114

FROM HIS PERCH ON the terrace of the second-floor apartment overlooking Ibn-Gvirol Street, his harness clipped to the cable, Cobi tightens his gas mask and launches down until he reaches the moving Challenger below, slips the clip from the cable, and drops to the roof of the slow-moving tank. Were he less focused on what he was trained over and over to do, he would see copies of himself alighting on every tank on the boulevard; were he in one of the Jordanian Apaches soaring over the city, he would see hundreds more. He clambers to the tank’s ventilator in the turret, pulls the foot-long brass tube from his belt, and smashes it down into the ventilator with his hammer.

By this time, the tank crew may be aware something untoward is happening, but like most main battle tanks, Challengers have 360-degree viewing capacity on the horizontal plane but are blind to anything happening immediately above or below. What is happening above is an example of the primitive overcoming the sophisticated. The ABC (Atomic, Biological, Chemical) filter on the intake vent of the Challenger is a soft multi-tissue membrane—it must be in order for clean outside air to enter the otherwise sealed tank cabin. Once that membrane is pierced, such as by a brass tube struck by a ballpeen hammer with sufficient force, the cabin is no longer secure.

The IDF planning group responsible for this breakthrough—and it is a breakthrough in more than figurative terms—first examined the feasibility of inserting a grenade into the cabin and thus neutralizing its crew of four on the spot, but since the objective is to utilize the enemy armor immediately, it was decided to use CS, commonly known as tear gas. The problem then was how to pierce the filtration membrane and fill the cabin with CS at once. Alon Peri provided the answer: a simple tube that, when hit in its center, engages a firing pin, while at the same time tearing through the filtration mesh.

From his office overlooking Ibn-Gvirol and—though he is not at the moment aware of it—his own son’s part in the operation, Yigal watches with Alon Peri as the choreography unfolds: IDF personnel sliding down the taut cables between the buildings, dropping to the tank roofs, inserting the brass tubes, striking them with hammers.

“How long will it take?” Yigal asks.

“Three,” Peri says, watching with him.

“Three what, minutes? That’s too—”

“Two,” Peri says. “One. Blastoff.”

In an operation that seems to have been designed by Busby Berkeley for a military training film—though minus the music—from one Jordanian tank to the next the same scene repeats: hatches fly open as the coughing, choking tank crews climb out, a good many falling off their tanks in a blind attempt to find clean air. Immediately, from storefronts and apartment house entryways, IDF soldiers sprint out to throw the retching tank crewmen to the ground and cuff their hands behind them with plastic ties. It is not so much a battle as a harvest.

While this is happening, IDF tank crews in gas masks enter the Challengers. These will be hot zones for at least an hour. Hatches open to air them out, the tanks move forward immediately, their new commanders riding above, for the moment able to remove their masks. What they see at street level is what the four Jordanian Apache pilots see from two thousand feet.

The empty boulevards swarm with people, a whole city come alive as the shelters empty. From the apartment house terraces, the white sheets are pulled down—one enthusiastic civilian even sets one alight, the flaming fabric falling to the street and nearly setting an IDF tank commander on fire. On every street, spontaneous dancing breaks out. Someone plays an accordion on his balcony. Here and there, as on the Jewish New Year, a ram’s horn sounds, a kind of tenor bellow, its pizzicato notes celebrating the joy of deliverance.

Then the Apaches drop down.

As one the celebrants look up, their happiness evaporating into fear as they stampede for cover. For dozens of civilians, it is too late—the Apaches’ twin 30mm machine guns plow through the crowd, spewing death in long lines like sewn seams as the helicopters swoop down the boulevards, aiming their Hellfire missiles at the tanks still bear the flying pennants of the Royal Jordanian Armored Corps. Two tanks are taken out immediately, their armor exploding in a wide radius, killing the tank crews and causing further civilian casualties.

But the attack does not last long.

From apartment house roofs, IDF infantry, among them a nine-teen-year-old red-haired girl sergeant who last used a Stinger missile a week earlier on the Tel Aviv beachfront, take them down with an efficient dispatch that is at once angry and professional.

Little is left of the Apaches other than their forty-eight-foot rotors, which spin off over the city until they crash into the tops of buildings and, in one case, fly through the windows of an office tower, some twenty feet of rotor blade sticking out into the still air like a flagpole. Later that day, an enterprising teenager will crawl out and attach to it the blue and white flag of Israel.