CHAPTER SEVENTY-FIVE

Tell Atlas Mountains, Northwestern Algeria, January 3, 0 dark-30

The INS [Israeli Navy Ship] S class submarine, Tanin [Tz-71], surfaced in international waters offshore from the bustling North African city of Sidi-bel-Abbès, Algeria, in radio silence and all-lights-out precautions. The ship had earned the affectionate name “Sugar Boat” among the crew and the commandoes from the smooth voyage and easy and silent surfacing maneuver. Nineteen men dressed all in black and with black-painted faces stepped swiftly onto the deck and took a moment to gain their sea legs. As they assembled, two zodiacs were put into the ocean on the starboard side; and crew men lined the bridge, coming to aid the commandoes as they entered the boats.

The zodiacs sped in the direction of the shoreline, and the Tanin submersed. The entire time on the surface of the Mediterranean had been less than seven minutes. Five minutes into Algerian waters, two Sikorsky S-58 helicopters—a longer and more powerful version of the earlier Sikorsky model S-55—appeared out of the blackness and hovered over the zodiacs. A trail line was dropped from the helicopters to each of the zodiacs and secured only by two men holding the line. A rescue basket was lowered and two men gingerly entered it and stretched out to avoid imbalance. The basket was retracted into the helicopter, and the two men were quickly helped out and into the cargo bay of the aircraft. The process was repeated three times, then the rescue basket apparatus was retracted into the helicopter for the last time. The final action was to pull the trail line back into the aircraft with six backpacks full of weaponry and emergency supplies. The boat drivers headed back to sea for the predetermined GPS site where they rejoined the sub. The Sikorskys moved swiftly at low altitude towards the Tell Atlas Mountains north of Sidi-bel-Abbès. It was largely an instrument flight since they could not risk lights.

The Sikorsky rose well above the mountains, and at the predetermined location, began to release the parachutists and their gear in a HALO [high altitude, low opening] drop. There was real danger in the process: it was pitch-black dark, they were landing in unfamiliar territory, and—unlike most of the rest of the archetypal barren North African habitat—their landing site was in the steep well-watered and forested mountains north of that vast desert. Had the landing been in the light, the men would have been treated to a striking green background with a surprisingly densely populated area of North African towns.

The mountains–with their inhospitable environment–have provided a refuge for the original inhabitants, who fled successive invasions. Here the Berber people survived, preserving their own languages, traditions, and beliefs, while at the same time accepting Islam to some extent. Village communities still live according to a code of customary law–known as kanun–which deals with all questions of property and persons. The family unit traces its descent from a single ancestor, preserving its cohesion by the sense of solidarity that unites its members; an injury to the honor of one affects the group as a whole and demands vengeance.

The Kabyle Berber society in the Tell Atlas Mountains had struggled for centuries to preserve its individuality apart from the majority Arabs. Nowhere is that more evident than in their choice of habitat. Their fortified villages are largely perched high up on mountain crests. Most of the villages are small, consisting of a few dwellings, a mosque, a threshing floor, and a place for the assembly of the elders—the djemaa which governs the affairs of each community altogether separate from adjacent villages. The fortified villages guard against predation by any outsiders, including the government. Families live in separate rooms in the form of a square around a closed interior courtyard. Parachutists would be greeted with a hail of gunfire if sighted.

Women grow vegetables in small gardens adjoining their houses. Fig and olive trees cover the mountain slopes below and around the villages, and those carefully tended trees are the principal resources of the clans and are husbanded communally. The Kabyle are also skilled craftsmen working with wood, silver, and wool. They supplement their families’ incomes by working as peddlers and selling carpets and jewelry to the people of the plains below.

