The Outside Man

by Don Bentley

  A final turn brought us within sight of a building with a red crescent painted on the side. Here again the driver poured on the speed as Curly slapped the truck’s roof like he was whipping a horse down the final stretch of the Kentucky Derby. The whole thing might have been comical if we weren’t closing on a rather solid structure at the better part of sixty miles an hour.

  Just when I thought the driver planned to expedite the hospital’s admissions paperwork by driving through the wall, he slammed on the brakes.

  I tumbled across the truck bed until the cabin’s forgiving steel frame gently arrested my forward motion. This time, I managed to turtle before impact. My shoulders and arms took the brunt of the collision, but damn if I didn’t bounce my head off the roll bars when we finally came to a stop. If I hadn’t finished off the wounded jihadi before, he would have been good and dead now.

  Thinking about the dead jihadi brought my scrambled brain back online. Trying to ignore the numbness radiating down my arm, I turned toward the dead man and retied his bandage. Then I pressed down with both hands as if I was keeping his intestines from spilling onto his shoes. This was the moment of truth. Either my half-baked idea would work, or I’d be the next one on the receiving end of a combat knife or two.

  Fortunately, God heard my unspoken prayer. Or maybe He just wanted to see what I’d do next. Which made two of us. In any case, four men in scrubs came out the building’s front door at a run, heading straight for me. As soon as I saw them, I started part two of my charade—CPR.

  On a dead man.

  As the trauma team rounded the back of the truck, they found me pounding away on the dead jihadi’s chest like he was my best friend. I sold it for everything I was worth, compressing the dead man’s chest like a maniac while screaming at him in Arabic.

  Okay, I might have held a wee bit back. There was no way in hell I was doing rescue breathing on this dead asshole. I had no idea the places his mouth had been. My lips weren’t going anywhere near his.

  Even so, I was still covered in his blood up to my elbows. I straddled his dead body, administering chest compressions like I was George Clooney auditioning for ER. And my thespian debut must have worked. The trauma team rolled a gurney up to the truck bed.

  Curly joined them, dropping the Hilux’s tailgate. Grabbing my leg, he yelled something unintelligible, which I assumed roughly translated to Get the fuck out of the way and let the professionals do their thing.

  A reasonable request, but reason and I had parted ways long ago.

  The moment I stopped trying to save a dead man’s life, Curly would be free to pepper me with questions. Questions that even Mr. Clooney with his famous theatrical skills would have a hard time answering. That meant I needed to stick with the dead jihadi for a little while longer. Finishing a compression, I rolled clear of his chest and knew what had to be done. As the medics hoisted the jihadi’s limp body onto the gurney, I pinched off his nose, tilted back his head, and gave him a rescue breath.

  I’d sucked on tailpipes that tasted better.

  Seriously. If the horrific stomach wound hadn’t killed him, I’m sure that whatever was decomposing in his mouth would have done the job. I gagged, choking back the vomit that wanted to rocket from my mouth just in time. Clearing my throat, I took stock of my options.

  They were not pleasant.

  On the positive side of things, the jihadi was now on the gurney and heading into the hospital. Unfortunately, this meant that the crowd of medics surrounding him was leaving me behind with Curly. I could not allow that to happen. I pushed my way to the moving gurney and gave the jihadi another rescue breath.

  Sweet baby Jesus.

  This time I did retch, but I managed not to throw up on my shoes. Even so, my performance let me follow the throng of medical personnel through the swinging doors and into the hospital proper. Victims often throw up into the mouths of the people rescue breathing for them. With this in mind, I was hoping that my puke session would help sell my performance. As I prepared to once again swap spit with a dead man, someone slapped me on the shoulder and pressed a bag valve mask into my hand.

  Part of me wanted to weep with joy at the random stranger’s kindness. The other half of me was consumed with a murderous rage at the thought that this device had been readily available the entire time I had been French-kissing the Elephant Man. Fitting the plastic across the jihadi’s face, I began to bag him as one of the medics climbed onto the gurney and resumed chest compressions.

