Pursuit (55 page)

And thinking of the Jew Brodsky, what would he do when his men reported that the signals had stopped, that obviously General Grossman had dismantled them? What he would do would be to instantly contact as many checkpoints as he could reach and tell them to report the passage of a brown army sedan license number AR 436 T. Would the Jew Brodsky tell them to stop that car and hold the driver? Very doubtful; the checkpoints were under the command of the army and such instructions could be overridden by a general, even one in civilian clothing. Besides, the Jew Brodsky would gain little by having the car stopped; no, what he would ask is that the passage and the time of passage be reported, nothing more. Grossman smiled in the dimness of the car, because it really made no difference what instruction the Jew Brodsky handed out; the roads he had selected for the first part of his journey had no checkpoints, he had determined that, and the few after that in the desert had no communication.

He grinned to himself savagely and drove on.

Brodsky's helicopter gave the proper recognition signals, received permission to land, and settled down past the sheer cliffs to touch lightly onto the brilliantly illuminated pad. The lights were extinguished as soon as the helicopter made contact with the concrete; the rotor engines were cut and in the silence that fell the pilot could hear his instructions.

“—into the hangar with the bird, and you too. Stay out of sight,” Brodsky said, and set off at a brisk walk for the command post.

The command post was set in the rear of one of the auxiliary caves, and Brodsky could not help but recall the place when it had been a simple kibbutz, with its plain cement-block buildings, when its products were melons and figs, and when the major problem had been water, the lack of it, or Arab attacks; when its boundaries were the old fence where Grossman had so recklessly knelt with the machine gun during that battle so many years before. Now the buildings were all gone, and the people and the melons and the figs were also all gone, and where the old fence had stood was less than a quarter of the way to the new electrified fence and the new watchtowers that were manned day and night by soldiers, not settlers, and the entire area was restricted. Brodsky sighed at the necessities of defense and security, and walked into the command post.

The majority of the personnel of the Ein Tsofar facility were off duty, spared from labor by the Independence Day celebration; they were either home in one of the major cities or in Arad, thirty miles away, enjoying the celebration that was going on in every town and village in the country, no matter how large or small. A captain was on duty, the result of losing a coin toss to see who would be stuck with the duty; with him was the radioman who had accepted the helicopter's recognition signal. He was not there as the result of a lost bet; he was there—like the sentries and the soldiers at checkpoints—because he had been ordered to be there.

The captain and his superior shook hands; the captain reseated himself, indicated a chair for his guest, and reached into a drawer for a bottle of brandy. He had always liked Colonel Brodsky, and a little conversation would be a pleasant break in the evening's dullness, although he was surprised to be hosting the colonel. If he were not a mere captain, he would certainly not be stuck out here in the desert on a night such as this one.

Brodsky checked his watch. If his theory was correct, Grossman still had at least thirty minutes of driving to reach the facility. He sat down, accepted the drink, and sipped from it. He put his glass down.

“Were there any messages for me from my office?”

The captain paused in raising his own glass. “No, sir.”

“Ah …” Brodsky took another sip of his drink. It was possible to reach Ein Tsofar without passing any checkpoints, or at least any with communications, simply by staying with secondary roads, and Grossman would be aware that the checkpoints would be notified. He looked at the captain. “General Grossman will be coming here tonight, I believe. In half an hour or so, if I'm right. Driving.”

The captain looked surprised. “General Grossman is coming here, sir?”

“I think so.”

“Again?”

Brodsky froze. “What do you mean,
again
? When was he here last?”

“Just this morning, sir. He arrived by helicopter about nine o'clock. He made a brief inspection by himself, just walked through the facility—briefer than usual, but of course no one is working today—and then he left. You say he's coming back, sir?”

Brodsky's hand flew to the telephone, and then stopped. Who was he going to call? Any message from any checkpoint would be relayed to him, and tying up the line with pointless calls, especially when he had no idea of who to call, was fatuous. Grossman had gone to his office in his usual manner, had undoubtedly simply told his secretary he did not want to be disturbed for either visitors or phone calls for several hours, had then walked into his office and locked the door, gone out the other door, down the back stairs to the street, and taken a cab to the airport. All very simple. And his men were glued to the car in the garage all the while. Great work!

“No,” he said. “I was mistaken. I doubt very much the general will be coming back.”

He reached for the brandy bottle and refilled his glass. As long as he had to await word from his office, he might as well use the time to get drunk. There was a very good chance he had just seen his future go down the drain, and worse, there was a good chance that the country's security had been compromised. And then Max Brodsky had a second thought, one he wondered had not occurred to him before, and he pushed the brandy bottle away, reaching for the telephone instead, speaking to the captain as he raised the receiver.

“Have my helicopter brought out and kept ready for instant departure.”

He brought the receiver to his ear and clicked for the operator. There
was
a call that just might do the trick.

Trailing a car at night, Herzl discovered, was far from an easy job, especially if one was to be careful and keep two or three other cars in between in order not to be identified. It required constant concentration, but even then Herzl had time to wonder that no other car, as far as he could determine, seemed in the least interested in the movements of the man he knew to be Colonel Helmut von Schraeder. Cars between his little sports model and the general's large sedan would pass the general's automobile to disappear into the night, to be replaced by other cars that first passed him and then passed the general's car, for the general seemed to be driving unusually slowly for a man with a temperament of Benjamin Grossman. Well, if nobody was interested in where von Schraeder was going, then he, Herzl, would follow him all night, if necessary. Gasoline was no problem, fortunately; one tankful in his little sports bug could take him from one end of the small country to the other.

