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  On a normal night, all three of them would have found rich humor in the uproar Mack had caused. But not tonight. They each ate a light dinner, and hardly a word was spoken.

  At 10:30 they emerged from their rooms, hoods down behind their shoulders, faces blackened with SEAL cammy cream, gloved hands carrying the boxes, the two fully loaded M4 light machine-guns tucked into the wide leather belts, concealed under the parkas worn by Benny and Mack.

  Just in case.

  11

  THEY CREPT THROUGH the upstairs corridors of the hotel like three cat-burglars, walking on tip-toe, peering around corners, making their stealthy way toward the rear door, carrying the boxes.

  “What the hell do we do if someone comes out of one of these rooms?” asked Johnny.

  “Blow his brains out,” whispered Mack. “What else? I’m joking. We can tell ’em we’re going to a costume ball dressed as urban spacemen.”

  “Urban what?” whispered Strauss.

  “Shut up,” said Mack, chuckling. “We’re nearly there.”

  They made the parking lot without being seen by anyone. Mack insisted they all check their lists and their ignition keys for both vehicles. They loaded the boxes into the rear of Mack’s Nissan, climbed in, and set off for the woods on the north side of the farm.

  It was raining now, not hard, but sufficient to need the wipers. That was the bad news. The good news was there was no moon lighting up the black cloudy skies and the freezing wide field that lay before them.

  The wind was just getting up from the squally weather front that had swept in off Long Island Sound, and Mack assessed it would drive straight into their faces as they traversed the field. He could feel the hard sou’wester faintly rocking the car as they drove across the river.

  It was pitch dark as they edged into the copse on the far side of the road. With the headlights off, no one could see a thing, but there could be no flashlight used. They pulled up their hoods, hauled the boxes out of the rear door, and set off across the road.

  On the plus side, the leather handles had made carrying the boxes much easier than Mack had imagined. He took the center spot, holding one handle in either hand. Benny was on the right, Johnny on the left as they walked line-abreast into the woods on the far side of the narrow road.

  Right there they switched position, with Benny taking the center spot and Mack leading the way through the trees, which now loomed dimly in the dark like old friends marking his route to the field. When they reached the edge Mack ordered the boxes opened and most of the nails removed.

  “We don’t need to make a sound over there,” he said. “Just leave the lids lightly tapped down so they come open without squeaking.”

  He stood up and trained his binoculars on the farmyard. He could see more activity than he had seen on previous nights. There were probably a dozen people moving around. All the outside lights were switched on, and so were the ones inside the wide-open barn.

  “We better wait till that crowd thins out a little,” Mack muttered. “They are all armed. And we don’t know if they have night-glasses. If someone spotted us, it’d be like walking into the jaws of death.”

  “Screw that,” said Johnny, mildly.

  And so they waited. Eleven o’clock came and went. Twenty minutes later, they watched seven men leave the yard and return to the farmhouse. However, many of the ones who had been working in the barn were still there, and there was one guard standing outside the big wide doors.

  It did occur to Mack that the right hook he’d landed on the guard’s jaw the other night may have put them off the entire idea of a having night watchman. Unknowingly, he was right. None of Ibrahim’s men had the slightest intention of sitting outside the front door of Mountainside Farm, in the dark, waiting for some crazed cage-fighter to show up probably baring his steel teeth, before putting yet another of them in intensive care. Fuck that.

  They were brave, and they were prepared to lay down their lives for Allah and Islam. But not that brave. When the downstairs lights went out, and the senior staff retreated to bed, the night watchman would be back inside the front door. Fast.

  Mack watched it happen. And from all the way across the field, he sensed the fear as the front door slammed shut suspiciously quickly, and the lights stayed out.

  Now Mack and his troops picked up the boxes and set off across the cold, flat, windswept acres. Three of them abreast, cursing the rain—especially Mack, who had both hands full, and could not even wipe the water out of his eyes.

  The field was growing muddy now, and their boots squelched on the soft slippery surface. To Mack they sounded like a trio of arctic sea lions splashing through the shallows. He hoped the guys in the barn stayed there.