  The trauma team seemed to know their jobs. If I hadn’t stabbed him in the heart, he might have had a fighting chance. Unlike, say, the helicopter’s crew and passengers he and his brethren had ruthlessly executed.

  Reap the whirlwind, motherfucker.

  Our little foursome was rapidly picking up new players as we rolled down the hospital’s sparkling hallways. Additional men in scrubs joined the group, and it was starting to get downright crowded. Someone appeared at my shoulder, spoke words I didn’t understand, and then reached past me to take over bagging the dead patient.

  I took this as my cue.

  Nodding my understanding, I stepped out of the way as the medical team pushed the gurney through another pair of swinging doors. As I’d hoped, my absence wasn’t noticed. The noise and activity in the trauma room spiked as a team of dedicated medics worked to save a man long past saving. With a final look around to verify that I had indeed been forgotten, I eased past the corner and walked smack into Curly.

  Son of a bitch.

  He grabbed my shoulders as his brown eyes found mine. “Your friend. Did he make it?”

  I shook my head.

  “Inshallah he was martyred. I know the clerics say we should rejoice for those who are now in paradise, but I’ve never met a true warrior who took joy in the death of his brothers. Come. I have something that will ease your pain.”

  “Thank you, my brother,” I said, “but I should get back. There is much to do.”

  “There’s always much to do,” Curly said, his fingers tightening around my arm. “But for now it can wait. Come.”

  This time the command wasn’t a suggestion. I nodded, and Curly released my arm. He started back down the hallway, and I followed, considering my options. As usual they weren’t particularly good. But they did beat lying dead on an operating table with a stab wound to the heart.

  As Mom liked to say, sometimes happiness was just a matter of perspective.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  Curly wound through the maze of hallways with an ease suggesting he was a frequent visitor. This struck me as strange until I realized that the hospital was more than just a hospital. Within two or three hallways, the sterile surroundings gave way to something decidedly grimier. The lighting grew dimmer, the floor dirtier, and the people we passed more unkempt.

  Not homeless person ratty per se, but definitely not the clean, scrub-wearing medical staff I’d seen earlier. In fact, the atmosphere began to remind me of a place I liked about as much as a hospital—prison.

  My suspicions were confirmed when Curly took a final left into a dingy corridor bisected by a faded steel desk clearly past its prime. Behind the desk sat a man who’d also seen better days. He straightened his slouch at Curly’s appearance, but his change in posture did nothing for his soiled uniform or unkempt, greasy hair. Curly shot a stream of Farsi at the man, who shrugged in response. A second, more forceful verbal barrage seemed to do the trick. The guard lumbered to his feet, unclipped a key ring from his belt, and handed it to Curly along with a clipboard.

  Curly took the key ring, ignored the clipboard, and beckoned to me.

  “I’m sorry for that khar,” Curly said as he walked past the guard. “This world would be a better place if he’d strap on a suicide vest and martyr himself.”

  “You know him?” I said.

  Curly nodded. “Too well, I’m afraid. He was wounded several mon
ths ago—a bullet graze to the leg, nothing more. Even so, he was sent here to recover. He’s been recovering ever since. The Iranians took pity on him. Instead of being sent back to his unit, he guards an empty detention center.”

  “If it’s empty, why do you need those?” I said, pointing to the key ring.

  “It’s not empty any longer,” Curly said, a wolfish smile on his lips. “Come, come. This you will enjoy. I promise.”

  The little man quickened his pace until we’d reached a series of doors on either side of the hall. They weren’t cell doors, but they looked sturdy enough. After passing three such doors, Curly paused at the fourth. He took a key from the key ring, and he inserted it into the shiny padlock that was securing a crossbar. With a twist of the key, the lock came loose. Grabbing the crossbar with both hands, Curly wrenched it open.

  Then he turned to me.

