AROMA ESPRESSO BAR, TEL AVIV, ISRAEL—16:45 / 4:45 P.M. IDT
How do you drink that abomination?” Nir asked, nodding to the iced coffee Nicole was carrying.
She placed a ceramic mug in front of him. “It’s 34 Celsius out. How do you drink hot coffee on a day like this?”
“I like how you informed me you’re using Celsius,” he said with a laugh.
Nicole rolled her eyes. “I’m in so many countries that announcing Celsius and Fahrenheit has become second nature. It’s like living in two worlds. I’ve become a master at converting feet to meters, gallons to liters, pounds to kilos—and back again.”
“Impressive skills. But what I meant by asking how you drink that abomination is actually more of an existential question. You see, I believe if God had wanted us to drink cold coffee, He wouldn’t have invented boiling water.”
“That’s shtuyot bamitz.”
“Nonsense in juice! Look at you with your Hebrew. Still, the fact remains that you think my logic is nonsense only because your brain has been addled by cold coffee. It makes perfect sense to me.” He leaned back in his chair and sipped from his mug.
“I think it’s much more likely that your brain was addled by that bullet,” she said, pointing to the bandage on his left temple. “That was a little too close a shave.”
“Speaking of shave, you like the new look?”
When the nurse said she needed to shave where the bullet had grazed him in order to stitch up the wound, he’d sweet-talked her into removing the hair all around his head, leaving only some tightly buzzed hair on top.
“I think you’ve watched Heartbreak Ridge a few too many times.”
“Oorah.” Nir took another sip.
“Seriously, that was a little too close. Between Iran and Syria… I don’t know. How many close calls do you get?”
He lowered his mug to the table. “No, I can’t talk about that. If thoughts like that get into my mind, I’ll freeze up someday.”
Nicole had a habit of slowly twisting her straw in cold drinks, which she was doing now. “On the field of operation, yes, I agree. You’ve got to just go on instinct. But in these downtimes, you need to ask yourself the what-ifs, Nir. What if that bullet had been millimeters to the right? Where would your soul be right now?”
Nir waved his hands. “Please, Nicole. I’m tired. I don’t think I’m up for one of these big eternal soul discussions. Seriously, I just got shot this morning.”
Nicole stared at him, but then a sad smile spread across her face. “You’re right. Just because it’s on my mind doesn’t mean I have to burden you with it. There’s a time and a place. This is neither.”
Nir reached over the table and took her hand. “Thank you. Now, what did you hear about the contents of those cases we pulled on the op? I got wind that it’s good news.”
“I guess that depends on how you take it. While you were in the infirmary, I got a call from the second-floor lab. Inside each case were wires and parts pieced together so they look like a bomb. The lab woman said they were put together like a lower-secondary class was given a science project to build a suitcase bomb.”
Nir pictured what he’d seen in the briefcase. That sounded about right. “How do we know they’re supposed to be suitcase nukes? Couldn’t they just be practicing to set off conventional bombs?”
Nicole lifted her phone and made a few swipes, then passed it across. Nir saw a photo of a yellow and black radiation warning triangle.
“Now I remember,” he said. He recognized that sticker. It was in that same briefcase. In the craziness of the event, he’d forgotten it was there.
“Each one of the cases had one or more of those stickers.”
A concerning thought struck Nir. “Does that mean we may have been exposed to something?”
Nicole shook her head. “No, they were only for show. Like, ‘Hey guys, don’t forget these are supposed to be nukes.’ So what happens now?”
“Hang on,” he said, standing. They had a usual routine where he ended up drinking Nicole’s drink after he’d finished his. But her buying iced coffee had thrown off the ritual. At the counter, he ordered a second cappuccino and asked the woman to deliver it to the table. When he got back, he said, “Now the ramsad goes to the prime minister, hopefully to tell him it’s finally time to permanently shut down Iran’s nuclear program.”
“Can we do that?”
“With enough firepower. It will cause a major international incident, and we’ll be paying for it publicly for a long time, but behind the scenes a lot of people will be happy we finally did something definitive.”
Holding her straw stationary, Nicole swirled her mug to spread the cold around. “Will Iran declare war?”
“They might. They’ve got plenty of missiles stockpiled. But they would hesitate to go all out with their conventional weapons.”
“Why’s that?”
“First, there would be little international backing. Again, while publicly nations may be sympathetic, most will be glad they don’t have to worry about a nuclear Iran anymore. But more importantly, you must remember that while they may not be a nuclear power, we are. Likely, what will happen is we’ll have rockets showered on us for a while from the north and the south, so it will probably be a good idea for you to stay away. But unless Russia gets involved…and they might. They keep inching their way farther and farther south in Syria. But unless they engage, we’ll survive it.”
“So if the prime minister approves this, how long until you think the strike will happen?”
“That really depends on the Saudis.”
Nicole froze with her straw still in her mouth. “The Saudis? What do they have to do with any of this?”
“Pull up a map of the Middle East on your phone.”
“You have a phone,” she said, picking hers up, then starting to thumb in a search.
“Yours is right there. Mine’s all the way down in my pocket.”
Nicole stopped and glared at him. He gave her an innocent smile.
Turning her attention back to her phone, she pressed a couple more buttons, then set it down between them.
“Okay, look between Israel and Iran. What do you see?”
“Other countries, of course.”
“Exactly. We can’t get to Iran without flying over other countries. But if we take the northern route, that means—”
“I get it. Flying over Syria and Iraq.”
