Three Days to Never Read Online Free PDF Page B

link up with a unit of General Yoffe’s tank division, which would by then have come down the shoreline from the north; from there they were to proceed inland to a site near the ancient Saint Catherine’s Monastery. They were told that their destination was to be a peculiar stone formation in that dry wasteland of granite and sand—the briefing officer referredto it as the Rephidim, which Lepidopt had known was the place where Moses had struck a dry rock with his staff to produce a spring for the mutinous Israelites.
    Every man in the Fourth Battalion had been given a cellophane-laminated map and a green plastic film badge, which several of the men recognized as being devices to measure the wearer’s exposure to radiation; the badges were heavier than they looked, and bore only the initials ORNL. They were apparently from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, in the United States. Lepidopt pinned his onto his khaki shirt, under his camouflage jacket.
    But at a little past noon, the orders were changed. No flying would be involved after all—Sharm el-Sheikh had already been taken, and the 55th was to proceed by bus to the Old City of Jerusalem instead, thirty-five miles away to the southeast.
    That meant Jordan had entered the war against Israel too, and Lepidopt and his companions would be fighting the elite British-trained Arab Legion. Equipped with new maps and having shed their parachutes, they boarded the buses at 6:00 p.m.
    Only after his bus was under way did Lepidopt learn that an officer had collected the film badges from the rest of the men who had been designated as the Fourth Battalion—Lepidopt still had his pinned to his shirt.
    Rocking in his bus seat as dusk fell over the ancient Judaean hills, Lepidopt had discovered that fear felt very much like grief—his father had died two years before, and now he found himself once again unable to hold on to or even complete a thought, and he clung to the view of trees moving past outside the window because staying in one place would be intolerable, and he was yawning frequently though he wasn’t sleepy at all.
    And in the streets of Mount Scopus that night, still a day’s march north of Jerusalem’s walls, he had found a cold Hieronymus Bosch landscape of domes and towers lit in silhouette by mortar explosions close behind them, and skeletons of jeeps and trucks white as bone in the glare ofthe Israeli searchlights—he was stunned by the ceaseless hammering of .50-caliber machine guns and tank-turret guns that concussed the night air; and the crescent moon riding above the veils of smoke seemed to be an omen for Islam.
    The ringing night had been enormous, and he had been grateful for the men huddled around him in a courtyard of the abandoned Hebrew University.
    But still he wasn’t at the front. When the bell in the YMCA tower struck one, the paratroopers began to advance south through the crashing darkness toward the walls of the Old City. The dawn came soon, and at midmorning they regrouped in the wrecked lobby of the Ambassador Hotel. By now they could see Jerusalem’s walls, and Herod’s Gate, but it wasn’t until late in the afternoon that they passed the Rivoli Hotel and saw, past the burned-out shell of a Jordanian bus, the tall stone crenellations over the Lion’s Gate. The paratroopers cautiously advanced toward it.
    Visible through the gate was a corner of the gold Dome of the Rock, where Mohammed was supposed to have ascended to Heaven—and from just inside the gate a .30-caliber machine gun began firing into the column of paratroopers. Their captain appeared to be blown out of the jeep he’d been riding in, and all around Lepidopt, men were spinning and falling as the bullets tore and punched at them.
    Lepidopt had dived into the gutter, and then he had his Uzi up and was firing at the flutter of glare that was the machine-gun muzzle, and seconds later he and a dozen of his