Barracuda 945 (2003) Page 11

  Ravi's delight at the absolute precision of the detcord blasts was tempered only by his chilling awareness that the Israeli Paratroopers could arrive any second, in helicopter gunships. He could not have known that possibility had disappeared because the man in the office on the phone had only had time to shout, "THE JAIL IS UNDER ATTA. . ."

  At the other end, the nineteen-year-old girl soldier who had received the call was replying, "I did not quite catch that. Who is speaking, please? This is Israel Army HQ Northern Command."

  The line was now dead, issuing an ominous dial tone and nothing else. The operator tried again, tapping the phone cradle up and down, saying, "Hello . . . hello . . . Is anyone there?"

  But there was no further sound. The girl called her supervisor and reported she had received a "funny-sounding call."

  "I thought they said something about a jail underwater," she said. "But the line went instantly dead."

  "What jail?"

  "They never said, sir. But I was sure I heard 'jail.' And I thought I heard 'underwater' but it didn't make sense. . . The caller did not say another word."

  "Well, let's give it another few minutes and see if anyone calls back. If not, it sounds like a wrong number. You think jail could have been gale, stale, rail, or some other word?"

  "Well, I suppose it could have been. But I did think it was jail. If it had been gale, and underwater, it could have been a ship's distress call on the wrong frequency. But I still think it was jail."

  "Okay. Let's leave it for fifteen minutes and see if we hear anything else. By the way, did you announce who you were, you know, Northern Headquarters, etc.?"

  "Yes, sir. I did. Right at the beginning. And after, the line went dead."

  "Okay. Good girl. Lemme know if they come through again."

  Meantime, back on the Nimrod ramparts, one of the lookouts spotted the first helicopter, clattering in from the north, flying low over the Lebanese border, straight toward the jail.

  "HELO INCOMING, SIR!" roared the lookout. "HIGH SPEED . . . DEGREES THREE SIXTY . . . LOW ALTITUDE."

  General Rashood swung around and charged back outside through the main gates, past the group of truly incredulous political prisoners, who were mostly too stunned by events even to speak, even to express their thanks. They just stared, as the Hamas CO, holding a pair of Israeli binoculars he had just stolen, trained them on the northern skies.

  There it was, one mighty Sikorsky CH-53D Sea Stallion hammering its way toward them, making 130 knots through clear skies. It looked military, it sure as hell had once been military. But right now it was painted bright white with blue trim, with a commercial insignia in Arabic presented boldly in still-wet paint, stay cool with frosty's. On the fuselage, a contented polar bear licked a giant ice-cream cone.

  Down on the lower rampart below the level of the jail, two of Ravi's men were holding orange flags aloft, waving in the big assault chopper, which was originally designed to carry thirty-eight U.S. Marines fully loaded for combat.

  But this morning it was empty, and the General bellowed his next order: "EVERYONE TO THE LOWER LEVEL. . . STRAIGHT DOWN THE HILL TO THE GUYS WITH THE FLAGS . . . THEN BOARD THE HELO. . . GO! GO! GO!"

  Two distant thumps told him that eight more prisoners were out, and he stood in the courtyard waving them on as they ran into the yard. "STRAIGHT ON," he roared. "STRAIGHT ON . . . KEEP RUNNING . . . STRAIGHT DOWN TO THE HELICOPTER . . . ALL ABOARD . . . ALL ABOARD. . . WE'RE OUTTA HERE . . . RIGHT NOW. . . GO! GO! GO!"

  Ravi knew the Sikorsky, right now on loan from the Syrian Army, was built for soldiers carrying huge packs and weapons. These prisoners had nothing, and it would thus carry more, maybe fifty if necessary with its overload capacity. He had counted on a total of eighty-six and had instructed his loadmasters to board the first thirty-two prisoners, plus sixteen of his own men on the first journey.

