Fuse of Armageddon (7 page)

He turned and slapped Zayat’s face. “Your wife and your children will be slaughtered before nightfall. But I will show them your head before they die so they understand it is your stupidity that killed them.”

Zayat fell to his knees. “Please! No!”

Abu ignored the begging. He knelt at the body at Quinn’s feet and pulled off the mask. He said to Quinn in English, “Is this a man you know?”

Quinn looked at the dead man’s thickly bearded face and shook his head.

“The sword,” Abu said. “The camera. It is obvious he wanted to execute you.”

“He was sent by Khaled Safady.”

Abu grew still. “Safady. My brother is dead because of that man?”

Quinn nodded.

“Why does Safady want you dead?” Abu asked. “You are not Israeli.”

Quinn shook his head to indicate he would not answer.

“I could kill you where you stand.”

“Yes,” Quinn said.

The moment dragged as Abu waited for Quinn to change his mind and explain why Safady wanted him dead.

Quinn calmly stared back at Abu.

“But killing you would satisfy the man who killed my brother.” Abu closed his eyes briefly, then stared again at Quinn. “You transferred the money for the hostages?”

“Ask Zayat.”

Abu didn’t have to ask.

“I have the number,” Zayat babbled in Arabic. “You will get the money. Spare my family.”

“Go,” Abu told Quinn. “This is now a tribal affair.”

“Zayat’s wife and children,” Quinn said, switching from English to Arabic. Abu’s men were alert with their machine guns for any swift action Quinn might take. “They don’t have to die.”

“American, you don’t understand the way of the desert.”

It had been generations since any Palestinian had been free enough to roam the desert. But they remembered what had been passed on, remembered what it took to survive when there wasn’t enough grass and water for everyone and dreamed still of freedom that came with the harshness of desert life.

“Zayat’s children did not steal your turkey,” Quinn answered. “Nor will they come for your camel and horse.”

Abu stared at Quinn again, this time allowing an expression of surprise.

Westerners were not supposed to understand the heritage of tribal politics, yet Quinn knew the Bedouin legend about the old man and his stolen turkey. The old man in the story called his sons and told them the family was in great danger. They laughed. It was only a turkey. A few weeks later, a camel was stolen. The old man told his sons to find the turkey. When the horse was stolen, he told them again: find the turkey. Then the old man’s daughter was raped, and he went to his sons and said it was all because of the turkey. Once it was known there was no retribution for taking the turkey, the old man cried, everything else was doomed to be lost.

“I will consider sparing his family,” Abu said.

“War and poverty don’t inflict enough pain on the children of Gaza?” Quinn remained at the table. “They of anyone in this land deserve more than consideration.”

“Bah,” Abu said. “Go.”

Quinn knew there was nothing else he could do or say at this point to help Zayat’s family. He pushed away from the table. With his good hand, he tucked the computer under his opposite arm.

“Could you help me with one thing?” Quinn said to Abu.

“I do not help Americans.”

“I am also the enemy of an enemy.” Quinn kept his eyes on Abu. “I’m an enemy of the man who had your brother killed.”

“What do you want?” Abu said sourly.

“Two of your bodyguards to put the dead man in the trunk of my car.”

Abu cocked his head and blinked several times. “Explain.”

“My hand is injured. I can’t carry him myself.”

“Do not play games.”

“Maybe I can learn something from the body that will lead to Safady.”

“How?”

“It’s as much as I want to explain.” If Abu learned Quinn intended to use the Mossad, there would be no cooperation.

An impatient sigh. “You push me.”

Quinn nodded.

“Two of you,” Abu barked at this men. He picked up the knife from the floor and continued his instructions, pointing the blade at one bodyguard and then another. “Carry the body and follow the American to his car. But be fast. You don’t want to miss my time with Zayat.”

Abu advanced on Zayat, and Quinn turned away. As he was stepping outside, he heard a sharp cry of pain.

The man was going to die, but not until he’d been mutilated in ways Quinn didn’t want to imagine. Even so, Quinn couldn’t find sympathy for the man, only anger at the price Zayat’s children would pay by dying as a warning retribution so that Abu would not look weak or, if Quinn had swayed Abu, by living without a father in the concentration camp that was called the Gaza Strip.

Sunshine hurt Quinn’s eyes. When he’d been pinned to the table, he had not expected to be in sun or heat again. It was as if he were seeing light and feeling heat for the first time. His core abdominal muscles began to tremble in the emotional aftermath of surviving an execution and witnessing a man torn apart by machine-gun fire. Common as violent death was in Gaza, it was a horrible thing to see, and Quinn knew it would be a long time before the memory was gone.

The two bodyguards followed Quinn toward the CCTI Mercedes parked just down the street. Quinn popped the trunk with his remote, and the younger men hurried ahead with their macabre burden. They had loaded it and closed the lid before Quinn got to the Mercedes. No passersby had said anything about the sight of two men dragging a dead body down the street. The bodyguards hurried away without acknowledging Quinn.

Quinn was clumsy opening the door to get inside. He had to first put the laptop on the roof, then open the door with his good hand, then put the laptop inside with that same hand. Finally he was able to slide behind the wheel of the Mercedes.

Quinn’s Mercedes was ten years old. It was dusty with multiple dents and a creased back fender. Barely worth a second glance, even in Gaza. But the engine was new, souped up to five hundred horsepower. The car’s transmission had been modified to handle the extra power and the entire suspension system bulked up to deliver performance capable of matching most race cars. The windows and body could stop anything but armor-piercing shells. All told, the car weighed some two thousand pounds more than it looked. But that was the point. A new and obviously fortified Mercedes would draw too much attention. Unlike Abu’s Mercedes, this one was impervious to a drive-by shooting.

