by Gary Haynes
“An electric motor powered by battery. But don’t be fooled. It’s cute. Got a unique parachute system so it can land on a mountain top, no problem. Payload’s cute, too. Thermal imaging camera at night. Flown through an autopilot system equipped with advanced software algorithms. Reliable recon, which is exactly what the little bird is doing right now.”
The other operatives called Gabriel the Professor. After the lecture, Tom understood why. But it made him feel better about the level of security the Turks had put in place for the hospital. That and the fact that the van passed another two makeshift checkpoints manned by heavily-armed Turkish Marines, resilient and seasoned, by the looks of them.
Ten minutes later, Tom saw the checkpoint at the entrance to the hospital. There was a barrier painted a staggered red and white like a barber’s pole, a concrete pillbox to the left, a small sentry building to the right, with barred windows. Two guards were standing either side of the barrier, wearing white helmets. They had Belgium bullpup-designed FN P60 submachine guns slung over their shoulders and calf-high gaiters.
There was a twelve-foot-high fence surrounding the hospital complex, topped with concertina razor wire, and metal security bollards set at three-foot intervals before it. A couple of Cobra military attack helicopters, and the Turkish TOROS artillery rocket systems in disposable launcher pods, together with three more APCs, added muscle to the defence of the isolated hospital. What else was here, was anyone’s guess, Tom thought. But it was impressive enough as it was.
After the lead SUV had stopped for about thirty seconds at the barrier in front, the minivan pulled away a sedate pace. The buildings beyond were mostly single-storey, Tom noticed, punctuated by square lawns, the grass being kept green beneath the baking sun by sprinkler systems.
The vehicles followed a tarmac road that cut through the middle of the complex, other roads branching off at ninety-degree angles, the complex having a grid design. Nurses pushed men in wheelchairs, the odd doctor walked by in a white lab coat. Here, the only sign that this was a military hospital were the occasional Jeep Wranglers and military policemen, the Askeri İnzibat, with their white belts and red armbands.
The little convoy stopped outside a whitewashed building, with slatted blinds at the windows, and a shrub garden either side of the paved walkway.
“I’ll take a minute with my father, okay with you guys?” Tom said.
Some nodded. Gabriel said, “Sure thing.”
The minivan had AC, but when Tom stepped out into the dry late afternoon heat it hit the back of his throat as he inhaled and seemed to burn like acrid smoke. He thought he caught a whiff of chloroform above the scent of lavender coming from the shrubberies and ducked to avoid a huge hornet, black as hell, that buzzed by.
“That’s their latest high-spec UAV,” Gabriel said, walking behind Tom with the medics and paramilitaries.
A couple of the guys snickered and Tom guessed he was just trying to lighten the mood. The heavy glass fire doors were opened by a man who Tom took for an orderly and, as he placed his feet on pale-blue tiles, he immediately felt the cool air on his skin.
Let him be okay, he thought. Let my father live.
Chapter 21
When the grenade had landed the three front FBI men had flung themselves to the ground and had called out warnings to their unseen buddies. The two that had shields had used them to cover their heads, even though they were wearing standard-issue protective Kevlar helmets.
But no explosion occurred.
Three seconds later, a lanky black man in his late twenties opened the door and raced out, barefoot. He was dressed only in a pair of tight, ripped jeans. He had a machete in his hand and looked wide-eyed and crazy. Stoned, Crane guessed.
The FBI men got up. An agent with a pump shotgun shouted at the black man to drop the weapon, to get down on the ground. But he only shouted back in a foreign language that Crane recognized. He drew the machete back behind his shoulder, as if he was about to hurl it at the agent with the pump.
The dumb sonofabitch, Crane thought. But before he could intervene the blast from the shotgun hit the man in the chest and lifted him off his feet. He landed with a thud on the grass. The other two SWAT men had already entered the front of the house and Crane heard shouting and screaming. He ran forwards, his Kimber Eclipse II in hand, with its five-inch barrel and iron dovetail sights.
