“Tov. Fire up the birds and stand by.”
The accent was as thick as the tone was urgent. Modine put the phone on hold and turned quickly to Prime Minister David Doron, standing beside a large conference table with Mossad chief Avi Zadok, Shin Bet chief Yossi Ben Ramon, Aman head Brigadier General Yoni Barak, and General Uri “The Wolf” Ze’ev, chief of staff of the Israeli Defense Forces.
“That’s Yarkon. We just picked up a signal close to the Jordanian border.”
“Can we be sure?” asked the prime minister.
“No, sir. But we can’t afford to be wrong.”
“Uri?”
“I agree, sir. We’ve got to move quickly.”
Zadok and Ben Ramon both nodded. The prime minister didn’t hesitate.
“Do it.”
Modine took the phone off hold.
“Captain, you have clearance. Operation Ghost Lightning is a go.”
Bennett was settling down now, pouring everyone another glass of brandy and stoking the fire. “OK, so really,” he pressed. “How do you guys know each other?”
“Well, actually, Jon, I knew Erin’s dad,” said the president, quieting down now and getting serious. “Sean McCoy was a Navy SEAL in Vietnam when I first met him. Then we got out, I went to Wall Street and he joined the CIA and worked his way up over time to become the DDO, first under Nixon and later under Carter.”
“Really?”
Bennett could sense the president’s changing demeanor.
“Besides Julie, Erin’s dad was my best friend. I’ve never met anyone else like him.”
“Was?”
“Sean was killed on an undercover mission—in Afghanistan, actually, after the Soviets invaded in ’79.”
“Oh…I’m so sorry…”
He looked at Erin. She wasn’t smiling any more.
“Thanks,” she said. “It’s OK. Mr. President, you really don’t need to…”
“I know,” the president continued, “but it’s important he know a little background here, if you guys are going to work together.”
She nodded her reluctant assent, and the President continued.
“So, anyway, when I was at Fidelity, I helped set up an account for Erin and her mom, you know, just to help them through it all.”
“You’re an only child?” Bennett asked.
McCoy nodded.
“In fact,” the president continued, “when I started GSX, Erin’s mom, Janet, worked for us for, what, two years, I think.”
“That’s right, sir,” McCoy added.
“The problem was, and I didn’t even know it at the time—not right away, at least—but, it turns out Janet had a very severe case of ovarian cancer and she…she was a trooper. Except for Julie and Sean, I don’t think I’ve really ever met anyone like her in my life. She just had incredible strength and optimism. She was amazing.”
“I had no idea.”
“It’s not something that comes up a lot,” McCoy offered quietly.
“Julie and I knew she had something we didn’t,” said the president, pausing a moment to look into the flickering fire. “I don’t think I even believed in God before I met her. But she had an incredible story. Christ had really changed her life, and I think that’s what really started Julie and me asking a lot of spiritual questions for ourselves. She was at total peace about dying and where she was going when she died. And Julie and I knew we certainly didn’t have that kind of certainty. I don’t know. She just really got us thinking.”
The room fell silent again. Bennett had no idea what to say.
“When was all this?”
“It was the year before you came, I think. In fact, Erin ended up living with us and our girls that year, right?”
“Right. About ten months, I think.”
“So we all got to know each other pretty well during that time. My girls fell in love with her. Personally, I couldn’t stand her.”
“Very funny, sir,” said McCoy.
She appreciated the president’s playful, personal banter. It had been a long time since she’d seen him last—and more than a decade since she’d seen his family.
When she’d gotten the call in London to come to Colorado ASAP on an Air Force jet to see the president, she wasn’t exactly sure what would happen when she got there. But after spending a fitful night trying to sleep in a bunkroom on the Peterson base, she’d spent nearly an hour with the president at breakfast, being briefed by him, in between calls from the vice president and various foreign leaders. Then he’d sent her off for a few hours to wait for her “reintroduction” to Bennett.
