CHAPTER 20: THE WAR ROOM

At 7:21 in the morning, A.K. stationed his car in the resident's section of the public parking lot. The parking area was located on the basement floor of the fifteen-storey downtown building, whose roof was cluttered with forty satellite parabolas, twelve telecommunication towers beaming with red lights and three microwave-frequency, phase-array transmitter and receiver antennas.

He climbed the stairs to the main lobby of the building, turned right down one of the corridors and passed his smart card over the electronic reader located to the right of a mediocre, inconspicuous office-room. As he entered, two uniformed men, sitting at a desk, waived to him "good morning".  He approached an elevator located at the corner of the office, wiped his card again and descended ten floors below ground level. The elevator doors opened into a long passageway which required more passes to open the doors that became larger and thicker as he proceeded.  The last door was an enormous concrete block covered with 1.5 inch armor steel that opened surprisingly-quick when A.K. passed his card for the fifth time.

This door opened into a twenty-foot-high, dimly-lit, circular hall that gave you the first impression of one of those natural, underground caves ornamented with stalagmite concretions and stalactite pillars thousands of years old.  The hall was filled with hundreds of consuls, monitors and hanging cables all arranged in a circular fashion, like the shells of an onion. The largest circle of desks was somewhat elevated relative to the next inner circle which was somewhat elevated relative to the next inner circle. Altogether, nine circles of intelligence stations made up the war room with the command station located in their midst at the lowest level. (The altars of very old synagogues are located at the lowest point of the chapel in tune with the verse in Psalms: "I call You from the depth, answer me from the infinity of G-d.")

Each circle or group was responsible for a different means of intelligence acquisition.

The outermost circle manned with approximately seventy intelligence personnel, was responsible for viewing, assessing and reporting the codes, pictures or videos on the monitors that were connected to the electronic revolving cameras and radars situated close to borders of the country.  Trespassers, drug traffickers and prohibited vehicles were easy to pick up with this sophisticated electronic equipment. In the case of an offense or a suspect, the viewer would notify immediately his superior, who would immediately notify his superior, who would notify the commander present at the middle desk. The commander would locate the troopers patrolling in the area, communicating a message and/or command on a secret frequency transmitted through the telecommunication tower located on the roof of the fifteen-storey down-town building.

The second circle had direct connection with 35 unmanned airplanes that cruised in the sky about 25 miles above the regions designated as problematic areas.  The planes carried a synthetic aperture radar that transformed the radar signals to clear black and white pictures of all that was on the ground and compared it automatically with pictures of that same ground at some time in the past, thus revealing any movement of enemy infantry or vehicles.

The third circle was the base station of the two AWAC airplanes that were actually two Boeing 747 aircraft converted into a massive jungle of electronic acquisition and warfare instrumentation, cruising in the sky alternately for periods of about 12 hours.  The four built-in phase array antennas in each plane surveyed an area of almost 2000 square kilometers picking up objects as small as jeeps and cars and transmitting the pictures or the codes to the personnel manning the third circle of the war room that was located ten floors under the fifteen storey down-town building.

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Unlike his unfortunate predecessor, Poduleses did all in his power to fulfill Ramses request to the letter and deal with the Jewish Problem seriously. It was for that purpose that he had established the war room.

It is not so farfetched to say that the war room of Poduleses, the successor of the Minister of Intelligence who, as you recall, was inadvertently murdered by the king on that bright Tuesday morning, was somewhat like a modern war room.

First, it was located in a circular house in downtown Ramses and a platoon of 70 Egyptians police patrolled the premises twenty-four hours a day.  Poduleses office was situated in the middle of the house, from where he passed out orders like hot bagels to the 400 officers under his command. Actions, abductions and killings were all planned out there.

The inside walls of the house were laden with thousands of lithographs and primitive abacus calculators.  Each plate represented one Jewish family in Goshen and each abacus showed the month of pregnancy that the mother of the household had attained.  Fifteen secretaries were assigned to inscribing the plates with the proper names and updating the abacus, adding a month on the day the couple married or after a pregnancy was reported or assumed by the intelligence officers.

The largest and most impressive plate was that of Amram and Shifra. The abacus showed seven colored beads meaning that two months were left until Shifra would give birth. Everything was ready and waiting.  The child would be plucked from her mother's womb right after birth and killed.  Poduleses` men could not wait to put their hands on the baby. A substantial raise for the officers and a big golden medal for Poduleses` were awaiting them.

מתוך הספר: HADRIANNA, PRINCESS OF EGYPT
המחבר (שם עט): JOHNATHAN ZAKAI
e-mail: [email protected]