  By now the Sea Stallion was on the ground and the prisoners were pouring through its open doors. And right then, the lookout called again: "HELICOPTER INCOMING, LOW ALTITUDE . . . DEGREES THREE SIXTY. . . HIGH SPEED . . . IDENTICAL . . . REPEAT, IDENTICAL. . ."

  All forty-eight men had clambered aboard the helo, and it was already lifting off, shuddering upward almost vertical. Then it tilted, its engine howling, and rocketed east, thundering toward No Man's Land and then the Syrian frontier.

  The second Sea Stallion was now making its approach, and more and more prisoners were racing down the path toward the lower rampart. Two more bangs signaled eight more men were free. Thus far, General Ravi's men had been inside the jail for three quarters of an hour, and there was just one more batch of prisoners to release.

  The second helicopter circled, wearing the same commercial livery, and as it did so, the Ops Room in the Israel Army's Northern Command Headquarters burst into life. A young Captain was listening intently as a supervisor stared at a computer screen, calling the information. "Another one, sir. No doubt. Incoming helicopter. Three sixty degrees. Speed one hundred knots. Altitude under five hundred. American built. But no military radar. Destination Nimrod Jail. . .

  "First helo taken off, track 238. . . headed zero-nine-zero, speed one hundred thirty knots. Altitude under one hundred feet"

  "How long was it on the ground?"

  "Four minutes maximum, sir."

  "ANY COMMUNICATION FROM THE JAIL?"

  "Trying, sir. No response."

  A new voice (stressed) ". . . Did someone say JAIL?"

  "Right. Nimrod."

  "Holy shit!"

  "What's up?"

  "One of my operators took a call this morning, a garbled sentence. She thought it said, 'the jail is underwater,' then the line went dead and no one called back. No one mentioned the name of the jail or anything.

  "I wonder if the real sentence was, 'the jail is under attack,' not water, but he couldn't finish the word."

  "AIR CREW GO TO ACTION STATIONS. GUNSHIPS TO NIMROD JAIL—IT MAY BE UNDER ATTACK. ASSAULT GROUPS ONE AND THREE."

  The station Commander bellowed for someone to connect him to the observation post up on the Disengagement Line, due east of Nimrod.

  "Yes, sir. We saw him alright. A big single-screw helicopter, traveling east to Syria. Commercial aircraft, sir. No military radar. It was white, looked like an ice-cream van with a rotor."

  "A WHAT!"

  "An ice-cream van, sir. . . white and blue. It had a big polar bear painted on it."

  "A WHAT!"

  "A polar bear, sir. It was licking a pink-and-white cone."

  The phone crashed down. "FUCK ME!" yelled the Captain.

  It took twelve minutes to fire up three IDF helicopters, load up the troops, and get off the ground for the twenty-mile flight up to Nimrod. But as the Israelis took off, General Rashood's second big Sikorsky was ready to go. Its rotor was screaming, the big passenger door was wide open, and the General was running for his life down the path, leaving the massive Israeli truck an inferno behind him, flames from its fuel engulfing the entire front side of the jail.

  Ravi hit the fuselage of the Sikorsky running, hauled himself up, and rolled into the rear cabin. Someone slammed the door and they took off instantly flying east out toward the Syrian border, hanging on grimly to a ten-minute start, although this was as yet unknown.

  Sprawled in the rear, the General was talking to his men.

  "Well, we never lost anyone, and we got 'em all out. Not a bad morning's work."

  Just then, the Navigator called back, "Sir, I got three paints on the screen right here, maybe fifteen miles off our starboard quarter, right on our four o'clock, heading for Nimrod. High speed."

  The General nodded, unsmiling. "As the Iron Duke might have mentioned, this had been a damned close-run thing. Another five minutes in that jail, we would not have made it."

  As the Sikorsky Sea Stallion thundered into Syrian airspace, the Israelis were on their final approach to Nimrod. They could already see the truck blazing in the gateway and the obvious bomb damage in the courtyard. A
s they drew nearer, they could also see two figures apparently asleep on one of the big artillery pieces.

