The Gamma Option

by Jon Land

“Where else?” Eisenstadt responded with terrifying matter-of-factness. “Masada.”

  Part Five

  Independence Day

  Masada: Saturday, May 13; noon

  Chapter 26

  THE MOUNTAIN PLATEAU of Masada rises ominously above the desolation that surrounds it. Standing on the border between the Judean Desert and the Dead Sea Valley, it is 1,400 feet from ground level to a rock-strewn summit that covers five acres. On the summit are reconstructed buildings dating back over two thousand years. The past lives and breathes on the desert wind that swirls the dust.

  Israel’s past.

  More than any other single symbol, Masada typifies the plight of the Jewish people through history. It was built originally as a royal sanctuary and fortress by King Herod, but it entered history over a half century after his death. Jewish Zealots who had revolted against Rome fled to Masada and held it for three years, the final one against continued onslaught from the entire Tenth Roman Legion. Outnumbered by more than ten to one, the Zealots outlasted the legion until the Romans constructed a ramp up one of the mountain’s sides and seemed on the verge of crashing through the fortress walls. Unable to accept either moral or physical enslavement, the Zealots denied the Romans their victory by taking their own lives. The Romans found nine-hundred-seventy corpses waiting for them inside the walls it had taken three years to penetrate.

  Today the flow of natives and tourists to Masada is constant. So too is the army’s tradition of ending the training of soldiers with a charge up the serpentine Snake Path that winds from the mountain’s base to its buffeted summit.

  The vast majority of visitors, though, opt for the faster and less tiring route offered by the cable cars that run up the mountain’s eastern side. The pair of vehicles work in perfect tandem, carrying visitors up and down throughout the day.

  The twenty-five men who packed into the cable car at the base station on this Saturday had arrived just minutes before on a tour bus. They were dressed in baggy, comfortable clothing well suited for the heat, and many had camera bags slung from their shoulders. No words were exchanged during the five minute trek upward. The khaki-clad tour-group leader emerged first on the unloading platform and approached a young soldier leaning complacently against a steel rail.

  “You will evacuate these premises immediately,” Yosef Rasin ordered him.

  The soldier stiffened. “Excuse me?”

  “You heard what I said. There are three more of your number atop the mountain as we speak. By now they have been approached by my men, as you have.”

  “Your men?”

  With that the soldier’s eyes scrutinized the two dozen men who had just made the trip up in the cable car. Those that he could see all had their hands tucked in their clothes or camera bags, intentions obvious, weapons a grasp away. Then he gazed at the long, winding line of patrons waiting to take the cable car down, disturbed by the sudden halt in its movement.

  “Are we being taken hostage?” he asked.

  “No, you fool. I want all of you off this mountain! You and the other soldiers will supervise the process but my men will oversee everything. We do not wish to make an issue out of this. Believe me, shedding Israeli blood is not our intention.”

  “I … don’t understand.”

  “We are not terrorists, we are patriots. At the base of the mountain more of us are waiting to be taken up. There is equipment they will transport upward with each shift. Is that clear?”

  “Yes.”

  “You will make no move to intercede. We are not enemies. It might not seem so now, but we are on the same side.”

  The soldier looked at Yosef Rasin more closely. “I know you. I’m sure I do… .”

  “When you are away from the mountain,” the fanatic continued, “you will tell the Israeli people to look to Masada. You will tell them that the ultimate step to insure the freedom of our people and our nation is about to be taken. A new meaning will be brought to Independence Day when it dawns tomorrow. Do you understand what I am saying?”

  “I … think so.”

  “Be sure of it. You are blessed, young man, blessed to be the messenger of a holy mission. Go about your business now. Let us keep the people lined up beyond us calm.”

  The soldier’s eyes widened suddenly. “I do know you. You’re—”

  “I’m nobody, young man. But tomorrow will change that.”

  “It’s done,” Isser reported to the prime minister, lowering the phone back to its hook. “He’s taken Masada, as planned.”

  “What have you told the army?”

