19
Quneitra, Syria
Day 6
Professor Rhinefeld scurried between the city’s burned out buildings. An ominous black night had descended upon the Syrian landscape, making it difficult to discern even the simplest of shapes.
Rhinefeld knew that at least one of his captors was looking for him; he could occasionally hear the man, scouring the shattered remains of the city several blocks behind him.
The professor cut through one of the broken buildings to a room several feet into the facade. He dropped his aching body down onto a pile of dry rotted wood shelving to catch his breath. The silence around him was haunting. His muscles cramped and his lungs burned deep inside his chest. The accumulated hemoglobin in his lungs attested to the taxing demand he was placing on his heart with the faintest taste of blood on his tongue.
His eyes found a hole the size of a refrigerator in the ceiling above the doorway. The charred rubble at the foot of the opening looked like a mortar round had punched its way through the ceiling.
He staggered over to the doorway and set his foot against the jam’s large hinge plate. He thrust himself upward and gripped the edge of the hole. The first few inches of concrete gave underneath the weight of his body and he fell with a loud crash to the floor beneath a shower of dust and debris. He lay there and looked up at the circular space, groaning in exasperation before shuffling to his feet. Rhinefeld repositioned himself in front of the door and put his foot back on the hinge. Slowly, he eased himself up until he was hanging from the edge of the hole. Once his eyes were level with his hands, he could see into the second story room. Everything his eyes landed on in the dim light, every stick of furniture, every light fixture, everything, had been exposed to the ravages of war and the arbitrary passage of time.
Rhinefeld’s arms shook as he tried to lift his body over the edge. After only a few pathetic attempts, he gave up. He didn’t have the strength to heave his mass up onto the second floor. He lowered himself back into the room and let go. It was a small drop but his feet smacked the concrete with a painful thud–sending sharp needlelike pains into the heels and balls of his feet.
Rhinefeld desperately searched the room for something he could prop up below the hole. He grabbed the top plank he’d sat on earlier. The wood was old and dry rotted with a deep bow in the middle. Void of other options, the professor leaned it up against the wall and rested the tip of his shoe on the top edge. He set his other foot on the hinge again and started the whole thing over. This time he reached up to the edge of the hole with ease. His hands could extend a good five to six inches into the second floor room. He pulled himself up, his arms shaking violently as each second passed under the great strain. Sweat beaded up on his forehead.
Rhinefeld pulled himself up to his chest and then his waist, where he lay for a minute, catching his breath. He pulled himself in the rest of the way and leaned over the edge of the hole. A few minutes passed before his stalker entered. He recognized the man as Azim. He cringed at the sight of him. Many of the professor’s bruises had been courtesy of Azim.
Azim scanned the room for the professor. Satisfied that he wouldn’t be finding his prey in it, he sat on the same dilapidated wood pile with its missing piece of wood. Azim angrily yanked a broken cigarette out of his shirt pocket. He broke the filter off completely and stuffed the smoke into the side of his mouth.
Rhinefeld pressed the tips of his shoes into the concrete floor and pulled himself silently away from the edge of the hole using his thigh muscles. He came to rest so that his face hovered over the drab yellowish gray floor. Rhinefeld had no plan at all, except to not get caught. He knew his actions had been foolish in climbing out of the window but there really was no point in flogging himself over that fact now. He only hoped and prayed that the students would not see reprisals.
The professor thought of nothing but the students now. He decided right there, on that crumbling concrete floor, that even if it only meant giving them one more day of life, it was worth sacrificing himself for it.
He steadied himself again with his toes. This time he pushed his body back to the edge of the hole so that he could put an eye on his pursuer.
