Fear the Survivors (5 page)
- - -
Lord Mantil also felt a measure of sadness and guilt at what he was going to have to do. He knew that he had to choose between the deaths of Jack and Jennifer and the death of these soldiers descending on them. He knew it was not a choice he wanted to make. Neither party truly knew what they were fighting for, neither knew what they faced. Neither knew that they were all, in fact, on the same side of the coming conflict. And so it came down to a simple choice between the hundred or so Iranian soldiers and the two American pilots. Simple mathematics should have led him to kill Jennifer and Jack himself and then leave the remains to the Iranians. Shahim could easily avoid soldiers on his own, especially as they would not come looking for him once they found the two pilots. But such things were never mathematical.
However misguided the Iranian soldiers may be, however justified their actions might be in the face of an illegal incursion by an American B-2 bomber into their airspace, the truth remained that Jack had been shot down solely because he sought to save the very people who now hunted him. And Jennifer was as innocent of the crimes of her captors as she could possibly be. Should she suffer an ignominious death for her unwitting part in the battle that had killed Martin and her copilot?
In the end it came down to one thing. Jack had willingly risked his life to protect others, and had saved hundreds of thousands in the process, maybe more. That alone justified protecting him. That the threat Jack had been fighting against had been brought on the same wing that had delivered Shahim himself to Earth only strengthened the Agent’s resolve.
These soldiers had every intention of capturing and then killing the captain and the major. Ignorant as they all were of the greater picture, it was time to choose a side and Lord Mantil had decided. It was time to fight once more.
Lacking the overhead view his cohorts were watching him on, he instead used his hypersensitive hearing like a passive sonar, listening to the hums and thrums of his quarry as they approached with the coming night. As he arced away from the small village, he triangulated the sounds of his prey in his head, picking out buggies and helicopters, and then codifying each one of the copters and cars by the minutest differences in the beat of their engines. Imperceptible irregularities in the walls of their thumping pistons or the explosive firing of their spark plugs leaving an audio fingerprint on each part of the faint cacophony that was starting to fill the night. He found them, he mapped them, and he started to plot their courses. Over time his map resolved; the longer he listened and the wider the range of his run the more clearly he could triangulate their routes. His path altered, his speed changing as he picked out the closest buggy.
A quarter of a mile away, the buggy came on, travelling at twenty miles per hour. Lord Mantil set himself to intercept. Thirty seconds.
The driver focused hard on the terrain in front of him, driving wildly around small rocks, shrubs, and ruts in the grit soil beneath his tires. The dusk was closing in, and the light his powerful headlamps were spreading out in front of him was starting to hold sway over the fading natural light. He switched on the larger bank of spotlights above him and his view brightened further. Behind him the gunner slowly swiveled left and right, the large spotlight mounted beside his machine gun following his sights as he panned the scene scrolling towards them.
Lord Mantil came in from their right, firing his legs in a final burst of speed as he approached; a blur in their vision. He leapt at the last moment just as the gunner spotted him, a shout rising up from his soul as the apparition appeared from the twilight. Lord Mantil landed hard against the steel cage of the buggy, his thundering momentum sending it skidding to the left. He grabbed the gunner by the collar and deftly ripped him from his seat, plucking his sidearm from its holster as he flung him, screaming, from the car.
The driver slammed on the breaks and the Agent used the change in speed as he was flung forward. Grasping the bar above the driver’s head, he swung over, bringing his two feet over and around like a swinging axe. But he did not need to kill these men, so he parted his feet at the last moment to fall either side of the stunned driver’s shoulders, allowing Shahim to come to rest facing the man, sitting neatly on the buggy’s small dashboard. Without hesitation, Lord Mantil neatly stripped the man of his helmet and sidearm and wrenched him bodily from the seat, propelling him out and away from the car as it skidded across the sand. No doubt both men would suffer a couple of broken bones to go with their dazed memories of the lightning-fast attack, but Shahim gave them little thought as he swiveled around and dropped into the driver’s still-warm seat, placing the man’s helmet and its radio receiver on his own head as he did so.
