Barracuda 945 (13 page)

He drove the truck in. Almost. He placed it in such a position that the gates could never be closed until the truck was moved one way or the other. He held his breath and cut the engine, then hit the starter again, buying time, pretending he had stalled and knowing the first wave of his attack was in motion. Eight of his
men were already out of the truck, beyond sight of the guards, racing back through the gate, four swinging left, four right.

The first squad found what they wanted within thirty yards: the two-man Israeli patrol, smoking, one sitting on the old castle wall. One single burst from the MP5s cut them down. They never knew what hit them. Seconds later, another burst from the other side of the jail signaled another triumph, as Ravi’s team gunned down the other patrol, just two soldiers leaning on one of the heavy artillery pieces overlooking the vast flatlands below.

Over the raging of Ravi’s disconnected starter motor, the shots were scarcely heard behind the mighty walls in the courtyard. But the attack was under way, and a single hooded gunman kicked open the door to the interior gatehouse, blew away both men inside, and obliterated the electronic control panel with a fusillade of machine gun fire.

All six duty guards began running toward the gatehouse, and three of Ravi’s men, lying flat underneath the truck, shot them all dead in their tracks. Not one of the guards even knew where the shots had come from.

This had all taken less then one minute, and now the Hamas General was leading the way. He hurled one hand grenade clean through the window of the small building on his left, in which four off-duty guards were sleeping. The blast collapsed the entire structure. The shuddering din, in the enclosed yard, alerted the three-man staff in the prison office, from which a door was flung open.

Framed in the doorway was the Governor of the Prison. One of the marksman under the truck shot him dead, while Ravi, who could see through the window another officer on the phone, hurled in his second hand grenade, then hit the floor as the prison office was blown apart.

Ahmed, carrying one of the cardboard boxes from the cab of the truck, had made immediately for the main gates out of the courtyard into the prison block, and surprisingly found them open. He pushed them both inward, and his two bodyguards, especially trained by the General himself, rushed in, machine guns blazing, cutting down the two duty guards who were both
gazing out of the window, wondering what to do, and trying to dial numbers on their cell phones.

Up above, on the second-floor cell-block landing, another guard rushed to the steel rail and looked over, yelling in English, “
WHAT THE HELL’S GOING ON?
” This was a big mistake because Ahmed’s bodyguards looked upward and instantly shot him dead. Which left no active guards on duty in the prison. Nimrod, for the moment, belonged to General Ravi Rashood.

His men swarmed into their designated positions, using keys taken from the work belts of the dead men to open the gates to the lines of cells, in which were incarcerated the most dangerous terrorists in all of Israel. These were forty-seven ringleaders of bombing attacks conducted on behalf of Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Islamic Jihad over the past several years. Many of them were well-known Palestinian leaders, but this place contained men who would never be released onto the streets of Jerusalem or Tel Aviv or Hebron ever again.

The Israelis called them political prisoners. In a sense they were. But only in a sense. All of them had found their way into this specialist high-security jail because of diabolical acts of mass murder and killing. And the Israelis were confident the mountain-top site, surrounded by miles of low farmland, would make the place as secure as Alcatraz, the wickedly exposed countryside being as dangerous and unhelpful to a fugitive as the wide, swirling currents of San Francisco Bay.

So far they had been right. And they may still be. General Ravi knew he had time to free the prisoners. But the getaway needed to be as flawless as the attack itself.

He went to work issuing the contents of his cardboard box to yet two more men he had personally trained. He gave them each a high-powered, battery-operated electric drill, each one of which would drive two small round holes into the locking bars of the cell gates. The second box was opened on the floor and he began to take out the reels of detcord, handing each one to a separate man. This stuff was precious, absolutely beloved to both the SAS and the U.S. Navy SEALs. Although it is really just a fuse—light it and stand well back—it is unlike any other slow-burning
fuse used by Special Forces to detonate high explosives.

