Massive Attack (A Guy Niava Thriller Book 1)

by Dana Arama

  I looked at the screen in front of me. All these hours, Yassin had remained on the floor, holding his young son. As the hours went by, his human parcel had seemed to grow heavier, yet Yassin would not leave. From time to time the doctor leaned over to check the child’s pulse and then returned to his seat next to the couch.

  “That’s dedication,” I whispered, as if embarrassed to assign the terrorist in front of me the human qualities belonging to a typical compassionate, doting parent.

  “I think he is still alive but is showing signs that the disease is taking its toll,” Linda noted. “Look at his chest, it’s barely moving when he breathes.”

  “Let’s go back and look at the plan,” said the agent commanding the break-in team. “Murat Lenika and the fighter next to the window will be shot down by the team breaking in through the main entrance. I want to clarify that I mean the guy standing by the window with the weapon. He must be shot.” Everyone listened raptly. “Curt will rappel down the side of the building, and enter the side room through the west window. Dan will rappel down next and will enter through the north window. If the terrorist with the hand grenades returns to his position, he will be in that room. In that case, Dan will shoot and neutralize him. Both of you must make sure that there are no more terrorists, or worse, more unknown hostages. That is the room we couldn’t cover with the cameras. If, by any chance, Jonathan Niava is in the suite, then he will most likely be in that room. Make sure all hostages remain unharmed.

  “What is our main problem?” I wanted to make sure that they all understood any big obstacles of our upcoming mission.

  “Yassin is hostile. He must be kept alive. I, as the commanding officer, will enter through the main door and will take my shot directly at Yassin, who will be sitting opposite the door. I have one chance to hit him with the anesthetic dart… It will be a difficult shot, especially taking into consideration that he is holding his son and we have no idea if he is wearing a bullet-proof vest or an explosive.”

  “What is the danger?”

  “That the dart will hit the child or that the child dies before we have a chance to wake him up or inject him with the Mossad’s antidote.”

  “Who will break into the wife’s room?”

  “I will go in with night-vision,” Jack said. “That room is as dark as hell. I need to make sure not to get tangled up in the curtain. This is the only room whose curtains have been shut the whole time.”

  “What’s next?”

  “After we make sure the rooms are clear and we remove Yassin for questioning, our doctor will come in with the Mossad’s antidote and inject the wife and son. We will have to evacuate them both to a government-isolated facility.”

  “Do we have enough of the antidote?” someone asked. I wondered if he’d been part of the meeting where the US government told Israel that they needed to fix their poisoning affair.

  “We have enough for everyone, including all those in this room. All those we know of and also those whom we have not anticipated. Make sure the doctor has three doses on him. Jonathan may be in there,” I said, looking at Linda to indicate that she was in charge of making sure the doctor had what he needed.

  I looked at all of them. They had done everything right. They’d checked their personal gear to make sure everything was intact, looked over the plan of the suite they were about to break into, memorized the kidnapped doctor’s face, and still, despite all this, I wasn’t calm. I should have been more relaxed. They were the most experienced agents we had. There was no reason that we couldn’t break-in successfully, neutralize the threat, and save the hostages. And yet I wasn’t completely relaxed. Did they understand the priority of this break-in? That the lives of thousands of people about to embark on those planes were more important than Yassin’s life? My anxiety prompted me to ask them, just before they made their way out of the room, to switch off all their communication and recording devices. I said, “The orders from above were to take out Yassin and then we were asked not to touch him and then to take him out again…” I took a deep breath and added, “The orders I am giving you now are going to determine your plan of action.” I looked into the eyes of each and every member of the team. “I believe the man to be guilty. He planned a series of devastating terror attacks and because of that, and since he is the only one who can stop these horrendous acts, we need him alive. So, despite the fact that the son of a bitch deserves to die, don’t kill him. Please remember that they may have explosives tied to themselves, so don’t let him commit suicide either.”

  My parting speech being finished, I let them walk out the door, then breathed out what I thought was a sigh of relief. But, in fact, as soon as they were out of my sight and on their way to the attacking position, my lungs were screaming for air.

  ***

  If the break-in went off without a hitch, I would be very surprised. The takeover was not a miracle but an intricate mission, which required all the agents to respond almost instantaneously as the situation evolved. This break-in was composed of many dynamic variables. I waited impatiently by the screen, and the tension grew and grew. My fingers drummed in a uniform rhythm on the table, my foot had a life of its own and without any connection to the rest of the body, it refused to stop tapping. When I heard in the earpiece the familiar, ‘Three, two, one, go!’ I jumped up from my seat. I knew that all the forces broke into the suite simultaneously, from different angles, because surprise is the most important element in a forced entry

  All eyes of those who were in the makeshift operations room were glued to the screens. The coordinator Major Key had left behind said, “In the left dark room, there is a problem. The explosives didn’t work.” I felt the tension in his voice, he announced: “I repeat, there is a problem in the left room, the explosives didn’t go off.”