The two made eye contact immediately. In a long, strange, moment they stared at each other, each man hesitating in the dark. Azim turned around to pick up the rifle that he had just laid against the wall. Rhinefeld’s eye caught a softball sized chunk of concrete that was dangling from the far side of the hole. He reached forward and grabbed the loose rock, which broke off in his hand. He drove the three pound stone downward and released his grip. The lump of concrete smashed into the center of Azim’s head. The man took several choppy steps backward and then fell through the open doorway, his rifle clamoring to the floor with him. Rhinefeld saw his opportunity. He grabbed another loose piece of concrete, this one about half the size of the first, and winged his body down through the hole. He landed hard, both of his ankles rolled to the outside and he fell to the floor. An intense pain shot up his lower legs. He looked at Azim. The man wasn’t unconscious but appeared to be on the verge of blacking out. Rhinefeld leaned on the fleshy part of his forearms and alternated shifting his weight between them as he crawled toward the stunned kidnapper. The professor got up close enough to smell Azim’s stale cigarette breath. The young man’s eyes were rolled halfway back into his head and moving from side to side as he struggled not to fall asleep in front of his former victim. Rhinefeld took the other rock and slammed it into the bridge of his nose. Blood ran from his nostrils and down his dark neck as his body sagged into dreamland.
The professor flopped over onto his back and pulled his right knee up to his chest. He carefully rotated his ankle in a counterclockwise motion and then reversed it. The ligaments that connected his foot to his leg were sore but nothing had been torn and no bone had been broken. He switched legs and repeated the process. The left foot was extra tender but it too would heal. He put his leg down and pushed his upper body into the sitting position. He looked back to the man next to him. Azim showed no signs of life, save for the subtle rise and fall of his chest.
The professor slowly got back to his feet. He bent down at the waist and retrieved Azim’s weapon. The aging educator hobbled over to a corner of the room. He stood the rifle up on its butt stock and laid the barrel in the joint where two walls came together. He traveled back to where Azim’s incapacitated body was and hovered over the man. Rhinefeld had nothing to tie the terrorist up with, no way to secure his body. He thought then that he would just keep running, this time with his pursuer’s weapon, and return with help. Then a thought froze him in place.
“Getting him to tell me some details about their plan might be useful.” He thought to himself. Rhinefeld didn’t know much about rifles and he didn’t want to wind up in a struggle where the man overpowered him in his weakened condition. But he saw no other way.
The professor bent down and grabbed the original rock that he had crowned Azim with. Lifting up the man’s head, he placed the rock at the base of his skull. He then picked up the second rock and cradled it in the palm of his hand. He leaned over Azim with the rock until he came to, which turned out to be a long ten minutes.
Azim’s eyes blinked rapidly and he groaned. He had momentarily forgotten where he was. But as his blurred vision slowly cleared, the professor’s face came into view. Azim gasped. He moved about in an attempt to get free from Rhinefeld who held a bloody rock in both of his hands just six inches away from his chin.
“Don’t move.” Rhinefeld shouted in broken Arabic.
“I am not moving.” Azim screamed back.
“I have placed a rock at the base of your skull. If I drive this one into your chin, your neck will break and quite possibly your brain stem. You will die instantly. Mine will be the last face you ever see.” Rhinefeld said coldly. The archaeology professor had no intention of striking the man again. He hoped desperately that the bluff would go his way.
“What are you waiting for?” A
zim yelled.
Rhinefeld thrust the rock downward stopping only inches from Azim’s face. Azim jerked his head back hard against the rock that braced it. He squirmed under the lingering stone.
“What is your plan? Are you going to let us go?” Rhinefeld shouted in frustration. The rock he had was shaking violently. His emotions were causing his hands to tremble and his voice to pitch up and down in broad swings. Specs of spit flew from the corners of his mouth as he repeated, “Are you going to let the students go?”
“No.” Azim replied quietly as he looked away from Rhinefeld’s penetrant stare.
The professor was tempted to crash the rock down the rest of the distance onto Azim’s face but he dropped it next to the terrorist instead. His heart sank at the realization that there had never been a thought of releasing them. Coupled with his personal doubts that anyone would be coming to extract them, his countenance fell hard.
