The Gamma Option

by Jon Land

  “Say something,” the head of Mossad said to the old man who was seated uneasily next to him in the rear seat of the cockpit.

  “Like what?”

  “Like telling me what fools we were to have joined forces with Rasin.”

  “I hate repeating myself. Help McCracken catch Rasin on Masada and I might just forgive you.”

  They were gazing at the Sikorskys hovering over Masada with floodlights blazing when a mortar shell flashed by the windshield, causing both men to shrink back instinctively with the certainty it was headed for them. Isser grabbed his handset.

  “Ready drop displacement,” he told the commandos scattered through the four gunships. “Prepare to secure the area. We’re going down.”

  Rasin could only follow the path of his fired shells briefly before angle and distance stole them from him. He had six more to fire, another three minutes work at most. In spite of the attack spearheaded by McCracken, he was on the verge of assuring the successful completion of the first stage of his plan.

  But he felt no elation, for there was the second stage to consider. And to effect that he would have to make it safely off this rock to freedom. There would have to be a way. Fate had gotten him this far. Fate had blessed him first with his own resolve, then with Eisenstadt, and at last with the Gamma cannisters salvaged off the Indianapolis. Yes, all this was happening because it was meant to. His was a holy mission, a blessed one.

  Masada had indeed been the perfect choice for the setting from which Israel would at last achieve true independence. And yet if he died here as the Zealots had, then all would be for naught. Rasin started to worry until once again the strange feeling of calm reassurance surged through him.

  He wasn’t going to die. He wasn’t going to be captured.

  He was going to finish the first stage of the plan here on Masada and then move on to the next to achieve his destiny. Fired by that thought, Rasin reached for the first of the final six shells.

  Three more shells had been fired before McCracken reached the plain of Masada once more. He stumbled briefly, suddenly dizzy, and had to lean against one of the ancient walls to steady himself. He still had a grenade, an Uzi he was able to pick up on the way, and a pistol. Enough. Plenty. But there was Hiroshi to consider as well, wounded somewhere and in need of help.

  “Come in, Hiroshi. Sorry it took so long. Where are you? … Do you read me, Hiroshi? Come in.”

  There was no response, and another mortar blast pierced the air as the helicopter gunships sprinted through the air above him. If Hiroshi’s plan to jam the Israeli soldiers’ communications had failed, reinforcements would have reached here significantly sooner, which meant the gunships had come courtesy of Isaac’s visit to the Mossad. But that did not insure the occupants of the choppers would be friendly. Blaine eased himself forward and waited for the next mortar shell to pin down where they were being fired from, his key to finding Rasin.

  When it came, he was ready. He sprinted forward, with the last of the battle between Hiroshi’s warriors and Rasin’s soldiers still raging. The fact that gunfire sounded only weakly and sporadically was evidence that the tide of the battle had turned toward the samurai. All that remained was for McCracken to do his part.

  He sped between the last wall of the storehouses and the higher one of a courtyard housing public toilet facilities. From there he darted past the quarry and into the open where the next mortar blast froze him in his tracks.

  The water cistern! It was coming from the water cistern!

  Blaine had started forward again when the rocks at his feet were kicked up by a burst from a machine gun. He hit the ground hard and rolled, bullets tracing him as he fired token return volleys in a wide spray. He didn’t have the gunman pinned down and was starting to plan how to accomplish that when the figure of Johnny Wareagle rushed into the open, firing toward the area of a water station forty yards to the left.

  “Go, Blainey! I’ll keep him occupied!”

  McCracken didn’t argue, just rose and sped off again with Johnny’s rifle continuing to spit fire. When the hammer clicked on an empty cylinder, he discarded the rifle and drew the massive killing knife from the sheath on his belt. He stood there holding it menacingly high so the gunman would know that rifle or not, he wasn’t giving an inch. The arriving gunships dipped lower, kicking up huge clouds of ancient dust and rocks that Wareagle had to squint his eyes to see through.

