by Dana Arama
“You think that you know he is a ticking bomb. I know that he is a British citizen, made ill by a third country on our land.” She was silent for a moment and then added, “You should know that political pressure has been put on Israel from the highest levels to supply Yassin with the antidote.”
“Do I still have back up regarding the meeting I’m heading for?”
“Officially, you’re on your own.”
My brother’s phone rang, I glanced at it. I didn’t recognize the number. “Officially,” I noted, “my mission starts now.”
I pressed the button and answered, “Niava speaking,” as I’d heard my brother answer his phone many times in the past, as he must have answered these calls before I took his place.
“You are about to enter South Carolina.” I was surprised to hear a Southern accent. “I will send you a location.”
“Is my son there?” I asked, but there was no answer. The line cut off and a text message appeared with a landmark. I pressed on the link and prayed it was the final destination. I added a little hope to my prayer, that they wouldn’t realize immediately that there had been a switch.
Laura Ashton,
November 15, 2015
After my last conversation with Gordon, where he’d warned me about the pressure that was about to be put on me, I hesitated in calling him again. But he’d somehow turned out to be one of the only people I trusted. The waiting was nerve-wracking. Everyone around me was waiting for a piece of information which would send us in some direction. The special forces and the undercover agents milled around, waiting for any kind of hint from me. In the end I couldn’t restrain myself and called Gordon. The ring sounded longer than usual, and I knew the reason. Everyone was working round the clock. When he answered, I thought he sounded more tired than ever before.
“Hi Gordon,” I said. “I need new information. Give me something I can connect to Yassin before I give the order to clear away and fold everything.”
“Straight to the point, huh?” His regular provocativeness had been replaced with admiration which, more than ever, gave me a warm glow of happiness.
“The pressure here is tremendous. I need to come up with some cover, or something to tie him to hostile activity.”
“You can always break in, check and apologize afterwards.”
“Under no circumstances!” I was appalled. “You have no idea from whom I received a warning call about our target. It has reached the President of the United States. We have to prove his guilt beyond reasonable doubt so that we save our asses.”
“I know. The pressure you have to withstand is well known here in our office. There’s pressure here too to stop the investigation into Yassin Graham, but the Israelis are insisting that it is him. And… I believe they are right. Give me a few minutes to reassess his contacts. Maybe a cross connection with detainees from previous hostile occurrences will bear fruit.”
“Gordon, I’m --” I wanted to say ‘waiting for information’ but instead it slipped out. “Waiting for you.”
He answered, “I am waiting for you too.” His voice softened and he added, “It’s boring without you here in the office. And in general, I am waiting for you to say ‘yes’.”
Instead of correcting him I just answered simply, “When we get back home safe and sound.” I knew that if he didn’t have any new information for me, I really would be coming home soon, but it surely would not be safe and sound.
***
Despite the pressure around us and the adrenaline coursing through my blood, I took advantage of the time to rest. I asked to be woken as soon as something changed. I needed to be on top of things, but I also needed to take advantage of all this down time and rest my eyes.
I woke to heavy boots running all over on the marble floor of the fancy hotel. I had enough experience with the sound, the pounding of army boots, the quickened pace of running and quick breathing from the excitement and the sound of the weapons handled by well-trained hands. Years of training and activity in the CIA had come down to five hours of waiting, twenty minutes of me trying to sleep, and ten minutes of me actually sleeping. It was a sleep which ended in me jumping up wildly. A face I didn’t recognize peeked around the door just as I was getting up from the chair I was sleeping in and called, “Their private doctor is upstairs.”
“Did anyone leave the room?”
“Trying to get the doctor in the room.” He waved his hands around, as if to get the words out faster. “Someone has just brought him over now, they have now left the service elevator with someone holding a gun to the doctor’s head. It is just as well we have security men on each floor.”
“So, he didn’t come of his own free will. Did you shoot his captor? In the head?” We walked briskly towards the conference room the team had taken over and turned into an operations room.
“Not only did he hide behind the doctor, he held himself close to him with an explosive device on him. If he’d detonated the device, the poor doctor and himself would have been blown up, and also a whole unit of security forces.” He sounded almost apologetic. “This was the only way to keep him alive.”
“You allowed the captor to bring him into the room?” I asked, not quite making sense of what he was saying.
“In a way, this new situation has made it easier for us,” Linda said. Even though she had joined the team just shortly before I went to take a catnap, she was already up to speed. In response to what she had said, I looked at her doubtfully, and so she explained: “Firstly, we know that it is the real Yassin, and secondly, we know for sure that he and the others in the room are starting to feel sick.”
“We took all that into account before, even when we weren’t sure it was the real Yassin. That is why we haven’t broken into the room yet.” I shook my head. “What you don’t know is that I received an order to pack up and to stop bothering the VIP guest, the honorable Mr. Yassin Graham. Even though I know that this man, without a doubt, is dealing in terrorist activities, I am continuing my investigation against him and at the same time trying to hold back the political pressure he is somehow able to exert.”