Detcord burns at
five miles per second.
Wrap a few turns around a good-sized oak tree and that stuff will blast the trunk in two. Its core is called
PETN
, a slim-line explosive that can be aimed with great accuracy. Detcord explodes so fast, you can hook it up to several targets, join the cord together, and knock down the lot, all at one time.

By now one of Ravi’s drillers had reached the top of the open staircase. The second drill was already working the lower level, and the scream of the motors was filling the air. Each driller hung a small precision piece of machined steel over the lock, and drilled into two preset holes, boring two more holes accurate to a hundredth of an inch, straight into the unseen steel locking bar behind the outside shield.

And right behind them raced the guys with the detcord, one on the reel and the other shouting in Arabic into the cell:…
Hamas! We’re getting you out
…
. Grab the cord and shove it back through the second hole
…
. Hurry!

No short instruction was ever carried out faster. As the length of cord was returned through the hole, an entirely new man moved up to grab it and drag it through, then wrap it around the bar twice more, and cut it to length with the pruning shears they’d used for the bracken. Another man was ready to tie the end hard to the next length coming from the next-door cell.

Ravi intended to blow the locks four at a time. And in strict relays his men drilled, threaded, dragged, wound, cut, and tied the lethal detcord, one task per man. The work proceeded with lightning speed as two of the General’s NCOs patrolled the cell blocks shouting clear instructions: “
When your detcord’s in place, retreat to the far wall of your cell. Lie flat facing the ground against the wall. If there’s a mattress, get it against your back, between you and the explosion on the door lock.
”

Six minutes after the first drillings had begun, General Rashood fired, and the explosions ripped into the first four locks, blasting them to pieces. Each of the doors swung open, and two men rushed into each cell to help the inmate to his feet. Thankfully,
they were not manacled and there were no injuries so far. It had taken approximately ninety seconds to liberate each man, but on the lower level, Ahmed was conducting a concurrent operation, and almost immediately there was another mighty blast and four more door swung open. Following the same procedures precisely, sixteen men were now engaged in walking the eight freed men to the muster point behind the truck in the courtyard.

Reassessing the time, Ravi now calculated he had eight men out in seven minutes. And he guessed they would get faster. That meant forty-two minutes maximum for all forty-seven. He had under a half hour’s work, but his mind was haunted by the face of the man he had seen on the telephone in the office.
Had he got a message away? And what had he told the Military HQ? Was there a direct hot line? If there was, it was trouble. If not, there was an excellent chance they’d have time to spare.

He had always known the quandary, the weak spot in the operation. Should he have gone in and knocked out the main electric supply to the jail? Or would this have started off an automatic alarm, which would have damn nearly blown the operation before they even made it inside the gates? He had estimated that was a risk too great to take, but now he did not know whether Israeli Paratroopers were on their way to Nimrod in helicopters.

He had already dispatched two lookouts to the high ramparts of the jail, to scan the skies. They’d been up there five minutes now and could see nothing in the clear blue of the morning. They had principally to look one way. Not east toward the Syrian border, not north to the Lebanon frontier, just south, toward the Israeli military.

The General climbed the gantry to the highest wall of the jail and dialed a number. The lookouts heard him snap, “HIGH ROLLERS GO!”

Back on the ground, fifteen minutes had passed and sixteen men were free. His 2 I/C (Explosives) was now detonating on the upper floor and Ahmed was in command of all explosions on the lower area. Two shuddering bangs in quick succession signaled eight more prisoners free. And still there was no word from the lookouts high above.

Ravi’s delight at the absolute precision of the detcord blasts was tempered only by his chilling awareness that the Israeli Paratroopers could arrive any second, in helicopter gunships. He could not have known that possibility had disappeared because the man in the office on the phone had only had time to shout, “
THE JAIL IS UNDER ATTA
…”

At the other end, the nineteen-year-old girl soldier who had received the call was replying, “
I did not quite catch that. Who is speaking, please? This is Israel Army HQ Northern Command.
”

The line was now dead, issuing an ominous dial tone and nothing else. The operator tried again, tapping the phone cradle up and down, saying, “Hello…hello…Is anyone there?”

