Hero by Joel Rosenberg Page B

rawboned Ezer Laskov, the S2; Colonel Yehoshua Sadok, who held the senior spot in S4, along with his long-time assistant, Senior Master Sergeant Yossi Bernstein. They were a funny pair: Sadok short and pudgy, thin hair slicked back over his balding head, Bernstein a head taller, his curly brown hair always uncombed and unruly.
    Doc Zucker was conspicuous by his absence, but the chief medician had been up until 0500, supervising the care of the wounded.
    The delegation from Third Battalion arrived en masse, and quietly seated themselves along the wall, Colonel Rabinowitz coming over to exchange a few quick words with Peled and the adjutant.
    Sidney Rabinowitz, now, he looked like something out of an advertising brochure: he was tall and muscular, but not overmuscled, size 40 Long khakis fitting him as though they had been tailored. His nose and chin could have been carved from stone, and he wore the triple oak leaves of a full colonel like the kings of old must have worn their crowns.
    The only trouble with Rabinowitz was that he was always complaining, and Shimon couldn't dismiss his complaints because they were always to the point. Right now, he was probably fussing about the size of his instant battalion: it was under-strength, built out of one training detachment and some spare specialists from Harari's special training group.
    No sense of proportion, that was the problem with Sidney. In another few minutes they'd be reconfiguring for cadre. Why bother?
    It was easy to tell who hadn't been involved in the firefight yesterday: they were all in clean, crisp khakis, none of them displaying the bandages and chalky complexions of the wounded.
    Ebi Goren strutted in, half a dozen officers from Second Battalion following closely on his heels. The trim little man nodded a curt greeting to all, then joined Peled, Rabinowitz and the adjutant over to one side of the room while the rest of the Second Bat delegation took seats.
    There was a certain something to the officers Goren had with him. All were junior for their jobs—there wasn't even a lieutenant colonel among them—and that probably meant that Ebi Goren, with one reasonably well-organized aggressor/defender company and two 250-man training detachments, had skimmed off some of the young studs from Ag/Def for his command staff, even though that meant some captains and majors would be taking direction from junior officers.
    Captain Yitzhak Galil strongly approved, although he wondered how strongly he would have approved if he were wearing oak leaves instead of bars.
    As the others from Second Bat took their seats, one detached himself from the group and came over to Galil.
    Galil had never liked Tetsuo Hanavi. For one thing, Tetsuo was too damned pretty: tall, his blond hair curled tight against his head, his chin too sharply chiseled. For another thing, he was a Hanavi of the Bar-Els, a member of one of the leading families of Metzada, destined—if he proved competent, granted; Galil tried to be fair—for at least the triple oak leaves of a full colonel, possibly even for stars on his shoulders.
    "Yitzhak," Hanavi said. "How's the leg?"
    "It'll do," Galil said. He pointed his chin to where Goren was still deep in conversation with Peled and the others. "What's Ebi got you doing?"
    "Err, I'm not working for Ebi." Tetsuo Hanavi smiled. "As of this morning, I'm assistant S3, regimental, working for Natan."
    S3? Plans and Operations? Galil tried to keep his disgust off his face. Of the four Hanavi brothers, there was one asshole, one competent line soldier, one green coward—and what to do about Ari Hanavi was something that Galil didn't consider settled, not by any means—and Tetsuo.
    But while he'd apparently been a decent enlisted striker—his Uncle Tzvi wouldn't have put him in for OCS if he hadn't been—he'd never commanded a company, or even a platoon. Each of the triple bars on his shoulder had been earned as a staff officer.
    Galil didn't have anything against staff