He was already gunning the throttle and swerving the buggy sharply right before the driver even hit the ground, killing its lights and relying on his acute vision to guide him through the dusk to find the buggy’s cohorts.
Wrenching the car around, he used the vehicle in ways it had never been driven before, cutting in a frenzied slice through the paths of other assault buggies in the platoon.
While he had been able to spare the first two, he could not afford such leniency with all of them. There were simply too many. Ripping the machine gun from its mount above his head, he wielded it like a scythe as he crossed each car’s path, his speed far outstripping the cautious twenty miles per hour the human drivers were managing in the fading light. He tried to maim rather than kill, but at the speeds he needed to drive at in order to catch them all before they reached the huts, even he could not place all his shots as accurately as he wanted.
One after one the bullets ripped through legs and shoulders as he bisected the paths of the oncoming trucks. The shots carved brutal paths through flesh and bone, and screams filled the helmets of the remaining pilots, drivers, and gunners as dark death swept through their ranks. It did not take long for them to see the pattern of their assailant’s movement in the order of the buggies being attacked, and the helicopters shifted their massive firepower to face whatever was tearing them apart in the night.
The light Shahed 285 Iranian Attack Helicopter carried twin autocannons and a barrage of air-to-ground missiles. They were homebred in Iran, and while not a match for their American or European cousins, they still brought vastly more guns to the game than the plethora of buggies whose drivers Lord Mantil was busy maiming or worse.
Shahim sensed the nearest helicopter veering toward him and saw it only a moment before its infrared-enabled pilot saw him too. The pilot shouted to his gunner. The buggy in their sights was going the wrong way and was coming at them from the direction of the death cries rattling their radios.
There was no way they were going to wait for orders on how to handle this apparition, and the gunner went weapons hot. Shahim did not hesitate either, leveling his machine gun and emptying its belt at the coming chopper. The pilot saw the muzzle flash in the distance an instant before the rounds started to impact his armored chopper. The sound was like an angry lead hail pelting the screen in front of him, which started to crack and shatter almost instantly. He instinctively veered hard right and responded in kind, his helmet-targeted front machine gun whirring to life as he squeezed the trigger, glaring furiously at the spot where he had last seen the buggy.
A thousand bullets ripped from the spinning cannon and raced toward Shahim, vastly larger and more deadly than the hail his popgun could return. Shahim’s reactions were fast but the fire was wild, and a storm of lead erupted the sand around him as it rained outward from the helicopter. The buggy’s sharp turn brought his left side to bear on the metal needles as they blurred the space between him and the damaged chopper, and the line of destruction that the bullets were burning into the ground scythed across the buggy like a chainsaw. The rear left tire shredded a moment before the empty gunner’s seat behind spat foam, and the next bullets hit Shahim square. The woven skin on his left shoulder ripped open as a hypersonic bullet bounced off the armor beneath and the next hit him hard in the ribs. Internal alarms sprang to life in his mind as his systems reported damage from the hits.
Deciding with machine rapidity that the buggy was now little more than a hindrance, Shahim propelled himself upward out of the seat, leaving the car to stumble onward into the night.
The copilot in the chopper was hard at work as well, sighting his first missile group on the car, he fired immediately, and two small but deadly heat-seeking missiles rocketed outward toward the small vehicle even as Lord Mantil landed in a roll and began sprinting away from it. Lord Mantil watched the rockets flame from the chopper toward him and then past him into the car. Their brilliant blue flames lighting up the ground and their smoke trails in the flash before they smothered the buggy in bright orange flame. Thud, thud, came the quick impacts and the car was gone, obliterated, not even a hulk.
Even as the missiles’ smoke trails wafted in the wind, Lord Mantil was bolting back along their path toward the helicopter, his cold machine body invisible to their infrared sensors and his movements but a blur in the twilight. The two men never knew what hit them, a weight suddenly landed bodily on the front of the helicopter and a moment later a fist came through the window with blinding power. They were both dead before their bodies hit the ground below.
