The Danger Within

by E. L. Pini

  The time was now. I drew my Glock and lunged at Imad. He took a step back, grabbing Anwar’s throat and using him as a shield. The crowd of worshippers around us staggered back in terror, clearing the area.

  I considered firing at Anwar, rolling to the right and firing at Imad. Then again, firing at Anwar might activate the charge stuffed in his gut, killing him along with Anwar, Imad and myself. I focused on Imad and continued moving toward him. He stared right back, slowly retreating, dragging Anwar with him.

  “Activate!” Imad was yelling. “Activate!”

  Anwar frantically tapped his phone, over and over again—nothing was happening. Imad snatched the phone away and roughly shoved Anwar toward me. I took half a step and lunged forward, my fist spinning into the center of his torso. There was a sharp crunch as his ribs cracked, followed by a hollow whistle of escaping air. Mass times acceleration—his sternum had just collided with about half a ton of force. I heard what sounded like a muffled explosion, and blood burst from his body. Anwar fell, unmoving. I rolled to the right. Someone threw a grenade and we were enveloped by yellow smoke. By the time I found my way out of the cloud, Imad was no longer there.

  I carved my way through the rioting crown, but who was I kidding? He was gone. Scheisse.

  Micha’s team struggled to clear a path through the mob, firing and throwing stun grenades at their attackers. A Border Police squad came up the road to the mosque, shoving and hitting, knocking down anyone on their way. They formed a defensive ring around us. Below us, the Almoravid wives were shrieking and howling. The cops, who were already at the end of their ropes, were becoming increasingly agitated. A squad car was hit by a thrown Molotov cocktail—it caught fire and began to burn. Thick black smoke rose up and obscured the sun.

  “The mosque is clear,” Micha alerted headquarters. “Repeat, the mosque is clear of charges. Two dirties neutralized. One escaped. No injured among our forces.”

  “The Temple’s safe,” I told Kahanov, “but Muhammad’s off the Mount again. Did you manage to get their phones?”

  “Why on earth would I confiscate phones?” he said, feigning innocence.

  I realized that he’d activated some sort of jamming signal to block all cellular frequency bands in the area. None of the videos would’ve been transmitted, and it would explain why Imad couldn’t activate Anwar’s stuffing.

  “You’re the best,” I said.

  Kahanov went by the book and had roadblocks and checkpoints set up throughout the area, but we both knew this was not the way this sneaky fuck would be found. For a pro, the fog of war provides excellent cover—and Imad was a true pro.

  87.

  After the debriefing I hurried to the hospital to pick up Verbin. She opted for dinner at Machneyuda, a fancy Jerusalem restaurant. On the way there, I did some reminiscing. For the fourth time now in a decade, that piece of shit had managed to slip away from me. This time it would be different. He’d gone and made it personal. I recalled one of Tarantino’s gangsters saying that family isn’t the most important thing—it’s the only important thing.

  I picked up Verbin, and Marciano and his partner Chayyim followed us in a separate car. On our way to the restaurant, Verbin decided she wasn’t really up for all the fanciness, and what she really, truly wanted more than anything was falafel. We pulled over next to our favorite falafel place, and for the first time in my life, I examined the oil in the deep fryer and asked, “Why does the oil look so shitty?”

  The falafel man shrugged. “Like you look so hot at the end of a workday.” Verbin laughed her ass off and asked him to be more understanding, seeing as I was pregnant.

  “Mazal tov,” he said. We ate our falafel, with Marciano and Chayyim at the table next to us. It was absolutely repulsive, but Verbin seemed to enjoy every bite, and so I really couldn’t ask for more.

  When we were done, we wanted to return to Agur, but Kahanov wouldn’t hear of it. We were directed to the apartment the Service kept at Rehavia.

  Kahanov woke me at 05:00. “Balata!” he barked into the phone. “Get ready. I’m six mikes out.”

  “Keep the kid safe,” I whispered, stroking Verbin’s small belly.

  She hummed in her sleep and rolled over.

