To the Death am-10 Read online

Just then the chilled Meursault arrived, and the waiter poured three glasses. David Gavron raised his and said quietly, “To the United States of America.”

  “Thank you, David,” replied the admiral, who usually presumed he was the United States of America, particularly in the event of trouble.

  “Before we begin, let me have them prepare a bottle of Bordeaux for our main course,” said Arnold.

  “No argument from me,” chuckled the Israeli, flashing his wide smile, which Kathy, along with several other beautiful women, some of them divorced, considered so engaging. It made him one of the most attractive men in Washington. Especially if anyone knew his background: decorated warrior, the Mossad’s James Bond, and latterly a high-ranking diplomat on the world stage.

  Arnold studied the wine list, which he normally referred to as the race card, and chose a third-growth bottle from Margaux, the 1996 Château Palmer, which sits on the left bank of the Gironde, just west of the junction with the mighty Dordogne River.

  “I think we’ll be okay with that,” he said. “Sixteen years old from the slopes near the village of Margaux, where they once grew the favorite wine of Thomas Jefferson. and you know something? People still say that after a really hot summer, those wines still surpass all others grown in the High Médoc.”

  “Arnie, how the hell do you know all this stuff?”

  “David, you may, during the course of this evening, become astounded at some of the things I know.”

  “Not for the first time, old friend,” said the ambassador. “And, I hope, not for the last, given your predilection to share the snorto-de-luxe. by the way, this white burgundy is probably the best I’ve ever had.”

  “They keep a darned good cellar here,” replied Arnold. “Shall we just sit quietly and have a drink, or do you want to have a look at the menu?”

  Kathy spoke first. “Let’s just have a drink,” she said. “Unless David’s in a rush.”

  “Not me, my dear,” he said courteously. “I’m happy to sit here with my two favorite people and sip the finest wine on earth until midnight if necessary.”

  “That’s good,” said Arnold, sipping luxuriously. “Because there’s a character who looms from our past who’s just become highly topical.”

  “There is? And who might that be?” asked the ambassador.

  “Do you remember General Ravi Rashood?”

  “Remember him! Jesus Christ, I still wake up in the night thinking about him. What’s he done now?”

  “Well, nothing we actually know about. But we have some interesting new information about him.”

  “And I bet I know where you got it.”

  “I bet you don’t.”

  “Okay, how about Guantánamo Bay, where you’re grilling the Boston airport bombers?”

  “Now, how the hell do you know that?” asked the admiral, plainly incredulous.

  “During the course of this evening,” said the Israeli, deadpan, “you may become astounded at some of the things I know.”

  Both men laughed. But Arnold Morgan looked serious when he said, “No one knows who we have and who we don’t have in Guantánamo. Except, apparently, the Mossad.”

  “We don’t know much,” said Gavron. “We just heard from one of our lawyers that both the wounded man who had the bomb, and the big cheese you picked up in New York, have been removed from the U.S. civilian justice system. We actually guessed the rest. Guessed, specifically, that you would want both terrorists out of the way, under military security, where you could interrogate them in peace and hopefully get some answers.”

  “And that brought you to Guantánamo?”

  “Absolutely. But I’m not going to ask you to confirm that. Because it’s none of our business. But I’ll say one thing: we would be inordinately grateful if you could help us to nail that terrible bastard Rashood. sorry, Kathy.”

  “David, you forget, I live in the ops room of a nuclear submarine. Even our clocks chime the bells of the watch — I haven’t known the correct time for years, and I’m really used to sailor’s language.”

  David Gavron smiled. “Of course,” he said. “Anyway, back to that terrible bastard Rashood. we’d do anything to find him. But he’s always escaped us, in Israel, in Syria, in France, once even in London. He always seems to be one jump ahead.”

  “So you’ll be pleased to know I may have a permanent address for him?” interjected the admiral.

  “Pleased? My entire country would be thrilled. He’s done us a huge amount of damage, and he’s still out there. Somewhere.”

