“In our tiny navy, there isn’t a large pool of officers and seamen from which to draw. The training to operate these particular boats, the first in the world with this fast yet small design, takes months, not weeks. We started last year at all levels with your guys. This past summer, we graduated the naval academy earlier than scheduled and put the cadets on a fast track to command the Saars—less time than we view as safe and necessary for the many situations that arise at sea.”
“Is that why I’m sharing a room with Pazit?”
“Would you rather have your own room in Valognes?”
The desolate village where Amiot gave the Israeli mission the use of a second apartment building is too far. Sharon says nothing. The steam of their breath coats the windows.
Danny continues, “The townsfolk loved us when our work supported over one thousand families. Now that manufacturing is about to end, unemployment here is rising. Amiot can’t accept and finance new orders until he’s reimbursed for the personal investment he made to keep his company afloat. Into this unfriendly mix, can we drop over eighty new Israelis?”
“Can’t they be trained on the seven boats already in Israel?”
“We run exercises there too. Less than half the crews are here. The Mediterranean Sea, though, is a sleeping baby compared with conditions in the Atlantic Ocean.” Danny rolls down his window and tosses his cigarette into a puddle. “We hide some officers among the Israeli families. The seamen are on the boats.”
That explains the two men at Naomi and Elazar’s small apartment. So men are living on these boats? Sharon examines the four vessels’ silhouettes against the wan glow of a moon struggling to break through clouds. Not even a pinprick of light twinkles in the portholes. It’s hard to believe that anyone is inside.
“The first time I reported to Kadmon, I told him that more careful planning was needed, and he asked me to write a proposal. I did, but it hadn’t been implemented when I left. Who at headquarters makes the travel arrangements? Given what you’re telling me about the situation, you can’t let their incompetence continue. Today’s recruits were caught at Orly.” She proceeds to report how, by sheer luck, the men were saved from questioning that would have brought in the highest levels of law enforcement. Her voice gets heated. “Now that the scope is expanding, you need the Mossad to take over.”
“That would require Jerusalem to approve Operation Noa.”
Operation Noa. She lets the new name sink in, although it reveals nothing about its nature. “Are you saying that our heads of state and defense are not on board with what’s being planned here?”
“Limon made Golda and Dayan aware of it.” Danny pauses. “They’ve accepted losing the fifty Mirage aircraft; they don’t want to risk further escalating tensions with France over a few boats.”
“This is crazy. These preparations are not merely a comma separating the legal from the illegal, as you once described it. Is Moka Limon running his own show? This is not just insubordination—it’s insurrection!”
Danny takes a deep breath. “Do you want to leave?”
“I should. Never in the IDF’s twenty-year history has there been a known case of mutiny, much less one of this scale.” She turns her face away and stares into the darkness.
“Limon views the Saars as crucial for defending Israel’s shores—and its Red Sea access,” Danny says, referring to the port of Eilat in the south. “We—the boats—are the tip of the spear.”
The tip of the spear is the first to penetrate an enemy. “I can’t believe that you brought me into this,” she mumbles in anger. She agrees with Limon, but she doesn’t presume to know more than her Six-Day War heroes Golda Meir and Moshe Dayan. Anyway, an army is structured on obedience. How can she go along with this scheme—this defiance—minor player that she is? She recalls handing the fake passports to the “Norwegians.” She overcame her hesitancy when it seemed to be a harmless infraction, strategically necessary. Now the scheme is huge. She understands its importance to the country’s defense, yet to be part of it, knowing that it’s outside her government’s knowledge?
For a few moments, the hum of the running motor and the heater’s soft whistle are the only sounds heard in the car. Moka Limon, she thinks. The man who, in his youth, commanded the fleet of refugee boats dodging the British blockade to reach Palestine. Judith Katz had been one of these refugees. If not for the Haganah’s daring during those years, hundreds of thousands of Holocaust survivors would not have been able to escape Europe and find a new home in Israel. Judith Katz included. Sharon would not be here, recruited to help in Israel’s defense.
The silence stretches between her and Danny. Finally, he yawns, shifts the car into gear, and begins to back out. It jolts Sharon out of her thoughts.
It’s settled, then. She’s staying.
“Wait,” she says. Danny is exhausted, but how can she not tell him? “I said I have something personal to tell you. It’s about your ta—”
“Please.” He cuts her off. “Me—I need some shut-eye.” He rubs the stubble on his cheeks and touches the cleft chin that must feel coarser. A small smile appears on his tired face. “Sweetheart, we’ll talk about you or me, as they say, ‘after the war.’ In the meantime, I’m glad that you’re back.”
Sweetheart again. Danny really is half asleep, she thinks. “You haven’t told me what my assignment is.”
“Feed the men.”
Chapter Fifty-Five
Cherbourg, France
November−Early December 1969
If feeding less than half a crew is this taxing, Sharon can’t imagine what it would take to feed one hundred and ten hungry men three meals a day. No shopping in town is possible, not in any meaningful quantity. Over a dozen low-ranking seamen who used to be housed and fed in the French navy barracks are now squeezed into her building’s first-floor apartment, which Kadmon filled with cots. They eat on the boats, as do the officers who are housed with the Israeli families or in the Atlantic Hotel, where they get only partial board.
How long can this impossible situation be sustained? The greatest risk is keeping the men’s presence inconspicuous. Sharon worries that every day increases the odds of exposure. The shipyard daytime workers might notice unfamiliar faces on the decks; a neighbor might complain at the grocery store that there are too many guests next door; a sailor might carp to his French girlfriend about overcrowding belowdecks. And a Parisian journalist privy to the goings-on in Pompidou’s government might come sniffing around and break the story.