  Kahanov came in a gray Land Rover Defender, shielded and bursting with antennas, which looked like he’d just stolen it from a Mad Max set.

  “Balata?”

  “Affirmative. Good chance he’s down there,” he said. “Not the nicest fucking neighborhood, if you ask me.”

  I happened to agree. Balata had the narrowest, most twisting alleys in the whole narrow, twisted Middle East. This shithole of a camp was controlled by private gangs, contractors for Hamas and Jihad. The whole town was held hostage by masked armed hostiles, ages twelve and up. The Palestinian police forces dared not treat there. The IDF only operated in Balata as an absolute last resort and always entered in large numbers. Any movement of tanks, APC or other armored vehicles required the demolition of whole streets. The hostiles were perfectly aware of the political and logistical difficulties involved in any large-scale military operation. The military lost its tactical advantage and got pulled into low-intensity, symmetrical retaliations. This played into the hands of the terrorists, who had no qualms about dragging the fighting into civilian homes. This is what urban guerilla warfare has always looked like.

  “Aren’t you gonna ask how?” Kahanov snapped me out of my thoughts.

  “How?”

  “Excellent question. At oh two hundred, one Ayach el Azazma breaks into a bait car in Kfar-Saba and drives it all the way to Ramallah. Police auto crime team tracks it. Apparently this guy’s a real prince. Child sex crimes. Smuggling. You name it. Then this fucker tells the blues that he was the one who got Imad the Semtex, and he’s willing to give us everything on the Israeli buyer, in return for a dismissal of all charges against him. Maxim, the interrogator, got him to promise to give us Imad’s safe house in Balata. He wanted cash for that, on top of the dropped charges.”

  “Did you take the deal?”

  “I promised that if we found Imad, we’d give him everything he asked for. Then again, I had my fingers crossed.”

  “Can’t this fucking thing go any faster?”

  “Eighty-six miles per hour, top speed. This is a Land Rover, not a fucking Ferrari. By the way, you should know Imad also has two of his Shabwah engineers with him—”

  “What happens now?” I interrupted.

  “We get to work. The territorial brigade and the Haruv commandos are closing off a perimeter. Inside there’s a paratrooper reconnaissance platoon and a Unit 217 force, including rooftop snipers and a shitload of my own men.”

  “And what—”

  I was cut off by the sound of rolling thunder. Kahanov answered the phone and put it on speaker. “Hey, Mizrahi.”

  “Evening, Kahanov. You by yourself?”

  “Evening, Colonel,” I chimed in.

  “Is that RP I hear?!”

  “In the flesh.”

  “Two hundred and thirty pounds of rage and power! Bdalak, ya ibni, Bdalak, we are honored. Welcome to the Middle East. When are you getting here?”

  “Four to five mikes.”

  “Okay, we’ll talk when you get here. RP, come get a piece of the action, I’m giving them hell down here.”

  “What kind of hell?” I asked after he’d hung up.

  “Trying to trigger retaliation,” Kahanov explained, and I remembered the last time we’d seen Mizrahi, in the chopper after we’d blown up Victor’s tanker, and the time before that, when he was coming up my driveway with the others to tell me about Eran.

  Kahanov laughed. “He’s been a brigadier general for three years, but you can’t take the battalion commander out of the boy.”

  Brigadier General Yosef Mizrahi—“the Colonel,” as we’d called him since he came back from a t
raining course at Fort Bragg—had spent most of his long military career out in the field, whether he was required to or not. Mizrahi grew up in Iraq, and some claim that it was he who had originally coined the adage “A good Arab is a dead Arab”—if not, he had certainly done more to propagate it than any other man alive. The Colonel was considered the father of the IDF’s low-intensity combat tactics. He was also the first to blast through the walls of houses in refugee camps, to move the forces off the streets and avoid side charges and sniper fire. I was one of the first junior officers to apply this tactic in the Jabalia camp.

  More rolling thunder.

  “Kahanov, you alone?”

  “Yeah, Maxim. Just me and RP.”

