Pandora's Grave (Shadow Warriors)

by Stephen England

  A muffled curse broke from the intruder’s lips and he jumped up, startled.

  “Get your hands up!” Harry screamed, his voice echoing like thunder in the narrow confines of the hangar. “ Now!”

  The figure hesitated for a moment, then he turned and darted towards the back of the hangar, toward the door there.

  Harry darted forward, ducking around the Huey, afraid to fire for fear of damaging the helicopter. He couldn’t get a clear shot.

  The man reached the back door and darted out into the night as Harry chased after him, feet pounding against the hard concrete.

  Harry paused at the door, listening, uncertain which way to go. He couldn’t see anyone now. Everything was still, so silent he could feel it. He took a careful step forward, the Colt extended in front of him. Somewhere…

  A wrench smashed into his arm, sending the Colt spinning out of reach. Harry whirled, gasping in pain, throwing his other arm up to deflect the attacker’s second blow.

  His right hand slipped to his ankle, searching for the combat knife strapped there, but the man bowled him over before he could reach it. The wrench descended toward his head.

  Harry rolled right, grabbing a fistful of sand and dirt, heaving it up and out, into the face of his attacker. Rubbing his eyes, the man reeled backward, barely keeping his feet.

  And he ran.

  Pulling the combat knife from its ankle sheath, Harry regained his footing. There was no sense in trying to locate the Colt. The man would be long gone before he could hope to find it.

  Harry dashed forward. The intruder was just disappearing around the side of one of the other hangars. There was still time to catch him, but Harry wasn’t going to let himself be fooled as easily this time.

  By the time Harry reached the edge of the hangar, the man was gone. Disappeared. Vanished into the inky blackness of the night.

  Inwardly, Harry prayed for a moon he would have cursed only ten minutes earlier. He had no idea which way to go.

  He moved toward the hangar door, pushed it open. It squeaked noisily on its hinges and he paused. There was no way he would have missed that sound. The man hadn’t gone inside. He must have gone around.

  He went around as well, moving slowly, listening, watching, the long knife still in his hand.

  Listening for something, anything. He could call the airfield’s security patrols to help with the search, but that would take too long, and from what he had seen of their efficiency that night, he didn’t know that they would be much help.

  A faint noise arrested his progress. He stopped stock-still, listening, his eyes trying to pierce the night. Without success.

  There it was again. A shuffling noise, as though someone were running through the sand. Around the edge of the hangar…

  Harry dropped into a crouch by the building as the noise came closer. A shape loomed above him and he rose, smashing the hilt of the knife into the man’s breastbone, knocking him off-balance.

  The man grunted and toppled backward, Harry going down on top of him. He pressed the tip of the knife firmly against the intruder’s throat. “Surrender,” he hissed in Arabic. “ Now .”

  “Nichols,” the man gasped weakly, forcing his words out past the knife. “Is that you?”

  Harry pulled the blade away quickly. “ Davood! What are you doing out here?”

  “I was coming from the latrines,” the Iranian-American agent whispered, rubbing his sore throat with his hand. “Saw somebody over by one of the hangars—let me up, will you!”

  “Of course,” Harry responded, rolling to one side. “But what did you see?”

  The agent pulled himself into a sitting position, still trying to regain his breath. “A man was sneaking around the hangars. I tried to follow him.”

  “Which way did he go?”

  Davood shook his head. “I don’t know. Lost him in the darkness. I was looking for him when I ran into you.”

  “Same here,” Harry nodded. “Got your automatic?”

  “I don’t need it to take a leak. I left it back in quarters.”

  Harry rose to his feet, looking around him, trying to get his bearings. Once again, everything was silent. Too silent. He glanced down at the agent. “Run and get Colonel Tancretti,” he ordered tersely. “I’m going back to the hangar where the Huey is housed. Do you know where that is?”

  “No,” Davood replied, rising to stand beside him.

  “Tancretti’ll know. Tell him I want a squad of men around that Huey from now on. Scratch that,” Harry corrected, anger in his voice, “I want a whole platoon around the hangar. Get going.”

