The Sinai Directive

by Rick Jones

  Getting to his feet, Brandt hit a few buttons on the console trying to get the system back online. After failing to do so, he decided to surrender any further additional efforts to get back online, and hastily exited the Control Room.

  Sixty feet down the corridor was a room that held specific arms for black-market retail, those hard-to-find goods that were not Soviet antiquities like the Combat Reconnaissance Patrol Vehicles or the Tuning BRDMs. These were more current and state-of-the-art weapons whose designs were poached from corporations and recreated under Faruk’s covert factories. Stepping inside and looking at the plethora of weapons to choose from, Brandt was clearly captivated by the modified Dillon M134D Gatling Gun, a six barreled, electrically driven machine gun that fired rounds at a fixed rate of 3,000 shots per minute. Though detachable from its mount and portable, the weapon still had heft and weight to it. The portable version also carried with it a 600-round belt, which also added to its weight. But Brandt was a large man who could maneuver such a weapon since he stood six-five and weighed 260, most of which was rock-hard muscle. The only problem with a 600-round magazine, however, is when it fires 3,000 shot per minute, it would only have a lifespan of twelve seconds before the ammo belt of 600 rounds ran dry. Still, the weapon was formidable enough to cut down his enemy in seconds. But he was also wise enough to arm himself with an assault weapon, which he festooned across his back, then loaded up with two extended magazines. Removing the gatling from its hooks along the wall, he held it like a toy and acted as if he was strafing the weapon from left to right to cut down his enemies, while expressing gunshot noises from behind clenched teeth.

  “Oh, yeah,” he said, holding the weapon up in admiration. Then he couldn’t hold himself back by mimicking the famous line from Scarface with horrible rendition of a Cuban accent: “Say hello to my little friend.”

  With the weapon firmly in his grasp, Emerson Brandt left the room with the 600-round ammo band trailing behind him.

  * * *

  The Sayeret Matkal Chayal team in search of the nukes were coming up empty. They had examined every room, every corner, looked beneath every tarp and inside every vehicle. They searched walls for hidden recesses, even though the blueprints indicated no such rooms that may have been secreted away. They searched every possible inch of the lower level only to come up empty.

  Then over his lip mic, Chayal One asked, “Two and Five, anything?”

  “That’s a negative,” said Two, which was subsequently followed up by a ‘negative’ response from Five.

  “They have to be here,” Chayal One insisted.

  “Maybe up top on the second tier,” Five suggested over his mic.

  “Yeah. Maybe.” And then from Sneh who spoke into his lip mic: “Chayals Three and Four, update.”

  In a hushed tone, Chayal Three responded, “Three and Four still searching.”

  “Copy that.” Sneh was becoming frustrated. Most of the floor space was taken up by massive vehicles, all empty and far from suitable for holding valued pieces of delicate hardware such as the suitcase nukes. Such weaponry, though useless because they still had to be armed in order to wreak havoc, had to be stowed away in lead-shield containers. Of course, there were the storage rooms containing wooden crates that were filled with assault rifles and assortments of grenades, both for hand tossing and weapons loading. Other rooms contained stockpiles of ammunition and ammo shells for large-scale guns and artillery for tanks.

  Still, no nukes.

  “Keep searching,” Sneh stated over his mic. “We haven’t got all day.”

  And Yosef Sneh was right; their window of opportunity was slamming shut because Ahmadi was closing in on the golden calf, maybe even within arm’s reach of it. If the nukes were here, then they had to be found and quickly. Though they were in control of the facility’s interior structure, whatever external remained an X-Factor. Sneh had to assume that peripheral forces were on the approach as part of a program to keep the facility safe from hostile powers that were too great for Faruk’s mercs to overcome. Hence, the twelfth man who governed from a Control Room was someone who had the reach to contact the president’s men.

