Good and Dead (An Avner Ehrlich Thriller Book 2)

by E. L. Pini

  On the chair sat the motionless form of Yefim Vasilyevich. His face was completely white; blood oozed from the empty socket of his left eye.

  “Please, come,” drawled Khazanovich, “come meet Mr. or Mrs. Yefim Vasilyevich.”

  “Is he alive?”

  Khazanovich nodded. “If you can call it living, yes, he’s alive.”

  “And Kaskov?”

  Khazanovich shrugged and spread out his hands. “He didn’t make it.”

  “Any leads to Boris Grigorovich?”

  “Not yet. But he’s got another eye, give me half an hour.”

  Vlad took out the pack of Marlboros and offered it to Khazanovich, who took one but didn’t light it. He inched closer to Vlad and in a low, sinister voice said, “Well done, Vladimir, truly excellent work, but next time – you come to me first, is that clear?”

  Vlad nodded and placed the pack back in his pocket.

  “Leave that here,” said Khazanovich. “The lady from finances is waiting for you inside.”

  Vlad placed the pack of cigarettes on the table and left the interrogation room. The second he was gone, Khazanovich landed another punch on Yefim’s eye.

  50.

  Moshe came back to the room along with the Chief of the General Staff, and Benny, the commander of the Air Force.

  “Anything happen with the PM after you left?” asked Nahum, and Moshe shook his head.

  “Now, back to the topic of our first-strike capabilities,” said the Chief of the General Staff decisively.

  “Do you remember Mustafa Tlass?” Ben David addressed the forum, and upon receiving no response added, “Assad Senior’s previous Minister of Defense. He once said that a single nuclear bomb is enough to paralyze Israel.”

  “So?” said Benny.

  “Well, he was right. And even more important is the realization that our second-strike is irrelevant. We must strike first, a preventative strike. With such force that they have no possibility of retaliation.”

  “That’s the only way we have out of this clusterfuck,” said Dovik, adding, “But it also means that unless we can prove we have no choice, we will be lepers. Shunned by the entire civilized world.”

  “This is precisely the proof the intelligence community is now burdened with,” said Benny. “Are you up for the task?”

  “Proof of intent is always in the eye of the beholder,” said Moshe. “I don’t know any further proof is possible. But I do know it’s better to be a living leper than a dead saint.”

  “Even the most indicative intel we can provide on their intention, apart from an actual attack, will always be open for interpretation,” said Dovik. “Therefore, the necessity of an effective preventative strike, even if it is clear to us at the time, is also a matter for interpretation. By whomsoever chooses to provide one.”

  “Okay,” said the Chief of the General Staff, taking over again. “If and when our intelligence indicates an operational level of intent – meaning, actual forces in the field – we document everything and hit them with a preventative strike. In fact, the first strike should incorporate everything planned for our second-strike: the total destruction of the enemy’s control operational and capabilities.”

  “You mean, the destruction of Tehran? Eight and a half million people?” asked Nahum. “We’ll lose every ounce of international support we have. Even our friends and allies will jump on the opportunity to denounce this… monstrously disproportionate retaliation.”

  Bella came in without knocking, made a gesture at me I didn’t understand, and handed Moshe a small note.

  “Ehrlich, go see Nora,” he ordered me.

  “Boris?” I asked, hopefully, but he shook his head.

  “When you come back, RP, I hope you break this embargo you’ve got going and contribute a thought or two to the mix. Preferably the less shitty ones,” he winked.

  “I’ll be right back,” I said, “And since you’ve asked so nicely, here’s a little food for thought: nuclear bombs, even the most powerful hydrogen bombs in the world, don’t launch themselves. People launch them. People make war with them.”

  “What are you referring to, O mysterious one?” asked Dovik.

  I leveled my eyes at Moshe, who nodded. He knew exactly what my mysterious self was referring to, and whom.

  I went into Nora’s office, where she immediately showed me a series of grayish photos.