  “This is the Israeli army!” a voice hailed over a PA from within one of the choppers. “Throw down your weapons and stand with your hands in the air.”

  The warning completed, doors opened on all four of the helicopters to allow dozens of slick ropes to drop out and Israeli commandos to slide down toward ground level with guns at the ready. But by now their presence was superfluous. Those remaining to acknowledge them were a dozen of Hiroshi’s warriors who had survived and their twenty prisoners who were being herded forward even then. Wareagle heard a rustle and turned back toward the water station.

  He saw the huge figure in black leather quite clearly, saw her as she stooped to lift up and support the gunman grazed by one of Johnny’s bullets. With the weight of the body taxing it, the figure in black could do nothing but gaze at the huge Indian with the large knife extending by his side.

  Gaze and smile.

  Then in the next instant the light from the Sikorskys wavered as they shifted to free landing space for the gunships, and by the time the area was lit again the two figures had disappeared.

  Yosef Rasin had heard the choppers and the warning that had come from one of them and knew his stand on Masada was finished. The army, and thus the government, must have turned against him. He had been double-crossed!

  But what had changed the government’s mind? What had turned their reluctant sanction of his plan into sudden disavowal? McCracken again no doubt, and the old men who had turned out to be real thorns in his side, too. And yet they of all people should have supported what he was trying to do. Traitors! They were all traitors! He alone could set Israel on the proper course now. One more shell to fire and then he would flee the cistern and find a way off this rock before the army could find him.

  Rasin reached out and dropped the final shell down the barrel.

  The shell blasted outward when Blaine was ten yards from the start of the steps that led down into the water cistern. Holding the Uzi tight before him, he glided the rest of the way, not wanting to alert Rasin to his presence.

  “Hold it right there!”

  The call sounded from his rear and McCracken knew instantly it had come from an Israeli soldier. The sudden grinding sound of additional footsteps stopping against the rock surface told him the speaker had been joined by two others. He turned slowly, hands and Uzi in the air.

  “Where’s your commander?”

  “Drop your weapon!”

  “Call your commander here now. Is it Isser? Call Isser!”

  “Drop your—”

  The speaker’s command was cut off when the figure of Johnny Wareagle crashed into him, spreading his arms to take down the two others as well. Blaine didn’t wait to see the rest. He rushed the final stretch to the entrance of the water cistern and was halfway down the stairs in the pitch blackness when he heard Rasin’s voice.

  “I’ve been expecting you.”

  McCracken stopped, searched for the voice’s point of origin.

  “Rasin?”

  “You shouldn’t have come down here, but since you have why not come all the way down?”

  McCracken stopped at the bottom step. The pungent scent of mortar fire singed his nostrils. There was something wrong here, wrong with the scenario, wrong with where Rasin’s voice was coming from.

  “I can’t see you.”

  “You’d like to, wouldn’t you? You think you’ve won.”

  “Plenty of people died here tonight. Nobody wins.”

  “Israel can, now that I’ve released my vaccine. Israel can win at last.”

  “Only if hundre
ds of millions more die. That doesn’t count.”

  “You’ve spoken to Eisenstadt.”

  “Give yourself up.”

  “Sorry.”

  McCracken finally pinned Rasin down to the far wall directly opposite him. But his voice had a strange echo, as if he were speaking down from a point on the wall.

  Blaine realized what was happening in time to start his sprint back up the steep stone steps. Maybe Rasin didn’t hear or see him. Maybe he just had to say one last thing.

  “Good-bye, Blaine McCracken.”

  The explosion came as he cleared the final step and lunged headlong through the air to carry himself as far as he could from the cistern. The stairs crumbled instantly and the entire ancient structure trembled, as fragments of the walls cracked and splintered in the last instant before the cistern collapsed upon itself, leaving Blaine to gaze back at the rubble.

  “He climbed out, I’m telling you,” Blaine insisted to Isser while Isaac looked on. “He must have had a rope ladder or something extended from one of the portals.”

  “He hasn’t left this rock, that’s for sure. We’ll find him.”

