State of Attack (16 page)

“I do.”

“Too small for fish market,” he said, revealing his nicotine-stained teeth. “Guests’ little ones like them, too.”

Tom thought him a friendly man. He’d noticed four tanks, which were situated in communal areas throughout the three-storey building. Perhaps the old man thought it made up for the lack of modern decor.

The owner shuffled off and Tom squatted down again. He reckoned the guppies were real used to people, especially little ones sticking their faces close up to the glass and putting their hands on it. The front glass was smeared with small fingerprints, and the fish weren’t bothered by him at all. He thought about his own fish back in his farmhouse that darted for cover as soon as the door inched open.

Standing he thought about his father who might be dying. He thought about the Turkish mafia plying their heinous trade, and Ibrahim, who sought to kill many of his fellow Americans. He thought about the meaning of a life worth living and what was worth dying for.

But a memory rose up stubbornly. An incident back in Louisiana when Lester had come to stay a couple of years after he’d dug him out of the rubble in Nairobi. They’d been out night fishing for redfish on Lake Hermitage Bayou.

It had been still dark, the heavy rain looking like hail under the headlights. But dawn wasn’t far off. A swath of coral-pink marked the distant horizon. Tom had jabbed a finger at the eject button on his CD player, and had asked Lester, who’d been sitting beside him, to re-case the Miles Davis disc. Lester loved Miles Davis.

The only place open had been an all-night diner called Sammy’s Place
.
A neon sign flickered above the flat roof, half illuminating a handful of station wagons and pickup trucks parked on the tarmac lot. Tom parked his silver Buick Century, and they got out and ambled in. The furniture and flooring looked thirty years out of date. A huge brass ceiling fan with oak blades remained motionless above their heads. They’d still had their mud-ridden steel toe-capped boots on, but it hadn’t looked like anyone would’ve given a damn.

They’d sat at a booth adjacent to the door. There were a dozen or so people, including a family with three kids and a couple of men who preferred to sit at the counter on high stools rather than occupy the booths. Tom thought the bearded guy in denim and a ball cap sitting opposite a skinny woman with corn-coloured hair looked like trouble. But they’d been fishing most of the night and had needed refuelling, and Lester had said that if they didn’t stop soon, he’d have an embarrassing accident.

There’d been a washroom in back, which might have led to a yard, but otherwise the only door had been the one they’d walked through. The guy with the cap had his back to them. But his girlfriend with yellow hair was glancing over. She smiled, revealing uneven teeth. Tom nodded back in the hope he didn’t appear patronizing. Lester turned around and was still grinning when he turned back again. Tom noticed that the checked-woollen jacket the guy was wearing stretched across a broad-shouldered back.

The guy turned around, staring at Lester’s back, his wide, vein-stained face so screwed up that his eyes were two dark slits, the peak of his New Orleans Saints ball cap lifted high on his forehead. He turned back, said something to the woman, who curled up her lip and looked down at her breakfast. But Ball Cap had looked around again, this time for longer.

After ordering eggs and coffee, Lester had risen and had headed for the washroom for what he’d said was a well-overdue leak. After he’d walked through the men’s door, Ball Cap had gotten up and had strolled over to Tom.

The guy had been a redneck asshole out for trouble, which had been based on the flimsy excuse that Lester had been flirting with his girl. The guy had raccoon shit for brains. He said he’d wait for them on the lot. When Lester had returned, Tom hadn’t said anything, hoping that Ball Cap had been a bluffer or had gotten bored, although the woman had been still sitting at the booth.

Tom had been glad he’d left his SIG in the glove box. If things got all animated, he wasn’t going to give the local sheriff an excuse to use his shotgun on something other than wild turkeys. He looked over at the woman. She had her head down as if she was praying. But he glimpsed a cellphone in her hand, her thumbs moving over the keys texting someone. It was a rule that he and Lester didn’t carry cells when they went fishing. Nothing could spoil the ambience like a ring tone, and they’d both agreed that it would have been kind of crass in any event.

Tom had decided that neither of them had deserved to deal with the guy, so he’d called the waitress over. He figured he’d get the cops to deal with Ball Cap. The diner had a payphone, but it hadn’t been working for a month or more, the waitress said. By the time they finished their breakfast and strolled out into the lot, the rain had stopped and muted sunlight was breaking through a copse of bald cypress trees, casting a veneer of the shimmering gold over the wet bark.