  “Taken this morning in Latakia. Professor Hamdani, sans beard and other bullshit costumes, looking just as he did a year ago in Tehran. He was standing in the entrance to a mosque. Here are the close-ups.” She spread out another series of photos on the desk. It was Hamdani, unquestionably.

  “Who loves you more than anything in the whole wide world?” Ecstatic, I spread out my arms for a hug, but her eyes told me she wasn’t done.

  “He lives in a villa on the beach, near Tartus.”

  “Tartus? You don’t say,” I said, recalling the general who had been neutralized. Nora immediately understood what I was thinking about.

  “The same neighborhood, even.”

  “What’re they doing in Latakia?”

  “You ready for this?”

  “Always.”

  “Meeting him,” she said, showing me a photo of Hamdani sitting at a café with Rasputin.

  “Unless I’m mistaken,” she said, “the fact that these two are here indicates that the sub with the bomb is on its way, too.”

  “More than likely,” I said.

  “So what the balls are you so happy about? The biggest bomb in the world is coming.”

  “If it’s coming closer to us, we’re coming closer to it. Anyway, I have to go back to the meeting…”

  “Aren’t you forgetting something?”

  “Like what?”

  “Like who do you think took these?” she asked, pointing at the envelope of photographs I’d planned to take back to the room with me.

  “Who?” I asked, tapping my watch with an impatience that she couldn’t care less about.

  She inched closer to me and said, “I’m just gonna prepare myself to receive the biggest hug any human has ever –”

  “Nora, what is it?”

  “Hug me!”

  I hugged her.

  “Tighter!”

  I hugged her tighter.

  “Boris,” she said. “Our Boris is okay. He’s alive and he’s okay, in Syria.”

  “You sure?”

  She nodded.

  “And how did Boris get to Latakia?”

  “Like everyone else – on a plane.”

  “Nora…”

  “Organized trip of the Moscow Mathematics Society, or something like that.”

  “And you’re sure it’s him?”

  “If I’m me and you’re you, that’s Boris.”

  I hugged her so fiercely she nearly went all the way through me.

  “Do we have a channel with him?” I asked, unraveling from the hug.

  “Sort of. A shitty one. Albert and his team are on it.”

  “I need to give you another hug now,” I choked, and burst into a sort of wild dance with Nora wrapped around me, the two of us tearfully bouncing up and down. Suddenly a throat was being pointedly cleared behind us. I looked around to find Moshe staring at us, nonplussed.

  “Get in here, boss,” said Nora and wrapped her arms around him, as well.

  “We have Boris,” I said. “Nora found him.”

  Moshe froze. “Are you sure?”

  “I’m sure,” Nora said. “I’ve just shown him the photos.”

  “Then you have your work cut out for you. When you see him, slap Boris for me, please. Twice. Now let’s go back inside,” he said surreptitiously blowing his nose.

  “I’m coming, give me a minute.”

  When he left I asked No
ra, “Can you coordinate an urgent meeting with Boyes from Special Ops?”

  She knew why I was asking. “Anything for you,” she said.

  We came back into the conference room just as Moshe was saying, “I’m afraid we don’t actually have the option of a truly effective preventative strike.”

  “Why is that?” asked Benny.

  “RP? Are you crying?”

  “Something got in my eye.”

  Dovik looked at me incredulously, then nudged his head toward Moshe. “Must be the same thing that got in his.”

  Moshe seemed reluctant to further explain his take on the matter of preventative strikes, and I took advantage of the lull to stand up and explain it for him. “Like Dovik was saying earlier, their first-strike – second-strike, tenth-strike, whatever – capabilities are spread all over the Middle East, from Khurramshahr with over six missile bases and four airfields, not to mention all of those subs, and all across their proxies, the Houthis in Yemen and Sudan and the Shiites in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon. Here’s the real problem: in practice, although Tehran is about 930 miles away, it shares a 90-mile border with us, more or less; while we don’t have as much as a single yard bordering Iran.”