  “I want him when you do,” Blaine said bitterly, thinking of the news Wareagle had brought him about Hiroshi. “There’s a score to settle now.”

  “We’ll settle it later.”

  McCracken looked up with frigid eyes. “Just find him, Isser. I figure you might be able to handle that much. But you’ve got to take him alive. Otherwise we don’t find out where he stashed the cannisters of Gamma gas and we might be facing this whole scenario again real soon.”

  “I’d rather not think about that.”

  “You’d better.”

  Blaine had barely finished the warning when one of the gunships fired up its engine, propeller and rotor blades springing to life.

  “I didn’t authorize anyone to leave,” Isser said in puzzlement. “What the hell is …”

  McCracken was already running, charging toward the chopper which was nearly ready for takeoff. He knew in that instant the huge woman in black leather would be at the controls, knew she would have disabled the other gunships to prevent pursuit as well.

  A group of soldiers reached the readying chopper ahead of him and were blasted back by machine-gun fire coming from just inside the door. Blaine approached on an angle that kept him from the gunman’s sight, and was almost there when the chopper lifted off suddenly. At the last moment he leaped to grab hold of the chopper’s landing pod as it rose, but his hand slipped off the steel. He plunged back down to the dust of Masada with the gunship shrinking into the blackness of the night.

  Chapter 29

  EVIRA LAY ON THE floor in her cell in the palace basement. Time had lost all meaning to her; she slept, she woke. There was little else to do. Kourosh lay against her, using her shoulder as a pillow. Occasionally in his sleep, the urchin would whimper and grab for her. Evira was more than happy to hug and soothe him, her own desperation eased in the process.

  How long had it been since Hassani had finished with them, since the reports of McCracken’s death? At least one day, perhaps two or more. Evira didn’t know why they were being left alive, unless it was to let them starve slowly to death. In all the hours they had been there, no one had come with food or water. She had long gone beyond being hungry, even thirsty. Her strength had depleted, and with it her resolve. Hassani had won, Rasin too. McCracken was dead and she was here. How idealistic she had been to believe the two of them were capable of defeating the plans of two madmen on their own.

  By her side, Kourosh whimpered again, long hair matted to his forehead by the sweat caused by the unremitting heat of the air about them. This boy had become her burden. Watching him die would be her punishment for how she had involved Blaine McCracken. The gods worked in strange ways, but always with method and purpose. She knew another day without food or water would bring severe pains and cramps to the boy. Such an awful way to die, feeling yourself wasting away. She had resolved that before her own strength ebbed too far she would end the urchin’s pain by killing him. It would be the last act of her suddenly feeble life and the hardest to fulfill.

  Evira felt herself nodding off again and hoped for a long, dream-filled sleep this time. She wrapped her arm around the boy and held him close to her. Her eyes slid closed.

  A sound from somewhere jarred her. How long had she been out, if at all? A dream, it must have been a dream that reached her in the state between consciousness and sleep.

  No, the sound came again, that of metal being worked; a scratching, grating sound. Her ears tried to focus in, eyes useless in the near-total darkness of the basement prison.

  Suddenly there was a loud echo of metal being forced aside. A wide beam of light darted haphazardly across the far wall. Men were entering through some secret passageway or tunnel. She remembered Kourosh describing it to her. But who were they? Why had they come?

  The single beam became four. The beams were joined by voices exchanged in a whisper, someone giving instructions, a search underway.

  They were looking for her!

  Over here, Evira tried to say, but her mouth was too dry to push the words out. She forced up some saliva and cleared the refuse from her throat.

  “Over here,” she managed hoarsely. “Over here.”

  Instantly a pair of the flashlights turned in the direction of her cell.

  “Yakov, we’ve found her!” a voice followed in an excited whisper.

  “Alive?”

  The light found her, blinded her, and she shrank back to shield her eyes.

  “Yes. Quite.”

  A third flashlight joined the first two. Evira struggled to gaze past the beams at the men who held them.

  “Can you hear me?” came the voice of the one called Yakov.

