by David Costa
Light of The Sun
David Costa
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2021 by Red Dragon Books
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any manner without written permission of the copyright owner except for the use of quotations in a book review.
I dedicate this book to my family and to all the brave men and women who stand on the wall.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Conrad Jones, Author, and Red Dragon Books for all their advice and support in writing this book.
Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.
Matthew 6:34 KJB
Chapter 1
Barcelona
‘Allah will bless you and keep you in the palm of his hand.’
The text on the phone screen was her signal to proceed. The Arab had told her the same words when he had helped her strap on the vest. With screws, nails, and TNT in the pouches around her, she noticed there was no smell only that from her sweat. She left the hotel and walking in the warm sun made her way to the La Rambla area of Barcelona. This was the main tourist area of the city, over one mile long with its pedestrian tree lined walkway through the centre. She had walked here twice, once with the Teacher himself. The streets were already filling with tourists and shoppers. The famous living statue street artists were picking the best spots to surprise those same tourists encouraging them to donate their money into the buckets, tins, and caps on the ground. No one looked at her, no one cared, they were all lost in their own little worlds, heads looking down at the phones in their hands or browsing the shop windows for bargains and holiday mementos. The pavement cafés were also filling up, with the loud chatter of conversation carrying across the street on the morning air. The suicide vest under her coat wasn’t heavy or bulky, and her clothing was that of a Western woman with blue jeans and a coloured headscarf, leaving her face fully visible to all around. He had told her to go to the indoor market for maximum effect. Being early morning, the market was packed with local shoppers out before the severe midday heat. She could see figures of people in front of her, but not in any clarity, just the outline, her eyes did not want to settle on any one person, she didn’t want to be weak, she was a soldier of Allah. He had told her to expect the fear, but that it would pass quickly as she passed through the gate into paradise. In her final moment she hoped someone would stop her, but then her voice took over, ‘Allah Akbar, Allah Akbar,’ she shouted. Her loud voice surprised her for a second and she could see some of the people closest to her turning their heads towards the sound, some faces already with the shock of the realisation of what was about to happen, death was here. She pressed the button on the handheld device.
The explosive blast with the force of the TNT in the crowded space caused complete and utter devastation. Her body was blown asunder into minute fragments of bone adding to the shrapnel already created by the flying packs of metal spread through the crowded market with the speed of bullets. Forty died immediately: men, women, and children, with fifteen more who reached hospital dying later, 150 victims were injured many of them losing limbs. All that was left of the bomber was her head, almost intact with her brightly coloured scarf still in place around her face.
When the blast sounded and vibrated through the city the Arab was strapping himself into his passenger seat on the 10.30 a.m. flight from Barcelona to Rome. He had sent the text message before boarding, breaking the SIM card, he had thrown it with the burner phone into a waste bin. God is Great, he thought. ‘Allah Akbar,’ he whispered quietly to himself.
‘Keep your face to the sun and you will never see the shadows.’
Helen Keller.
Iran.
The sun was at its hottest as Colonel Ali Shafi of Iran’s elite Republican Guard drove the Jeep through the third security gate allowing access to the Parchin military site. Parchin was supposed to be a secret site southeast of the capital city Tehran. According to reports from the UN nuclear watchdog the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) it was suspected of being a possible location supporting the Iranian nuclear enrichment programme working towards the production of a nuclear bomb capability.
Intelligence reports from the CIA and Mossad confirmed the fears of the IAEA inspectors. Iran continued to tell the world that it needed the nuclear material for a medical research reactor, yet despite numerous requests by the UN team to inspect the site, they’d been delayed; until, as they now believed, to allow time to hide the true purpose of the site.
Satellite pictures had shown the site had been sanitised to protect its secrets in an effort to remove and cleanse any evidence of illicit nuclear activity.
The clean-up activity had taken several months and included a large covering being placed over a steel chamber; this the IAEA believed was being used for explosive experiments in an apparent effort to prevent satellite monitoring of the location.
The IAEA report had detailed that significant ground scraping and landscaping had been undertaken over an extensive area in and around Parchin. Buildings had been demolished and power lines, fences, and paved roads removed. The IAEA assessment was that this activity was a deliberate operation by the Iranian government to protect the real work that had been going on at Parchin, and to deliberately hamper its investigation if the IAEA was to be granted access to the site. Their most recent report which was now available to the UN and other interested parties stated, ‘The activities observed… further strengthen the agency’s assessment that it is necessary to have access to the location at Parchin without further delay.’
This delay of access was not only of concern to the Secretary of the UN and the President of the United States. The Prime Minister of Israel had explicitly stated that Israel couldn’t allow a government who had called for the state of Israel to be wiped off the face of the earth, to have a nuclear capability on its doorstep. The threat was implicit, ‘we will act before you do.’
Over the last two years as commander of the secretive base Shafi had overseen the security of Iran’s biggest gamble; to become an independent nuclear power. Today as he parked inside one of the covered bunkers, he knew that the Western powers and supporters of the Zionist state of Israel would shudder with fear as the cause of Allah came down on them with the wrath of thunder.
