Pandora's Grave (32 page)

His mind barely registered the man standing there among the rocks before the pistol in the man’s hand exploded in fire…

Harun lowered the Makarov semiautomatic and walked forward, to where the body of the intruder lay crumpled against the mountainside. The mask of the biosuit was half-off and he could clearly see the man’s face. He was a Kurd.

And he was still living. As Harun moved closer, the intruder turned his head and spat in contempt, a filthy stream of phlegm and blood.

Harun raised his pistol and shot the man once more, between the eyes.

1:57 A.M. Local Time

The marina

Eilat, Israel

The marina at night was not a quiet place, light splashing across the water from a thousand boats filled with tourists.

Everyone seemed to be playing their own brand of music, and the ocean itself seemed to move to the discordant beat.

Chaim Berkowitz walked along the pier, a deliberately insolent swagger to his step as he moved in and out of the crowd of tourists. An FN Five-SeveN pistol was tucked into his waistband, covered by the loose Hawaiian shirt he wore. The suitcase in his left hand held a field-stripped Remington M24 sniper rifle.

A few moments later, the GPS unit in his cellphone beeped and he paused, looking left and right. Ahead of him, in the alcove of a boathouse, was where he would set up his hide.

Time to move…

3:57 A.M. Tehran Time

Alborz Mountains

Iran

Thomas didn’t need to look back. The brief bursts of gunfire and abrupt silence following immediately thereafter told him the whole story.

His friend was dead.

He moved more quickly now, his bio-suit discarded in the swift-flowing mountain stream a hundred meters back, a crude procedure Langley had recommended for cleansing himself of the toxin. Heavy as his clothes now were with water, he could move freely.

Voices sounded ahead of him, a body of Kurdish fighters moving down the mountain. Another moment and Azad Badir appeared, at the head of a score of rebels. At the sight of Thomas he held up a hand to halt his men.

“Did you retrieve the samples?” the guerrilla leader asked, seeming only then to realize that Thomas was alone.

Estere appeared behind him, her face pale as she stared into his eyes.

Thomas saw her lips form the question, and in that instant it felt as though his heart would break.

“He’s gone,” he whispered, unable to say more.

“No,” she responded, shooting him a look of fragile defiance as she shook her head. She placed a hand against the trunk of a nearby tree to steady herself. “No.”

Badir stepped forward, placing a hand on his granddaughter’s shoulder. “Allah has appointed unto us a time for mourning,” he began, his own voice trembling with emotion, “but it is not now. Mr. Patterson, I trust that you were successful in your mission?”

Thomas nodded, a lump forming in his throat. “I was.”

The Kurd spoke sharply in his native tongue and the guerrillas began to scatter, taking up defensive positions farther down the mountain. In a few moments, it was only the three of them standing there by the tree.

“The time has come for us to part,” Badir announced, turning back to Thomas.

Thomas nodded in reply, but the old man wasn’t done.

“My granddaughter will guide you to the border,” he continued. “In a cave twelve kilometers to the west you will find two horses. They are young and strong, and should make the journey easily.”

“I do not know how I could repay this kindness,” Thomas responded formally.

“I do,” was Badir’s blunt reply. “I want you to escort Estere across the border to Qandil Mount. Our people are there and she can find safety in their ranks.”

“But what about you?” Estere exclaimed, seizing hold of the old man’s arm, anger not unmixed with grief in her voice.

A burst of rifle fire from down the mountainside served as the answer to her question. Badir unslung the Kalishnikov from his shoulder, extending the stock with a single, purposeful motion.

“I am a soldier!” she hissed, fighting back tears as he turned away from her. “My place is here!”

The old shepherd cast a final look back over his shoulder. “If you are to be counted a soldier, you must follow the orders you have been given. Take our friend to the Qandil. Do not return.”

5:00 A.M.

Isfahan, Iran

Hossein was standing on the steps of the mosque when his cellphone went off. He pulled it from his pocket and glanced at the screen before answering. It was the Supreme Leader.

“Good morning.”

“I don’t think so,” came the reply, sending a chill down the major’s spine. “It’s begun…”

7:13 A.M. Local Time

Eilat, Israel

The job had taken all night, but it was done at last. Farouk leaned forward, placing his laptop on the hood of the explosives-filled Jeep Grand Cherokee.

“You will drive here along the road,” he instructed, tracing an imaginary line across the on-screen map. “Then turn into the Hotels Zone. Park here—approximately two hundred meters from the Crowne Plaza Hotel. You will await my call to close in on your target, which will be approximately—here.”

A young jihadist from the Eilat cell nodded, his face pale with excitement. Farouk turned away to hide a smile of contempt.

