Boiling Point (An Ethan Galaal Thriller Book 4)

by Isaac T. Hooke

  “What are the Israelis plannin’ on doing?” William asked, running his fingers through his Abe Lincoln-esque beard.

  Sam’s eyes rested on Bretta. “They’re sending in a Kidon team.”

  Ethan glanced at Bretta. Her face was grim.

  Ethan sat back. “Not messing around, are they?”

  “The Israelis aren’t known for half-assin' things,” William said.

  “No,” Sam agreed. “They’re going in, and they’re going in with extreme prejudice. It appears that the way they figure it, better that this scientist and the research simply disappear––though I’m sure part of their brief will be to recover Dr. Avesta’s laptop and any notes.”

  “So you want us to go in, lift the HVT and get out?” Ethan asked.

  “Affirmative,” Sam replied.

  “From Imam Hossein University?”

  “Correct. Security is minimal on the campus and, when our target usually gets there––around twenty hundred hours––there are very few students about. I recommend heading in at twenty-one hundred hours to further minimize any unfortunate civilian run-ins.”

  “I’m sending you through blueprints and photographs of the university,” Sam said. “It should be relatively straightforward in terms of execution. The only thing that worries me is that we don’t know when the Kidon team has been instructed to move in. If they know that we know they’re aware of this research…”

  “We’ll get the next commercial out of Dubai then,” Ethan said, getting to his feet.

  “Good,” said Sam. “Your doctored travel documents have been left in the usual place in your apartment. You’re travelling as returning Iranians. Getting through the airport shouldn’t be too difficult. The Iranians have their hands full at the moment, as you’ll doubtless see for yourselves. Execute the HVT’s retrieval tonight.”

  “Roger that,” Ethan said.

  “I’ll contact you once more when you get to the safehouse in Tehran. I’ve made sure that there will be gear and weapons waiting for you.”

  The laptop screen went blank.

  “All right, kids,” Ethan said, already striding towards the bathroom, where their fake passports were waiting in the toilet cistern in a Ziploc bag, “gear up. We’re out of here.”

  2

  Tehran, Islamic Republic of Iran

  March 4th 2020

  Local Time - 11:40

  It was only a little over two-hour flight from Dubai to Tehran, the Iranian capital. An almost perfectly straight shot north across the Persian Gulf, over the cities of Shiraz and Isfahan, until the Emirates flight touched down at the Mehrabad International Airport.

  Ethan and his team had seen exactly what Sam meant when she had spoken of Iran having their hands full. The Tehran-bound flight was seventy-five percent empty. The Emirates staff all wore surgical masks and disposable gloves and, although their eyes smiled above the masks, there was something twitchy and uncomfortable about their demeanors.

  “This thing, this COVID virus,” William murmured to Ethan, as the plane started its descent over the Kavir National Park, “it’s clearly a bit more than a common cold, huh?”

  Ethan frowned, looking at all the empty seats. He noticed that only passengers who were obviously acquainted with one another were sitting next to each other. Every single solo traveler was separated by at least one seat from their fellows. “I’ve flown this route plenty of times while working out here. These flights are usually packed.” Ethan glanced at his friend. “Now’s not the time to be worrying about any of that. If the Mossad are sending in a Kidon team…”

  He glanced across at Bretta who was staring silently out the window. She had barely said a word for the past hour and a half.

  “Yeah,” William said, “ain’t going to be much fun if we run into those assholes.”

  Ethan nodded.

  The Kidon––Hebrew for “bayonet”, and often thought of by Western intelligence agencies as the tip of the Mossad’s spear––were the most lethal component in the Caesarea unit; an undercover operational branch of Mossad that was in charge of distributing and handling spies inside Arab countries and around the globe. Kidon teams were made up exclusively of professional killers and saboteurs, usually four to a team.

  I could ask Bretta about these Kidon bastards. She was in the Mossad, she’d know.

  Something about her expression held Ethan back.

