Coup D'Etat (51 page)

The black chopper moved quickly down the runway from the terminal behind them. It honed in on the Israelis.

“LAF!” yelled Meir. “
Cover!
”

From the chopper’s right side, a minigun began firing rounds on the Israeli position as they dived for the protection of the wing. Bullets rained down on the cement, riddling the tar around them. The chopper circled overhead and around the flaming C-130. It swept back in, and the sound of the minigun cut the air. The weapon pounded the steel wings just in front of the Israeli position.

From down the runway, Hezbollah moved closer, their bullets dinging the metal of the C-130.

From the ground, crouched against the fuselage, Dewey, Meir, and the remaining commandos fired blindly up at the chopper, which attempted to move into a position directly above them. One of the Israelis, three feet to Dewey’s right, was struck in the head by a round from the sky. The round tore his head clean off, down to the shoulders, and he was thrown violently back from the fuselage.

The sound was deafening now. Chopper blades ripped the air. Machine-gun fire was like a drumbeat. Sirens pierced the silences in between.

Dewey counted three men alive, including him, Meir, and one other commando. The deadly circle was growing closer, Hezbollah to the south, and now LAF from the north, hemming them in by chopper, cutting them off.

Dewey made eye contact with Meir. He could not have been more than twenty-five years old. He had short brown hair and freckles. He was tan, with a sharp nose. Meir looked at him with a blank look. There was no anger there, nor fear. There was no emotion at all. And Dewey knew that in some way he was looking at himself. Both men knew time was up.

“I’m sorry,” said Dewey.

Meir stared back, expressionless. “You would’ve done the same. America would’ve done the same.”

Dewey had had tough moments like this before, in other battles, with other men, the moments that forged the brotherhood of soldiers. But he’d never felt as close to death. The look, both men knew. It seemed to say: We’ll die this day, at this hour. But we’ll do it together. We’ll do it the way soldiers are supposed to, believing in something right, fighting against the forces that would destroy us all.

A loud hissing noise rose above the pandemonium of the battle theater.

Dewey’s head jerked up. A white comet of movement blazed through the black, smoke-clogged sky. He traced the trajectory of where the missile had come from. In the distance, a single black object, an attack chopper that Dewey recognized immediately: Panther.

The Israeli chopper lurked like a deadly metallic vulture, moving into the air above the airport with menacing speed.

The Mistral air-to-air missile fired from the Panther emitted smoke from its tail as it accelerated through the humid Beirut air, its high-pitched whistle cutting through all other noise. It tore into the side of the LAF chopper directly overhead, bright white light mushroomed, then the detonation an instant later as the chopper and everything inside was pulverized mid-sky. Metal and body parts dropped in a fiery wash across the tarmac just behind their position.

Another piercing hissing noise as a white burst sparked from the Panther, followed by the telltale comet of the Mistral. The missile ripped across the sky in the opposite direction, toward the end of the runway. Hezbollah dispersed in every direction as the missile honed in, but it was futile, they were too late. The missile exploded near the fence in the center of the Arab position. Every terrorist within twenty feet was eviscerated by the blast. The Panther turned its nose and began firing 20mm rounds from the Giat M621 on the side of the chopper, pounding the Hezbollah positions behind the cement barriers, closer to Dewey, Meir, and the other commando.

Then the Panther turned and swept forward, moving down the tarmac. The chopper descended onto the runway, twenty feet from Dewey and the Israelis.

Dewey picked up a dead Israeli, then moved with Meir and the other commando, carrying corpses on their shoulders to the Panther.

Dewey ran, the corpse over his right shoulder, his left hand triggering the carbine down the runway at yet more Hezbollah, who were still attacking.

Up the runway, a pair of troop carriers sped down the runway from the direction of the terminal carrying LAF soldiers.

Dewey reached the Panther first. He lay the body inside the cabin, then turned toward the terminal, where LAF troops began firing from the north, moving closer to the Panther, whose rotors tore the air as Meir and the other surviving Israeli hastily loaded the corpses of their fallen comrades. Dewey swept his carbine across the line of Lebanese soldiers, killing several men, while the others dived for cover behind the troop trucks.