It seemed strange, but she was suddenly beginning to feel at home again. The idea of being at the epicenter of a high-priority mission for the President of the United States would have made her mom and dad very proud. She tried hard to steady herself and not concede the powerful emotions roiling inside her. But it wasn’t easy.
“Julie and I have known little Erin—well, not so little anymore—since, gosh, since before she was born. Julie even threw a baby shower for Janet at our old house in Cherry Creek way back, I don’t know, whenever that was.”
“I loved that house,” said McCoy, staring into the fire.
“Me, too,” said the president. “Me, too.”
IDF Unit 212—Sayeret Maglan—is one of Israel’s most highly trained and secretive special forces teams.
Three of its pilots and eight special ops commandos were already in place. The two American-built AH-64 Apache helicopter gunships and accompanying Sikorsky Blackhawk helicopter were already fully powered and ready for takeoff.
The largely underground and ultra-top-secret air base in the Negev desert was on full alert. So by the time Captain Yarkon burst out of the command center door with his orders, his team was ready to move. Yarkon jumped into the back of the Sikorsky and gave the thumbs-up sign. Within moments, the whole package had lifted off and disappeared without a trace.
Flying without lights, without radio communications, and flying low—at times just fifty feet above the desert blurring below them—would be terrifying to most men. But not to Unit 212. They had practiced such operations in the dark, foreboding, shadowy mountains and wadis of the Negev for years and they were confident.
In a certain sense, in fact, the three pilots weren’t piloting at all. They were just monitoring the computer as it did most of the work. The Israelis, after all, have nearly perfected the art of flying by autopilot and precisely for such a time as this.
Every few months—at night—the IDF secretly flies highly sophisticated computerized drones—essentially tiny unmanned reconnaissance planes—across their borders at incredibly low levels and steer them by remote control to predetermined rendezvous points inside hostile countries.
The drones gather a wealth of data every inch of the way. They videotape the entire journey with night-vision equipment so IDF pilots can later watch and re-watch and re-watch again the very routes they may one day fly. The strategy allows the pilots to learn every crack and crevice and rock and boulder and tree and snake they will encounter along the way, until they can fly such routes with their eyes closed or in their sleep. Just as important, the drones record every ascent, every descent, every turn, and every increase and decrease in air speed.
The data are then washed through IDF computers and recalculated to account for the differing weights and response times of other IDF aircraft, all of which are heavier and “stiffer” than the tiny drones. What spits out on the other side are highly classified CDs that can precisely replay the “musical score” of a trip across enemy lines to certain preselected destinations. These CDs can then be loaded at a moment’s notice into an aircraft’s computers for a proprietary software program to read and replicate.
Tonight, all three superquiet Unit 212 choppers were flying by CD, across the Red Sea and through the rugged, unforgiving mountains of Saudi Arabia. And this was no exercise. This was the real thing.
Ali Kamal was ecstatic.
He’d found his destination not far from Highway 10, the shadowy base of a massive sand dune perhaps sixty feet high. He arrived on time, three minutes under the wire, but on time. And his team was moving quickly to get ready.
The first order of business was to unload the German camel. This was the most difficult, labor-intensive and time-consuming of their tasks. Nothing else mattered if it wasn’t done right. But Kamal wasn’t worried.
The average team took thirty-four minutes and eighteen seconds, followed by another four minutes and six seconds to complete their other procedures. The record had been set back in 1991—thirty-one minutes and twelve seconds.
Three days ago, Kamal’s team had done it in twenty-eight minutes, forty-seven seconds—a new record, and the reason they’d been selected by General Azziz for this very mission.
“Any word?” asked the prime minister.
He stepped back into the blastproof war-room bunker after making a series of phone calls to various Cabinet members from the bunker next door.
“Not yet, sir,” replied the defense minister, calmly sipping an icy glass of freshly squeezed orange juice. “But don’t worry. It won’t be long.”
