The 5 Greatest Warriors

by Matthew Reilly

  She recalled the scene vividly: trapped in a filling pool of quicksand, she had stood on Stretch’s shoulders to poke her nose and mouth above the surface, while he had breathed through his sniper rifle’s gun-barrel, using it as a snorkel.

  Alby asked, ‘What does the Mossad do to Israeli soldiers who switch sides and fight against them?’

  Jack threw a glance at Zoe and Wizard. Zoe nodded silently. Wizard just bowed his head.

  When he finally answered, Jack spoke in a low voice, his face serious. ‘The Mossad isn’t known for showing mercy to its enemies. Traitors like Stretch receive the harshest punishment of all. There are stories of maximum-security desert prisons, their locations kept strictly secret, where high-grade prisoners are kept under twenty- four-hour guard and . . . mistreated . . . for years.’

  ‘Mistreated?’ Lily said.

  ‘For years?’ Alby said.

  Jack said, ‘if Pooh Bear even manages to discover where they’re keeping Stretch, getting in and busting him out will be an all-but-impossible task. It’d be like breaking into Guantanamo Bay and running off with a terrorist.’

  Lily said, ‘You did that once, Daddy. Can’t we go and help Pooh Bear?’

  Jack looked at her sadly. ‘Lily. Honey. There are some operations that even I wouldn’t dare attempt, and this is one of them. I’m sorry, I really am, but we have to leave that to Pooh Bear and keep our eyes on the larger mission. It’s a hard decision for me to make, really hard, believe me, but weighing up the possibilities and probabilities of success, I have to make it this way. I’m sorry.’

  Jack bowed his head, but not before he saw the look Lily gave him—a look he’d never seen on her face before. It was a look of the most profound disappointment, and in that moment, he hated himself.

  ‘So what are we going to do now then?’ Lily asked in a sour tone.

  ‘First of all,’ Jack said, ‘Alby is going back to his mother in Perth; she’ll be beside herself when she sees his arm. And after Christmas, I’ll be sending you to join him. Keep you two out of harm’s way for a while.’

  ‘What!’ Lily protested. ‘What about the rest of you?’

  ‘We’re going to try to find the remaining Pillars and Vertices before the world ends in March next year.’

  WOLF’S MINE

  LALIBELA, ETHIOPIA

  11 DECEMBIR 2007

  ONE WEEK EARLIER

  Wolf and Mao Gongli emerged from the mine, stepping out into bright sunshine.

  It was six days before the events at the Second Vertex.

  Wolf had just seen his son Jack West Jr crushed underneath a massive stone slab, seemingly killed. He’d also left Pooh Bear down there to be sacrificed by the mine’s zealous religious guards.

  Waiting calmly and casually up here was the British woman, Iolanthe. Waiting less casually—hogtied hand and foot with handcuffs, bleeding from a beating, his eyes blindfolded by a filthy rag, and lying face-down in the bed of a pick-up truck—was Stretch.

  Arriving at the pick-up, Wolf stood over Stretch for a long moment, as if assessing him.

  ‘Lieutenant Benjamin Cohen,’ Wolf mused. ‘Once of the Sayaret Matkal, the famed Israeli sniper force, where you attained the call-sign Archer. Transferred to the Mossad in 2003 and soon after assigned to infiltrate the multi-national team led by Jack West Jr and monitor its attempts to locate the pieces of the Golden Capstone of the Great Pyramid. But you went native and you joined West and his team, culminating in a terrible Solomonic Choice where you had to choose between your new friends and your old masters.’

  Wolf paused. ‘And you chose your new friends.’

  Beside him, Mao grunted in disgust.

  ‘Which is why your old bosses at the Mossad made you a Category 5 Enemy of the State of Israel—a category usually reserved only for ex-Nazis and terrorist leaders. They put a price on your head, sixteen million dollars, which I will be only too happy to collect. You chose wrong, Lieutenant Cohen.’

