THE WAVE: A John Decker Thriller (26 page)

Gulzhan stared absently at a nearby table festooned with horsewhips and leather straps, and riding crops and razor blades, scalpels and freshly sharpened knives, and copper-headed jumper cables, bright as ten-tenge pieces, newly minted, lying there neatly in rows.

He picked up a horsewhip. He flicked it once to feel its weight, and the end snapped with uncompromising certitude. The prisoner arched his back. It was a Pavlovian response. He was several yards away, on the other side of the cell.

Gulzhan flicked the long black whip behind him, letting it uncoil, relax, until with a firm flip of the wrist, the whip came up and over, and nicked an almost imperceptible nugget of raw flesh from the prisoner’s naked back.

He screamed and writhed as the whip came down again, again, and again. Blood seeped out of the wounds, into tiny tributaries, rivulets of life that coursed around and down into the tight crack of his buttocks. Then it was over.

Gulzhan laid the whip back on the table, curling it into coils. He approached the prisoner. He let his fingers play along the back, along the bleeding indentations in the no-longer-perfect skin. The man winced.

“Tell me,” Gulzhan said. “Is it true? If you tell me, I will end it quickly. That, I promise you. Are you working with the Zionists?”

The man’s head and upper torso lolled over to the side. It was difficult to tell whether he was nodding or shaking his head. He moaned again, this time with less conviction. He was almost spent.

Gulzhan grasped him by the nape of the neck, by his short black shiny hair, and pulled. He brought his own mouth close to the prisoner’s skin, breathing him in.

“Are you working with the Zionists?” he repeated. And then he shook the prisoner’s head from side to side, clamping it in his short but powerful fingers, like a puppeteer testing the neck of a doll. “Do you deny it?” he said with mock surprise.

There was little point in killing him.
If
he lived. Gulzhan stared at the bloody livid welts across his back. He wondered at the dislocated shoulders, the way the figure hung there by the tendons and the nerves, without the benefit of bone or muscle. This beautiful young man had once been one of Gulzhan’s best recruits. Indeed, the Kazakh leader had often looked upon him as a possible successor. The accusations were serious; this much was true. But Gulzhan knew, with an absolute conviction – unsullied by romance, by personal delusion, and grounded too by more than thirty years of grim experience at his craft – that the prisoner would remain loyal to him for the rest of his days. Something bound them now, with a greater intimacy than he had ever shared with any of his wives, or with his mistresses, or even with his closest friends.

Gulzhan leaned against the prisoner, caressed his neck and whispered, “‘No one can bear the burden of another. If a heavily laden one should call another to carry his load, naught of it shall be carried by the other, even though he be a kinsman . . . Turn ye to your Lord and submit yourselves to Him before the punishment overtakes you and no one is able to help you.’”

For whom, exactly, am I praying?
he thought. Gulzhan turned the prisoner around, at the same time removing a resplendent blade from behind his belt, and as he spun him, as he readied to cut the body down, the face came into view, into the light, and it was Uhud’s face – his former young lieutenant. His eyes were leaching tears of blood. His erection was grotesque, unnaturally bloated, huge. Gulzhan heard a man scream. It was his own scream issued somewhere far away, as if by someone else. He screamed and screamed until the darkness fell upon him like a cloak, and Gulzhan woke inside his tent, on his own cot, his shirt soaked through with sweat, winded and paralyzed with fear.

A full minute passed before the narcotic of terror released him. Then Gulzhan swung his legs up, up and over, sat bolt upright and rubbed his salt-and-pepper beard. They were getting worse, he thought – the nightmares. He shuffled over to a writing desk at the far end of the tent. The letter was already complete. All he had to do was fold it and give it away. He looked down at the piece of paper on his desk. It read with cold, uncompromising clarity:
We demand that you release El Aqrab within twelve hours, or the Brotherhood of the Crimson Scimitar will detonate a one kiloton nuclear device in Israel.