- - -
“Jesus,” whispered Barrett at the sight. He couldn’t make out exactly what had happened but the results were clear. The image was grey and faded with the passing of the day, but he had seen the inhumanly fast figure from the huts leap onto the unsuspecting buggy, had seen two men fly from it a moment later. Then he had watched as the car tore bloody murder down through the ranks of the coming forces as they approached the huts Barrett knew harbored his friends.
He had then seen the first of the two attack helicopters in the squadron engage the man he knew was Lord Mantil and seen as it destroyed the car that had born Shahim down on his prey. But a moment later the chopper had visibly faltered in the evening air. Then it had become a slaughter. Barrett assumed the original pilots of the chopper were no longer onboard because he had watched as it turned its guns on the rest of the squadron. The next few minutes were ugly, the remainders of the squadron dying quickly as what was clearly now Lord Mantil piloting the chopper wielded the agile machine’s guns and missiles like a samurai.
- - -
Shahim watched his radar as the last of the terrified soldiers eventually fled. Shahim let them go, turning the helicopter back toward the huts. He landed in the deserted settlement and barely hesitated. In a matter of moments he had taken his two charges aboard and was on his way, flying hard for the border.
Chapter 6: Ghazzat
A deep
heat lay on the city of Gaza. A dry, dusty heat that desiccates the bones and forces you to squint. It had been a long, long time since Saul had been outside his homeland of Israel. Indeed in some ways he still wasn’t. But though the Palestinian National Authority was hypothetically part of the nation of Israel, Saul Moskowitz could not have been farther from home.
It was not the first time he had been in Palestinian territory, but the last time he was here it had been under the orders of the feared and respected Israeli intelligence agency, the Mossad. Plus he had been thirty years younger. He had been fitter and at the peak of his trade.
Since then he had gone into a form of retirement. He had reached a point when he had felt his sharpness fading, his skills dulling, and he had been faced with three choices: take a desk job in analysis, stay in the field until the day he finally met his match, or turn his long experience to the aid and guidance of the next generation. He had chosen the third. And so for two decades he had handled a wide variety of agents as they worked their way into the plethora of political and militia bodies that wished Israel harm. Even this job had faded with time, his age leading him to manage fewer and fewer assets in the field. Attrition had slowly whittled down that list, either through retirement or death, typically the latter. Eventually, inevitably, he had been left with none.
Until one had reemerged. The day Ayala had called him he had been stunned, but his long training had kept his voice steady. You can train yourself not to show surprise. To remain placid even during the most shocking of events. It takes a long time, and a lot of practice, but every agent learns quickly that the slightest facial tick or inflection of voice is all a trained spy needs to read you like a book. So you learn to keep a phenomenally tight rein on your reactions if you hope to live very long. So tight, that in the course of normal life you find yourself having to remember how you are supposed to react to important news, consciously triggering smiles and laughter as friends and loved ones share themselves with you, unaware of the calculated method behind your responses.
He had shown no such emotion when Ayala had called. He had greeted her offhandedly, and they had agreed to a meeting, using the long-outdated codes she had used in her time as an active asset. They had met, and they had spoken, and it had taken Saul a few hours to realize that Ayala, his former agent, had just turned the tables, and had activated him, the handler.
He had spent the next few weeks travelling around Israel, contacting agents, speaking with former colleagues, spreading an inoculating contagion that Ayala had given to him to administer. He had been spreading the antigen, and his work had gone a long way toward inoculating the region. But that had been but the first of two tasks given him by Ayala. He had also been given the name of an innocent-seeming junior officer in the Israeli Air Force and been told that she was the single greatest threat to Israel in the nation’s short and bloody history.
It had been hard to believe, and Saul had known that he was only being told half the truth, but he had also trusted his old ally enough to believe that the measure she was not giving away would not be something he needed to know in order to survive. Sure enough, she had told him to keep his distance, and he had. She had told him that the woman was not as she seemed and soon enough that had been proven beyond any reasonable doubt. Finally Ayala had warned him that the woman was part of something far larger, something that spanned the globe, and that one day he would know why he had been kept in the dark.
