8:32 A.M. Local Time, September 23rd
The offices of the Prime Minister
Tel Aviv-Yafo, Israel
“General Shoham to see you, sir.” Prime Minister Eli Shamir looked up and nodded at his secretary.
“Show him in.” The Mossad chief’s arrival was hardly a surprise. Indeed, the only thing remotely unexpected was the timing. Shamir had expected the general to come beating down his door at the crack of dawn.
“Good morning, general,” the prime minister greeted warmly as Shoham entered, closing the door firmly behind him.
“I wish,” the general replied, his voice sharp. Almost brittle. A moment later, a slightly sheepish look came over his leathered face. “I’m sorry, sir. I should not speak so abruptly.”
“Don’t mention it, Avi. Have a seat. You look tired.” And he did, the prime minister thought, regarding the man in front of him with a grim smile.
Avi ben Shoham, hero of the Golan in the ‘73 war, the tanker who had racked up a total of eighteen destroyed Syrian tanks over the first week of the war before pulling two of his crew members from the wreckage of their burning Centurion. Avi ben Shoham, the man whose second cousin had been one of the athletes killed at Munich. Avi ben Shoham, the commander of Mossad for the last five years. Yes, he had earned the right to speak abruptly, if any man had. But that was hardly to the point.
“When we talked yesterday, you said you were in the process of the developing contingency plans, general. What do you have?”
Avi rose and walked over to the prime minister’s desk, handing him a thick folder. “Project RAHAB, sir.”
Shamir took the folder in silence and began leafing carefully through it.
Twenty minutes later, when he had finished, he glanced back up at the general. “What do you need me to do, Avi?”
“I need your authorization to detach a special unit from Sayeret Matkal, to be placed under my command for the duration of RAHAB.”
“It’s yours. Keep me updated.”
“Thank you, sir,” General Shoham said, rising from his chair and heading for the door. The prime minister’s voice stopped him in his tracks.
“Don’t thank me, Avi,” he admonished, his face unusually grim. “Just get it done. And be careful.”
“I will.”
9:31 A.M.
A safe house
The Gaza Strip
“It is clear, commander.”
Ibrahim Quasim rose from his chair and walked over to the window, lifting the venetian blinds to carefully peer out into the street. Nothing was stirring. But it was time to leave. He glanced at his two bodyguards. “We must move quickly.”
“I will have Muhammad bring the car around,” the taller one declared, pulling a small radio from his pocket. He switched it on and spoke quickly in Arabic. “He’s on his way.”
“Good,” Quasim replied, watching as a small black sedan came rolling down the street. It was a dirty, nondescript car. Nothing that would attract the attention of the Israeli Defense Force or the dreaded Mossad, attention the Hamas lieutenant could hardly afford.
The car pulled quickly to a stop right in front of the door, and he turned to his bodyguards. “It’s time.”
“We have subject exiting building N-32. He’s flanked by two bodyguards. Fourth man in the car, black sedan. Subject entering car, back seat, right side. I have VISDENT on Ibrahim Quasim.” The young man paused, thumbing the safety off his 9mm Beretta.
“Execute! Execute! Execute!”
The AH-1 Cobra attack helicopter rose from four streets over, lifting above the buildings, skimming over their tops with an ear-shattering thwap-thwap-thwap of rotors.
Quasim saw the helicopter a second before his bodyguards. He knew what it meant. It was coming for him. His hand went out, grasping at the door latch, forcing it open. There wasn’t much time…
The next moment, 2.75-inch rockets flashed from the side-mounted pylons of the Cobra. They hit the car dead on, blowing it over on its side, setting it aflame.
The explosion lifted Quasim bodily into the air, throwing him away from the car. He screamed, feeling the metal rip into his legs like shrapnel, the flames licking at his pants.
Part of the wreckage fell on top of him, pain flooding through his veins as he lay there, pressed to the pavement. He raised himself on his elbows, trying to pull himself away, trying to ignore the searing pain, the blood trickling freely from his body. He had to move. Get away.
A shadow fell over him, blocking out the sun. Quasim raised his eyes. A man in the clothing of a street Arab stood over him. A friend. “ Please,” he whispered, forcing the words out past bleeding lips. “Help me, brother…”
A pistol materialized in the man’s hand as he leaned down, pressing it against Quasim’s forehead. “Good-bye,” the young man whispered, a smile crossing his face. A smile as cold and dark as his eyes.
