Hesh Kestin - The Siege of Tel Aviv

The man tied to the chair is Alon Peri, at forty-five the same age as his captor, sweat pouring down his face like wind-driven rain so that in the harshly air-conditioned cabin he feels it turn almost to ice. Peri is a manufacturer of sophisticated technology, mostly under contract to the Defense Ministry. In size, his factory is tiny compared to the behemoths that make up Israel’s arms sector, but he specializes in delicate yet stable fuses and remote triggering devices without which the giants of the industry could not survive. Lately he has developed a line of near-microscopic firing mechanisms for the newest generation of Israeli drones, which permits a reduction in weight, doubling their effective range.

While a dozen of Misha’s fellow hoods come and go in the salon, where a smaller group of four is intent on watching a television musical on the high-definition screen, Misha engages Peri in a long, if one-sided, negotiation.

“Mr. Shulman,” Peri says, sweating, “I have a board of directors. I just can’t say yes or no. It’s a corporation.”

“Board, shmord—you sell, I buy. It’s business.”

“Can I be frank?”

“We’re friends,” Misha offers. “Certainly, we could be.”

Peri continues to sweat, the runoff burning his eyes. “Your name can’t be anywhere near the deal. Not even a whisper.”

“Whispering I can’t prevent. It’s a small country. Everybody knows everything about everybody. You want to know my shoe size? Ask a taxi driver. When the prime minister gets her period, it’s a national day of mourning.”

“Mr. Shulman, your name just cannot be in it.”

Misha turns to his colleagues, who, as if drawn by invisible strings, turn to him from the television. “Balls the man has. I give him that. Brains, it’s an open question.”

Eight eyes return to the flatscreen. In many variations, they have seen this before, both on the screen and on the yacht.

“Look, Alon—can I call you Alon?”

“Sure,” says the man tied to the chair. “My friends call me Alon.”

“I don’t come to you like a leech, to draw blood. But as a partner.” Misha smiles wide enough to reveal a gold mine in the rear of his mouth—the lowliest Russian dentist knows more about precious metals than any ten jewelers at Tiffany. “Alon, I want to make you money. I want to make us both money. There’s nothing wrong with that. Nothing illegal.”

The man tied to the chair tries another tack. “Arms have a way of announcing themselves, Mr. Shulman. Every time I want to sell to, let’s say, a gray party, the government refers my request to committee. I’m not even sure there is such a committee. At bottom, it’s Washington that decides. The Americans don’t want to see our technology in the wrong hands.”

“Hands they don’t control.”

“Exactly.”

“What you’re saying is, me they can’t control.”

“Exactly exactly.”

“True enough. In Russia, they sent me to the gulag for seven years, and still they couldn’t control Misha Shulman. From Siberia, I ran everything.”

“If I deal with you, someone they’ve been trying to throw in jail for years, they’ll shut me down.”

Misha shakes his big head slowly. The heavy gold chain around his neck barely moves. “Whatever happened to capitalism?” he asks.

AT PRECISELY THE SAME time, at a Syrian Air Force base so secret even the intelligence arms of the various rebel groups fighting at the country’s borders have not so much as a clue it exists, ground crews begin fixing air-to-ground missiles to the undercarriage of sixty-two SU-24 Sukhoi jet fighter-bombers diagonally lined up on the runway like dancers in some lethal corps de ballet.

Because the Sukhoi normally carries fuel for a range of 1700 miles and only some 120 miles round trip will be required for this mission, the Russian-made jets are modified to carry four extra missiles instead.

As the mechanics work, a general in a jeep passes down the line. He is nothing less than the Syrian Air Force chief of staff, thought to have been killed in a rebel suicide raid months earlier. Instead he has been working steadily in secret, totally focused on what he expects will be the capstone of his career. Compared to sending jets to strafe and bomb primitive rebel positions in the eastern hills, this will open for him the doors of paradise, where he will reside in eternal pleasure, to say nothing of assuring his place in the history of military aviation. Not bad for the third son of a grocer in Aleppo.

IN HIS STUDY IN a villa in Herzliya Pituach, a beachfront community just north of Tel Aviv that is home to Israel’s old wealth—anything over five years qualifies—Yigal Lev, barefoot in pajamas, sits dictating to his secretary, who is nowhere to be seen. In only a few hours, she will transcribe these recordings into letters, emails, and faxes and send them out to Yigal’s network of business associates. As he sits in his favorite leather chair, feeling the wetness of the sea air envelope him like a damp blanket, he is blissfully unaware not one of these letters, faxes, and emails will be sent.

Isracorp, which Yigal founded twelve years earlier to coordinate the array of properties he accumulated based on a hunch—that Israel’s astoundingly successful high-tech sector would not merely generate fame for its originators but cash they would need to invest—is the country’s largest single business. It controls two banks, a shipping company, Israel’s second-largest airline, a phosphate mine at the Dead Sea, a boutique hotel chain, and the construction firm rebuilding the country’s railroad into a high-speed link that ties together its four largest cities, a nice complement to Isracorp’s chain of gas stations. “No bus company is for sale,” he was quoted in Globes , the Israeli business daily. “Otherwise, we’d have three out of three.” Outside the country, Isracorp mines gold in Zambia, grows pineapples in Sri Lanka, assembles cars in Brazil, tractors in Mexico, cell phones in Malaysia. To make this work, Yigal depends on a second hunch, which is that the same skills that created the technology providing key software for Microsoft, Apple, and Google can also provide the management talent for so many disparate companies. Both hunches proved correct.

At forty-six, Yigal Lev is a legend in Israeli business and a major player in the world economy. Unlike others of similar attainment, he prefers to live in the country of his birth, close to his boyhood friends, to the son serving as a young officer in the IDF, to the armored brigade he has commanded for the past ten years, men he loves and trusts, and who feel the same way about him. He has spent most of his military life with these men, starting as a young tank commander in the now obsolete British Centurion.

A model of that tank sits on the bookshelf opposite him the way another man might have a model of the Ferrari in his garage.

Another reminder sits within him: a jagged bit of steel that lodged in his spleen twenty years before when his tank was destroyed around him. After a medic patched him up, he refused to be evacuated to the rear and instead took command of an orphaned Mk I Chariot whose commander had been shot by a Syrian sniper when he got out to take a piss. Over his years in the armored corps, Yigal insisted that every one of his tanks carry sufficient empty canteens.

“Never leave your tin can,” he likes to tell his men. “It’s all you’ve got.”

These tankists admire and respect him, not because of his career as a tank commander, but because once he briefs them he encourages them to fight as independent units, sometimes as a battalion, sometimes in platoons, and sometimes in individual tanks. Always he trusts the judgment and initiative of his officers, just as he trusts the judgment and initiative of his managers.