Barracuda 945 (12 page)

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 walling 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, their 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.

Back came Ravi’s lethal right hand, and, still holding the knife, he rammed the butt of his fist with upward force into the nose of the guard, driving the bone deep into his brain. In the hundredth of a second before he died, the Israeli could probably have guessed how SAS Sergeant Fred O’Hara had felt a few months before in a Palestinian house in Hebron.

The situation was now critical. General Rashood and his three-man team were stranded in the middle of a highway, in Israel, with two members of the IDF laying dead on the highway, murdered in cold blood. But the night was dark, and silent, and his Hamas fighters were superbly trained for an eventuality that might compromise their mission.

Groups Two and Three were already on the highway, grabbing the two inert bodies and dragging them across into the fields beyond.

“Everyone cross as fast as possible and make for the river,” Ravi ordered. “Four men on each body. Drag or carry, whatever’s easiest. Keep going. Try to stay in fours, and be ready if anything else happens.”

They reached the bank of the river, which ran through a mile or so of swamps, and there they dumped the bodies out of sight in marshy wetland, deep in the bulrushes. No one missed a beat. Ray guessed correctly it would be a couple of weeks at least before anyone found anything. And even then the Israelis would never admit two of their guards had been murdered.

The men from Hamas moved away from the burial area swiftly
and silently, moving through the lush farmland at such a pace that they never even heard the Israeli Army jeeps roaring back and forth along the highway looking for two missing personnel.

Ravi picked up a path used mostly by visiting observers of nature and the rich bird population, which has found a home in these northern wetlands.

In fact, he had acquired a map from the Galilee International Bird Watching Society, after enrolling Shakira as a member. She thought he must have gone out of his mind, but he would not tell even her why he needed a detailed knowledge of the secret paths of the birders through this peaceful Israeli wildlife reserve.

She still did not know, but the thirty-five men who tracked him through the night of April 28/29 were astounded at his navigational expertise in the pitch dark.

By half past two, they were officially off the foothills of the Golan Heights and across the river. Before him Ray could pick out the towering crags of the Nimrod mountain, and he began to edge further north, over drier, grassy fields, thus ensuring that his team advanced at a right angle to the highway, moving onto the rock face and then climbing the less-steep slopes up to the hide under the right-hand side of the approach road.

Once on their final advance, they moved into the blessed cover of high woodland, and Ray led them almost straight through, breaking cover within 300 yards of the escarpment. He was obviously hurrying now, because it was almost three o’clock, three hours before the first pink strands of daylight began to illuminate the sky behind them. They had a climb, and then some meticulous camouflage work to complete. Never had the men from Hamas experienced anything like the degree of planning, organization, and execution their new Commanding Officer provided.

He led them on a zigzag path up the mountain, and they climbed easily, many of them grateful for the brutal three-month training regime he had imposed upon them, ruthlessly weeding out men who could not cope. Of the sixty volunteers who started out, eighteen had been axed from the program. As they were removed, the standards grew tougher, and men began to feel the pride of the elite warrior.

Two of those who were let go were overcome with that Arab sense of shame, which is unaccountable, and very dangerous. Both had threatened to cut the new General’s throat, but Ahmed Sabah had advised them this was probably a poor idea, if they had ambitions to go on breathing. One very tough young brave, age nineteen, humiliated beyond his own tolerance at being asked to leave the program, flew at the General with both fists, shouting, “WHO YOU THINK YOU ARE, YOU BASTARD!”

Ahmed Sabah was furious and complained bitterly all through the forty-eight-mile journey to the big hospital in Damascus where surgeons would reset the young man’s broken arm and collarbone. “I’ve killed men for a lot less,” growled Ravi. “Consider yourself lucky.”

Thirty-five men now climbed Mount Nimrod, convinced they were following some kind of Divine being sent to them by Allah himself. When they reached the safety of the hide, below the road at twenty after three, they each, to a man, thanked their God for their mission and their leader.

By six o’clock they were invisible, both from the road and anywhere else, protected by layers of brushwood. They were not to know, but this temporary new headquarters was almost a precise replica of another observation post constructed by Major Ray Kerman, five years previously, 3,500 miles away in West Africa, on the north bank of the Rokel Creek.