Fire erupted from the gun’s muzzle. Fire and blackness…
Lieutenant Gideon Laner rose from beside the corpse, replacing the Glock in the folds of his garments. “Subject is down, repeat, subject is down,” he stated into his lip mike. “Mission complete.”
“Right,” the voice replied over his radio. “Your pick-up is arriving in the area. Proceed to the extraction zone.”
“Roger.” He walked quickly over to the bodies of the two militants, toeing each one with his boot. They were dead. There was nothing more for him. Not here.
Gideon broke into a trot, down the street. With any luck-a small dirt-brown Toyota appeared from a side street, slowing to a stop beside him.
“Get in,” the man behind the wheel ordered curtly. He too was dressed like a Palestinian, like Gideon. The lieutenant opened the door and slid into the passenger seat.
“How did it go?”
“Quasim is dead, Yossi,” Laner replied. “Drive.”
“Are you sure?”
Gideon glanced over at his companion, irritation flickering in his dark eyes. “I put a pistol between his eyes and blew his brains out, Yossi. Of course I’m sure.”
“Good.”
10:49 A.M. Baghdad Time
Q-West Airfield
Northern Iraq
There were no tracks. Whatever imprints had been left in the soft sand had been wiped away by the night breeze. It told him nothing. It was here that he had fallen, rolled onto his side to avoid his attacker’s second blow. A slight impression was all that remained.
Harry stood to his feet, glancing carefully around him. Off in the distance, he could hear jet engines warming up, their shrill whine oddly discordant in the desert air. He walked slowly across the sand, to the place where he had attacked Davood. Something didn’t ring true. Someone had betrayed them. Someone wasn’t on their side. And he didn’t know who.
He had worked with Tex, Thomas, and Hamid many times before. In combat, they were a finely-honed team, anticipating each other’s actions, working together like parts of a single machine. They were like brothers. What had happened last night couldn’t have been their doing. Their loyalty was beyond reproach.
Of course, a little voice reminded him, the same thing could have been said of that old FBI turncoat, Robert Hanssen. And his friends had been wrong.
Perhaps the director had been right. Perhaps his initial suspicions were focused on Davood simply because of who he was, what he was. And he couldn’t afford to operate on that basis. But Kranemeyer wasn’t on site, and something felt wrong about this. All of it.
A voice behind him got his attention. It was Davood. “The colonel sent me for you. He says the Huey is repaired.”
Harry turned, his eyes betraying none of his suspicion. “Thanks. Tell him I’ll be right there.”
1:21 P.M. Tehran Time
The base camp
Major Hossein glanced at his watch. They were late. Perhaps there was a logical explanation for that. Then again, perhaps Tehran’s intelligence had been in error.
Perhaps the strike force had arrived early. Maybe the convoy had been intercepted.
He rubbed sweaty hands on his pants, checking the magazine of his Makarov semiautomatic pistol for the twentieth time in the last three hours. It was loaded. A loaded AK-74 stood by the door of the trailer he had taken over as a headquarters. His men were thrown out in a defensive perimeter extending three kilometers out from the laboratory trailers.
Once again they had justified his choice of picking them. Experienced fighters, veterans of Afghanistan and Iraq, they knew the country. They were taking advantage of every bit of high ground, every rocky crag from behind which they could fire without exposing themselves.
The radio at his side crackled loudly with static and he leaned over, grasping up the microphone. “Convoy to Base Camp, we are three kilometers out. Request instructions.”
Praise Allah! Hossein thought in a rare moment of pious thanks. He spoke rapidly into the microphone, ordering them to the rocky outcropping he had picked out seven hours before. When he had received the message from Tehran.
Yes, praise be to Allah. Now he only needed another half-hour for the missile battery to arrive and position themselves. Then they would be ready. Ready for the Americans.
11:58 P.M. Local Time
Sayeret Matkal Headquarters
Israel
Gideon Laner turned the faucet all the way to hot, cupping the water in his hands and splashing it over his face. It was refreshing to be clean once again, after the tedious strain of being undercover for the past two months. He reached into the drawer underneath the sink and pulled out a Gillette razor. He hadn’t shaved in that time either. But he had succeeded. Ibrahim Quasim was dead. Now Sayeret Matkal, the Israeli special-ops unit, would just have to see who Hamas replaced him with.
