False Flag Read online

  Both men faced her expectantly. Dalia lowered herself onto the love seat. “And I quote: ‘A particular subsection of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, serving as liaison with several universities. Top Secret, Sensitive Compartmented Information only.’”

  Meir’s brow rose approvingly. Feigenbaum stroked his wispy gray intellectual’s beard and grunted.

  “Of course, I played hard to get. But in a day or two I’ll go back, tail between my legs. After having thought it over, how could I do otherwise?”

  The men exchanged an almost imperceptible nod. Dalia had expected more praise for a job well done. Of course, Feigenbaum, the old yekke, was naturally undemonstrative. Tell him he had inherited a fortune from a lost uncle, and he would just keep stroking his gray goatee in contemplative silence. But Gavril Meir, a fire-breathing Russian Jew like herself, a Galicianer, took his morning piss with his shmekel in one hand and his Uzi in the other. He was a bellower, a brawler, a taker of bulls by the horns. Apparently, two months in the quiet New Jersey countryside, far from the fig trees and blossoming wild mustard of Israel, had damped his inner flame somewhat.

  Meir lit a Noblesse cigarette and exhaled a short, hard gust of smoke as his glass eye looked just over her shoulder. “Are we ready for this, Dalia?”

  She smiled tightly. “Meir,” she said, “we were born ready.”

  * * *

  On the drive back to Princeton, she turned that one over in her mind.

  Her ancestors had been marched into gas chambers at Auschwitz, burned to death in their farmhouses by the czar’s secret police, scattered during the Diaspora, carried off from Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar. They had been so persecuted across the millennia that entire new vocabularies, of pogroms and blood libels and Zyklon-B, had developed to describe it. The suffering of Jews was part of Dalia Artzi’s DNA. And as a Sabra, part of the first generation to be born in the modern state of Israel, she, along with others like her, had been inculcated with a single overwhelming priority: Never again. Indeed, she had literally been born ready.

  And yet …

  Bouncing along the raw country road, she gripped the steering wheel too tightly.

  And yet, until they took Zvi, she had remained a sincere pacifist. Never blindly—she was, as she and McConnell had agreed, nobody’s fool—but earnestly. For Islam was not the real enemy. Extremism, be it Muslim, Christian, Jewish, or something else, was the real enemy. The supreme goal of Judaism was not to deliver a crushing deathblow to their enemies, but to gain real peace, to practice tikkun olam and repair the world. Cooperation, moderation, sympathy for the disadvantaged—these were the core values, too easily forgotten. During the millennia of persecution, Jews had always been the underdogs. Now it was not quite so simple.

  But she had lost her son. Show her the mother who, under such circumstances, would not strain at the leash when offered the chance that Meir and Feigenbaum had offered during their visit to her office at Tel Aviv University.

  They had shown up just an hour after she accepted by email the visiting professorship at Princeton. (How long had they been watching, listening, waiting?) After offering obligatory nachas, Gavril Meir had delivered the pitch leaning forward in his chair, immobilizing her with his off-kilter gaze, as Feigenbaum wandered about the office, quietly inspecting the military relics on her shelves.

  “We find ourselves,” the heavier man had said, “faced with a unique opportunity to penetrate the defense department of the world’s greatest superpower. This once-staunch ally, I am sorry to say, has recently wavered in its devotion to us. Bending over backwards to make deals with the Persians, kowtowing to the United Nations Security Council, leaving us standing alone against the Arabush hordes … They claim to be on our side. But when their back is to the wall …?” A sad twitch of the shoulders. “The bloodwind is blowing again. We have never been more isolated than now. And Israel’s next mistake might be her last.”

  Dalia had shaken her head because she had known such rhetoric and resented it when she heard it. And because, although her son had already been lost, her daughter’s children were rapidly approaching the age of military service. And Dalia Artzi knew better than anyone, both as a historian and as a bereaved mother, that an occupying army could never truly be safe. Her grandchildren deserved better than to find themselves manning checkpoints, presenting targets for car bombs and explosive vests. They deserved real, lasting, stable peace. They deserved to be neither oppressed nor oppressor.