  Soon they would discover a jail entirely devoid of inhabitants. There were no guards, no prisoners, and a total of twenty men dead. All officers of the jail. "Mother of God," breathed the Commanding Officer as it began to dawn on him that every single lock on each cell door had been skillfully and professionally blown out. As indeed had the impregnable reputation of Nimrod Jail itself.

  Somewhere out there, beyond the rugged landscape of the Golan, there lurked the most dangerous enemies of the State of Israel; men who had proved they were prepared to die in the cause of attacking, killing, and maiming the Jewish populations of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. The young Commander, whose parents had both been killed in the momentous Israeli drive to the Golan Heights in 1973, was not looking forward to making his report.

  Twenty minutes later, when he did so, on the helicopter's radio his message sent a frisson of pure anxiety around the Northern Headquarters of the Army. How could this have possibly happened? It was plainly state-sponsored, and brilliantly planned. But by whom?

  The CO of the Northern Command requested the satellite be adjusted to photograph Syria's military bases, particularly the ones in which helicopters were parked. Over many days, photographic evidence came in showing lines of the choppers, all painted in grim, functional desert light brown, with insignia. No one knew that beneath two coats of this smart Syrian Army livery, two giant polar bears licked their respective cones, uncaring that they would never be seen again.

  It took two days for the Israelis to admit what had happened, that they had somehow been the victims of one of the most spectacular jailbreaks in history. The incident at Nimrod had probably been the most daring raid on any jail in the world, at least since Britain's Great Train Robber, Ronnie Biggs, was "sprung" from Wormwood Scrubs on top of a furniture van in West London back in the 1960s. But there was only one of him.

  Israel had just lost every one of her forty-seven most lethal political prisoners. They were sworn enemies of the State, who had been incarcerated in a purpose-built prison designed to render escape impossible. Where were they all now? God alone knew that. They were surely no longer in Israel, and they were probably beyond the reach even of the Mossad, being sheltered in some country that was innately hostile to Israel and would offer no information or cooperation.

  The Israelis were careful with their press release, desperately trying not to look incompetent or, in this case, even ridiculous. It was released quietly, from a Government Department to the Jerusalem Post on the quiet news evening of Saturday, April 30. It was faxed at around eight-thirty in the evening, complete with the name and phone number of the Press Officer, Abe Stillman, who was no more a Press Officer than Arnold Morgan. Mr. Stillman was a Senior Field Officer from the Mossad. He knew how to blockade dangerous questions, and he knew how to lie with absolute impunity.

  The release read as follows:

  Twenty prison officials have died in a Palestinian terrorist attack on a jail in Northern Galilee. The dead

  men all worked at the Nimrod High-Security Prison. They were on duty at the time, some of them

  working outside the walls of the jail.

  The terrorists are believed to have rammed the gates open with a freight truck and then shot down the

  guards in a cold-blooded, cowardly massacre of civilian personnel.

  It is not yet known which group was responsible, but Israeli Security Forces are assuming that either

  Hamas or Hezbollah carried out the raid.

  It is also known that certain prisoners escaped by air, in two civilian helicopters. They are believed to

  have flown into Syria, but the Syrian military has denied all knowledge of the attack.

  The names of the deceased will be released when the immediate families have been informed.

  Throughout the release, the Israelis played down the overwhelming importance of the escaped men, spinning the story to emphasize the deaths of the guards.

  It was a tactic destined to fool no one. David Heyman, the young, gifted night editor of the Post, read the fax sheet with amazement, lasered in on the fact that no one was telling anyone which of the most dangerous convicts in the country had escaped, and hit the wire to Abe "Stonewall" Stillman.

  The man from the Mossad lived up to his nickname.

