7

IDF NORTHERN COMMAND HQ, SAFED, ISRAEL

“What do you mean, gone?”

“They’ve vanished, sir,” replied the commander of the quick reaction force over an encrypted radio channel. “Disappeared. Nowhere to be found.”

“Impossible.”

“Nevertheless, sir—my men and I just arrived on scene. We’ve found eight KIA of our own and fifteen Hezbollah bodies. We’ve taken one prisoner, a kid, no more than fifteen or sixteen years old. Actually, he had already been stripped of his weapons and his hands and feet were bound in flexicuffs. On my command, we’ve opened fire on snipers shooting at us from some nearby homes, and we’ve begun blasting them with mortar rounds. But the two Americans and their handler—there’s no trace of them, sir.”

“Where’d they go?”

“No idea, sir. My men are scouring the area. We’ve found their backpacks. We’ve found the scorched remains of a BFT unit. There’s blood and shell casings everywhere. But, sir, I think we have to consider the possibility they’ve been captured.”

Yossi Kidron did not reply.

“Sir?” asked the on-scene commander. “Sir, can you hear me?”

Still the major general did not answer. A wave of panic was threatening to paralyze him. It wasn’t just a crushing sense of fear. It was utter disorientation bordering on vertigo. Kidron had served in combat. He understood the fog of war. He was no stranger to fear. It had never threatened to shut him down. Not like this. Not ever. But suddenly everything had changed.

Thirty minutes earlier—if that—his country had been relatively peaceful and increasingly prosperous, steadily recovering from the devastating coronavirus pandemic that had crippled so much of the Israeli and global economy. Less than a century earlier, an independent Jewish state hadn’t even existed. Now it was a rising regional power. Strategically allied with the world’s only superpower and closer to Washington than ever, thanks to an unapologetically pro-Israel president in the White House. Energy independent, thanks to the discovery of trillions of cubic feet of natural gas offshore. Peace treaties with two of its Arab neighbors, Egypt and Jordan. A recent peace agreement with the United Arab Emirates. And on the verge of signing a historic peace treaty with Saudi Arabia, even if negotiations had been frozen for months due to the pandemic.

Yet now, in the mere blink of an eye, it was all at risk of falling apart. If Hezbollah really had seized not one but two Americans, together with an IDF soldier—and not just any soldier, but this particular soldier—then Israel was suddenly on the brink of all-out war with Lebanon. And not with the Lebanese army but with Hezbollah, Iran’s most dangerous proxy.

Yossi Kidron had spent his entire life on the Lebanon border. He had grown up not far from Haifa on the Carmel mountain range, practically in the shadow of the Shia radicals who routinely threatened to storm across the border, kill every Jew they found, and seize the land they considered rightfully their own. Kidron had been drafted into the IDF at the tender age of eighteen and become a paratrooper. He could have just done his three-year mandatory stint and moved on with his life. Instead, he’d chosen the army as his career. Indeed, it was his life.

His father and all his uncles had fought in the First Lebanon War. “Operation Peace for Galilee” had begun on June 6, 1982. Everyone had expected it to last no more than a few weeks, but it had slogged on for eighteen brutal years, becoming a lethal quagmire, Israel’s own Vietnam. Only on May 24, 2000, was the last Israeli soldier finally withdrawn. On that date, the Jewish state had unilaterally pulled back to the internationally recognized border. It was the hope of then–Prime Minister Ehud Barak that such a gesture of goodwill would lead to peace with the government in Beirut and decades of quiet along the border. Perhaps even a formal peace treaty one day.

It was not to be.

Even now, Kidron could vividly recall the morning of July 12, 2006. It was a Wednesday, hot and hazy. That was the day a Hezbollah cell had ambushed an IDF patrol along the border, killing three soldiers and capturing two more. Kidron had been in the resort city of Eilat on a weeklong leave, scuba diving in the Red Sea with a group of army buddies. He remembered eating falafel and drinking beer at a hole-in-the-wall restaurant near the beach when they heard the breaking news alert. They had stared at each other in disbelief as they listened to the prime minister explain what was happening in the north and order the IDF to retaliate and to get those boys back.

At that point, no one knew for sure if the captives were dead or alive. But Kidron could still remember the surging emotions as he tried to imagine what it would be like to fall into the hands of such a wicked and bloodthirsty enemy.

Kidron and his friends had not waited for word from their commander, ordering them back to the base to report for duty. Without hesitation, without even discussing the matter, they had jumped into his beat-up old Range Rover and raced back to the hostel where they’d been staying. They’d quickly packed their bags, piled back into the Range Rover, and sped north.

He remembered gearing up. He remembered boarding an armored personnel carrier and heading into his first live mission in enemy territory. And he remembered how ready Hezbollah had been for them. The land mines. The tank traps. The rocket launchers. The sniper nests. And the carnage that had ensued.

How was it possible that the Israeli high command could have so disastrously miscalculated Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah’s response? The generals in “the Pit”—the hardened subterranean war room deep underneath the IDF’s headquarters in Tel Aviv—had expected Nasrallah to fold quickly and hand over the two prisoners. Instead, the Sheikh had gone crazy. He’d ordered his Hezbollah operatives to launch some 4,000 missiles at Israeli cities and towns, forcing more than a million Israelis living along the northern border into underground bomb shelters or to flee to friends and relatives in the center and south of the country.

When it was all over, 121 Israeli soldiers had been killed.

Nine of them were personal friends of Kidron’s, including his best friend.

Beyond that, 44 Israeli civilians had died.

Some 2,000 were wounded.

And the “Second Lebanon War” had lasted only 34 days.

The next one, Kidron knew, would be longer and worse.

Unimaginably worse.

And it seemed it might already be starting.