The Gamma Option (8 page)

“Our way of life is facing destruction. Israel’s, too. I hate the militants as much as you do. I’m going to kill Hassani. I want him stopped as much as I want Rasin stopped. This is our only chance to beat down what both of them represent forever.”

“Only to do so you have to employ their methods, so you become no better than they are.” Blaine paused and looked at her with eyes of ice. “Tell me how civilized you are, but first tell me what will happen if I get up from this table and walk away.”

Evira hesitated only slightly. “Your son will die.”

Chapter 7

COLONEL BEN-NESER STOOD
nervously in the open warehouse across from the gift shop. Shielded by porcelain fixtures, he gazed across the street, clenching and unclenching his remaining hand into a fist. Evira was barely thirty yards away from him. A quick dash across the street and he could take her himself. Screw the complications and get it over with.

Still, the American Evira was meeting with provided an unexpected complication. Bad enough the colonel should be about to initiate a wholly unsanctioned operation. But if an American, innocent or otherwise, should perish as a result the political fallout might be sufficient to cost Ben-Neser his career.

What little remained of it, that is. He had been born to be a soldier, not a bureaucrat. He came from a tradition of warriors and had proved himself worthy of that legacy as an infantryman in the Six-Day War of ’67. Six years later the Yom Kippur engagement had seen him perform heroically in a leadership capacity until his tenure was ended prematurely. He was rounding up strays when a boy lunged out and tossed a grenade. While the attention of his men remained fixed on the escaping boy, Ben-Neser had focused on the grenade. Calculating instantly that the only hope his squad had of survival lay in his tossing it away from them, he had managed to lift and start to hurl the grenade when it detonated. The colonel’s men were saved, but his arm was reduced to sinews sprouting from the shoulder joint.

The rehabilitation period had been long, and Ben-Neser resisted the use of prostheses and learned to live with a single arm. The best therapy was determination, and he focused all he had into becoming the best marksman in Israel. He learned how to steady the rifle with a single arm and could reload as quickly as any man with two. A decade’s assignments had culminated in a single mistake—a civilian lunging in front of a bullet meant for a much wanted terrorist—and he was reassigned to Mossad as a field control officer, an overseer of other people’s work. With each report, he found himself contemplating not how the operation had been done, but how he would have done it himself. The frustration mounted.

It spilled over when the first hard reports on Evira began to cross his desk. He maneuvered to get himself appointed as head of the team gathering intelligence on her and then became obsessed with putting an end to her shadowy and elusive movements within Israel. In these past two years he had considered nothing else, and when at last a report linked her to a booth in the Jaffa Market, Ben-Neser elected to hold on to the memo and deal with it himself. The commandos with him knew no better. He was their control, after all, and they saw no reason to doubt this sudden change in plans.

“Come in, Colonel,” a voice squawked over his walkie-talkie.

“I read you, Ari.”

“All men are in position. Ready to move on your signal.”

Ben-Neser reviewed for himself the final deployments he had decided on once Evira’s position was confirmed. Besides himself and Ari, he had a detachment of six commandos at his disposal. Of these, two had been placed upon the flat roof of the long angular building that housed Ben-Neser’s location along with a dozen other sidewalk shops. One had been stationed around the corner from the target shop on the chance Evira might manage to flee in that direction. The remaining three were all planted among the locals: one seated before a blanket crammed with cheap watches, a second in apron selling food from a heated pushcart, and a third looking like an eager patron who had yet to purchase a thing.

The phantom pain scratched at Ben-Neser again. Had he already passed the point of no return, or was there still time to abort? No matter the results here today, he knew the ramifications so far as his future was concerned. But he was approaching the end of his run anyway and desperately wanted to take something with him, something beyond the anonymity of the kills he had made over the decade he had served as a marksman.

Ben-Neser turned his walkie-talkie to the channel that connected him with his commandos. “We move on my signal. Get ready. No shooting unless absolutely necessary. Clear? I want her taken alive. That’s the first priority.” He gazed across the street one last time. With the itch of a no-longer-existent arm driving him to shudders, Ben-Neser spoke again. “Thirty seconds, people. On my mark …”

“You don’t have a choice and neither do I,” Evira was saying.