  “He’s on his way to you. Nothing more to be gained by interrogation. He’s done.”

  “You didn’t break him?”

  “You know the Supreme Court’s on my ass,” said Maxim defensively.

  “I’ve got no one on my ass,” I cut in. “Not the Supreme Court, not the Heavenly Court of the almighty himself. Bring that fucker out to the field.”

  The Colonel suddenly barged in on the radio. “RP! Kahanov! Heat waves in the house, I’m starting a ‘pressure cooker.’”

  “With you in three,” said Kahanov, pressing the gas pedal as far down as it would go. I called the office.

  “Bella, get me Froyke.”

  “They’re both at the prime minister’s, with foreign guests.”

  “Let him know I’m with Kahanov on the way to Balata.”

  “You know you’re not supposed to be down there,” she gently scolded me.

  “I know. I know I’m not. Be sure to tell him. Bye.”

  88.

  The UAVs hovering over the camp sent their footage to the screens in Mizrahi’s command post. One UAV surveilled the whole camp, providing the big picture, while the other lingered above the house. The Colonel was wearing a perfectly pressed dress uniform as he did during every combat op. He pointed at Yuval, the reconnaissance company commander, and brought two fingers to his eyes spread in a V shape—the signal for “give me eyes.”

  Yuval had recently collected on a debt owed to him by Sela from the Matkal intelligence team, borrowing a set of XAVER 100 radar imaging systems, for detection through walls—until now, only Flotilla 13 and Matkal teams had had access to it. But now, he was failing to calibrate the device. The division intelligence officer removed his helmet and tried to finish the calibration himself, and a rock thrown from one of the rooftops hit him in the head. As the medic tried to stop the bleeding, a single shot cracked through air. A 217 sniper, positioned on another rooftop, fired without waiting for approval. A boy of about fourteen tumbled to the street, a bullet in his forehead.

  “Shit! Shit, shit! A kid? Why a kid?!” Mizrahi muttered furiously.

  A mob of old, veiled wailing women appeared, seemingly out of thin air, and collected the body, all the while howling obscenities at the soldiers. The soldiers were firing into the air, trying in vain to scare the women away. Some masked adolescents drew courage from the group of women and began to throw rocks, wooden planks and garbage cans at the soldiers. Someone spilled a tub of boiling oil from a window onto a patrol jeep, burning the driver. A medic from the battalion aid station ran to his aid, slipped on the oil-covered cobblestones and sprained her ankle. The crowd around her cheered.

  “Starling38, get someone to evacuate the kid’s body,” said the Colonel, glancing at Kahanov. “They’ve got me dispersing demonstrations now in my old age. Didn’t even give me a damn water hose. Seventeen, bring the teddy bears and clear everyone from the street, over.”

  “Crown, this is Starling. Body’s not here. They must’ve taken it, over.”

  “Great, now we’ll have a huge funeral… goddamnit. Where’s the teddy bear?”

  “Crown, this is Screwdriver. We can’t go in with the teddy to evacuate people, only—”

  “Shut up. Out.” Mizrahi cut him off, furious.

  A squad of paratroopers and a young lieutenant from Unit 504, the Human Intelligence Formation, had taken over the PA system of the nearby mosque. The officer ordered the crowd to clear the area around the house immediately and addressed Imad and the two engineers by name, ordering them to exit the house unarmed and with their hands in the air.

  “This is your first and final warning,” he said in perfect Palestinian Arabic. “You either exit the house within the next three minutes or you’ll be killed. You’re surrounded and out of options. Come out and live. The countdown begins now.”

  He then went back to warning the other residents of the camp to clear the area. The masked teenagers were still throwing rocks and planks at the soldiers, who retaliated with gas grenades. One of the boys came too close and was captured and handcuffed, as his friends continued to rain bricks and random debris at the soldiers. The soldiers fired high above their heads, trying to keep them away, but they wouldn’t stop. More rocks came. Two soldiers were mildly injured and taken away. The other soldiers lowered their rifles and fired at the ground. One of the boys was shot in the knee and the other in the face. Their friends dragged them back toward a waiting Red Crescent ambulance. Mizrahi ordered the soldiers to grab anyone filming with a smartphone or a camera.

