by Gary Haynes
But other than the brief facial expression he didn’t react to the sound. He knew medium-altitude recon drones, Eitans and Herons, would be looking for a reaction, someone running for cover or shielding their face. Never run, never hide your face, he’d been told. Never stand out from the crowd. In Gaza people either looked up, or, more commonly, just got on with their daily chores or work. Even the innocent knew not to garner attention when an Israeli raid was about to happen. They just hoped the gunships would pass overhead and land somewhere out of sight, he imagined.
But Ibrahim knew different. There could be Mossad assets and mercenary opportunists on the ground around him, as well as long-range snipers in the cabin doorways of the helicopters. There would be onboard surveillance systems and orbiting satellite observation. Everything, human and machine, would be looking for the tell-tale signs of panic or guilt. So, as the military helicopters got close, Ibrahim kept walking and looking straight ahead, as did his bodyguards.
Then as one of the helicopters swung around 180 degrees and hovered low he caught a glimpse of it as the downdraft from the rotors threw up a cloud of grit and dust. He recognized the gunship as an adapted Sikorsky UH-60 Black Hawk, the type used in the US Navy SEALs’ Abbottabad raid to kill bin Laden, but without the need for anti-radar cladding or additional sophisticated COMMS. This made them lighter and more agile.
Helos had a peculiar psychological effect on ground-based troops or civilians. They could both hover and travel close to the land, after all. There was a disconcerting intimacy that aircraft didn’t elicit, together with a sense of manoeuvrability that eluded tanks. Add in a Hellcat missile system, a .50mm Gatling gun, and a cabin full of heavily-armed Special Forces troops, and it was a downright menacing sight. And there was a ten-strong fleet of them behind the lead one, travelling at almost two hundred miles per hour directly out of the white sun.
With that one of the Hamas bodyguards, the eldest, made a dash for the alley just a few yards away. The other called out to him but Ibrahim knew what had just happened. He’d been betrayed by one of his own, or he had proved himself a coward. If it was the former it meant the Israelis would have him in their sights. He racked his brain for an escape plan and clenched his jaw to prevent himself from screaming after the man.
The youngest bodyguard looked dumbfounded. He was twenty-two, with minimum body fat on his six-three frame. The sunlight made the two-inch scar on his forehead more visible, the result of a baton round by the IDF in his teens, he’d said. Ibrahim took in the man’s ash-grey eyes below the cropped hair, the full mouth verging on being sloppy, looking for any sign of fear or betrayal.
There wasn’t any.
“I’ll fight them, brother. All that matters is that you live,” he said.
Each helicopter could carry eleven troops, Ibrahim knew, which meant a firefight would be suicidal, and he had to live, at least for the next couple of weeks.
“So be it,” Ibrahim said.
Chapter 41
The man in command in the lead helicopter was a seren, a lieutenant, called Ariel. He was twenty-six years old and an expert in Krav Maga, the Israeli martial art. The men about to fast-rope down into the old city of Gaza were from Shayetet 13, the Israeli Navy Special Forces unit out of Atlit naval base on the northern coast of Israel.
Like him they were dressed in khaki fatigues, their faces covered by black balaclavas, and were armed with TAR-21 bullpup assault rifles, with built-in lasers and MARS red-dot sights. The stubby weapon was ideal for urban warfare, there being no need for a bulky suppressor here.
The attack and retrieve plan had been put together with haste. Fifty of his team in the second wave of Black Hawks would storm the house, hoping to recover the body of the Mossad operative there, and wipe out his murderers. Two backup Black Hawks would continually circular the area, their snipers looking for RPGs or suicide squads.
Ariel, together with another thirty specialist operators, was tasked with targeting an otherwise unknown jihadist who was approximately forty yards away, and appeared almost nonchalant in the circumstances. After the bodyguard had scuttled away, he had thought the jihadist would have shown signs of stress and even made a run for it. He was wrong, and that worried him a little.