  Meir, taker of bulls by the horns, had sensed her resistance but continued undaunted. “Your expertise in your field is beyond question. Your well-established affiliation with Meretz works in our favor; the Americans will not consider you a threat. And the tragic abduction of your son, of course, offers them a fulcrum to lean on. Take it all together, and you make the ideal lure. The chances of an approach by their Department of Defense during your stay in Princeton have been calculated at nearly eighty-five percent.” He had straightened in his chair, communicating with his posture the triad of Israeli hardliner attitudes: haughtiness, pride, and disdain. “They can’t pretend any more that Vietnam was an exception. They can’t deny, after Iraq and Afghanistan, that asymmetric warfare trumps brute strength, that your theories reflect reality more accurately than theirs. Their mission has indeed not been accomplished. And their morale cannot withstand the loss of another major engagement. They need a win.” A significant pause. “They need you, Professor.”

  Still she had shaken her head. For an entire long career, she had encountered men in her field who assumed they understood Dalia Artzi better than she understood herself. They could not fathom that she devoted her life to the study of war only to better enable herself to prevent it.

  “Of course,” Feigenbaum had put in mildly from the bookcase where he stood, inspecting a fragment of a Minié bullet, “your contribution will be remembered. We make no promises. But if, perhaps, a prisoner exchange becomes feasible …”

  He had trailed off artfully, seeing from her sudden stiffening that he had said exactly enough.

  “But,” Meir had added gently, “you must do your part.”

  Part of her had seemed at that moment to watch herself from the outside, from somewhere near the office doorway. She had seen a woman in her late sixties, too thick around the middle, too frugal to spring for the salon dye job that would hide her silver roots more convincingly; a woman some might have called a hypocrite, who had studied battles, taught battles, theorized about battles, walked battlefields long after the fact, bent creakily to take souvenirs from old battlefields to save on shelves in this office from which she earned a healthy living by teaching and studying and theorizing about those battles; a woman who had grown elderly, or nearly so, ensconced in various ivory towers, never actually taking part in the battles that she profited from, protected by younger and braver men and women who ran the risks she herself had never run. Instead, she had wielded a hoe, and an unyielding philosophy, at a now long-defunct kibbutz. In the years since, unlike many of her academic contemporaries, she had managed to avoid ever consulting for a military, ever moving beyond the classroom. (John Boyd, for one, had not only lent his services to the Pentagon—the devastating “left hook” of Operation Desert Storm had been his—but had lived to see his theories warmly embraced within the realms of business, litigation, and professional sports.) But now, suddenly, on the other side of the scale was Zvi, rotting in some filthy Arab prison, five years older than the last time she had seen him, his last trace of boyhood innocence blown away; malnourished, blindfolded or hooded, manacled, bloodied, and bruised—if in fact he still lived at all. In the face of that image, the youthful ideals she had still stubbornly clung to seemed as rusty as the old hoes she had swung on the kibbutz.

  And although she had suspected, in some secret, true, preconscious place, that she was making a mistake, she had slowly nodded.

  For Zvi.

  Those who play wit
h the devil’s toys, Fuller had written, will be brought by degrees to wield his sword.

  She gripped the steering wheel even tighter.

  As she neared Princeton, the houses grew thicker. Beyond the houses, a warm red glow spread across the horizon—another new day, ready or not.

  Chapter Two

  Princeton, NJ

  McConnell seemed unsurprised to see her.

  After offering refreshments, he placed a call and then led her out through a rear exit, to a waiting black Land Rover. The gaunt man who had escorted her from the lecture hall yesterday was driving. They turned north under a lowering sun. As soon as the wheels found smooth tarmac, Dalia, exhausted from a sleepless night, was out.