It would have been a pretty sight, except that Ball Cap was waiting there just as he said he would, leaning against a customized red pickup truck. He reached over and took out a crowbar from the bed of the truck. He nodded towards a large wooden shack a few yards from the diner, which abutted a field of straggly, green-leafed sugarcane. Tom looked around. One of the kids, a moon-faced girl with brown curly locks, was staring out of the window. That meant they’d have to walk over to the shack. He’d sighed.

As they’d all gotten to the shack, a tailgate truck had skidded into the lot, with five white guys hanging onto the back, whooping and shouting like they’d been downing moonshine all night long. There was the sound of a barking dog, too, and Ball Cap grinned. The dog, a flesh-coloured pit bull, was unleashed, leaping off the back of the truck. It ran snarling at Tom. He lashed out with his boot, the dog sinking its teeth into the steel cap. Lester moved at lightning speed, bending down and splitting the dog’s belly open with his scaling knife. The dog had yelped briefly before dropping dead to the tarmac.

Ball Cap had run forwards, wielding the crowbar above his head. But Lester was up and, sidestepping and weaving his head to avoid the blow, slashed at the man’s arm, severing an artery. Ball Cap squealed as a geyser of blood spurted out. But Lester wasn’t finished with him yet. He lunged at Ball Cap, headbutting him squarely on the nose. The back of the man’s skull hit the tarmac with a loud crack. As the five guys from the truck reached them, Lester broke teeth and bones. Tom took out a couple of them, but Lester had fire in his eyes. When it’d been over, he’d looked disappointed.

It had been Lester’s look of disappointment that still troubled Tom. But there was nothing to do now other than wait.

Chapter 40

The centuries-old Afghan sword had been given to the young Saudi to keep as decided, its ancient blade bright red with fresh blood. Ibrahim had beheaded the Mossad operative a few minutes ago, the eyes removed from the corpse. It had been filmed with the video recorder for propaganda; posterity, too, he liked to think. After telling the Saudi to clean the blade thoroughly with oil, he’d changed into khaki pants, a short-sleeve shirt and a ball cap and had left the safe house with two Hamas bodyguards.

They’d walked past the half-empty, open-fronted stores, selling everything from second-hand radios to goat meat, and had headed for the rat-infested alleyways close by. He’d carried the sword into battle in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, and it had become a sort of fortuitous talisman, as well as a means of eliciting fear. But he no longer had use for such things. He was on his way to his brothers in the West to check everything was prepared. It had begun.

Walking now between the flaking, graffiti-ridden walls of two apartment blocks, flanked by the young, clean-shaven bodyguards, he watched scruffy kids playing with toy guns by a stagnant puddle. But as they emerged into the busy street, he grimaced as he heard the unmistakable sound of fast-approaching military helicopters, a sound as common in Gaza as police sirens in Western cities. He didn’t believe in coincidences. He knew they were looking for him.

But other than the brief facial expression he didn’t react to the sound. He knew medium-altitude recon drones, Eitans and Herons, would be looking for a reaction, someone running for cover or shielding their face. Never run, never hide your face, he’d been told. Never stand out from the crowd. In Gaza people either looked up, or, more commonly, just got on with their daily chores or work. Even the innocent knew not to garner attention when an Israeli raid was about to happen. They just hoped the gunships would pass overhead and land somewhere out of sight, he imagined.

But Ibrahim knew different. There could be Mossad assets and mercenary opportunists on the ground around him, as well as long-range snipers in the cabin doorways of the helicopters. There would be onboard surveillance systems and orbiting satellite observation. Everything, human and machine, would be looking for the tell-tale signs of panic or guilt. So, as the military helicopters got close, Ibrahim kept walking and looking straight ahead, as did his bodyguards.

Then as one of the helicopters swung around 180 degrees and hovered low he caught a glimpse of it as the downdraft from the rotors threw up a cloud of grit and dust. He recognized the gunship as an adapted Sikorsky UH-60 Black Hawk, the type used in the US Navy SEALs’ Abbottabad raid to kill bin Laden, but without the need for anti-radar cladding or additional sophisticated COMMS. This made them lighter and more agile.