The seventy-six-year-old prime minister sat down, pulled out his reading glasses, and began glancing over the newly received intelligence reports from Washington, London and Paris. A nightmare was unfolding, and if the Americans didn’t or wouldn’t act, he just might have to.
Maybe it was the cold night air.
It was now the middle of the night in Iraq and the desert temperatures kept sinking. Maybe it was the fatigue of such a long day of driving from Baghdad. That had not been part of his team’s training and perhaps it should have been.
Maybe it was the fact that the new warheads they’d been given were significantly heavier than the ones they’d always used and trained on in the past. This seemed to have created an unusually high level of anxiety among his men, and they were taking extra time and moving too slowly.
Or maybe it was the fact that this was their first real mission and the stakes were so much higher. All of them had been too young during the previous Gulf War.
Whatever it was, they were finally done. But they would win no awards. It had taken them thirty-nine minutes and twenty-one seconds, a complete failure.
Ali Kamal raced back to his Range Rover and powered up his cell phone. Ten seconds later, he speed-dialed a phone number in Berlin. That was automatically forwarded to a phone number in Johannesburg, South Africa. From there it was forwarded to a phone number in Sao Paolo, Brazil. That was digitally forwarded to a number just outside of Moscow where it was forwarded to Tangiers, Morocco.
At that point, it was intercepted by Gibraltar Station—an “Echelon” listening post run by the U.S. National Security Agency on the British-controlled Rock of Gibraltar—on its way to the Iraqi Defense Ministry, where it was fed down into Saddam Hussein’s personal war room, deep under Baghdad.
“The letter is stamped and ready for the post office,” Kamal said in Farsi, though his native tongue was Arabic.
“Praise be to Allah,” responded the voice at the other end, also in Farsi. “Go ahead and mail the letter.”
Kamal quickly turned off the phone and threw it back in his precious Range Rover. All eyes were on him now and he gave his team his full attention, flashing them five fingers. They had five minutes to warm up their R-17 Al Hussein rocket—a Soviet-designed ballistic missile known in the West as the Scud B—and wait for his signal to launch.
This was no humanitarian mission, and Kamal and his team didn’t work for the U.N. Indeed, they had murdered an entire U.N. relief team a few days earlier, dumped their bodies in a lake, and taken over their vehicles precisely for this moment.
Kamal and his top lieutenant scrambled up the sand dune to use their night-vision goggles and make sure all was clear. But they were hardly worried. Since the Gulf War, America and her allies had launched more than twenty-eight thousand air sorties over these deserts but had never found, much less destroyed, an Iraqi mobile missile launcher. How could they? Western Iraq alone was more than twenty-nine thousand square miles of raw, ugly desert. It would be easier to find a specific drop of water in the Indian Ocean than to find them, particularly at night.
Sure, the Americans and British found and destroyed a few fixed-site missile launchers. But not a single mobile launcher. Nor would they. Especially not one hidden inside an official U.N. food-and-medical transport. Especially not at night.
The young platoon leader couldn’t help but smile as he approached the top of the dune, even though his eyes and face were now completely covered with sand and stinging horribly. Maybe he would be personally given a medal of honor by President Hussein himself.
A shudder of excitement rippled through his body. He looked back once more to see his lieutenant about twenty yards behind him, taking a swig from a canteen of water and trying to get the sand out of his mouth. He looked down below and saw his team lit up by the headlights of their Range Rovers. They gave him the “go” sign. The missile was ready. They were ready. Let history begin.
Kamal adjusted his night-vision goggles and fell flat on his stomach against the dune. He carefully inched his way to the top, just five feet away. On the other side would be the Jordan Valley, Jordan herself, Palestine, Israel, and the sea. His heart raced with joy and pride.
And then he heard it.
Kamal carefully peaked his head up over the dune and turned on his goggles.
The shock of what he saw froze him in place.
Had he been standing, his head would have been chopped clean off by the Israeli Apache now slicing the air just a few feet above him.