The Panther’s nose remained targeted at the south end of the runway. As they finished loading the dead, the gunman fired 20mm rounds through the smoky, chaotic din, back at the terrorists at the southern end of the runway.

They packed in six dead Israelis.

Dewey and Meir stood side by side, Dewey gunning up the tarmac at LAF soldiers, Meir firing at Hezbollah to the south.

“
Get on!
” screamed the commando already on board.
“Kohl! Andreas!”

Dewey and Meir stepped back toward the chopper, which was already above its weight capacity, and packed to the rafters with dead Israelis.

Meir sat in the door, feet dangling out. He grabbed a safety strap above the door frame with one hand and started firing behind the chopper, up the runway. Dewey sprinted to the other side of the chopper and knelt in the door, holding a safety strap with his left hand while he fired.

“Go!”
screamed Meir.

The pilot lifted off, but the weighted down Panther barely got its wheels off the ground before it settled back down onto the tarmac.

Lebanese soldiers moved closer as the chopper stalled. The low hiss of a surface-to-air missile sounded. A white blur scorched through the air from behind the cargo plane, sailing just in front of the Panther. Then, a second later, Meir lurched forward as a slug from somewhere on the ground struck him in the leg, just above the knee.

“
Get rid of the fuel!
” screamed Dewey to the pilot. “
Now! Dump it!
”

Beneath the Panther, a flood of gasoline spread as the pilot emptied three of the four tanks on the chopper. The smell of gasoline was suddenly everywhere.

The pilot revved the Panther’s engines and the chopper lifted slowly into the sky.

Meir, blood pouring from his leg, fired at the ground as the chopper climbed. He fired his weapon north, at the government troops who now ran in groups, weapons raised, trying to shoot the chopper from the sky. Meir picked off soldier after soldier, creating clusters of corpses in a loose line behind the smoking C-130, ignoring the pain in his leg.

Dewey, on the opposite side of the Panther, registered half a dozen Hezbollah, running up the tarmac, like ants, firing at the climbing chopper. He fired calmly from the open door, striking terrorist after terrorist, like target practice.

The chopper climbed higher. Dewey and Meir gunned from the open doors, firing their weapons as the black Panther AS565 AA climbed higher and higher above the tarmac into the smoldering, smoke-clouded sky.

Suddenly, the chopper arced hard right, the engine churned furiously, and the Israeli Panther rushed away from the battlefield into the protective sky above the black waters of the Mediterranean.

81

MOUNT OF OLIVES CEMETERY

JERUSALEM, ISRAEL

FOUR DAYS LATER

Jessica walked through the open gates of the cemetery. The simple, solemn burial ground sat on a windswept hill a few miles south of downtown Jerusalem. The cemetery was Israel’s most solemn burial ground, more than three thousand years old. Many of Israel’s greatest heroes were buried at Mount of Olives. Today, that number would grow.

Long, uneven lines of tombstones ran in every direction. Dotted throughout the cemetery were olive trees and small patches of lush green lawn. In the background, the cemetery arose in sandstone hills, uneven steppes of graves that spread to ivy-laced walls, Jerusalem’s clustered mass of buildings in the distance. The sky was bright blue. The sun shone down fiercely. The temperature was in the seventies. Wind came softly from the east. It was a perfect day, a comfortable, clear, beautiful day.

A single violin player near the gates played a soft, slow, mournful sonata by Boccherini.

In straight lines, beginning at the north cemetery wall, gravestones descended in simple, serial geometry: rectangular slabs of sandstone, decorated in Hebrew letters. These were the markers of Israel’s sons and daughters, her buried heroes, the pained, proud legacy of a young country whose survival was earned only with the barrel of a gun, the thrust of a blade, the blood of its children.

Jessica took her place in line at the heavily guarded gates to the cemetery. She followed an elderly couple, who walked slowly down the long, pebble stone, center aisle. When she reached the rows of seats, which were mostly filled, she looked to the front. She saw her boss, Rob Allaire, the president of the United States, seated next to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Shalit. Behind them, she saw Secretary of State Lindsay, Ambassador Priest, several senators and members of Congress. Toward the front, on the left, she saw Hector Calibrisi seated by himself, his eyes closed in prayer.

A uniformed Israeli soldier, standing at the front of the aisles, nodded to her, then walked to meet her.

