'It's 1600 now,' he said. 'We'll be through by 1900. We'll break for dinner, and sleep as long as possible. There'll be a two-hour meeting tomorrow at midday, then rest in the afternoon. We'll eat early, final short briefing at 2200, trucks away at 2300 sharp.'
The two unmarked army trucks growled softly into the night, heading west, trying to stay out of the howling low gears, trying to keep their headlights down yet still miss the rocks, trying to navigate a more or less straight line to the Syrian Disengagement Line.
General Rashood, who had traversed the route a dozen times with Ahmed, sat next to the driver of the lead truck, watching the compass, peering through his night goggles, doing his best to translate familiar landmarks from the granite-strewn sunlit landscape of his memory, into the spooky, greenish glow of the Russian-made binoculars.
They bumped and bounced their way forward, driving up small, rough tracks, cutting across flat areas, glad to be on smoother, quieter ground, but anxious to regain the cover of the rocks. They were literally between the rock and the hard place and, on reflection, the bumping, lurching tracks between the jutting granite had the edge. Uncomfortably safe, as opposed to more comfortably exposed. To the Israeli satellites, that is.
They reached the Syrian Disengagement Line, and Ravi signaled to the patrol that awaited them, all was well. They drove on into No Man's Land, beginning to come down off the heights, moving over a gentle downward slope almost all the way.
The General ordered the headlights doused at the border, and the little convoy was now dependent on the night goggles through which he was staring. They kept going for a mile and a half, and then Ravi could see lights way up ahead, magnified by his glasses, and unmistakably those of vehicles, lower down the slopes, maybe three and a half miles away. He took off the goggles but could see nothing through the dark with the naked eye.
'Okay, guys, this is it. This is the end of our ride. Trucks return to base, everyone else split into team formation. I'll lead, the rest of you stay in your 'fours' and follow tight behind. Any problem, no shooting… the knife, always the knife. Stay alert.'
The men from Hamas jumped lightly down onto the damp spring grass and zipped their jackets against the cool night air. They wore standard molded-rubber desert boots, supple, expensive equipment, calf-high, tight fastened. Even if they crossed the river, minimal water would leak in.
They set off across the desolate night acres of the Buffer Zone on the Heights, moving swiftly, at the jog, following the ex-SAS Major who had recced this very path several times before. After twenty minutes they saw the lights of the Israeli Patrol moving north up the westward Disengagement Line. Each man flung himself flat on the ground, heeding General Rashood's warning that high-powered night goggles could pick up running men at two miles.
When the lights disappeared, they picked themselves up and ran on west some more until the lights returned, this time heading south, back down the Line. Again they all hit the deck and then powered forward when the coast was clear, running hard now, going for the hide under the spoon-shaped rock, just short of the Line itself.
The General led them safely into the shelter of the rock, and they fanned out in the formations they had practiced, unseen from the path of the Israeli patrol. Each man was supremely fit, but breathing heavily after the run in. They huddled together, between their own guards, front, rear, and up on the granite cliff face.
Ray Kerman watched the jeep driving toward them, and there was not a sound as it came by at around 30 mph. They waited until it returned, exactly eight minutes later, and Ray watched it go south. Two minutes more, and he called softly, 'This is it, guys… Form up and let's go… See you at the RV point… Groups of four. .. two- minute intervals… fast and quiet… Watch the GPS now… '
With that, he and his three-man team set off, again running hard, straight across the Israeli Line, pounding over the ground, right on the heels of the General, who still wore the night goggles, peering in front of him through the deserted landscape. They ran strongly for eight minutes, when Ray stopped to check the GPS.
On course, he reduced speed to a steady jog, and within a few moments they hit the rising ground, breasted a low hill, and then climbed again for fifty yards before striding easily into a natural rock fortress around seventy-five feet across. They'd have to climb the west wall and slide down to level ground before the next stage of the journey. But he had selected this desolate place carefully, and he had buried six containers of water on his last visit. He'd also hidden a shovel, which he now found and began digging the earth away.
One minute later, Team Two arrived, then Team Three, and Team Four. In forty-five minutes they were all there, gulping water, and preparing for the five-and-a-half-mile walk in, across rich, brilliantly created Israeli agricultural land, just now beginning to yield superb crops of apples, pears, and almonds, peaches, plums, and cherries.
So far they had covered only a few miles from the compound, but the landscape was changing before their eyes. At least it would have been if it had not been pitch black, from the arid, rocky wastes of the Syrian side of the Golan, to the lush, irrigated triumph of Israeli farming policy.
It was exactly 1:15 when the Hamas General led his lead team of nine up over the granite 'wall' and began the fifty-foot grassy slide to the ground. They achieved this in near silence, and when the group was all present and correct, Ravi Rashood checked the GPS and whispered, 'Okay, guys. Here we go. Follow me.'
Behind them Group Two was high on the ridge preparing to slide down as soon as the leaders were under way. Within twenty minutes all thirty-six of the armed, hooded figures were walking softly through the fields, approaching Highway 91, north of Mas'ada, heading west.
Ever cautious and acutely aware of the possibility of radar, patrols, and intense Israeli surveillance, General Ravi ordered his men back into four-man groups for the highway crossing. His caution was well founded. There was bristling danger on that highway, because on Ravi's last sortie to Nimrod, an Israeli security detail had indeed picked up shadowy, furtive movement. It was, in fact, a fluke. The driver had been parked on a high ridge, peering through long-range night goggles about a mile south to the shallow, narrow valley the Hamas warriors now occupied.
Through the pale green landscape shown in the lenses of the binoculars, the guard had been only half focused. But up here, observation was hair-trigger sensitive. The guard had no idea what he had seen, but everyone at Northern Command knew that no big animals lurked on the Golan. It did not really matter what the guard had seen, anything was enough. And for the past week a four-man Israeli foot patrol had been sweeping a five-mile strip of Highway 91, operating in pairs, each armed man wearing black camouflage cream and soft desert boots.
Right now, the south-moving pair of Israeli guards was heading near silently down the middle of the deserted highway, not twenty-five yards from where Ravi and his three men were about to make the first dash across the blacktop, into the safety of the dark, verdant farmland.
Ravi's four were already split into pairs, the first two men poised to bound up the bank and rush across the highway, half crouched, weapons poised. He and his bodyguard would provide them with covering fire if necessary.
'Now!' hissed Ravi, and the two Hamas fighters broke cover, heading for the center of the highway. But they never got there. The first Israeli guard saw them, bang in front of his astonished eyes. And he had his weapon leveled, a short-barreled MP5 machine gun.
'HALT!' he yelled in Hebrew. 'FREEZE! RIGHT THERE. HANDS HIGH!'
The Hamas warriors froze and raised their hands, then-machine guns still dangling around their necks. The guard, standing only four yards from them, but ten yards in advance of his colleague, began to move forward, gripping his MP5 tightly.
But as he did so, Ravi's bodyguard came off the bank with a bound that would have made a jungle leopard gasp and plunged his combat knife clean through the second Israeli's back, ramming the life-ending blade through the center of the heart.
The only sound was the scuffing of this Israeli's boots as he fell backward into the Hamas killer's arms. The lead guard turned, swinging around almost involuntarily, calling sharply, 'IZAK?'
Big mistake. Ravi Rashood was up to the bank and on him. With his left hand he clamped an iron grip on the barrel of the Israeli's MP5, wrenching it sideways. And then he brought his gloved right hand down in a murderous chopping arc, hammering the handle end of his combat knife into the space between the guard's eyes, smashing the central forehead bone.