  They crept over the last hundred yards very slowly, crouched down, one hesitant step at a time. It seemed to take double the time he had spent crossing that field on his own over the hard crisp frost. Finally they made the shelter of the barn’s rear wall, gratefully dropping their heavy load, getting their new bearings and taking a breath.

  Mack looked around the corner into the yard and was surprised to see the outside lights were now off. In fact, the only lights he could see in the whole place were inside the barn. The bus motor was shut off, and the only sounds were metallic, perhaps tools being stored away. At five minutes before midnight, three men walked out of the barn and turned off the lights. One of them pulled shut the big doors, hooked the padlock into the chain, snapped it closed, and locked it with the key. Mack saw him take the key out and drop it into his pocket. So did Benny, who muttered, “Christ!” under his breath, “How do we get in?”

  Mack did not answer as they watched the barn workmen cross the yard in the phosphorescence of the rain and disappear through the front door. No more lights went on.

  They waited five more minutes, and then Mack edged around the wall, took out his personal key, and unlocked the doors, holding them a couple of feet apart and letting his team in. He also seized the chain and padlock, and took them both with him. There were three reasons for this: he could throttle someone with the chain, fracture someone’s skull with the heavy padlock, and if he had the locking mechanism, no one could imprison them in the barn.

  Once inside they went to work, carrying the boxes into the straw enclosure and placing them at the far side of the bus. Mack ripped off the lids and shone his flashlight in, while Benny pulled out the cakes of C-4 explosive, which he had already taped together into eight sets of four. Plus two bundles of dynamite.

  Benny rolled under the bus with the tape and the brackets. Mack positioned two flashlights to shine with maximum illumination for Benny. As needed, he passed him the big screws, the screwdriver, and the electric drill.

  Johnny Strauss, his machine gun drawn, climbed into the bus and counted the boxes containing what he knew were packed bags of high-explosive, the ammonium nitrate Mack had smelled so clearly last time he was here.

  He exited the bus, leaned down, and told Benny the entire bomb cargo was stacked in the rear half. He heard the Mossad hero scuffle back a couple of feet on the stone floor beneath the bus, and he heard the crackle of the duck tape as the Israeli ripped it off, cutting sections with a knife, lashing his own private bomb into a shape of maximum upward-blasting efficiency.

  At this point Johnny took up his station inside the enclosure, standing watch over the narrow entrance between the front straw bales.

  “Someone comes in here, blow him away,” whispered Mack. “We might have to abort the mission, but you miss the guy, and we’re all dead. There’s too many of ’em.”

  “Mack, old buddy, I’m a former infantry officer in the Israeli Defense Force. I’m a Mossad assassin. We don’t miss, okay? I’ve never missed. That’s why I’m still breathing.”

  Mack laughed quietly. And Benny called back from under the bus. “Okay, guys, start handing me the electronics. It’s gonna take the biggest part of an hour. Lemme have the box and the brackets first, and I need help. Mack, get under here yourself, w
ill you?”

  It was pitch dark in the barn, and the rain beat down upon the corrugated tin roof. The only light in the entire place was from the flashlights aimed under the bus, and they sent a ghostly refracted glow out along the straw bales. Beyond that, in the rest of the area, there was only darkness.

  Mack rolled underneath taking the two flashlights with him to direct the light better onto the precise section Benny was working. Benny was aiming the drill and when he hit the start button, it screamed to life. It then screamed even louder when he drove a bore-hole into a steel strut beneath the fuselage of the bus.

  “Fuck me!” breathed Mack. “They could hear that sonofabitch in Torrington.”

  The drill stopped and all three men stopped breathing, afraid that the front door of the house would somehow catapult open and ten crazed terrorists would come rushing to the barn.

  “Wasn’t too bad out here,” hissed Johnny from beyond the bales. “The straw really muffled it. From outside the barn walls it would be even softer, and inside the house, I bet you could hardly hear anything.”