As soon as he got to the black man, he could tell he was close to death. He was gasping for air like a fish on a line. The wound to his chest was awful. The pellets had imbedded themselves in such a manner that the skin looked diced. Like hamburger meat. He heard him mumbling. His few words were indecipherable. Tears rolled from his wide eyes. Then he was just staring into space, and Crane knew he’d just died.
“A mad crack addict,” the SWAT man said, coming up to Crane’s shoulder. “I didn’t have a choice.”
Crane turned on him. “That blade would’ve bounced off ya ballistic vest like a rubber ball off a wall,” he said, shaking his head.
The FBI guy looked dumbfounded.
Crane walked over to the missile that had been tossed from the broken window after the chair. He knelt down and examined it, without touching it. It was a black paperweight, designed to look like a grenade. Hearing a commotion, he looked up. Two black women of similar ages to the deceased were being led from the bungalow. They were heavily made-up and wore pink bikinis and multicoloured headscarves. They were shouting and struggling. The SWAT guys had cuffed them and were gently pushing them forwards, despite the tirade. When they saw the dead man, they began to wail.
Then a second back male appeared. He had a beard and out-of-control hair, and looked about thirty-five. He was barefoot, like all the others, but he was wearing a pair of combat pants, a red silk shirt, a ton of gold chains and a gangster cap. He’d been cuffed, too.
Crane saw the unit chief speak to one of the agents before walking over the grass towards him. He was a tall man, perhaps six-three, with an elongated neck, pallid skin, and wiry gray hair, a pair of thick black-rimmed eyeglasses perched halfway down his hooked nose.
“That’s the Somali,” he said, thumbing over his back in the opposite direction to the stiff.
Crane felt like whooping, but just walked past the man to where the FBI were now frogmarching the Somali down the path, each limb tucked under a hefty arm. Crane held up his splayed hand at he got to them. “Stand him up,” he said, taking a cigar from his breast pocket.
One of the FBI men looked over to the unit chief. As Crane lit up, he glanced over, too, seeing the man nodding. The Somali was manoeuvred upright, as if he was a plastic drinking bird.
Crane took a deep pull on his cigar, blowing out the smoke through his nostrils like an old dragon. “You’re screwed, son. There’s only one way out for you.”
“What do you want from me?”
“You speak, English. That’s good. We’ll talk when you’re in a cage. But you clam up on me, well, nobody will be able to save you. I’ll see to it that you get thrown in with the crazies. Simple. There’s only one option. Only one.”
“What option?”
“Well, that’ll be me, son.”
“I want a lawyer.”
“Yeah, and I want me a beach house down in Santa Monica. Besides, you think a lawyer will save you from what’s coming? Not even God can save you from what’s coming. Only me. Now you remember my face, son.”
Crane gave the Somali a closed-mouthed smile before looking at the FBI man who’d sought the okay from the unit chief. “You can flip him over now.”
A metallic grey minivan pulled up parallel with the bungalow and a broad-shoulder guy wearing jeans jumped out of the passenger side. He walked around to the back and opened the twin doors.
The unit chief walked over to Crane and asked him what the hell was happening. “He’s a US citizen, least he has been for the last few years,” he went on.
Crane put his hand into his breast pocket and handed over a piece of paper. The un
it chief peered down at it, his face turning pale.
“That don’t matter no more,” Crane said, feeling ambivalent. He jabbed at the document with his thick forefinger. “And that’s the president’s signature.”
The document authorized the Somali, now a US citizen, being taken into military custody. A trial was deemed superfluous, and was legal, under the broad anti-terrorism provisions in the National Defense Authorization Act.
The CIA paramilitary who’d opened the doors came over to the FBI agents holding the Somali. “Just toss him in there, okay guys,” he said, gesturing towards the minivan.
As they looked nonplussed, Crane patted the CIA guy on the arm. “You keep that mother safe for now, you hear?”
“Yes, sir.”
Chapter 22
The upscale motor cruiser that Ibrahim had been travelling in had sped down the Mediterranean Sea at a distance of fifteen nautical miles from the coast, safely away from the internationally recognized twelve nautical miles’ limit. It had berthed in the Egyptian coastal city of Rafah in northern Sinai.
