But how do we get in the truck instead of the meat and eggs?
Suddenly everyone wanted to know that. General Rashood carefully answered. “At 1050, a car driven by two Arabs in traditional dress will drive up the road and stop thirty yards before our hide. It will pull up in the middle of the road, and its driver and passenger will walk around the front and lift up the hood.
“At this point, Ahmed and I will move up from the hide and station ourselves on either side of the road. When the supply truck is forced to stop, ten minutes later, for the apparent breakdown blocking the road, the two IDF men will most certainly disembark, and we will kill them both, using the knife. Plainly, we do not want gunshots within a mile of the jail.
“At that moment the road will be deserted, except for us, and the stretch we will occupy cannot be seen from the jail. All of you will rush up the escarpment and unload that truck, drag out the cases and throw ’em over the edge. It’s a massive vehicle; really a ship’s freight container being hauled by a powerful front end. And it carries a ton of stuff. It may even be going on to deliver in other locations. But there’s thirty-six of us, and we’re going to empty it. Meanwhile, the broken-down car will head back down the hill where it will break down again, sideways, once more blocking the road. In the unlikely event any other vehicle arrives, the occupants will be killed instantly.
“By now everyone will be in the truck. You guys in the container, which will be open at the rear, covered only by tarpaulin. Ahmed and myself will be in the cab, wearing the Israelis’ uniforms. I’m driving.”
But what happens then, sir? How do we get in the jail? What
if there’s a password? What if they want to search the truck before they open the gates?
The General explained, again with care, how he had lain in wait for the truck, crouching on the escarpment the previous Friday, listening in the quiet of the morning, way up there on the ridge of the Nimrod.
“There was no password,” he said. “The delivery was obviously expected. And the driver gave two light beeps on the truck’s horn. The guards on the outside flanks of the jail, in charge of the artillery, did not even walk around. The gates opened and the truck drove directly inside.
“Two days from now, that precise moment represents our H-Hour, the instant we hit. When the truck has moved into the jail, through the gates, out of sight of the outside patrols, but not far enough inside for anyone to close the gates. That’s our H-Hour. That’s when I hit the brakes, and you guys hit the ground.”
General Ravi, still every inch the SAS Commander, stood up once more and moved back toward the third map. “Gentlemen,” he said, “this is the map of the jail, constructed from satellite pictures we have obtained, and refined for us by our staff in Damascus. For the next three hours we will work on the detail of our attack, each man reporting to me for complete instructions of his personal duties. Like all highly briefed Special Forces, we want no surprises, no confusion, and as little opposition as possible.”
The General knew he was putting his foot soldiers through a crash course of preparation, which would not have been good enough for the SAS. Only his twelve most trusted men had been party to the infinite detail of the operation—the ones who had accompanied him to Nimrod.
Ravi was torn between the SAS method of briefing, practicing, rehearsing, and more, and the need for secrecy. He could have staged a dummy run somewhere in Syria, but he was uncertain about security leaks, of the Israelis finding out something was going on, and he elected to play his cards close to his chest.
“It’s 1600 now,” he said. “We’ll be through by 1900. We’ll break for dinner, and sleep as long as possible. There’ll be a two-hour meeting tomorrow at midday, then rest in the afternoon. We’ll eat early, final short briefing at 2200, trucks away at 2300 sharp.”
11 P.M., Thursday, April 28, 2005
Hamas Compound, Golan Heights
The two unmarked army trucks growled softly into the night, heading west, trying to stay out of the howling low gears, trying to keep their headlights down yet still miss the rocks, trying to navigate a more or less straight line to the Syrian Disengagement Line.
General Rashood, who had traversed the route a dozen times with Ahmed, sat next to the driver of the lead truck, watching the compass, peering through his night goggles, doing his best to translate familiar landmarks from the granite-strewn sunlit landscape of his memory, into the spooky, greenish glow of the Russian-made binoculars.