Tel Aviv to Malta.
Rachel Cohen looked down on the landscape of the island of Malta as the Air Malta A319 with 141 passengers on-board made its landing approach to Luqa, Malta’s international airport. The flight from Rome had only taken one hour and twenty minutes. Rachel knew touchdown was only a few minutes away when she saw the cabin crew strap themselves into their seats facing the passengers in the aircraft’s cabin. Looking at the ground below she picked out the landmarks on the almost treeless surface that she remembered from the many times she’d visited the island in the past. Then she’d come as a tourist. Looking now out the window she could follow the roads as they wound their way through the island and the small villages and towns to the larger tourist developments on the coast. She could pick out the hilltop town of Mdina. The fortress town had been the original capital of the island before the residents moved down to the coast for work. When most of the inhabitants left, the city became so quiet
it soon became known as the Silent City. Yet she remembered it as a beautiful place to walk through its narrow-cobbled streets, then dine in one of the restaurants on the battlements that looked down on Malta spread out below. Now ahead to her left she could pick out the current capital Valletta, with its Grand Harbour one of the best deep-water harbours in the world, and the lifeline for the survival of the British Forces in the Mediterranean in the Second World War battle against Rommel’s Afrika Corps and the Italian Axis forces in the battles across the North Africa and the Libyan desert. For the bravery shown by the Maltese people in that campaign the island was awarded the George Cross by King George VI. To this day it is displayed on the national Maltese flag as a symbol of pride. The people of Malta were fiercely proud of their history, not only during the Second World War but also when the Knights of Malta fought off a Muslim Army from the Ottoman Empire in the Great Siege in 1565.
Now as the ground rushed up to meet her Rachel thought of how she’d fallen in love with the island and its people. This time her visit would not give her the chance to relax. This time she would be looking through the eyes not of a tourist, but of a field agent in the employment of the Israeli Secret Service, Mossad.
Now, she would be going through customs using her cover name of Anna Stressor; the Italian housewife; accompanied by her husband Palo now seated next to her. Palo appeared to be resting his eyes but Ari Rosenberg, also a member of the elite Mossad Kidon teams was, as always, alert.
Passport Control was as usual simple enough to go through, with just a cursory look from the female officer behind the desk. ‘No problem so far,’ thought Rachel. Was it only yesterday she was sitting in her apartment on the outskirts of Tel Aviv, when her mobile phone had buzzed a text alert? The words in capital letters RETURN TO OFFICE meant, ‘Urgent get there now!’ Less than an hour later Rachel and Ari sat in the office of Mossad HQ in King Saul Boulevard in downtown Tel Aviv. Sitting behind the desk facing them was Kurt Shimon, head of the Mossad Counter Terrorist Kidon teams.
Rachel had met him a few times when training for the Kidon teams in the Negev desert. His reputation was legend in the Mossad. He had a desert tan with thick white hair; he looked fit and spoke with great confidence and authority. The Kidon or Bayonet in English, were the elite of the Mossad. Most members of Kidon came from a military background having served in the Israeli Defence Forces, IDF, and most of them had served in its Special Forces or elite regiments. On rare occasions a Mossad member could transfer into the Kidon when it was found they had that special gift or qualification. The training was tough, and few made it through to join the special clandestine killing arm of Mossad.
‘We have a situation which needs your expertise immediately. Our intelligence sources in Iran have identified a clear threat to an unknown target somewhere in Western Europe. Scientists in Iran have perfected a small nuclear device using a small amount of plutonium which we believe is already being transported to Europe. This device could demolish most of London and leave a radioactive cloud to spread to the south of England and the coast of France, that’s if London is the target. We do not know how it’s being transported, but the triggering mechanism is travelling separately, and this is where you come in. An Iranian Colonel is travelling as we speak to Malta, with protection from the members of the Iranian Quads and possibly Hezbollah. In Malta he’ll be handing the plutonium over to someone who will smuggle it into Europe where they’ll meet up with members of a terrorist organisation, as yet unknown. We believe this Colonel is travelling from Iran on a container ship which is going to put him and his friends ashore at the Grand Harbour in Valletta in two days. This team will have the plutonium, and when it reaches their people in Europe, they will supply the explosives and trigger to set it off. The final target, and who their people are in Europe, are still unknown. That is where you come in. Get to Malta, pick up the trail, and try to identify the rest of these people. Combined with the explosive and the plutonium, this will be a dirty nuclear device. Anything information we get here we’ll let you know immediately.’
Every Mossad and IDF member knew the danger posed by the Iranian regime.
Iran had supported the terror group Hezbollah for many years, and its main operating base was in Lebanon, with Israel its main target. The Iranian Quads were really the Paramilitary wing of the Iranian Army, highly trained killers. Iran had told the world that the destruction of the state of Israel was their main priority. The Prime Minister of Israel had made it quite clear; Israel wouldn’t allow a threat of nuclear attack against its people. Israel would carry out a pre-emptive strike before Iran had the capability to launch a missile attack on its country. The Western powers, especially the United States, feared such a scenario and that’s why they’d put pressure on Iran to cease its nuclear strategy through inspections and sanctions. This would be no picnic, thought Rachel.
