With that he led us to the roof of the building, where a helicopter was waiting with its engines idling. We climbed on board and the bird immediately took off. I’d never ridden in a helicopter before and found it pretty unnerving, but Esther wasn’t fazed a bit. That reminded me again how little I knew about her.
After a few minutes I looked out the window and spotted the unmistakable shape of our destination: the Pentagon. This was certainly a week full of firsts for me: I’d never been to the Pentagon before either. Soon enough we landed on one of the helipads and were immediately escorted deep into the inner rings of the command center of U.S. military might. An armed guard was waiting beside a non-descript door, and when we approached he opened it and motioned us inside.
The room we entered was a long rectangle. Most of the center was taken up by a large oval table. The seats were arranged to face a huge flat-screen monitor that filled the wall at the far end of the room. Seated at the table were more generals, admirals and other high-ranking officials than I had ever seen in my life.
Esther and I were shown to one of the chairs that lined the side walls. Across the room I spotted the director who’d ordered me to Oak Ridge. He quickly looked away when he saw me staring at him. After a few minutes the lights were dimmed and everyone turned to face the giant flat-screen. At first the only light came from two time displays on the bottom of the screen. One showed Washington, D.C., the other Tel Aviv. Esther whispered anxiously, “It’s almost midnight in Israel!”
Suddenly the big screen filled with a gods-eye view of the earth, but I couldn’t figure out what I was seeing. Then the screen blinked and suddenly the same view reappeared, this time with a “normal” north-south orientation. I could see a line of lights that seemed to outline the shores of an ocean, and there were clusters of lights from other cities as well. Then lines appeared on the screen marking national borders, and circles and names popped up around the major cities. I realized that I was looking down from a satellite at a night-time view of the whole Middle East.
Suddenly the screen zoomed in, then zoomed in further. Now all I could see was what appeared to be the lights of a small town in the desert with a highway running by it. The caption read Dimona. “Too close,” a voice spoke up, and then it looked as though we were climbing through the atmosphere. Now I could see the coast of the Mediterranean in the northwest corner of the screen and a dark area toward the east. “That’s the Dead Sea,” Esther whispered to me, pointing at the picture.
“A little further, please,” the voice said, and suddenly we could see the whole of Israel and parts of its neighbors. “Alright, people, we’re approaching zero hour,” the disembodied voice said, and suddenly Esther was gripping my hand very tightly. The screen might look like some sort of media presentation, but her anxiety reminded me that there were real people down there.
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