  All that matters is that they’re basically the equivalent of the CIA’s Special Operations Group, and those guys and girls don’t fuck around when it comes to wetwork.

  It was alleged that this branch of the Mossad, whose specialty was assassination, had been responsible for the killing of a thirty-five-year-old Palestinian scientist a couple of years previously in the Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur. The man had been a specialist in the field of energy saving and power systems and had published several papers that had not been looked on kindly by Israel for one reason or another. He had been gunned down with clinical precision in the street by a masked motorcyclist, and his murderer had never been apprehended.

  Ethan gave himself a mental shake. There was no point getting spooked with ghost stories. Kidon teams might be good, but Ethan, Bretta and William were far from useless themselves. The three of them had survived some extraordinarily dangerous scenarios.

  A little kick on his ankle dragged his mind out of the entrance of Memory Lane and he looked up. Bretta was standing over him, proffering him one of the disposable surgical masks that so many of their fellow passengers had elected to wear.

  “Pays to blend in,” she said, grinning wolfishly. “And you know how I’m all about safety first.”

  Ethan took the mask and smiled. Bretta squeezed past him, on her way to her window seat, dropping another mask into William’s lap as she edged past him.

  Ethan regarded the mask for several moments. It would prove a valuable tradecraft addition at the airport terminal...

  Who would have thought that a global pandemic could have its uses?

  Ethan, William and Bretta stood in line and waited to pass through customs at Mehrabad International.

  “Jesus, what a goddamn shit-show,” William muttered through his surgical mask. Outside, it was eighty-two degrees Fahrenheit, but here inside the main terminal, the air-conditioning units were working so hard that Ethan could see gooseflesh rising on Bretta’s bare arms.

  It was quite a surreal experience, waiting in line to have their passports checked by the guard behind the Plexiglas window. Ethan couldn’t stop looking around at the newly applied, highly stringent security methods that the Iranians were implementing.

  This coronavirus has all the hallmarks of SARS.

  All the airport workers were wearing surgical facemasks in an attempt, Ethan supposed, to minimize the risk of being sprayed by droplets if someone sneezed. They all wore disposable gloves too, and there were bottles of hand-sanitizer placed throughout the airport. There were signs too, informing people, in Arabic and English, that they should see security if they felt feverish or unwell, should refrain from touching their faces, were to sneeze into their elbows and stand at least a meter and a half from others. The queue to the customs booths stretched about three times further than it might ordinarily have done.

  Ethan had the eerie and bizarre feeling of being on some apocalyptic film set. It all seemed so far removed from how life was supposed to look. Usually, people were jostling and muttering impatiently, chaffing to get through security so that they could escape the airport and make it to journey’s end. Now though, the queue was silent and grim-faced, and if anybody coughed they were looked at with anxiety.

  Ethan had caught a little bit of news while he had been on the plane. It had been a transmission from the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting recorded a few days earlier. In it, the Iranian deputy health minister had been adamant that the country had almost eradicated this new strain of influenza that seemed to have most of the world so worried. The man had been pale and drawn and had mop
ped his brow so often that an aide had walked onto the podium and handed him a box of tissues.

  Would’ve been funny if it wasn’t so troubling, Ethan thought. That’d be about our goddamn luck; keeping an eye out for Israeli assassins only to be taken down by some sort of super virus.

  Ethan was jogged from his thoughts by Bretta stepping forward, and he realized that it was his group’s turn to have their passports checked.

  He grinned slightly behind his facemask. It was, if nothing else, a fantastic and totally unremarkable way––in the current climate, at least––in which to obscure his features from any potentially troublesome facial-tracking software the Iranian security HQ might be running. Ethan had to keep resisting the urge to tweak and change the mask, though. He’d wedged cotton swabs into his mouth, beneath his cheeks, in an attempt to subtly change his face shape in case he was asked to remove the mask at some point. Because of those swabs, the damned mask wouldn’t quite sit comfortably.

