Hesh Kestin - The Siege of Tel Aviv

On the opposite bank, semi-trailers are lined up on the roadway leading to the Jordanian customs post guarding the approach to the Allenby Bridge—and to Israel, a former enemy state now something less than that, not yet an ally, merely a neighbor. This single-lane commercial link permits dozens of trucks to cross the rickety bridge carrying fruits and vegetables bound for Israel’s open-air markets, along with manufactured items, mostly piece goods stitched together in Amman, for export to Europe and the United States through Israel’s ports. Jordan has only one seaport, at Aqaba in the south, directly across from the Israeli vacation resort city of Eilat, but that port faces the wrong waterway. To reach Europe, the same goods would have to travel south down the Red Sea, whose mouth is infested with Eritrean pirates, then north again through the Suez Canal, whose mouth is controlled by Egyptians comfortably ensconced in arguably the world’s most expensive toll booth. At the end of this journey of five hundred miles, the shipment would be an hour’s drive from the same Allenby Bridge. Through a careful arrangement, Jordan uses the Israeli ports of Haifa and Ashdod as though they are its own—and unless the goods are destined for Israeli consumers, there is no tax.

It is this example that the United States and its fellow peace brokers have utilized to convince the Arab League to exchange the bomb for the briefcase.

Cobi’s cell phone chimes the opening notes from Happy Birthday , the ringtone a present from his mother the month before.

“Mom,” he says. “I told you never to call me at the office.”

“I was thinking of you.”

“It’s four in the morning. You should be sleeping.”

“Your father and I were talking. I can’t wait until tomorrow to know you’re well.”

“Do we still have hot water?”

“Hot water?”

“Then I can’t wait until tomorrow either. Look, Mom, I really—”

“And with all the good news…”

“What good news?”

“The peace.”

“Yeah, well,” Cobi says, a twenty-one-year-old trying his best to sound grown-up, which to him means cynical, world-weary—his father’s son. “We’ll still need an army.”

“But no more war, darling. Think about it.”

“Not my job, Mom.”

“Stay safe,” she tells him. “At the last minute, always at the last minute, boys die. If they don’t decide to be heroes, if they can just wait on the sidelines…”

“Love to Dad,” Cobi says. He has heard this before.

“I love you.”

“I love you too,” he says, clicking off. He turns to the radioman squatting next to him, smoking a joint. “I’m here nineteen days. I never saw this many trucks.”

“I’m here nineteen months. Jordan Customs opens only six hours a day. They get backed up.”

“Still, that’s a lot of trucks.” He considers letting it slide, then: “Get me HQ.”

“We’re reporting trucks?”

“Too many trucks.”

“Your funeral,” the radioman says, drawing in a long toke before he puts through the call.

IN THE PASSENGER SEAT of a white Volvo sedan speeding south to Tel Aviv from his home in Caesarea, the ancient port that was at one time the Latin-speaking capital of Roman-ruled Palestine, Lieutenant General Pinchas Harari listens carefully to what is being explained to him on the phone. Harari is one of those officers who refuses to delegate but hates being bothered by details, an impossible contradiction that wears him down and earns his staff sleepless nights. If he were the head of a corporation instead of an army, he would long ago have hired a psychologist to help him resolve this conflict, but as chief of staff of the IDF he has no such luxury. If a secret like that ever got out, it would end his career. His predecessor—the most capable officer of his generation, who liked a drink from time to time—was branded an alcoholic and lost his job as a result.

“Repeat.”

General Harari listens even more carefully than before. “Coincidence is not conspiracy,” he says. “But I’m on my way. Continue monitoring.” To himself he mutters: “Sissies.”

“Commander?”

General Harari turns to his driver. “Gingy, I said something to you?”

“I don’t know, commander. I thought maybe—”

“How long have you driven for me?”

“Six years, sir. Almost seven.”

“In that time, when I gave you an order, did you ever consider I was asking about your taste in ice cream?”

“No, sir.”

“In simple Hebrew,” the general said, pissed off that they awakened him to leave his soft bed and warm wife to fly on a fool’s errand to Israel Defense Forces headquarters in Tel Aviv before four in the morning. He has no one to scold but his driver. “When I have something to tell you, you’ll know it.”

“I understand, commander.”

“And stop calling me commander.”

“Sorry, Pinky,” the driver says. “Pinky, it’s just when you’re in a mood, it puts me on edge.”

“How the hell do you think it makes me feel?” the general asks. “Interrupted sleep, it’s part of my job.” He laughs despite himself. “Yours too. Forgive me, Gingy. It seems in the entire IDF, bristling with communications devices and computers and who knows what more, no one has bothered to read the papers.”

“The papers?”

“The papers. Everyone knows we’re on the verge of peace.”

“That’s what they say, Pinky.”

“That’s what they say, Gingy. That’s what they say.”

AT A ROYAL JORDANIAN tank base only fifteen miles from the Israeli border, which has been quiet for decades, a military band plays Arab martial music, replete with bagpipes—the effect approximates dozens of cats being strangled by uniformed sadists—as Royal Jordanian Army Major General Tawfik Ali, standing in the rear of an open 1956 Rolls Royce Silver Wraith, takes the salute of his tank crews standing at attention before an endless row of Challengers. The rumbling of the powerful 1200-horsepower diesel engines mixes in the night air with the screeching of the military band to create a musical miasma, a symphonic swamp so murky that any hint of melody is lost in the noise.

General Ali feels at home with this noise. His family estate in the Scottish lowlands was itself awash in the sound of bagpipes, and this continued through his education at Sandhurst, where generations of British officers are trained in the art of warfare to the sound of pipes. There he was known as Twyford (Ticky) Oliver, second son of Baron Allmond of Cleave. As with many British noble families—Lord Allmond was born twenty-third in line of succession to the throne—the non-inheriting sons found careers in the foreign office, the clandestine services, or the military. It was Ticky Oliver’s fate to be employed by all three. Simultaneously. Having gone out to the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan to train and then build up the Royal Jordanian Armoured Corps, then Col. Oliver grew close to the late King Hussein, a tank buff of the first water. When the little king wasn’t flying military jets, he was playing with his tanks as though they were toys in a sandbox.

One day during maneuvers, His Majesty made the young colonel an offer of no small consequence. Should the Scotsman convert to Islam, he would be given lifetime command of an armored force equal in vehicular strength to half the British tank corps, in effect becoming what he had been robbed of at home by an accident of birth: a baron, not of nobility but of firepower.

The young colonel begged leave to consult with Whitehall. The Foreign Office saw a nice opportunity to regain influence in the Middle East, to say nothing of huge armaments sales to the Hashemite Kingdom. Whitehall passed Col. Oliver to MI6. Ticky now had three masters, as a result of which, like anyone with three masters, he was his own man.