The Hamas asset had a GPS tracker in the sole of his shoe, which had guided them to insert point. The man only known as Ibrahim was to be taken alive. The op commander had been belligerent about it, even after the bastard had instigated the prolonged torture of the Mossad operative, a fact that had been captured on film by the optical technology Ariel didn’t understand.
When Ariel had asked why, his commander had said that he’d never known the brass be so insistent, and if the terrorist did get hit, even by a ricochet, he, Ariel, would spend the rest of his years in the military getting stones and Molotov cocktails thrown at him in minor riots in Ramallah on the West Bank. And that was a shithole, Ariel knew, even by the standards of the Palestinian territories.
What he didn’t know, of course, was that Deputy Director Crane of the CIA had, after coming to grips with the new intel concerning the planned attacks on US military bases, stated to the heads of the Israeli intelligence community that if the jihadist sonofabitch, Ibrahim, got capped in Gaza, he would personally arrive at their doors with a baseball bat and dislodge their kneecaps. The heads of the Israeli intelligence community were tough old-school, just like Crane, and they’d respected that. And so it was. They knew that he wanted the man alive to extract every ounce of information he could.
Ariel received a message via his short-wave radio from tactical support. The three Mossad operatives, who had been close enough to get here in time, were moving in a triangular formation towards this Ibrahim and his remaining loyal bodyguard.
Don’t shoot the bastard, he thought. Knee him in the balls or break an arm. But don’t shoot him.
Ariel figured that if this Ibrahim saw Special Forces troops descending on ropes from the Black Hawk he’d take off and likely disappear in the multiple back alleys of the old city. And that was the reason why he had to wait until the terrorist had been properly overpowered by the Mossad operatives, which meant frisked, cuffed and hooded. Only then would his men descend from the helicopter and secure the surrounding area, ensuring any counter-ambush team didn’t succeed in freeing him, although the intel from the Hamas asset was that there wasn’t one.
This was a dangerous and volatile city and the last scenario his superiors wanted to hear was that they’d lost Ibrahim because he’d been freed on his way back to Tel Aviv. To prevent even the remotest possibility of that happening, the plan was that once his men had hit the ground the gunship would land on the flat roof of the hotel fifty yards away. From there Ibrahim would be flown back to a military site in the south of Israel’s capital. That objective had cancelled out the option of a precision airstrike by an FI6 jet fighter, or a drone firing a Hellcat missile.
Ariel had a laptop resting on his closed thighs that was showing a live feed from a UAV, an unmanned aerial vehicle. The three Mossad operatives were swarthy-skinned, dressed in loose-fitting cotton shirts and blue jeans, which was the best way to fit in and disguise the fact that they had Glock 9mm handguns concealed on them, as well as plasticuffs, radios and sedatives.
As they moved in, automatic fire and breeching charges could be heard from the three-storey whitewashed house where the Israeli had been murdered, as well as muted screams and harsh voices carried on the warm onshore breeze. The ground and roof assault was underway.
He focussed hard on the black and white images. Ibrahim and the bodyguard had reached the entrance to the alley. There was an open-fronted store selling pita bread and mahashi, rice-stuffed vegetables, to the left, and a bicycle repair garage to the right. Behind them was a derelict apartment block, with a rusted chain-link fence covering the ground-floor entry doors and windows. An emaciated cat sniffed for scraps in the shadows. There was an old man sitting on a stool outside the store and a young boy spinning a wheel on an in
verted bike at the entrance to the garage. But the narrow street was bustling with people.
One operative was coming up the alley, the other two from either side. Ariel saw that the man only known as Ibrahim appeared to be incapable of responding. The operatives on the ground had images of him on their smartphones, sent from the command centre. He was standing still now, his arms dangling by his sides.
As the bodyguard clearly clocked the Mossad operatives, Ariel glanced at the sniper in the cabin to his right. The SR-25 rifle was resting on a bipod, the barrel tip parallel with the open door. The man’s eye was fixed to the Leupold Mark 4 scope, the magazine chambered in 7.62mm NATO. Ariel knew that the sniper could’ve lifted the top of Ibrahim’s head clean off from this distance, and that would have been fine with him. But not those he answered to, of course.
