Forty-Eight X (2 page)

Of all the primates, the human being is the only one that cries. In fact, only one other land animal cries—the elephant. On this field of battle, there were no elephants around to grieve, and the only tear shed was Link McGraw’s.

J
oshua Krantz was fishing, well trolling to be exact, several hundred yards offshore from the picturesque walled city of Akko, the Hebrew name for the port city of Acre. He wasn’t in search offish but of history. He watched the monitors on deck as a metal detector hovered over the seafloor looking for a signal from the past. Just weeks before, he’d retrieved a rusted clump of metal not far from this same spot. Chemically washed free of debris, it had revealed two carved lilies, the crest of Louis VII of France, who had come to Akko in 1148 to save Christendom and battle the Arab hordes.

“L’at, l’at.”
Slow, slow, he yelled, catching a glimpse of some promising shadow on the monitor.

Krantz’s partner, Fala al-Shohada, who had been steering the forty-foot cabin cruiser slowly in ever-widening circles, surveying the seafloor, throttled back.

“L’at, l’at. B’sedar.”
Slow, slow, all right, he hollered again in a classic undulating Israeli accent and a booming voice. If he had been wearing the nineteenth-century garb of the
shtetl
, you could imagine him belting out “Tradition! Tradition!” But today, he was shirtless, wearing only a lime-green Speedo and a chain with a gold filigree mezuzah around his neck. If you asked him, he would say the mezuzah was more a fashion statement than a religious one. Krantz considered himself one of Israel’s majority, a secular Jew. It was not that he didn’t believe in God; he just accepted the existence of God as the answer to how so much order had been created out of nothing. Besides, he didn’t believe man was capable of understanding or describing God.

“Religion is just a man-made answer to the unanswerable,” he often said. “And the Bible, well, that’s just a ‘good book,’ a gift of the Jewish people to the world on how to view God and live a moral life. But divine revelation—no.”

But inside every mezuzah rested a tiny parchment scroll, written with the words of the
shema
, the paragraph in the Bible that begins “Hear, O Israel, the L
ORD
our God, the L
ORD
is One.” For a mezuzah to be considered “kosher,” and not just jewelry, the words had to be written by a
sofrim
, a specially trained religious scribe. Krantz had paid extra to have his mezuzah “koshered.” Little contradictions acted out by many secular Jews sometimes spoke more about their faith than their words.

Krantz kept his hair close cropped, a quarter-inch cut, like a marine’s. He would deny it, but Fala knew it was vanity. He was balding. Nevertheless, he was still a very handsome man. In his early fifties, with chiseled features and a well-toned and tanned physique, he looked ten years younger. Only the gray hair on his chest gave away his real age. His parents had been Czech Holocaust survivors who settled in an agricultural kibbutz in Northern Galilee. He was born there in October 1956, almost seventeen years to the day from the Yom Kippur War and the momentous events that would alter his life.

His partner, in science and romance, was thirty-three-year-old Fala al-Shohada, an exotically dark and beautiful woman, once runner-up for Miss Egypt in a decade-old Miss Universe contest. She was almost as tall as Krantz, and wearing high heels she stood taller. At formal events, elegantly gowned, she never failed to turn heads. Today, she wore a flowered bikini and a baseball cap. It had a red P—for the Philadelphia Phillies—on the brim, a gift from a former professor at the University of Pennsylvania where she’d studied for her master’s degree in archaeology. That’s where she had met Joshua Krantz. Attracted to strong and intelligent men, he suited her perfectly. He was the man she had settled upon, and though they had some obstacles to overcome, she was comfortable that it would only be a matter of time before they would make their relationship a legal one.

Colonel Joshua Krantz, now Dr. Krantz, had received his doctorate in archaeology from the University of Pennsylvania at the same time Fala had studied there. She was his teaching assistant then, and though she was nearly twenty years his junior, they soon became lovers. In geopolitical terms, the relationship seemed doomed. She was an Egyptian, a Muslim, and a nationalist, proud of her country’s ancient heritage and still on staff at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. Krantz, on the other hand, was a
sabra
, a native-born Israeli and a former colonel in the Israeli Defense Forces, the IDF. Though they had a chemistry that seemed likely to explode, they never did. They just gave off plenty of heat.