  I'm sorry we have no further information on that. . .Right now we have a team of investigators at the prison trying to ascertain the facts. . . It would be wrong of me to give you inaccurate information. . . Sheik who? . . . I'm sorry, I cannot comment on the status of individual prisoners. . . Yes, it was a military-style attack on the prison . . . I cannot comment on the precise nature of the killings. . . I understand some of our people did die of gunshot wounds . . . The telephones? I'm afraid the system is down . . . I don't know how or why . . . When we have further information from the government investigators we will inform you.

  David Heyman sensed a gargantuan cover-up. He called the night news editor, and told him to get up to the back bench, the hub of the newspaper where the front page is prepared, designed, and edited.

  The ex-Fleet Street reporter Eddie Laxton was probably the best hard newsman in the Middle East. He read the fax, listened to the night editor's description of his talk with Stillman, and immediately dispatched a team of six reporters and photographers to the Nimrod area.

  He ordered a helicopter to fly them to the small commercial airport north of Galilee where two cars would be waiting for the twenty-mile drive up to Nimrod. He knew the entire area would be cordoned off and that there was little chance of being granted access. But his men were trained tough. If they had to, they'd climb the mountain to observe and photograph the state of Nimrod Jail.

  Eddie Laxton was something of a crusader, and he did not think governments should be covering up lapses in security. If this story was what he thought it was, he, Eddie, was going to nail it.

  Shortly after midnight, one of his boys nailed it down hard. While the photographers were skirting the roadblock in an attempt to reach the jail, lit up now by big military arc lights, the Post's junior reporter, Ben Lefrak, twenty, decided to place himself in the nearest coffee shop, one which might stay open half the night while emergency teams were toiling into the night.

  And at 2:15 a.m. it happened, in the little coffee shop in the Druze village of Majdal e-Shams. Three uniformed members of the IDF, covered in dust, came in and ordered coffee and pastries. And the landlord, sporting the gigantic mustache of his Islamic sect, served them cheerfully.

  The place was busy, and when Ben went to the counter to order his fourth coffee, he returned to a different seat, right next to the IDF men with whom he skillfully struck up a conversation.

  "Pretty bad up there, eh?" he ventured.

  'Tell me about it," replied the young soldier. "Boy am I tired."

  "Did they knock the place down?"

  "Not really, but they blew the hell out of the guardroom and the office, and exploded a fucking great truck right in the gateway."

  Wow! Any prisoners injured? You know, trapped in their cells and hit by the blast?"

  "Couldn't say really. There aren't any prisoners left in there, not so far as we could see. They all got away. The place is empty now, but there may be more bodies. That's what we're digging for."

  "Gotta be hard work, right? The place is made of granite."

  "Yeah. None of us is looking forward to going back up there. But the Prime Minister is supposed to be there sometime in the next hour."

  Twenty minutes later, when Ben Lefrak got outside and dialed the newsroom back in Jerusalem, Eddie Laxton could have kissed him.

  David Heyman's front page was a masterpiece. There was a three-column picture, two inches high, of the Nimrod Jail, then three head shots of the Prison Governor, the Chief of Security, and the Military Commander. Captioned starkly, "All Dead, Gunned Down in Raid." Beneath was the two-deck headline: HAMAS TERRORISTS BLAST
NIMROD JAIL—EVERY POLITICAL PRISONER FREED.

  Underneath that was a block of twenty one-inch square photographs, five by four, each one captioned with a name. In a transparent strap line, set diagonally across the pictures, was the word gone!

  For the Jerusalem Post this was a sensational treatment of any story. It more than matched the conservative coverage in the Syrian Times, an English-language publication that offers wildly pro-Arab slants on all items of news.

  Their headline read:

  HEROIC HAMAS FREEDOM FIGHTERS

  LIBERATE OUR MARTYRS

  The stories were remarkably similar in content, each pointing out that every worthwhile political prisoner in the entire country had essentially vamoosed, set free by a brilliantly led hit squad from across the border.