  “Roger.”

  11:57 P.M.

  Q-West Airfield

  Northern Iraq

  “So, what did he do?” Harry demanded as Tancretti rose from his crouch by the Huey. The colonel’s face was unusually grim.

  “He trashed one of the external stabilizers.”

  “Can you fix it?” Thomas asked, holstering his automatic.

  “Yes,” Tancretti replied. “But I would need parts from Mosul.” He glanced at his wristwatch. “We have an hour till go-mission.”

  Harry nodded silently, weighing his options. None of them were good. Tancretti was speaking again.

  “We could take the Pave Low.”

  “No,” Harry retorted sharply, looking over at the colonel. “I believe I told you this afternoon. Washington wants plausible deniability on the operation. Using the Pave Low compromises that.” He shook his head. “I have my orders.”

  His eyes locked with Tancretti’s. “How do you suppose he got inside?”

  “I don’t know,” Tancretti replied, shrugging his shoulders. “We have twenty kilometers of perimeter fencing to patrol. My men are spread thin.”

  “And those you’ve got aren’t doing their job well enough!” Harry snapped. “One of those kids let me get within five feet of him tonight before he issued a challenge. I could have put a knife between his shoulderblades and he would have been dead before he knew the difference.”

  “They’re learning. But we’ve had saboteurs slip inside before. It’s part of the country, Colonel.”

  Harry took another step toward him, his face dark as the night. “I couldn’t care less what is a part of this country, Tancretti. What I want to know is why one of these ordinary run-of-the-mill, routine saboteurs would choose the oldest aircraft on base to sabotage it! It doesn’t make sense. You’ve got millions of dollars of hardware on this airfield and this man penetrates all the way to the middle to disable the one aircraft that is of no use to anyone—except us. This mission. The mission that was supposed to go down one hour from now.”

  He glanced around, searching the faces of his fellow team members, of the Air Force personnel clustered behind Tancretti. “Someone knew…”

  4:08 P.M. Eastern Time

  NCS Operations Center

  Langley, Virginia

  One hour. Actually, less than an hour. Fifty-one minutes, twenty-five seconds to be precise, Bernard Kranemeyer thought as he carefully synchronized his watch to Baghdad Time. And then Operation TALON would begin.

  A computer had randomly picked the code name for the operation, but the selection had brought a grin to the faces of both Kranemeyer and the DCIA. Eagle Claw had been the codename of the last US hostage rescue mission into Iran. And an eagle’s claw was a talon.

  For a moment, both men had thought about changing it, to avoid someone else noticing the comparison. But in the end, they had left it in place. Perhaps it was an omen.

  A light on his phone flashed bright red. An incoming call. He picked up the receiver, waiting in silence for the encryption sequence to engage.

  “Kranemeyer.”

  “Boss, this is Nichols. TALON has been scrubbed.”

  The statement nearly brought the DCS out of his seat. “ What?”

  “We had an infiltrator thirty minutes ago. He disabled the helo we were using for TALON.”

  “How did he get in?”

&nb
sp; “We don’t know,” Harry replied, glancing around him. “Colonel Tancretti says he can repair the helicopter if we give him another twelve hours. I propose to postpone TALON until tomorrow night, oh-one hundred hours.”

  “You won’t have the weather in your favor if you wait,” Kranemeyer observed grimly.

  “I know. But I don’t have another choice.” Harry walked away from the group, pushed open the hangar door, stepped into the darkness. “I’ve got a problem, boss.”

  “What is it?”

  “Someone on this base is taking it both ways. Whether it’s one of the Air Force guys or one of the strike team, I don’t know.”

  “Why?”

  “The saboteur came all the way into the center of the base to strike the oldest airframe there. Doesn’t that strike you as odd?”

  “Yeah. It does. You think someone knew that you were planning to use the Huey.” It wasn’t a question. It was a statement.

  “I do.”