  “Yes.”

  “I’m going to blow the lock on your cell. Back up as far as you can in the corner.”

  She did as she was told and dragged Kourosh along with her. The boy started to stir, barely awake.

  “It’s okay,” she soothed. “We’re being rescued.”

  She held him close to her as a fizzle came, followed by a flash, and a poof! One of the men kicked at the cell door and it reeled inward to allow the group to enter.

  “How long since you’ve had anything to eat or drink?” Yakov asked her.

  “Two days, I think. Maybe three.”

  “Then that’s our first priority,” he said, helping her to her feet, while another of the men supported the urchin. “I assume the boy is with you.”

  “He is. Who are you? What brought you here?”

  “A long story. For now I’ve got a message from Blaine McCracken. He says you should have stayed an old hag in Jaffa.”

  “What?” Isser blared at McCracken’s assertion of the final piece in the mad plan of Yosef Rasin. “That’s insane!”

  “Of course it is,” Blaine told him. “It’s Rasin.”

  “But if what you say is true …”

  “Then everything makes sense. Everything becomes clear.”

  “How could he have pulled it off, though? Think of the logistics.”

  “Forget logic. It doesn’t matter anymore; it never did. We’ve got to think like him if we’re still going to have a chance to win.”

  They were seated in Isser’s office in the squat, innocuous complex of buildings outside Tel Aviv near the Hebrew Country Club that formed the permanent headquarters of Mossad.

  “You know, Isser,” Isaac started, “I think he’s got a point.”

  “It’s crazy,” the head of Mossad persisted. “And you want me to risk everything based on this … hunch.”

  “Not a hunch and not everything. Just me and Operation Firestorm. I go into Tehran and get Rasin. All you do is let Firestorm proceed as planned.”

  “Including the Apaches, of course.”

  “More than ever, since one of them’s gonna serve as my taxi in.” He turned back toward Isaac. “So when’s show time?”

&n
bsp; The old man turned an empty gaze out the window where the first signs of light were still an hour or so away.

  “Dawn,” was all he said.

  The Shah’s secret tunnel ran nearly half a mile and ended beneath a street beyond the square that fronted the royal palace.

  “You’re Israeli,” Evira said as they made their way forward with flashlights slicing through the darkness.

  “Born and raised.” Yakov laughed, taking his turn at carrying Kourosh.

  Evira recalled her suspicions brought on by the comic books purchased in Israel. “But what are you doing here?”

  “We’re here to start a revolution. Several hundred of us were planted over a year ago amidst the young, the poor, and the students to organize their discontent into rebellion—and to supply them with the means to fight.”

  “Weapons …”

  “No revolution is complete without them.”

  “An Israeli-inspired revolution?”

  “Supported would be a better choice of words. It is the people’s will. We are merely helping them exercise it.”

  “ ‘We.’ Mossad?”

  “Let’s say we’re an independent group working with their sanction. Easier to disavow involvement that way. Less likely to have leaks with an operation required to take place over such a long period of time.”

  “Jews working with Iranians. Incredible …”

  “Not really. People working against oppressive, murderous regimes is never incredible. You must agree. You came here to kill Hassani yourself.”

  Evira stopped suddenly, and Yakov’s men bringing up the rear nearly collided with her. “How did you know—”

  “Because an order was sent by the mission controllers to insure you failed. With Hassani dead, the people would have lost their symbol to rise against. There would be no Firestorm.”

  “No what?”

  “Code name of this operation.”

  “Then it was your people who betrayed that cell in Naziabad.”

  “Regretfully,” Yakov acknowledged softly. “This boy, he saved your life?”

  Evira nodded. “And to return the favor I’m going to get him out of this country. With your help, of course.” Thanks to Blaine McCracken, she almost added but didn’t. The fact that he had somehow arranged this rescue could only mean that he had fulfilled his end of the mission. Whatever happiness she might have felt over that, though, was tempered by the failure she had experienced at her end. But maybe it wasn’t too late… .