It meant now that he was inside the car, Quinn would be safe all the way to the security checkpoint, where he was already resigned to complications explaining the body in the trunk. His biggest danger would happen if he was careless with his wounded hand and bled on the leather upholstery. Rossett was fussy about things like that.

4

CCTI Headquarters, Tel Aviv • 10:42 GMT


Quinn gave his usual sigh at the chiming of the metal detector in the lobby of the five-story office building owned by Corporate Counterterrorism International. He took a half step forward and raised his arms for the wand search.

“Be gentle on me,” Quinn said to Steve Gibbon, the big, redheaded former marine who ran the X-ray machine and the metal detector. “It’s been a tough morning.”

“I heard. This operation go fine?”

“I think so,” Quinn said, holding up his bandaged hand. Two months and three operations since the knife had pinned his hand to the table in Gaza, the pain was gone. But the memories were still fresh. “Bones are fine. Apparently a few ligaments need more time.”

“You being his partner and all, you’d think a trip to the hospital would be enough for Rossett to let you through without this today,” Steve said, waving the wand along Quinn’s belt loop.

“Being his partner and all just guarantees he won’t make any exceptions for me. Ever.”

“Now you’re clear,” Steve said when he was finished. Formality had to be served. Rossett was a freak for procedure and had become even more of a freak in the last month or so. Steve paused. “Just so you know, Rossett had Starbucks as he came through this morning.”

All the employees knew that Rossett only stopped for coffee down the street when he was in a particularly bad mood. In fact, Rossett hated the stuff, but on the mornings he wanted to be left alone, he carried it into the building like a red flag of danger.

“Thanks for the warning,” Quinn said. He took a step toward the elevator, mentally confirmed that the video camera was focused on the back of his head, and stopped. Rossett had a feed from the camera into his office.

“Steve, take a few quick steps and grab my shoulder like you don’t want me to get to the elevator,” Quinn said, still facing away from the camera behind him. It wouldn’t surprise Quinn to learn someday that Rossett could read lips and had kept this from everybody else at CCTI. “Trust me on this.”

A second later, Quinn felt Steve’s hand.

“Good,” Quinn said. “When I turn around, point at my left hand.”

Quinn turned around, face toward the camera. No doubt Rossett was watching. Rossett saw everything.

Steve obliged Quinn by pointing at his left hand, wrapped in fresh gauze, with a trace of blood leaking through.

“Give me a break, Steve,” Quinn said, clearly enunciating the words for the sake of the video camera. Rossett was tough enough to deal with when he was in a good mood. Security lapses drove him nuts and would put him on a rant for days.

“I just left the hospital,” Quinn continued to Steve. “Think I’ve got a poison gas capsule hidden in it or that the physician implanted C-4 in my palm? And do you know how much it’s going to hurt for you to pat this down?”

Steve blinked but figured it out a split second later. “Good catch,” he said in a low voice to Quinn. “I owe you one.”

Suez Canal, Port Said, Egypt • 10:43 GMT


Although the heifer had been sedated, when the crane lifted the container, the sudden movement startled the animal into a small fit of bucking. A flailing hoof caught the upper thigh of one of the soldiers who had been standing to stretch.

Joe Patterson had been dozing in a sitting position, his back against the metal wall of the container. The sharp cry of pain from that soldier jolted him out of his dreams.

It took a moment for Joe to orient himself and remember that he was in a shipping container with the rest of the soldiers. A crane was unloading the container from a cargo ship. The platoon shared the interior of the container with a black and red heifer—a small cow that had never calved. Patterson had no idea why the heifer was with them. Only Saxon knew their ultimate mission; he’d told them it would not be revealed until the last minute. This was to protect the mission in the event that any soldiers were captured before then.

The platoon had endured two weeks of slow travel to reach Port Said at the top of the Suez Canal. The journey had begun with a military flight from Afghanistan to Djibouti on the Horn of Africa. From there, a ship carried them northward up the Red Sea. It would have taken less time to fly into Port Sudan, halfway up the Red Sea, but the economy there was in tatters, and the risk of drawing attention to the platoon was too great.

On the ship, the soldiers had been armed with fake seamen’s books and contracts of employment to look like workers if for any reason the ship was stopped and searched. The beards they had all begun to grow weeks earlier were thick and untrimmed. They had orders to sit in the sun for hours each day to darken their skin. They’d applied deep brown dye to their hair and with each passing day had begun to look slightly more native to the Middle East.

At the north end of the Red Sea, their cargo ship had met another coming down through the Suez. The rendezvous of the two ships had been brief and raised questions for Patterson because the southbound ship had transferred this heifer to their northbound ship. The platoon’s ship had resumed its journey north toward the Suez Canal, with the heifer placidly eating hay.

The heifer’s presence was another reminder to Patterson that this new phase of the platoon’s operation was highly planned and equally mysterious. To get such a large group of American soldiers this far and this invisibly into the heart of the Middle East was one thing, but to stop two ships just to transfer a small cow? Every detail had been handled with precision and forethought by whoever had planned it—right down to the shipping container with a hitching ring welded to the front of the interior.

Just before dawn, in the final hours before reaching the Suez, the heifer had been led into the container—forty feet long, nearly eight feet wide, and eight feet high—and roped to the ring. The rear of the container was stacked with Soviet-issue weapons. Saxon had told them that part of the cover for this mission was an arms deal with Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

The platoon had followed the heifer inside, with the container door sealed behind them, becoming completely hidden among the hundreds of shipping containers on the cargo ship. Although they were de facto prisoners in the box that would smuggle them into Egypt, there were no fears of a double cross. The container door could be opened immediately from the inside, tiny air holes gave the soldiers a decent view of what was happening outside the container, and the shipper would not receive the last installment of a substantial payment from the arms dealer unless the container safely reached its destination.