“Time for breakfast,” he said and for the first time I thought that I detected him suppressing a smile of satisfaction.
We all went to Jerry’s hotel restaurant. I sat next to Udi and when the other two went to refill their plates at the buffet, I asked Udi how things were going with Niki.
“Niki who?” he asked, and the subject was closed.
Back in Israel, I found Niki exhausted after the intensive intelligence collection course, but also happy. This was the first time since our reunion that we’d been apart for longer than a day or two and during that evening and night, our pent-up longings for each other kept erupting right up until we had to leave and go our separate ways.
When I reached the base, I heard good things about her from the staff who didn’t care as much about “need to know” as Udi. “I have never seen such agility in performing the phone drill,” Avi told me. He was referring to a move involving surveillance of a target who was staying at a hotel but would regularly use a nearby payphone. The trainee’s task was to slip a microphone-transmitter into the mouthpiece of the phone. As he or she was doing this, a cop was sent in to check up on them. Niki was just finishing replacing the cover of the mouthpiece, with the mike already installed, when she was surprised by the officer.
She greeted him with a smile and said, “Oh, hi officer, thank God you’re here. Perhaps you can screw this mouthpiece on better. I’m not strong enough.”
The cop, who didn’t know what it was all about, helped her. Only after Niki had left the scene, when the officer was rebuked over his radio, did he hurry after her, and ask her why she’d been tampering with the phone, and why she had a screwdriver in her hand. “One can tell that you haven’t used a payphone in a long time,” she said. “Ever since the arrival of the mobile phone, no one maintains these things, and people who need them know they have to work on them a little.”
He nodded and let her go.
Niki, my own champion.
I recalled how I had strained my brain for a cover story when I’d done the same drill and, in the end, had come up with a really pathetic pretext. I wondered if Udi also made such comparisons between me and her.
2.
Together and Apart
OUR TEAM’S NEXT missions were no less successful than the New Delhi caper. Relatively quiet months in Israel, as far as terror attacks were concerned, enabled Mossad intelligence to focus us more and more on activities connected to Iran and Syria’s non-conventional arms acquisition, and their supply of weaponry to the terrorist organizations. The material from New Delhi yielded further operations that kept many other squads busy, and we also were assigned a small slice, which involved photographing the documents of a high-level North Korean official on a stopover in Beijing.
I knew Beijing from my trip there after my first year at art school but in the interim the city had changed astonishingly. A wide superhighway, the likes of which I could not recall, led from the airport to the city centre, and as we drew nearer I saw the stumps of a dense multitude of skyscrapers that hadn’t been there ten years before. The city’s multiple ring roads were wider than I remembered and it seemed to me that entire neighbourhoods of the traditional hutong alleys and small homes had been razed to make room for the highways and high-rises.
The break-in and photographing operation was fairly straightforward and went smoothly. This time, too, we got our hands on a laptop, the insides of which Udi was only too happy to replicate, giving plenty of fruitful work to the personnel of the department whose job was tracking non-conventional armaments.
The abundance of information that we’d brought in from Beijing, New Delhi and Warsaw also provided new missions for most of the operational squads. As for Udi’s squad, we were assigned jobs in the Muslim republics of the former Soviet Union, intercepting consignments of missiles on their way to Iran. This was the route chosen by the Russians to avoid the risk of direct flights or marine shipments which could be vetted by the Western powers enforcing sanctions against Iran. Silent sabotage operations, the injection of a chemical agent into the launch mechanisms, had been decided upon as our modus operandi. No one would know or see anything until the order was given for firing the missiles when nothing would happen. In each case, we located the convoys, followed them to a spot where they parked for the night, and then stole into one truck after another and dealt with each missile, by removing the cap of its “brain”, inserting the liquid and reassembling it. We took turns, Jerry and I keeping watch while Udi and Ronen were doing the job on the missiles, then switching roles.