He gave the shoot-to-kill order into his cheek mic and, watching the Perspex screen, saw the back of the bodyguard’s head erupt into a thick spray of blood and skull fragments. A split second later the lifeless body buckled to the floor. The three Mossad operatives had drawn their Glocks from behind their backs and their hanging shirts, and Ariel felt sure the mission would be a success, although complacency didn’t figure highly in his nature.
It would be clean, precise. Then the point man would fast-rope ten yards from a bar protruding out of the fuselage, using padded gloves to avoid shredding the skin on his hands.
Ariel had done it many times himself. He knew it would be hard for him to see when he first hit the stony track, due to the dust cloud whipped up by the rotors. But the man was trained to find his bearings in a split second and to react.
Then, just as the three operatives on the ground moved in for the arrest, something extraordinary happened.
Chapter 42
Ibrahim felt the young bodyguard’s blood splash across his cheek. He didn’t have to look sideways to know what had happened. He had seen many comrades killed by a sniper’s bullet. Some of the many passersby looked over, but a Mossad operative had already covered the Hamas fighter’s head with his body and looked to be comforting him. To avoid suspicion, Ibrahim knew. The other two were almost upon him, their handguns loose by their sides. In that instant he did something no one would expect.
Ibrahim shot the boy with the inverted bike first, then the old man sitting outside the store, the Glock bucking in his hand, the brass casings skipping out. It would have been difficult shots, given the number of people milling around, but he was at the edge of the alley, and he only had to wait for an elderly woman in a white hijab to move away from the store before having an unencumbered view.
The old man was hit in the neck, severing his carotid artery and causing a geyser of blood; the boy in the temple, causing instant death. Like the handguns held by the Mossad operatives, his wasn’t suppressed, which meant that the muzzle blast was loud, instantly disorientating and fear-inducing for those who heard it at close quarters. As the brass cases clanked on the floor, the first screams began. He didn’t have the time or the inclination to collect them up, as he’d sometimes ordered his men to do in Syria when they’d wanted to blame the local Shia militia for an atrocity.
He started shouting above the din from the Black Hawk’s engine, “Mossad, Mossad, Mossad,” and pointed at the three operatives.
In a second the crowd turned on them, lashing out with fists and feet, a great flurry of limbs. Others raced about, eager to pick up loose stones and broken concrete to use as weapons. The Mossad men discharged their weapons in the air at first, but then killed a few before they fell. Ibrahim saw that a sniper lying in the cabin of the hovering Black Hawk got a couple more Palestinians, but by the time they were being beaten and kicked half to death, Ibrahim had made his escape in the alley.
With the sounds of screaming and shouting in his ears, mixed with the rotors of the helicopter, he ran down the old stone pathway, which was barely wide enough for three adults to walk side-by-side, past stacked sacks of shiny dark brown coffee beans and the vivid colours on display in plastic containers at a candy store.
He kept tight to the side, underneath the awnings and canvases, as best he could once he’d avoided the shoppers and store owners. He knew the various methods of aerial reconnaissance at the Israelis’ disposal would be attempting to track him. The Special Forces in the Black Hawk might have fast-roped down already.
He took off his ball cap as he ran and tossed it into a public trash can. Slowing down, he ripped open the buttons on his short-sleeve shirt, revealing a lime-green T-shirt, and, pulling at the outer shirt he scrunched it up. He knew he couldn’t go to the agreed rendezvous point, because the Hamas traitor, if that was what he was, knew where it was too, of course. He decided to lie low until it was dark. The fishing boat in the harbour wouldn’t go without him, but he’d need to implement the emergency plan now, and that didn’t involve a Gazan-owned fishing boat. The assault was a setback, nothing more, he decided.
He felt bad about killing innocent Muslims, but innocents had always been killed in war and if he was caught the most audacious and devastating attack on the West, far greater than 9/11, would be compromised, and he couldn’t allow that to happen. Allah would forgive him, he believed.
He kept running, and, spontaneously, his fear was replaced by joy, a deep and religiously-motivated joy. He had outwitted them. He had beaten them. He had survived.