The landing went relatively well; for seventeen of the nineteen commandoes, it was safe, efficient, and successful. For one thing, none of the men parachuted into a town by mistake. For two of the IDF noncommissioned officers, it did not go so well. Rav samal mitkadem [Rasam-advanced chief sergeant) Levi McGuire hit a rocky outcrop, fell fifteen feet, and fractured his right femur, and Rav samal rishon [Rasar chief sergeant first class] Shaul Shraga ben Peretz landed on a spike of a dried up cork oak tree which penetrated his left foot through-and-through. Unfortunately for the unit, and especially for the two soldiers, they were out of commission; and they had to be dealt with appropriately. Fortunately—and as the result of good planning—Jacob ben Amsallem, the sayanim from Sidi-bel-Abbès, was waiting for the commando unit in the drop site with his pack mules. The little tailor knew a village situated near the mountaintops which was populated by a small clan of strict Orthodox Jewish families who were as private, protected, and prickly as their Berber neighbors—the nearest of whom lived forty-five miles away. He loaded the two injured men onto mules and led them up the rough trails to the village where the rabbi was happy to serve as an auxiliary sayanim and to provide nursing and protective care for his coreligionists, who were a rarity in his mountains.

The seventeen still fit commandoes donned night vision goggles and began to pick their laborious way down the mountainside through moist forests of cork oaks, an undergrowth of cane apple and heather shrub, and treacherously irregular carpets of rockroses and lavender. The footing was especially difficult in areas of crumbling limestone where they encountered heavy roots of green oak, arborvitae, stands of cedar, and thin bushy undergrowth covering the rocky soil. There were decent trails and even two gravel roads which would have been navigable for a family automobile. Lev insisted on avoiding both of those options for the sake of security. It was slowgoing due to the need for silence. Occasionally a small herd of wild boars or an infrequent jackal startled the advance guard, but they were well enough trained not to utter a sound. Besides the uneven terrain they had to descend, the march was difficult because of the weight of their packs.

Every man carried a backpack holding weapons that could not be traced back to Israel: a Russian Stechkin APS—A 9x18mm Makarov 1951 modified to the AO-44/APB variant with attaching silencer and steel wire stock, a select-fire machine pistol; a Walther or Pistole P38, a 9 mm semiautomatic handgun which was the service pistol of the Wehrmacht during World War II. The Israelis had the late 1963 postwar military model P1 with an aluminum frame rather than the steel frame of the original design. The pistol held eight rounds in a single row, detachable box magazine, and was fitted with a silencer; twelve Soviet F1 RPG-6 [Ruchnaya Protivotankovaya Granata] hand grenades and plastic explosives; and a Soviet spetsnaz force NRS-2 survival knife worn in an ankle holster with a built-in single-shot firing mechanism able to fire a 7.62x42mm SP-4 cartridge. The packs also contained three days of emergency rations and water, injectable morphine, tetanus antitoxin, and antibiotics—penicillin and streptomycin—a tourniquet, tape, plastic splints, and powder antibiotic wound packs.

For all of that encumbrage, the unit made good time and with no mishaps. The outskirts of the city were barren and burned—a landscape somewhere in composition between Galilee and the face of the moon. The city itself—located forty-six-and-a-half miles inland from the Mediterranean Sea—was now the populous commercial center of an important agribusiness area of vineyards, market gardens, orchards, and grain fields. It was formerly surrounded by a wall with four gates, but all that was left for the commandoes to see and to stumble over were some small piles of rock rubble. They silently passed the university which served as a landmark. Wide boulevards and squares replaced the traditional quarters, causing the town to lose much of its former character beginning in 1962. It was still completely dark when they arrived at the northwestern gates of Sidi-bel-Abbès—the side opposite the location of the Foreign Legion headquarters–giving the city something of a desert ghost town quality. Once again, Jacob ben Amsallem was waiting in the shadows.

“Following me, please, sirs,” he said, looking down to minimize the possibility that it could appear that he was giving orders.

The commando unit fell in behind the sayanim, and they moved like shadows. The sky was overhung, making it a moonless and starless night—perfect for the task at hand. They walked quickly and cautiously to avoid brushing debris on the streets but in what were obviously semicircles; the commandoes presumed it was for the purpose of security. They circled the Sidi Bel Abbès Domestic Airport and the Metropolitan Police station—which was a decaying remnant of the colonial era—before splitting into two groups and focusing on the EMT station. Jacob led one arm of the commando unit and Lev led the other. Their objective was the BOQ [Bachelor Officers’ Quarters].