  “Darned near deafened me,” said Mack.

  “Don’t worry about it,” replied Benny, “I’m only going to do it three more times—for the moment.”

  “Jesus Christ,” said Mack.

  Benny hit the start button, and under the bus Mack nearly had a heart attack. The drill shrieked, bored into the metal, leaving a neat, clean, round hole.

  “Beautiful,” whispered Benny.

  The actual drilling had taken only fifteen seconds each time, and Johnny again confirmed the straw had deadened the sound brilliantly. What none of them knew, however, was that Mountainside Farm was not quite as sleepy as it appeared.

  IN IBRAHIM’S LARGE BEDROOM, on the south side of the house, there was a major strategy meeting in progress. The boss had just asked for a copy of the Canaan Academy floor plan, and Ben al-Turabi couldn’t find it.

  “Damn,” he said, “I must have left it in the darned bus.”

  “What the hell was it doing in the bus?” Ibrahim wanted to know.

  “I took it over this evening, while I was on guard duty,” replied the tall Palestinian terrorist. “In case anyone’s forgotten, I’m hauling the first two bomb cases into the school and they’re both marked ‘Coffee.’ I just wanted to check the layout one more time, from my entrance door on the side, to the kitchen area.”

  “Well you’d better go out and get it, since you’re the only one who knows where it is.”

  “Okay, boss,” replied al-Turabi. “Be right back.”

  Ben was annoyed with the way Ibriham had spoken to him and he decided he’d take his own sweet time going back out into the freezing night. So he made two stops on the way to the front door. The first was at the bathroom; the second at the kitchen, where he filled the big kettle and put in on the stove. Then somewhere a phone rang, but Ben couldn’t find it before grabbing the door handle and heading out to get the map.

  UNDER THE BUS, Benny Shalit had just connected the batteries, and a tiny red light was blinking intermittently on the detonator. The Mossad man pushed it aside for a few moments while he stripped some electric cable ends and wound them onto the power pack terminals. Right at this moment, Ben al-Turabi slammed the front door, wind-assisted.

  The pounding rain was drowning out some sound, but Johnny Strauss almost had a stroke when he heard footsteps approaching. With supreme presence of mind Johnny pulled the door tight shut, wheeled back through the straw gap, and hissed, “Mack, Mack! someone’s coming, heading straight for the barn.”

  The ex-SEAL team leader never hesitated with his commands. “Benny, clear the decks—get the tools and equipment under the bus. Johnny, grab a box and get on station at the back-end, behind the luggage trunk. Stay concealed and don’t take him out unless you have to. Knife, not gun.”

  Mack himself switched off the two flashlights, stood up, and hauled the second box back to the wall, out of sight. Now he could hear someone trying to open the barn door, which would not have provided much of a challenge since the padlock and chain were in Mack’s pocket.

  Whoever was coming in had a flashlight and did not bother to turn on the two bulbs that lit the barn, poorly, from the center of the ceiling. Mack rolled silently under the yellow school bus. The intruder stepped through the door, leaving it swinging open in the rain.

  Mack just hoped to God the new arrival was not the man who had finally locked that door when the shift was over. Because, if so, he would surely notice the fucking chain and padlock were no longer there.

  There’d been few breaks on this night. But right now they had one. The big ex-Guantanamo Bay goalkeeper had left early, and had not the slightest idea whether the barn had been secured by padlock or not.

  He didn’t notice and didn’t care. He just wanted to find the stupid architectural floor plan, shove it under his coat, and get the hell out of this freezing farm building, back to the house for a cup of coffee, and a couple of the sweet Iranian pastries Faisal al-Assad had given them.

  All three of the saboteurs heard Ben al-Turabi slouch across the stone floor to the straw entrance. Behind the bus Johnny could see him, lashlight in his right hand, machine gun slung over his back, a position that would render him at least seven seconds late with his first shot, if Johnny had to kill him.

