Mirage Read online

  The general removed his dark glasses. The eyes that regarded Aradd possessed a steely grey strength. They were the eyes of a man used to getting his way. In the stranger’s face Aradd saw fatigue even greater than his own.

  The general’s face relaxed suddenly into the creases of good humour that habit had etched around his eyes. He held out his hand.

  ‘I’m Major-General Emil Kalen.’

  The name meant nothing to Aradd. For a moment he was tempted to challenge the senior officer to produce an identification but the hard grey eyes were an effective deterrent. ‘You’ve done a fine job out here, major,’ the general continued. ‘But I’m not here to give out medals - there’ll be time for that later. I need a favour. This is an unofficial visit. If you’re busy - tell me to fuck off and I’ll understand.’

  Aradd gave an involuntary smile at the unexpected expletive. ‘I’m not too busy for a coffee, general. If you would like to step into my tent -’

  ‘Thank you, major - but it can wait. Yesterday you reported a Mirage that had been brought down in this area?’

  ‘That’s correct, sir. A Syrian surface-to-air missile battery.’ Aradd paused and grinned proudly. ‘The battery doesn’t exist any more - nor does the Syrian army, of course.’

  ‘Did the pilot eject?’

  Aradd looked curiously at his guest. ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Where did it crash?’

  Aradd pointed. ‘On the plain, sir. About six kilometres west. It looked as if the pilot tried to make a belly landing in a field but he didn’t have enough control. It caught fire and burned out.’

  ‘Show me, please.’

  The two men followed a steeply rising goat track that wound past the blackened remains of a Syrian mortar position. Shattered slabs of wire-reinforced concrete lay scattered around like discarded headstones from the pounding that the emplacement had received from Israeli tanks. Some of the tangled remains were splattered with blood. Under the watchful eyes of battle-weary Israeli soldiers, a team of Syrian Red Cross men were picking over the scene - slowly and methodically filling Soviet Army-issue human remains plastic bags. The two officers were sweating in the hot sun by the time they reached a precarious crag that overlooked the plains.

  Aradd pointed to a distant smudge of blackness that disfigured a melon field. ‘That’s it, sir. I’ve got two snipers posted on that hill to keep souvenir-hunters away. Goddamn Syrians’ll steal anything.’ General Kalen trained his binoculars on the mangled, burnt-out remains of the fighter without speaking. The sun beat down on his muscular bare arms but he stood quite still - seeming to take in every detail of the scene. Eventually he spoke to Aradd: ‘Did you send anyone to investigate?’

  Aradd felt uneasy. He began to understand why he was being honoured with this visit. ‘You mean immediately after it crashed, sir?’

  General Kalen lowered his binoculars and stared at Aradd. The grey eyes seemed to be probing the innermost recesses of his mind - turning over all his dark secrets; dispassionately cataloguing them for future reference. ‘Of course, major.’

  ‘No, sir. And with respect, sir - a rescue attempt was out of the question. Firstly - we were under fire from this position; secondly - there was no time to get to the aircraft even if it had been safe. If there’s to be an investigation I shall say —’

  ‘No one’s gunning for you, major,’ General Kalen interrupted. ‘You’ve done a first-class job here.’ He paused and allowed his gaze to return to the black smudge. ‘If I fix up a wrecker, could you spare the men to get that Mirage loaded? I’ll understand if it’ll give you problems.’

  Puzzled, Aradd nodded. Standing orders required war materiel wreckage, particularly aircraft, to be recovered as soon as possible. What was unheard of was for a high-ranking officer such as a general to concern himself with such details. ‘May I ask a question, sir?’

  ‘Go ahead.’

  ‘What’s so special about that Mirage?’

  General Kalen turned his stocky frame away from Aradd and levelled his binoculars once again at the scene of the distant crash. ‘The pilot was my son,’ he remarked over his shoulder.