  With his head pressed against the hard steel bed of the pick-up, beneath his blindfold, Stretch closed his eyes in dismay.

  A single tear appeared from underneath his blindfold and trickled down his cheek.

  Curiously, Wolf himself took Stretch to Israel.

  Of course Stretch was kept blindfolded for the duration of the short journey—during which time he heard Wolf occasionally speak on a satellite phone with his team in Africa, the team pursuing Wizard, Zoe, Lily and Alby through Rwanda and the Congo.

  But for the final leg of his journey to his former masters, Stretch was drugged and his world went black.

  When he awoke, he found—to his horror—that he was suspended upright inside a reinforced glass tank of some sort, his hands and feet spreadeagled, star-like, manacled to chains at the four corners of the phone-booth-sized tank.

  He was naked.

  He noticed an IV drip stuck into his right arm—its tiny clear tube rose up and out the open top of his rectangular glass coffin. A catheter-like excretion unit covering his groin area took away waste.

  Beyond the confines of his tank, Stretch saw Wolf talking with an older man whom Stretch had met only once in his time at the Mossad: Mordechai Muniz, the ruthless former head of the Mossad, now its ‘official advisor’.

  Bald, fat and pale, with pitiless black eyes, Muniz had been on the team that abducted Adolf Eichmann from Argentina in 1960.

  He had also captured the Black September mastermind behind the Munich Olympics massacre: alive. The terrorist had not been seen since. In the world of spy agencies, Muniz was a legend and his nickname, ‘the Old Master’, was well deserved.

  The Old Master turned to appraise Stretch, surveying his manacled and exposed body like a hunter assessing a captured lion.

  Muniz smiled thinly, revealing a set of uneven yellow teeth. ‘Lieutenant Cohen. Welcome back to your homeland. You know, there are some who believe that traitors like you should simply be executed for their crimes. But in the higher echelons of the Mossad, we believe that as a punishment death is too easy, too quick, for one such as you: you the wrongdoer suffer no consequence for your actions, you don’t get to really think about what you’ve done.’

  As Muniz spoke, Stretch saw two technicians climb up a pair of stepladders on either side of his nine-foot-tall glass tank. One of them reached in the open top of the tank and jammed a nose-and-mouth scuba-diving regulator over Stretch’s mouth and nose, securing it firmly to Stretch’s head so he couldn’t dislodge it. The regulator’s oxygen tube snaked up and out of the big tank to an air canister attached to its rear flank.

  The second technician did something far more frightening.

  He angled a wide-bore firehose into Stretch’s tank and pulled a lever, unloading gallon after gallon of a stinking green liquid into the tank. The liquid swelled around Stretch’s feet, sloshing wildly, quickly rising to his knees . . . then his waist . . . then his chest

  Bang!

  The two technicians slammed a thick glass lid down onto the tank’s open top and started welding it into place with blowtorches.

  Welding it. . .

  His mouth covered by the breathing apparatus, Stretch’s eyes boggled.

  They were welding him inside this tank!

  The sickly green liquid rose ever higher, reaching his throat. Muniz’s voice sounded hollow now, distant. He said, ‘No, Lieutenant Cohen, death is far too good a sentence for you. Your crime deserves more than that: it requires substantial suffering. This is where I come in. Trust me, after several years down here with me, you’ll wish we’d executed you.’

  And with that the foul green liquid sloshed over Stretch’s face and he began to breathe quickly, desperately, through his scuba mouthpiece.

  The world around him became blurred, veiled in pale green.

  Stretch could just make out Muniz and Wolf shaking hands, and Muniz handing Wolf a suitcase of some kind.

  Then Wolf left.

  Muniz returned, alone.

  And he stood before Stretch
’s tank, arms folded, just staring up at Stretch—naked and spreadeagled, submerged in the foul green liquid, encased in the welded-shut reinforced glass tank.

  Unable to move, and hearing only the sound of his own breathing inside his head, Stretch watched the blurred figure of Muniz standing there gazing at him.