  Nahum automatically let out a low whistle, and quickly covered his mouth with his hand. Dovik gave me a sort of limp salute, and Ben David scribbled something on a piece of paper.

  “You can’t organize a sortie sufficient for a surprise preventative attack on all of them at once,” I told Benny, “and that’s not even mentioning the Hamas presence in Gaza and Sinai. Combined, that’s about 300 thousand ballistic missiles. Say we get fifty percent in our initial surprise attack – that leaves us with 150 thousand, conventional, but heavy and accurate. If they have the sense to initiate a joint attack, our computers – our domes and arrows and magic wands – every one of our system will collapse under the pressure. Am I leaving something out?”

  Ben David, Dovik and the head of the Service nodded in agreement. Benny, Moshe, and the Chief of the General Staff remained silent and unreadable.

  “In case of an all-out war,” the head of the Service finally joined the discussion, “we predict a temporary union between the Fatah and Hamas, which means a huge increase in terrorist activity, including overhead fire, and not only from Gaza. We predict that the West Bank Hamas will also join in. This puts Jerusalem and the adjoining neighborhoods at risk, as well as Modi’in, Re’ut, Kochav Yair and Kfar Saba – and this is before we’ve even considered the effect on the settlements east of the Green Line.”

  “With all due respect to home-made mortars,” said Benny, “What sort of impact are we talking about, here?”

  “A mortar bomb that hits an unprotected residential area or a kindergarten,” the head of the Service said grimly, “will cause significantly greater death and destruction than a hydrogen bomb dropped out of range.”

  A bitter silence followed this, broken only when the Chief of the General Staff said that any allocation of forces intended to handle the main problem would not affect the level of preparation in the West Bank, “And if any effective intelligence comes into our possession, we’ll deal with the problem by any means necessary.”

  Benny hurried to jump in, “If Hebron starts acting like Beirut, they get the Dahieh treatment,” he said, hoarsely.

  “Which will guarantee it’ll be another hundred years before peaceful contacts become even remotely possible,” said the head of the Service. Moshe nodded, and Ben David folded the pages he was writing on and tore them up, nodding as well.

  “Allow me to remind you that this discussion isn’t about peaceful contacts. It’s about the preventative action we must take before they drop a hundred-megaton bomb right on top of us!” said Benny.

  The meeting had gone sour.

  “Okay. I need to go,” I said. “I will, however, remind you that if we blast them back into the Middle Ages, we’ll be doing them a favor. The Iranian proxies are organizational, not state-dependent. Our ‘preventative’ strike and the ensuing chaos will only serve their interests, and allow them to take complete control over the countries in which they operate in a limited capacity today.”

  “At which point,” stated Benny, “we’ll finally be rid of this ‘asymmetrical war’ nonsense, and have all the justification we need to permanently crush them.”

  “And the bomb that brought us all here today?” I asked. “How symmetrical is that, exactly?”

  “Jesus, Ehrlich,” said the Chief of the General Staff, “do you have any operative suggestions, or are you just here to scare the shit out of us?”

  “I have some, sir. And I’m on my way to work on them now.”

  51.

  “Blyat, cocksucker. Unbelievable. A bank account in California? Blyat. Half a million dollars! What is this? Down payment on partnership in the vineyard? Motherfucker. Who’s this? The big guy with the beard?” Rasputin demanded.

  “The partner from California.”

  Rasputin shook his head. “No. To both those things. I know this man. Cocksucker. I know him. Take this up to get ID’d.”

  “No need, sir.” Vlad turned the screen around to show Rasputin as he dragged the photo into the search tab. “This’ll only take a moment, sir. It is the biggest database in the world, after all.” He attempted to slip some national pride into his voice.

  “A moment? I don’t have a moment!” Rasputin boomed.