“Exactly. Syria essentially belongs to Putin, and as we just said, he’s a wild card. We can’t know if he’ll make the IAF pay on the way back from Iran, make Israel pay later, or just say, ‘Sucks to be you, Khamenei.’ But any way you look at it, he’ll exact some sort of price out of Israel.”
“What about the central route over Jordan, then Iraq?”
The barista delivered his coffee, which Nir received with a “Thanks.” Then turning back to Nicole, he said, “Good question, because it seems the most logical route. But we’re touch-and-go with Jordan’s King Abdullah. He’s in a tough place. He’s Western enough to be hated by the Arabs and Arab enough to be distrusted by the West. He makes semi-nice with Israel for his own preservation, but he has too many militant Arabs and Palestinians in his country to allow our air force to fly over for a major attack on fellow Muslims. Giving permission for that is a good way to get himself assassinated.”
“So that leaves the southern route and Saudi Arabia.”
“And thanks to the Abraham Accords, we actually have a relationship with them. It’s not necessarily formalized yet, but the back channels we’ve had with them for years no longer have to remain so hidden.”
“Can we trust them?”
Nir laughed. “Absolutely not. The royal family is corrupt, and the crown prince is as shady a dude as you’ll ever find.”
Nicole threw up her hands. “Okay, now I don’t get it again. Why would we depend on a government we can’t trust run by shady characters?”
“Because they need Iran’s nuclear program gone as much as we do. They know if Iran doesn’t bomb them themselves, they’ll give the Houthis a nuke so they’ll do the dirty work in their stead.”
Nir took a sip of his drink. “So the ramsad will go to the crown prince on the prime minister’s behalf, present him the evidence, and ask him to let us fly our air force over his country on our way to knock the snot out of Iran’s nuclear program.”
“Such an elegant way of putting it,” she said with a wink. “Do you think the crown prince will say yes?”
“I don’t know. It’s a big ask. He’ll know the pros, but he’ll also recognize that he’ll pay a price internationally and with the Houthis. Those Yemeni rebels are already making his life miserable, like being perpetually bitten by a swarm of sandflies. If he does say yes, he’ll want something big for it.”
“Of course, because, as you love to say, everything in the Middle East is a deal.”
Nir laughed. “Spoken like a true Jew! Nothing is ever given or received for free. He’ll ask for some intelligence or technology or weaponry or something.”
“Will the prime minister agree to the price?”
“I guess it depends on what it is. But probably yes. We’re not really in a strong bargaining position.”
“The Middle East is so weird.”
“As opposed to your African home, where everything is so stable all the time.”
Nicole laughed. “Touché.” She took another pull from her straw, then sat back looking at him with a smirk on her face.
“Tired of shoptalk?” Nir asked.
“Dreadfully.”
“Good, because I have something I want to talk about.”
Nicole leaned forward. “Sounds ominous,” she said with a glint in her eyes.
“I just…it’s… Okay, so when we were jogging back to the LZ to get picked up by the Yanshuf and flown out, there was nothing to do but bleed and think for an hour and a half. Want to know what I thought about most of the time?”
“Aunt Mila’s cocoa?”
Nir laughed. “No, I thought about you…about us. I thought about this, these coffees, and the rare times we get to see each other. I thought that if that round had been a few millimeters to the right, I would have died not telling you exactly how I feel about you.”
“Stop.” Nicole was dead serious. “We can’t have this conversation.”
Exasperated, Nir leaned back. “Why?”
“You know exactly why, Nir. We’ve been over this so many times already.”
“Okay, I do know why. I just don’t get it. I know Jews who are married to Muslims. I know Muslims who are with Christians. And I know Christians who are with Jews. Why does it seem like everyone can make it work except us?”
Nicole paused, and he could tell she was collecting her thoughts. “I can’t speak for those other people. All I know is that Jesus is the most important person in my life.”
“Sababa. You’ve said that. I get it. I’m cool with that.”
“You say that now. But how many more conversations like the one I tried to have with you earlier—”
Nir had opened his mouth to interrupt, but Nicole put up her hand. “How many more of those kinds of spiritual conversations can we have before you just get tired of it and end things between us?”
“I don’t know. A better question is why we have to keep having these conversations. Why are you not content for you to believe what you believe and for me to believe what I believe?”
“Because it doesn’t work that way, Nir. Okay, think of it this way. What if that coffee mug was made out of lead?”
“That would make for some pretty nasty coffee.” He laughed.
Nicole didn’t smile. “Let’s say I told you using that lead mug would kill you, but you still came in here and used it day after day. You loved that lead mug, and you were determined to keep drinking from it. Then one day you got so frustrated with my telling you to get rid of it that you told me you never wanted to hear me talk about it again. What should I do?”
Nir didn’t answer. This was not the way he’d hoped this conversation would go.
“Would the loving thing be to just shut up about the mug so we could get along? Sure, I’d have to watch you killing yourself one day at a time, but as long as we had some laughs together and I didn’t offend you anymore, it would all be good. Or would the loving thing be to risk our friendship, risk our future, risk everything we had so I could save your life?”
The impossibility of their relationship was sinking in. Nir saw no prospect that Nicole would ever budge on this point. Any hope he had for a future with her was fading into nothing.
“But you’re not saving my life, Nicole,” he said quietly. “I’m not dying.”
“Maybe not physically. Spiritually, though, you’re already dead. I’m just trying to show you how God can bring you back to life.”
Nir shook his head and sighed. “I don’t get it. We used to have so much fun together. Now it’s like you’ve become this one-note violin.”
Nicole stared at him, and for a long moment neither of them uttered a word. Then a tear trailed from one of her ice-blue eyes. “It’s the only note that really matters, Nir.”
She stood and walked out of the café.