  “To set up a perimeter but not to interfere in any way. The area must be sealed so Rasin can work his black magic undisturbed on that rock.”

  “You sound disturbed.”

  “He brought an army with him, Mr. Prime Minister, upward of sixty men. That was not part of the deal you made.”

  “But it doesn’t surprise me. It’s a warning to us, another of his symbols. The scene will look much better tomorrow when the television stations arrive at dawn for the announcement of his appointment as minister of defense.” The old man paused. “Unless McCracken has something to say about it.”

  “We’ve confirmed it was Isaac who sprang him and the Indian from our safe house in Jerusalem. We’re not trying to track him down. If he wants to walk away from this now, he can.”

  “But you know he won’t, don’t you, Isser?”

  “You’re probably right, and that’s as good a reason for maintaining a military presence around Masada as any. If McCracken so much as shows his face near the mountain, he’ll be shot on sight.”

  It was just after twelve-thirty when Isaac at last gained confirmation of the worst from a government contact.

  “Eisenstadt was right,” he reported. “Rasin and over fifty of his soldiers took Masada just after noon.”

  “And the army’s supporting him, of course,” McCracken concluded.

  “They’ve cordoned off the entire area around Arad. Nobody gets in. The whole Negev’s been closed down. The mountain belongs to Rasin and there’s nothing we can do to change that.”

  A stiff wind rattled the walls of the Bedouin tribe leader’s tin house. Outside a rooster crowed incessantly.

  McCracken turned his gaze on Wareagle, who had spread out a map of Masada over an ancient crate. “What do you think, Indian, can we succeed in less than a day where ten-thousand Romans failed in three years?”

  Wareagle looked up at him. “The army’s presence has less to do with our problem than the fortress itself, Blainey. Slipping past the soldiers might be possible, but that would leave us with only these two routes of approach to Rasin.” With that, Johnny traced a massive finger, first up the serpentine Snake Path which wound up the eastern side of the mountain, and then traced the path the Romans had left up the western slope with the ramp they had used to gain entry at last to the fortress. “Both paths are easily defensible with far less manpower and weapons than Rasin has by all accounts brought with him.”

  “Especially when he’s got just the two of us and four Haganah fighters to contend with. No offense, Isaac.”

  “Give me a gun. Give all of us guns. We can still shoot.”

  “For that you need a target first, and right now we can’t even get close to it. Okay, Indian, so ground approach is out. That would seem to leave us exclusively with air.”

  Wareagle frowned in response to that suggestion. “The Israelis know you, Blainey, and they know you will try anything. They will be watching the skies. We’ll never get close.”

  “How about a low-altitude drop?”

  “Again, it might get us by the Israelis fortifying the mountain base, but unless we could come up with a way to disguise our parachutes, we would be exposed to Rasin’s troops the entire way down.”

  “We need cover then.”

  “Where cover plainly doesn’t exist.”

  “Goddamn it!” Blaine roared. “We’ll climb the rock face if that’s what it takes to get up ther
e. But we’re going to stop Rasin, do you hear me?”

  “I hear you, Blainey, but your words fail to consider the realities of the limitations before us. We have looked to the obvious. Now the time has come to look deeper.”

  “We’re deep now, Indian. Over our heads, as I make it.” Blaine stopped suddenly, obviously struck by something. “Okay, Indian, make believe you’ve got access to all the tech hardware in the world. Everything considered, could you find a way to get us on top of that rock?”

  Wareagle turned his attention back to the map. At last he looked up and nodded emotionlessly.

  “Yes, but it would take men as well as machines.”

  “But there is a way?”

  “A means without any guarantees. The spirits provide alternatives, not certainties.”

  “That’s good enough for me, Indian.”

  “Fudo-san,” Hiroshi said. “I can hardly hear you.”

  “We’ve got a strange connection, Hiroshi. I’m talking to you from a Bedouin camp in the Judean Desert. Blame the bad reception on a radio signal traveling via land-line patch-through.”