  A second before we heard the explosion, we saw the door of the main entrance being torn off its hinges. As soon as there was an opening, a spread of fighters swarmed the area, just like in the instructional tapes I’d watched at the Academy a decade ago. The professional terrorist, who had stood by Yassin the whole time we’d surveilled the suite, turned sharply towards the torn door and took aim with his weapon. He managed to shoot at the agents a fraction of a second before the agent on the right shot two very precise, silenced shots. The professional terrorist’s bullet hit the ceiling. We heard the burst of gunfire and the metallic sound of the shells hitting the marble floor. We received the message saying ‘Clear’, and our eyes jumped to the left. The agent on the left fired at the position where Murat Lenika had been standing a moment before, taking care not to hit the computer screens, but Murat had disappeared.

  The commanding agent, standing in the center of the room, knelt down and shot Yassin with the anesthetic. Just as we’d feared, Yassin constituted a small target because he was sitting on the floor and also because of the boy in his arms. Despite the difficulty, we heard the call of ‘Okay, clear’ we’d been waiting for. We all let out a sigh of relief, but we knew that the mission was far from being over.

  As if in slow motion, the doctor’s mouth opened in a soundless cry of alarm. He got up from the floor, leaning on one hand with the other hand held up high. The stethoscope hanging around his neck rocked to its own rhythm. I feared that someone might shoot him by mistake and bit my lip so as not to interfere. The coordinator quietly warned: “The doctor is in the line of fire.” That was enough for them not to shoot him.

  While agents had been breaking in through the main entrance, two more men had come down from the roof and entered the room like monkeys. They were accustomed to breaking through brick, but before them was thick glass. The terrorist standing there took two accurate shots at the agents and then hid behind the bed. Dan, the agent who had entered from the north, was hit directly in the chest and was thrown back. Curt, who’d broken in from the west, made his way towards the terrorist and, in two large strides, shot him twice in the head, turning the
terrorist into a heap of lifeless limbs on the floor, surrounded by a puddle of blood. We heard ‘clear’ and immediately he asked, “Are you okay, brother?”

  “Okay,” Dan answered shortly, and I heard pain and frustration in that one word. I knew he would overcome the frustration and so I scanned the area. Murat Lenika was still missing. A few seconds later, he came out of the dark room with a gun in his shaking hands. Three of the agents shot six fatal shots. They called out ‘clear’, in unison.

  I heard Linda say from the side, “We are left only with Yassin for interrogating.”

  “They did what they had to do.” I answered. If I had known that Murat Lenika was a source of information who had turned from hostile enemy to collaborator, I might have been less assertive in my answer. But that was information I learned about much later.

  “Checking the area,” the commanding officer reported as he went from room to room. He turned on his flashlight in the dark room and saw the wife lying on the bed. “I want the doctor to come up with the antidote and a bomb disposal squad team.”

  “We will start with the bomb disposal team so that we can turn on the lights and get the doctor inside without endangering him,” the coordinator answered calmly.

  “Take note of the computers. The orders are not to disconnect them and not to touch them. They may have a self-destruct mechanism, so leave them as is.”

  “It is a good thing you said something,” said the coordinator in his calm voice, “Because the next step was to disconnect them.”

  ***

  “Send everyone out!” Major Key ordered and he and his fighters started moving Yassin, his son, the kidnapped doctor and Dan, the injured fighter, outside. The three bomb disposal agents wearing protective gear and gas masks entered the suite. They were a veteran team who’d dealt with disposing of bombs for many years. They approached the darkened room as if by unspoken agreement, because the most important task was to neutralize the explosives around the sick wife’s body.

  I stole a look at Linda. Her eyes were locked on the screen. She stood, leaning forward, fingers gripping the back of the chair tightly. Her body language signaled the tension everyone in the room felt and, as if by its own accord, my hand touched her shoulder. I murmured, “It’ll be okay. You’ll see it will all be okay.” Was I trying to comfort myself as well?

  We both continued to swallow up the screen with our eyes. The bomb disposal team split up. One of them turned directly towards the wife and checked the wiring on her body, while the others carefully and skillfully checked the rest of the room. When they didn’t find anything, they turned on the light and examined the rest of the suite.

  The day Gail was born, I went with my father to see her at the neonatal intensive-care ward. The nurse taking care of all these premature babies lifted Gail’s little body with such tender gentleness, yet with practiced skill. The bomb disposal agents reminded me of that nurse. It was nerve-wracking but we soon received the okay from the bomb disposal agent next to the wife’s bed. He lifted his hand to signal that he had finished the job, like he was in a chess competition. Seven minutes and thirty-two seconds had passed. The doctor had finished injecting the little boy and Yassin with the antidote, as well as checking up on the kidnapped doctor. He now waited for the ‘okay’ to inject the wife.