Tuesday, February 1 – 5:17 AM

Beersheba, Israel

Specialist Gal Baror stumbled as he wound his way through the tunnel. Captain Rifkin could hear him. The boy was breathing heavily behind him, touching the stone wall with his fingertips to steady himself in the dark. It was his fourth mission with the Beersheba Bomb Disposal Unit (BBDU), and his first with Rifkin alone. Gal had only just graduated. Rifkin still remembered the moody brown eyes of his fiancée, Tor, and the solemn, studied way she had danced with her future husband at his graduation party a week earlier. Rifkin generally avoided such affairs; he didn’t like to get too close to his men, at least not in the beginning. But Gal was his nephew, his sister’s son, and there had been no ducking it. “Keep still,” he said. “Don’t touch the walls, Gal. They may be booby-trapped.”

And why did everyone bestow upon their children such insipid, sexless name these days? It was as if they yearned to give their kids neutrality, or a false sense of equality between the sexes, with monikers designed to be pronounceable for international consumption. Inoculated. Pasteurized. Stripped of the burden of history. Hebrew, without being Jewish. Shir, Din, Ben, Gal, Tal, Bar. Such noncommittal monosyllables.

“Yes, Captain.”

“How many times do I have to tell you? Call me David, Gal. We don’t stand on ceremony in the BBDU. I don’t want a sniper’s bullet in my spine just because you have a compulsion to salute.”

“Yes . . . David.”

They came to a bend in the tunnel and Rifkin pointed his flashlight at the map in his left hand. The light illuminated his face. He was a short man in his late thirties, with a heavy frame and the sloping shoulders of a wrestler. His eyes were small, of the darkest malachite green, his eyebrows linked together at the top by a tuft of wiry brown hair. He sported a close-cropped ginger beard.

“Do you think it’s true?” said Gal.

Rifkin didn’t look up. He studied the map. The left branch of the tunnel connected to the well at the heart of the old tel. The right branch ran for another hundred meters or so and linked up with a series of P-style PVC sewage pipes approximately 630 millimeters in diameter.

“David?”

“What is it?” Rifkin answered tartly. He looked over at his nephew. Young Gal was corpulent and slow, clumsy on his feet. But he had a pair of the steadiest hands that Rifkin had ever seen. Of course, the boy had yet to see a friend blown up into a hundred pieces right in front of him. Not everyone got used to that.

“About the agreement. I hear they’re freeing a senior member of the Brotherhood. Perhaps El Aqrab himself.”

“Do you really believe Garron would ever agree to such a thing? Always with the rumors, Gal.” Rifkin turned left, down toward the ancient well.

“Well, that’s what they’re saying.”

Rifkin moved through the semi-darkness without bothering to counter. It had always been Israel’s most stringent policy never to negotiate with terrorists, especially those with blood on their hands, like Gulzhan Baqrah and El Aqrab. Once you started down that path, there was no turning back. And yet, thought Rifkin, if the choice were either nuclear annihilation or letting El Aqrab go free . . . He could not let the concept linger in his head. He corralled it and drove it away. Thankfully, these were not the kinds of decisions that he was forced to make. His was a world of instantaneous results, where if you made the wrong decision, you knew it right away: either you proceeded to the next step in the process, or you were already dead. Rifkin stepped out of the tunnel and down into a circular room at the heart of the old tel.

“What now?” said Gal.

“We do as we were told. We wait.”

* * *

Decker didn’t hear about the bomb until he’d returned to the Bureau’s headquarters in Manhattan from Cape Cod. By then, it was old news. Apparently, Prime Minister Garron had agreed to an exchange – two Israeli businessmen and the remains of some sixteen IDF soldiers for more than 125 Palestinian detainees, including senior members of the PLO and other terrorist organizations. While this was the public story, according to Warhaftig, the Company had it on good authority that only one prisoner was being released – none other than El Aqrab himself. The Israelis were being blackmailed. The Brotherhood of the Crimson Scimitar had placed a nuclear device within the water system of the old town of Beersheba. Exactly where, the Israelis would find out – once El Aqrab was transported safely to the Lebanese border. Only after he had been freed would he provide them with the bomb’s disarming sequence. Otherwise . . .

Decker was stupefied. It seemed incredible that Garron would let a terrorist like El Aqrab go free. It just didn’t make sense. Johnson disagreed. “What else can he do? Garron has to negotiate, if only to buy time,” he said. “Can you imagine what an atom bomb going off in that region of the world would do? Garron has no choice. And don’t forget: It isn’t simply Israel at stake here. When those desert winds blow, the fallout will run right into Saudi and Iraq. I doubt we want our boys in Baghdad dying, or the Saudi oil fields contaminated just because the Prime Minister of Israel refused to let a single prisoner go free.”

