by John Altman
Copyright © 2017 by John Altman
E-book published in 2017 by Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Cover design by Kathryn G. English
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Library e-book ISBN 978-1-5047-5481-1
Trade e-book ISBN 978-1-5047-5856-7
CIP data for this book is available from
the Library of Congress
Blackstone Publishing
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Ashland, OR 97520
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FALSE FLAG: the technique of posing as an enemy to execute a covert operation and provide casus belli, “a case for war.”
Prologue
Mount Hood, OR
She feigned sleep.
At last, silently, she slipped from the bed. Navigating by moonlight, she crept to the doorway and out into the front room. Here she paused, listening. From the bedroom, his breathing maintained its slow, even rhythm. From outside came only the sounds of the mountain: owls and rustling field mice and cold October wind whispering darkly through cedar and fir.
Her purse sat on the couch, beside his oil-stained Levi’s. Brushing a strand of hair from her face, she took a penlight from the handbag. The narrow beam swept around the room, illuminating empty forty-ounce beer bottles on the coffee table, a woodstove, an old Frigidaire in the attached kitchenette, a large Confederate flag hanging on one wall.
She opened the stove and stirred embers and ashes with a heavy iron poker. She looked inside the refrigerator, behind the flag, beneath the sink. She rifled through cupboards and drawers. In the small bathroom, she explored the medicine cabinet and the toilet tank. She returned to the front room and circled the perimeter, softly thumping the molding and the low ceiling, searching for drop panels or loose baseboards.
She went back into the bedroom. The penlight’s beam found swastikas, Celtic crosses, SS insignia, and Tyr runes tattooed across the sleeping man’s bare chest.
She looked beneath the bed frame. She opened dresser drawers. She pulled the nightstand away from the wall, gently, gently … and found nothing but dust bunnies and an unused electrical socket.
She slipped into her shirt and moved back through the front room, to the cabin’s single door. Outside, shivering in the cold wind, she walked around the cabin, bare feet crunching softly on dead leaves. Hiking trails wound off into the dense forest. Wind sighed through moonlit trees. The air smelled of pine sap and fresh rain.
On the west-facing side of the cabin, she found a woodpile covered with a frosty tarp. Out back, a padlocked toolshed. Near the shed, a hatch trapdoor leading to a sunken cellar. The trapdoor’s wood was splintered and mossy, but its Uline padlock was gleaming, brand spanking new. The toolshed, by contrast, was secured with only a rusty old Grainger. She hammered the shed open with a strike of one palm. The penlight swept across an air compressor, a gas can, bungee cords, a chain saw, a pole tree pruner … bolt cutters.
The bolt cutters made short work of the Uline. Lying facedown on half-frozen ground, she played the penlight over the dark crawl space. She saw crenellated concrete and moist, worm-cast earth, a rotting support beam, an ossified dead rat, a patch of green, almost phosphorescent moss. And there, tucked far back in shadow, unlabeled wooden crates, carefully stacked.
As the wind rose to a growling moan behind her, she clamped the flashlight between her teeth and slid nimbly through the hatch.
She picked her way carefully forward, over crumbling concrete and frigid mud, through a mysterious subterranean breeze. Using the bolt cutters as a crowbar, she set to work on the first crate. Spiders and centipedes scurried frantically away. With an effort, she got the top off. Inside, she discovered neatly rolled rags smelling faintly of oil. Inside the rags were M16 lower receiver parts.
In the next crate were AR15 rifles, to which the M16 parts could be attached to create fully automatic weapons.
She kept going. Ka-bar knives, modified practice hand grenades, fuses and detonators, stacks of white-power literature: The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, Traitors Beware: A History of Robert Depugh’s Minutemen, Fighting for the American Dream, The Turner Diaries, Ambush at Ruby Ridge: How Government Agents Set Randy Weaver Up and Took His Family Down. Taking a pamphlet from one stack, she opened to a random page: “The issue with Jews is not their blood, but their identity. If we could somehow destroy the Jewish identity, then they wouldn’t cause much problem. The problem is that Jews look White, and in many cases are White, yet they see themselves as minorities. Just like niggers, most Jews are always thinking about …” She let the pamphlet fall to the ground.