  Arnold Morgan, sensing an advantage, decided to keep his guest on the hook for a while. “Okay, let’s have a look at the menus, shall we? David, I don’t want you to get overexcited on an empty stomach.”

  They read through the short list, three appetizers, four entrees. “All fresh, nothing frozen, and no bullshit,” said Arnold, glancing up at the newly arrived Deanna and saying, “Crab cakes, and then rack of lamb, please. Kathy?”

  “Sea scallops and grilled rockfish, please.”

  David Gavron went for gravlax and then breast of duck with risotto, spinach, and port sauce. All three of them were accustomed to making swift, firm decisions.

  “Arnie, do you really have an address for Rashood?”

  “Of course I do, and since you plainly know our source, you’ll understand we have assessed it as highly reliable.”

  “Will you tell me?”

  “Got a pen?”

  David Gavron produced a slim gold ballpoint and a wafer-thin leather notepad, and looked up expectantly.

  “He’s in Syria,” said Arnold. “Damascus, Old City, right inside the Roman wall near the eastern gate. Bab Touma Street. Less than a hundred yards from the Bab Touma Gate itself, left-hand side of the street coming in from the Barada River bridge.

  “Sorry we don’t have a street number, our informant did not know, and if he had known he’d have told us. He said it’s a big eighteenth-century house right around the corner from the Elissar restaurant.”

  “That’s fantastic, Arnie. Does he live there with his wife?”

  “What wife?”

  “Oh, a Palestinian girl he met right after he defected from the Israeli army. I heard they were married almost immediately. She’s supposed to be very beautiful. And she’s also very dangerous — apparently gunned down two French secret servicemen a couple of years back, in Beirut.”

  “She had a good tutor,” said Admiral Morgan.

  “None better,” said David Gavron. “Ex-SAS major, wasn’t he? His background’s still a mystery, and the Brits won’t tell even us who he really is.”

  “Nor us,” said the Admiral. “I think the guy embarrassed the hell out of ’em. Ramshawe says he’s from a rich family, Iranians living in London. He went to Harrow School and then the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, ended up commanding their top special forces, and then jumped ship and joined the goddamned Palestinians.”

  “Harrow’s one of their top private schools, right?” asked Kathy.

  “Sure is. Churchill went there. Guess they taught him about patriotism.”

  “Probably taught the former Major Kerman too,” said David. “But he couldn’t sort out who he was, not until he ended up back in the desert. Funny, isn’t it? Turning his back on everything like that, becoming an enemy of everything he’d ever known.”

  “Sure as hell is,” responded the admiral. “Can’t hardly imagine waking up one morning as a decorated, serving British Army officer, and suddenly deciding to be a goddamned Arab terrorist! Jesus Christ. Must have been some turning point.”

  “Arnie, are you planning to get after him?” asked the ambassador.

  “Not right now. Not with the Middle East peace talks coming up. We couldn’t afford to get caught, or even suspected.”

  “Happily, my former organization suffers from no such constraints. You may leave it to us.”

  “I had hoped so, David.”

  “Yes, I guessed as much. There is, after all, no such
thing as a free dinner. Especially one as good as this.”

  1645 Monday 6 February 2012 Mossad Headquarters King Saul Boulevard Tel Aviv

  Inside the briefing room, the atmosphere was subdued. The Israeli general, a man in his sixties, standing in front of the big computer screen on the wall, spoke quietly and firmly, pointing with his baton at the illuminated map of Bab Touma Street, Damascus.

  “Right here,” he said, “we have rented an apartment on the third floor. It’s pretty basic, but it has a bathroom, cold water only, and electricity. Our field agents have moved in a couple of mattresses and some blankets. But you’re going to be uncomfortable. There’s no workable kitchen and nothing to cook on. We have installed an electric kettle and a coffeepot. There’s not much else.”

  Before him, sitting at the conference table, were four ex-military secret service officers. All of them, for the moment, wore olive-green uniforms and had duffel bags slung on the floor next to them, alongside their M-16 machine guns. Two of these men wore the coveted wings signifying membership in Israel’s elite parachute division. They both wore officers’ bars on their shoulders. All four of them had the distinguishing three small Hebrew letters stitched in yellow above the breast pocket.