Chapter 43
Ariel had gotten the go ahead to send his men down into the bloody melee within seconds of radioing the op commander, a leathery-faced guy with powder-blue eyes, who was a veteran of the Israeli-Lebanese conflict in 1982. The short delay had been after the commander had shouted out a string of expletives worthy of a crack addict.
Two seconds later, Ariel heard through his headphones that the assault on the Hamas safe house hadn’t resulted in any prisoners being taken. They’d all fought to the death or committed suicide. It was turning into the worst day in his professional life.
What’s more, the drones couldn’t penetrate the store canopies and Ibrahim had disappeared without trace. He couldn’t let his men go after him because the risk of them being kidnapped in the warren of corridors that constituted this part of the city was too high, and by the look of the way the Palestinian mob was laying into the Mossad operatives they’d all be needed to secure their release, even if a pursuit on foot had been feasible.
He gritted his teeth now, watching his men tearing back into the Palestinians, using the butts of their weapons as clubs. Part of him hoped one of the Arabs would pull a blade so that another enemy of the State of Israel would be legitimately dispatched and be laid to rot in this parched earth.
His radio crackled before he heard the commander barking into his headphones. “I can’t fucking believe that terrorist got away. The CIA will go apoplectic. You got that, lieutenant?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Fucking apoplectic and then some. Your wife like living by the sea? Yeah I guess she does, well, you can tell her that’s fucking history. Now get my men out of there.”
Ariel ripped his headphones off then. He’d say it was a temporary malfunction. If he had to listen to any more shit from the commander he might just cap a Palestinian in the leg for being there. Stunned by his own propensity for violence that this place was capable of conjuring up, he quickly put the headphones back on.
The co-pilot in the cockpit turned around, his seemingly outsized aviation helmet making him look like an alien. “You okay, lieutenant?” he said via the radio.
“Yeah, I’m fine.”
“The area’s secure,” he said, pointing down. “We’re heading for the roof.”
Ariel peered down at the narrow street. Half a dozen Palestinians were lying in the dirt, their heads cracked. His men had surrounded the Mossad operatives, who were being held upright by a trio of operators, who had shouldered their weapons. The crowd had dispersed, the young adults throwing rocks from a distance.
“Copy that,” he said.
He radioe
d his men to move.
Part of him, that part he shielded from the world, his family even, hoped that the hostilities would end tomorrow so that his son wouldn’t have to perpetuate the enmity and killing, the madness that festered in this biblical land.
It was a living hell, but one which he knew his country felt pride in. Some, he believed, mostly the Zionist settlers, had come to relish. And he shivered at the thought of that.
Chapter 44
Crane had travelled the short distance to Marine Corps Base Quantico in the Washington Metropolitan Area. Bordered by the Potomac on three sides, the base covered over one hundred square miles and also housed the FBI Training Academy. The general had been taken here to ensure his ongoing safety. It was late evening in Ankara and Gaza, the two cities sharing the same time zone, and mid-afternoon on the east coast of the States. The mud-grey cloud was low and stationary, and it looked as if a rain shower wasn’t far off.
The medical team who’d travelled back from Turkey with the general had been replaced by the two doctors and three nurses from the Navy Medical Corps, headed up by a captain who had served three tours of Afghanistan with the jarheads. A good man, the Marine colonel who had driven Crane to the base had said just as they’d passed the replica of the Marine Corps War Memorial, depicting the World War Two flag-raising on Iwo Jima that stood at the entrance to the base.
The general was in an underground medical facility that was part of an evacuation site and unknown to all but a handful of the twelve thousand or so inhabitants of the base. The room was twelve foot square, with AC and enough intensive care equipment to keep a squad of Marines alive, including a defibrillator.
The general lay on his back attached to a selection of tubes and monitors. It smelt of antiseptic wash and something Crane thought was akin to toffee. The captain who’d shown him here was a short man, his hair turning silver at the temples. He was wearing a pair of metal-rimmed eyeglasses halfway down his Roman nose and spoke so quietly that Crane had difficulty understanding him.