  “Go ahead,” Curly said. “Take a look.”

  “At what?”

  “At the reason your friend was martyred. What’s inside won’t bring him back, but it may help you find purpose in his death.”

  I stepped past Curly into the dimly lit room, my spider senses tingling.

  I have a thing about sharing jail cells with homicidal terrorists. My last operation in Syria had landed me in just such a place. I’d made it out alive only because a troop of Delta assaulters breached the building moments before the jihadis holding me intended to livestream my execution. I’d lived, and the terrorists holding me hadn’t.

  But that didn’t mean I’d gotten away scot-free.

  The fingers on my right hand began to tremble.

  “What is that?” Curly said, pointing to my hand as he stepped into the room beside me.

  “Nothing,” I said, clenching my fingers into fists. “What are we here to see?”

  Curly looked from my spasming fist to my face. His brown eyes held something I wasn’t expecting to see—compassion. Fortunately, he must have decided to play along with my ruse. Instead of asking a follow-up question, he pointed to a dark corner of the wall. “It’s over there.”

  “What is?” I said, clasping my hands behind my back as I fought the tremors.

  “The Jew.”

  I didn’t quite follow what Curly was saying, but truth be told, I wasn’t really concentrating. The trembling had spread past my forearms, and spasms were now racking my shoulders. I hadn’t had an episode this severe since . . . since that moment on a piss-soaked slab of concrete. The moment when I’d been convinced that my luck had finally run out.

  Closing my eyes, I pictured my knockoff Gibson’s worn neck. A week or two after I returned from Syria, Laila had surprised me with a high-end Baird acoustic. It was a magnificent instrument, way too much guitar for a strummer like me. But it was still my knockoff Gibson that I pictured in moments like this.

  Stretching my fingers across imaginary frets, I started with a mournful E minor chord before sliding to a G. The G transitioned to a D before yielding a bright A. The haunting opening chords of John Anderson’s “Seminole Wind” filled my mind, but the spasms continued.

  This wasn’t working.

  “Brother—do you recognize him?”

  Opening my eyes, I found Curly in the gloomy corner of the room holding someone by the hair. My teeth chattered. I didn’t trust myself to speak, so I shook my head instead.

  “Ah, the light in here is terrible,” Curly said, reaching into his pocket. “How about now?”

  He punctuated the question by activating a small flashlight. The beam caught the person he was holding full in the face, and I sucked in a breath in surprise. The features were black-and-blue, and the nose was pushed slightly off the center. But the person was recognizable all the same. Perhaps not to everyone, but certainly to me.

  After all, spies made a habit of learning the faces of those who played the game. But in this incarnation, I wasn’t a spy. I was a foreign-born jihadi. So rather than speak the man’s name, I slowly shook my head.

  “That’s okay,” Curly said. “I guess I shouldn’t have expected you to. He’s a Shin Bet agent. A bodyguard.”

  Curly was wrong. In the lexicon of espionage, agents are the people who are convinced to spy upon their countrymen. The people who do the convincing are known as case officers. If the beaten and bound man crumpled in the corner had been an operative for the Shin Bet, the nation of Israel’s internal security force, that would have been his title. But he wasn’t a bodyguard or even a member of the Shin Bet. His name was Benny Cohen, and he worked for an altogether different organization.

  Benny was Mossad.

  THIRTY-SIX

  Most people hear the word Mossad and equate it with the CIA. This is accurate, after a fashion. But to really understand how the Israeli intelligence organization is an altogether different animal from its American counterpart, you have to understand the history behind the two organizations.

  The CIA’s heritage hearkened back to the Office of Strategic Services, or OSS, an organization conceived during World War II. This time of blood and fire certainly played a role in forging what would become the world’s best-known intelligence agency, but the years following the CIA’s 1947 founding were positively docile in comparison with the carnage endured by its predecessor. Don’t get me wrong. Convincing men and women to spy against their own countries will never rank as one of the world’s safest vocations. Some CIA officers did lose their lives during the Cold War, but these deaths were few and far between. Setting aside the Vietnam War, Agency casualties were almost nonexistent.