  “You will see from the map, gentlemen, that this apartment has a commanding view of the big house directly opposite, and we were damn lucky to get it. An old Arab man used to live there, and we paid him generously to get out. While you are in residence, you will ignore his mail, answer the door to no one, and use cell phones only under the most dire circumstances.

  “You will eat a proper meal only once a day, and that will be after dark. For that you will leave by the back door, and never, under any circumstances, use the same restaurant twice. Fortunately, Damascus stays open very late.”

  One of the paratroopers asked about the getaway, and the general answered sharply. “Right here,” he said, pointing with his baton, “one street back, is a locked garage, right before house number 46. You will of course recce this, and inside that garage you will find a very old, battered-looking wreck of an automobile, plainly on its last legs.

  “However, it has been expertly converted, four new tires, new transmission, brand-new Mercedes engine, everything directly out of the show-room. When you leave, you will be in Arab dress and you will make your escape in the old car, which will run like a Ferrari and attract the attention of no one. There will be two heavy machine guns in the back in the event of an emergency.

  “You will drive out of the east gate and turn hard right down to the circle, and then it’s marked, straight down the highway to the airport that lies to the southwest of the city.

  “Two of our field agents will meet you. One will get rid of the car; the other will escort you to a private Learjet, and you will take off immediately for Israel. The agent already has your passports. You will not need them for entry into Syria. There will be no record that you were ever in the country.”

  The general, whose name was never mentioned, stood before them in full uniform, his steel-gray hair cropped tight, his posture still rigidly upright. His face was a picture of military sternness as he outlined the operation designed to execute Ravi and Shakira Rashood, the sworn and proven enemies of Israel.

  There have always been officers in the Israeli Army whose determination borders on fanaticism. They are men who will stop at nothing to keep their nation safe, and this particular general was most certainly one of them.

  As a twenty-year-old infantry lieutenant, he had fought shoulder to shoulder against the invading Egyptians with General Avraham Yoffe, when they smashed their way through the Mitla Pass in the Sinai during the Six-Day War in 1967. They were six bloodstained days of pure heroism by the Israelis. In less than a week, they destroyed four armies and 370 fighter-bombers belonging to four attacking nations.

  The general had not been brought up to drop his guard against enemies of the state.

  And here in the plain white-walled briefing room, in the heart of Israel’s Institute for Intelligence and Special Operations, he was once more planning a deadly strike against a couple of Palestinian terrorists who had posed more trouble for his nation than the Egyptian Second Army had done thirty-nine years previously.

  It was a typical Mossad briefing. Two guards on the door, no cell phones permitted. The four men who were going in tonight had made their wills and had their last contacts with home. They would not carry any written notes with them when finally they were released, and they would leave from the rooftop, by helicopter, to the Israeli Army’s Northern Command HQ base for a short stopover. The sixty-mile onward flight to Damascus would take them over the Golan Heights, along the north-running 1974 Ceasefire Line, and then east over the desert into the southern area of the city.

  The leader, sitting pensively, listening to the general, was Colonel Ben Joel, fortyish combat veteran, unshaven, former Special Forces, who had been involved in the revenge attack on Yasser Arafat’s house in Gaza. Ben was an infantryman, a ground-to-air communications officer, and an explosives expert, more accustomed to fighting with a club and tear gas against rioting crowds of Arab youths.

  His number two was Major Itzaak Sherman, son of a true Israeli patriot, the legendary, highly decorated Sergeant Mo Sherman, who had gone into Entebbe Airport alongside Jonathan Netanyahu to rescue the hostages in 1976. Sergeant Sherman was a choral conductor in Tel Aviv, and no one in the aircraft ever forgot him, standing up as the commandos screamed in from the east, low over the pitch-black northern waters of Lake Victoria. Sergeant Sherman conducted these armed daredevils as they sang at the top of their lungs that most haunting patriotic song of Israel, “Onward — we must keep going onward!”—shutting out the fear of the great unknown that faced them when they landed.