  “You can forget about the strike team,” Kranemeyer stated firmly. “They’ve all been thoroughly vetted. We know everything there is to know about each and every one of them—and that includes you. And you know your team as well as anyone.”

  “I’m not worried about them,” Harry retorted, steel in his tones, his meaning clear as crystal.

  “You’re wondering about your Iranian, eh?”

  The inference was there. Loud and clear. And it irritated him.“It wouldn’t matter to me if he was a card-carrying WASP! I’ve never worked with him before. So of course I’m wondering.”

  “He’s clean, Harry. Forget it.”

  “What about his parents? What do we know about them?”

  “His parents escaped the Revolution in ‘79. They live in Dayton. We had the Bureau put them under surveillance for six months prior to accepting his application. His uncle is the local imam, but none of them have ever been linked with anything remotely troubling.” The DCS paused. “I’d start looking among Tancretti’s flyboys if I were you.”

  “I will.”

  “Twenty-four hours, Harry. If anything further happens, let me know.”

  Kranemeyer punched a button on his phone, waiting briefly for the line to clear. Something was going wrong. That much was clear. And he didn’t like it.

  “Nicole,” he said, “put me through to the DDST.”

  “Right away, sir.” A moment later, the Deputy Director of the CIA’s Science & Technology branch came on the line.

  “Good afternoon, Scott,” Kranemeyer said calmly, his voice betraying none of the tension welling up inside of him.

  “It’s good to hear from you, Barney,” Scott Hadley replied, clearly surprised at the call. “What can I do for you?”

  “I need you to coordinate twenty-four hour satellite coverage with Sorenson over at the NRO. I want an area covered in real-time, live streaming feed right to the NCS op-center.”

  “Just give me the coordinates, sir, and I’ll get that fast-tracked.”

  “Here they are…”

  Chapter Three

  8:32 A.M. Local Time, September 23rd

  The offices of the Prime Minister

  Tel Aviv-Yafo, Israel

  “General Shoham to see you, sir.” Prime Minister Eli Shamir looked up and nodded at his secretary.

  “Show him in.” The Mossad chief’s arrival was hardly a surprise. Indeed, the only thing remotely unexpected was the timing. Shamir had expected the general to come beating down his door at the crack of dawn.

  “Good morning, general,” the prime minister greeted warmly as Shoham entered, closing the door firmly behind him.

  “I wish,” the general replied, his voice sharp. Almost brittle. A moment later, a slightly sheepish look came over his leathered face. “I’m sorry, sir. I should not speak so abruptly.”

  “Don’t mention it, Avi. Have a seat. You look tired.” And he did, the prime minister thought, regarding the man in front of him with a grim smile.

  Avi ben Shoham, hero of the Golan in the ‘73 war, the tanker who had racked up a total of eighteen destroyed Syrian tanks over the first week of the war before pulling two of his crew members from the wreckage of their burning Centurion. Avi ben Shoham, the man whose second cousin had been one of the athletes killed at Munich. Avi ben Shoham, the commander of Mossad for the last five years. Yes, he had earned the right to speak abruptly, if any man had. But that was hardly to the point.

  “When we talked yesterday, you said you were in the process of the developing contingency plans, general. What do you have?”

  Avi rose and walked over to the prime minister’s desk, handing him a thick folder. “Project RAHAB, sir.”

  Shamir took the folder in silence and began leafing carefully through it.

  Twenty minutes later, when he had finished, he glanced back up at the general. “What do you need me to do, Avi?”

  “I need your authorization to detach a special unit from Sayeret Matkal, to be placed under my command for the duration of RAHAB.”

  “It’s yours. Keep me updated.”

  “Thank you, sir,” General Shoham said, rising from his chair and heading for the door. The prime minister’s voice stopped him in his tracks.

  “Don’t thank me, Avi,” he admonished, his face unusually grim. “Just get it done. And be careful.”

  “I will.”

  9:31 A.M.

  A safe house

  The Gaza Strip

  “It is clear, commander.”