They bumped and bounced their way forward, driving up small, rough tracks, cutting across flat areas, glad to be on smoother, quieter ground, but anxious to regain the cover of the rocks. They were literally between the rock and the hard place and, on reflection, the bumping, lurching tracks between the jutting granite had the edge. Uncomfortably safe, as opposed to more comfortably exposed. To the Israeli satellites, that is.
They reached the Syrian Disengagement Line, and Ravi signaled to the patrol that awaited them, all was well. They drove on into No Man’s Land, beginning to come down off the heights, moving over a gentle downward slope almost all the way.
The General ordered the headlights doused at the border, and the little convoy was now dependent on the night goggles through which he was staring. They kept going for a mile and a half, and then Ravi could see lights way up ahead, magnified by his glasses, and unmistakably those of vehicles, lower down the slopes, maybe three and a half miles away. He took off the goggles but could see nothing through the dark with the naked eye.
“Okay, guys, this is it. This is the end of our ride. Trucks return to base, everyone else split into team formation. I’ll lead, the rest of you stay in your ‘fours’ and follow tight behind. Any problem, no shooting…the knife, always the knife. Stay alert.”
The men from Hamas jumped lightly down onto the damp spring grass and zipped their jackets against the cool night air. They wore standard molded-rubber desert boots, supple, expensive equipment, calf-high, tight fastened. Even if they crossed the river, minimal water would leak in.
They set off across the desolate night acres of the Buffer Zone on the Heights, moving swiftly, at the jog, following the ex-SAS Major who had recced this very path several times before. After twenty minutes they saw the lights of the Israeli Patrol moving north up the westward Disengagement Line. Each man flung himself flat on the ground, heeding General Rashood’s warning that high-powered night goggles could pick up running men at two miles.
When the lights disappeared, they picked themselves up and ran on west some more until the lights returned, this time heading south, back down the Line. Again they all hit the deck and then powered forward when the coast was clear, running hard now, going for the hide under the spoon-shaped rock, just short of the Line itself.
The General led them safely into the shelter of the rock, and they fanned out in the formations they had practiced, unseen from the path of the Israeli patrol. Each man was supremely fit, but breathing heavily after the run in. They huddled together, between their own guards, front, rear, and up on the granite cliff face.
Ray Kerman watched the jeep driving toward them, and there was not a sound as it came by at around 30 mph. They waited until it returned, exactly eight minutes later, and Ray watched it go south. Two minutes more, and he called softly, “This is it, guys…. Form up and let’s go…. See you at the RV point…. Groups of four…two-minute intervals…fast and quiet…. Watch the GPS now….”
With that, he and his three-man team set off, again running hard, straight across the Israeli Line, pounding over the ground, right on the heels of the General, who still wore the night goggles, peering in front of him through the deserted landscape. They ran strongly for eight minutes, when Ray stopped to check the GPS.
On course, he reduced speed to a steady jog, and within a few moments they hit the rising ground, breasted a low hill, and then climbed again for fifty yards before striding easily into a natural rock fortress around seventy-five feet across. They’d have to climb the west wal
l and slide down to level ground before the next stage of the journey. But he had selected this desolate place carefully, and he had buried six containers of water on his last visit. He’d also hidden a shovel, which he now found and began digging the earth away.
One minute later, Team Two arrived, then Team Three, and Team Four. In forty-five minutes they were all there, gulping water, and preparing for the five-and-a-half-mile walk in, across rich, brilliantly created Israeli agricultural land, just now beginning to yield superb crops of apples, pears, and almonds, peaches, plums, and cherries.
So far they had covered only a few miles from the compound, but the landscape was changing before their eyes. At least it would have been if it had not been pitch black, from the arid, rocky wastes of the Syrian side of the Golan, to the lush, irrigated triumph of Israeli farming policy.