The archaeologist walked back over to where he had stashed the AK-47 and picked it up. He had seen enough movies to know which end to point at an enemy but that’s about where his gun knowledge expired. Azim knew nothing of Rhinefeld’s inexperience however and the professor intended to use this to his advantage.
Azim was struggling to get to his feet.
“That’s right, get up.” He ordered.
Rhinefeld could see that Azim was out of sorts; the fanatic was dizzy and off balance. His face was flush and blood still trickled from his nose.
“We are in the desert, many miles away from any inhabited place.” said the man. “Where do you think you will take me?”
Rhinefeld studied Azim’s face briefly before replying.
“To the students.”
Azraq Jiden Island
Ben slipped into the warm Arabian Sea and swam toward one of three doors attached to a floating garage. Emily Stansborough was behind him, thrusting her arms and legs out to each side like a frog but barely keeping up.
The pair broke the surface on the other side of one of the doors next to a wooden deck that lined the interior walls. They waited for several seconds, ensuring that they were alone, then Ben threw his hands up on the deck and lifted himself out of the water. He turned and extended Emily his hand.
Two of the garage’s slips were occupied while the third was empty. Ben walked along the hard wood planking, his tennis shoes squishing softly beneath him. The first slip housed a small bone white, pleasure yacht. A series of wide, dark tinted windows lined the upper deck and a brightly polished railing followed the footprint of the hull.
Ben passed it by, proceeding to the last slip. Parked in the spot was a black Vescucchi cigarette boat.
Deriving the last part of its name from its long slender shape, the Vescucchi was, at one time, the fastest production speed boat sold to the public. The craft gently bobbed up and down with the ebb of the bay. Ben grabbed the mooring lines and pulled the craft closer to the deck. He stepped onto the boat and began searching the cockpit for keys. He searched under the dash, around the steering column, beneath the captain’s chair and inside a glove compartment next to the wheel but he couldn’t find them. He opened the cover to the engine compartment last and peered down into an empty housing. He dropped the hood and drove a frustrated fist down on top of the fiberglass shroud. He figured the boat’s powerplant was probably being repaired somewhere else. Ben jumped off of the Vescucchi and climbed aboard the yacht.
He opened the wheelhouse door and stepped inside of a small cabin that housed the helm. The keys were in the ignition. He looked at Emily through the open door; she was still standing on the planked walkway, no signs of fear or distress on her oval face. In an incredibly short time, she had come to trust Ben.
Schweitzer stepped into the yacht’s main cabin behind the wheelhouse, through a joining door. Because the boat was relatively small for a yacht, many of the common amenities were downsized or simply not there. Ben quickly walked past a row of leather couches and a forty inch flat screen television. Behind a tiny wet bar was a mahogany door with polished chrome trim. The Mossad agent opened it and stepped inside of a dark paneled hallway. His shoes transitioned from the spongy sopping sounds they were making to a more pronounced and flat thud as the floor changed to marble. There was only one master bedroom for the ship’s occupants and one stateroom for the captain. At the end of the hall Ben came to the yacht’s engine room.
To his surprise, Ben found the craft was powered by twin sixteen cylinder, 2100 horsepower Harkin-Marine diesel engines. These particular powerplant’s would propel the yacht through the water at better than sixty knots, a steady clip by anyone’s estimation. A pile of scuba gear rested in the corner behind a medium sized boiler. There were six oxygen tanks with rigging and matching buoyancy compensator vests. Ben fumbled through the equipment until all of the tanks were upright and their gauges facing him. Three of them were full, while the others were between one third full and completely empty. He lifted one of the cylinders and bounced it in the palms of his hands, feeling the weight.
There were two immediate problems with using the yacht to escape. The first was that there was an empty slip in the garage. Assuming that another boat was usually docked in the slip meant that it was either somewhere else for repairs, or it was currently patrolling the perimeter of the island. If it turned out to be the latter, then Ben would have to contend with the pilot of that boat once he and Emily were sighted leaving the harbor. The second was that Nazari’s men were currently scouring the grounds in search of him and the rest of the reporters meaning they would have to fend off the attack they were sure to receive from the shoreline.
