The Gamma Option (35 page)

If that was his first mistake, his second was to dwell on it and to let his fear for the life of Hiroshi blot out his normal alertness. He sped heedlessly up the final steps onto the semicircular terrace that looked down over the remainder of the mountain. A sudden burst of automatic gunfire clanged off the steel support rail. His hand was stung and he was reaching for his Uzi when another spray sliced through the darkness and banged against the gun, ricocheting madly and stripping it from his grasp.

McCracken reeled sideways and grasped for the railing as the tracing fire searched for his shape in the blackness. His hands found the rail but, still numb, they slid off. His last measure of balance was lost and he pitched over the side of Masada to the dark abyss at the bottom.

Chapter 28

FEELING HIMSELF AIRBORNE,
Blaine had flailed desperately for a hold as he began to drop, but he brushed the steel rail with his fingers and that was all. Arms extended, he slid for a brief time straight down the rock-face side before his legs slowed his pace and then caught on a narrow ridge extending out from the mountain. He gathered his breath and checked his extremities. Miraculously nothing was broken. His hands and arms were scraped but functional. His thick pants had been torn and he could feel blood from the lacerations trickling down his legs. No broken bones, though, nothing to stop him from going on.

He inspected the area in the darkness around him. He had gone over the rail on the side of the northern terrace, leaving a straight drop of nearly a hundred yards if his perch gave way. His eyes probed above him in search of handholds in the rock face to take him back up. He could conceivably manage it, but the time it would take would be prohibitively long.

He then looked downward and spotted beneath him the set of steps winding from one terrace level to another. He could not hope to drop onto it, but he could ease himself down, a difficult and dangerous task but one requiring far less time. At once he began to lower his legs over the ridge that had saved him, shifting his weight to make him top-heavy as his hands replaced his legs on the ridge. He found a foothold firm enough for one foot but not two, and eased his bulk onto it as he began to dangle his left leg in search of another makeshift step. As he was feeling around blindly, his right foot slipped and he came close to falling again. Only his firm grip on the rocks prevented a disaster, and he hung there in space briefly to recover his bearings.

Somehow that flirt with disaster seemed to charge him. Inside, Blaine knew he was going to make it; he could almost see the rocky face with his legs and feet. He found a twisted rhythm, body never balanced the same way twice. When his feet at last grazed the safety rail bordering the steps, it seemed as if only a few seconds had passed instead of several minutes. He touched down, possessed by a strange calm that swallowed all the hurt and wounds.

But the trail of a mortar shell speeding through the air high over Masada stripped the calm away and Blaine threw himself into a rush back up the stairs.

From the base of the mountain, Major Shamsi contemplated the direction of the shells. He had seen battle often enough to know mortar fire when he saw it, but this shell had been fired apparently at nothing. The battle raging atop Masada already defied explanation. This just confused matters more.

Shamsi continued to gaze upward toward the sky, but it was his ears that snapped alert next, picking up a familiar pulsating sound approaching from the west. He turned to see the flashing lights of a quartet of helicopter gunships slicing toward Masada like buzzards over a corpse.

“It’s about time,” Shamsi said to himself. “About fucking time.”

Isser had issued the call-up five minutes into Isaac’s story, before he had even heard the tape containing the claims of Eisenstadt. They were airborne inside of twelve minutes and covered the distance to Masada in ten.

“Say something,” the head of Mossad said to the old man who was seated uneasily next to him in the rear seat of the cockpit.

“Like what?”

“Like telling me what fools we were to have joined forces with Rasin.”

“I hate repeating myself. Help McCracken catch Rasin on Masada and I might just forgive you.”

They were gazing at the Sikorskys hovering over Masada with floodlights blazing when a mortar shell flashed by the windshield, causing both men to shrink back instinctively with the certainty it was headed for them. Isser grabbed his handset.

“Ready drop displacement,” he told the commandos scattered through the four gunships. “Prepare to secure the area. We’re going down.”

Rasin could only follow the path of his fired shells briefly before angle and distance stole them from him. He had six more to fire, another three minutes work at most. In spite of the attack spearheaded by McCracken, he was on the verge of assuring the successful completion of the first stage of his plan.