For there would be a replacement, that was granted, but the new man would not be as experienced as the man whose body now lay back in the dust of a Gaza street. Not as skillful. And they would kill him too.
Gideon pulled off his shirt, glancing in the mirror as he did so. A tired, worn face lined with worry stared back at him. The face of a man old before his time. He sighed and reached for the razor.
At that moment a knock came at the door, startling him. “One moment,” he answered, pulling his shirt back over his head.
He yanked open the bathroom door. “What’s going on?” he demanded, irritated at the interruption. A female corporal from Communications was standing before him.
“I’m sorry,” he began, embarrassed by his outburst.
She didn’t seem to notice, handing him a clipboard. “This arrived over the wire, lieutenant. You have to sign for it.”
He took it from her, noticing the Mossad crest at the top of the cover sheet. What did they want?
8:03 A.M. Eastern Time
CIA Headquarters
Langley, Virginia
“I understand, Scott, I do understand. But tell Sorenson I want that satellite coverage ASAP-as Kranemeyer requested. Keep on him. Goodbye.” Director Lay hung up the phone, sighing heavily as he did so. The NRO still wasn’t providing the real-time sat coverage that had been requested. Their regional KH-13 was apparently tied up covering one of the interminable uprisings in Indonesia.
Lay slammed his fist against the solid oak of his desk. To blazes with Indonesia! His teams weren’t there, weren’t headed into harms’ way in that godforsaken part of the globe. They were going to Iran. And something was giving him a bad feeling about all this. There was something wrong.
He had become DCIA six years before with a clear mission from Hancock’s predecessor. Transform the Agency. And, as much as was possible, he had done so. He had successfully lobbied the Hill to increase the budget for human intelligence and special operations by over fifty percent, started running operations the like of which hadn’t been done for forty years. And there were people in this town that didn’t like that. They didn’t like it one bit. Which was why he had to be careful.
He rose from his chair, going over to the window, his hands in his pockets as he gazed out over the city. From his office he could see the Washington monument, the tall granite obelisk that towered over the city, stone glistening in the autumn sun.
They couldn’t understand, it seemed no one could anymore. The price of freedom. The sacrifices necessary to obtain it. Sacrifice. The politicos that inhabited the swamp inside the Beltway defined sacrifice as the necessity of leaving their Washington lifestyle and heading back to their home districts every few years to campaign.
Sacrifice. With a weary sigh, Lay sank back into his chair, reaching for a photograph on his desk. The face of a woman in her mid-twenties smiled back at him, a baby cradled in her arms.
He’d had a family once upon a time, but that was where the resemblance to a fairy tale started and stopped.
Trisha. His wife and their baby girl, Carol. The Cold War had been in its death throes when he’d joined the Agency, running agents between Moscow and Havana, working through the immigrant communities of Miami. Back in those halcyon days when religious zealotry had barely crossed the CIA’s radar. He’d had to leave them both in Washington when he moved south pursuing his career-Agency protocol that his family be insulated from danger.
Patriotism? Or blind ambition? The nights he’d spent in search of an answer to that question. Trisha had left him when their girl was four, citing emotional abandonment in the divorce papers that he found on his desk upon his return, papers already three months old by the time he got them.
That was twenty-six years ago, and all hope of reconciliation had died along with Trisha when she had succumbed to a long battle with lymphoma at the age of forty-eight.
His fingers moved to the second photo and a tender smile touched his lips. In all those years, he had never seen his daughter. Her mother had taken back her maiden name and legally changed Carol’s name as well, moving to the opposite end of the country to live with her parents. Buried in his work, he’d convinced himself that it was for the best, that he never could have become the father she needed. But the desire never left him, to know, to answer the aching question. What had become of her?
And then a twenty-eight-year-old young woman had shown up on Langley’s doorstep two years ago, armed with a tech degree from MIT and the ruthless instincts of a computer hacker. He nearly hadn’t recognized her at first. Until he saw her mother in her eyes…
Lay sighed, turning his attention back to the phone and the President. There were sacrifices he regretted…
5:39 P.M. Tehran Time
The base camp
The surface-to-air-missile system was the flower of Russian technology. A further development of the competent SA-15 “Gauntlet”, as code-named by NATO, the TOR-M1 9M330 had been supplied to Iran in December of 2005. It was a system capable of detecting and tracking forty-eight targets, and engaging two targets simultaneously with over a 92 % kill probability, making any sort of low-level attack a virtual suicide mission. The twenty-nine transport launcher vehicles, or TLVs, which Tehran had purchased had cost them the equivalent of over a billion dollars in U.S. currency.