Ben hoisted the oxygen tank onto his shoulder and bent down to retrieve another. He carried the tanks through the boat and set them down on the walkway in the garage. He went back for two more.
“What are we going to do with those?” Emily asked when he returned the second time.
“Have any experience with scuba diving Ms. Stansborough?”
“Uh…some…well a little that I picked up in Hawaii. Of course, that was about ten years ago.” She said nervously. For the first time, a portion of her resolve seemed to melt.
“Okay pay attention, this will be a quick refresher.” Ben whispered as he picked up one of the steel bottles.
Emily listened carefully as the spy reminded her of how the tanks worked.
“You simply inhale like normal using the regulator and then breathe out through it. Try to control your emotions or you’ll consume more oxygen than you need and possibly be out before you’d like. The bubbles that you create by exiting air through the regulator might attract several fish. Don’t panic or your mask will fog up and you won’t be able to see, which will complicate matters.”
Ben set the tank down and went back to the engine room. He returned with two of the buoyancy compensator vests and a small spool of nylon thread. He lassoed two of the tanks with the nylon and began weaving an intricate net from the bottom of each tank up to the neck just below the threaded valve and then around the body of both cylinders. Once the two tanks were effectively one, he started working on the other two and then attached an air regulator to each rig.
Emily hesitated when he handed one of the heavy sets of compressed air, along with the buoyancy compensator, to her. She didn’t know what he was planning but just the sight of the underwater equipment formed a tight knot in her stomach.
“What are we going to do?” She asked again, partly knowing the answer.
Ben looked at Emily. She was pretty, especially in the dim light of the garage. He noticed the long locks of flowing dark blonde hair that fell just beyond her shoulders. She had a classic look and elegance to her that couldn’t be disguised. In Ben’s line of work, there was no time to cultivate relationships. He’d always considered this part of the sacrifice he’d decided to make in joining the Mossad. It had never really bothered him before but as of late, a lot of things were beginning to make him uneasy.
“We are going to be strapping these to our b
acks…I don’t have a plan for therest…yet.” He said.
Emily was about to make a suggestion when they overheard voices coming from outside the dry entrance to the garage.
Ben reacted quickly, grabbing the tanks and lowering them into the water between the boat and the dock. He turned on his heels and secured the reporter by the waist. Lifting her off of her feet, he pulled her in close and stepped off the edge of the dock. The two of them plunged into the water and grabbed the tanks that were kept from sinking by the compensators. Ben held onto his rig and vest with one hand and kicked gently until his head poked through the water on the other side of the empty slip. He pushed on the bottom of the walkway to keep his head below its level and out of sight, while he monitored the entrance to the garage. Two men armed with AK-47’s entered. They were speaking Farsi. Though the Iranian language had been a part of Ben’s extensive training, he couldn’t hear everything from his position in the water. He only made out enough of the conversation to know that they were arguing about a football match between two Iranian teams.
The rumbling sound of an approaching boat filled the garage. One of the men headed over to a fixture on the wall and depressed a large, green, square button. The door in front of the empty slip rolled upward in its tracks and stopped when it was parallel with the roof of the floating parking structure.
Ben dipped below the surface as light burst through the open door. He pulled Emily to himself and swam under the walkway next to the yacht. They emerged below the wooden planks and treaded water with their legs.
A blue catamaran with broad yellow pinstripes slid into the empty slot. The men on the walkway grabbed the mooring lines and tied them to two cleats embedded in the deck. Several men walked around on the deck of the boat.
“Did you find them?” one of them asked the pilot of the ship as he stepped out of the tiny standalone wheel house and onto the slender walkway. The man replied in Arabic. “Does it look like we found them, you idiot?”
SANCTION: A Thriller Page 16