  Then Muniz went over to his desk and casually sat down to make a phone call, and in a moment of the purest horror, Stretch suddenly saw how he was destined to spend the rest of his natural life.

  RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL

  31 DECEMBER 2007, 2358 HOURS

  It had taken Pooh Bear almost three weeks and two million dollars to find him.

  Money certainly made things move more quickly, he thought. The Israelis had spent sixty years trying to capture Wolfgang Linstricht, but to no avail. Once, in Buenos Aires, a Mossad assassin had found him, but Linstricht had killed the man with a bread-knife through the ribs, having stalked his stalker through the grimy alleyways of the Argentine capital.

  A lifetime ago Linstricht had been the sergeant-at-arms at the notorious Nazi concentration camp Treblinka. He had been Franz Stangl’s enforcer: when the commandant ordered that someone be shot, it was Linstricht, a towering six-foot-four brute, who’d carried out the order.

  But when World War II ended and top Nazis like Stangl scattered, Linstricht also slipped the net and fled to South America, and had not been seen since.

  As Pooh Bear had discovered, Linstricht moved constantly between South American countries to avoid capture: from Brazil to Argentina to Chile. The Israeli abduction of Adolph Eichmann must have scared the shit out of him. But as the episode with the Mossad stalker showed, even at age 86 and constantly hunched to disguise his height, Linstricht was still lethal.

  And now here he was, Pooh Bear saw, right there across the street, and old man chatting up a long—legged Brazilian prostitute amid the fireworks and festival atmosphere of New Year’s Eve in Rio.

  Pooh Bear watched them from the shadows, watched them head hack to Linstricht’s hotel.

  After Pooh Bear and Jack had parted ways at Nairobi airport three weeks earlier, Pooh Bear had headed back to his home country of the United Arab Emirates, his primary goal: to discover where the Israeli Secret Service, the Mossad, was keeping his friend Stretch.

  He also wanted to inform his father the Emirates’ chief sheik, Anzar al Abbas, of his brother Scimitar’s heinous betrayal.

  But en route to Dubai, Pooh Bear had discovered from a friend in the Intelligence Service that only a day before, his father had abruptly disappeared. The old sheik, he was told, had been summoned by Scimitar to join him in Riyadh. Shortly after, all contact with him had been lost.

  Dubai, Pooh Bear’s friend told him, was now in the hands of his brother’s cronies. It was not safe for him to return.

  Despite the state of affairs back home, being the second son of the Emirates’ chief sheik still had its advantages. Pooh Bear had contacts in the international intelligence community and large amounts of his own trust-fund money—a couple of million dollars—to throw around.

  For a week, Pooh Bear made calls, did research, paid bribes and spoke with Mossad watchers both legitimate and not-so-legitimate. For a quarter of a million dollars, he acquired a collection of CIA intercepts of phone conversations between the highest ranked Mossad officials.

  After all that, his key discovery about Benjamin Cohen—once known as Archer, but known to Pooh by the name Lily had given him, Stretch—was that he had been designated a Category 5 Enemy of the State of Israel for the crime of treason.

  Israel’s ‘Category 5 List’ was an elite one, reserved for the worst of Israel’s enemies.

  But despite his intelligence contacts, intercepts and money, Pooh Bear could not discover where captured Category 5 enemies were jailed. No-one knew. Lesser targets were placed in military prisons or supermax jails. But not Category Fivers. If they were jailed, no- one knew where, and if they were executed no-one knew where or how such executions were carried out.

  The only thing that Pooh knew for sure was that if Israel captured a Category 5 enemy, that man disappeared from the face of the Earth.

  And so he formed a plan.

  He would find a Category 5 Enemy of the State of Israel and turn him in to the Mossad—but not before doing one last thing.

  The target he chose was Wolfgang Linstricht.

  Fireworks exploded in the sky above Rio.

  Ten minutes after the New Year was rung in and with the last fireworks still flaring above the city, Pooh Bear kicked in the door of Room 6 of a run-down hotel on the waterfront.