  A plaintive voice cut through darkness. Mommy? Beside her in the dream, her husband drowsed. He could sleep through anything. But Dalia was the opposite, forever teetering on the edge of wakefulness. In the dream, she clambered out of bed and padded through the gloom to her son’s room. She knelt and, in the glow of the night-light, found Zvi’s small hand. Mommy, I’m scared. It was dark and there was a monster hiding in the shadows. I couldn’t see him, but I knew he was there. He was coming to get me. Dalia leaned forward. Just a dream, she murmured within the dream. She planted a kiss, a single delicate blossom, on his beautifully smooth forehead. Over now. Go back to sleep.

  The Land Rover thumped across a pothole. Her eyes snapped open. McConnell was looking at her sideways while pretending not to. Dalia did not let herself sleep again.

  They left the highway near Newark Liberty International. Getting out of the car, she wrinkled her nose. Back home, the fresh sea air carried undertones of olive groves and flowering eucalyptus. Here the evening wind felt turgid, swampy, bearing hints of sewage, exhaust, and offal from the rendering plant. In Israel, they had been forced to get creative, ingeniously using the Jordan River to turn barren desert into a flowering Eden. Here in America, with so much arable land, they let toxic runoff turn their good soil to a poisoned waste.

  McConnell got out after her, and they entered a compound of institutional white brick set behind spike strips and polycarbonate guard booths. Inside the foyer, he found a key card and took Dalia through double doors of smoked pebbled glass, conspicuously bare of any agency logo. They moved down threadbare carpet without passing through any metal detector. She was allowed to keep her phone. It was a far cry from her expectations: a windowless, lead-lined subterranean room in Langley, where she would consult with military intelligence advisors wearing sober thousand-dollar suits, and chiefs of staff in spangled and beribboned full dress uniform.

  With fraying furniture, drooping houseplants, and recessed lighting turned low, the conference room they came to moments later might have belonged to a cut-rate lawyer. On the other side of a wide window, factory smokestacks and an old Budweiser billboard rose in silhouette. Seated around a table, four men and one woman watched Dalia intently as she took a seat. The men’s clothing was seedy like the office—not actual business suits, but sport coats with similar-colored slacks. The woman was better dressed, wearing a charcoal jacket and rimless spectacles, with an Afro elegantly graying at the temples. All wore name tags and sat a little straighter in turn as McConnell introduced them: Bharadwaj, Wingfield, Gangjeon, Reed, and Ms. Stember.

  McConnell took the chair at one end of the table—symbolic pater. Dalia took the only other available seat, opposite his—symbolic mater—and waited. With a gesture, McConnell ceded control to Bharadwaj.

  “First,” said the man officiously, “let me assure you, Ms. Artzi, that this is a genuine honor. We are all your devotees here, if only through your books.”

  She offered a perfunctory smile.

  “The question on the table at the moment,” he continued, giving his comb-over a reassuring touch, “is how to get the most out of our communications budget during future overseas engagements …”

  The disagreement was laid out in bold strokes. One camp, led by the pudgy yet formidable Mr. Wingfield, strongly supported digitizing battlefield communications. The other, led by Ms. Stember, maintained that digital networks were overly susceptible to both failure and sabotage, which was why 90 percent of exploitable intelligence in Iraq had come the old-fashioned way: from PRC-119 combat radios. The first faction called the second “Luddites”; the second called the first “technofetishists.” McConnell gestured again, quieting the room. “Thoughts?” he said.

  Dalia tapped one lacquered fingernail reflectively against the tabletop. She steadied herself. Four decades of ideals, out the window.

  Her own damned fault. “It’s not as if they took him from nowhere,” she had blurted following her son’s capture. Microphones shoved in her face, dazzling lights burning from every side—she had given in to resentment, impulsiveness, determination not to be browbeaten into mongering war … and stubbornness, her fatal flaw. “They took him from a tank shelling women and children.” With that single ill-considered statement, she had demolished any reasonable chance of a future prisoner exchange. Despite the deep-rooted Israeli principle of “leave no soldier behind,” the trade of a thousand Palestinian prisoners for a single man was a contentious proposition, requiring public opinion to be firmly behind the soldier in question. For the son of a traitor—for so she was quickly branded by the hawkish old-boys’ network that had lately become Israel’s ruling class—there were too many complications. Or had been, until Meir and Feigenbaum had come to visit her office in Tel Aviv.