The democratically elected Muslim Brotherhood, fellow Sunnis, had been deposed by the Egyptian military in a coup d’état led by General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, the army chief, on July 3 2013. As a result, what would have been a friendly city for Ibrahim was now a potentially lethal one. The subsequent election, boycotted by many Muslims, had elected el-Sisi as the new president. No big surprise to Ibrahim.
Following the subsequent outlawing of the Brotherhood as a political entity, a move supported by the educated middle classes of Cairo and Alexandria, as opposed to the rural poor, who were devout, the essentially secular and pragmatic Egyptian military had embarked on a process of healing wounds with its old allies. In 2013, it had closed the Rafah crossing to Gaza indefinitely. Previously used as an entry point for Muslim pilgrims en route to the hajj in Saudi Arabia to the south via Jordan, Ibrahim knew it was in response to jihadist violence in the Sinai after the deposing of President Morsi.
Ibrahim met up with a couple of the young men from the Sinai-based Islamic terrorist group, Ansar Bayt Al- Maqdis, who were responsible for the violence. They would guard him as he travelled to the tunnels. He would be met on the other side of the border by his Hamas brothers, and, if all went well, be taken to see the Amir in Gaza City. He already had forged papers for his time in Gaza, having travelled there on several occasions, and the Egyptians had handed him fresh ones for the Sinai after a brother had radioed ahead to Rafah. There hadn’t been enough time to get new ones made so they’d had to adapt existing ones, stolen in a marketplace by professional pickpockets.
An hour later, after transporting him to Rafah in the back of a Toyota pickup truck, his body covered by hessian sacks full of dates and olives, they dropped him off in a side alley and told him to walk to the fourteenth house on the right in the adjacent street.
As the pickup pulled away Ibrahim brushed off the old brown suit he’d been given to wear and covered his head with a red and white chequered keffiyeh headdress. This was as far from Cairo as you could get in Egypt, both in miles and in views and customs, and he would have to look the part. He carried a small plastic bag in which he’d put a pair of jeans and a T-shirt. Other than this he had no personal possessions.
Walking up the dusty alley bordered by rundown, concrete apartment blocks, he watched a couple of skinny dogs scavenging around a pile of garbage beneath a rusted-out fire escape. Otherwise nothing stirred. Even in the shadows the heat was in the low hundreds, and as he reached the sun-baked street he glanced back, feeling the first tendrils of claustrophobia as he thought of the tunnel that awaited him.
Be vigilant, he thought. Be strong.
In December 2009, Egypt, with technical assistance from the US and France, had begun to erect a steel wall along the Gaza border, which had been sunk eighteen yards below the surface. They had reinforced the border area with a thousand troops to protect construction crews from Palestinian sniper attacks. The construction process had already damaged almost a hundred smuggling tunnels and Ibrahim knew that not only had many fighters perished, but the process had hit Hamas financially, given that it charged an annual fee of two-thousand five hundred US dollars for their use.
The only comfort was he knew that the Gaza-Egypt border was seven and a half miles long, and, as yet, most of the construction had been confined to either side of the Rafah terminal some miles away. Even the bloody incursion by the IDF in the summer of 2014 hadn’t destroyed more than a third of the tunnels there, as the Israelis had focussed on the tunnels that had led directly into Israel, especially in the north and east of the Strip.
The street had never seen tarmac and was crater-ridden and stony. A woman wrapped from head to foot in a black and light blue burqa was walking beside her husband as he sat astride a bedraggled donkey. A small group of barefoot kids with dirt-stained clothes threw rocks at a tin can. Seeing an Egyptian Army armoured personnel carrier pass along an abutting street about fifty yards away, Ibrahim kept walking so as to not to draw attention to himself.
Seconds later an open-topped military jeep with a roll bar passed behind the APC. It stopped abruptly and turned down the street towards Ibrahim. He looked behind him. The kids scattered, the old man drew his hand over his neck before gesturing towards the alley with a crooked finger.
“Go, go,” he said.
But Ibrahim knew if he ran there was a good chance he’d get caught, and if he did, he didn’t want to think what the Egyptian Army would do to him in such a remote and volatile place. He’d heard they had carte blanche from the generals to quell the unrest by any means, and in northern Sinai that meant days of torture, followed by imprisonment in a hellhole or death.