It was exactly 1:15 when the Hamas General led his lead team of nine up over the granite “wall” and began the fifty-foot grassy slide to the ground. They achieved this in near silence, and when the group was all present and correct, Ravi Rashood checked the GPS and whispered, “Okay, guys. Here we go. Follow me.”
Behind them Group Two was high on the ridge preparing to slide down as soon as the leaders were under way. Within twenty minutes all thirty-six of the armed, hooded figures were walling softly through the fields, approaching Highway 91, north of Mas’ada, heading west.
Ever cautious and acutely aware of the possibility of radar, patrols, and intense Israeli surveillance, General Ravi ordered his men back into four-man groups for the highway crossing. His caution was well founded. There was bristling danger on that highway, because on Ravi’s last sortie to Nimrod, an Israeli security detail had indeed picked up shadowy, furtive movement. It was, in fact, a fluke. The driver had been parked on a high ridge, peering through long-range night goggles about a mile south to the shallow, narrow valley the Hamas warriors now occupied.
Through the pale green landscape shown in the lenses of the binoculars, the guard had been only half focused. But up here, observation was hair-trigger sensitive. The guard had no idea what he had seen, but everyone at Northern Command knew that no big animals lurked on the Golan. It did not really matter what the guard had seen, anything was enough. And for the past week a four-man Israeli foot patrol had been sweeping a five-mile strip of Highway 91, operating in pairs, each armed man wearing black camouflage cream and soft desert boots.
Right now, the south-moving pair of Israeli guards was heading near silently down the middle of the deserted highway, not twenty-five yards from where Ravi and his three men were about to make the first dash across the blacktop, into the safety of the dark, verdant farmland.
Ravi’s four were already split into pairs, the first two men poised to bound up the bank and rush across the highway, half crouched, weapons poised. He and his bodyguard would provide them with covering fire if necessary.
“Now!” hissed Ravi, and the two Hamas fighters broke cover, heading for the center of the highway. But they never got there. The first Israeli guard saw them, bang in front of his astonished eyes. And he had his weapon leveled, a short-barreled MP5 machine gun.
“HALT!” he yelled in Hebrew. “FREEZE! RIGHT THERE. HANDS HIGH!”
The Hamas warriors froze and raised their hands, their machine guns still dangling around their necks. The guard, standing only four yards from them, but ten yards in advance of his colleague, began to move forward, gripping his MP5 tightly.
But as he did so, Ravi’s bodyguard came off the bank with a bound that would have made a jungle leopard gasp and plunged his combat knife clean through the second Israeli’s back, ramming the life-ending blade through the center of the heart.
The only sound was the scuffing of this Israeli’s boots as he fell backward into the Hamas killer’s arms. The lead guard turned, swinging around almost involuntarily, calling sharply, “IZAK?”
Big mistake. Ravi Rashood was up to the bank and on him. With his left hand he clamped an iron grip on the barrel of the Israeli’s MP5, wrenching it sideways. And then he brought his gloved right hand down in a murderous chopping arc, hammering the handle end of his combat knife into the space between the guard’s eyes, smashing the central forehead bone.
Back came Ravi’s lethal right hand, and, still holding the knife, he rammed the butt of his fist with upward force into the nose of the guard, driving the bone deep into his brain. In the hundredth of a second before he died, the Israeli could probably have guessed how SAS Sergeant Fred O’Hara had felt a few months before in a Palestinian house in Hebron.
The situation was now critical. General Rashood and his three-man team were stranded in the middle of a highway, in Israel, with two members of the IDF laying dead on the highway, murdered in cold blood. But the night was dark, and silent, and his Hamas fighters were superbly trained for an eventuality that might compromise their mission.
Groups Two and Three were already on the highway, grabbing the two inert bodies and dragging them across into the fields beyond.
“Everyone cross as fast as possible and make for the river,” Ravi ordered. “Four men on each body. Drag or carry, whatever’s easiest. Keep going. Try to stay in fours, and be ready if anything else happens.”