On the sixth crate, she knew even before removing the lid that she had hit pay dirt. Odors are the most powerful triggers of memory—the olfactory nerve lies adjacent to both the amygdala and the hippocampus—and as she winkled a nail out of crumbling plywood, her brain made a sudden and vivid cross-connection.
She had been manning a checkpoint in Haifa with Asher. Much scowling, no smiling, hands never leaving the stocks of their Glilon assault rifles. Asher had waved forward a boy wearing a checkered kaffiyeh. Approaching, the youth had reached beneath his loose-fitting robe. And Jana had caught a vague but unforgettable whiff of Composition-C RDX: sour and chemical and faintly toxic, like a child’s plastic toy left too long in the sun. And then her world had turned to fire and blood and agony.
She pulled out another nail, set aside the lid, and lifted free a brick of plastic explosive: bluish-white, soft to the touch, and surprisingly heavy.
The crate was filled with it.
The last crate was unlabeled, and lighter than the rest. Prying off the lid, she removed a faded black briefcase with a combination lock. Holding the latch in the open position, she set the leftmost number to zero and tested the other two wheels. Loose. Still holding the latch, she reset the leftmost wheel to one. Two … At three, the middle wheel gave resistance. She repeated the procedure. The combination that opened the case was, perhaps unsurprisingly, 3-1-1—code for a triple repetition of the eleventh letter of the English alphabet: KKK.
Inside, the penlight beam illumined eight wallet-size plastic packets, labeled in Cyrillic, German, and English: Handhabung siehe Anleitung. SOMAN, SARIN, V-GASES.
Inside each wallet she found ten glass ampoules, tipped blood-red.
Light splashed from the open trapdoor behind her. Her heart vaulted into her throat. Dousing the penlight, holding her breath, she backed up against one wall.
“Th’fuck?” His voice was thick, blurred with sleep, weed, and Mickey’s malt liquor. “You down here, you bitch?”
She sank as far as possible back into shadow. He descended clumsily through the hatch—a slab of tattooed muscle, backlit by pale moonlight and brandishing a lantern flashlight in one hand.
“Th’fuck?” he said again, wonderingly, as his light found the opened crates.
She stepped up behind him, raising the bolt cutters with both hands.
She swung hard. He staggered; the lantern seesawed crazily. She swung again. A sickening crunch, and he went down.
The lantern rolled and fetched up glaring directly into his face. Ice-blue eyes shocked and staring, lips slightly parted. A pulped wound in his right temple pulsing out blood.
She retreated from the spreading pool of gore. She had never killed before. For a few moments, she swallowed against her hitching gorge. Then she made a small “uh” and put her hands on her knees, breathed, and counted down. Five, four, three, two …
Bett
er.
She straightened again. For a few moments more she stood motionless, looking at the dead man, the still-widening pool of blood, the open crates of plastic explosive and white-power literature and red-tipped ampoules, as the soft wind whickered through the trees outside.
An owl hooted somewhere nearby, breaking the spell, and she moved again.
Part One
Chapter One
Princeton, NJ
A soft breeze ruffled the gold and crimson leaves.
Dalia Artzi sighed and rearranged her hands in her lap. Her gaze moved restlessly away from the mullioned window, back to the study where she sat. Mellow late-afternoon sunshine fell across dark wood, pearled wall sconces, shelves jammed with leather-bound classics, a heavy marble hearth sheltering a single ash-encrusted log.
Her eyes drifted shut. Behind closed lids, she saw the lecture hall where she had spent most of her afternoon. Wrenching the attention of fidgety undergrads away from smartphones, MacBooks, and the bright Indian summer day outside had required her most commanding tone. By the time she had reached her conclusion, her throat was dry, yet she had dug deep, found an untapped reserve, and restated her thesis with the same vigor she displayed at the start.
