Boiling Point (An Ethan Galaal Thriller Book 4)

by Isaac T. Hooke

  “Goddamn it!” Ethan said. His bike was faster than the Volkswagen, which was tailing him, but the denseness of the Istanbul traffic coupled with the erratic nature of the driving meant that he could only get a couple of bike length’s ahead.

  “I have you,” Bretta’s voice said in his ear, as he flashed past the university tram stop. Her tone was perfectly level, any trace of humor gone from it.

  “I’ve got a tail. Think you can help me out?” Ethan said over the scream of the Yamaha’s engine, as he dropped it into third and sped around a van. The Volkswagen followed, clipping the side-mirror off an old Renault as it squeezed through a gap in the traffic.

  “Kill shot?” Bretta asked, with a coolness that other people might use when asking if their friend wanted milk and sugar in their coffee.

  “Negative, disabling!” Ethan replied.

  Five-hundred meters down Ordu Avenue, in the window of a derelict office block, Bretta Storm flicked off the safety of her M110A1 rifle. One of her bright blue eyes followed Ethan on his motorcycle through the Schmidt & Bender 3–20×50 PM II Ultra Short telescopic sight, as he sought to get ahead of the pursuing Volkswagen. He was four-hundred meters from the exfil point.

  Bretta’s finger curled around the trigger.

  The 7.62 millimeter NATO round went through the engine block of the Volkswagen at almost 800 meters per second. Hot engine oil sprayed up the windshield and the car veered right, colliding with the side of a parked tram with a rending screech of bending metal and shattered glass. It spun back out into the road and was promptly T-boned by an oncoming sedan.

  Bretta barely saw the crash. As soon as she had confirmed the hit, she had started disassembling the rifle and slinging it unceremoniously into a gym bag along with the yoga mat she’d been lying on. Within thirty seconds she was heading down the stairs to the street.

  Ethan saw the Volkswagen crash behind him and instantly slackened his speed. “Thanks very much, Maelstrom.”

  “Any time,” Bretta replied.

  Ethan pulled onto the curb at the intersection of Ordu and Gençtürk just as William stopped the rented Toyota Prado across the street. He honked the horn.

  Leaving the stolen bike idling, Ethan hurried across the road and hopped into the passenger seat. A few seconds later, Bretta piled into the back. As the car took off she reached forward and held out an expectant hand.

  “Where’s that twenty, Copperhead?” she asked.

  “Do I sound out of breath to you?” Ethan replied.

  He was saved by the sat-phone ringing. Ethan picked it up, pressed the button and the scrambled connection was made.

  “Copperhead,” he said.

  “How did Istanbul go?” Sam Rond asked without preamble.

  “By your tone, I’m guessing you know just how it went,” Ethan replied.

  Sam sighed. “It did lack finesse, to some degree. I was watching it over the Blackjack feed.”

  “The intel looks good though,” Ethan said. “From the quick glance I got, it’s going to tell us everything we need to know.”

  “That’s good,” Sam said. “But it’s out of your hands now. I’m reassigning you. I want you and your team on the next commercial flight to Dubai.”

  Ethan frowned. “What’s in Dubai?”

  “I’ll fill you in when you get there. Black Swan out.”

  1

  Dubai, United Arab Emirates

  March 3rd 2020

  Local Time - 06:50

  Dubai; a four-and-a-half-hour flight south of Istanbul, over some of the most unstable, treacherous, war-torn countries on the face of the planet. It was an area of the world that Ethan, Bretta and William were all too familiar with; a place of great geographical beauty and bitter feuds, wonderful people and ceaseless bloodshed.

  Ethan had almost been able to feel the different countries as they had slid by under the belly of the Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner; Syria, Lebanon and Iraq, they were all places that he and the others had spent a lot of their time under hostile conditions.

  I’ve lost friends, killed and been maimed within the borders of those countries, and yet also encountered some of the kindest, most open-hearted people I’ve ever met.

