Flight of the Skyhawk

Chapter 3

3

Thirty-five minutes later, Talia Stiel half-jogged down the sterile, white hospital corridor. She skidded to a halt in front of the nurse’s station, wobbling on her high heels before grabbing the counter top to stabilize herself. “I’m looking for a patient, Yosef Stiel?”

“Yes, ma’am,” a nurse in surgical scrubs said as she looked up from a computer monitor. “Mr. Stiel is in pod seven, just that way.”

Talia ran past pod five, then six. When she came to number seven, she stopped. She could see through a bay of large glass windows into the room where an old man lay. Tubes and wires were connected to his arms and chest. His face was obscured by an oxygen mask, and Talia squinted to get a better look.

She clutched her purse, then pushed the door open and stood staring at the man’s face. Its warm familiarity flooded over her. It was her grandfather, a man who, until now, only existed in faint, time-washed memories. It was Yosef Stiel.

Talia placed her hand on a handrail against the wall as a wave of dizziness swept over her. She steadied herself when a different nurse, a woman with wrinkled skin and gray hair pulled back into a tight bun said, “Are you all right, Miss?” The woman spoke softly, as one might in a public library.

“Oh, yes, thank you. Vertigo. Comes and goes.”

“Would you like to sit down?”

“No. This will pass. The dizziness comes sometimes when I’m under stress. I’ll be fine.”

The nurse smiled. “The ICU can be overwhelming.” For just a moment, the woman’s warmth reminded Talia of her own mother.

Talia looked back at the old man on the bed. His eyes were closed. Several digital monitors hung on the wall, each making its own, distinct bleeping sound. She walked closer and looked down at him.

A moment later, his eyes flickered open as he registered her presence. “Talia, Talia!” the old man said, his voice crackly and hoarse. “My little Peanut. Look at you.” He pulled the oxygen mask from his mouth.

Talia startled, but the voice, it rang true in her mind; it was really him. “Grandpa?” she said as she leaned closer.

His face softened, and he reached for her hand. “My glasses,” he said, his voice raspy and dry. “I need my glasses. I want to see your face.”

She reached to the side table and picked up the glasses, and that’s when she noticed her own hands were trembling. When he had donned the glasses, a warm smile spread across his wrinkled face. “Come closer. It’s really you, isn’t it, Peanut?”

“I don’t, I don’t understand. You’re . . . dead.”

“I’m so sorry, sweet pea. It was your parents, you see? I had to lie to you. I had to lie to you all. I know what they told you.” He began to cough violently. When the hacking abated, he drew in a deep breath. “They told you I had died. But there was a lot at stake. I had to disappear. Otherwise, they would have found me.”

“Who? Who would have found you?”

“That’s not important right now. I’m just glad to see you. My little Peanut.”

The face, the familiar voice, it was all starting to feel so real. And the reference to her childhood nickname brought a lump to her throat. “Grandpa, I’m so lost. Ima and Aba told me you had died. You’re saying my own parents lied?”

“Do not place blame on them. They were simply trying to protect you.”

“Protect me? Protect me from what?”

Her grandfather c****d his head to the side. To Talia, it appeared he had lost his train of thought.

“None of this is important now.”

Talia decided to try a different tack. “What did you mean when you said they would have found you?” Talia shook her head. “Why don’t you start from the beginning.”

“No, no,” he said as he began coughing. It was worse this time. “There are other things I must tell you—”

His coughing fit exploded, and a nurse walked in. She replaced the face mask over his mouth and nose and connected one of the tubes to a nebulizer pump.

She opened a small white box of medication labeled Salbutamol Teva 5mg Solution for Inhalation, then pulled out one of the vials of clear liquid. She poured a bolus of the liquid into the nebulizer and turned the machine on. A medicated mist began to blow into the face mask.

The nurse said, “There, there, Mr. Stiel. Just breath in slowly. That’s it. You’ve got to stay calm now.” She waited as the coughing subsided, then walked back out.

He pulled the mask down again. “There’s not much time,” he said as he gripped his rib cage and held it. The underlying pain’s intensity magnified across his face. “But you have to know. You have to know everything. Otherwise, it will be too late.” He stopped, apparently lost in thought.

“Grandpa?”

He took a few breaths through the face mask, then pulled it down again. “There is something I must tell you, something that has pained me all these years. I can’t hold it inside any longer. It’s been eating me alive since I was a young man. And,” he coughed, “as it turns out, you, you are the only one left, the only one who can help me.”

“Wait. Are you-”

“Dying? Yes, my dear. That’s why I must tell you now before it is too late.”

She pulled a chair closer to the bedside and sat, then placed her purse on the floor. “Um, okay.” Talia studied his face a moment and found herself entranced with its familiarity. “Is this something I want to hear?”

“That is for you to decide.” He drew the face mask closer and allowed the nebulized medication to waft into the air near his face. He covered his mouth and coughed again. “It was 1965. I was young, and so was Israel. You’ve got to understand, things were much worse back then. We had enemies on all sides. None of our enemies had wanted the state of Israel to come into existence in the first place. There was very little time.”

“Time for what?”