“On the battlefield,” she had declared, “no single quality is more decisive than maneuverability.”
She had moved out from behind the lectern: a broad-shouldered woman pushing seventy, wearing a button-down tweed suit and purple d’Orsay pumps, with dark hair shining silver near the roots. “Not that all of my esteemed colleagues, I should mention, will agree.” Her English formed too low in the throat, yet it was precise. Her carriage was sturdy and flat-footed even in heels, suggesting hardy peasant forebears.
“Richardson at Yale, for instance, continues to value the conventional model of attrition warfare: two armies square off, and the more powerful in terms of resources, firepower, manpower, and matériel eventually achieves victory. In his model, maneuverability is of secondary concern. And, of course, he is entitled to his opinion. But I can think of no lack of brilliant generals—from Khalid ibn al-Walid, military counsel to the Prophet Muhammad during the seventh century, to George Washington, striking a vital surprise blow across the Delaware River on Christmas night of 1776, to Trần Văn Trà, architect of the Tet Offensive in 1968—who might beg to differ.”
A man in a gloomy blue suit had slipped quietly into the rear of the hall. Dalia’s gaze flicked momentarily in his direction. Gaunt and high-cheeked, he possessed the look of someone hailing from outside academia—the corporate world, perhaps, or inside the Beltway.
“When you read Keegan’s depiction of Agincourt over the weekend,” she had continued after a brief pause, “put yourselves in the place of the French: better equipped than your enemy, better rested, better fed, better armored, better reinforced, far more numerous, fighting on your home terrain. And yet, mired in mud, fatigued by sixty pounds of heavy plate mail before you ever joined combat, crushed and crowded against your fellow soldier, outflanked and outmaneuvered at every turn by Henry’s lighter, more mobile longbowmen. And then convey this feeling to me, if you would be so kind, in an essay of approximately thirty-five hundred words. Quail not, my friends. As Henry himself might say, ‘Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood.’”
As the students filed from the amphitheater, the stranger in the blue suit had approached the lectern. And now, forty-five minutes later, Dalia Artzi found herself here, in a stone cottage tucked into a forgotten far corner of Princeton’s ivy-draped campus, with the hour reserved for her afternoon nap ticking steadily away.
Her eyes opened again. A family of deer had appeared outside the window. Two spotted fawns nosed through the waving bluestem. The doe sniffed the wind, one ear twitching.
Again Dalia rearranged her hands in her lap. Her eyes moved past the browsing deer, to the crooked fence at the meadow’s far end. The sprawling woods beyond concealed the Institute for Advanced Study, where Einstein had spent the last years of his life in vain pursuit of his elusive unified field theory. “A quaint and ceremonious village …” he had called Princeton, before adding, “… of puny demigods on stilts.”
And beyond the forest rambled the hilly field where, on an icy morning in 1777, George Washington had given the Great American Experiment a crucial early boost. Upon being offered her visiting professorship to Princeton, Dalia had immediately anticipated witnessing firsthand the battle’s annual reenactment. But it had turned out to be a travesty: the positions of the armies reversed, the date wrong, General Mercer’s crucial martyrdom altogether absent, and hot dog vendors where the redcoats’ heavy cannon should have been.
A man entered the study. He was chubby, sixtyish, wearing a starched white dress shirt. Dark circles underscored his intelligent green eyes. In his left hand, he held a half-empty Styrofoam cup of oily black liquid as his right reached for a handshake. “They found you,” he said. “An honor, madam. Jim McConnell’s the name.”
Dalia shook the hand firmly. She followed McConnell from the study, past mounted heads of elk, moose, and antelope, and into a second room strikingly similar to the first. A picture window gave a slightly different angle on the foraging deer. A bird feeder, lighted by the low-hanging sun, hosted a robin. Or a cardinal, maybe? She was not good at American birds.
“Coffee?” McConnell closed the door gently behind him. “Tea? Aperitif?”