Once a career officer, now a “scientist,” Krantz had first visited Egypt on October 15, 1973, as a seventeen-year-old during the Yom Kippur War. He followed a young major general named Ariel Sharon in Operation Stouthearted Men, the successful counterattack against the Egyptians. Israel was on the verge of defeat after the Egyptian and Syrian surprise attacks on the Yom Kippur holy day. One day Krantz was carrying a knapsack as a freshman history student at Tel Aviv University, and the next he was carrying an Uzi as part of Sharon’s small force assembled to bridge a gap between the Egyptian Second and Third Armies. They ferried across the Suez Canal in inflatable boats and created a bridgehead on the Egyptian side of the canal until Israel could bring in tanks and ground troops to surround and defeat the Egyptian army. Israel’s written history of the war noted that Joshua Krantz was a hero of the Chinese Farm, the irrigation project east of the canal and just north of the crossing point, where the bitterest fighting took place. In just a few weeks, Krantz went from being a fuzzy-cheeked college boy, to a sergeant in the IDF, to a captain and company commander of a hundred men, to a national hero.

But while recent history separated Joshua Krantz and Fala al-Shohada, ancient history brought them together. Besides a physical attraction, they both had an intense interest in archaeology. He was an expert on the Greek, Roman, and Byzantine empires. She fancied the Minoans, the Persians, and, of course, the dynasties of the pharaohs of Egypt. And, they were both secularists. Both disdained the fundamentalism of their countries, be it Muslim extremism, with its religious fatwas, jihads, and praise of suicidal martyrdom; or Jewish orthodoxy, with its own faithful fanatics who believed Israel’s borders were mandated by the Bible and fellow Jews were deserving of stoning for violating the Sabbath. Floating beyond the breakwaters of Acre Harbor, they stayed focused on each other and the past. In the study of ancient history, the truth of past events was already known, or mostly known. Their work provided them great peace because it successfully removed them from the fury of an irrational world.

“It’s a world gone mad,” Joshua Krantz had said time and again, “because of beliefs in scriptures–the Torah or the Koran—written thousands of years ago by God knows who, or who knows God.”

Krantz picked up his T-shirt, already soaked with sweat. He’d been using it as a towel for the last hour. They had started their work at dawn, but it was midday and the temperature was well over one hundred degrees. He wiped sweat from his brow again and listened. The engines had stopped. A problem? He looked up at the bridge to Fala for the answer. Her body glistened in the noonday sun. She was indeed beautiful. With a high forehead, thick black eyebrows, and full lips that seemed to always frame a serene smile, she bore a striking regal resemblance to those Egyptian pharaonic statues of Nefertiti—except, of course, for that damn American baseball cap. Her every movement was pleasing, Krantz thought—no, more than that, with a bikini enhancing and revealing every curve, she was seductive. How many times had they set aside their work aboard ship to enjoy each other? Was she in the mood now? Her long fingers tipped with cherry red polish were gracefully pointing toward something astern. His eyes followed.

An Israeli coastal patrol boat was fast approaching. Krantz was familiar with the boat, a U.S.-built Cyclone-class ship about 180-feet long. It had a complement of four officers and thirty enlisted crew. It was heavily armed with Stinger ground-to-air missiles, grenade launchers, four machine guns, and it was fast. It had considerable success interdicting weapons supply vessels and low-tech Palestinian terrorist attacks from the sea.

The patrol boat stood off his stern about thirty meters—standard routine—and sent a small skiff with a crew of four to board Krantz’s boat. The patrol boat’s .50-caliber machine guns were all manned and all pointed at him. Krantz didn’t mind. They were just doing their job. The price of staying alive in Israel, a tiny island of Jews in the midst of a sea of Muslims, was persistent vigilance.

“What do they want?” Fala asked.

“Don’t know,” Krantz replied, stowing a bit of gear and slipping on some pants. “They probably have some intelligence that makes our boat seem suspicious. But they’ll check our documents, look around a bit, and we’ll get back to work. No worry.”

An Israeli major, Chaim Ben-Benjamin, came aboard. The gangly, bespectacled young man, an accountant when he wasn’t on active duty, was army, not navy, and, unsteady on his sea legs, wobbled a bit as the boat rolled.

“Colonel Krantz?” he queried.

“Yes.”

The major saluted. Krantz lazily waved a salute back. The Israeli navy was clearly looking for something in particular—him.