  His team had caught the very first flydubai flight out of Istanbul’s Sabiha Gokcen International Airport, a flight that had been delayed several hours thanks to the virus currently playing havoc with the world.

  After landing, the twin GEnx-1B / Trent 1000 engines of the Dreamliner wound down, and the mad scramble for the overhead storage bins began.

  With a population of almost three-million people, of which only about fifteen percent were Emirati, Ethan, Bretta and William passed through Dubai International Airport customs without a second glance. Dubai was a city that encapsulated the term ‘cultural melting pot’ and the trio of clandestine military personal walked through as just three more faces in the crowd.

  Once outside, the three of them hailed separate taxis, which whisked them into the city. It was a twenty-minute drive from the airport to the Jumeirah district in which the safehouse was located. Sam had selected this particular district because it was one of the chief ones in which expatriate Western workers resided in; Bretta’s Israeli, William’s Texan and Ethan’s west-coast accents would go completely unremarked upon. It was the beauty and frustration of Dubai––depending on what side of the fence you were standing on––that it was, perhaps, the easiest city in the world in which to blend in.

  Ethan arrived at the safehouse––an apartment on 26 D Street––second of the three team members. He had had the cab drop him by the Galleria Mall and then walked the rest of the way. This was to make spotting tails easier, though he didn’t see any reason as to why the trio would be being followed.

  William had gotten there before him, and the big man was busy setting up the laptop and checking the secure server connections for the coming briefing.

  As Ethan dumped his small duffel bag on the couch, William let out a leonine yawn and sighed.

  “You should catch a little shut eye once you’re done with that, before the call,” Ethan said.

  “I might just have to,” William said, stretching his arms over his head. “That early mornin’ flight got to me. I didn’t catch a wink. Can’t remember the last time we had to catch a commercial at zero dark stupid.”

  “Yeah, you and your surveillance equipment have been living the dream recently, huh?” Ethan said, grinning wryly.

  “None of that you and your surveillance gear shit, thank you very much. I saw you noddin’ on the plane.”

  Ethan grinned. Before he could retort though, there was the scrabble of keys in the lock. Ethan instinctively reached for a pistol at his belt that was not there, but it was only Bretta.

  The lithe Italian-born, Israeli-raised DIA agent shouldered her way through the door and kicked it closed behind her. She was wearing a pair of faded black jeans, combat boots that were both practical and, on Bretta at least, fashionable in a grungy way and a black tee-shirt that did little to disguise the curves and contours of her athletic body. She pulled off her Ray Bans to reveal those bright blue vulpine eyes, eyes that Ethan had thought could not possibly believe were real when they had first met.

  Our no intimacy during operations rule is a lot easier to stick to when she’s dressed in combat fatigues, Ethan thought to himself.

  He realized he had been staring for a second or two longer than was probably appropriate. He cleared his throat and started rummaging in his bag. As his eyes flicked away from the female DIA contractor, Ethan thought he saw the ghost of a smile play around the corners of Bretta’s crooked mouth.

  “I got us some breakfast,” she said, stepping forward and dumping a brown paper bag onto the island bench in the kitchen.

  Ethan opened the bag and fetched a couple of shawarmas wrapped in aluminum foil. He tossed one to the Texan who had sat back from his laptop setup.

  “Nice,” William said approvingly, taking a huge bite of the meat and vegetables
wrapped in pita bread.

  “Trust you two to leave it to me get food,” Bretta said, dryly. “It’s like the nineteen-fifties all over again.”

  “Yeah, you better watch out, Copperhead’ll have you vacuuming the floor before you know it,” William said, through a mouth stuffed with lamb and onions.

  Ethan snorted. “She’s not the vacuuming type.”

  William laid himself down on one of the leather couches, his big feet dangling off of one end. He had already demolished his shawarma.

  “For a guy who’s running on fumes that was pretty high speed,” Ethan commented.

  William closed his eyes and folded his arms over his chest. “Never get between a soldier and his grub.”

  Ethan’s eyes snapped open as his phone vibrated on the bedside table next to him. He snatched it up and looked at the screen. The number was scrambled and unreadable, but the message itself read simply:

  MANDATORY FUN.