  She tucked a silvering strand of hair behind one ear. “Halfway methodology,” she said, “quickly turns counterproductive.”

  Stember glared ice at her, but McConnell nodded encouragingly. “America’s problem,” Dalia continued, “is that it clings to the perceived advantages of superior firepower. Perhaps it’s just human nature. Perhaps the playground bully always wants to believe—”

  “Israel’s problem,” interrupted Stember, “is arrogance: willful, inexhaustible arrogance. Without this ‘playground bully,’ as you call us, your country would have long since—”

  McConnell silenced her with an upraised hand and beckoned Dalia to continue.

  “Your Marine Corps, your Special Forces, your SEAL teams, have some of the best soldiers in the world. But you keep them on a short leash.” She shrugged, not meeting Stember’s glare. “Too short. You’re frustrated that your enemy disappears into mountain caves and ruined cities, that the killing blow never gets delivered. But you don’t use their own tactics against them. Instead, you go halfway. You implement Boyd’s left hook, then draw up short. Because you remain at heart a Christian nation, with all the hypocrisy that implies.”

  She was watching herself from the doorway again. Now she saw a jaded, selfish old woman who stood by her ideals as long as they suited her. A woman applying her knowledge for the first time to the real world, in a real way that would have real consequences—and cost real lives.

  “You know the answer to your own question. But you need me to say it.” She nodded. “Far vos nisht?” Why not? “You require decentralized command down to the regimental level, over distances that cannot be predicted. The range of PRCs is strictly limited. Therefore, you must embrace digital connectivity, and accept as unavoidable any losses that come. As radio replaced telephone wires between the World Wars, now satellite replaces radio. One cannot implement isolated aspects of the maneuver warfare doctrine and expect success. Guderian didn’t achieve victory over the French, after all, simply by adding Panzers to his infantry. He also took his enemy off guard, penetrated deep behind its lines more quickly than anyone thought possible, split the Allied army in two, let his tank commanders press their advantage once they’d found it. Like Hannibal at Cannae, he orchestrated a magnificent concerto, in which all the parts worked together. Combined arms, order of battle, flexibility, knowledge of terrain, decentralized command, the element of surprise.”

  Stember stared fiercely. McConnell strok
ed his jowls.

  “Commit yourselves,” Dalia finished. “Release the leash. Let slip the dogs of war.”

  Bharadwaj nodded slowly. “Of course,” he said, “this raises its own set of practical questions. Does every dismounted rifleman carry a device with battery pack? Or do we, at least during a transitional period, limit small-unit initiative and instead focus on battalion- or even division-level communication paths?

  Ellicott Street NW,

  Washington, DC

  After a few moments, Stacy stood and went into the kitchen.

  The tap ran. The stove clicked and caught. Listening, Michael Fletcher scratched the cat’s ruff. The big Maine coon stretched lazily, flicking one ear, turning onto her back, tail gently switching.

  From three blocks away came the faint sound of traffic, both vehicular and pedestrian, on Wisconsin Avenue. The Saturday evening crowd just gearing up: laughing, drinking, having fun. Later they would come home, happily tipsy—stumbling, hugging, touching, kissing, making love.

  The teakettle whistled. His wife returned, stirring a Grumpy Cat mug, giving the impression of a woman tightly controlling herself. She sat down again, a few symbolic inches farther away on the couch.

  “I guess,” she said, “on some level, this feels … overdue.”

  Her intense self-control made him think of a kid named Ashenmiller, one night in Kirkuk: manning a turret gun on a Humvee, swiveling constantly but never actually firing, so ruthlessly self-contained that his face, in the endless muzzle flashes provided by other, less inhibited soldiers, remained perfectly set and expressionless.

  “I didn’t picture it like this.” She spoke slowly, with utmost care. “And I’m sorry. I really am. But I think it’s for the best … right?”