“No.” As an afterthought: “Toda.” Thank you.
“Please, sit.” He waved at a burgundy club chair, then took a seat opposite. For a few moments, he concentrated on a dark vein of wood in his armrest, choosing his next words carefully. Somewhere on campus, not far away, a young woman laughed.
Abruptly, he smiled. “It really is an honor. I’ve enjoyed your books immensely.”
She dipped her chin modestly.
“Thank you for making the time. I appreciate how busy you must be. How are you enjoying Princeton?”
For the space of several heartbeats, she regarded him coolly. “Too much bureaucracy,” she finally said. “People try to be polite instead of saying what they mean.”
He blinked. “Er, yes.” Clearing his throat, he shifted in his chair. He raised his Styrofoam cup, looked inside with distaste, and set it aside. “Well. So I’ll get right to it. You must be wondering why I’ve asked to see you today.”
She said nothing.
“Let this meeting remain between us, Professor, if you don’t mind. I’m affiliated with a subsection of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. I serve as liaison with several universities. My particular office is TS/SCI—Top Secret, Sensitive Compartmented Information—only.”
He paused, leaving another space that invited filling. Dalia waited him out.
“Some of the country’s best and brightest work for us. And many of them consider you an inspiration. I’m told you’re the greatest strategic thinker since John Boyd.”
She gave a bored shrug.
“Myself, I’m a humble middle manager. Not equipped to judge. But when these people say that in the field of maneuver warfare you’re the woman to beat, I listen.” His eyebrows lifted suggestively. “Of course, I’m acquainted with your feelings about … How did you put it? ‘America’s ill-fated macho posturing in Iraq, driven by an archaic empire-building urge’?”
She gave an arid smile.
“As I said, I’ve read your books. Clearly, you’re nobody’s fool.” Leaning away, he stroked his sagging dewlaps thoughtfully. “A political naïf, perhaps—forgive me—but a tactical genius. I flatter myself, madam, that I can talk some sense into you. There’s too much at stake for me not to try.”
Very slightly, but with a distinct note of challenge, she lifted her chin.
“You must recognize,” he continued after a few moments, “that we face a common enemy. If Arabs put down their guns, the fighting stops. If Jews put down their guns, Israel is destroyed. Y
ou can’t make peace with an enemy that wants to obliterate you.”
“A friend of Israel, are you, Mr. McConnell?”
“Anyone who values democracy—freedom—is a friend of Israel.”
“Until things get messy. At which point you withdraw your troops and leave others to fight your battles.”
“Don’t make the mistake of—”
“I’ve made no mistake.” Her dark eyes blazed. “And as you say, I’m ‘nobody’s fool.’ Once, perhaps, during my kibbutznik days. But those were a long time ago.”
Again he paused. He laced fingers together carefully in his lap. “At the risk of overstepping, I have a son myself, Professor. And if he had been subjected to … God knows what, paraded as a war prize, kept from public view for half a decade, I promise you, you would not be able to hold me back if someone offered me the opportunity I’m offering you now. You of all people should value Israel’s right to defend itself.”
“I value,” she said icily, “the right of all people to defend themselves.” She stood up. “I wish I could say, sir, that it has been a pleasure.”
She turned neatly on one d’Orsay heel and left him looking after her.
north of Tel Aviv, Israel
Inside a house of pale limestone, atop a hill near the Trans-Samaria Highway, cold moonlight angled through two large picture windows.
Seated behind a piano, a man picked out chords—melancholy minors, tense augmented triads, to match his restless mood. He eased into E-flat major, the key of kings, triumphant and regal. Then into a snatch of Wagner, with its schizophrenic shifting tonal centers. A terrible anti-Semite, Wagner, but only a fool would deny his talent.
The man’s fingers came to a rest. He glanced at the Roman-
numeral clock hanging on one wall. Getting late. Too much wine. Tomorrow he must visit the office, weekend notwithstanding. Too many important projects under way. No rest for the wicked.