  This was military parlance for the sort of gathering that was meant to be fun, but was in actual fact compulsory to attend, like a staff dinner party or the like.

  Ethan snorted, rubbed the sleep out of his eyes and got up to rouse the others. They gathered in front of the laptop and their employer, Samantha Rond, appeared, dressed in her usual black abaya robe. She looked tired.

  “All right,” Sam said, surveying Ethan and his two colleagues through the laptop screen, “I guess we may as well get the congratulations and backslapping out of the way first––good work in Istanbul. It was a little on the fly, but you got what was needed. The intel is good. Very good.”

  Ethan nodded. He thought that the small team had done well to cope with such a mercurial situation, but the professional part of his mind acknowledged that, ideally, things should never have gotten quite so public.

  “I’m glad you’re happy with the results,” Ethan said.

  Sam nodded, but a slight frown had creased her pale face. The software they were talking through was akin to that of Skype or Zoom, but had the benefit of having had millions and millions of DOD dollars pumped into, as well access to satellites that private companies did not know even existed. Ethan could make out every worry-line and wrinkle on his employer’s face, though to be fair, there were not too many of either.

  “You’re not happy with the results, Copperhead?” Sam asked him.

  Ethan shrugged. “Could’ve been neater,” he said. “A motorcycle chase down one of Istanbul’s main roads isn’t exactly what springs to mind when the word ‘clandestine’ comes up.”

  “I agree,” Sam said, in her customarily succinct manner. “It wasn’t ideal but, then again, there’s seldom anything ideal in this business. Hope for the best, prepare for the worst. I don’t know who said that, but they couldn’t have summed up military covert operations thinking any more concisely.”

  She clapped her hands, as if adjourning that part of the meeting. “All right, now that’s done, let’s focus on the future.”

  Almost palpably, the atmosphere around the laptop sharpened. The three sets of eyes stared intently at the countenance of their non-official cover case officer.

  “I need you to get yourselves to Iran,” Sam said, matter-of-factly. “I have what is––hopefully––a fairly straightforward extraction of a HVT in the middle of Tehran.”

  Missions revolving around the extraction or elimination of HVTs––or High Value Targets––had become increasingly common ever since the United States had started engaging with the likes of Al-Qaeda. In some ways, it was the most simplistic of missions: a team went in and got their target out.

  Yeah, Ethan thought, on paper it’s always a stroll in the park.

  “Military or civilian?” Bretta asked, her ice-chip eyes narrowed.

  “Civilian,” Sam replied. “Your target is a certain Dr. Avesta, an Iranian national and one of the preeminent minds in Iran’s nuclear science community. Dr. Avesta is employed in a senior position at the Tehran Research Reactor, but also spends significant amounts of time at the Arak heavy water and power plant, the Parchin nuclear military site outside of the capital and the fuel enrichment plant, Natanz.

  “Now, I know you’re all well aware of the sort of things suspected of going on in these places, particularly Parchin. The Department of Defense has been keeping a close eye on Parchin since 2004 when a report regarding the construction of a large explosive containment vessel was leaked. It was believed it had been built so that the Iranian military could conduct hydrodynamic experiments. However, it appears that Dr. Avesta only makes use of the R & D departments while visiting, and we have no intel to suggest that the doctor’s visits are anything other than scientific in nature.”

  Sam paused to take a drink from a glass of water that she produced from off-screen.

  “Our chief interest, however, is the work that Dr. Avesta has been carrying out at the FEP at Natanz. Now, there are many long and industry-pertinent words that circulate around Dr. Avesta; an expert in reactor thermal hydraulics and heat transference, extremely interested in fusion energy and plasma physics, as well as being somewhat of a walking textbook on fuel management and radioisotopes––”

  “I’m sorry,” William interrupted at this point, “I hate to sound like the obnoxious kid in class, Sam, but can you give us the layman’s version.”

  Bretta looked down at her lap and smiled.

