Upfall

After the briefing, Shapira took Belete aside—lieutenant to lieutenant. Shapira was a big man, but with a swimmers lanky body, that gave him a particularly youthful appearance. He had a big nose and a big mouth. He'd attended Hebrew day schools ir1 New Jersey and several summers on kibbutzim before immigrating to Israel on his own at eighteen. A competitive swimmer, he impressed his evaluators at the daunting tryout - called a gibush - for the Israli equivalent of the SEALs, Shayetet 13, then survived nearly two years of brutal training after that. He'd seen fairly continuous combat in the territories and Lebanon, finally attending Balad 1 after four years of service. He assumed that he would return to the navy, but found himself recruited into Yatom's super-secret new sayeret, his new comrades commandos from Israel's alphabet soup of elite reconnaissance units. Itzak Belete was nearly as tall as Shapira, and just as lanky. Like many Ethiopians, though he was brown skinned, his facial features were Semitic. His nose was thin and aquiline, his cheekbones, high.

He was a Falasha. His parents had been part of Israel's massive rescue of Ethiopia’s Jews in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Though some orthodox Jews in Israel declined to accept the Africans as true Jews, most of the country welcomed the Falashas. Belete didn't always have an easy time in his adopted country, but like most Israeli immigrants he the best of it. His parents gave Belete a traditional Jewish first name, and as Itzak grew up as an Israeli, not an Ethiopian. He never considered not joining the IDF, and his strength and intelligence got him through the tough gibush and training regime of sayeret Shaldag.

Shaldag was trained to operate deep behind enemy lines, and was charged with guiding the air force's precision munitions to target.

Itzak met Mofaz in Shaldag. An observant Jew, like the Major, Belete had hoped to follow him into Sayeret Yatom. Belete wasn't invited during the initial selection and so attended Balad 1 instead. Now a freshly minted Second Lieutenant, he'd been transferred into the sayeret unit to replace the fallen Yoram. Itzak happily became Mofaz's radioman grenadier - and as an officer fourth in the line of command.

"Do you know anybody else in the sayeret besides Mofaz?" asked Shapira as he and Itzak walked from the briefing room.

"Ido Weiss. We went through the Shaldag gibush together" said Itzak. Ido was the unit medic. "He was always funny, making jokes."

"Still does."

"How about you—anybody else from the navy?"

"No" said Shapira "I'm it. Most of the men are from Matkal, like Yatom. The only other guy not a Matkalist is Roskovsky—he's from Yahalom."

"That makes sense—he's the engineer, yes?"

"Right." Sayeret Yahalom was the Engineer Corps commando outfit—but Yahalom men were frequently detached and assigned to other units.

"The men are already calling you Itzak—that's good" continued Shapira.

"Is it? I heard Yatom can be a stickler for protocol, and I know Mofaz is..." In the IDF it was common for officers and men to address one another by first names, but it depended on the commander.

"Don't worry about them. As long as you don't call them by first name they won't care how the men address you."

"What do they call you?"

"Lieutenant—who knows why? Let them call you Itzak. It's cool."

Belete nodded. "Tell me about the capsule—is it as bad a ride as the men say?"

"How did you do on the simulator at the gibush?

"Not too well—I threw up. I wasn't expecting it. Probably that's why I didn't make the initial cut."

"Well, just try to keep your mind off it. Yatom will let you listen to music, or sing, or whatever you want to do during the ride in, just so long as you're ready to fight once you step out."

"I think I'll pray" said Itzak.

"That works too" said Shapira.

They walked on to the armory to claim Belete's gear. At Natanz the men in the sayeret all carried identical equipment, suitable for a close range firefight in an enclosed area. Their personal weapons had been American-made M-4 carbines, which had been the primary weapon of IDF special-forces troops for decades. The use of the American weapons also created a degree uncertainty as to the origin of the raiders.

Operation Slingshot, if it went off at all, would be different. Mughniyeh had been an Israeli target for many years, and Hezbollah a formidable enemy that generated much propaganda out of its skill and strength. When and if Mughniyeh went down, the IDF wanted credit.