"Paul-Loup Sulitzer - The Green King" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sulitzer Paul Loup)

Thus was formed the 412th. And the strategem was discovered by the British only in April 1946.

On August 21, 1945, a group of thirty-five illegal emigrants embarked in Ban on a twenty-five-ton fishing boat, the Do/in-
in reality, the Sirius, whose true port of call was Monopoli, twenty-six miles farther south on the Adriatic coast.
After seven days at sea, without the slightest incident, the first postwar clandestine boat arrived at Caesarea. Reb Klimrod and Yoыl Bainish were aboard.

THE CANDLE STICKS OF BOGOTA

1

Reb held the dagger in his hand, squeezing with his thumb to insure the direction of the weapon. At a distance of six feet he jumped, his right foot pressed against the hollow of the knee, his right hand hitting at eye level, while the other hand, the one holding the weapon, struck, from top to bottom. When he felt the blade thrust up to the guard, at the height of the epigastrium, his wrist executed an arclike movement. Slaughter. He had accomplished the series of movements with fantastic smoothness and rapidity.
He took two steps back, his arms falling to his sides. He had decapitated the dummy.
"Not bad," said Dov Lazarus, in his raspy voice. "Not too bad. Providing the sentry is deaf and also drunk. Moreover, if he were sound asleep, it would be even better. All these conditions being met, you would have one chance to slit his throat before his screams alerted the entire British Army within a two-hundred-and-fifty-mile radius. One chance, not two."
Under the short mustache he sported that day, his large white teeth shone as he smiled. The mustache seemed to have grown during the night. He didn't have it the day before. Dov Lazarus was nearly fifty; he weighed about one eighty-five and was only five seven. He had been born a little before the turn of the century in Petah Tikva-the Door of Hope-the first Jewish colony in Palestine. It had been established on the banks of the Yarkon by enlightened emigrants fleeing the Russian pogroms. His parents had been members of the Friends of Zion, and they had arrived, wearing babushka and boots to the knee, in 1882. He was, when not in disguise, very fair, almost strawberry blond. His massive round corpulence, his kind smile, his pleasant myopic gaze behind rimless glasses gave him
the most misleading appearance. He was a man of violence and only that, driven all his life by a dark and exclusive passion. Yoel Bainish believes that Dov Lazarus lived for a while in Ireland, and fought in Collins's I.R.A., in the United States for several years, in South America, and even in the Far East. According to Bainish, many episodes of Reb Klimrod's life can be traced to contacts established by Lazarus in New York and Chicago between 1925 and 1930.
The change of direction in Lazarus's life came in 1933, when he met David Ben-Gurion for the second time. He had first seen Ben-Gurion in 1906, as a young boy in Jaffa, when the future Zionist leader had just arrived from Poland. The two met again in France in 1933, when Ben-Gurion toured Europe during an electoral campaign held in the heart of European Jewry. This "walking time bomb," as Ben-Gurion called Dov Lazarus, had finally found his place, working for a worthy cause. Lazarus idolized Ben-Gurion.
He said now to Yoыl Bainish: "Your turn. Try to do better. Put the dummy's head back in place, and remember it's a man whose throat you are about to slit."
As Barazini had requested, Lazarus had personally taken charge of the new immigrants from Austria. His main function within the Irgun was to train newcomers to be shadow fighters. In the fall of 1945, the leader of the Irgun, created in 1937 as a non-terrorist movement, was a man born in Brest Litovsk who had come to Palestine only in 1942, Menachem Wolfowitch Begin.
"Pathetic," said Lazarus. "Unbelievably pathetic. Your only hope would be that the British sentry would have a great sense of humor. In which case, hilarity would kill him for sure."
He got up, moving like a shadow, and went to stand next to the dummy.
"Try it on me, Yoыl. Try to slit my throat. Start when you like. Take off your shoes. And really try to kill me."
Bainish removed his shoes, hesitated. The knife in his hand was as sharp as a razor and the blade was nine and a half inches long.
"You have one minute to kill me," said Lazarus, with his back turned. He was facing the white wall of a house on a narrow street between the Jewish and the Armenian sections of
Jerusalem, near the Tower of David. Yoыl looked at Reb, who nodded.
Bainish jumped .
and three or four seconds later, the knife was pointed at his own throat, grazing ever so slightly the skin below his Adam's apple, and a terrible pain flashed in his left arm and shoulder.
Silence.
Klimrod asked: "Can I try?"
Their eyes met. Bainish remembers the silence that followed. Dov Lazarus smiled.
"No," he said.