‘Why Malta?’ asked Rachel. ‘It seems strange that if they want to get it into Europe, why tie themselves up on an island in the middle of the Mediterranean?’
Kurt Shimon smiled at Rachel when he answered.
‘Believe it or not the Iranians still have contacts they trust in Malta even though we eliminated one of their friends there in 1995.’
Everyone knew the legend as part of the Mossad story. A Kidon team had travelled to Malta when intelligence was received that placed the leader of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) Fathi Shaqaqi, who had links with Iran, and who had been meeting with the Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi in Tripoli, to organise training, weapons, and money to be supplied to his terrorist teams had stopped off in Malta. The Kidon team, that was quickly dispatched to Malta, soon tracked him down and shot him dead outside his hotel. It was a well planned and executed Mossad operation, once more showing the terrorist leaders, nowhere was safe from their reach.
‘Anyway, it does not matter why they’re back in Malta it’s our job to find out why, so I’m sending you two. All the information you need will be sent by encrypted message to your smartphones. Go over to operations they’ll supply you with false identity, weapons, and any information on this Iranian Colonel and his friends. I’ll be keeping an eye on this, and in the meantime I’ll be contacting our friends in the European Security Services to bring them up to date.’
The file on Colonel Ali Shafi was thin. A ten-year-old photo showed a round faced man with a heavy dark moustache and dark brown eyes. His family and military background were standard for a Colonel in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Not only was he a Colonel in the guard but also a member of its Quads Force, the Unit with a specific remit to carry out unconventional warfare and intelligence activities, and responsible for extraterritorial operations. As Rachel expected, the Mossad files showed that the Quads worked closely with Hezbollah, Hamas, and the PIJ; all enemies of Israel. The interesting thing was his family. He had married into the family of the Grand Ayatollah of Iran Sayyid Ali Hosseini Khamenei. This was no ordinary soldier, thought Rachel. The files had been downloaded to the two Mossad agents’ smartphones which could only be accessed through their thumb print to the screen. Anyone else trying to access the phone, would lose a finger or two when it blew up in their hand. A bit of Mission Impossible stuff but the science boffins of Mossad don’t mess around. Next stop was the Grand Hotel Excelsior in the capital Valletta. Rachel had stayed there once before in another world a long time ago. The weapons would be supplied to them by one of Israel’s Sayanim living in Malta. These are Jews and local residents living and working as normal citizens in every country outside Israel. They are recruited by Mossad to help its operators with everything from transport to money, safe houses, weapons and access to communications networks and other facilities, including official documents exclusive to that location. Sayanim dedicated their lives to the state of Israel and its existence and had indicated their desire to help in whatever way they could. First stop after booking into the hotel would be to contact the local Sayanim and collect their weapons.
A final piece of the m
essage sent on their phones surprised both operators telling them that they would be contacted at the hotel by an agent from the British Secret Intelligence Service, David Reece.
Chapter 2
‘I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, who shall I send, and who will go for us? Then said I, Here I am; send me.’
It was raining in London, which made the River Thames that flowed through the nation’s capital dark with churned-up mud, its colour more brown than usual. Sir Ian Fraser was looking out the window of his office on the top floor of Vauxhall Cross, the headquarters of MI6, the Secret Intelligence Service of the United Kingdom. Sir Ian head of SIS who was also known in the secret world of intelligence services and his employees simply as ‘C’, had his back to the room and the three other people sitting around the conference table. Still looking down at the river he could see the spires of the Houses of Parliament to his right and the outline of Thames House the home of MI5.
‘So, what you’re saying is she was British?’
The voice from the room behind Sir Ian was that of Sir Martin Bryant the Chairman of the British Joint Intelligence Committee. Fraser turned to face the three people in the vast office.
‘Yes, that’s what I’m saying. Interpol have identified her as being British. She was originally plain Margaret Brown from East London.’
‘But how did Interpol identify her as Margaret Brown. Surely there was nothing left to identify the woman?’ again it was Bryant asking the question.
It was now the turn of the only woman in the room to speak.
‘DNA and fingerprints.’ Caroline Aspinall was the head of the Security Service or MI5 as it was better known. MI5 have responsibility for intelligence operations within the boundaries of the United Kingdom, while MI6 has the responsibility for intelligence gathering and operations on all borders beyond the UK and throughout the world. Both organisations have as their main remit, the protection of the citizens of the UK and its assets. Aspinall was a career Intelligence Officer having joined MI5 straight from university in Cambridge. She had earned her stripes and the respect of the men in the room working her way up the ladder, first as a field agent then as a top-class analyst. Her clear thinking and dedication had saved many lives, and as she progressed through the Security Service ranks, her qualities were noticed. After serving for ten years as head of operations, she had recently been promoted to the top job when her boss had retired.
