“It’s been thirty minutes,” Yossi Eiland announced, checking his watch. “Time to shift over.”
Moving cautiously in the small confines of the hide, the two men traded places, Chaim Berkowitz taking his place behind the bipod-mounted Remington. “I have the gun,” he announced into his lip mike. It was standard protocol to rotate shooter and spotter every thirty minutes. Any longer and field studies showed a degradation in situational awareness.
He nestled down, pressing the buttstock against his shoulder as his eyes focused in on the scope.
Suddenly Eiland reached over and tapped him on the shoulder. “We’ve got a subject at your two o’clock. Is that him?”
Chaim swung the barrel of the M24 around, the cross-hairs resting on the subject’s face. It matched the file photo they had been shown, older, to be certain-but a positive match.
“We’ve got Harold Nichols at the south entrance of the hotel. He appears to be making a phone call. Do you copy?”
Gideon’s voice came crystal clear over the comm channel. “Yes. I’ve got Nathan following him. Sarah tried to tap into his cell phone frequency, but she’s not getting anywhere. Our best guess is that it’s the new-gen CIA TACSAT.”
“What are we looking at, Tex?” Harry asked, looking out over the palm-shadowed courtyard of the hotel. A swimming pool nestled in the middle of the courtyard and it was already crowded with tourists taking advantage of a mid-morning swim. Or splash, which seemed to be what most of them were doing.
“Hard to say, really,” came the Texan’s laconic reply. “I’ve been on the scope for an hour-no sign of the Israeli agents yet.”
Harry cast a cautious look back inside the lobby restaurant. “I’ve got one of them on my tail if I don’t miss my mark. Youngish guy, mid-twenties I’d say, medium-build. He’s wearing a photographer’s vest, my guess is he’s packin’. Carries himself like an operator.”
“I’ll keep an eye out.”
“You do that, I’m going to call Langley and give them an update. Hour and fifteen minutes till showtime.”
“Blast it!” Sarah Halevy exploded, pulling off her headphones and throwing them to the floor in frustration. “I almost had him.”
“Easy, love,” Gideon replied. “What were you able to get?”
“I ran a trace on some of the diplomatic communications channels that American intelligence typically uses. Sure enough, he’s using one of them. Here’s the thing-it’s a satellite phone, so I can track the satellites he’s using to bounce the signal.”
“So?”
“So, I was able to ascertain that he’s placing a call to someone here in Israel. Another couple minutes and I could have run a locator trace on their phone as well.”
“You’re saying he may have back-up here in Eilat?”
“Maybe. Just two or three more minutes and I could have known for sure.” She glared at the laptop as though it was responsible for the failure.
Gideon placed his hands on her shoulders and began to knead the tight muscles there. “Don’t be so tense,” he admonished, leaning over her. “Just relax.”
“Right…”
“What’s the latest?” Barney Kranemeyer demanded, arriving in the NCS op-center like a gust of wind.
Carter looked up from his terminal. “Not much. According to a call we got from Nichols about thirty minutes ago, everything’s still on course. He’s got a Mossad agent tailing him, but that’s to be expected.”
“As much for his protection as anything else,” Kranemeyer added.
Carter acknowledged that comment with an affirmative nod. The senior analyst yawned and took another sip from the coffee mug at his desk. The clothes he wore looked like they had been slept in, his tie pulled loose from his throat, the shirt wrinkled like an accordion, his pants devoid of crease, giving him the over-all appearance of a bedraggled starling.
Kranemeyer stared at the bank of screens filling one wall of the op-center. “We should have positioned more assets,” he stated, filled with sudden misgivings.
“How?” the analyst asked rhetorically. “What did you want to do, activate Station Tel Aviv’s strike team? The Israelis don’t miss that much. I think we were lucky to get Richards in the back-door.”
“Maybe so.” Kranemeyer never looked away from the screens in front of him. “It’s important that we emerge from this one on top. This isn’t a game anymore.”
Carter drained his mug and cast a weary look in the direction of the DCS. “I don’t think you need to worry. Nichols doesn’t know
The cleaning cart rumbled down the hall on the fifth floor of the hotel, its wheels creaking ponderously.
Fayood al-Farouk’s eyes roved from left to right as he proceeded along the hallway, scanning for threats.
A door opened behind him and he looked carefully back just in time to see a young couple exit, the man’s arm wrapped around the waist of a dark-haired Sabra girl. Farouk smiled. Such would serve him in paradise.
Five rooms down, he stopped and knocked on the door. The rattle of a chain greeted the knock and the face of a young man stared out.
“
“
With another judicious glance down the corridor, he pushed the cart inside and closed the door behind them, hearing the lock click into place. Two men occupied the hotel room, both young Palestinians in their early twenties.
The bag on the side of the cart held a pair of stripped-down Kalishnikov assault rifles and loaded magazines for both. With a quick, cat-like movement, Farouk moved to the balcony door of the suite, pulling the blinds aside just long enough to glance out.
It was eighty, maybe a hundred meters to the courtyard where he had been told the meeting would go down.
“Remember,” he instructed, turning back to his men. “Do not fire until our brother has given his life.”
“He’s at your eight o’clock,” the voice in Sarah’s ear observed. The young woman withstood the temptation to turn her head in the direction indicated. Instead, she focused her attention on massaging the sunscreen lotion into the skin of her arms, protection against the sun beating down upon her body through the spotty shade of the palm fronds above.
“He’s coming your way,” Yossi’s voice announced once more through the earbud.
She glanced over to where Gideon reclined on a pool chair a few feet from her own. He looked deceptively