Thanks to the stash of water back at the RV Point, they all had full canteens, but no food because it was cumbersome and unnecessary. This was a short mission. They drank sparingly and waited. Some of them grabbed some sleep, between guard duties, and by half past ten they were listening for the sound of the decoy vehicle they knew would break down, right above them.

In fact, Ray Kerman saw it before they heard it, moving steadily along the highway way down the valley. He and Ahmed waited right below the chalk line they had made on the surface of the road, and when the old, dilapidated Ford Escort finally labored up toward them, they both watched it move into the very center of the road and then stop dead, bang on the line.

They now knew precisely where the supply truck would stop,
and they broke cover, positioning themselves for the kill, Ray on the far side of the road, Ahmed, hidden in a clump of bushes on the near side, above the men.

The twenty-eight-wheeler came groaning up the hill, obviously heavily laden, in a low gear. With a hiss of giant air brakes, it rumbled to a halt, its engine ticking over noisily in the precise spot Ray had planned. The driver hit the horn, but the two Arabs, their heads deep in the car’s engine, just waved and did not look up.

The doors to the truck’s cab opened simultaneously and the two Israeli soldiers climbed down, and walked slowly to the car, the last steps they would ever take. While one of them leaned over the engine, the other looked on. Which was where they died, instantly, each with a long combat knife through his back and deep into his heart.

At that moment the place came vividly to life. The Hamas warriors swarmed up onto the road from the hide below, and cranked down the steel rear flap. They pulled up the tarpaulin and clipped it high. Within moments they were hauling the big cardboard crates along the floor of the truck to the back end where hands waited to grab them and lift them to the side of the road, then over the edge of the cliff.

General Ravi and Ahmed took two much smaller cardboard boxes out of the trunk of the car and dumped them both in the cab of the truck. Then four more of the raiders dragged the two bodies off the road, pulled off their jackets and hats, and dumped them over the cliff.

The General shook hands with the two Arabs, who jumped back in the car, made a three-point turn, and roared back down the hill to organize their second blockade of the morning, the side-on breakdown which would prevent any other vehicle driving up to the jail.

The men worked fast, sliding, grabbing, and hauling the cargo out of the Israeli Army truck. The stuff was heavy and awkward, but there were a lot of hands and a lot of muscle. They worked in prearranged teams, four men in the truck, four on the ground dragging the cartons out, then handing over to a relay of twelve carriers, rushing the boxes to the side of the road, where twelve
more men had nothing else to do except shove the boxes the last six feet and over the edge. This was the kind of operation that could easily have turned into a Chinese fire drill, but it proceeded like clockwork, smart in its efficiency.

Six minutes later the truck was empty, the cargo gone, resting way below the road, in the bracken, along with its dead former driver and guard. One would have to get awfully close to the edge, and peer downward into a specific spot in the low mountain foliage, to see the light brown packing cases, full of eggs, meat, vegetables, and bread.

By now Ravi and Ahmed had changed into the Israeli uniforms and were in the cab with their carbines and two boxes. The rest of the team was piling into the back of the truck, hoods down, MP5s at the ready. It was a bit tight, but they all made it. Then they pulled down the tarpaulin, but left the rear gate down for a quick and easy exit.

Ravi released the brake, rammed the truck into first gear, revved the engine, and slowly began to climb the hill. He wound it up to 30 mph, and two minutes later they drove up to the gates of Nimrod Jail. Ravi hit the horn twice; short, sharp notes, nothing urgent.

Inside the walls, the duty guard casually looked up on the monitoring screen, saw the supply truck, and absentmindedly pushed the button to open the main entrance, returning immediately to his newspaper.

Ravi and Ahmed watched the great wooden doors swing inwardly. Then the truck edged forward, its engine roaring as it pushed into the inner courtyard. Ravi could see a total of six guards, two on one side of the yard, four on the other. Two of them waved cheerfully and Ravi waved back, noting the men were in a civilian prison uniform, not military, unlike the two patrols he had watched so often outside the walls of the building.