§§§§§§

BOQ [Bachelor Officers Quarters], EMT [État-major tactique, Tactical Command Post], La Légion Étrangère, Sidi-bel-Abbès, Algeria, early morning

“It’s the dark romance of the French Foreign Legion: haunted men from everywhere, fighting anywhere, dying for causes not their own. Legionnaires need war, certainly … [and] there’s always the hopeless battle…. The real lesson here was not about combat tactics. It was about do not ask questions, do not make suggestions, do not even think of that. Forget your civilian reflexes. War has its own logic.”

-William Langewiesche

Antoine cursed the time of day—not yet 0500—his insistent bladder, his arthritic joints, his insomnia, and his old age for not allowing him more than four to six hours of sleep a night. He was too old to be a soldier, he thought. He was too old to be still sleeping in a narrow utilitarian bed in a Spartan room, in a godforsaken desert, among dark-faced strangers he detested. Otherwise, he loved the Legion and the safety and the anonymity it provided. He pushed his creaky bones up out of bed and began to curse the heat—the omnipresent heat. He was already sweating by the time he made it to the narrow veranda overlooking the now rarely used parade grounds. His bladder forced him to hurry. He unzipped and leaned out as far as possible and let flow a narrow and frustrating stream of urine down onto the walkway in front of his building.

He cursed his fellow Gebirgsjägers—now Legionnaires—his real friends, Hugues Beauchamp and Serge Rounsavall, and all the rest of the sleeping Legionnaires. He cursed all of the men in the unit, indeed all men everywhere who were not rapidly going bald like him. He was just in a foul mood. He needed to stretch his limbs and to get his blood flowing; so, he threw on a blouse and shoes and walked down to the walkway he had just besmirched to go for a walk. The command post was empty of people. If there were sentries, they were likely asleep—the lazy good-for-nothings. Such conduct would never have been tolerated in his old unit, the 33rd Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS Charlemagne (1st French) Regiment. During the war, such a miscreant would have stood before a summary court martial and been shot the same day. He missed the glory days in the SS, the absolute power, the adventure. He missed being important. His regiment had been personally assigned to be the last defenders of the Führer in the final Battle of Berlin.

He had to admit that now he was somewhat awake he enjoyed the early morning quiet. It was peaceful. He tallied the positive aspects of his life as he slowly walked around the streets of Sidi-bel-Abbès and tried to imagine—there in the dark—what the place had been like during its glory days as the international headquarters of the French Foreign Legion. Nothing like Berlin with the SS regiments marching down the Ku’damm in perfect order; but still, the Legion had its own pomp and tradition that could still make an old Frenchman’s heart swell.

He heard a shuffling sound. Rats. The place was crawling with them. It was more than a decent human being’s life to venture into an alley at night. The thought made his skin crawl. He listened again but heard nothing else; so, he moved on, a little more wary now. He stepped into shadows and listened intently. There was a distinct sound—as if a man had brushed against a building or alley wall. Now, Antoine’s antennae went up. He went into reflexive combat vigilance mode. The night became quiet again, but Antoine refused to believe that he was hearing things that were not there. There were bandits—marauding Berbers who would love to kidnap a senior Legion officer—or maybe just a drunk sliding along a wall for balance trying to get home. That thought gave him an immediate goal. He crept silently into a dark alley and made his way quickly back to the barracks.

He tapped first on Serge’s door, then on Hugues’s.

“Quiet,” he said. “Maybe this is nothing, but I am sure I was being watched. At least there’s somebody out there that shouldn’t be. Get dressed. My old defensive prickle is back. I think we need to get ready for something.”

Both men were groggy and a little confused. But they both had been with Antoine long enough to trust his sixth sense about danger.

“What do you want to do, Mein General?” Serge asked, but thought, What are we doing up in the middle of the night?

“This will sound stupid, but I want to overreact. If there’s nothing to this, we can just slip back to our rooms; and nobody will be the wiser.”

