by Stephen Moss
It had been an exhausted Saul, showing all of his sixty-five years in his gray tufted beard, who had called upon an old colleague in the middle of the night in Gaza. The friend had been startled and afraid but he had granted his colleague shelter and food. Saul knew he had ruined his colleague’s cover and probably endangered the man’s life, but every part of him had told him that this was more important than that. More dangerous to Israel. More valuable than either his life or that of his associate.
Saul woke from a deep sleep with an aching body. While he showered, his friend made him some coffee in the local tradition, roasting the fat green beans in a pan with some cardamom, then grinding them with a big wooden al-houn. As Saul explained the situation the other agent poured the steaming hot brew … repeatedly. Saul did not wave his fingers over his cup until he had downed his fifth.
He did not shave. He had too many enemies here. Anything he could do to disguise his identity was welcome. With fresh clothes and a gun, he ordered his colleague to leave the city as soon as possible, and then Saul returned to the place he had watched Raz rent a room.
For several hours he veered toward despair that she had moved on, knowing that if she had, he would probably never regain her scent. His relief was palpable when she returned to the lowly guesthouse, a heavy duffle bag of supplies slung over her shoulder. Canisters of food, perhaps, he could not make them out. But seeing that she was settling in for a long stay he settled himself as well, mentally and literally, seeking out and then renting himself a room in the building across the street before sending for help. Help from the only person he was certain he could trust.
- - -
“I’m still getting used to the fact that we can talk on the phone.” said Ayala into her cell, catching up with Neal on what she had missed on the satellite images from Iran. It was one of many things she was getting used to. Travelling first class at the US’s expense was another, as was sitting in the executive lounge she now found herself in at Heathrow airport. Starting to openly work with senior members of the CIA, MI6, French DGSE, and assorted other agencies across the globe was yet another.
She had been trying furiously to organize some semblance of an intelligence network to track down the remaining four Agents still at large when her old friend Saul had called her. It could only be in reference to one thing. And the location code he had used could only mean that his target had gone in the dragon’s den, and he had followed her. She had immediately boarded a flight to Europe and on to Tel Aviv, making arrangements as she went. The Mossad, the CIA, all had assets she could use on the ground. And she intended to use all of them.
She had been in the air when US StratCom had managed to identify and pass back images of Shahim in Iran, and had heard only secondhand the story of his clash with the Iranian Commandoes. As she swelled with pride at this evidence of what her allies John and Shahim could do, she also reminded herself that the tale also foretold the capabilities of her foes. All four of them.
“I know,” said Neal in response to her comment about using the phone, “it still seems forbidden. I hadn’t even paid my phone bill in three months. Apparently it has affected my credit.” He chuckled at the futility of such things, and Ayala smiled. She had tried to impress upon the team the need to be mindful of such things, sudden changes in that kind of behavior being the key signs someone such as herself might look for as they tried to identify a spy or a recently converted asset. But as they had approached zero hour they had all begun to quite simply say fuck it.
Since then, the inclusion of the leviathan political machines that were now joining their cause had put a quick end to such considerations. The identities she had carefully crafted for her team had become moot as they started to enjoy the full support of some of the most powerful governments, armed forces, and intelligence agencies on earth. There were not many doors you could not open with the blessing of the leaders of the US, UK, France, Germany, Japan, India, and Brazil. Unless those doors were in Russia or China, of course.
It was a Mossad liaison that greeted Ayala when she landed in Tel Aviv. It was the first time since she was eighteen that she had flown into the airport under her own identity and it felt deeply unnatural. But she was left little time for reveling in the newness of it as she brusquely refused a meeting at Mossad headquarters in favor of making her way toward the border immediately. Despite the liaison’s protestations, her summation of the Israelis’ readiness for her arrival was true to her own long experience, and her small team was indeed prepped and ready to move. She had joined them at a warehouse close to the border, two vans at the ready. The men were shoddily dressed, poorly shaven, slovenly and unkempt: clearly professionals, and she did not expect nor ask them to salute as she entered.
“Gentlemen, as you may or may not have been told, your mission today will take you into Gaza. But let me assure that we are not tracking anything so pedestrian as a Hamas cell today.” She allowed her offhanded dismissal of their longtime foe to sink in. A foe to whom they had all lost friends and colleagues and dedicated their very lives to battling. Seeing that they were all equal parts offended and piqued by the nature of her opening remark, she built upon it.
“No, by comparison to the quarry we track today, our friends at Hamas are but a nuisance. In fact, what you face today is so exponentially more dangerous that we may even call our friends at Hamas allies before this year is out, if we cannot defeat this entity on our own.” Again she allowed that bombshell to wash over them, and looked each of them in the eye, matching their rising anger with her own intensity of purpose until they each recognized the seriousness with which she delivered her words.
“Gentlemen, please open your packets.” They did so, and photographs of Raz Shellet were clipped at the top of each of the sheaves of papers inside. “Our first and only priority is the tracking of this single target. Not interception. The only way I can make it clear enough that interception is not an option, is to tell you that I will happily sacrifice any and all of you to her lethal abilities rather than provoke a full-scale conflict with her.