“Ms. Tanzer,” he said. “Please follow me. General Dayan has asked that you be seated next to him.”

Jessica felt herself pulled, her gaze drawn, to the right away from the Israeli soldier. Her eyes moved to an empty seat in the back row. Next to the empty seat sat a lone figure. Large, muscled arms filled a navy blue blazer. He had long brown hair that was combed back. His face was covered in a beard and mustache. He was an outcast here; a rugged-looking man, with a blank, merciless look on his tanned face. He returned her glance, his eyes drawing her to him from across the crowd.

Jessica held his gaze for a long moment. She felt her heart race; the familiar feeling. She stared at him, trying to understand what he was thinking at that moment. Guilt, she guessed, at the death of the Israeli commandos, men he hadn’t even known but who, Jessica knew, he wouldn’t want to have died so that he could live. Responsibility, he probably felt that too, she thought to herself, for the murders of Rob Iverheart and Alex Millar in Islamabad. She looked for something, anything, but he was emotionless; the wall that she’d worked so hard to climb over was now as tall as ever, shielding memories she knew were too fresh, too painful. Jessica willed herself to avert her eyes, to look away. She followed the Israeli soldier down the pebble aisle.

Jessica stepped to her seat, just two seats from Prime Minister Shalit, next to the head of Israel Defense Forces, General Menachem Dayan. In front of her, in the front row, the mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, of the dead Israelis, the families of the six men who died at Rafic Hariri Airport. The men who died saving the life of the American in the back row.

In front of the families, six wooden caskets lay atop a green hill. On top of each casket, the flag of Israel, white with the blue Star of David.

To the right of the caskets stood two men. One was a rabbi, dressed in a long robe, a yarmulke on his head. He had glasses on, a beard, and was elderly. The other was a young Israeli with short brown hair, a large, sharp nose, tough-looking. He stared ahead, above the caskets, above the walls of the cemetery, toward a place only he knew.

For several minutes, the soft strains of the violin were the only sounds that could be heard. Time, during those moments, seemed to fall away, to stand still and linger as if the finality of what was about to happen, the bitter memorial, the ending of it all, could somehow be prevented, delayed, or altered. But it could not.

Finally, the violin went silent.

The Israeli soldier standing at the front of the gathered crowd stepped forward and walked behind the caskets. He limped as he walked, and for the first time, Jessica saw that he held a cane. He moved slowly across the ground to a simple wooden podium.

The young Israeli officer looked out at the large crowd. He stepped to the podium and spoke into a microphone.

“My name is Kohl Meir,” he said, his voice deep and soft.

For the first time, in the light of the direct sun, which now illuminated the Israeli’s face, Jessica saw that the area beneath his eyes was wet with tears.

“I would like to read to you the names of my six colleagues who died at my side. All six were members of Shayetet Thirteen and served under my command. Please remember them as the heroes they were. Lieutenant Colonel David Ben-Shin, Tel Aviv, age twenty-seven. Lieutenant Joshua Rabin, Dimona, age twenty-two. Major Ezra Bohr, Hafiz, age twenty-four. Lieutenant Colonel Samuel Ivri, Beersheba, age twenty-five. Lieutenant Colonel Jonathan Lutanz, Uvda, age twenty-five, Major David Iza, Tel Aviv, age twenty-seven…”

*   *   *

Dewey remained seated as the last of the funeral guests left the cemetery. He was alone now. He stared down row after empty row, to the caskets.

“You okay?”

Dewey turned. He saw Jessica’s legs first, thin, brown, sculpted legs that climbed to her white skirt, blue piping edged just above perfect knees, white button-down blouse, auburn hair, then her face, green eyes, sharp nose covered in freckles, so pretty.

“Yeah. I’m okay.”

Jessica moved down the aisle and took the seat next to him. They sat, silently, for more than a minute. Finally, Jessica placed her hand on Dewey’s thigh.

“I know you don’t want to talk, but I’m here for you.”

“Thank you,” said Dewey. He looked at her hand on his thigh. Such a small gesture, and yet it sent a large wave of warmth through his body, warmth he needed so badly in that moment.

“We retrieved the bodies. Alex and Rob. The president and I are meeting the families at Andrews tonight.”