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“Yes, it could,” he said.

“What?” Rabin barked.

Gonn replied matter-of-factly: “It is a physical device. It obeys the laws of physics. When, for instance, there’s a thunderstorm in Turkey, a flash of lightning could discharge at precisely the frequency needed, or one of its lower harmonies, with enough energy to activate the fuse in the detonator.”

I was far junior to everyone else in the room. But as a physics student, I was probably the only one who could fully follow the argument he was making. Looking at Rabin’s expression, it was clear that he was about to cancel the operation on the spot. “Excuse me, sir,” I said. “Could I ask Doctor Gonn another question?”

I pointed at an unopened bottle of orange soda on Rabin’s desk. “Tell me,” I asked the physicist, “is it possible that the fluid in that bottle is spontaneously leaking through the glass even as I’m speaking?”

“Sure,” Gonn said. “It might take years before even a fraction of a centimeter of the soda goes missing. But glass is like a ‘frozen’ liquid, and liquid water, or the molecules, are seeping into, and through, the more viscous ‘liquid’ of the glass. It’s just physics.”

Rabin looked at me, then at Gonn. But he had clearly got the message. “The operation is confirmed,” he said, in the deep, gravelly voice I would become much more familiar with in the years ahead. “Good luck.”

The device didn’t explode, but I couldn’t defuse it either. I did manage to get the remote metal tool locked on the bolt on the booby trap. But it wouldn’t budge – even when I waved back Nechamia and the others and took out an ordinary wrench. Though this was the first of my sayeret missions that ended in failure, that wasn’t what worried me as we boarded our helicopter back into Israel a couple of hours before dawn. It was the real possibility that the Egyptians would inadvertently discover that we’d been intercepting their communications. Dovik Tamari, as sayeret commander, was especially upset. This was one of the last operations during his period in command of the unit. He was about to hand over to a veteran paratroop officer, Uzi Yairi.

Yet our aborted Sinai mission turned out not to matter. What saved our eavesdropping network was the very thing which I was confident would not happen when I left for university: another Arab-Israeli war.

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