  Wolfgang Linstricht leapt out of bed, naked, hurling the woman off him, reaching for a pistol among his clothes—but Pooh Bear was faster, bounding across the room. He must have looked fearsome to the ageing German: a burly, dark-eyed, big-bearded, olive-skinned Arab, charging across the dingy room. Pooh kicked Linstricht to the ground before he could grab the gun and jammed a handheld taser into the German’s ribs.

  Linstricht convulsed violently and then slumped to the floor. The prostitute screamed.

  ‘Get out,’ Pooh Bear growled.

  She scuttled out, clutching her clothes, leaving Pooh Bear standing over the unconscious Linstricht in the damp little room.

  Pooh Bear pulled a capsule from his pocket—it was the size of a standard headache pill—slid it into Linstricht’s mouth and pinched the man’s nose, forcing him to swallow it.

  Then Pooh Bear called the Mossad.

  DIMONA NUCLEAR RESEARCH CENTRE

  NEGEV DESERT, ISRAEL

  10 JANUARY, 2008, 0530 HOURS

  Ten days later, Pooh Bear lay flat on his belly in the hills of the Negev Desert in the barren core of Israel.

  Two hundred metres ahead of him stood an enormous military facility, the centrepiece of which was a sixty-foot-high shiny silver dome. Arrayed around the dome were a dozen warehouse-sized buildings, two concrete smokestacks and a cluster of satellite dishes and radio antennas. Anti-aircraft gun emplacements marked every corner of the base—emplacements, Pooh had noticed, that were manned twenty-four hours a day.

  It was the Dimona Nuclear Research Centre, the beating heart of the Israeli nuclear weapons programme, a programme whose very existence Israel has neither confirmed nor denied since the 1960s.

  As Pooh Bear well knew, Israel possessed nuclear weapons—about two hundred of them, in fact—and they built them here at Dimona, making it the most heavily guarded installation in the country.

  It was curious then, Pooh thought, that the capsule-sized GPS transponder that he’d slipped down Wolfgang Linstricht’s throat had led him here. After the Mossad had picked up Linstricht— based on Pooh’s tip-off—they had taken a circuitous three-day journey halfway around the world that had ended here at Dimona.

  And according to Pooh’s GPS monitor, Linstricht had been taken to a small bunker-like building half-buried in the earth in the isolated north-eastern corner of the base.

  ***

  The Negev Desert is one of the most desolate places on Earth.

  The ruins of ancient waystations, stopping points on the spice route, can be found among its rocky hills and valleys. Likewise, Roman-era quarries and mines are common: King Herod’s vast salt mine, Baqaba, lies forty kilometres south of Dimona, not far from its smaller sister mine, Uqaba. Crumbling mesas and craters provide the only sights. It is a dead land: vast, empty and of little interest to anyone. Nothing grows in the Negev.

  It had taken Pooh Bear four days to get into position close to the fenceline.

  Four days of careful slow crawling, so as not to set off any motion sensors; sleeping under a camouflaged thermal blanket so as not to betray a heat signature; and lying still during the day so as not to catch the eye of the sentries who periodically patrolled the perimeter of the complex.

  He’d spent half of one day locating some kind of weak-point in the fence—and found it in a small eroded crevice of crumbled rock that straddled the base of the
fence on the eastern side of the complex. The second half of that day had been spent chipping away at the crevice, making it wide enough for him to slip through under the fence.

  After that, he’d backed off and waited till this morning to make his move.

  The reason: according to his intel, the previous night Dimona was to receive a large shipment of enriched uranium, during which security would be upgraded.

  His intel proved to be correct: that night the whole base had lit up like a football stadium, with floodlights blazing and extra guards patrolling the fences. Around midnight, over at the main gates on the western side of the complex, a large semi-trailer rig—with a lead-lined shipping container on its back and flanked by escort jeeps equipped with .50 calibre machine guns—had rumbled into the complex and headed for the base’s storage and enrichment facility, Machon-2.