  In fact, from the founding of the CIA until the war on terror began in earnest on September 11, 2001, only seventy CIA officers were killed in the line of duty. A sacrifice, to be certain, but when you considered that the Agency currently boasted more than twenty-one thousand employees, the chances of finishing out your career and collecting your government pension at age fifty-five were pretty good.

  The Mossad had a very different lineage.

  Unlike the United States, the modern state of Israel had neither natural barriers in the form of oceans nor friendly countries to act as a buffer against its enemies. In fact, Israel’s geographical neighbors had tried on multiple occasions over the nation’s short modern history to wipe it from the face of the earth.

  During the Yom Kippur War, eight countries attacked Israel from all sides with thousands of armored vehicles, nearly overrunning the tiny country before the Israel Defense Forces counterattacked. Accordingly, Israel’s intelligence service didn’t have the luxury of playing by the good-old-boy rules the British and the Americans had adopted against the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War.

  No, the Israelis operated by a much simpler and more direct set of guiding principles best articulated by a statement from ancient Jewish law known as the Talmud: If a man is coming to kill you, rise up and kill him first.

  Long before the Americans began to understand that killing terrorists in their third-world dens was preferable to waiting for them to land on American soil, Israelis were sending squads of men and women all over the world. Known as kidon within the Mossad, these operatives had just one mission: kill the enemies of the state of Israel as if their very lives depended on doing so.

  Because they did.

  And the crumpled and beaten man on the floor in front of me was not just a high-ranking member of one of the world’s most vicious and lethal intelligence agencies. He was director of the Special Operations Division. When it came time to let loose the kidon on Israel’s enemies, Benny was the one who unchained their collars. Except that right about now, Benny didn’t look like he was in charge of much of anything.

  His right eye was swollen shut, and his left didn’t look any better. His nose had been broken at least once, and rivulets of blood leaked from the corner of his mouth. Curly was holding Benny upright by strands of blood-matted hair, but the Israeli made no attempt to st
and. I was guessing this was because he’d tried that already and had received a beating in response.

  “He doesn’t look like much of a bodyguard,” I said, closing the distance to Benny.

  Now that I was just an arm’s length away, his injuries looked even more severe. Benny’s right shoulder hung lower than the left, indicating that his clavicle was either broken or dislocated. His shackled feet were swollen, and his bare toes black-and-blue where they’d been stomped with thick-soled boots. His hands were cuffed in front of him, and two of the fingers on his left hand pointed off at odd angles.

  “You mustn’t judge a Jew by his appearance,” Curly said, turning Benny’s face first one way and then the other like he was showing off a freshly caught fish. “They may not look like much, but Shin Bet are worthy adversaries. Paradise is full of brothers who have underestimated these dogs.”

  As he spoke, Curly slapped Benny’s face. The crack of flesh on flesh echoed through the small cell like a gunshot. Benny’s head lolled back on his neck, drool snaking down his chin in ropy crimson lengths.

  “Come on, Jew,” Curly said, delivering another slap. “Wake up. We have questions.”

  This time, Benny’s good eye fluttered as his brain tried to make sense of what his overloaded pain receptors were telling him.

  “What’s going to happen to him?” I said, hoping to spare Benny another slap with my question.

  Curly shrugged. “I don’t know—that’s up to the Iranians. They were hoping to get an American general too, but that ambush failed. Still, in the right hands, a high-ranking Jew can be worth three Americans.”

  American generals. Interesting. So the Iranians, and by extension their proxy, Hezbollah, were conducting operations in Iraq. And not just ambushing American convoys with EFPs. I’d interrupted a full-on snatch mission—an effort to kidnap an American general from his convoy. That operation had failed, but the one against the Israeli had apparently succeeded.