  As they dropped below a hundred feet, howling toward the runway, Mo Sherman hooked up the sound system to the bittersweet anthem written by Paul Ben-Haim and each man grappled with his onrushing task to the glorious strains of “Fanfare to Israel.”

  Those who were there swear to God that that music made them all feel fifteen feet tall, revved them up for the murderous firefight to come in the airport, the fight in which Yanni Netanyahu was mortally wounded. Mo Sherman, brokenhearted, helped carry the young leader’s body into the aircraft for the homeward journey.

  And here was Mo’s son, Major Itzaak, preparing to go into another hostile foreign country and carry out his unquestioning duty on behalf of his government. His father’s last words to him were simple: “Go bravely, son, and make sure you do not let anyone down.”

  The third man was another ex-member of the Israeli Special Forces, a newly promoted Mossad agent, Lt. Colonel John Rabin, aged forty-one. His own father had died in the Sinai on the opening morning of the Yom Kippur War, along with hundreds of young soldiers facing the Egyptian tanks. John never knew him, but followed in his footsteps as a career combat soldier. Like Ben Joel, he was an explosives expert, but a specialist, said to be the best in the Israeli Defense Force.

  The fourth member of the team was one of those Mossad hard men whose background was not publicized. He was a five-foot, ten-inch iron man from a small town south of Hebron. He was massively strong, skilled in close combat, and a maestro with a knife, a man who’d kill you as soon as look at you. His name was Abraham, and he was on the team as a personal bodyguard to the other three.

  His wide smile and cheerful manner did not provide any clue to his true disposition. But the others liked him immensely and were delighted, to a man, that Abraham would be with them.

  Midnight, 6 February Northern Command HQ, Galilee

  The wide single rotor flailed the cold night air as the Texas-built Sea Panther lifted slowly off the runway. It rose vertically for fifty feet, then tilted north toward the Sea of Galilee and rocketed away into the night, climbing to five thousand feet. When it reached the Ceasefire Line, it would drop down drastically, in order to come in under any Syrian radar that might be active. Unlikely, but remotely possible. />
  To the rear of the pilot sat the four Mossad special operators: Colonel Ben Joel, Major Itzaak Sherman, Colonel John Rabin, and Abraham the bodyguard. All of them were in Arab dress for the insert. And each one of them carried his personal light machine gun, strapped beneath his white robe.

  They carried only food and water in their traveling bags, and no identity. All of their operational equipment was already installed in the apartment on Bab Touma — the high explosive, the detonators, the timing devices, the electronic wiring, the tool bag, a laptop computer, a long-lens camera, the binoculars, two cell phones, the front and back door keys, four mugs, one spoon, a bag of Turkish coffee, and a bag of sugar, plus two thousand Syrian lira.

  They flew at almost two hundred miles an hour, in silence, for a half hour before the pilot called back, “We’ve cleared the Heights and we’re descending to around fifty feet. get ready. ten minutes.”

  The Sea Panther came clattering over the cold, silent desert at the farthest possible point from Syrian military radar. None of the operators detected them; no one had the slightest idea they were there. The pilot used night goggles to spot the road running up from the south, and then called:

  “This is it, guys, we’re landing.”

  The army helicopter touched down just before 0100. The loadmaster jumped out and held open the door, with his other arm pointing toward the road. All four of the Mossad hitmen followed him out and, without a word, walked away from the aircraft, which was up and flying home thirty-six seconds after it had landed.

  After a hundred yards, they reached the long straight road that led to Damascus, and they stood on its edge in the dark. In the distance they could see headlights coming toward them, very fast. When the vehicle reached them, it skidded to a halt. It was a big old clapped-out American Ford, its side door dented, one window cracked, in desperate need of paint, or even a clean. On the plus side, it was right on time.

  Abraham automatically climbed into the passenger seat; the other three piled into the back. The driver, an Israeli field officer known to Ben Joel, just said, “Hi, Ben. Everyone aboard? Okay, let’s go.”