They debated the issue back and forth. “Perhaps he should negotiate,” said Decker. “But I still can’t see him doing it. He’d be sacrificing his conservative base. It’s just not like Garron. And who knows if there really is a bomb?”

“Well, we’ll find out soon enough,” Warhaftig said. “The deadline is six AM.”

“Tomorrow?”

“Six AM in Israel,” said Johnson, cutting in. “Try and keep up, Decker. They’re seven hours ahead of us. We have until eleven PM tonight.” He glanced at his watch. “Less than half an hour now.”

“Oh,” Decker said. But he was already thinking of something else. He’d forgotten about the time difference. Unconsciously, almost despite his active focus on the conversation, he found his mind besieged by numbers:
540,000; 205,200; 334,800; 5,580;
and
93.

If the hijacking of the train in Kazakhstan corresponds with the number 540,000; and if the second wallpaper features the number 205,200; the difference is 334,800. And 334,800 seconds from the moment of the hijacking is 5,580 minutes, or 93 hours, or six AM in Israel.

“Wait a minute,” he said. “Perhaps the second wallpaper is linked to Beersheba.” He explained his theory.

Johnson remained unconvinced. “You’re using those numbers like statistics,” he said, “massaging them to fit the scenario. You’re not looking at the scenario to legitimize your numbers.”

“Still, with your permission, sir,” Warhaftig said. “It might be a good idea to set up communications with the field team in Beersheba. Simply as a precaution.”

Johnson looked at Warhaftig with a scowl. He glanced about the room. Everyone was staring at him. “Alright,” he said. “I guess it can’t hurt.”

* * *

The M113 Zelda armored personnel carrier (APC) rumbled along the narrow country road, within a stand of cypress trees that crowned the crooked hill. It was a bright blue dawn. Dew still lingered on the grasses shivering in the valley below. Only a pair of fences in perpetual race marked this bucolic place as the no man’s land between Israel and Lebanon.

Inside the APC, El Aqrab sat handcuffed by a pair of plastic manacles, lashed to the rear hatch. He rose and fell on every bump, each curve, swayed back and forth, trying to spare his wrists, and peered through a narrow slit in the external armor as a team of Special Forces from the Sayerot Mat'kal materialized from nowhere. They were dressed in camouflage, with real and artificial bushes sprouting from their clothes, like scarecrows. Their faces were painted black and green. They carried high-power assault rifles, some with telescopic sights.

As the last of the commandos scurried into view, Major Ilan Ben-Ami pulled himself up and out of the APC. He dropped lightly to the grass. Although Ben-Ami was almost forty-two, he had the toned physique and raw physical demeanor of a man half his age. His friendly, heart-shaped face was boyishly handsome. His eyes were a poignant sea blue. Without a word, he motioned to the Special Forces.

El Aqrab watched the men fan out around the APC and set up a perimeter. Within seconds, the area was secure. Only then did they unfasten his manacles. They pulled him to his feet. As he emerged from the APC, El Aqrab took a long deep breath. He felt the cold air fill his lungs with an exquisite agony. It was as though he were catching the dawn, inhaling it, like a fire-eater. This was the first sunrise he had seen in days. He smiled. They pushed him from the APC and down onto the grass below.

The Major strolled back to the Zelda. One of his men handed him the mouthpiece to the radio and he said to El Aqrab, “No tricks, you hear me? Just tell them where to find the bomb. That’s all. You have thirty seconds.”

El Aqrab looked to the east, at the bright red tendrils of dawn dragging across the earth. He took the mouthpiece in his hand. “Are you there?” he said.

“This is Eagle,” said Captain Rifkin.

“Proceed due west along the main tunnel. When you’ve gone approximately twenty meters, turn right up tunnel seventeen. You will notice a silver conduit above your head,” said El Aqrab. “Follow it for another fifteen meters until the tunnel ends. The device is hidden behind the cistern to your left. An aluminum attaché case.”

El Aqrab returned the microphone. Then he began to stretch his arms, one after the other, raising them high above his head. His shoulders were stiff; he felt a knot at the center of his back. He rolled his head and heard his neck crack. “It is a beautiful dawn, is it not, Major?” He ended the sentence with a smile.

The Major did not answer.