Hesh Kestin - The Siege of Tel Aviv

“Impossible to say, Mr. President.”

“Well, at the risk of asking the goddamn obvious, has anyone informed them?”

The silence that ensues seems to last minutes, but it is only a matter of seconds.

“Flo,” the president says. “You hear that? In an election year.”

“We can turn this around, Mr. President,” Flo says in a voice as raspy as a nail file. “But not in a vacuum.”

“I hear you, Flo,” the president says. “I hear you loud and clear. Now, will someone get that Israeli bitch on the phone?”

THE PRIME MINISTER IS deeply asleep when the red phone on her night table rings with its special buzz of angry bees. It is only minutes since Israel’s air force has been destroyed. She turns on the light to check her face in the hand mirror before picking up the receiver, thinking: Good the man can’t see me. I look like hell . “Good evening, Mr. President,” she says brightly, an acquired skill. After all, it is only 9 p.m. in Washington. “I must say this is an unexpected pleasure.” At 4 a.m. it would be , she thinks. But it wouldn’t be a precedent. When first in office, she got a call at 2 a.m. wishing her a happy Yom Kippur. What was she supposed to do, lecture the leader of the free world on the solemn significance of Judaism’s principle day of mourning? Was there no Jew on the White House staff aside from that horrid Flo Spier?

“Madam Prime Minister, if this call is truly unexpected, it might not be a real big pleasure.”

Absurdly she thinks, It’s not my birthday, is it? She has just been awakened from a deep and peaceful sleep. She switches into what she thinks of as Amerispeak, a form of discourse that reflexively puts the spotlight on the other person, his life, his interests, his needs. “Mr. President,” she says. “If there is anything my government can do, please let me know.”

The president’s voice takes on the dramatic timbre that got him elected, and may again. “Madam, according to our sources, still unconfirmed—”

A tremendous explosion rocks the building, then in rapid succession six more, the last of which blows in the windowpanes, fragments flying into the room like shrapnel. A two-inch shard slices into her arm. Shula rushes to the window. She is thinking of the children, upstairs with her mother. What she sees causes her heart to stop.

Lit by exploding bombs, a cloud of black-clad paratroopers fills the sky. Even on this moonless night, she has no trouble seeing them. The sky over Jerusalem is on fire.

With her heart now pumping so hard she can feel it, Shula picks up the white phone, which is attended twenty-fours a day by a security liaison in the basement. The system was established by her predecessor, who proudly showed it off when he walked her through the prime ministerial residence. In its weekly tests it always operates faultlessly, connecting her at once with the IDF chief of staff, the chief commissioner of the Israel Police, and the heads of the Mossad and Shabak, which correspond roughly to the CIA and the FBI respectively. In addition, there is an optional link to the head of the Israel Broadcast Authority, so that if need be she can address the nation from her bedroom or kitchen, or toilet. In every case, should the primary contact be unreachable, a connection is made immediately to his second in command. In test mode, the system never failed.

Now all she has is a mild and distant static.

She moves to her personal cell phone, where the same numbers are on autodial. Silence.

IN THE WHITE VOLVO flying south down the near empty coastal highway, the chief of staff reaches for his cellphone at the precise moment he sees the southeastern sky light up as though it is Independence Day. Later he will not be certain the phone rang at all. He may have picked it up to call headquarters. Or perhaps they were calling him.

“Skull Prime here. Report.” He listens, then responds. “Code blue. Repeat: code blue.” He turns to his driver. “Gingy, drive like your life depends on it.”

The driver floors it.

“Because it does.”

ON HIS FIFTY-TWO-FOOT HATTERAS in the marina at Tel Aviv, Misha Shulman is not happy. This Alon Peri is being stubborn. I could pick up his family, his wife, his children , Misha thinks. Or bomb his factory. Or drug him and have pictures taken that would ruin his life . None of these is appealing. Misha has given up this kind of thing, the way he has given up dealing in prostitutes. He sees himself these days as a legitimate businessman with the misfortune of having started out as a criminal. In Russia, what other choice did he have? He had no rich father—in fact, he had no father at all. His mother died when he was twelve. For three years he lived on the streets of Moscow like a feral dog, eating garbage, selling his body, dealing in drugs until he was able to buy himself shelter in an abandoned warehouse near the Promzona metro station, and then to acquire a car—a Moskvich: only sixty-eight horsepower, but not many seventeen-year-olds in Russia drove a car—all the while putting together a group of young thugs who like him had no place in the new Russia. In the old Russia, under the Communists, he would have been sent to an institute for wayward youth, forced to listen to endless lectures on the evils of capitalism, and in so doing at least avoided hunger. But the new Russia offered a different kind of education.

By the time he was twenty, Misha Shulman was known as Big Misha. He controlled dozens of street prostitutes and a handful of better-quality escorts who serviced the new capitalists of Moscow, along with diplomats and foreign visitors. He had connections with the Georgian mafia and the opium growers of Tashkent. In the power vacuum that was the new Russia, Misha Shulman was a power. Until the bureaucrats tracked him down and demanded a piece of the action.

When he refused, a smirking judge sent him to the same gulag that had existed since the time of the czars, a prison stockade in Siberia whose name was a number and whose infamy was legend. There, despite his reputation, or more properly because of it, the guards organized their favored trustees to teach him a lesson.

Instead Misha taught them. Within a month he was on top again, running the prison, and within a year was directing his Moscow operation via remote control, using the guards and their families to send and receive messages. In three years, through the influence of lawyers delivering bags of cash to the same bureaucrats who had imprisoned him, he was out.

On one condition. He would have to leave the country.

An unlikely Zionist, Misha found himself in a Tel Aviv that was not so different from Moscow. A million and a half Russians had emigrated to Israel during his years as Big Misha and his exile in Siberia. He did not know the names of these new Israelis, but they knew his.

“Alon Peri,” Misha says. “How would you like if I break your legs?” Before Peri has a chance to consider this offer, Misha sighs dramatically. “Ah,” he says. “That was the old Misha Shulman. Now and again he pops up and wants to beat the shit out of somebody.”

“Mr. Shulman,” Peri says from his chair. “You have no idea how—” When silence becomes a noise it can be very loud. The TV music has stopped, the screen blank. The four musclemen watching it look abruptly to Misha, but he is looking to the TV, as if in anticipation. The television issues three long beeps.

The angst-ridden face of a familiar news reader comes on. “We interrupt our regularly scheduled programming for the following public service announcements.” Then, reading from a list, he carefully enunciates: “Tired Toe; Blue Ears; Rusty Knees; White Eyes…”