  They proceeded forward and stepped up to the booth containing the masked man who would decide whether or not they were allowed to “re-enter” Iran. For a moment, as the agent leafed through their fake Iranian passports, Ethan experienced a fleeting fear that he might be flagged. The man behind the Plexiglas screen froze for just a second, his eyes flicking up and raking the masked faces of the three people standing in front of him.

  “I see that you have recently been in Italy,” he said.

  “That’s right,” Ethan said. “Is there a problem?”

  The custom agent’s Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed nervously. He was a young man with a smattering of acne across his cheeks and an impressive monobrow. He stared at the passports he held in his gloved hands as though they were covered in poison.

  This little addition of the Italian visa stamp had been Sam’s idea. She had seemed to think that it would accelerate the whole lengthy process of getting through customs, and it looked as of she had been right.

  The young man stamped their passports quickly and pushed the documents gingerly back through a slot in the Plexiglas. He promptly sprayed his gloves with disinfectant.

  “You’ll all be staying at the same address once you leave the airport?” he asked in distaste.

  Ethan nodded and said, in the bored voice of the weary traveler, “That’s correct.”

  “Give me your cell phones,” the agent ordered. He made a sour expression, as if greatly repulsed by the idea.

  “Excuse me?” Ethan asked.

  “I am required to install a government app before you can pass through,” the man explained.

  Ethan hesitated.

  “It’s a policy that has been recently implemented,” the young man added hurriedly. “For public safety. Now please. Your phones.” That sour expression remained on his face.

  He’s clearly been on the end of a few tongue-lashings over this already, the poor bastard, Ethan thought.

  “What is this app for?” Bretta asked in perfect Farsi.

  “It is, ah, information,” the suddenly tongue-tied man replied, “for the, um, the COVID-19. It will tell you everything that you need to know about protecting yourself, as well as, um, updating you with the latest government news and announcements.”

  Bretta smiled again, as if that all made perfect sense and was not in the least bit shady, and handed over all three of their cell phones.

  “Well,” Bretta said behind her facemask, as the three of them walked out through the exit of the arrival hall, their bags over their shoulders, “getting through there was easier than I thought it was going to be. Easier than three people carrying phony passports could have hoped, no?”

  Ethan raised his eyebrows in agreement.

  “How about that bullshit about the app?” William said, as they strode out into the heat of the early afternoon sun.

  “Yeah, I’d be highly surprised if there wasn’t a sneaky little tracking bug riding bitch with that,” Ethan said.

  “My thoughts exactly,” William said.

  “It makes sense, that they’d want the ability to contact trace anyone who tests positive for the virus,” Bretta said.

  “Yeah,” William said. “I’m sure that’s their official excuse, anyway.”

  As the three of them walked past a line of buses and headed for the taxi rank, Ethan ordered: “Pass me your phones.”

  The other two obliged.

  He continued a few steps, then stepped neatly into the open rear door of a bus and tossed all three phones into the overhead luggage racks.

  After stepping back out he commented: “Let them track those for as long as they like.”

  As in Dubai, they caught three separate taxis into Tehran. The safehouse that they had been assigned was in the Yousef Abad neighborhood of District 6, one of Tehran’s old neighborhoods that had recently been redeveloped. It was, needless to say, in almost the exact opposite part of the city to the address they had given the authorities at the airport.

  The taxis arrived at the safehouse at nearly the same time, and the operatives disembarked, rendezvousing at the front door.

  “Black Swan can be a frosty bitch sometimes,” Bretta said, as she shouldered her way through the reinforced safehouse door, tucking her key into her pocket. “But when it comes to the op, she sure knows how to house her team huh? We must only be a ten-minute drive from the university, maybe a little more. I saw it as we drove through the center of town.”

  Ethan was already checking the laptop that he had brought with him, accessing a satellite map being broadcast thanks to the U.S military satellites whirling high overhead.