  Sneh looked at his watch. The center of Tunis was a twenty- to twenty-five-minute ride—less if the convoy was speeding its way, which would cut the time to fifteen minutes over the poorly maintained roads. Conservatively speaking, they had ten to twelve minutes to find those suitcase nukes. Whether they were discovered or not, they would have no other choice but to make their way towards the extraction point for immediate removal.

  “We have twelve minutes,” he said into his lip mic. “After that we bug out. Find those nukes!”

  “Copy.”

  “Chayal Two.”

  “Go.”

  “How are you holding up?”

  “Still good.”

  “Head to Sector-B where the artillery shells are,” Sneh told him. “And set the charges to go off in fifteen.”

  “In fifteen. Copy.”

  Sneh checked his watch. They now had eleven minutes to find the nukes.

  * * *

  Chayals Three and Four discovered the staircase at the rear of the facility that led to the second-tier offices. From these offices and one hundred feet east of their position was the Control Room.

  Chayal Three took the left side of the corridor and Four the right. The offices, which were more like cubicles, were vacant. Computer screens remained on, but no one was there to man them.

  With caution, they moved along the corridor with their weapons raised to eye level, with both searching every room off the hallway. Nothing but emptiness. When they reached the Control Room, they discovered that it was empty. The monitors were dead, the screens black and the Controller gone.

  Gesturing to Chayal Four to keep moving along with caution, Chayal Three nodded and continued forward.

  A faulty bank of overhead fluorescents was flickering and humming, the noise coming from a faulty ballast. It was all Emerson Brandt needed to cover his footfalls as he approached the commandos from behind from a veil of dark shadows. He was holding the point of the six-barrel gatling gun in their direction, the large man bearing a predatory grin as he depressed the trigger.

  The barrels began to spin in blinding revolutions as rounds discharged from the weapon. Bullet holes appeared against the surrounding walls and chipped out fist-sized chunks of concrete, which skated across the floor. Brandt, who cried out with savage lust and with eyes ablaze, strafed the weapon from side to side to hit his marks.

  High-caliber rounds struck Chayal Three in the chest and the abdomen, the ammo penetrating through the armor and riddling his body. Chayal Three dropped his weapon as he was punched backward from the impacts, his body jerking as if supercharged with electricity, until he finally fell back and landed on the floor in a state of mock crucifixion.

  Chayal Four took cover by diving to the surface. Shots skipped along the floor around him with the pieces erupting as splintered chunks.

  Brandt continued to shout out with a fierce cry, as the trailing band of ammo continued to feed into the weapon, the belt slowly disappearing as it continued to feed the remaining rounds all the way until the ammo belt had finally run its course. Though the barrels continued to spin with a metallic sound of tubes rolling, the weapon had gone dry after its twelve-second run. When Brandt released the gatling and tossed the weapon aside, he went for his assault weapon that straddled across his back.

  Chayal Four, however, from his prone position, fired off a series of well-placed shots.

  Bullet holes manifested themselves in the joint between his right shoulder and chest, and then a second wound pared back at the joint between his left shoulder and chest, the shots neutralizing the use of both arms that were nothing more than dead weight by the Controller’s sides. As Chayal Four got up from the floor, aimed his weapon, and approached Brandt in a steady walk, he fired off two more shots. The first shot hit Brandt squarely on the right thi
gh, the second hit him in the left. The muscles, however, were thick, the Controller still on solid footing.

  Chayal Four continued his approach and closed the gap between them with his gun raised.

  Another shot, this time just above Brandt’s left knee, causing a blood gout to arc. Yet the big man did not go down as rage fully consumed him. As his face turned the shade of crimson and the veins in his neck stood out like cords, the large man screamed in challenge: “Come on, Sweetheart! You think you can take me?”

  Another round entered Brandt’s leg above the right knee, this time causing the big man to waver in his stance. Finally, Brandt fell to his knees. Although he continued to appear angry, he also appeared exhausted.

