—a white flag may come in handy later. After rolling the huge corpse into the wadi, she turns to the adjutant. In a moment she is out of her clothes and into his, not a bad fit at all, though she will have to adjust the pistol belt holding up his, no longer her, pants. The adjutant’s Colt Commander, a .45, looks so new she wonders if it has ever been fired.

“Shit,” she says aloud. She should have done this before.

Climbing down into the wadi, she removes the colonel’s brass insignia of rank and his pistol, another Colt, but this one gold-plated. She climbs back to the road, wraps her heels in her dress, tosses the adjutant’s shoes into the front of the Cadillac, and takes off, leaving the bodies of the adjutant and Lieutenant Colonel Anwar, head of Egyptian Special Operations Branch, for the lappet-faced vultures.

In this there is the irony of rough justice. Col. Anwar has just come from setting up a “relocation camp” for the Hamas leadership of Gaza. Allied to the Muslim Brotherhood that for decades has been a thorn in the side of Egypt’s secular leadership, Hamas has long been at the top of the Egyptian army’s hit list.

Relocation is of course a euphemism. Just outside of Beersheba, Col. Anwar personally supervised the mass burial of twelve hundred Palestinians identified as Hamas, many of them accurately. Though Col. Anwar would have preferred to spend a bit more time on each one of these enemies of Egypt, this is hardly practical: wholesale torture in a war zone might leak out of even the most hermetically sealed area. The only choice was machine gunning them into mass graves and then bulldozing tons of sand to cover the bodies deep enough so that the ever-present vultures, whole flocks of which had migrated to feast on the victims of this war, would not spread their bones across the desert floor to become a diplomatic embarrassment and then, later on, a problem for tourists. For tourists, there can be nothing worse that coming across a pile of human bones before lunch.

Col. Anwar’s engineers had identified a spring close to the burial spot, which is why it was chosen. In a matter of weeks, Egyptian peasants are to be brought in to plant date palms over the mass graves, whose decomposing bodies will provide excellent fertilizer and the spring adequate water. A meticulous planner, Col. Anwar early on filed a claim for the site, together with a thousand acres surrounding it, more than sufficient for a village. Given a bit of luck and special investment from Cairo, one fine day the village might become a city. Upon maturity, the palms alone will provide an annual profit sufficient to ensure a wealth stream to generations of Anwars, to say nothing of rents from the village, and then—Allah willing—the city into which it might grow. According to the Egyptian proverb: Plant today, feast tomorrow .

But according to another Egyptian proverb: Because we feared the snake, we missed the scorpion .

In her adjutant’s uniform, adorned with Col. Anwar’s rank insignia, Alex reaches the first of what will be many Egyptian checkpoints. Half a dozen vehicles are lined up. Alex drives the Cadillac briskly around them, taps the horn, and takes the salute of the four infantrymen standing guard. Having removed her makeup and blond wig, Alex returns the salute with the casual ennui of a staff officer and drives on through, barely slowing down as the barrier is lifted.

THE NEXT MORNING, BARELY a hundred miles distant, two dozen Chariot tanks with the markings of the 112 tharmored brigade roll south down the Tel Aviv beachfront, passing the startled residents of the tent city that runs almost the entire length of Tel Aviv’s once pristine seafront. These are not tents precisely, but mere shelters strung together from sheets and blankets over whatever wood or metal could be scavenged from the beachfront hotels. Hotel mattresses provide the beds, each laboriously carried down dozens of narrow flights of stairs and then dragged to the beach. In a mélange of pragmatism and desiccated whimsy, most of these tent neighborhoods are marked with signage liberated from the hotels. In this way, one can say he now lives in the Herzl Suite near where Frishman Street meets the beach, or in the Presidential Ballroom at the end of Dizengoff Street. At the encampment marked King Solomon Conference Room, the tanks, led by a convoy of ten jeeps, turn east into the heart of the white city, rattle across a now brown public park, and come to a stop before the Tel Aviv Hilton. Compared to the massive armor the luxury hotel seems now blurry, faded, shrunken.

Its lobby is empty of furniture but not of people. These are not reading the Jerusalem Post and drinking espresso, signaling waiters for another round or meeting business associates. Instead the cavernous hall is full of children squatting on the now-filthy carpeting in juryrigged classrooms whose walls are the box springs that until recently supported the mattresses moved to the beach. In the classic manner of educators everywhere, the volunteer teachers attempt to hold the attention of their students through a combination of charm and discipline. They use blackboards of all sizes and shapes, some merely framed prints from the guest rooms painted over in matt black. The children sit on the floor, some rapt, most allowing their gaze to widen at the entrance of Yigal and Misha followed by forty men, half of them in uniform, the rest in the telltale mufti of muscle shirts and gold chains. All are armed.

Yigal is surprised there is a clerk at the long front desk, quite as if there could possibly be paying guests now that almost all foreign nationals have been evacuated via special flights from Ben Gurion International Airport—now Yasser Arafat International, though no one in Tel Aviv can bear to utter the name.

The receptionist is not a Hilton employee but a dedicated civil servant, working of course without pay, because there is no one to pay him, and even if there would be, the money he receives will be worthless. A hand-printed sign is propped on the desk:

Misha tips over the flimsy cardboard with the barrel of his gun. “Where do you keep the government?”

The clerk is not about to argue. He points in the direction of a sign that has not yet been taken down to become the name of a tent neighborhood. Misha motions to four of his men to remain in the lobby.