The two young men from Mauthausen participated in their first real operation on September 28, 1945. They had learned, among a hundred other things, how to make nitroglycerin, by pouring, drop by drop, preferably without trembling, glycerin into equal parts of nitric acid and sulphuric acid at a seventy-degree Baume concentration; and to make the classic black powder from saltpeter taken from the walls of stables and cattlesheds, sometimes even from catacombs. They learned to handle military explosives, usually obtained by commando raid on British quarters: trinitrotoluene, C-4 melinite, and others.
In the beginning, Yoыl Bainish showed remarkable abilities as a preparer, his specialty being, without doubt, an incendiary explosive made from three parts of potassium chlorate to which was added one equal part of pine resin and one part of powdered sugar. (This last ingredient delighted him; it reminded him of a cooking recipe.)
In the beginning only. When it came to real action, he turned it over to Reb Klimrod. Reb's total lack of fear in all circumstances was obvious from the start. In all the teams trained by Dov Lazarus, whether for Irgun or Stern, there was never a lack of courage, sometimes bordering on recklessness. Reb was different. And not only in his complete indifference to danger. Many members of Begin's Assault Force were camp survivors, often the only surviving members of their families. They were not intimidated by death, and this fighting was sometimes their only way to remain sane, by giving them a reason to live. Reb was just like that then. But there was something else: he never
took part in any discussion of the Jewish state. In this respect, he was like Dov Lazarus. For Lazarus, politics were an abstraction, and he lived only for action. This wasn't the case with Reb, of course, but from the start, there was between them a surprising, but real, rivalry and complicity.

The mission of September 28, 1945, consisted of the ambush of a small British column on a road seven and a half miles northeast of Ascalon. Fifteen men took part in it, under the command of a man known to Bainish only as Eliahou. The orders were to give priority to the destruction of equipment over the execution of British soldiers, and to break away at the first signal. It was essentially a movement of harassment, aiming, according to Begin's expression, to give the British the feeling they were "sitting on a nest of scorpions."
There were five trucks, preceded by a Jeep. As planned, Eliahou's machine gun fired first, raking the column on its right. The incendiary chlorate grenade that was to have blown up the Jeep bounced on the hood with no result. It was a simple contraption made of a whisky bottle filled with chlorate, powdered sugar, and resin, sealed with a round piece of felt, completed by a small flask made of thin glass that held the sulphuric acid. Before throwing it, one had to break the flask so that the acid filtered through the felt. Then, it was better not to waste any time.
Yoel saw Reb get up thirty feet to his right. At no time did he seem in a hurry; his movements were always accomplished in what appeared to be detached nonchalance. He reached the road in four big steps. He jumped over the low embankment and went directly toward the head of the column, across from the Jeep. The machine gun was still firing, and the path of its bullets must have passed very close to him. In his large left hand, he held four or five grenade bottles by the neck, the way Grinzing waitresses served new wine. A few yards from the Jeep, he shattered a flask of acid, patiently counted to three, and threw a grenade at the center of the grille, between the headlights. The vehicle rapidly caught fire. Reb had already dodged it. He tackled the first truck, blew it up in the same way. Then another, and another, while all the machine guns were still firing.
He wasn't even hit. The action didn't last long. From the first shot fired by the machine gun to the breakaway signal given by Eliahou, no more than two minutes elapsed. The withdrawal of the commando team took place as planned. Four hundred yards from the road and the burning vehicles, where the British were still shooting, just in case, a regrouping took place, only to disband. Bainish and Klimrod were relieved of their precious arms.
Then they were suddenly alone, or rather, three, trudging through the reddish sand. The third man was Eliahou, who normally would not have accompanied them. They walked together for two hours, until they were in sight of Telashod. Eliahou stopped.
"We are going to separate here," he said. "You have certainly been told where to go and how to get there."
He hesitated. Much smaller than Klimrod, and even smaller than Bainish, he was staring at Klimrod's face in the semidarkness. He finally shook his head.
"I could have killed you ten times, with my machine gun."
"You didn't," answered Reb.
"Two steps further to the right or left, or forward, and you would have been in my direct line of fire. Did you know?"

Eliahou shook his head again. "And I believe you; that's what amazes me the most. How old are you?"
"About a hundred years old," said Reb. "Give or take a few weeks."
"Who taught you to use a grenade like that? Dov Lazarus?"