  Chayal Four raised his foot so that Brandt could see the underside of his shoe and the imprint of his sole, then rammed it forward, hitting the large man whose nose exploded with the sound of breaking cartilage and the twin jets of pouring blood.

  Brandt, who was now seeing eternal stars from the blow, fell backward. His arms lay by his side, both useless from the wounds that damaged the joints. Though his eyes had rolled to be nothing more than slivers of white, they eventually turned back to reaffirm that the point of an assault weapon was inches from his face. He could still see the slow curl of smoke rising from its tip.

  Chayal Four was holding Brandt with a hard stare, when he asked the big man, “Where are the nukes?”

  Brandt appeared genuinely perplexed by this, though he remained silent.

  “Where are the nukes?” Four repeated evenly.

  When Brandt refused to answer, Chayal Four dug the point of his weapon into the wound of Brandt’s left shoulder, the weapon’s point going deep.

  Brandt, who screamed in agony and was impotent to do anything about it, said, “I have no idea what you’re talking about!”

  Chayal Four removed his rifle’s point from the hole, the tip coming away wet and glistening with Brandt’s blood. “Where are the nukes?”

  “There are no nukes!”

  Chayal Four now tried the right side, the tip of his weapon once again digging deep. “I can do this all day,” he told the big man.

  But Brandt resisted. “There are no nukes here. There never was.” He sounded nasally congested because his passages were filled with blood.

  Chayal Four looked at Brandt with a look that did not betray emotion or thought. “There are three suitcase nukes somewhere inside this warehouse. Where . . . are . . . they?”

  “Are you out of your mind?” Brandt asked rhetorically. “We only carry artillery vehicles, assault weapons, and occasionally a howitzer or two. But never anything as unusual as a suitcase nuke.”

  Chayal Four believed him. The Mossad had obviously been fed disinformation by a trusted source who, no doubt, had been misled by Abesh Faruk.

  When Brandt started to laugh, his laughter quickly turned to pain as he groaned against the torment of his bullet wounds. Then: “All for nothing,” he commented. “You failed to achieve the means. The nukes were never here.” More laughter despite the pain.

  Chayal Four backpedaled and tapped his earbud to engage his lip mic. “Chayal Four to Chayal One.”

  “Chayal One.”

  “The packages are not here. I repeat, the packages are not here.”

  Silence.

  Then: “The last element?”

  “Still alive,” he said. He maintained his weapon on Brandt, who remained on the floor.

  “Terminate without prejudice,” was the response.

  “Copy that.”

  Chayal Four walked up to Brandt, directed his aim to the Controller’s head, and set off a short burst.

  Returning to the body of Chayal Three, Chayal Four hoisted his deceased comrade upon his shoulders in a fireman’s carry, then started to exit the second tier. No man would ever be left behind.

  * * *

  The president’s military convoy was quickly approaching Abesh Faruk’s supply magazine. It was just beyond the outskirts of the capital city and a twenty-minute drive. Trucks filled with heavily armed troops were geared and ready to meet the challenge. And as they crested a final hill, they could see the stronghold in the distance, about seven clicks away and beyond the trees that fronted it.

  There were eight trucks in all with twenty troops per truck, an overkill of fighting machines. But the president was not concerned about the breach on sovereign territory from a hostile group, but of the possibility of losing the constant funding from Abesh Faruk. What the president saw was his cash cow drying up, not an invasion.

  The trucks continued to close the gap.

  * * *

  Chayal Two could feel the damage to his insides, which no one was supposed to feel at all. But he did, the injury to his chest and lungs from the dual impacts he took were serious. As he reached Sector-B, which he recalled from the studied blueprints, his sight began to blur. Taking deep breaths, this somehow aided with his visual clarity as he entered the stockpiled goods of artillery shells that had been manufactured for howitzers and guns of that nature. What Chayal Two was looking at were shells filled with gunpowder, the place a powder keg.