“Listen,” said one of the tacticians, who was leaning over the map of the hotel showing the suite floor. “In principle, it is best to sit it out and do nothing. If we wait patiently, whoever is in the room will die, and the last ones in, the doctor and his captor, will remain alive by the time we break in.”
“That is not possible.” I shook my head again. “It goes against the opinion of the experts at the White House. I think that his body is not going to deter anyone. You…” I corrected myself, “I mean we, we need Yassin Graham alive, to answer all our questions. Otherwise how can we know what his plans are for this attack? When? And what scope? Partners in crime who need to be stopped?” I explained to them.
And Linda added, “To wait is the worst plan. We can’t afford to allow Yassin to die, because a dead Yassin may be more dangerous than an alive Yassin.”
I turned to the tactician and asked, “What other options did you think of?”
“To break in through the windows. We already have snipers waiting on the roof opposite the building.”
“That is almost an impossible shot,” I noted. I didn’t add that it was so impossible that they would have to shoot over and over again, because it was known that there were multiple hostile elements and one had to make sure that they weren’t shooting anyone innocent.
“Yes…” Linda said. “That is a desperate step and is only suitable if they have a specific person in their sights to take out immediately.”
“Can I suggest another way, a little less ‘Rambo’ and a little more ‘insurance company boredom’?” Laura asked.
The officer in charge of the breaking-in said, “Of course.”
“They’re on the top floor. We can go up on the roof, drill a few microscopic holes and pipe in an anesthesia gas.”
The break-in team looked at one another and then at me and at Linda, who said, “By the look on your face, there is a serious ‘but’.”
“By the time we finish, the wife and son will die.”
Her face hardened as she answered, “And in the diplomatic incident that will ensue we can blame Israel. We should think of another alternative and fast.”
The officer moved the map and took out his tablet. He uploaded a picture of the hotel’s rooftop. “Wait a minute. Don’t give up so quickly. Maybe microscopic holes into such a large space are not such a good idea under the circumstances, but the idea in itself is very good. All we need to do is to find a larger opening. Like, for instance…” He enlarged the picture on the screen and Linda focused on what seemed like a chimney.”
“A chimney?” she asked doubtfully. “How come they have a chimney?”
“They have four chimneys in this suite. As a matter of fact, there are air ducts in every bathroom and toilet and there are four of those.”
“Are the airways too small for a person to pass inside?”
“They are too small for that, but large enough to throw a hand grenade. The only thing we need to do is to stop the ventilation for a short while and we can do that with a short cut in the electricity,” he said.
“I am afraid it is not so simple. We need to hit them surgically and specifically. Now that we know that the doctor is inside and that he is involved, neutralizing is not an option anymore. We need him alive and we can’t jeopardize innocent civilians. We already know about four innocent people there: The wife and the son, the newly kidnapped doctor and the previously kidnapped boy, Jonathan Niava. We need to control our break-in and quickly take over.”
***
The new situation now involving a kidnapped doctor had turned Yassin from a known dignitary to a common terrorist. It turned the uncertain situation to a much more valid operation. The state of affairs gave me a sort of complacent feeling. I knew what needed to be done and even if it was going to be difficult, it was much better than just sitting around waiting for the decision to fold, or for a piece of information that may help us out, or not. At long last I knew for certain where the situation was headed.
The officer in charge of the break-in team was my key man for this operation and was called ‘Major Key’ by his men. He entered the room and announced, “This new situation demands more valid intelligence.”
I put on a smile of self-confidence. “That is a task for the technical team,” I answered.
“Who is directly under you? I need them to penetrate more points in order to insert more bugging devices and electro-optical devices into the room.”
I gave permission, Major Key gave the instructions, and his men implemented them. A long few minutes of tension passed until a new, more vivid picture of the situation in the room came through and it was not encouraging. In the room, on the floor, sat a man with a beard, holding the body of a little boy. Next to him, the doctor was listening to the boy’s pulse. There was a look of helplessness mixed with fear on his face, or maybe it looked that way because of the beads of sweat accumulating on his forehead. Was the boy still alive?”
“I suppose that is the real Yassin,” I remarked quietly. “The boy in his arms complicates our solution of a direct hit.”
“Because we cannot hurt the boy or the doctor, that leaves the break-in team with two choices,” the officer of the team stated. “Either we shoot Yassin in the head or we dominate him another way.”
“A shot to the head isn’t a viable option,” I answered. “We need him alive in order to interrogate him.”
“Then we are left with the option of shooting with an anesthetic bullet,” Major Key said.
“Like one would shoot an injured elephant?” I asked, and then, slightly concerned, I said, “We need to remember that we can’t harm the innocent.”
“In the same room where Yassin was sitting, there were two other men standing by. Pay attention,” Major Key noted, “One of them looks like Murat Lenika. He is the first one we should shoot at.”
“He really deserves it,” Linda agreed.
“That is not the reason. We will shoot him first because he seems to be the least calm person in the room at the moment and that makes him unpredictable, and therefore the most dangerous.”