Kamal instinctively ducked, looked down at his team and tried to scream. But he couldn’t. And it wouldn’t have mattered if he had. No one could have ever heard him over the roar of the chopper. He could see the blank expressions on the faces of his team. It wasn’t fear. It was total disbelief. And now it was death.
The Apache’s 30mm guns began blazing away. Fire and smoke poured out of them as tracer bullets shredded his men into tiny bits of bloody vapor. Two laser-guided Hellfire missiles penetrated his precious Range Rover and the one beside it, causing both to erupt in a massive fireball that left Kamal screaming and writhing in pain and trying desperately to remove the night-vision goggles from his eyes.
Another Apache suddenly emerged out of nowhere. Two more Hellfire missiles exploded in two more Range Rovers. Then two more missiles struck the Daimler-Benz truck and it, too, exploded in a deafening fireball, fed by hundreds of gallons of reserve diesel fuel.
With every man on Kamal’s team dead or dying, the Sikorsky quickly landed nearby and eight Israeli commandos and Captain Jonah Yarkon burst out the side door and moved to secure the Scud missile and remove its warhead. Kamal was still screaming in pain, but none of the commandos could hear him over the on-going explosions and the roar of three choppers.
Kamal tried blindly to reach for his side arm, but it was then that the lead Apache pilot whirled his chopper around—constantly looking for an enemy—and saw the twenty-six-year-old leader thrashing about wildly on the sand dune.
With a flick of a switch and a press of his thumb, the IDF pilot put Ali Kamal out of his misery, though he seriously doubted the man was now in the arms of seventy virgins in paradise.
The two Apaches moved away, enlarging the perimeter of security for the commandos and switching on their high-powered radar to see if there were any other mobile Scud launchers—or aircraft—in the vicinity. But they saw nothing. All was clear.
Six minutes later, the commandos—each wearing hazmat clothing and protective goggles, headgear, and gloves—had the warhead detached from the rest of the missile, secure in a heavily insulated and hermetically sealed safe box, and piled back into the Sikorsky.
The chopper lifted off, joined the Apaches and began their race back home, leaving timed explosive charges to detonate and destroy the rest of the Scud B rocket and its l
auncher just seconds after the Israeli strike force had cleared the area.
“The snow cone is on ice,” said Captain Yarkon into a digitally encrypted radiotelephone, his only communication of the night.
Now the question was: What flavor was the snow cone?
NINE
The train ride from Vienna to Moscow normally takes about fifty-two hours.
But it is more than merely a slow, plodding, and quiet journey through snow-covered fields and hamlets and villages and the Carpathian Mountains. It is a journey back through the heart of darkness.
With a glass mug of hot Russian chai in your cold hands and some warm black bread and a plate of steaming kashka-varnishka, you can sit at the small table in your sleeping car and play cards and smoke cigarettes, or get lost in a novel, or just stare up at the ceiling and think about nothing or everything or a little bit of both. But if you care to peek out through the smudgy, filthy windows of your claustrophobic compartment, you will find a sad and war-weary land, scarred by German occupation and Soviet suffocation.
You will snake your way through Bratislava, the poor but proud capital of Slovakia, a city of trade and learning and history, born of Romans and Celts and eventually settled by Slavs in the eighth century and now almost half a million people strong.
It was here that a good peace was once found when Napoleon and Francis II signed the Treaty of Pressburg in 1805, following the Battle of Austerlitz.
Yet it was here, too, that a great rescue was once narrowly and tragically lost. In 1942, the Nazis—perhaps cynically, perhaps not—offered a rabbi named Weissmandl and a woman named Gisi Fleischmann a deal to trade one million imprisoned Jews headed for the gas chambers for two million dollars. But the rabbi and Fleischmann and their colleagues couldn’t persuade anyone in the West to come up with the cash. It may have been the West’s callous indifference. It may have been the fear that the Germans would renege on the deal and use the money to help defeat the Allies. It may have been something else entirely. But the money never came in, and a million souls never came out.