McCracken glared at her from across the table. “Do you really expect to be able to reach Hassani? You’re talking about a man who is almost never seen and about whom virtually nothing is known.”

“Some is known. Enough. The underground movement in Tehran is small but well focused. They will help me.”

“Killing him will almost certainly mean your own death.”

She returned his emotionless stare. “Would you not do the same thing if in my position?”

“I’m still not quite clear on what that position is.”

“I’m an Arab and so is Hassani. Is that it?”

“Not at all.”

“It is in enough ways, Blaine McCracken, and you know it. Yes, I am an Arab, and no one wants to see a Palestinian homeland more than me. I’ve worked most of my life toward that end.” Her voice thickened. “When the soldiers came and—Well, that doesn’t matter now. Hassani speaks to my people in a language of death and violence. He preaches, lives it. Accept that dogma and even with a homeland there can never be peace. Palestinians must get what they deserve, but men like Hassani will never give it to us. To them, we’re just tools for them to use for their own ends.”

“Except there’s also Yosef Rasin,” McCracken told her. “Hassani can kill your dream from one side, Rasin from the other. A pair of fanatics from opposite directions aiming toward the same goal.”

“You will find him. You will stop him.”

Blaine almost laughed. “You overestimate me.”

“No,” Evira retorted immediately. “I have followed your career, studied it. You are driven by ideals and nothing stops you when they are at stake. I … emulate that. I have since the beginning. I obtained all your files. I’ve read everything Israeli and Egyptian intelligence has to say about you.”

“Lies and exaggerations mostly.”

“For the sake of your son, let’s hope not.”

When his count had reached five, Colonel Ben-Neser saw a pair of jeeps crowded with Israeli soldiers pull over to the side of Oley Tsiyon where the flea market splintered to the left down an alley.

“Hold your positions!” he ordered his men. Since this mission was not logged, the area had not been sealed. The army had no idea what was going on. “Ari, come in,” he barked into his walkie-talkie.

“I read you, sir.”

“Do you see them?”

“Routine patrol.”

“It wasn’t scheduled, damn it! I checked the logs.”

“They’re here, Commander. Our only choice is to abort.”

“No! We can’t. We’ll lose Evira if we do, maybe forever!”

“What then?”

Ben-Neser watched the soldiers climbing from their jeeps and stretching leisurely as they adjusted their automatic rifles to be within easy reach if needed.

“Approach them,” the colonel ordered Ari. “Approach them and identify yourself. Do it quietly. Don’t let anyone else realize what is going on. Tell them to get the fuck out.”

“They’re soldiers. They might question.”

“Not Mossad, they won’t question Mossad.” Ben-Neser swung his binoculars quickly back toward the the gift shop. “Go to them, Ari. Do as I say.”

Seconds later, Ari’s shape appeared from a centrally placed jewelry shop. He made his way down the crowded sidewalk in the direction of the soldiers who had only just begun to move away from their jeeps. He approached the officer wearing the beret of the team leader. Ari was all smiles, like a tourist might be, his shirt untucked, his walk loose-limbed. Ben-Neser could see they were a yard apart, Ari identifying himself and the officer seeming to heed him. A hand raised by the bereted leader into the air held up the progress of his team into the square.

That’s it, damn it, that’s it!

The bereted officer started to turn. Ben-Neser had actually relaxed, when the officer swung round and leveled into a combat stance with rifle angling straight for Ari. The brief reports sounded like hammers striking nails and Ari’s body was tossed backward, blood spouting from the punctures in his chest.

“My God,” was all Ben-Neser could mutter. In his hand he felt the sweat-soaked plastic of his walkie-talkie. Somewhere in his mind he recorded the sight of the men who could not have been soldiers at all fanning out through the crowded square that was suddenly bursting with panic. In that instant he forgot totally about Evira, thought only of Ari, a friend and soldier, who lay dead because of him and his damned obsession.

The walkie-talkie was at his lips now. He heard himself speaking into it, forming the words in the last instant before they emerged.

