Leon Uris by Exodus Page B

together, for although Joab was still in his early twenties he was one of the crack agents in the Mossad Aliyah Bet, with an intimate knowledge of the Arab countries.
    From the beginning Yarkoni had been one of the wiliest and most daring operators in Mossad. His greatest feat was one which started the Jews of Palestine in the date-palm industry. The Iraqi Arabs guarded their date palms jealously, but Yarkoni had managed to smuggle a hundred saplings into Palestine from Iraq.
    David Ben Ami had given Joab Yarkoni command of the children’s compound, for it was, indeed, the most important place in the Caraolos camp.
    Joab showed Ari around the compound, which was filled with orphans from infancy to seventeen years of age. Most of them had been inmates of concentration camps during the war, and many of them had never known a life outside of barbed wire. Unlike the other compounds, the children’s section had several permanent structures erected. There was a school, a dining hall, a hospital, smaller units, and a large playground. There was a great deal of activity here in contrast to the lethargy in the other areas. Nurses, doctors, teachers, and welfare people from the outside, sponsored by money from American Jews, worked in the compound.
    Because of the flow of outsiders, the children’s compound was the most loosely guarded in Caraolos. David and Joab were quick to capitalize on this fact by establishing Palmach headquarters in the compound.
    At night the playground was transformed into a military training camp for refugees. The classrooms were turned from standard schools into indoctrination centers in Arab psychology, Palestine geography, tactics, weapons identification, and a hundred other phases of warfare instruction.
    Each refugee receiving military training by the Palmach had to stand trial by a kangaroo court. The pretense was that the refugee had got to Palestine and had been picked up by the British. The Palmach instructor would then put him through an interrogation to try to establish that the refugee was not in the country legally. The refugee had to answer a thousand questions about the geography and history of Palestine to “prove” he had been there many years.
    When a “candidate” successfully completed the course, the Palmach arranged an escape, generally through the children’s compound or the tunnels, to the white house on the hill at Salamis, whence he would be smuggled into Palestine. Several hundred refugees had been sent to Palestine that way, in groups of twos and threes.
    British CID was not unaware of the fact that irregular things took place inside the children’s compound. Time and again they planted spies among the outside teachers and welfare workers, but the ghetto and the concentration camps had bred a tight-lipped generation of children and the intruders were always discovered within a day or two.
    Ari ended the inspection of the children’s compound in the schoolhouse. One of the schoolrooms was, in fact, Palmach headquarters. Inside the teacher’s desk was a secret radio and transmitter which maintained contact with Palestine. Under the floor boards weapons were hidden for the military training courses. In this room papers and passes were forged.
    Ari looked over the forgery plant and shook his head. “This counterfeit work is terrible,” he said. “Joab, you are very sloppy.”
    Yarkoni merely shrugged.
    “In the next few weeks,” Ari continued, “we are going to need an expert. David, you said there is one right here.”
    “That’s right. He is a Polish boy named Dov Landau, but he refuses to work.”
    “We have tried for weeks,” Joab added.
    “Let me speak to him.”
    Ari told the two men to wait outside as he stepped into Dov Landau’s tent. He looked over at a blond boy, undersized and tense and suspicious at the sudden intrusion. Ari knew the look—the eyes filled with hate. He studied the turned-down mouth and the snarling lips of the youngster: the