“I could tell you that I fear the conflict, or that I know we would lose it, no matter how well we all believe we have been trained. But instead I will tell you that the last time a team tried to take down one of this woman’s colleagues, it led to the disaster that is even now spreading up the East Coast of the United States.” They all looked up at her as one, aghast at her statement. Terrorism was an ever-present threat for everyone who lived in Israel, and a nuclear related attack, though it had never actually happened, was the specter that defined their greatest fear.
“She is a member of a team you have never heard of. Over the next few months and years you may hear more of them, but hopefully not. Hopefully we will defeat them before this all necessarily becomes public. For now our first priority is to find them. To find them and find out what they are planning. Only when we have done that will we have a chance of mitigating the threat they pose.
“So, I repeat to you, gentlemen, we are not to engage this woman under any circumstances. We are to assume at all times that she is hostile and vigilant. We are also never to use radio communications near her, or any other form of wireless communications, for it is very possible she can hear anything that is said over them. We are to assume positions around her last known location and monitor her behavior. And we are to do so while maintaining maximum cover and distance, we are going to place hard taps on her building’s phone lines and transmit the information back to Herzliya for analysis via hard line.”
Ayala turned to the liaison and spoke, “You will coordinate with our American and British friends to see that my team is involved in the process.”
He nodded, as this was also detailed inside his extraordinary package of orders for this mission. This woman had complete carte blanche. In his fifteen years at the agency, she had been given an unprecedented level of clearance. This had clearly come from the very top, and with enough weight behind it that it had received no resistance on it
s way down.
She turned back to the team, “Very well, gentlemen, let us begin. I want maps of the neighborhood, electric and sewage lines, known assets and threats in the vicinity, let’s go, gentlemen!”
They sprang to life, gathering laptops and locating information points on the fly. They all worked with rapid efficiency, quickly forming into the team they would need to be, skilled, amorphous agents slipping into roles as needed, taking and giving orders, and finding solutions as problems arose. Specialization was a luxury of regular troops. Field agents may or may not have a preferred field, but they were trained to be proficient in all: explosives, marksmanship, hand-to-hand combat, physical and electronic surveillance. They set to their task, and over the next two hours their plan formed.
Within a few hours of landing, Ayala was in the second of two deceptively dilapidated old vans, each carrying half her new team. Each was following a different route. Everyone on the team now had defined roles, along with the various weaponry, bugs, and other equipment they would need. A specialized group was also working with the liaison to ease their vans’ passages through the Gaza Strip’s strict border security.
Her team members’ respective roles were clear and she had every confidence that they would execute against them. What she could not predict was how Raz Shellet would behave. She had not been blowing smoke up the team’s proverbial ass when she said that the last time someone tried to take down one of these beasts it had caused the greatest single disaster in history.
For many years Ayala had enjoyed the quiet confidence of someone who is trained to a lethal standard, who can assume she is probably more deadly than any single person she might come up against. It was tempered by a healthy humility, but all of that confidence was banished by the thought of what she faced now. If she went up against this bitch, she knew she would be deader than Davy Crockett, and as she contemplated the recent demise of a squadron of heavily armed Iranian Commandoes, she reached for the black suit that lay in her bag and began to unwrap it.
She had thought of handing them out to the rest of the team, but unfortunately for them the risk of having one of the Agents discover the extent of their new abilities was greater than the risk of these men dying. It was a callous decision on her part, but it was not the first she had made, and it most certainly would not be the last.
Chapter 7: Let’s Come Together
Banu sat with a haunted expression on her soft, six-year-old face. It was late and she should be asleep, but she couldn’t, not tonight, not with that incessant coughing from her father and two of her brothers. So she had crept out of the small, three-room cabin that she lived in with her father, mother, grandfather, spinster aunt, and three brothers.
Even out here she could still hear the hacking coughs and wheezing snore of her father, but it was dulled and softened by the breathing of the wind in the valley and warm embrace of the sounds of the vivid fauna busying themselves, unseen, in their nocturnal world all around her.
She did not dare wander too far from the cabin. They lived only half a mile from their nearest neighbor, a larger house, with five separate rooms and only seven people living in it. Of course her family was sullenly jealous of them, but that family in turn was equally envious of the battered old Toyota truck that Banu’s father owned, a prized possession indeed. Banu had once been friends with the eldest son of the neighboring family, Mabatim, but he was two years older, and was no longer interested in spending time with a ‘child’. One of the many tribulations of her young life.
Now, late at night, she wanted to walk away from the cabin. To escape the incessant hacking, to lose herself in the night. But if she was missed inside and she was not near the cabin, the consequences would be extreme indeed. Fearing a beating or worse, she sat, shivering in the night air, trying to shut her ears to the sounds of her family succumbing to the virus she could not know was well on its way to killing them all.