These were relatively lengthy missions, taking a few nights each to neutralize all the missiles in each convoy, and we could only work between patrols of convoy guards. In the daytime, we drove some distance away from the convoys using a transponder that we’d fixed onto one of the trucks. At night we caught up with them and worked. We were exhausted after the first round on one of the convoys, more so after the second, and the third turned out to be the last.
On our last mission we began in Kazakhstan, continued in Uzbekistan and wound up in Ashgabat, Turkmenistan, close to the Iranian border. After completing the work, and as we were walking away from the convoy towards our vehicle, we were surprised by a Russian officer in a military jeep, who was apparently checking the parked trucks or the guards. We were a few hundred yards away from the convoy but also a similar distance from our car, and we didn’t have any logical pretext for being there. The Russian could see this and he aggressively demanded that we identify ourselves. He got out of his jeep and menacingly placed his hand on the butt of his pistol.
What authority a Russian officer had in the independent republic of Turkmenistan wasn’t clear, but, apparently, the Russian military still enjoyed quite a lot of freedom of action here and in the other ex-Soviet republics that allowed the convoys to pass through their territory. Udi never bothered to ask for his credentials. The punch he delivered to the throat of the Russian, who was every bit as burly as Udi himself, was so fast and so professional that the man immediately crumpled to the ground. He made gurgling choking sounds but with what was left of his consciousness he went for his handgun. Udi was quicker, and bending over, he reached the gun first, drew it out of the holster, gripped it by the barrel and smashed the butt against the officer’s temple. There was a crackling sound of broken bone, and a black pool of blood spread on the ground.
Udi wiped the pistol, replaced it in the holster and mounted the driver’s seat of the jeep. “Get in,” he said, and drove us to our car.
“He’s going to die out there,” I said.
“You have my permission to go back and administer mouth to mouth resuscitation,” Udi replied gruffly, “or, perhaps you want us to carry him with us to the nearest hospital?”
We got into our car and Udi sped away in silence, until we crossed the border into Azerbaijan. Only there did he report to HQ and request that a flight be laid on for us from Tashkent the next night. This meant another long day of speeding along the potholed roads. Some of the route covered part of the ancient Silk Road. I would have been happy to visit Bokhara or Samarkand, but knew that would have to wait for another opportunity. At least I could enjoy the scenery.
I wasn’t supposed to tell Niki about the mission, and I didn’t go into the details, but she saw how moody I was and I decided to tell her about the killing of the Russian officer. An unnecessary killing, to my mind. “I’ve already seen Udi in such situations. He turns into a machine. It’s frightening,” I said, and Niki patted my hand. When she tried to make the point that if the Russian had remained alive he would have given a description of us and we were likely to have been caught, I was angry. I knew she was right. But like in Warsaw, it was difficult for me to accept killing for purely tactical reasons, whatever they may be. It bothered me that she was defending it.
“It’s not that he’s a machine,” Niki insisted. “I’m spending quite a lot of time with him, and I can read people. There’s some kind of a secret there.” Her words d
idn’t console me, and her closeness to Udi didn’t improve my mood.
In August, Hamas dealt Israel a painful blow: a double-suicide attack on two buses in Beersheba that left sixteen people dead. This time, the Mossad decided to send us to Khartoum to hit the Hamas office there which was still occupied with organizing arms smuggling from Iran into the Gaza Strip, through Egypt. When I complained that this was an attack “under the lamppost” at a second or third echelon target of the organization, Udi replied that we were not the only squad going on the offensive, and that this wasn’t merely an act of retaliation but the prioritization of a pigeonholed operation that had only now been approved by the prime minister.
The mission had another interesting element: after we had got organized and rented a car, Udi would report to HQ and then we’d head for a dry riverbed near the seashore and rendezvous with a unit of naval commandos who would give us the explosive devices we were to use.