  Then, to his horror, he noticed that the tiny flickering light on Benny’s equipment was casting a red glow on the floor about five feet back from the main automatic doors. He dared not shout a command, nor even an alert. Mack and Benny could see al-Turabi’s feet, and one of his leather shoes was actually reflecting the red glow every time it flickered. Benny could not reach it, and neither could Mack, but Mack had managed to lunge sideways to block the menacing glow with a couple of fingers.

  Al-Turabi had noticed nothing as he climbed into the bus and clumped around inside, shining his light around until he found the floor plan on the wide armrest next to the driver’s seat. He folded it a couple of times, pushed it under his jacket, and left, carefully closing the door behind him, leaving the barn precisely as he had found it.

  For three minutes no one moved or spoke. Mack kept his fingers over the flickering lightbulb and the only sound was the rain pelting down on the cold tin roof.

  Benny was back into action first, fixing the electronics to the underside of the central area of the fuselage. Every now and then he would issue a curt instruction to Mack. Gimme six more feet of that wire, the thin black one. Strip the ends for me, will you? Small screwdriver, Mack. Duct tape, cut me four feet. Okay, large battery. That should do it.

  It was now twelve minutes after 1 a.m. on Friday morning—Abraham’s Day at Canaan Academy—and Benny Shalit was done. Except he had one worry. “Mack,” he said, “I’m concerned about the strength of that steel floor above our bomb, because it stands between us and the massive amount of explosive stacked inside the bus. I’ve done everything I can to ‘shape’ the charge, making it blast upward, but I’m still afraid that floor might provide too much of a shield.”

  “Christ, Benny, I don’t want to take any chances like that,” replied Mack. “Any thoughts?”

  “I was thinking of drilling up through the floor again, and connecting their bomb cases directly to our dynamite, which will explode instantly.”

  “Det-cord?” said Mack.

  “Precisely. We got a good-sized roll of it in that box back there, and it just gives us that one edge that makes us foolproof. When those bundles of dynamite blow, they will fire the det-cord, which I’m gonna feed right into four of their boxes.”

  “Okay, buddy. Let’s go. How long?”

  “I’d say twenty minutes.”

  “Where d’you want me?”

  “Right next to the bus, holding the cord, the knife, and the duct tape. Just keep handing the stuff to me. I’m gonna drill through the floor and then through the wooden base of the packing cases.”

  “Jesus, don’t drill right into the sacks of ammonium nitrate,”
said Mack. “Heat sets ’em off.”

  “Right now, Lt. Commander, you are telling God how to open the Pearly Gates.”

  Mack laughed as the Israeli slid back underneath the bus, and Mack and Johnny held their breath every time he unleashed the drill, boring straight through the floor of the bus, and up into the wood cases. Four times he drilled, and four times the steel tip drove into the cases above.

  Then Benny made one of his most dangerous requests. “Get in the bus, Mack,” he said. “When I feed the det-cord through make sure it goes into the small hole, bottom of the crate. I’ll finish down here, then I’ll come up and help.”

  His last request was four fifteen-foot lengths of the military’s favorite explosive, the stuff that burns along at two miles every three seconds. And while Johnny and Mack began to clear up, Benny attached the det-cord to the chassis, and threaded it up through the tiny holes he had made, right into the bus.

  By the time he emerged from the underside of the bus, the place was almost ship-shape. The boxes were neatly stowed with the residue of the saboteur’s gear, and they were much lighter. But they still had to be carried away.

  Benny and Mack climbed into the bus and Mack heaved the bottom cases upward, while his buddy shoved the det-cord right into the base, through the holes he had bored, to rest about a hundredth of an inch from the high explosive, inside the box.

  They gathered at the door, and the little electronic power-indicator flickered cheerfully beneath the school bus, casting a soft, triumphant glow on their skill and daring. Mack hoped to hell that big fella with the goddamned flashlight would not show up again during the night.

  Holding the remains of their work in the boxes, they slipped out into the rain, hoods up. Mack re-fitted the chain on the barn door, and turned the key in the padlock. And they set off across the field, walking through the mud, each of them content with their efforts.