  From the cargo pockets of his pants, he removed a pair of explosives that were chrome-plated pucks. On their face surfaces were the keypads that enabled the units. On the back surface was a magnet. After attaching the two pucks to two separate shells, he set the charges to fifteen minutes and started their countdowns.

  . . . 14:59 . . .

  . . . 14:58 . . .

  . . . 14:57 . . .

  With a hand over his injured chest, Chayal Two leaned against some of the weaponry. A moment later, he went into a chain of coughing, which caused a large blood clot to land in the palm of his hand. Spitting the excess blood from his mouth and then wiping it dry with the sleeve of his uniform, Chayal Two reached deep to find his reserves and made his way out of the storage area. Tapping his earbud to engage communication, he said, “Chayal Two to One.”

  “Go.”

  “Charges set.”

  “Copy that. Make your way to the extraction point. The packages are not here. We’ve been disinformed.”

  Struggling to move ahead, though Chayal Two continued to do so on reserves, he answered, “Out.”

  * * *

  “Chayal Two to One.”

  “Go.”

  “Charges set.”

  “Copy that. Make your way to the extraction point. The packages are not here. We’ve been disinformed.”

  “Out.”

  As Chayal One logged off with Chayal Two, that was when he saw Chayal Four carrying the body of Chayal Three across his shoulders. Rarely did the Sayeret Matkal lose a man in battle, but casualties were sometimes the barometer that reminded them that even as elite as they were as a squad, they were still mortals.

  Then into his lip mic, Chayal One said, “I need Team Alpha to the extraction site ASAP. I repeat, Team Alpha to the extraction site ASAP.”

  Within four minutes, the team had regrouped at a predetermined point within the tree line, with one amongst them dead, and began to make their way towards the extraction site.

  . . . 13:05 . . .

  . . . 13:04 . . .

  . . . 13:03 . . .

  * * *

  When the president’s convoy reached the gates of the stronghold, they discovered that the doors were open, the guards were dead, and drove right through the opening. Once the soldiers hopped from the trucks’ bays, they immediately charged the facility. Once they reached the motor pool, they immediately observed the twisted and broken corpses. Four on the bottom, three by the stairwells, four outside by the gates, and the Controller on top. The entire team had been liquidated.

  When the team leader advised his units to search the premises, they checked every room, every corner, both dark and light, only to discover that the hostiles had committed to a hit-and-run strike. There was also noted damage along the upper tier and in the hallway whose walls had
been riddled with gunfire, the facility and its wartime goods, however, appearing to be fully intact.

  Though he relayed this to the president who sounded pleased, the team leader could not have been any further from the truth.

  Inside the chamber that housed the artillery, the pucklike explosives were ticking down their final moments.

  . . . 00:23 . . .

  . . . 00:22 . . .

  . . . 00:21 . . .

  * * *

  The Tunisian president was on the line with his lead operator, with the president obviously concerned but was soon alleviated when he heard the news. Faruk’s mercenary team had been terminated, but the goods remained whole with minimal damage to the facility. Nothing, he stated, appeared to have been absconded with. But then again, the inventory was a long list. Goods may have gone missing without this being too apparent.

  As the president was praising his team leader for a job well done, there was the sound of an explosion on the other end, loud and disturbing, which was followed by white noise and the sudden loss of communication.

  Holding the phone outward as if it was something odd, he then returned it to his ear and said, “Hello?”

  He received no response.

  * * *

  . . . 00:03 . . .

  . . . 00:02 . . .

  . . . 00:01 . . .

  . . . 00:00 . . .

  * * *

  Team leader was on the phone with the president when his entire world erupted around him. There was a muffled whump of a muted detonation deep inside the facility, which was followed up with a powder keg explosion that sent the roof and the walls of the stronghold to blow upward and outward. Boils of fire and smoke rolled through the interior to devour everything in their path, destroying everything as the concussive pressure lifted the ceiling and sent it skyward, only for gravity to eventually send the myriad pieces back to Earth.