The night-time navigation job, from the moment we left the main road, was given to me. I spent many hours with Moshik, the intelligence officer, going over the route to the meeting place. Because I couldn’t be carrying a detailed map when I entered Sudan, and the large scale maps necessary for navigation weren’t available, I studied the route on aerial photographs that showed all the details but were not up to date, and which I could not, of course, take with me. I used a stereoscope and the 3-D pictures jumped out at me and engraved themselves on my memory – but in black and white. In any case, that’s what it would look like at night …
This was my first mission in a Muslim country that, unlike Jordan, was openly hostile, and I confessed to myself that I derived a great deal of encouragement from the presence of Udi, Ronen and Jerry. From the window of the plane, a vast, flat, brown city spread out in all directions, with the confluence of the White and Blue Niles at its centre, a little to the north-west of the airport. I was reminded of Moshik’s briefings, when he told me that the river divided the city into three: Khartoum itself, Omdurman beyond the White Nile, and North Khartoum across the Blue Nile. Some eight million people lived in the metropolitan area, with their mud dwellings stretching from horizon to horizon, and reddish desert mountains in the background. I didn’t remember why one river was called white and the other blue, but both were brownish-green, with narrow strips of greenery along their banks.
Entry procedures weren’t too complicated, with most of the talking done by Jerry, the head of our “safari group” and he did so with a relaxed charm. As soon as we left the obsolescent terminal, a cab took us to the Kanon Hotel, which Jerry had recommended, a little to the south-east of the airport. “Last time I was at the Hilton and I hated it,” said Jerry. “It looks fine from a distance, a pink ten-storey building, but inside everything was falling apart. I moved here, and it was great.”
The Kanon was a modern building in modern surroundings, something that, based on Moshik’s briefing, I didn’t think I’d see in Khartoum.
During the day, we surveyed the area around our target, and Udi decided on the way we would do the job. We would break into the office at night, place the explosive device in an inside room, and when the door to that room was opened, the blast would kill everyone in the offices. And we’d leave another bomb, with a time-fuse, for the first responders. When I objected, Udi replied in biblical terms: “‘Woe to the wicked man and woe to his neighbour – especially if the neighbour accommodates and feeds him.”
Udi didn’t want to lose time, and he reported to HQ that from our point of view we could go ahead with the rendezvous with the navy the next night. We set out at noon, heading for the Red Sea coast, more than 300 kilometres to the east. The highway itself was in bad shape and at nightfall we had to go off the road for several dozen miles to the meeting place. I dozed most of the way in the air-conditioned Range Rover Jerry had provided for his safari, waking up only for my night-time navigation duty.
Udi established contact with the naval unit, received confirmation that they had left their mother ship and had begun sailing towards the beach, and I took over the steering wheel. I ascertained that we were at the right point for leaving the highway. The contours of the terrain were well fixed in my mind and fitted in with the dirt road we were now travelling on. Jerry told me what to say if we ran into a military patrol. The paucity of wild game in this area made our “safari” cover story more than dubious, but at most they would think we were rather silly. Jerry had all the necessary official papers.
It took us about two hours to reach our destination. Udi made sure that the surrounding sand was firm enough for our vehicle before I left the dirt road and stopped. We didn’t want to be seen by anyone who happened to drive past on the dirt road, or by some Bedouin, but neither did we have any intention of sinking into the sand dunes. I switched off the lights and the engine. I walked a few hundred yards eastwards, Ronen went northwards and Jerry southwards, to make sure there was no one in the vicinity.
When I had gone far enough and my eyesight had adjusted to the dark I knelt and scanned the area around me. There was no one to be seen, but I could smell the sea, and it filled me with both gladness and longing. For a moment I thought I could also hear the roar of the waves. It was a peculiar feeling, to be alone in the desert, with the star-filled dome of the sky above me, a light breeze lapping at my face, and intermittent calls of nocturnal animals. I thought, in that silence, that this was a situation that no ordinary person could ever experience, and I felt blessed that I was in this place. Only Niki was missing, beside me, but soon …
We came back to the vehicle and started taking kit out as if we were preparing a camp site for the night. Udi contacted the navy and gave them our precise coordinates. They reported that they’d made a quiet landing and had begun their hike in our direction.
