her voice.
A burst of rifle fire from down the mountainside served as the answer to her question. Badir unslung the Kalishnikov from his shoulder, extending the stock with a single, purposeful motion.
“I am a soldier!” she hissed, fighting back tears as he turned away from her. “My place is here!”
The old shepherd cast a final look back over his shoulder. “If you are to be counted a soldier, you must follow the orders you have been given. Take our friend to the Qandil. Do not return.”
Hossein was standing on the steps of the mosque when his cellphone went off. He pulled it from his pocket and glanced at the screen before answering. It was the Supreme Leader.
“Good morning.”
“I don’t think so,” came the reply, sending a chill down the major’s spine. “It’s begun…”
The job had taken all night, but it was done at last. Farouk leaned forward, placing his laptop on the hood of the explosives-filled Jeep Grand Cherokee.
“You will drive here along the road,” he instructed, tracing an imaginary line across the on-screen map. “Then turn into the Hotels Zone. Park here-approximately two hundred meters from the Crowne Plaza Hotel. You will await my call to close in on your target, which will be approximately-here.”
A young jihadist from the Eilat cell nodded, his face pale with excitement. Farouk turned away to hide a smile of contempt.
It would be the young man’s first and last mission. He had been chosen for a reason. Simply put, he had not shown enough skill to justify continuing his training. So, he was expendable.
The Hezbollah leader fingered the cellphone in the pocket of his jeans. The bomb was wired for remote detonation should the boy’s nerve fail at the last moment of the suicide mission, as it often did.
Sad, he mused, that devotion to Allah should waver in the face of death. Had they not read the sacred verses of the Quran?
“I think I’ve got it here.”
“What is it, Sarah?” Gideon asked, still focused on the Uzi submachine gun he was loading.
“I’ve got the name,” the young woman replied, looking up from her laptop.“Nichols is registered here at the Crowne Plaza under the name Joseph Isaac. Fifth floor, room 347.”
Laner laid the gun on the bed and crossed the hotel room to stand behind her, his hand resting easily on her shoulder. “Good work-how hard was he to find?”
“Not hard,” she responded, smiling up at him as she touched his fingers lightly. “The hotel system was an easy job-a relatively simple firewall backed by Blowfish encryption. Once in, they scan the photo IDs provided at the desk and store them on the intranet. It was just a matter of cross-referencing the photos with our database and Nichols came up. Apparently, he’s a low-level diplomat with the U.S. State Department, because he’s traveling under a diplomatic passport.”
Gideon chuckled, his hand moving to stroke her mane of dark hair. “Not the last time I checked.”
He walked back across the room and replaced the Uzi in its specially-designed briefcase, casting an affectionate glance back at the young woman as she returned to her work.
In addition to being the resident tech expert, Sarah Halevy was a
They had worked together before, and although official Mossad regulations prohibited romantic entanglements between personnel, in reality it prevented very little. Gideon cast a glance around the room where they had spent the night and smiled with the realization. They had moved beyond acting a long time ago.
“Do we have confirmation from Chaim and Yossi?” he asked.
“Yes,” Sarah replied without looking up. “They are in position as of 0300 hours. Currently-Eiland has the gun.”
“The cave is just ahead.” Thomas’s head came up at the sound of her voice-the first words she had spoken since they had left the band of
Turning a corner in the mountain path, he saw the cave, there in the side of a cliff and nearly invisible to the casual eye, obscured by a carefully planted screen of pistachio trees.
“A mountain shepherd tends to the needs of the animals,” Estere explained, pushing her way through the brush covering the entrance. “The border peoples are forbidden to own horses, but the order is disregarded more often than not, particularly by those friendly to our cause.”
He ducked his head to enter the cave behind her, his eyes slowly adjusting to the dim light. There, in rough- hewn stalls cut into the side of the mountain, were stabled two large horses, a black and a dappled grey. Slinging her rifle over her shoulder, Estere walked into the stalls and brought out the mounts, one by one.
“This is Kejal, the gazelle,” she announced, handing the reins of the grey to Thomas. He looked up at the massive flank of the horse and grimaced, suddenly feeling rather foolish.
He had just begun to place a foot in the stirrups when her voice arrested him. “No, no. Kejal is my horse. You will ride Bahoz, the black.”
“Oh,” he responded, flushing in spite of himself. She reappeared in a moment leading a black stallion that seemed even larger than the grey, if that were possible.
She took the reins of Kejal from his hand and swung herself into the saddle with the grace of a bird.
Something went wrong-he would never quite figure out what-but he ended up on the dirt floor of the cave, rolling over in a crude approximation of the parachute landing fall as Bahoz shied away in fear, a loud whinny of protest issuing from the stallion’s mouth.
“What is going on?” cried Estere, grasping the reins of Bahoz in one hand while trying to calm her own mount.
Thomas picked himself up and stared at her, a hot flush of embarrassment once again spreading across his face. “I–I’ve never ridden a horse before,” he responded.
“You haven’t?” Her tones were filled with disbelief.
He shook his head with a wry grin. “Never actually been this close to a horse before, let alone ridden one.”
She muttered something in Kurdish under her breath-what, he didn’t know, but he was sure it wasn’t complimentary.
“Let me dismount,” she said after a long moment, “and I’ll show you. And here-give me your gun, we don’t need that going off.”