Daily, Sharon travels in her rented van near and far in the Cotentin Peninsula, shopping for food. At each supermarket, she fills one cart with a reasonable amount of rice, beans, chocolate, crackers, cereal, margarine, cigarettes, cookies, marmalade, oatmeal, and canned fruit and vegetables, enough for a large family. At each farm, she buys dozens of eggs for her supposed bakery in Bayeux. At each dairy farm, she buys one huge wheel of cheese weighing thirty or forty kilos, a block of butter, and a hip-high canister of fresh milk, even though she needs four. She can’t return to the same chicken and dairy farms for a couple of weeks. She drives for hours to the cities of Caen and Rouen to purchase wholesale sacks of flour and sugar and cans of cooking oil under the pretense that she owns a restaurant. She buys loads of baguettes daily—never more than half a dozen from each of the many bakeries she visits daily—and shows up at the weekend markets early to pick up cases of fresh string beans, parsnips, cabbages, and carrots. She moves her van to the other end of the market and buys only two sacks of potatoes and a kilo of roasted coffee beans, then drives to the next town market for another kilo of coffee and crates of apples “for my pies.” As if she were foraging for precious objects, she collects slaughtered chickens cleaned of their feathers and innards—tasks that can’t be executed in a ship’s tiny galley. In this region that is so rich with cattle and sheep and industrious fishing villages, she can’t buy meat because of the IDF’s kosher regulation, nor can she draw attention to herself by buying trout and sea bass for more than two dozen hungry men at a time.
Her contact is Kadmon. He works in the formerly busy office with just one new man, Rear Admiral Vaknin, who is quiet with a distinguished professorial look down to his plaid jacket with leather elbow patches. From the charts on his walls and his locked office door, Sharon suspects he’s a military strategist devising battle games.
Kadmon hands Sharon lists and cash. On her return from her shopping trips, she leaves the full van parked next to the office and gets a ride home from the gate of CMN with one of the workmen. In the morning she retrieves the key to the now-empty van. She imagines the seamen unloading it at the dock under a night sky tinged with a predawn glow. Her crates, sacks, and canisters are silently loaded onto the first boat, then transferred to the next boat in the chain, where each cook examines the produce to plan nutritious meals.
She’s been doing this for seven weeks now, seven days a week. She’s exhausted. She hasn’t been alone with Danny since that first evening, and she’s seen him only three times at Friday dinners. The boy with the blue star tattoo. Every day, for the whole day, along with a small crew of officers and seamen, he takes out one of the boats—never more, even though he has the personnel hiding in their hulls. She fantasizes about accosting him on the dock one night and blurting out everything she’s learned of his past. Against the odds, he’d be grateful. He’d hug her in delight; he’d kiss her—
She brushes her longing away. It’s just a young woman’s infatuation with her handsome boss. If Danny had the time, he would find himself another girlfriend like Dominique—accomplished, sophisticated. What he needs most now is for Sharon to support his mission and not become a major headache. How could she drop a bombshell into his life when he feels like the future of Israel rests on his shoulders? His emotions are on high alert, focused on his men and his boats, on preparing for the inevitable next war, a war that, the Arabs threaten, would “finish Hitler’s job.”
Sharon can’t imagine how the crews can train for sea battles against four or five Russian-equipped navies without the benefit of arms on deck to practice. But train for battle they must. A small news item buried deep in an Israeli paper informs readers that a fishing dinghy off Israel’s southern coast exploded. A report that arrived at the office revealed a crucial detail about it: the dinghy was hit by a missile. Egypt had tested the accuracy of the new Russian-made sea missile against a distant small target. It proved incredibly precise.
If Sharon is this stressed and tired, Danny, Benjamin-Pierre, must be more so. The long trips to the countryside give her hours of time to reflect and second-guess herself. Yet, she can’t block the names that flash through her head while she drives: Pelletier. Châtillon-sur-Indre. Valençay. Robillard.
She inserts a cassette into the tape deck, turns up the volume, and belts out Israeli songs to drown out the names. She sings “Speak to Me with Flowers.” She doesn’t regret having traveled to the Loire Valley when she did. Valençay would, one day, be key to solving the puzzle—but it would be up to Danny to pursue it to find the answers. She modulates her voice to the quieter, melodious “Maybe None of It Had Happened.” But it all happened.
At a farm stand, she buys two crates of leafy greens and accepts the offer of a cup of hot tea sweetened with honey. Back on the road, Sharon lets her eyes feast on the sights: the contrast between textured, ancient forests and smooth, mowed fields; between foaming ocean waves crashing against rocks and the softly rippling hills. If only it weren’t winter. It starts to rain, and a gust of wind whips her van so hard that Sharon forgoes a drive to the fishing villages along the coast of Lower Normandy. She turns inland, following her map on which she marked each farm and what it sells.
At nightfall, she returns to her new lodging: Rachelle’s living room. Rachelle insisted that Sharon’s alternative—living in the isolated, distant Valognes—was no life for a young woman. The evenings in Cherbourg, though, are also quiet, so different from the boisterous nightlife of the year before. The Israeli seamen who once relished platters of oysters and clams in the cafés and danced until midnight in discos are now under a strict curfew. The mood is somber. Since Rina’s husband is always at sea, she returned to Haifa with her two babies so her mother could help her. Naomi and Elazar are packing to leave; his drafting job using a pencil and a ruler has ended. Even Yaniv’s family is gone, although he stays, often locked with Vaknin in the latter’s office.
Whatever Operation Noa is, it may never take place if Golda doesn’t give her approval.