We had a relaxed but alert wait of about half an hour, with a warm desert wind caressing us, myriad stars lighting the sky, and the noises of the desert by night, made by small reptiles, insects and nocturnal birds all around us. The navy men walked for about two kilometres along the dry river bed from the beach up to where we were waiting. Just before they made contact, their commander reported to Udi by radio that they could see us with their night vision equipment, and he signalled with a quick flash of a torch.
Soundlessly their shapes emerged out of the dark, remaining part of it. Most of them knelt down a few dozen yards away from us and only three approached – the commander and two commandoes carrying the two explosive devices. Udi, Jerry and I walked towards them, with Ronen staying at the wheel of the Range Rover, in case of a hitch. Udi and the commander shook hands, Jerry and I took the bombs, and within moments they were gone, vanishing into the wadi as if they’d never been there.
“Great guys,” I said.
“That’s what they’re saying about us now,” said Udi nonchalantly, and he told us where to put the devices. We returned the rest of the stuff to the vehicle and, in keeping with procedures, we waited half an hour, until the commander of the navy unit radioed that they were back on the water. Then we set out on the long drive back.
I was a bit anxious about travelling with the explosives, not because I was afraid they’d go off, something I knew wouldn’t happen, but because of the roadblocks deployed at the entrances to the city at night. The Mossad bomb-makers had thought of this and disguised the devices as thermos flasks – a large one for cold water and a smaller one for hot. But I was happy that we didn’t have to be searched, as we arrived back in Khartoum after daybreak.
The following night we broke into the Hamas offices. At seven a.m. we were at the airport in time for the first flight out of Khartoum which was to Cape Town, and Jerry and Ronen took it. The next flight was to Madrid, and Udi and I were on that one.
Until we reached Tel Aviv, we heard nothing about the results of our expedition, and in fact there was nothing about it in the media for a few days. Had there been some kind of technical hitch with the charges? Udi sent an inquiry about this to the technical division and they
replied that the charges had been subjected to multiple jolts during testing and had remained intact. Only about a week later intelligence material was received confirming that the bombs had gone off and there had been fatalities among the Hamas personnel but we were given no more details. We could only hope that at least there would be delays in the consignments of weaponry to Gaza.
Niki completed her training. Months before the planned date, her instructors all agreed there was no point in dragging it out any longer and she was ready to be tossed into the water. At her induction ceremony, I was her “family” and I was as happy and as proud as any parent.
“All those layers I had to peel off you – she came already peeled,” Udi told me when I said something about her short training period. But then he added: “She could not have been accepted if you weren’t her partner. We aren’t asking her to convert to Judaism or anything like that, but both in the psychological testing and in my evaluation of her, it came out that she is here because of you and for your sake. Her link with the country and with the Mossad is you, and without you, that link would not cross the threshold of loyalty that we demand. I’ve also made it clear to her, in different words, that we are aware of this. None the less, as long as there are no two-man operations, from my point of view each one of you is a lone operative, with everything that implies.”
Niki was given – not entirely surprisingly – the codename Ruth. In the Bible, it was Ruth the Moabite who said, “Thy people shall be my people” and “Whither thou goest, I shall go” and ended up married to Boaz.
Later on we were summoned to a meeting with Eli, chief of the division. It was the first time Niki had entered Mossad HQ. I’d only been there once myself, after I’d completed establishing my cover. Niki was very excited and didn’t hide it as we were led into the central building, which resembled Hyatt hotels all over the world, with a large rectangular lobby overlooked by galleries adorned with greenery. She was still excited when we entered the division’s wing, through “smart” electronic doors and sat down in the chief’s office, with a view of the Mediterranean through the windows.
Final Stop, Algiers: A Thriller Page 27