  3

  The melons were Syrian therefore Sergeant Eli Laski, singing lustily at the top of his voice, took a perverse pleasure in aiming the pounding tyres of the battered General Motors wrecker at the plumpest and ripest fruits as he hurled the savagely bucking vehicle across the uneven field. Rav Turai (Corporal) Rudi Kal clung to the power winch mounted on the wrecker’s front bumper, busily warding off the slashing leaves of the melon plants while wishing he had thought of a safer place to ride in his search for a breeze. The size of the vicious leaves, and the fruits that were being pulped under the wrecker’s tyres, were a credit to the centuries-old irrigation techniques of the Middle East: few Syrian growers had modern water-pumping equipment and yet the fruits were plump and healthy. A particularly large melon burst obscenely and splattered Rudi with its flesh. Melon seeds slithered into his unkempt beard like disturbed woodlice. His yell at Laski to slow down died on his lips when he saw the buckled tailplane of the Mirage. The wrecker slowed its mad progress. Eli at the wheel had also seen the tailplane.

  Like many soldiers during the past six days, Rudi and Eli had seen a lot of death, but six days was not long enough to become hardened to it, if, indeed, there was a definable period for such a process. When he and the others had come upon a shattered Syrian position and seen dead men for the first time, they had fallen silent. By the second and third encounters they had laughed and made jokes in passing. But the laughs had been hollow and the jokes shallow; a bravura born out of an unwillingness to appear anything other than callous in the eyes of their comrades that deceived only themselves and the jackal-like news teams that followed in the wake of Israel’s lightning conquests. Previously the two men had come upon death by chance; this time, as they approached the Mirage, they were deliberately seeking it out and they were frightened at what they knew they would find.

  Eli swung the wrecker in a tight circle and reversed it towards the blackened patch of field that marked the Mirage’s funeral pyre. He jumped down from the cab and stumbled through the waist-high melon foliage. Rudi joined him. The two men stood in silence as they contemplated the wraiths of smoke still curling from the burnt-out wreckage. The only intact parts of the fighter were its wingtips - gleaming in their unpainted aluminium nakedness. As Eli studied the barely recognizable remains, he realized that the tailplane had broken away from the airframe and was upright while the fighter itself was inverted.

  ‘We’d better get the bag,’ Rudi muttered.

  Eli shook his head. ‘It’s upside down,’ he pointed out. ‘No point in recovering any remains until we’ve lifted her clear of the ground.’ With frequent anxious glances at the nearby hills that could easily conceal Syrian snipers who hadn’t accepted the United Nations cease-fire, Eli and Rudi set to work with the wrecker’s crane. It took them thirty minutes of sweated labour under the scorching sun to secure hoisting straps around the half-melted airframe. On a word from Eli, Rudi worked the hydraulic controls on the wrecker’s crane. Black debris showered from the inverted cockpit as the Mirage lifted. Rudi stopped the crane when the wreckage was suspended a metre clear of the ground. Miraculously the lump of distorted hardware that had been the Atar jet engine remained secured to the airframe.

  ‘Who’s volunteering?’ Rudi asked uneasily.

  Eli took a heavy-duty plastic bag from the driver’s cab. It bore a Star of David emblem. ‘We’ll both do it,’ he replied curtly.

  ‘Funny that nothing fell out the cockpit when we lifted.’ ‘Because he was strapped in. Come on - let’s get it over with.’ The two men reluctantly approached the suspended Mirage. It was swaying gently in the breeze - a slave to the aerodynamic forces it had defied the previous day. Dreading what they were about to find and what they had to do, they ducked under the rim of the cockpit and looked up. Hanging by a blackened thread that had once been part of the seat harness were the rema
ins of a five-point harness buckle. Eli touched it. The strand parted and the buckle clinked to the ground where the rest of the heat-blackened harness hardware had already dropped. As Eli stared up, he realized that he was looking at the partially melted aluminium frame of what had been an ejector seat.

  There were no hanging remains of a skeleton.

  No grinning skull cooked into a flying helmet.

  The men were silent for a few seconds. Rudi was the first to speak: ‘Goddamn Syrians!’ he spat. ‘They took him last night. Animals!’ Eli knelt and picked the buckle out of the dust. ‘I don’t think even they would do that, Rudi.’

  Rudi sneered in contempt. ‘Both of us saw the crash. He didn’t eject or bail out. Last night those bastards took what was left of him .... What every smart Syrian has in his house - a bit of bone that belonged to an IDF pilot.’

  Eli straightened and climbed on to the roof of the wrecker’s driver’s cab. From this vantage point he could see the two furrows of destruction that the wrecker and the Mirage had carved through the melon crop. It was then that he thought he heard a sound. Rudi shaded his eyes and looked up at him.