  The bomb disposal agent who’d raised his hand joined his teammates in examining the rest of the suite. Each room of the suite had a different team working in it. One of the agents examined the dead bodies to make sure that they weren’t wired with explosives, the second agent checked the electricity system to make sure that there was no tripwire, and the third agent made sure that the computers weren’t tripwired either. Only after we received the ‘okay’ from all three of them did I permit the NSA to enter the room to start extracting the data from the remaining computers.

  Guy Niava,

  November 16, 2015

  It was morning and with it came the hustle and bustle of a normal day. The puddles of water that had formed from the rain of the last hour were drying up. People were awakening to the false security of a regular, routine day, while others, somewhere nearby, were buying a plane ticket for a flight destined to take them to hell. According to information I had received from the security forces, a plane attack was imminent. There was a high alert but a lack of information. How many planes were going to blow up? Which airlines? When? Thanksgiving was in ten days’ time, and in the meanwhile the flights filled up with thousands of people planning on seeing their loved ones, families expecting to reunite for a festive dinner. Who would get to sit with their loved ones and who would fall?

  The break-in plan had proved efficient. In less than thirty minutes, I’d received the information that Jonathan was not among those present in the suite and that Yassin had been arrested. The wife and child were removed from the scene and sent to a secluded hospital. They had received the antidote but had been separated far from Yassin Graham’s sight. The knowledge that they might die was a trump card too good to immediately give up.

  Yassin was not only the single terrorist left alive but also the last link to Jonathan. He also had exclusive knowledge about the planned attacks. Breaking Yassin was vital. Even though I wanted to backtrack, I knew that I couldn’t be of any help there. Somehow, there was still a slim chance of finding Jonathan at the place I was aiming for.

  “Do you know what I learned from this event?” David Gideoni asked me in an amused tone.

  “What did you learn?” I patiently complied.

  “That you have matured. You aren’t looking just for the action and it makes you more levelheaded. You, sir, have the makings of a great office clerk.” I wondered if he was smiling as he said it. I didn’t answer and then Gideoni added, “I am not letting you go.”

  An hour later I realized I should have remained a field agent, whatever Gideoni thought. I paid the price for not working out in so long when Yassin’s thugs attacked me.

  Laura Ashton,

  November 16, 2015

  In the building that never slept, the lights were on even at night. But now, the morning of doomsday, new forces joined with fresh ideas. I hoped that these new forces would bring with them innovative ideas and try to solve the computer mysteries. According to the information received from the Mossad, doomsday had already begun. A bomb was about to explode in our faces in the form of a terror attack the likes of which we had never seen before, and we still weren’t any closer to a solution. In fact, we didn’t even know the relevant questions to ask to solve the puzzle.

  A paper cup on my desk still held remnants of cold coffee. I added the cup to the pile standing at the edge of the table. Stubbornly, I refused to let the cleaners throw away the tower of cups. They gave me a sense of the time passing by, like a ticking bomb. The higher the paper cup tower, the more distressed I became. I was distressed over the knowledge that we had not yet broken Yassin. We had not managed to reveal his secrets and had not yet stopped the disaster he was planning. I finished counting the twenty cups, took a deep breath and dialed a number.

  “We are checking all the cameras in the areas they had been, starting from the harbor. We already have photographs of some suspects and we will find him.” The dry informative words weren’t supposed to console Guy. I knew that if we didn’t find Jonathan, nothing would console him.

  He answered dryly, “I am sure you are doing your best to catch them quickly. Have you managed to get any information from the computers?”

  “We are still working on it,” I answered. I didn’t want to tell him that, as one of the computer experts had attempted to hack into one of the computers, it had auto erased its hard drive, as it had been programmed to do. This is what we’d been afraid of. I didn’t tell Guy that our best cyber experts were trying to restore that information and to crack open the other systems too, without harming the computers. I didn’t tell him about the tears of frustration from one of the comp
uter experts when he’d understood that the access had been blocked, about the tension in the room, about the determined engineering agents desperately fighting for time to try and save the world, because we all knew that there was vital data in these computers that could shed some light on Yassin’s treacherously dark schemes.

  “What about the professor?” I asked, when really, I was asking if he’d witnessed something, seen something by accident. Overheard something by chance. I knew that depending on such information was like clutching at straws and I didn’t want Guy to see through that.

  He coughed slightly and then answered hoarsely, “You should check with the wife and child.” In the background I heard the GPS telling him to exit at the next turnoff. “Any piece of information could help us.”

  “How much longer till you reach your destination?” I asked with concern. “You have been driving for hours.”

  “If that really is the destination. They are trying to wear me down. I have already driven past this road twice.”

  “What does the GPS show?”

  “Another few minutes.” He still hadn’t ended the call and neither had I. After another moment of silence, he said, “Try and coax them and see what they know.”

  “We already have someone there interrogating them.” I hoped it would calm him a bit, knowing that. “Have you sent the new location point?”