  “And that is where your trail has led you?”

  “Among other places, yes.” McCracken paused. “Did you mean what you told me in Japan? Would you really do anything to right the wrong of your aiding Rasin?”

  “I have violated my honor, Fudo-san. In days past that would be grounds for taking my own life.”

  “There’s a way to regain your honor far more worthwhile than that.”

  “Anything, Fudo-san. If it is within my power, it will be done. Just name it.”

  “It’s a long list, Hiroshi. Better grab yourself a pad… .”

  When he was finished and the connection broken, Blaine acknowledged Johnny Wareagle’s slight smile and Isaac’s flabbergasted expression.

  “Can this really be done?” the old man asked, incredulously.

  “Hiroshi can pull it off. The only thing that might stop him—and us—is time.”

  “A foe we will have difficulty staring down,” Wareagle reminded them.

  McCracken checked his watch. “It’s one o’clock now. Hiroshi says he can be here with the equipment within ten hours. We’ll be cutting it close but we’ll have time. We can’t stop Rasin and the others from releasing their allotments of vaccine. But if we grab him on Masada, he won’t be able to unleash Gamma on the world on Independence Day.”

  “And just how do you think he plans on doing that anyway?” Isaac wondered.

  “If I’m right, the key is Tehran. Can you get a message to your people in the city?”

  “I was about to contact our team leader. He can’t reach the individual cells directly, but there’s a signal he can employ meaning abort.”

  “No! You can’t abort. Do you hear me? Firestorm is more important now than ever!”

  Isaac looked totally confused. “Maybe you forget that the government was supplying the Apaches, and without them Firestorm has no chance of succeeding.”

  “We’ll worry about them later. For now you’ve just got to trust me. Operation Firestorm must go on as planned.”

  “Then why did you ask if I could get a message into the city?”

  Blaine looked him in the eyes as he spoke. “You know where Evira is. I want her rescued. Send the word.”

  “The risk! The danger!”

  “It’s like this, Isaac. Without her, I might never be able to find my son. If she dies, he probably dies too. Sound simple? Let me put it another way. If I can’t save the kid, I might just help Rasin empty his cannisters filled with the Gamma virus.” And then he added to Wareagle, “I just can’t see the fucking point anymore.”

  “But you see something the rest of us as of yet cannot, Blainey.”

  “My eyes may be playing tricks on me, Indian. Let’s hope to hell they are.”

  “Is there anything else?”

  “No,” Yosef Rasin replied to the leather-clad Lace, “I believe you have everything covered.”

  “Not quite,” returned the tall woman with the hard-muscled body. Her eyes turned toward the base of the mountain, where motion was visible amidst the floodlights the army had set up for itself. “But our friends down there are sure to cover anything we may have missed.”

  “You still believe McCracken is alive?”

  “I don’t believe he could have been killed as easily as your reports indicate.”

  “So if he comes …”

  Lace smiled and her neck muscles tensed. “Let him.”

  And then she took her leave to rejoin Tilly in a sweep of the fortified positions she had arranged on Masada before night had fallen. Rasin had elected to concentrate his base on Masada’s northern front, just above the remains of Herod’s palace. Much of the large bathhouse, terraces, and labyrinth of storehouses had undergone extensive reconstruction and regained a measure of their original fortification. The remainder of structures on Masada were scattered across its rock-littered vastness. Rasin had expected the posting of their forces to begin at the guardhouse two hundred yards from the northern edge. But, fearing an attack, Lace had elected to disperse a number of guards along the entire perimeter so security could be maintained from all directions. If an attack came, they would know about it well in advance.

  All the lights atop the mountain had been turned on, casting ancient Masada in an eerie, modern glow. Rasin was amazed by it. He could almost see to the ends of the mountaintop from his perch on the bathhouse roof. He had been wise to listen to Lace, wiser still to bring with him his personal commando force composed of outcasts like himself—a carefully chosen group of men tossed out of the military for brutality to Arabs. In short, a band of cutthroats. He did not fear an attack from McCracken as much as one from the government should it change its mind. His men were there as a deterrent against that. There was no way even the army’s most elite units could succeed in any assault on him. No way at all. Several of his commandos were armed with anti-aircraft weapons, for if an attack were to come, it would be from the sky.