“They’re not soldiers! Take them!” he ordered.

“Shots!” Blaine shouted, lunging from his chair.

“Wait!” Evira responded, hand feeling for one of the pistols in a drawer that had been open through the course of their conversation. “Take this.”

She was by his side when they re-entered the store, pressing a gun into his hand. Panicked bystanders rushed by outside, colliding with displays that had been set up on the sidewalk. Blaine and Evira stayed pinned behind the doorway and peered out. Beyond, all was chaos. A small group of gunmen dressed as merchants were firing upon two jeeploads of uniformed soldiers. The soldiers’ bullets cut indiscriminate lines through the crowd, their fire slowed only when sniper bullets rained on them from the roof of the building across the street.

“Yours?” Blaine asked.

“No! I don’t know who they are! I swear it! Let’s get out of here!”

Pistols in hand they ducked out the doorway to be swept away by the crowd rushing from the area.

Colonel Ben-Neser wasn’t thinking anymore, simply watching and reacting. He had drawn his pistol and rushed from the cover of the warehouse onto the sidewalk. He had seen at least three of the enemy’s number fall to the fire of his riflemen on the roof. But the fake soldiers had retreated behind the cover of their jeeps and were concentrating their fire upward in an incessant hail. After Ari, he had watched his aproned commando fall to a second barrage that commenced as soon as Ben-Neser had given the order to move in. He felt himself struck each time a bullet found one of his men. This was his fault, damn it,
his
fault!

Above him, one of the marksmen found a clear bead on another of the soldiers, but the others honed savagely in on his position and blasted away. The man was pitched backward while the second marksman seized what he thought would be the advantage and showed himself long enough to aim. But the soldiers’ fire never let up. Bullets punched into the second man and sent his body headlong from the roof on to the street a dozen yards in front of Ben-Neser.

“Bastards,” he moaned.

The surge of the crowd reached him then and Ben-Neser was tossed about like a puppet in their midst. A hard smack to his arm tore the pistol from his grip and he lowered himself to feel for it amidst the sea of thrashing feet.

The drop was what saved his life.

The fake soldiers had turned to spray the crowd. The butchers! Of course, with the marksmen neutralized the only shots aimed their way were coming from figures disguised within the crowd. So they had taken the most obvious, and most barbaric, action. They must have come to protect Evira, he theorized with a guilty chill. And he had handed his team to them on a silver platter by having Ari approach.

Bodies toppled over him while more of the panicked crowd struggled to flee. Two of his remaining men posted in the square, meanwhile, saw the direction the fake soldiers’ firings were taking. To save whatever lives they could, they broke off from the crowd and rushed into the center of the square to draw the bullets to themselves.

Ben-Neser saw this just as he recovered his pistol and pushed himself on his elbows over a pair of fallen tourists, both near death. He fired a full clip in the time it took the imposters to cut down these two men and a third who had circled in from around the corner, leaving him as the last.

“You fuckers!” Ben-Neser screamed as he lurched to his feet with a fresh clip snapped home. He was charging now, charging through the remnants of the crowd with pistol burning in his hand.

He felt the hot gush of pain to his armless shoulder, and for that instant he was back in the West Bank the day he had lost the limb. The phantom itching was replaced by the same fiery agony he had felt when the grenade blew into him, and once again he was melting into nothingness, this time with nothing to pull him out.

Evira and Blaine’s original aim had been to swing left outside the shop and rush away amidst the chaos. But their turn had brought them almost face-to-face with a pistol-wielding man shoving his way toward them.

“Mossad!” Evira screamed, and instantly they swung around to head toward the center of the chaos that had overrun the market.

The flow of panic was moving in all directions and they let themselves be swept up in it. The street was cluttered with wares abandoned by peddlers to the fate of the crowd, some of whom still managed to stoop to retrieve attractive items on their way. Maneuverability was cut further by the dozens of cars immobilized on the street. Windows and windshields had been punctured by bullets and most of the drivers huddled beneath their dashboards for dear life.

When the soldiers turned their fire suddenly and inexplicably into the crowd, Blaine and Evira dove to the sidewalk together.