And when the world had gone mad on that strange autumn night, the sky alight with missiles and explosions, stories of deadly dogfights over Afghanistan, and nuclear hell breaking loose in America, Raz Shellet had fled. He had been watching her, as was his mandate, from a distance. He had used his not inconsiderable talents to gain an understanding of her movements without triggering any unwanted alarms, and he had watched, almost expectantly, as she had calmly walked off the base and vanished from her old life.
He had followed her. It had not been easy. He had not been prepared for her flight and had not been carrying any but the most basic amenities, not nearly enough for a prolonged pursuit. Most of all he had been unprepared for where she was going. But he should have known. Israel had allies in most of the civilized nations of the world, and information sharing treaties came as part of those allegiances. If you wanted to hide from Israel’s eyes, you needed to do so among her enemies. And there were few places with more enmity toward mother Israel than in the Islamic strongholds of Gaza and the West Bank.
The city of Gaza, the largest of all the Palestinian cities, held more than four hundred thousand souls spread along the coast almost to the border with Israel, only fifty miles south of Tel Aviv. But the trip had taken days, days marked by long nights and hitchhiked rides, at first with dubious and mistrusting Jews and then, as they got closer to the fortified border with the Gaza Strip, the rides had become even less savory.
It had been an exhausted Saul, showing all of his sixty-five years in his gray tufted beard, who had called upon an old colleague in the middle of the night in Gaza. The friend had been startled and afraid but he had granted his colleague shelter and food. Saul knew he had ruined his colleague’s cover and probably endangered the man’s life, but every part of him had told him that this was more important than that. More dangerous to Israel. More valuable than either his life or that of his associate.
Saul woke from a deep sleep with an aching body. While he showered, his friend made him some coffee in the local tradition, roasting the fat green beans in a pan with some cardamom, then grinding them with a big wooden al-houn. As Saul explained the situation the other agent poured the steaming hot brew … repeatedly. Saul did not wave his fingers over his cup until he had downed his fifth.
He did not shave. He had too many enemies here. Anything he could do to disguise his identity was welcome. With fresh clothes and a gun, he ordered his colleague to leave the city as soon as possible, and then Saul returned to the place he had watched Raz rent a room.
For several hours he veered toward despair that she had moved on, knowing that if she had, he would probably never regain her scent. His relief was palpable when she returned to the lowly guesthouse, a heavy duffle bag of supplies slung over her shoulder. Canisters of food, perhaps, he could not make them out. But seeing that she was settling in for a long stay he settled himself as well, mentally and literally, seeking out and then renting himself a room in the building across the street before sending for help. Help from the only person he was certain he could trust.
- - -
“I’m still getting used to the fact that we can talk on the phone.” said Ayala into her cell, catching up with Neal on what she had missed on the satellite images from Iran. It was one of many things she was getting used to. Travelling first class at the US’s expense was another, as was sitting in the executive lounge she now found herself in at Heathrow airport. Starting to openly work with senior members of the CIA, MI6, French DGSE, and assorted other agencies across the globe was yet another.
She had been trying furiously to organize some semblance of an intelligence network to track down the remaining four Agents still at large when her old friend Saul had called her. It could only be in reference to one thing. And the location code he had used could only mean that his target had gone in the dragon’s den, and he had followed her. She had immediately boarded a flight to Europe and on to Tel Aviv, making arrangements as she went. The Mossad, the CIA, all had assets she could use on the ground. And she intended to use all of them.
She had been in the air when US StratCom had managed to identify and pass back images of Shahim in Iran, and had heard only secondhand the story of his clash with the Iranian Commandoes. As she swelled with pride at this evidence of what her allies John and Shahim could do, she also reminded herself that the tale also foretold the capabilities of her foes. All four of them.
“I know,” said Neal in response to her comment about using the phone, “it still seems forbidden. I hadn’t even paid my phone bill in three months. Apparently it has affected my credit.” He chuckled at the futility of such things, and Ayala smiled. She had tried to impress upon the team the need to be mindful of such things, sudden changes in that kind of behavior being the key signs someone such as herself might look for as they tried to identify a spy or a recently converted asset. But as they had approached zero hour they had all begun to quite simply say fuck it.