“Look at that terrorist.” I pointed at a man, short with broad shoulders, standing near Murat Lenika. “Try and get a good picture of his face and run it in the system to see if we get a hit on his identity,” I said to Linda, and she did so immediately.
“The way he carries himself leaves no doubt that he is a professional,” Major Key remarked, looking at him. “He is dangerous for the right reasons.” Major Key focused the team on this character and said, “Notice how he checks the windows over and over again, also the roof tops nearby and the ceiling. He was probably a soldier with a history of combat, so he is anticipating a break-in team.”
I also thought it would be a good idea to neutralize him. I studied the picture of the room, frame after frame. “Look at this,” I noted and stopped the picture on the screen. I enlarged it and focused on the line of laptops on the table.
“Don’t harm those computers. I want to take them and hand them over to the NSA to check them out.”
The cameras moved to a darkened room and we could see it on the screen, once the picture had been altered with more light. It was a bedroom, with a bed taking up most of the space. On the left side of the bed a body was visible. The long, light-colored hair on the cushion stood out in the poor lighting. I recognized her from the surveillance pictures we had gathered. In the pictures, Yassin’s wife had looked glamorous. Now, in the darkened room, she looked far from that, and it caused me to shudder slightly. “That is Juliana Graham, Yassin’s wife. The poor woman looks really sick.”
“No one is tending to her,” someone from the back noted and then said what we all were wondering: “Could she already be dead?”
The darkness in the room was like a light for us, because it meant we could enter from there without too much obstruction.
“Focus on the woman lying on the bed, please,” asked Major Key. “If I am seeing correctly, there are electrical wires on her. It seems like she has an explosive tied to her.”
“She may be so sick that they decided to get rid of her,” Linda noted.
“They may all be carrying explosives on themselves,” Major Key answered her.
Two more men stood next to a separate screen: The officer in charge of bomb disposals and his deputy commander. They went over the pictures, painfully slow, and tried to study everything they could see in the room. Another man was seen walking nervously around in the room. He kept setting down the gun he carried and drying his hands. The two hand grenades tied to his belt were cause for concern. If there was something disturbing about a fighter with a hand grenade, a nervous fighter with a hand grenade was even more troubling.
“What are you looking for?” I inquired.
“The wife won’t activate the explosive on her own, so there must be an operating unit for the explosive,” the tall agent answered. “It will look like a remote control of a garage door with one button, or maybe a handle.”
“This?” I asked and pointed to a remote control which was lying on the sideboard under the television set.
“That could possibly be it. Maybe it is hidden in a bundle of keys, which someone may have in their pocket. In any case, we will have to neutralize him before he activates it, or the boy and the wife and all the break-in team will go to heaven faster than planned.”
The operating room filled up with people. Besides the commanding officers of the control team, the intelligence team and the bomb disposal team, the commanding officer of the negotiation team stood by, just in case Yassin agreed to talk to someone. At the same time, I received notifications from the teams in the field, whose job it was to
secure the surrounding area. The local police blockaded the streets to prevent civilians from passing by. Also, despite the dissatisfaction of the press, the isolation of the area included them as well. We couldn’t afford anyone reporting live from the field, assuming that Yassin and his men could receive the information immediately.
The commanding officer of the break-in team would not let me participate in the actual break-in, so I remained in the operations room. There, on the big screen, I could watch and listen as they quietly organized themselves. The CIA’s Black Ops forces were so named because of the black operations they had to perform. This time the operation was in fifty shades of darkest black, each deeper than the next. I wasn’t with them physically, but I could feel the adrenaline flowing through their bodies, sharpening their eyesight, their reflexes and their body movements, making them more alert and precise, like cheetahs preparing to pounce on their prey. Not only were the muscles affected but also the brain. The feeling of heightened concentration turned the mind into a more effective machine and made teamwork a personal challenge.
Their professional honor and prestige were being tested, the will to prove to everyone, to commanding officers, the other units, to the brothers in arms, as well as to oneself. They had practiced so many years for this moment, for this one single shot, which would hit its target and miss the hostage. Their failure would not only jeopardize the whole operation, but their close friends as well.
I understood why Major Key hadn’t included me. Such teamwork was built through weeks and months of training, which lead to knowing exactly how to operate precisely. Who goes in from the right and who from the left, who will be in front and who kneels to shoot, and where. It all lay on knowing your teammates and on your almost blind understanding of how each of you would react when faced with danger.
Laura Ashton,
The Break-in, November 16, 2015, 1:30 a.m.
The field team reported that the streetlights were darkened. The electricity was switched off in the hotel across the street and the apartment building next to it. The darkness outside would create a cover for the black-clad fighters and serve as another shield. Soon six fighters will be hanging outside the windows, the sleepy street below them, awaiting the signal to break-in. Two of them were hanging near the area where Yassin, his professional fighter, and Murat Lenika had been spotted. Two of them would break into the corner room, where the nervous guy with the hand grenades had come from and another two would quietly enter the darkened room where the wife lay sick. The alpha team, headed by Major Key, would break in through the main entrance.