  Rasin breathed deeply and drank in the dry air. The power he had long sought, the power it had been his destiny to achieve, was now within his reach, thanks to Gamma. He checked his watch. Just five hours until he would fire his portion of the vaccine into the air. Around the same time a dozen others, placed strategically across Israel, would release their allotments to be swept by the wind across the small nation to render her safe from the imminent release of the Gamma virus. Since exposure to the ultraviolet rays of the sun would kill the vaccine organism instantly, the key was to time its release so it might spread as close to Israeli borders as possible by sunrise. It wasn’t an exact science, but it was close enough. Besides, fate was on his side.

  He had outmaneuvered them brilliantly, of course; he had outmaneuvered everyone. If they ever suspected the lengths he had gone through to assure the success of his plan, if they ever realized the charade he had enacted for the world … Oh well, no sense in pondering over that. The charade was rapidly drawing to its conclusion.

  The wind blew over the Dead Sea, smelling vital and alive to him. Perhaps even it would live again with the coming of the morning. Perhaps Moses had not performed the last miracle at all.

  What Rasin was about to do proved that much at least.

  “Well, old friend, can we pull it off?”

  Hiroshi’s attention was so entrenched in Wareagle’s map of Masada spread over the crates in the tin Bedouin house that he barely heard McCracken’s question. Without speaking, he moved to a rip in the house’s metal that served as a window. In the desert land just beyond the camp, bathed in the spill of floodlights powered by portable generators, Hiroshi watched two dozen of his finest men assembling and preparing the incredible stores of equipment they had transported from Japan. A jet transport had managed the flight in eight hours, landing in a private field in Egypt where a pair of commandeered Israeli Sikorsky troop-carrying helicopters were waiting. The equipment was transferred and the flight to the Bedoui
n village negotiated without incident, arriving just after midnight.

  “It can be done, Fudo-san,” Hiroshi replied finally without turning back. “The idea is brilliant, but …”

  “Yes?”

  “The elaborateness of it confuses me. A strafing run aimed at obliterating the stronghold would seem a far more logical strategy.”

  “Too random,” McCracken explained. “If Rasin dies or makes it off Masada in all the confusion, we lose our chance of getting the Gamma cannisters back. That’s priority one.”

  “I understand, Fudo-san, but the fact remains we’re going to be dropping into heavily fortified positions with little or no cover behind us.”

  Blaine looked at Wareagle. “Leave that to the Indian. I’m more concerned with how we’re going to stop the soldiers at the base of the mountain from calling in the cavalry once they realize what’s going on.”

  “Leave that to me,” Hiroshi said.

  The flat desert plain beyond the Bedouin camp lay bathed in a darkness broken only here and there by the floodlights. The only sound breaking the still cool of the night was that of the Sikorsky armored troop carriers warming their engines as the moment of takeoff approached. Hiroshi was kneeling, hands on knees, facing his troop of samurai warriors who knelt before him in a straight line. All had dressed in black tops and black baggy skirtlike bottoms called hakama. Though most would be outfitted with modern automatic weapons, their focus now was rooted on the sheathed swords lying before them. On Hiroshi’s cue, they grasped the ancient weapons and pushed them through their belts, the collective motion eerie in its singular calm. McCracken stood nearby, reviewing once more the details of Johnny Wareagle’s plan.

  “You can call me a schlemiel,” Isaac said, suddenly by his side, “but I thought you said dropping out of the sky was suicide.”

  “I said parachuting down was suicide. This is different.”

  Isaac humphed. “It’s still the sky.”

  “And you?”

  “I’m leaving now to pay Isser a visit. He won’t be able to dismiss me after what Eisenstadt told us. We don’t want you to succeed at Masada only to be killed by the real army.”