Since then, the inclusion of the leviathan political machines that were now joining their cause had put a quick end to such considerations. The identities she had carefully crafted for her team had become moot as they started to enjoy the full support of some of the most powerful governments, armed forces, and intelligence agencies on earth. There were not many doors you could not open with the blessing of the leaders of the US, UK, France, Germany, Japan, India, and Brazil. Unless those doors were in Russia or China, of course.
It was a Mossad liaison that greeted Ayala when she landed in Tel Aviv. It was the first time since she was eighteen that she had flown into the airport under her own identity and it felt deeply unnatural. But she was left little time for reveling in the newness of it as she brusquely refused a meeting at Mossad headquarters in favor of making her way toward the border immediately. Despite the liaison’s protestations, her summation of the Israelis’ readiness for her arrival was true to her own long experience, and her small team was indeed prepped and ready to move. She had joined them at a warehouse close to the border, two vans at the ready. The men were shoddily dressed, poorly shaven, slovenly and unkempt: clearly professionals, and she did not expect nor ask them to salute as she entered.
“Gentlemen, as you may or may not have been told, your mission today will take you into Gaza. But let me assure that we are not tracking anything so pedestrian as a Hamas cell today.” She allowed her offhanded dismissal of their longtime foe to sink in. A foe to whom they had all lost friends and colleagues and dedicated their very lives to battling. Seeing that they were all equal parts offended and piqued by the nature of her opening remark, she built upon it.
“No, by comparison to the quarry we track today, our friends at Hamas are but a nuisance. In fact, what you face today is so exponentially more dangerous that we may even call our friends at Hamas
allies
before this year is out, if we cannot defeat this entity on our own.” Again she allowed that bombshell to wash over them, and looked each of them in the eye, matching their rising anger with her own intensity of purpose until they each recognized the seriousness with which she delivered her words.
“Gentlemen, please open your packets.” They did so, and photographs of Raz Shellet were clipped at the top of each of the sheaves of papers inside. “Our first and only priority is the
tracking
of this single target. Not interception. The only way I can make it clear enough that interception is not an option, is to tell you that I will happily sacrifice any and all of you to her lethal abilities rather than provoke a full-scale conflict with her.
“I could tell you that I fear the conflict, or that I know we would lose it, no matter how well we all believe we have been trained. But instead I will tell you that the last time a team tried to take down one of this woman’s colleagues, it led to the disaster that is even now spreading up the East Coast of the United States.” They all looked up at her as one, aghast at her statement. Terrorism was an ever-present threat for everyone who lived in Israel, and a nuclear related attack, though it had never actually happened, was the specter that defined their greatest fear.
“She is a member of a team you have never heard of. Over the next few months and years you may hear more of them, but hopefully not. Hopefully we will defeat them before this all necessarily becomes public. For now our first priority is to find them. To find them and find out what they are planning. Only when we have done that will we have a chance of mitigating the threat they pose.
“So, I repeat to you, gentlemen, we are
not
to engage this woman under
any
circumstances. We are to assume at all times that she is hostile and vigilant. We are also never to use radio communications near her, or any other form of wireless communications, for it is very possible she can hear anything that is said over them. We are to assume positions around her last known location and monitor her behavior. And we are to do so while maintaining maximum cover and distance, we are going to place hard taps on her building’s phone lines and transmit the information back to Herzliya for analysis via hard line.”
Ayala turned to the liaison and spoke, “You will coordinate with our American and British friends to see that my team is involved in the process.”
He nodded, as this was also detailed inside his extraordinary package of orders for this mission. This woman had complete carte blanche. In his fifteen years at the agency, she had been given an unprecedented level of clearance. This had clearly come from the very top, and with enough weight behind it that it had received no resistance on its way down.
She turned back to the team, “Very well, gentlemen, let us begin. I want maps of the neighborhood, electric and sewage lines, known assets and threats in the vicinity, let’s go, gentlemen!”