  Ibrahim Quasim rose from his chair and walked over to the window, lifting the venetian blinds to carefully peer out into the street. Nothing was stirring. But it was time to leave. He glanced at his two bodyguards. “We must move quickly.”

  “I will have Muhammad bring the car around,” the taller one declared, pulling a small radio from his pocket. He switched it on and spoke quickly in Arabic. “He’s on his way.”

  “Good,” Quasim replied, watching as a small black sedan came rolling down the street. It was a dirty, nondescript car. Nothing that would attract the attention of the Israeli Defense Force or the dreaded Mossad, attention the Hamas lieutenant could hardly afford.

  The car pulled quickly to a stop right in front of the door, and he turned to his bodyguards. “It’s time.”

  “We have subject exiting building N–32. He’s flanked by two bodyguards. Fourth man in the car, black sedan. Subject entering car, back seat, right side. I have VISDENT on Ibrahim Quasim.” The young man paused, thumbing the safety off his 9mm Beretta.

  “Execute! Execute! Execute!”

  The AH-1 Cobra attack helicopter rose from four streets over, lifting above the buildings, skimming over their tops with an ear-shattering thwap-thwap-thwap of rotors.

  Quasim saw the helicopter a second before his bodyguards. He knew what it meant. It was coming for him. His hand went out, grasping at the door latch, forcing it open. There wasn’t much time…

  The next moment, 2.75-inch rockets flashed from the side-mounted pylons of the Cobra. They hit the car dead on, blowing it over on its side, setting it aflame.

  The explosion lifted Quasim bodily into the air, throwing him away from the car. He screamed, feeling the metal rip into his legs like shrapnel, the flames licking at his pants.

  Part of the wreckage fell on top of him, pain flooding through his veins as he lay there, pressed to the pavement. He raised himself on his elbows, trying to pull himself away, trying to ignore the searing pain, the blood trickling freely from his body. He had to move. Get away.

  A shadow fell over him, blocking out the sun. Quasim raised his eyes. A man in the clothing of a street Arab stood over him. A friend. “ Please,” he whispered, forcing the words out past bleeding lips. “Help me, brother…”

  A pistol materialized in the man’s hand as he leaned down, pressing it against Quasim’s forehead. “Good-bye,” the young man whispered, a smile crossing his face. A smile as cold and dark as his eyes.

  Fire erupted from the gun’s muzzle. Fire and bla
ckness…

  Lieutenant Gideon Laner rose from beside the corpse, replacing the Glock in the folds of his garments. “Subject is down, repeat, subject is down,” he stated into his lip mike. “Mission complete.”

  “Right,” the voice replied over his radio. “Your pick-up is arriving in the area. Proceed to the extraction zone.”

  “Roger.” He walked quickly over to the bodies of the two militants, toeing each one with his boot. They were dead. There was nothing more for him. Not here.

  Gideon broke into a trot, down the street. With any luck—a small dirt-brown Toyota appeared from a side street, slowing to a stop beside him.

  “Get in,” the man behind the wheel ordered curtly. He too was dressed like a Palestinian, like Gideon. The lieutenant opened the door and slid into the passenger seat.

  “How did it go?”

  “Quasim is dead, Yossi,” Laner replied. “Drive.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Gideon glanced over at his companion, irritation flickering in his dark eyes. “I put a pistol between his eyes and blew his brains out, Yossi. Of course I’m sure.”

  “Good.”

  10:49 A.M. Baghdad Time

  Q-West Airfield

  Northern Iraq

  There were no tracks. Whatever imprints had been left in the soft sand had been wiped away by the night breeze. It told him nothing. It was here that he had fallen, rolled onto his side to avoid his attacker’s second blow. A slight impression was all that remained.

  Harry stood to his feet, glancing carefully around him. Off in the distance, he could hear jet engines warming up, their shrill whine oddly discordant in the desert air. He walked slowly across the sand, to the place where he had attacked Davood. Something didn’t ring true. Someone had betrayed them. Someone wasn’t on their side. And he didn’t know who.