- - -
Miles away, a damaged helicopter flew low and fast over the rugged ridges and valleys. Jennifer and Jack were bitterly cold, a powerful wind blowing over them from the damaged window Lord Mantil had been forced to kick out. But the shuddering breeze had served to awaken Jack at last. He had been disoriented at first, but it had not taken him long to ask after Martin and Jennifer’s copilot. As Jennifer told him what had happened, the grief and self-loathing in his eyes had been tangible, and had finally broken Jennifer of her hatred for him.
Huddling against the cold in the gunner’s seat of the helicopter, they had talked into each other’s ears, she updating him on Lord Mantil’s activities, he telling her the full truth behind what she had become unwittingly embroiled in. After what she had seen Lord Mantil accomplish, it had not been difficult to believe what Jack had said, and a bond of sorts had formed between them, breaking through the crustal remnant of mistrust and the pain of recently lost friends.
With fuel running low, Lord Mantil surveyed their progress. They were twenty miles from the border, but reports of fighters being deployed were coming over the radio. Fighters sent to seek the murderer of the squadron whose helicopter he had co-opted. He needed to land and get his charges away from the easily detectable chopper before the planes found them.
- - -
Banu sat in silence. She had never left the valley in her entire life. Its noises and sights were her whole world and she knew them intimately. The sounds of the seasons spoke to her and she could tell the changes in the weather like the rest of her farming family, from the humidity of the air and the thrum of the wind through the trees.
Before she could place a finger on it, something unsettled Banu. More than the ragged coughing, more than the cold wind, something new was in the air. After a moment, a faint swirling noise began to swell out of the night, and the insects and other creatures of the dark seemed to fade to silence in response, as if trying to identify the sound as well.
It was still but a whisper, but it was undeniable, echoing across the blackness like a demon. Banu sat up, straining her ears to identify it, but even as she did so it was becoming more and more pronounced by the moment. It grew and grew until it filled her ears and became a tangible breath on her face, rising to a gale, her ragged sleeping gown whipping this way and that as the shouted voice of hell thundered out of the night at her. The monstrous black shape emerged from the dark sky without lights or warning, descending upon her world like a dragon, and she shook with fear, tears streaming down her face. A sea of soil and grit pelted her and the house behind her and she shielded her face against the storm.
Her father and brothers came rushing from the house even as the whirlwind sank to the ground in front of her, settling on the sandy soil with improbable lightness. From its side, a man sprang nimbly, running up to her family with long strides. They could only stare bewildered at the apparition in front of them as the beast he had been born on whined, its roar slowly diminishing.
As the blades that spun over the beast’s head started to slow, the man shouted over the dissipating tornado he had arrived on. He spoke in the lyrical Persian dialect that was their tongue, “I am sorry but I require your truck, give it to me and you will not be harmed, attempt to stop me and I will be forced to kill you. Is that clear?”
Lord Mantil had no time for diplomacy. He needed to move. More than that he recognized the initial signs of the virus in these people, and knew that their lives were essentially already sacrificed to the first of humanity’s battles with the Mobiliei. Hoping that the dramatic nature of his arrival amongst these people would overwhelm any desire to resist him, Lord Mantil stood, bold as day, and demanded that they acquiesce.
They shook in front of him, Banu’s father trembling with equal parts fear and impotent rage, but he said nothing. After a moment, Lord Mantil nodded with finality and stepped past them to walk toward the truck that sat under a tarpaulin on the other side of the house. He started the old Toyota with ease, his capable fingers caressing the wires of the ordinarily unreliable starter motor in ways th
e truck’s keys had failed to do in years. As Shahim drove the old truck round to the side of the now idling helicopter, a growing anger boiled in Banu.
She could not help it. She was overwhelmed with contempt for her cowardly father. That truck was all that separated them from the nomads and lowly serfs of the plains, and her father had put up no more resistance than if the powerful-looking man had asked for an ear of corn.
Her father glanced at her and caught her look of disdain, seeing her plain-faced disgust at his cowardice. Unwilling and unable to face the man who was stealing their livelihood, he lashed out at her instead, delivering all his rage at his lack of courage into a vicious backhanded blow across his young daughter’s face. She staggered back, her vision swimming as her cheek swelled, blood filling her mouth. Her father sensed shock from his sons and turned on them with the threat of the same, but their looks of fear were not for their father as they stared at something behind their enraged patriarch. The man turned to see what they were looking at, but was greeted instead with the cold solidity of Shahim’s fist connecting with his jaw. He flew back, unconscious before he hit the ground, and Shahim turned to the stunned girl. She was sitting on the dusty soil, her lip and nose bleeding, trying to compute what was happening.
The Agent stared at her. Though the little girl did not know it yet, her whole family was about to die. There was, unfortunately, very little that Shahim could do about that. Within a week, maybe two, everyone she knew would be dead, and if Shahim left her here she would be dead too.
But worse than that, somehow, she would suffer the fury and rage of her cowardly father in those last few days, adding brutality and cruelty to an already tragic end. Shahim could not help but be overcome by a sudden desire to save this single life, one amongst thousands, a single drop of mercy in a bloody sea of atonement. He looked at her. He could do it. It was not much, but he could save her.