  ‘Anything?’

  ‘Shut up!’

  Rudi shrugged. He was about to say something when Eli suddenly jumped from the roof of the cab and dived into the waist-high foliage. Rudi crashed after him, tripping over and cursing the huge, unyielding melons. Eli ducked out of sight. Rudi reached the spot where Eli had disappeared. He sucked in his breath in astonishment at what he saw: Eli was on his knees, circling his arm around the pilot’s neck while feeling inexpertly for his pulse. The man’s eyes were closed. Melon juice stains and seeds were caked around his mouth, and a handful of the broad leaves, stained brown with dried blood, were wrapped ineffectually around the pilot’s left foot.

  Rudi knelt beside Eli. The two men stared down at the still form. The pilot had unusually fair hair and skin for an Israeli. Eli checked his identification bracelet. ‘Daniel Kalen’ was inscribed on the name plate in Hebrew. Eli guessed his age at about twenty-seven.

  ‘We could have driven over him,’ Rudi muttered, remembering Eli’s lunatic driving across the field.

  ‘Well we didn’t.’

  ‘Is he ...?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The two men were silent for some moments. Eli stood and opened a pouch on his belt. Like all Orthodox members of the IDF, he always carried his prayer vestments with him in a special pouch. He donned his yarmulke and draped the tallith across his shoulders before opening the tiny prayer book his mother had given him. He found the page and began reciting the Kaddish in good Hebrew. He was on the fourth line of the ancient prayer for the dead when Rudi saw the pilot’s lips move.

  ‘Eli! He’s alive!’

  Eli was on his knees in an instant - his ear close to Daniel’s mouth. He listened intently. Daniel’s eyes opened; his lips moved again; he whispered something in Eli’s straining ear before lapsing back into unconsciousness.

  Rudi was the bigger of the two men. On a signal from Eli he stooped down and lifted Daniel in his arms.

  ‘What did he say?’ Rudi asked as he carried Daniel to the wrecker. Eli gave a rueful grin. ‘He’s got a sense of humour. He quoted Mark Twain.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He said that reports of his death were greatly exaggerated.’

  4

  HAIFA

  Ben Patterson went in first. The napalm bomb he released from the underbelly of his Mirage followed a parabolic downward curve and hit the Egyptian coaster above the waterline, engulfing it in a huge, expanding fireball of flame. The streamers of burning napalm, arcing in all directions from the point of impact, were like the avenging fingers of some hellish creature from the pit - exploding the sea to steam where they hit the water and setting fire to the ship’s paintwork where they hit the superstructure so that even steel itself seemed to be catching fire and burning under the hideous assault. Daniel watched in morbid fascination as the flames leapt through the complex network of radio antennae arrays that were mounted on the ship’s masts. Globs of molten aluminium from the burning arrays fell on to some men who were milling in panic on the mid-deck.

  Patterson sheered away in a sharp turn that was intended to fool the Egyptian gunners. Daniel went in as soon as Patterson was clear. The young Israeli rolled out of his turn at a height of three hundred feet above the dazzling blue of the Mediterranean and lowered his flaps to reduce speed and improve accuracy. Even at two hundred knots, the blazing ship was swelling rapidly. It was obviously doomed but the airmen had clear orders to ensure that there were no survivors. Ben Patterson had been firm on that point during the briefing: ‘The ship is the Qsair - an Egyptian spy ship - crewed with Egypt’s top radio cipher experts and crypto-analysts. So, gentlemen ... no survivors.’

  ‘What if they get into liferafts?’ someone had asked.

  Patterson had sighed. ‘We can’t risk any of them making it home. Like I said - no survivors.’