But there was no further sound. The girl called her supervisor and reported she had received a “funny-sounding call.”

“I thought they said something about a jail underwater,” she said. “But the line went instantly dead.”

“What jail?”

“They never said, sir. But I was sure I heard ‘jail.’ And I thought I heard ‘underwater’ but it didn’t make sense…. The caller did not say another word.”

“Well, let’s give it another few minutes and see if anyone calls back. If not, it sounds like a wrong number. You think jail could have been gale, stale, rail, or some other word?”

“Well, I suppose it could have been. But I did think it was jail. If it had been gale, and underwater, it could have been a ship’s distress call on the wrong frequency. But I still think it was jail.”

“Okay. Let’s leave it for fifteen minutes and see if we hear anything else. By the way, did you announce who you were, you know, Northern Headquarters, etc.?”

“Yes, sir. I did. Right at the beginning. And after, the line went dead.”

“Okay. Good girl. Lemme know if they come through again.”

Meantime, back on the Nimrod ramparts, one of the lookouts spotted the first helicopter, clattering in from the north, flying low over the Lebanese border, straight toward the jail.

“HELO INCOMING, SIR!” roared the lookout. “HIGH SPEED…DEGREES THREE SIXTY…LOW ALTITUDE.”

General Rashood swung around and charged back outside through the main gates, past the group of truly incredulous political prisoners, who were mostly too stunned by events even to speak, even to express their thanks. They just stared, as the Hamas CO, holding a pair of Israeli binoculars he had just stolen, trained them on the northern skies.

There it was, one mighty Sikorsky CH-53D Sea Stallion hammering its way toward them, making 130 knots through clear skies. It looked military, it sure as hell had once been military. But right now it was painted bright white with blue trim, with a commercial insignia in Arabic presented boldly in still-wet paint,
STAY COOL WITH FROSTY
’
S
. On the fuselage, a contented polar bear licked a giant ice-cream cone.

Down on the lower rampart below the level of the jail, two of Ravi’s men were holding orange flags aloft, waving in the big assault chopper, which was originally designed to carry thirty-eight U.S. Marines fully loaded for combat.

But this morning it was empty, and the General bellowed his next order: “EVERYONE TO THE LOWER LEVEL…STRAIGHT DOWN THE HILL TO THE GUYS WITH THE FLAGS…THEN BOARD THE HELO…. GO! GO! GO!”

Two distant thumps told him that eight more prisoners were out, and he stood in the courtyard waving them on as they ran into the yard. “STRAIGHT ON,” he roared. “STRAIGHT ON…KEEP RUNNING…STRAIGHT DOWN TO THE HELICOPTER…ALL ABOARD…ALL ABOARD…WE’RE OUTTA HERE…RIGHT NOW…. GO! GO! GO!”

Ravi knew the Sikorsky, right now on loan from the Syrian Army, was built for soldiers carrying huge packs and weapons. These prisoners had nothing, and it would thus carry more, maybe fifty if necessary with its overload capacity. He had counted on a total of eighty-six and had instructed his loadmasters to board the first thirty-two prisoners, plus sixteen of his own men on the first journey.

By now the Sea Stallion was on the ground and the prisoners were pouring through its open doors. And right then, the lookout called again: “HELICOPTER INCOMING, LOW ALTITUDE…
DEGREES THREE SIXTY…HIGH SPEED…IDENTICAL…REPEAT, IDENTICAL….”

All forty-eight men had clambered aboard the helo, and it was already lifting off, shuddering upward almost vertical. Then it tilted, its engine howling, and rocketed east, thundering toward No Man’s Land and then the Syrian frontier.

The second Sea Stallion was now making its approach, and more and more prisoners were racing down the path toward the lower rampart. Two more bangs signaled eight more men were free. Thus far, General Ravi’s men had been inside the jail for three quarters of an hour, and there was just one more batch of prisoners to release.