One of them now sat on top of the rock outcropping Major Hossein had designated. He rubbed his hands together as he looked up at it, smiling to himself.
There was a part of him that was like a child with a new toy. He really couldn’t wait to try it out.
One of the technicians came around the back of the vehicle. “Everything is ready, commandant.”
“Good.” Hossein smiled. “What is the chance of an aircraft getting through your screen?”
“What type of aircraft?”
The major thought for a moment. “A transport aircraft. Or a helicopter. I’m not sure which.”
A smile crossed the technician’s face. “None, major. None at all…”
4:09 P.M. Local Time
Mossad Headquarters
Somewhere north of Tel Aviv
“What do you think of our chances for success, lieutenant?”
The young man looked up slowly, his eyes locking with the Mossad chief’s. “My father was a rabbi, sir,” Gideon said finally. “He taught me never to gamble.”
A ghost of a smile flitted across his features. “But with these odds-I’m not even tempted.”
“I knew your father, Gideon,” General Shoham replied. “He was the chaplain of my unit in the Golan.”
“He’s spoken of you too, sir.” Lieutenant Laner turned back to the matter at hand. “You’re wanting to launch this mission tonight?”
The Mossad chief glanced at his wristwatch. “That’s correct, lieutenant. Nine hours. Before daybreak tomorrow, I want your team on the ground. In Iran.” His eyes narrowed. “Can you do it?”
“I think so, sir. You’re cutting us close. Not much prep time.”
“I know that, lieutenant. There’s no help for it. A C-130 Hercules transport will deploy you forty kilometers from the target. You will use the two fast attack vehicles to get in position. The plan is relatively simple: make a surgical strike, rescue Dr. Tal, eliminate the Iranian communications facilities and proceed to the extraction zone.”
“What about the other archaeologists?”
“You won’t have room in the extraction helicopter,” the general replied, watching Laner closely. “Your mission is to get our man out. That is all.”
Gideon never even blinked. “Understood, sir. I’ll go assemble my team.”
5:27 P.M. Baghdad Time
Q-West Airfield
Northern Iraq
“Right, director. I understand. Good-bye.” Harry replaced the TACtical SATellite phone in his shirt pocket and walked back to the barracks, Kranemeyer’s last words ringing in his ears.
Good luck.
They were going to need a lot more than luck if they were going to survive the next few hours. He pushed open the door. Tex was lying back on one of the bunks, apparently asleep.
A moment passed, then he opened one eye, gazing carefully at Harry.
“Where’s the rest of the team?” Harry asked, looking over at his friend.
“Over at the hangar. Reloading the equipment in the Huey. What’s going on?”
Harry walked over to his locker, pulling out the equipment he would take with him. “I just talked with Kranemeyer,” he said finally. “We have go-mission.”
Tex uncurled himself from the bunk, standing to his feet. He stood almost an inch taller than Harry.
Back in his Marine years, Force Recon had nearly rejected him. Said he made too large of a target. After Afghanistan, no one had questioned the big man. They just left him alone.
“You stickin’ to the plan?”
Harry nodded slowly, turning to look him in the eye. “What do you think of Davood?”
“I had him in my demolitions class,” Tex replied, shrugging his shoulders. “Doesn’t mean anything.”
“I understand.”
“He’s a good man with explosives,” the Texan said after a moment of silence. “One of my best pupils.”
“Glad to hear it.”
“Good at the Farm and good in the field are two different things. He’s never been in the field.”
Harry stared keenly at his old friend. “I know. Do me a favor and keep him close…”
4:59 P.M. Local Time
Sayeret Matkal Headquarters
Israel
The two fast attack vehicles, or FAVs, as they were commonly called, were little more than heavily modified dune buggies. Heavily modified, because no commercially-produced dune buggy had ever come equipped with a fifty-caliber machine gun for the passenger. Each FAV could hold three people at maximum and was equipped with three machine guns and two small anti-tank rocket launchers
It could reach speeds of one hundred and thirty kilometers an hour on level ground. But where they were going, there wouldn’t be any level ground. Gideon turned away from the vehicles, back toward his men.