But he felt no elation, for there was the second stage to consider. And to effect that he would have to make it safely off this rock to freedom. There would have to be a way. Fate had gotten him this far. Fate had blessed him first with his own resolve, then with Eisenstadt, and at last with the Gamma cannisters salvaged off the
Indianapolis.
Yes, all this was happening because it was meant to. His was a holy mission, a blessed one.

Masada had indeed been the perfect choice for the setting from which Israel would at last achieve true independence. And yet if he died here as the Zealots had, then all would be for naught. Rasin started to worry until once again the strange feeling of calm reassurance surged through him.

He wasn’t going to die. He wasn’t going to be captured.

He was going to finish the first stage of the plan here on Masada and then move on to the next to achieve his destiny. Fired by that thought, Rasin reached for the first of the final six shells.

Three more shells had been fired before McCracken reached the plain of Masada once more. He stumbled briefly, suddenly dizzy, and had to lean against one of the ancient walls to steady himself. He still had a grenade, an Uzi he was able to pick up on the way, and a pistol. Enough. Plenty. But there was Hiroshi to consider as well, wounded somewhere and in need of help.

“Come in, Hiroshi. Sorry it took so long. Where are you? … Do you read me, Hiroshi? Come in.”

There was no response, and another mortar blast pierced the air as the helicopter gunships sprinted through the air above him. If Hiroshi’s plan to jam the Israeli soldiers’ communications had failed, reinforcements would have reached here significantly sooner, which meant the gunships had come courtesy of Isaac’s visit to the Mossad. But that did not insure the occupants of the choppers would be friendly. Blaine eased himself forward and waited for the next mortar shell to pin down where they were being fired from, his key to finding Rasin.

When it came, he was ready. He sprinted forward, with the last of the battle between Hiroshi’s warriors and Rasin’s soldiers still raging. The fact that gunfire sounded only weakly and sporadically was evidence that the tide of the battle had turned toward the samurai. All that remained was for McCracken to do his part.

He sped between the last wall of the storehouses and the higher one of a courtyard housing public toilet facilities. From there he darted past the quarry and into the open where the next mortar blast froze him in his tracks.

The water cistern! It was coming from the water cistern!

Blaine had started forward again when the rocks at his feet were kicked up by a burst from a machine gun. He hit the ground hard and rolled, bullets tracing him as he fired token return volleys in a wide spray. He didn’t have the gunman pinned down and was starting to plan how to accomplish that when the figure of Johnny Wareagle rushed into the open, firing toward the area of a water station forty yards to the left.

“Go, Blainey! I’ll keep him occupied!”

McCracken didn’t argue, just rose and sped off again with Johnny’s rifle continuing to spit fire. When the hammer clicked on an empty cylinder, he discarded the rifle and drew the massive killing knife from the sheath on his belt. He stood there holding it menacingly high so the gunman would know that rifle or not, he wasn’t giving an inch. The arriving gunships dipped lower, kicking up huge clouds of ancient dust and rocks that Wareagle had to squint his eyes to see through.

“
This is the Israeli army!”
a voice hailed over a PA from within one of the choppers. “
Throw down your weapons and stand with your hands in the air.
”

The warning completed, doors opened on all four of the helicopters to allow dozens of slick ropes to drop out and Israeli commandos to slide down toward ground level with guns at the ready. But by now their presence was superfluous. Those remaining to acknowledge them were a dozen of Hiroshi’s warriors who had survived and their twenty prisoners who were being herded forward even then. Wareagle heard a rustle and turned back toward the water station.

He saw the huge figure in black leather quite clearly, saw her as she stooped to lift up and support the gunman grazed by one of Johnny’s bullets. With the weight of the body taxing it, the figure in black could do nothing but gaze at the huge Indian with the large knife extending by his side.

Gaze and smile.

Then in the next instant the light from the Sikorskys wavered as they shifted to free landing space for the gunships, and by the time the area was lit again the two figures had disappeared.

Yosef Rasin had heard the choppers and the warning that had come from one of them and knew his stand on Masada was finished. The army, and thus the government, must have turned against him. He had been double-crossed!