They reached the bank of the river, which ran through a mile or so of swamps, and there they dumped the bodies out of sight in marshy wetland, deep in the bulrushes. No one missed a beat. Ray guessed correctly it would be a couple of weeks at least before anyone found anything. And even then the Israelis would never admit two of their guards had been murdered.
The men from Hamas moved away from the burial area swiftly and silently, moving through the lush farmland at such a pace that they never even heard the Israeli Army jeeps roaring back and forth along the highway looking for two missing personnel.
Ravi picked up a path used mostly by visiting observers of nature and the rich bird population, which has found a home in these northern wetlands.
In fact, he had acquired a map from the Galilee International Bird Watching Society, after enrolling Shakira as a member. She thought he must have gone out of his mind, but he would not tell even her why he needed a detailed knowledge of the secret paths of the birders through this peaceful Israeli wildlife reserve.
She still did not know, but the thirty-five men who tracked him through the night of April 28/29 were astounded at his navigational expertise in the pitch dark.
By half past two, they were officially off the foothills of the Golan Heights and across the river. Before him Ray could pick out the towering crags of the Nimrod mountain, and he began to edge further north, over drier, grassy fields, thus ensuring that his team advanced at a right angle to the highway, moving onto the rock face and then climbing the less-steep slopes up to the hide under the right-hand side of the approach road.
Once on their final advance, they moved into the blessed cover of high woodland, and Ray led them almost straight through, breaking cover within 300 yards of the escarpment. He was obviously hurrying now, because it was almost three o’clock, three hours before the first pink strands of daylight began to illuminate the sky behind them. They had a climb, and then some meticulous camouflage work to complete. Never had the men from Hamas experienced anything like the degree of planning, organization, and execution their new Commanding Officer provided.
He led them on a zigzag path up the mountain, and they climbed easily, many of them grateful for the brutal three-month training regime he had imposed upon them, ruthlessly weeding out men who could not cope. Of the sixty volunteers who started out, eighteen had been axed from the program. As they were removed, the standards grew tougher, and men began to feel the pride of the elite warrior.
Two of those who were let go were overcome with that Arab sense of shame, which is unaccountable, and very dangerous. Both had threatened to cut the new General’s throat, but Ahmed Sabah had advised them this was probably a poor idea, if they had ambitions to go on breathing. One very tough young brave, age nineteen, hum
iliated beyond his own tolerance at being asked to leave the program, flew at the General with both fists, shouting, “WHO YOU THINK YOU ARE, YOU BASTARD!”
Ahmed Sabah was furious and complained bitterly all through the forty-eight-mile journey to the big hospital in Damascus where surgeons would reset the young man’s broken arm and collarbone. “I’ve killed men for a lot less,” growled Ravi. “Consider yourself lucky.”
Thirty-five men now climbed Mount Nimrod, convinced they were following some kind of Divine being sent to them by Allah himself. When they reached the safety of the hide, below the road at twenty after three, they each, to a man, thanked their God for their mission and their leader.
By six o’clock they were invisible, both from the road and anywhere else, protected by layers of brushwood. They were not to know, but this temporary new headquarters was almost a precise replica of another observation post constructed by Major Ray Kerman, five years previously, 3,500 miles away in West Africa, on the north bank of the Rokel Creek.
Thanks to the stash of water back at the RV Point, they all had full canteens, but no food because it was cumbersome and unnecessary. This was a short mission. They drank sparingly and waited. Some of them grabbed some sleep, between guard duties, and by half past ten they were listening for the sound of the decoy vehicle they knew would break down, right above them.
In fact, Ray Kerman saw it before they heard it, moving steadily along the highway way down the valley. He and Ahmed waited right below the chalk line they had made on the surface of the road, and when the old, dilapidated Ford Escort finally labored up toward them, they both watched it move into the very center of the road and then stop dead, bang on the line.
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