Lod Airport, Israel: Two Concorde jets take off for a U.N. conference that will finally bring peace to the Middle East. Covered by F-14 fighters, accompanied by security men, the planes carry warriors, pacifists, lovers, enemies, dignitaries--and a bomb planted by a terrorist mastermind. Suddenly they're forced to crash-land at an ancient desert site. Here, with only a handful of weapons, the men and women of the peace mission must make a desperate stand against an army of crack Palestinian commandos--while the Israeli authorities desperately attempt a rescue mission. In a land of blood and tears, in a windswept place called Babylon, it will be a battle of bullets and courage, and a war to the last death.
1
In the Samarian hills, overlooking the Plain of Sharon, four
men stood quietly in the predawn darkness. Below them, spread out on
the plain, they could see the straight lights of Lod International
Airport almost nine kilometers in the distance. Beyond Lod were the
hazy lights of Tel Aviv and Herzlya, and beyond that, the Mediterranean
Sea reflected the light of the setting moon.
They stood on a spot that, until the Six Day War, had been Jordanian
territory. In 1967, it had been a strategic spot, situated as it was
almost half a kilometer above the Plain of Sharon on a bulge in the
1948 truce line that poked into Israel. There had been no Jordanian
position closer to Lod Airport in 1967. From this spot, Jordanian
artillery and mortars had fired a few rounds at the airport before
Israeli warplanes had silenced them. The Arab Legion had abandoned the
position, as they had abandoned everything on the West Bank of the
Jordan. Now this forward position had no apparent military
significance. It was deep inside Israeli territory. Gone were the
bunkers that had faced each other across no man's land and gone were
the miles of barbed wire that had separated them. More importantly,
gone too were the Israeli border patrols.
But in 1967 the Arab Legion had left behind some of its ordnance and
some of its personnel. The ordnance was three 120mm mortars with
rounds, and the personnel were these four Palestinians, once members of
the Palestinian Auxiliary Corps attached to the Arab Legion. They were
young men then, left behind and told to wait for orders. It was an old
stratagem, leaving stay-behinds and equipment. Every modern army in
retreat had done it in the hopes that those agents-in-place would serve
some useful function if and when the retreating army took the offensive
again.
The four Palestinians were natives of the nearby Israeli-occupied
village of Budris, and they had gone about their normal, peaceful lives
for the last dozen years. In truth, they had forgotten about the
mortars and the rounds until a message had reminded them of their
pledge taken so long ago. The message had come out of the darkness like
the recurrence of a long-forgotten nightmare. They feigned surprise
that such a message should come on the very eve of the Peace
Conference, but actually they knew that it would come precisely for
that reason. The men who controlled their lives from so great a
distance did not want this peace. And there was no way to avoid the
order to action. They were trapped in the shadowy army as surely as if
they were in uniform standing in a parade line.
The men knelt among the stand of Jerusalem pines and dug into the soft,
dusty soil with their hands. They came upon a large plastic bag. Inside
the bag were a dozen 120mm mortar rounds packed in cardboard canisters.
They pushed some sand and pine needles over the bag again and sat back
against the trees. The birds began to sing as the sky lightened.
One of the Palestinians, Sabah Khabbani, got up and walked to the crest
of the hill and looked down across the plain. With a little luck -- and
an easterly wind sent by Allah -- they should be able to reach the
airport. They should be able to send those six high-explosive and six
phosphorus rounds crashing into the main terminal and the aircraft
parking ramp.
As if in answer to this thought, Khabbani's kheffiyah suddenly
billowed around his face as a hot blast of wind struck his back. The
Jerusalem pines swayed and released their resinous scent.
Nelson DeMille was born in New York City and moved as a child with his
family to Long Island. In high school, he played football and ran track.
DeMille spent three years at Hofstra University, then joined the Army
and attended Officer Candidate School. He was commissioned a Second
Lieutenant and served in Vietnam as an infantry platoon leader with the
First Cavalry Division.
DeMille returned to the States and went back to Hofstra University where
he received his degree in Political Science and History. He married and
had two children, divorced, and remarried.
DeMille's earlier books were NYPD detective novels. His first major
novel was By the Rivers of Babylon, published in 1978 and still
in print, as are all his succeeding novels. He is a member of The
Authors Guild, the Mystery Writers of America, and American Mensa. He
holds three honorary doctorates: Doctor of Humane Letters from Hofstra
University, Doctor of Literature from Long Island University, and Doctor
of Humane Letters from Dowling College.