“Take off the rocket launchers, Yossi,” he ordered briefly, turning to the man that had been his driver in the Gaza Strip. “We don’t need the weight.”
Yossi Eiland responded with a grin. A small, stockily built man, the twenty-seven-year-old Jew had been a race car driver in France before emigrating to Israel and enlisting. He would be the driver of the lead FAV.
“Right away, boss.” He took the cigarette from between his lips and tossed it away, grinding it into the concrete pad.
Gideon turned to look at the rest of his men. There was Chaim Berkowitz, twenty-four years of age, their sniper. A tall, lean boy, his name meant ‘life’.
It couldn’t have been more inappropriate. Angel of death would have been more fitting. But he did his job. That was why Gideon had picked him.
The third team member was leaning over the FAV, already helping Yossi unscrew the launchers from their fastenings. His name was Nathan Gur. The youngest man on the team, he had gone into the Bekaa with Gideon the previous year, as part of a joint American-Israeli op.
None of his men were rattled by the short notice they had been given. They were accustomed to it, to the strain of laying on a mission in a hurry. Often they only had hours before a terrorist would change locations. The mood this time was actually relaxed.
All that would change soon enough…
8:32 P.M. Baghdad Time
Q-West Airfield
Northern Iraq
Thomas Parker glanced at his watch. Five hours. He laid down his cleaning brush and picked up the scattered parts of his 7.62mm SV-98 sniper rifle, starting to reassemble the gun. It wasn’t his favorite weapon, but it would do the job. Anything of American manufacture was out of the question.
He re-mounted the scope, brushing a fine layer of dust off the lens. Sand seemed to permeate everything.
The scope wasn’t standard-issue, it had come from an American lens manufacturer whose name had been carefully ground off the side. It gave him magnification up to 10x and night-vision capability. More than he needed, but with it, he had placed bulls-eyes at fifteen hundred yards.
It was the rifle he had carried into Azerbaijan. That was another reason he didn’t like using it.
Rising, he left the reassembled SV-98 on the bunk, and walked over to the window. Out on the runway, they were readying a fighter jet for take-off.
Thomas stood there for a moment, staring out into the desert, his eyes shadowed. Azerbaijan. Failure. He didn’t like to be reminded of failure. Of the men that had been left behind. Of the men he had let down. He could never let it happen again.
He returned to the bunk, picked up the sniper rifle, cradling it in his arms. It was a personal way of killing. You looked down the scope, you looked into the eyes of the man you were about to destroy. If he was the first man to die in an area, you saw him as he was, cheerful, determined, going about his life.
If others had gone before him, you saw the raw, naked fear in his eyes, the pallor of his face as he heard your rifle-shot ring out in the distance, speeding death his way. Messenger of destruction…
11:57 P.M.
Q-West Airfield
Northern Iraq
“Request permission for takeoff. Ident two-seven-one Lima.”
“Permission granted, two-seven-one Lima. You have go-mission clearance.” A brief pause and then Tower added, “We’ll leave the light on for you.”
“Thanks, Motel Six,” Tancretti acknowledged sarcastically, turning back to his work. He had a chopper to fly.
The strike team sat in the back, arranged in the order in which they would exit the plane. Tex was closest to the door. On the ground, he would take point. Hamid sat right beside him. Harry sat across from the two of them, followed by Davood. Thomas sat in the far back, the sniper rifle slung over his shoulder. He would provide rear security. They were dressed in desert camouflage, their faces painted a sandy brown.
Nothing on their clothes identified them as American, nothing about their weapons. They were clean, deniable.
Harry glanced out into the darkness as the chopper slowly began to lift off from Q-West, feeling adrenaline surge through his body. They were going. This was it. They were committed. The moment of truth, the writers called it. Perhaps.
He looked around at his team members. Their expressions were unreadable in the darkness, the face paint masking their eyes. Davood stirred at his side.
His dossier had said he’d never been deployed operationally before. Perhaps that accounted for his nervousness.
Or maybe not.
Truth? Another writer had said it was the first casualty of war. Harry was more inclined to the second opinion. But they were past the point of no return. They were going in…
Fifteen minutes later, a C-130 Hercules transport aircraft rose from a small military airfield north of Tel Aviv, heading west, across Syrian airspace, across northern Iraq, flying low to avoid detection by the American military radars. Destination: Iran…