In the street below, Lev gave Haggai a withering look. He had stumbled over a bag of trash and bumped into a wall. To Lev in his heightened state of awareness, it sounded as if he had fired his pistol. Lev did not need to say anything; Haggai and everyone else got the message. Moises took five men and made their way through the narrow alleys around to the back of the BOQ. Every man in the unit could remember when a fugitive had escaped out the back when they went in the front. They were determined that this not be another one of those times. A long foot chase would be noisy and would attract a lot of highly unwanted attention.

Antoine, Serge, and Hugues made their way down the connecting hallways of the three barracks buildings until they came to the west facing exit. Serge took point and popped his head out of the door to take a quick look. Nothing there. He was beginning to feel rather sheepish. He signaled, and the other two Gebirgsjägers followed point just as they had done for all their years of combat.

Serge stepped up to Antoine, cupped his hands over Antoine’s right ear, and whispered very softly with careful enunciation, “Where to?”

Antoine did the same thing to Serge. His whisper was terse: “Armory.”

They were less than twenty-five yards away if they had chosen the most direct route, but their instincts pushed them to walk through the darkest alleys and past the broken streetlights they were familiar with. They made their way to the back of the armory, being careful not to fall over the trash strewn back there. Antoine felt a twinge of disgust that he was part of an outfit that permitted such lack of military order. He determined to report this to the CO later that morning … if nothing came of his foray in the night.

Lev and Moises whispered orders into their Bulgarian Radioelektronika handheld radio transceivers.

“Two sentries in the street in front and in back of the BOQ. The rest of the teams get up to the second floor. Jacob says they are in rooms 210, 211, and 212. Be on the lookout for sentries. Radio silence from here on out.”

There were no guards, and the Israelis met no resistance. They lined up two men to each door while the rest stood guard in the halls and stairwells. Lev gave a twisting finger signal, and a man tried the doorknob of each of the three rooms. To no one’s surprise, they were all locked. The locks were ridiculously simple—skeleton keyholes with no bolt locks. The doors were unlocked in less than five seconds and very nearly silently.

“Look for booby traps,” Lev whispered as he pushed his door slowly open.

Ten seconds later, the commandoes returned to the hall and shook their heads.

“At least we didn’t wake the garrison,” Lev whispered.

He was wrong, as it turns out. Before he could ask the obvious question—Where are they?’—two men peeked out of their partly opened doors, one in the first third of the hallway, the other nearer the other end. An IDF master sergeant took down the man at his end, and did it in lethal silence. At the other end, the Legionnaire recognized instantly that he was facing a much superior force and rushed back into his room, threw on pants, and went out through the window facing the front of the building. He jumped to the veranda—which made a serious crashing noise—and got a severely strained ankle for his reward. He leaped off the veranda onto the top of a small Fiat and crumpled the bonnet in with a resounding crash. Micah was one of the guards on the street. He saw the man’s two landings, and was at the Fiat to dispatch him before the Legionnaire could get off the car. Micah cut his throat and did it quietly, but the damage was already done.

Half-dressed Legionnaires began pouring into the street, opening the barracks room doors and rattling sabers and locking and loading rifles and pistols. Micah Freiburg and Rasar Evon Meir were shot dead by men who saw Micah cut the throat of one of their brothers-in-arms. The Legion drilled the Code d’honneur du Legionnaire into every recruit, including officers from their first day in the Legion, and required frequent rote recitation of the men to ensure that it was never out of their minds when Legionnaires came under fire.

“Légionnaire, tu es un volontaire, servant la France avec honneur et fidélité.

[“Legionnaire, you are a volunteer serving France with honour and fidelity.]

Chaque légionnaire est ton frère d’armes, quelle que soit sa nationalité, sa race ou sa religion. Tu lui manifestes toujours la solidarité étroite qui doit unir les membres d’une même famille.” [Each Legionnaire is your brother-in-arms whatever his nationality, his race, or his religion might be. You show him the same close solidarity that links the members of the same family.”]

Then hell broke loose.