But what had changed the government’s mind? What had turned their reluctant sanction of his plan into sudden disavowal? McCracken again no doubt, and the old men who had turned out to be real thorns in his side, too. And yet they of all people should have supported what he was trying to do. Traitors! They were all traitors! He alone could set Israel on the proper course now. One more shell to fire and then he would flee the cistern and find a way off this rock before the army could find him.

Rasin reached out and dropped the final shell down the barrel.

The shell blasted outward when Blaine was ten yards from the start of the steps that led down into the water cistern. Holding the Uzi tight before him, he glided the rest of the way, not wanting to alert Rasin to his presence.

“Hold it right there!”

The call sounded from his rear and McCracken knew instantly it had come from an Israeli soldier. The sudden grinding sound of additional footsteps stopping against the rock surface told him the speaker had been joined by two others. He turned slowly, hands and Uzi in the air.

“Where’s your commander?”

“Drop your weapon!”

“Call your commander here now. Is it Isser? Call Isser!”

“Drop your—”

The speaker’s command was cut off when the figure of Johnny Wareagle crashed into him, spreading his arms to take down the two others as well. Blaine didn’t wait to see the rest. He rushed the final stretch to the entrance of the water cistern and was halfway down the stairs in the pitch blackness when he heard Rasin’s voice.

“I’ve been expecting you.”

McCracken stopped, searched for the voice’s point of origin.

“Rasin?”

“You shouldn’t have come down here, but since you have why not come all the way down?”

McCracken stopped at the bottom step. The pungent scent of mortar fire singed his nostrils. There was something wrong here, wrong with the scenario, wrong with where Rasin’s voice was coming from.

“I can’t see you.”

“You’d like to, wouldn’t you? You think you’ve won.”

“Plenty of people died here tonight. Nobody wins.”

“Israel can, now that I’ve released my vaccine. Israel can win at last.”

“Only if hundreds of millions more die. That doesn’t count.”

“You’ve spoken to Eisenstadt.”

“Give yourself up.”

“Sorry.”

McCracken finally pinned Rasin down to the far wall directly opposite him. But his voice had a strange echo, as if he were speaking down from a point
on
the wall.

Blaine realized what was happening in time to start his sprint back up the steep stone steps. Maybe Rasin didn’t hear or see him. Maybe he just had to say one last thing.

“Good-bye, Blaine McCracken.”

The explosion came as he cleared the final step and lunged headlong through the air to carry himself as far as he could from the cistern. The stairs crumbled instantly and the entire ancient structure trembled, as fragments of the walls cracked and splintered in the last instant before the cistern collapsed upon itself, leaving Blaine to gaze back at the rubble.

“He climbed out, I’m telling you,” Blaine insisted to Isser while Isaac looked on. “He must have had a rope ladder or something extended from one of the portals.”

“He hasn’t left this rock, that’s for sure. We’ll find him.”

“I want him when you do,” Blaine said bitterly, thinking of the news Wareagle had brought him about Hiroshi. “There’s a score to settle now.”

“We’ll settle it later.”

McCracken looked up with frigid eyes. “Just find him, Isser. I figure you might be able to handle that much. But you’ve got to take him alive. Otherwise we don’t find out where he stashed the cannisters of Gamma gas and we might be facing this whole scenario again real soon.”

“I’d rather not think about that.”

“You’d better.”

Blaine had barely finished the warning when one of the gunships fired up its engine, propeller and rotor blades springing to life.

“I didn’t authorize anyone to leave,” Isser said in puzzlement. “What the hell is …”

McCracken was already running, charging toward the chopper which was nearly ready for takeoff. He knew in that instant the huge woman in black leather would be at the controls, knew she would have disabled the other gunships to prevent pursuit as well.

A group of soldiers reached the readying chopper ahead of him and were blasted back by machine-gun fire coming from just inside the door. Blaine approached on an angle that kept him from the gunman’s sight, and was almost there when the chopper lifted off suddenly. At the last moment he leaped to grab hold of the chopper’s landing pod as it rose, but his hand slipped off the steel. He plunged back down to the dust of Masada with the gunship shrinking into the blackness of the night.