“He’s in Syria,” said Arnold. “Damascus, Old City, right inside the Roman wall near the eastern gate. Bab Touma Street. Less than a hundred yards from the Bab Touma Gate itself, left-hand side of the street coming in from the Barada River bridge.
“Sorry we don’t have a street number, our informant did not know, and if he had known he’d have told us. He said it’s a big eighteenth-century house right around the corner from the Elissar restaurant.”
“That’s fantastic, Arnie. Does he live there with his wife?”
“What wife?”
“Oh, a Palestinian girl he met right after he defected from the Israeli army. I heard they were married almost immediately. She’s supposed to be very beautiful. And she’s also very dangerous — apparently gunned down two French secret servicemen a couple of years back, in Beirut.”
“She had a good tutor,” said Admiral Morgan.
“None better,” said David Gavron. “Ex-SAS major, wasn’t he? His background’s still a mystery, and the Brits won’t tell even us who he really is.”
“Nor us,” said the Admiral. “I think the guy embarrassed the hell out of ’em. Ramshawe says he’s from a rich family, Iranians living in London. He went to Harrow School and then the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, ended up commanding their top special forces, and then jumped ship and joined the goddamned Palestinians.”
“Harrow’s one of their top private schools, right?” asked Kathy.
“Sure is. Churchill went there. Guess they taught him about patriotism.”
“Probably taught the former Major Kerman too,” said David. “But he couldn’t sort out who he was, not until he ended up back in the desert. Funny, isn’t it? Turning his back on everything like that, becoming an enemy of everything he’d ever known.”
“Sure as hell is,” responded the admiral. “Can’t hardly imagine waking up one morning as a decorated, serving British Army officer, and suddenly deciding to be a goddamned Arab terrorist! Jesus Christ. Must have been some turning point.”
“Arnie, are you planning to get after him?” asked the ambassador.
“Not right now. Not with the Middle East peace talks coming up. We couldn’t afford to get caught, or even suspected.”
“Happily, my former organization suffers from no such constraints. You may leave it to us.”
“I had hoped so, David.”
“Yes, I guessed as much. There is, after all, no such thing as a free dinner. Especially one as good as this.”
Inside the briefing room, the atmosphere was subdued. The Israeli general, a man in his sixties, standing in front of the big computer screen on the wall, spoke quietly and firmly, pointing with his baton at the illuminated map of Bab Touma Street, Damascus.
“Right here,” he said, “we have rented an apartment on the third floor. It’s pretty basic, but it has a bathroom, cold water only, and electricity. Our field agents have moved in a couple of mattresses and some blankets. But you’re going to be uncomfortable. There’s no workable kitchen and nothing to cook on. We have installed an electric kettle and a coffeepot. There’s not much else.”
Before him, sitting at the conference table, were four ex-military secret service officers. All of them, for the moment, wore olive-green uniforms and had duffel bags slung on the floor next to them, alongside their M-16 machine guns. Two of these men wore the coveted wings signifying membership in Israel’s elite parachute division. They both wore officers’ bars on their shoulders. All four of them had the distinguishing three small Hebrew letters stitched in yellow above the breast pocket.
“You will see from the map, gentlemen, that this apartment has a commanding view of the big house directly opposite, and we were damn lucky to get it. An old Arab man used to live there, and we paid him generously to get out. While you are in residence, you will ignore his mail, answer the door to no one, and use cell phones only under the most dire circumstances.
“You will eat a proper meal only once a day, and that will be after dark. For that you will leave by the back door, and never, under any circumstances, use the same restaurant twice. Fortunately, Damascus stays open very late.”
One of the paratroopers asked about the getaway, and the general answered sharply. “Right here,” he said, pointing with his baton, “one street back, is a locked garage, right before house number 46. You will of course recce this, and inside that garage you will find a very old, battered-looking wreck of an automobile, plainly on its last legs.
“However, it has been expertly converted, four new tires, new transmission, brand-new Mercedes engine, everything directly out of the show-room. When you leave, you will be in Arab dress and you will make your escape in the old car, which will run like a Ferrari and attract the attention of no one. There will be two heavy machine guns in the back in the event of an emergency.
“You will drive out of the east gate and turn hard right down to the circle, and then it’s marked, straight down the highway to the airport that lies to the southwest of the city.
“Two of our field agents will meet you. One will get rid of the car; the other will escort you to a private Learjet, and you will take off immediately for Israel. The agent already has your passports. You will not need them for entry into Syria. There will be no record that you were ever in the country.”
The general, whose name was never mentioned, stood before them in full uniform, his steel-gray hair cropped tight, his posture still rigidly upright. His face was a picture of military sternness as he outlined the operation designed to execute Ravi and Shakira Rashood, the sworn and proven enemies of Israel.
There have always been officers in the Israeli Army whose determination borders on fanaticism. They are men who will stop at nothing to keep their nation safe, and this particular general was most certainly one of them.
As a twenty-year-old infantry lieutenant, he had fought shoulder to shoulder against the invading Egyptians with General Avraham Yoffe, when they smashed their way through the Mitla Pass in the Sinai during the Six-Day War in 1967. They were six bloodstained days of pure heroism by the Israelis. In less than a week, they destroyed four armies and 370 fighter-bombers belonging to four attacking nations.
The general had not been brought up to drop his guard against enemies of the state.
And here in the plain white-walled briefing room, in the heart of Israel’s Institute for Intelligence and Special Operations, he was once more planning a deadly strike against a couple of Palestinian terrorists who had posed more trouble for his nation than the Egyptian Second Army had done thirty-nine years previously.
It was a typical Mossad briefing. Two guards on the door, no cell phones permitted. The four men who were going in tonight had made their wills and had their last contacts with home. They would not carry any written notes with them when finally they were released, and they would leave from the rooftop, by helicopter, to the Israeli Army’s Northern Command HQ base for a short stopover. The sixty-mile onward flight to Damascus would take them over the Golan Heights, along the north-running 1974 Ceasefire Line, and then east over the desert into the southern area of the city.
The leader, sitting pensively, listening to the general, was Colonel Ben Joel, fortyish combat veteran, unshaven, former Special Forces, who had been involved in the revenge attack on Yasser Arafat’s house in Gaza. Ben was an infantryman, a ground-to-air communications officer, and an explosives expert, more accustomed to fighting with a club and tear gas against rioting crowds of Arab youths.
His number two was Major Itzaak Sherman, son of a true Israeli patriot, the legendary, highly decorated Sergeant Mo Sherman, who had gone into Entebbe Airport alongside Jonathan Netanyahu to rescue the hostages in 1976. Sergeant Sherman was a choral conductor in Tel Aviv, and no one in the aircraft ever forgot him, standing up as the commandos screamed in from the east, low over the pitch-black northern waters of Lake Victoria. Sergeant Sherman conducted these armed daredevils as they sang at the top of their lungs that most haunting patriotic song of Israel, “Onward — we must keep going onward!”—shutting out the fear of the great unknown that faced them when they landed.
As they dropped below a hundred feet, howling toward the runway, Mo Sherman hooked up the sound system to the bittersweet anthem written by Paul Ben-Haim and each man grappled with his onrushing task to the glorious strains of “Fanfare to Israel.”
Those who were there swear to God that that music made them all feel fifteen feet tall, revved them up for