He suddenly found himself without an intermediary car and he slowed down precipitously, just as the general's sedan pulled to the shoulder of the road, and he saw his father get down and bend over as if inspecting the front tire. He flashed past, relieved not to have been seen, drove down the highway a bit and pulled off into a narrow trail leading into the dunes. Had something happened to the other car? He backed around with difficulty in the narrow space, cut his headlights and waited, the engine of the small sports car panting as if anxious to take up the chase again. Herzl wondered if perhaps he had been detected or, even if he had not, if the maneuver were merely a move to do precisely what it had done—put a potential pursuer up some trail waiting while the other car turned and went off in another direction. But before he could worry about this possibility very long the brown sedan swept past his hiding place, no longer at such a leisurely pace, and he barely made it back to the highway in time to see the taillights of the other car disappearing in the distance. From then on it took all his attention and driving skills on the narrow, winding road to just keep up with the car ahead.

Traffic thinned considerably as they passed Kiryat Gat on the road to Beer Sheba. Herzl was now positive there was no surveillance at all on the other man, for now there were no other cars in sight for long distances, either ahead of them or behind them. He realized that in time the man in the car ahead would know he was being followed, but other than keeping the car in sight, he knew of no way to discover where the man was going. But even though the man might eventually suspect he was being followed, there would be no way he could determine he was being followed by his son.

An occasional Egged bus, loaded with passengers, would roar past him and he could see it ahead cutting around the brown sedan; otherwise they seemed to be alone on the road. Where could the man possibly be going? There was nothing ahead except desert. And why was von Schraeder being permitted to move about so freely? Herzl was very glad now that he had resisted the temptation to call Max Brodsky; certainly there had to be something very suspicious in the way Brodsky was acting—or, rather, not acting.

At Beer Sheba the streets were bright with streetlamps and he had to drop back, but at least both cars had to move slowly through the people that moved about on the main street, bottles in hand, celebrating. The brown sedan took the road to Dimona, and as they passed that little village, also alive with music and dancing, Herzl knew he could not continue to trail the other man without being discovered, for now, other than an occasional Egged bus no other traffic was to be seen. When the car ahead passed the cutoff to the old road leading down the mountain, Herzl made up his mind. He had to take the chance that the man ahead was going to Eilat; there was nothing on the road before that point. With the extra speed of his small car he could get there first, but it meant taking the old road down what was known as the Scorpion's Ascent, coming into the Eilat road at the small settlement of Hatzeva Ir Ovot. With a shudder at the thought of the road ahead, he swung into the old road, hoping he was not making a terrible mistake. The taillights of the other car disappeared into the night.

For approximately ten miles the road was paved; then he turned into the trail leading to the Scorpion's Ascent, his wheels spurting sand, trying to concentrate on the road immediately before him and not on the torturous decline he would soon meet. He had come here with a group of friends one summer vacation in a jeep, and he remembered the frightful descent at a creeping pace; now he intended to take it as fast as he could without sliding from one of the precipitous cliffs into the jagged chasms that lined the snaking road.

He seemed to be alone in the world, the overhead sky flooded with stars, the sliver of a moon the only things to keep him company in the night, the road a constantly curving ribbon of sand, barely marked; and then he was at the Scorpion and on it, fighting the terrifying, twisting, dropping curves with sweaty hands, wondering what he was doing here. The headlights of his car seemed to bounce off the cliffs beyond the chasms on either side as he braked and swung into each curve only to step on the accelerator momentarily with his other foot on the brake pedal, the wheels skidding obediently to the very edge of the treacherous drop, barely gripping in time. The twisting road that swung before his sweeping headlights seemed to be almost vertical in places, as if he might slide down it rather than drive down it. To Herzl it seemed he was driving in a nightmare, and a small portion of his mind detached itself from the terror of the road and the necessity to calculate each co-ordinated movement of his hands and feet, to wonder if he went over the edge whether he would float down and down with the weightlessness of a dream and then suddenly waken to discover it had all been unreal, for the Scorpion's Ascent was like nothing but a scene from Dante's
Inferno
. And then, when it seemed he had been fighting the frightening road for hours, the lights of the settlement could be seen far below, and he was out of the last curve and onto the straight stretch that dropped down the last of the mountain to the intersection with the Eilat road.

He turned into the Eilat road and found himself back in the world again. No car headlights could be seen in either direction; he could only hope he was ahead of the other car, because if he had gone through the nerve-racking torment of the Scorpion for nothing, if the other car was still ahead of him or—worse thought—if the other car had not been destined for Eilat but had turned north and was now miles away … It was not wise to think of such things. He
had
to be ahead and the other car
had
to be going to Eilat. And he was going to get there as fast as he could. He stepped on the accelerator and closed his mind to any thought except to reach his destination. What he would do when he got there, and when the other car got there—for it was pointless to think the other car would not get there—was something he would have to worry about at the time.

It was on the road from Beer Sheba to Dimona that Benjamin Grossman was finally certain he was being followed, and after the two cars had both passed Dimona and faced nothing but desert, he determined to find out exactly who was following him, and to handle the matter. He certainly did not intend to fail at this time. He eased his revolver from the holster set beneath the dashboard and held it in one hand even as he started to pull onto the shoulder; then the headlights that had been trailing him for so long swung off onto the road that led to the tiny settlement of Oron, deep in the Negev. With a humorless smile at his own display of nerves, Grossman completed braking the car and turned off his lights, waiting. If it had merely been a maneuver on the part of the other car, its driver would get a good surprise when he came back and passed this spot, but no car appeared and after a brief wait he put the revolver back in place and pulled back onto the highway, resuming his journey. It had been an idiotic thought in the first place; who could follow a man at night in the desert, where headlights are necessary to avoid disaster, and hope not to be detected? He had better not start imagining things; he was too close to completion of his mission for that. On the other hand, there was no point in taking needless risks.