Helos had a peculiar psychological effect on ground-based troops or civilians. They could both hover and travel close to the land, after all. There was a disconcerting intimacy that aircraft didn’t elicit, together with a sense of manoeuvrability that eluded tanks. Add in a Hellcat missile system, a .50mm Gatling gun, and a cabin full of heavily-armed Special Forces troops, and it was a downright menacing sight. And there was a ten-strong fleet of them behind the lead one, travelling at almost two hundred miles per hour directly out of the white sun.

With that one of the Hamas bodyguards, the eldest, made a dash for the alley just a few yards away. The other called out to him but Ibrahim knew what had just happened. He’d been betrayed by one of his own, or he had proved himself a coward. If it was the former it meant the Israelis would have him in their sights. He racked his brain for an escape plan and clenched his jaw to prevent himself from screaming after the man.

The youngest bodyguard looked dumbfounded. He was twenty-two, with minimum body fat on his six-three frame. The sunlight made the two-inch scar on his forehead more visible, the result of a baton round by the IDF in his teens, he’d said. Ibrahim took in the man’s ash-grey eyes below the cropped hair, the full mouth verging on being sloppy, looking for any sign of fear or betrayal.

There wasn’t any.

“I’ll fight them, brother. All that matters is that you live,” he said.

Each helicopter could carry eleven troops, Ibrahim knew, which meant a firefight would be suicidal, and he had to live, at least for the next couple of weeks.

“So be it,” Ibrahim said.

Chapter 41

The man in command in the lead helicopter was a
seren
, a lieutenant, called Ariel. He was twenty-six years old and an expert in Krav Maga, the Israeli martial art. The men about to fast-rope down into the old city of Gaza were from Shayetet 13, the Israeli Navy Special Forces unit out of Atlit naval base on the northern coast of Israel.

Like him they were dressed in khaki fatigues, their faces covered by black balaclavas, and were armed with TAR-21 bullpup assault rifles, with built-in lasers and MARS red-dot sights. The stubby weapon was ideal for urban warfare, there being no need for a bulky suppressor here.

The attack and retrieve plan had been put together with haste. Fifty of his team in the second wave of Black Hawks would storm the house, hoping to recover the body of the Mossad operative there, and wipe out his murderers. Two backup Black Hawks would continually circular the area, their snipers looking for RPGs or suicide squads.

Ariel, together with another thirty specialist operators, was tasked with targeting an otherwise unknown jihadist who was approximately forty yards away, and appeared almost nonchalant in the circumstances. After the bodyguard had scuttled away, he had thought the jihadist would have shown signs of stress and even made a run for it. He was wrong, and that worried him a little.

The Hamas asset had a GPS tracker in the sole of his shoe, which had guided them to insert point. The man only known as Ibrahim was to be taken alive. The op commander had been belligerent about it, even after the bastard had instigated the prolonged torture of the Mossad operative, a fact that had been captured on film by the optical technology Ariel didn’t understand.

When Ariel had asked why, his commander had said that he’d never known the brass be so insistent, and if the terrorist did get hit, even by a ricochet, he, Ariel, would spend the rest of his years in the military getting stones and Molotov cocktails thrown at him in minor riots in Ramallah on the West Bank. And that was a shithole, Ariel knew, even by the standards of the Palestinian territories.

What he didn’t know, of course, was that Deputy Director Crane of the CIA had, after coming to grips with the new intel concerning the planned attacks on US military bases, stated to the heads of the Israeli intelligence community that if the jihadist sonofabitch, Ibrahim, got capped in Gaza, he would personally arrive at their doors with a baseball bat and dislodge their kneecaps. The heads of the Israeli intelligence community were tough old-school, just like Crane, and they’d respected that. And so it was. They knew that he wanted the man alive to extract every ounce of information he could.

Ariel received a message via his short-wave radio from tactical support. The three Mossad operatives, who had been close enough to get here in time, were moving in a triangular formation towards this Ibrahim and his remaining loyal bodyguard.

Don’t shoot the bastard, he thought. Knee him in the balls or break an arm. But don’t shoot him.