“And how many divisions have you deployed there?”

“Three.”

“Ah. Forgive me for questioning your military genius. Remind me of the strategic importance of Imtan again?”

“It has no intrinsic value as a strategic target.”

“Then why are you attacking it?”

“A better question would be, ‘Why are they defending it?’”

“If I had to guess,” Christine said flatly, “I’d say it was because you are attacking it.”

The general’s lips pursed in mild irritation.

“A valid reason, but not a sufficient explanation in itself,” the general said. “If the target had no strategic importance, one would expect the enemy to put up little resistance.”

“So,” Christine began. “You’re attacking Imtan…”

“Because the Syrians are defending it. Precisely. Also….” The general paused, his stony façade failing to conceal his eagerness to tell more.

General Isaakson was nearly seventy, but he looked twenty years younger. This, Christine reasoned, was God’s way of compensating him for the fact that he was brutally ugly and had looked to be on the verge of middle age since his bar mitzvah. He had been born with a full head of bristly white hair matted by amniotic fluid and meconium – an aspect which he seemed to have taken pains to maintain over the years as he had bounded up the ranks of the Israeli military. He looked the same in every picture Christine had seen of him. The hideous scar running from his left temple to his upper lip, which she had at first taken for a war injury, was present even in his school pictures. During the course of her hurried background work on him she had learned that it was the result of an accident that occurred at the age of ten, when he was helping his father build frame a horse barn just outside of Bethlehem. He had fallen from a ladder and his face had caught on an exposed nail. Tetanus nearly killed him, and the scar healed irregularly, so that although it had faded over the years, even today it looked like a river that had flooded its banks. This event, the last in a long string of carpentry-related mishaps, prompted David Benjamin Isaakson to swear off construction and pursue a career as an officer in the IDF.

War had been as kind to him as his civilian upbringing had been cruel. It seemed that every skirmish took a little more of the edge off Isaakson’s disconcerting visage, and he had been known to joke that he would start to look for a wife only after Armageddon had rendered him passably handsome. As a recently promoted Aluf in the Israeli army in the early part of the twenty-first century, his involvement in the big showdown was looking like a safe bet.

“What?” Christine said impatiently. “There’s something about Imtan that the public isn’t aware of?”

“Oh, I shouldn’t go into detail,” Isaakson said. “But off the record… We have intelligence that indicates that Imtan may be of particular importance.”