“I’m not in the army, Major. I don’t need a salute anymore.” “Yes, sir.”

“Are we at war again?” Krantz asked, as if that was the only explanation for the Israeli military to disturb his idylls.

“No, sir.”

“Would you like a drink, Major?” Fala interrupted, stepping up from belowdecks, where she’d wrapped a robe about herself and, with some residual Arab modesty with strangers, had covered her head with a scarf.

“B’vac a shah.”
Please, the major responded.

She retrieved a bottle of water from an ice chest on deck, wiped it dry, and handed it to the officer.

“Todah.”
Thank you, he said, and turned again to Krantz. “Colonel, you do not answer your phone. You do not listen to your radio.”

“I don’t have anything I want to hear. Or anyone I want to hear from.”

“I’ve been sent to ask for your help.”

“And by whom?”

The major eyed Fala with some suspicion.

“If you could come aboard, I could speak with you in private.”

“I have no secrets from Fala. We’re partners.”

The major had orders to encourage Krantz’s cooperation. If that meant being forthright, so be it.

“I am sent by
Aman,”
he responded.

Krantz was taken aback. He had been a soldier, familiar with battlefield tactics and sometimes covert operations,
but Aman
—

Aman
was the abbreviated name for
Agaf ha-Modi’in
, or Israeli military intelligence. It was a service independent and coequal with Israel’s army, navy, and air force. It had only a few thousand personnel but provided the daily national intelligence for the prime minister and the cabinet on all Arab countries and, in fact, on all foreign risks. While Shin Bit handled domestic intelligence and the Mossad handled foreign counterterrorism,
Aman
was the service dedicated to protecting Israel from total annihilation. In the 1973 Yom Kippur War, its failures were described as key to Israel’s near defeat and destruction. Since then, it had recovered its prestige and its renown.

“As to military secrets,” Krantz interjected, “I have no interest and she has no interest.” He made a point of emphasizing his intent to stay out of the military’s business by turning his back on the major and busying himself adjusting the cables to his underwater metal detector.

“What’s important is that we have an interest in you.” He looked again at Fala. “Miss al-Shohada, she’s an Egyptian national. Is she not?” It was a statement of fact, not a question, but Major Benjamin’s tone was intimidating.

“She is,” Krantz confirmed, reeled back into paying attention by the unveiled threat. “But unless we are perhaps again at war with Egypt, I believe she would do nothing to harm Israel. I would put my life on it.”

But there was little need for more small talk. He knew he would go—voluntarily or involuntarily.

The patrol boat escorted them into the harbor, along the Acre seawall toward the marina.

“It must be nice,” the major commented, “to live and work here. It’s beautiful.”

“It is,” Fala agreed.

The city held meaning, as well, for their relationship. Acre was a glorious town to admire from the sea, and she’d always marveled at the majesty and history of its fortifications. It was the ancient gateway to the Holy Land—a city that had always been difficult to capture and hold. Fala smiled and wrapped her arms tightly around Joshua, a man she had captured and intended to hold.

“Did you know, Major,” Fala said, easing into a teacher’s role, “Akko is only mentioned once in the Old Testament?”

“Is that unusual?”

“Well,” she went on, “it’s such an old city, with so much history, but it’s only mentioned once, in the Book of Judges.”

“You know the Bible?”

“It’s history, and I’m an historian,” Fala replied. “In Judges,” she quoted, “it says that after the death of Joshua, the children of Israel asked God: ‘Who will go up for us against the Canaanites, to fight against them?’ And God said, ‘Judah shall go up and I will deliver the land into his hand.’ But you know, Major, the Jews never drove out the inhabitants of Akko. It says that, in the Bible.”

“Well, we’re certainly here now,” the major retorted with a serious, rebuking gaze.

“I think the point she wanted to make,” Krantz cut in, “is that sometimes history is not exactly what the Bible says it is. Even with God’s favor, Akko was one place where the Israelites were unable to dislodge the Canaanite inhabitants. So the Israelites and the Canaanites came to share the land together.” He nodded toward the seawall they were paralleling. “That wall, while it was originally built thousands of years ago, was most recently rebuilt, after Napoleon’s siege in 1800, by Pasha Al-Jezzar under the direction of his Jewish advisor Haim Farkhi. Arabs with Jewish advisors. Can any of us conceive of such a partnership today?”