  “A kid with a smartphone had more power over the field of battle than a trained infantry brigade. If you see one, fire in the air and neutralize them, or their cameras,” he said. “After that, do your jobs. Yuval, look alive!”

  “Yuval team, this is Crown.” The reconnaissance company commander gave a messy salute and started walking toward the house, speaking into his walkie at the squads perched around the house.

  “One, here.”

  “Two, here.”

  “Three, four, five?”

  “Three. Four. Five. Ready.”

  “One, two, three, four, five. Good luck. You are go.”

  A barrage of bullets ventilated the walls of the house from all directions.

  Yuval looked up at the Colonel, who raised two fingers, like a basketball coach signaling a play. At the end of the street, I could just barely make out the tips of Corner Shot barrels peeking out from behind a wall and disappearing. Occasionally the snout or wagging tail of an Oketz dog peeked from the corner before it was hastily restrained by its handler.

  “We need to wrap this up,” grumbled the Colonel, “before the whole camp gets here along with the bleeding hearts and their damn film crews and media circus.”

  Another barrage rained on the house. No response.

  The 504 officer gave the besieged another ninety seconds.

  “Yossi,” I addressed the Colonel, “I’m going in with the recon team. I need him alive.”

  “No one goes in there. Sorry, RP, not even you. He either comes out or he dies. There’s no other option—charging in there can only end with our guys in the shit. Ain’t happening. And you sure as hell aren’t stepping foot in there. Sorry, really, I am. But you must know, a good Arab is—”

  “Yeah, yeah,” I spoke over him, “a good Arab is a dead Arab, sure, okay, but this one, he’s a really bad Arab, and I need him alive.”

  “The one who’s coming after you? Oh, I am definitely killing him. And his fucking mother.”

  The officer in the mosque again addressed Imad by name. “The clock is ticking. You have twenty seconds to get out of there alive.”

  Yuval decided to lend some weight to the countdown and ordered another barrage.

  The commander of the antitank platoon requested permission to fire a missile at the house. Mizrahi denied it. “Too much collateral. And a hell of a photo op.”

  He ordered the two teddy bears to approach. The two armored bulldozers came forth and sank their metal claws into the walls of the house. A series of underground charges was activated from inside, exploding violently. At the same moment, Yuval dove to retrieve the XAVER system and
was buried under the collapsing wall. My heart skipped a beat and I moved forward, but Kahanov held me back. Two of Yuval’s troops sprung out of cover to charge forward and retrieve Yuval’s limp form from the wreckage. They huddled around the medic who ran out to examine him. “He’s alive!” the medic cried out. Yuval was still stubbornly clutching the XAVER system when they carried him to the rescue chopper.

  The explosion left no chance of survival for anyone inside the house. Meanwhile, the bulldozers kept tearing away at the walls. The clouds of dust and the smoke from the explosions mingled with the yelling and commotion. The large teddy bears then began to clear away the wreckage—bricks, logs and pieces of mangled corpses were tossed to the other end of the street, and the soldiers began a gradual evacuation.

  We left the dark and battered Balata behind us and headed for Jerusalem. Kahanov broke the heavy silence with, “So the schmuck is finally dead!”

  “Last time he died, he came back alive,” I said and hesitated. Something was troubling me. “Before I went up to the mosque, I asked you for a team of undercover operatives and a jamming system. It was already set up, though. Micha and his team, the guy from the bomb squad who didn’t know his ass from his elbow—how did you get it all ready in time?”

  Kahanov laughed. “Took you a while, Mr. analytical mastermind. Here, take a look.” He handed me his phone. “Go to the gallery.”

  I found a video of me interrogating Ibrahim—he was telling me about the planned attack at the mosque. The intel I’d kept to myself, shared with no one—this bastard had known all along. He’d been watching my back. I lit two Cohibas and placed one in his mouth.