  “You’re right,” he said. “About two and a half klicks away.”

  “You got any idea how you want to play this?” William asked.

  “I want as few moving parts as possible to reduce the chances of a fuck-up,” Ethan replied, still studying the layout of the streets on the satellite image in front of him.

  “We go in with civvies or full battle-rattle?” William pressed.

  “We go in light, but not too light. Dark colored civvies. Bulletproof vests over the top with type three armor plates inserted. The sort of thing a casual bystander might confuse for a cop. I can’t see the Kidon, if we encounter them, packing anything heavier than rifles.” Ethan puffed out his cheeks and looked at William. “They’ll want to be in and out as quick as we want to be, and they’ll want to keep the noise to a minimum. With that in mind, pack light enough to be able to exfil on foot if worst comes to worst. Got it?”

  “Roger that.”

  3

  The assembling and preparation of weapons and equipment had always been a task that Ethan had found oddly therapeutic. The Yousef Abad safehouse, like all of the DIA’s secure locations, had a modest supply of armaments and equipment hidden in concealed panels about the place. Despite what Hollywood convention would dictate, these caches were not hidden in elaborate vaults that slid out of the floor when an agent pressed their finger to a concealed biometrics reader on the microwave. Rather, they were stacked neatly inside certain wall cavities, the panels of which had been carefully pried from the framework underneath and then replaced.

  Ethan, Bretta and William all wore Bates 922 combat boots––which were the boot of choice for many Navy SEALs––with dark navy combat trousers and matching navy long-sleeve tee-shirts. Their tight-fitting bulletproof vests, with their ballistic-grade steel trauma plates inserted into the front, rear and side SAPI pockets, would go over the top of these. Ethan planned on storing these, along with their weapons, into duffel bags, and stowing them in whatever vehicle William managed to procure for them. This was so that they would excite no comment in leaving the safehouse. Even though the streets were mostly quiet from the fear induced by the virus, it was probably a safe assumption that three figures striding quickly out of an apartment building, wearing body-armor and carrying assault rifles would be noticed by someone.

  Ethan had decided to go for a fairly lightweight, yet versatile load-out. Most of th
e weight of his gear was going to be comprised of spare ammunition. He had been filling spare magazines with 5.56mm rifle rounds and .45 ACP pistol ammunition for the past twenty minutes and had more than he would probably be able to carry. It was always his belief though, that it was far better to have too much than not enough when it came to bullets. He stuffed as many as he could into the generous side pockets of his combat trousers and buttoned them, allowing himself a few more of the assault rifle magazines than the pistol.

  He had picked himself out a compact, but nonetheless quite effective, MK 13 CQBR assault rifle from the stack that Bretta had retrieved from the hiding place in the wall. This weapon was a variant of the ever-popular M4 family of carbine rifles. It had been designed for close quarter battle and was about eight centimeters shorter in the barrel than its more popular cousins, the M4 and M4A1. Ethan chose it because it gave him the stopping power of an assault rifle in a submachine gun sized package. It was extremely popular in tight combat situations, and had become a favorite of the U.S. Coast Guard teams. He had fitted it with an Aimpoint Micro T-2 red-dot scope to the rail and a flash-hider to the muzzle. Next to his primary, sat a HK45C pistol, another favorite of the U.S military. It was a rugged and versatile pistol, and this model had the optional threaded barrel fitted so that a suppressor could be attached if need be.

  Ethan field stripped and cleaned his weapons with the practiced hands of a man who had done it many times, under many different conditions. Once this was done, he worked the actions on both weapons a few times to make sure they were operating smoothly. Satisfied that they were not going to jam, he then slapped a magazine into the magazine well of the pistol and the rifle, half-pulled back the slides so that he could see through the ejection ports and make sure the firing chambers were, indeed, empty, and then slipped the HK into his thigh holster. He picked up the MK 13, along with a couple of M84 stun grenades, and left the bedroom.