26

HEADING NORTH ON THE coastal road, traffic thickening around him as more reservists head for their units, Cobi’s father shoots the BMW sedan to 130, then 140 miles per hour. As he drives, Yigal buttons his uniform shirt, then slips on his dog tag in its leather pouch, which most Israeli soldiers wear so that the metal won’t reflect light.

His pistol is on the passenger seat. All of this he keeps prepared: his field uniform hanging in the closet, IDF identification card in the placket pocket over his heart, a ballpoint pen and a yellow map marker in the right-hand pocket, along with a tiny steel jar, not much bigger than a thimble, in which he keeps the present his own father gave him on his induction into the IDF. “In case you fall into captivity,” his father told him. “They’re not like us.”

His father was a hospital orderly for forty years. One day during that time he must have liberated the pills in the steel container. Yigal never opened it. He is certain there is nothing left after so many decades in his pocket other than fine powder, and maybe even that has disappeared. He carries it for luck, and to remember. He taps the cellphone in his lap.

“Call Noam,” he tells it.

Busy circuit, a series of short buzzes.

He taps the phone again, this time pressing down heavily.

“Call No-am!”

The circuits are still busy. They will be all day and into the night. He knows why. After all, Yigal does control the second largest of Israel’s four cell phone companies, a gold mine really, but as with any gold mine, its proprietors—he is thinking of himself—are reluctant to invest when profits are easy, and equally reluctant when they seem like a distant goal. Why spend the profits when things are good? Why add to the losses when they are not? These are business decisions. But in times of emergency he is one of millions paying the price of his own investment strategy.

He presses his foot down on the accelerator pedal: 145, 150, 155. Beyond that, Yigal fears he will not be able to control this beast of a car. Should another automobile swerve into his lane it will be over for him in seconds. The brigade will be leaderless. He drops it down to 150. One-fifty is good, he thinks. I can handle one-fifty.

He turns off to the east before the exits for Haifa. Above the city already he can see the black smoke rising. The port is on fire, he thinks. No, he knows it. The car’s speakers, tuned to IDF Radio, little different from a commercial station in time of peace, are still calling codes: Dry Fish. Hairy Leg. Broken Nose. Dark—

The speakers emit a sound that is the beginning of a boom, then silence.

Yigal has been in three wars. IDF Radio has never been down. He pushes the BMW to 160.