  But a moment later, as promised, Vlad let out an uncontrollable, “Yes!” as the facial recognition software declared its success. He spun the laptop back around, his eyes glinting, but Rasputin grabbed his wrist. “No, don’t tell me. I know who it is, blyat. That piece of shit, Avner Ehrlich Ne’eman, the Deputy Head of Operations at the Mossad, Tel Aviv.”

  “Ramat HaSharon, it says, sir. Yes, Avner Ehrlich, Mossad, Ramat HaSharon.”

  “Same difference. Mr. Ehrlich doesn’t know it yet, but he’s good and dead already. Good and dead!” Rasputin slammed his fist down on the table. Vlad hurried to grab the laptop which bounced precariously, and Rasputin looked into his eyes.

  “Ehrlich and his wife and his children and all of zhydland, fucking kaput!” He snarled, raising his finger in front of Vlad’s now slightly terrified face.

  “And what about the cocksucker, Boris Grigorovich? Where is he now?”

  “He landed in Baku yesterday. Their ambassador met him at the airport.”

  “Their… ambassador? Met him at the airport? What?”

  “Yes, sir – the report seems to imply they’re good friends, they were hugging and –”

  “What? Hugging?!” Rasputin cut him off. “Who the fuck hugs an ambassador at the airport? Get me everything we have from the Baku surveillance, all the photos, including the hug. Go on, what’re you waiting for?”

  Rasputin’s face grew red; the veins in his forehead bulged alarmingly. Vlad quickly scrambled to his feet, “Yes, sir, I’ll handle it right away.”

  When he got to the door, Rasputin suddenly barked, “Wait!”

  Vlad froze.

  “Check out that zhyd Khazanovich, as well. His bank accounts.”

  “Sir, you don’t think he…”

  “I think what I want, and you do what I tell you. Understood?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Vlad left the room, trying to put his mind in order. Khazanovich? A part of him was awash with schadenfreude – he could never stand the guy. On the other hand, this was his direct superior. He found it hard to believe that he could be a part of this. He stood there for a second, trying to figure out what to do first, but suddenly heard a loud bang, followed by the crash of shattered glass. Rasputin, thrashing around in his office like a caged beast. Vlad quickly removed himself.

  52.

  “RP!” Boyes thundered, embracing me in a mighty hug. “Just a moment – excuse me, Lady Nora – take a step back, let me get a look at
the goods. Two hundred and thirty pounds of rage and power, my balls. Same ugly little fucker you always were. Gimme some sugar,” he said, and kissed me on the cheek, then took Nora’s hand and kissed it, too.

  “Welcome, Lady Nora. Head of Intelligence, not too shabby at all! Takes a hundred-megaton clusterfuck just to get you two to visit. Pretty exciting!”

  Boyes’ real name was Boaz – which softened to “Boye” over time, then became “Boyes.” He was one of those rare individuals that actually made me look small by comparison: 6’3’’, about as tall as I was, but with the circumference of a small planet; barrel-chested, adorned with a droopy Geppetto moustache, John Lennon sunglasses, a bald spot the size of a football field, and the nimbleness of a ballet dancer.

  Boyes was an immigrant who had come alone from Argentina to serve in the military – he was a few years my senior in the Unit, then got badly injured and spent about a year getting patched up in hospitals before returning to active duty. After that he spent a few years in the Research and Planning Division, before getting into Special Ops. In the unwritten book of the Unit’s legendary alumni it was told that after he finished his training and made it to the final interview, when the Unit’s commander asked him if he was willing to die for his country, Boyes unblinkingly replied, “Absolutely not. But I will kill for her.”

  “So how’s it been, RP? Years since we last worked together.”

  “What can I say? You guys are pretty worthless, usually.”

  “And unusually?”

  “We decided to throw you a little bone.”

  “See that, Nora? Who needs nepotism when you’ve got ties like this.”

  His trilling Argentinian “R” reminded me of ’loco’ Moshiko, and my heart momentarily crumpled.