He decided to stand his ground and take his chances.
Chapter 23
Inside the military hospital’s lobby, Tom saw two doctors with stethoscopes draped around their shoulders standing before him like sombre sentinels. One was a clean-shaven man wearing thick eyeglasses, the other an elegant-looking woman, with her blue-black hair in a neat bun. She was holding a black clipboard and as Tom got closer he could see that her lips were full, almost lascivious, her eyes dark and humane.
She smiled without revealing her teeth, holding out her hand to greet him. “Mr Dupree?”
“Yes,” he replied.
“I am Doctor Asani. Your father’s doctor. I hope you had a comfortable journey.”
“Just fine, thank you, ma’am.”
The male doctor said nothing, neither did his resigned expression change, which Tom felt wasn’t a good sign.
“This way, please,” she said, leading him out of the well-lit corridor, the walls of which were dotted with oil paintings showing various scenes from Turkey’s military history.
Tom stopped in his tracks. He said, “My father first. Then we can talk. If that’s okay with you, ma’am.”
She looked a little taken aback, but the closed-mouthed smile soon returned. Tom reckoned she wasn’t used to being contradicted.
She nodded. “But I must warn you that your father cannot speak,” she said. “He is in a coma.”
Tom clenched his jaw, nodded back. Dear God, he thought, a coma.
“Don’t touch anything,” she said, as if he was a school kid.
About ten yards down a blue cinderblock corridor, Tom entered the windowless private room, which was about fifteen foot square and painted a milky white. It had a low ceiling, decent enough AC, an empty nightstand and a closed closet. The general lay on his back in a metal-framed bed, hooked up to a ventilator and three monitors.
There was a saline drip and another two tubes leading from his hands. He looked wraith-like, his body appearing bony and frail beneath the flimsy disposable paper gown. His head was bandaged; his freshly scarred face gaunt and grey around the breathing apparatus. His visible forearms and calves were lacerated.
Tom took out his small Buddha that he always carried with him and rubbed its mahogany surface with his thumb
. But when he knelt and prayed that his father would live, it was to the Christian God, not the man, Siddhārtha Gautama.
He moved forwards now, stretched out his hand but retracted it. It wasn’t because of what the doctor had said, but rather the fact that he felt his father’s bones would somehow crumble under his touch, his skin turn to powder like a butterfly’s wings.
So he began to talk, just that, just words. He couldn’t recount the great times they’d had together when Tom was a kid, because there weren’t any. He just talked about the journey here, a mundane and detached summary.
A few minutes later the door opened and Gabriel came in, holding a secure satphone. He looked awkward. “Sorry to intrude. But it’s urgent.” He gestured with the phone.
“Who is it?”
“The boss.”
“Yours or mine?”
He thrust the phone out, but then placed it on the nightstand. “I’ve posted two paramilitaries outside. Good men.”
“Thanks.”
He left. Tom walked over and picked up the phone.
“How is he?”
It was Crane’s voice.
“‘Bout the same as you were told before I set out, I guess.”
“I thought he might recover given the time it took you to get there,” Crane said.
“No you didn’t. So what’s the deal?”
“Deal?”
Tom walked over and opened the closet. The clothes hanging inside were clean and pressed.
“You still there?” Crane asked.
“Yeah, I’m here.”
“You wanna stop kissin’ diplomat ass and get some action? It’s a drug, ain’t it?”
Tom thought about that as he turned and looked over at the state his father was in. “Which means what?”
“The stakes have gotten high, Tom. We ain’t just talking about your father here. Besides I know how good you are.”
Tom figured Crane thought a man with his experience could only be a benefit. He had an excellent intelligence background. The time he’d spent in the DS’s counterintelligence office had begun as a surveillance operative, a glamorous title for doing little more than the average PI. But after eight months, he’d worked alongside the FBI for three years on some serious investigations of suspected espionage. He spoke fluent French, Arabic and Urdu, and could get by on a couple more languages besides. But there were plenty of people with his credentials. And why would Crane risk using someone who could be deemed too close? he thought.
