AN THE DARKENED WAR ROOM OFF THE PRIME MINISTER’S office, Zalman Cohen paced back and forth in front of the bank of telephones, fanning his puffy face with a sheaf of papers. Elihu stood motionless in front of a window staring at his reflection without seeing it. He envied Baruch, who was younger and fitter and had talked his way onto the raid as a representative of the inter-agency Working Group. Waiting, for the katsa, was sheer agony; it was psychologically easier to be on a raiding party than in a command center dreading each ring of the telephone. The chief of the general staff, a barrel-chested general with a crimson beret jammed under an epaulet, growled orders into a satellite phone fitted with a scrambler; troops were being deployed in anticipation of Arab protests if and when the so-called mujaddid was shot to death by Israeli soldiers. The Shin Bet people, along with the Minister of Defense and two other members of the inner cabinet, helped themselves to fruit juice at a sideboard and talked in undertones. The Prime Minister, the only tranquil person in the room thanks to his legendary self control, sat alone at the oval conference table smoking one of the rare cigarettes he permitted himself. Every now and then he would grip it between his thumb and three fingers, a habit he had picked up from a Polish uncle, and pluck it from his mouth to watch the end burn down, as if there was a message waiting to be deciphered in the glow of the embers. On the blotter in front of him were the two versions of the communiqué that Cohen had prepared for the eight o’clock press conference. Both versions started out by explaining that the release of the Palestinian prisoners had been announced to give the General Staff commando unit time to raid the hideaway where Abu Bakr was believed to be holding Rabbi Apfulbaum; that all the prisoners demanded by the hostage takers were still in Israeli custody, where they would remain for the foreseeable future. The first version of the communiqué went on to disclose that the raiders had succeeded in freeing the Rabbi. The second version announced that Apfulbaum had been killed by his abductors before the Israeli soldiers could reach him. Both versions ended with a solemn declaration of the government’s intention to never give in to terrorist blackmail. “There is no rear area in the war against Islamic fundamentalist terrorism,” Cohen had the Prime Minister saying. “There are no non-combatants. All of our citizens—the private patrolling West Bank roads, the mother crossing Jerusalem on a number eighteen bus, the Rabbi returning from Yad Mordechai—are on the front lines.”
A red telephone on the table purred. The men drinking fruit juice around the sideboard broke off their conversations and wheeled toward the sound. The katsa took two steps in Cohen’s direction as the director of the Prime Minister’s military affairs committee reached out and snatched the phone off its hook.
“Cohen,” he mumbled. He listened, nodded once, nodded a second time and dropped the phone back on its cradle. “They’re inside the Old City,” he announced. “Operation Simon Bar-Kokhba is underway.”