“The Land was in great danger. We knew if Israel were to be invaded, we wouldn’t stand a chance. We had to have a means of defending ourselves.”

“But, Grandpa, we had an army. It was formed with the country’s inception in 1948.”

“When your tiny country is surrounded on all sides by enemies, just having an army is not enough. Even in 1965, our army was small, ill-equipped. We were facing the distinct possibility of being annihilated. It had become a matter of urgency.”

“What did you do?”

“I did what had to be done, everything in my power. We had to obtain what we really needed, the one thing that would secure the security of The Land for generations to come.”

Talia’s head turned to the side as the statement played forward in her mind. “Which was?”

He coughed, but only mildly. “We needed a nuclear weapon.”

Talia shifted in her seat.

He continued. “Your work at the Mossad as a nuclear physicist means you are in a scientific role, but from what I know about you, you’ve been something of a historian your entire life. You’ve studied the country’s history, even to the point of accessing Mossad case files in order to learn all you could.”

“How do you know that?”

He placed the mask over his mouth and waved the question off. “It’s not important.”

“But you haven’t seen me since I was five.”

He ignored the question. “You know that in 1965, Israel did not yet possess such capabilities. Not only did Israel not have nuclear weapons, but at that time we were not allowed to possess them in any form.”

“Yes, yes,” Talia said, “that was part of how the deal to create the State of Israel came about in the first place.” The old man opened his mouth to speak, but Talia spoke over him. “Wait. You worked in the bakery with Ima and Aba. What do nuclear weapons have to do with a pastry chef?”

He coughed again yet a smile widened across his face. “Ah, Peanut. I am so glad you grew up with that picture of me in your mind. You were so young and innocent.” He looked out the window a moment. The smile abated, and his eyes became glassy, like one lost in a memory. “I wouldn’t have wanted you to know who I really was. Who I am.”

There was something laced in his words. It sent a cold shiver up Talia’s spine.

“But this is not why I wanted to talk to you.” His face furled a moment as if assembling the words he wanted to use next. “We appealed to the United States, Canada, Great Britain, France and Norway for help obtaining a weapon, but none would defy the treaty.”

“Well, sure," Talia said, “The United Nations Special Committee on Palestine made the recommendation for the creation of Israel after a lot of compromises. No one would have wanted to go against the agreements set aside in the Partition Plan.”

“I was right. You do have a love of history. You are correct, my dear. Nonetheless, by 1965 our intelligence sources feared an invasion was imminent, an invasion we could not survive. We had to obtain a weapon, without which we would face utter annihilation.”

He coughed again and gripped at his ribs. Talia stood and squeezed his hand. His face grimaced as he braced against the pain buried somewhere deep within his side. “I’ve got to tell you something,” he gritted out, then his voice quieted. “It’s a story you’ll have a hard time believing, but it is true, every word of it. In 1965, I was a Mossad agent.”

Talia’s head turned, and she peered down at him out of the corner of her eye. “What?”

He began to hack and pulled the mask over his face and inhaled the bronchodilator medication until the coughing settled. “I was assigned a very specific mission.”

“No, no,” Talia said as she shook her head. “You worked in the bakery. Am I supposed to believe that all those times I saw you kneading dough and making pastries were all just my imagination?”

She stared at him a moment and studied his expression. When it was clear his story was not about to change, she said, “I work at the Mossad as a research analyst, but you are telling me you were an agent?” The word came out as if it tasted of spoiled milk.

“Do not judge me, dear Peanut. I was determined The Land was to survive, and it was up to me to obtain a device.”

Talia’s brow flattened. “A nuclear device?”

“The weight of the entire nation was on my shoulders. The Land,” he said, referring to how most Israelis refer to their country, “needed me, and I was not going to fail it.” His voice became dry, like the winds of the Negev desert. “I was to obtain the device using any means necessary.”

Talia knew the types of covert operations the Mossad was involved in. “Any means?” She crossed her arms over her chest. “What did you do?”

“I killed a man,” he said. “But not just any man. I killed . . .” his eyes crunched shut, “my own brother.”

“You killed . . . but you don’t have a brother.”

“Your father probably never talked about Golan because of what he did with his life. To the family, he was a disgrace, and they carried the shame around with them as if it were a curse. But it wasn’t. Golan Stiel was a great man.”

Talia shook her head. “You’re telling me I had a great uncle named Golan?”

Yosef spoke as though recounting a horror. “My brother didn’t fail at his life. There was no disgrace. He was murdered at my hands, though no one knew it. In fact, the Israeli Prime Minister and the Director of the Mossad were the only ones who knew the truth, besides myself.”

Yosef’s eyes started to shift back and forth, and Talia wondered if the man was telling the whole truth.

“The truth you murdered my uncle, or that Israel was trying to obtain a nuclear device?”

“Both, my dear. In those days, I was recruited for the mission, a mission of such importance the future of the State of Israel hung in the balance.”

“All right,” she said as she turned around. “Grandpa, this is all a little too much for me to take in.”

“You must hear this. You are the only one that can know. You must hear the story of how my brother died. It is my dying wish.”

The old man studied the ceiling tiles a moment, then began.