  The first shots in Daniel’s long burst of cannon fire punched holes in the ship’s hull. He eased the Mirage’s nose up and sent his rounds stitching murderously across the after deck towards some men who were desperately running for cover. The last man suddenly threw up his arms in a gesture of despair as Daniel’s shells ripped through his body. The long-term effect of what happened next would be something that would haunt Daniel for the rest of his life; the short-term effect was that he wanted to be violently sick into his flying helmet: the man’s legs separated from his body at the waist and went flailing clumsily against the bulwark while the rest of his body went sprawling across the metalled deck - arms outstretched - the wildly scrabbling hands of what had once been a living, breathing mortal trying to arrest the grisly slide towards the rail. It was the first time that Daniel had ever seen a man killed as a direct result of his actions. Until then the four days’ fighting had been impersonal: the destroying of Egyptian aircraft on the ground or the shooting-up of tanks in the Sinai. Even when glancing back at the blazing pyres of the tanks, the easy option for Daniel had been to believe that the crews had escaped. The sight of the mangled remains of the man offered no scope for self-delusion.

  Another sight caught Daniel’s eye and one that was to have an equally profound effect on his reason. He saw a flag fluttering briefly through a gap in the smoke before the flames consumed it.

  The Stars and Stripes!

  ‘Break-off!’ he screamed. ‘Break-off! Break-off! She’s a US ship!’ There were sounds of dismay in his helmet from the other pilots in the attacking group, and then there was the calm voice of the controller in Tel Aviv telling the fliers to complete their mission.

  ‘But she’s an American!’ Daniel heard himself screaming. ‘She’s American! She’s American!’

  Suddenly there was a gut-wrenching pain in his ankle that forced the appalling scene out of focus and finally dissolved it altogether. He heard a distant voice yelling repeatedly from the enveloping darkness: ‘She’s American! ... American ... American ...’

  Then a soothing, feminine voice: ‘That’s all right, Daniel.... Just you lie back .... You’re all right now.’

  This time the voice was a whimper and he realized that it was his own voice saying repeatedly: ‘She’s American. She’s American.’ ‘Maybe she’ll come and visit you when you’re stronger.’ The feminine voice had a slight French accent.

  Daniel opened his eyes and focused them on the last thing he ever expected to see. A dangling crucifix. For a crazy, impossible moment he thought that he was dead and that there had been a monumental cock-up with the registration procedure or whatever celestial system was used to process new arrivals. The crucifix was swinging on a silver chain. Above it was the concerned face of a woman - her ageless features starchly flanked by the distinctive flared wimple of a Sister of Mercy.

  ‘Where am I?’

  The nursing sister bent over him and plumped his pillows. Her starched uniform crunched like virgin snow trodden for the first time. �
��Hospital, young man. Where did you think?’

  Daniel’s gaze traversed the cool, pleasantly decorated room and returned to the sister who was removing a thermometer from its tube. He could think of nothing sensible to say except: ‘But I’m Jewish.’

  ‘Don’t worry, Mr Kalen. This thermometer is strictly kosher. Open your mouth.’

  Daniel did as he was told. The sister pushed the thermometer under his tongue. ‘What about my foot?’ he mumbled.

  ‘Much better than your uninjured foot. You’ve got a steel pin in it that’s ten times stronger than bone.’ She stood back and looked critically down at him. ‘Well - you’re looking a lot better than you did yesterday, young man. I’m Sister Veronica. You can call me sister or Sister Veronica. I don’t mind.’ She moved to the door and, as if expecting her patient to carry out a stunt involving his climbing down knotted sheets while she was gone, warned him that she would be returning in a few minutes.

  For countless moments Daniel hovered in a morphine-induced twilight world in which legless men were reaching towards him - trying to pluck him down into the hideous abyss of the torment he had created for them. Eventually he heard voices approaching him. A deep, booming chuckle. He opened his eyes and focused them on the stocky figure standing at the end of the bed.

  ‘Hallo, dad.’

  Emil Kalen’s face broke into its customary, easy smile that the wrinkles around his hard grey eyes were always ready for. ‘Hallo, Daniel. How’s it going?’

  The nun took the thermometer from Daniel’s mouth and made an entry on the clipboard at the foot of his bed. ‘Five minutes, Mr Kalen,’ she said firmly as she closed the door of the private room softly behind her.

  Emil was wearing neatly creased slacks and a lightweight rollneck sweater. As usual, he looked more like an aspiring golf professional rather than a serving officer. For that reason he was accustomed to civilians addressing him as ‘Mr’. He dropped his stocky frame into the chair beside the bed and seized his son’s hand in a firm grasp. ‘Hallo, Daniel. Good to see you awake at last. How are you feeling?’ ‘Not clever.’