  Sam seemed to come close to rolling her eyes. “Fine. In a nutshell then; Dr. Avesta is, what I might be inclined to call, a genius. She specializes in the enrichment of uranium. Now, uranium, typically, is either enriched with a low concentration of the isotope U-235––about three to four percent to make fuel for nuclear power plants––or a high concentration––ninety percent for nuclear weapons. Our good and clever doctor has, from what we can gather through various channels, found a way in which to more swiftly and efficiently enrich uranium.”

  “This has the definite whiff of good intentions about it,” Ethan said dryly.

  One corner of Sam’s mouth turned up at this comment. “Why, Copperhead, when did you get so cynical?” she said.

  “Probably around about the time I met you,” Ethan replied.

  “Oh, come now.”

  Ethan gave her an amused look. “You’re right. If I had to trace it back, I imagine it all started the day I joined the military.”

  William chuckled next to him.

  “Well, you’re right, in a way,” Sam said, her mouth relaxing back into its usual unreadable flat line. “From what we can ascertain, Dr. Avesta’s only compulsion in delving so deeply into uranium enrichment is to provide the world with a more refined and efficient energy source. Something that will leave coal-power stations as completely obsolete.”

  Ethan nodded. “And the U.S would like to get their hands on this information before the likes of, say, China or––” he began.

  “Or Iran itself, yes,” Sam interrupted.

  Bretta frowned. “Dr. Avesta is an Iranian scientist working in Iranian military facilities. Surely, the Iranian government is aware of the progress that––”

  Sam shook her head and held up a hand. Obediently, Bretta subsided.

  “We don’t think the Iranians are aware of just how far along Dr. Avesta’s research has come,” Sam said. “This scientist is no fool, and has, apparently, kept the project’s progress tightly under wraps due to concerns that the Iranian government would do exactly what we expect them to if they got their hands on it: weaponise it. The only reason we know what the doctor has achieved is thanks to a lucky bit of intel gleaned from a junior operative sent in to ascertain whether Dr. Avesta really was on to anything.”

  Ethan puffed out his cheeks. “All right. You want this HVT, and you want us to go in and get it. I assume you’ve got photographs so that we can identify our target?”

  “Of course,” Sam said. “I’m sending through all the relevant information now.”

  A file attachment appeared at the bottom of the screen and Ethan opened it. The data w
as full of the usual: a series of photographs, copies of the target’s passport, bank account statements, addresses, car registrations and all the other documentation a person accrued during the course of their adult life.

  Ethan and his team scrutinized the pictures closely.

  “This junior operative you mentioned,” Bretta said, her head cocked slightly to the side as she studied the pictures of their target. “At what facility did they manage to gain access that allowed them to get an eyeball on this scientist’s work?”

  “This is just it,” Sam said, and she looked pleased to be able to divulge whatever nugget of information she had up her sleeve here. “Due to the limited and strict hours that the Iranians impose on the staff at these high-security facilities, Dr. Avesta also has recently been spending a lot of time at the Imam Hossein University Physics Research Center, which she has access to twenty-four-seven.”

  “And that’s where this operative managed to find out what this scientist was up to?” Bretta asked.

  Sam nodded. “Copied a plethora of notes straight from the hard-drive of the target to a USB while the target was in the can.”

  “You’re kidding!” Bretta said.

  Sam permitted herself a small smile. “It was a stroke of luck, no doubt about it.”

  “Why don’t you just get this operative to pick up the target?” Ethan asked.

  Sam’s satisfied smile faded. “Therein lies the rub. Over the last couple of days, it has come to my attention that the Israeli government has gotten wind of Dr. Avesta’s work.”

  At Ethan’s side, Bretta stiffened. “Mossad?” she said.

  Sam nodded.

  “Shit,” Bretta said. “How do you know this?”

  “You don’t think all the DIA’s budget is funneled into custom Gulfstreams and apartments in Dubai, do you?” Sam replied. “It costs a lot of money to keep the backdoor channels and double-agents open and talking. But, trust me, this intel is real and I’m moving on it.”