It would be the young man’s first and last mission. He had been chosen for a reason. Simply put, he had not shown enough skill to justify continuing his training. So, he was expendable.

The Hezbollah leader fingered the cellphone in the pocket of his jeans. The bomb was wired for remote detonation should the boy’s nerve fail at the last moment of the suicide mission, as it often did.

Sad, he mused, that devotion to Allah should waver in the face of death. Had they not read the sacred verses of the Quran?

7:59 A.M.

The Crowne Plaza Hotel

Eilat, Israel

“I think I’ve got it here.”

“What is it, Sarah?” Gideon asked, still focused on the Uzi submachine gun he was loading.

“I’ve got the name,” the young woman replied, looking up from her laptop.“Nichols is registered here at the Crowne Plaza under the name Joseph Isaac. Fifth floor, room 347.”

Laner laid the gun on the bed and crossed the hotel room to stand behind her, his hand resting easily on her shoulder. “Good work—how hard was he to find?”

“Not hard,” she responded, smiling up at him as she touched his fingers lightly. “The hotel system was an easy job—a relatively simple firewall backed by Blowfish encryption. Once in, they scan the photo IDs provided at the desk and store them on the intranet. It was just a matter of cross-referencing the photos with our database and Nichols came up. Apparently, he’s a low-level diplomat with the U.S. State Department, because he’s traveling under a diplomatic passport.”

Gideon chuckled, his hand moving to stroke her mane of dark hair. “Not the last time I checked.”

He walked back across the room and replaced the Uzi in its specially-designed briefcase, casting an affectionate glance back at the young woman as she returned to her work.

In addition to being the resident tech expert, Sarah Halevy was a
bat leveyha
, an escort agent whose task on this particular assignment consisted of posing as his spouse.

They had worked together before, and although official Mossad regulations prohibited romantic entanglements between personnel, in reality it prevented very little. Gideon cast a glance around the room where they had spent the night and smiled with the realization. They had moved beyond acting a long time ago.

“Do we have confirmation from Chaim and Yossi?” he asked.

“Yes,” Sarah replied without looking up. “They are in position as of 0300 hours. Currently—Eiland has the gun.”

10:08 A.M. Tehran Time

The Alborz Mountains

Iran

“The cave is just ahead.” Thomas’s head came up at the sound of her voice—the first words she had spoken since they had left the band of
peshmerga
. They had walked the twelve kilometers in dark, brooding silence, silence broken only by the rattle of small-arms fire from the east, punctuated by the occasional scream of a rocket.

Turning a corner in the mountain path, he saw the cave, there in the side of a cliff and nearly invisible to the casual eye, obscured by a carefully planted screen of pistachio trees.

“A mountain shepherd tends to the needs of the animals,” Estere explained, pushing her way through the brush covering the entrance. “The border peoples are forbidden to own horses, but the order is disregarded more often than not, particularly by those friendly to our cause.”

He ducked his head to enter the cave behind her, his eyes slowly adjusting to the dim light. There, in rough-hewn stalls cut into the side of the mountain, were stabled two large horses, a black and a dappled grey. Slinging her rifle over her shoulder, Estere walked into the stalls and brought out the mounts, one by one.

“This is Kejal, the gazelle,” she announced, handing the reins of the grey to Thomas. He looked up at the massive flank of the horse and grimaced, suddenly feeling rather foolish.

He had just begun to place a foot in the stirrups when her voice arrested him. “No, no. Kejal is my horse. You will ride Bahoz, the black.”

“Oh,” he responded, flushing in spite of himself. She reappeared in a moment leading a black stallion that seemed even larger than the grey, if that were possible.

She took the reins of Kejal from his hand and swung herself into the saddle with the grace of a bird.

Oh well, here goes
, Thomas thought, placing one foot in the stirrup in an attempt to swing himself up.

Something went wrong—he would never quite figure out what—but he ended up on the dirt floor of the cave, rolling over in a crude approximation of the parachute landing fall as Bahoz shied away in fear, a loud whinny of protest issuing from the stallion’s mouth.

“What is going on?” cried Estere, grasping the reins of Bahoz in one hand while trying to calm her own mount.

Thomas picked himself up and stared at her, a hot flush of embarrassment once again spreading across his face. “I—I’ve never ridden a horse before,” he responded.

“You haven’t?” Her tones were filled with disbelief.

He shook his head with a wry grin. “Never actually been this close to a horse before, let alone ridden one.”

She muttered something in Kurdish under her breath—what, he didn’t know, but he was sure it wasn’t complimentary.

“Let me dismount,” she said after a long moment, “and I’ll show you. And here—give me your gun, we don’t need that going off.”

10:39 A.M. Local Time

The Eilat Marina

Israel

“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…”