by E. L. Pini
When we reached the arabesque-adorned iron gate of the clan complex, two armed men signaled us to stop. After recognizing Abu, they opened the gate and jogged after the car until Ami stopped, upon which they could conduct their exhaustive hugging-and-kissing ceremony.
We went inside, and while Abu went to arrange some refreshments, Ami and I sank into the old sofas and silently stared at each other. I checked my wristwatch. We left in fifteen minutes. I went into combat mode, sliding a bullet into the chamber, just as Ami did the same, as if we’d coordinated. As we smiled to one another, two short, decisive bursts of gunfire sounded outside.
We jumped to our feet, weapons cocked, but it was too late.
“Where’s that fucking Abu?” Ami hissed as the front door crashed open, along with two windows. Black, threatening rifle barrels were pointing at us from each one.
“Which one of you is Ehrlich?” the man who entered through the front door asked in Arabic, returning his gun to its shoulder holster. He was squat and thick, like a German sausage. Ami and I stood together. The Sausage approached Ami and held out his hand. Ami glanced at me and surrendered his Glock. The Sausage shoved the gun into his belt, his eyes trained on Ami.
“You must be Kahanov,” he said.
There was no longer room for doubt. Abu had sold us to the Hezbollah.
In the meanwhile, one of the other two men relieved me from my own Glock and surprisingly settled for that, not frisking me any further. We weren’t the only ones playing it by ear, apparently.
“Cuff them!” he told the other one.
“Hands and feet?” asked the younger one.
“Just hands, unless you want to carry them. They’re not going anywhere. Let’s go.”
44.
The one thing we had going for us, the only reason we were both still alive, was that they knew they needed both of us to authorize the money transfer. This meant we had to find a way out of there before the transactions took place. Ami was hurled into the front seat of the Ford Transit that took the lead, with the Sausage. I was tossed into the refrigerated box of an Isuzu truck. I found myself cuffed, lying on a pile of green wooden crates enforced by thin bands of metal. RPG-32, antitank rocket launchers. I wondered if this was the shipment they had gotten from Victor and set to figuring out my next step. I was still wearing the tiny transmitter installed by Ami’s technician, which had fortunately not been activated yet. Even better, they hadn’t taken away my Blundstones. A small leather pouch was sewn into my left boot, and nestled within was a small knife with a folding steel blade. A gift from Eran, who had written to me then that “no organizational consultant is complete without his letter opener.”
I estimated I had no more than five or six minutes. I hugged my knees, pulling them as far up as I could. For some reason, I was struck with the ridiculous notion of pulling the knife out with my teeth. Once that failed, I folded forward and reached toward the boot with my cuffed hands. It took me four attempts, but on the fifth I managed to pull out the compact knife, dangling between my two pinkies. Now I had to somehow move it into my palm and fold out the blade.
As I began the process, the asshole driver hit a speed bump and the knife clattered away from my hands. I threw myself on the floor, picked it up, held on to it for dear life, and managed to pull the blade out with my teeth. Once I’d achieved that, cutting the cable tie was a cakewalk. The first thought that came to me was that I needed to contact Froyke. The second was that by the time the cavalry showed up, the bad guys would have finished us.
Were we headed for the same fate as Ron Arad21? Panic gripped me momentarily. His last-known photo appeared in my mind—bearded and sunken. I decided against the attempt to contact Ami and risk exposing myself. I would not be Ron Arad. The metal strip hugging the wooden box beside me was thin and sharp. I wrapped my hand in my shirt and leaned into it with every ounce of mass I had, until it gave.
This was the turning point.
I pulled an RPG out of one of the crates and armed it. Then I reconsidered and pulled out three more launchers, armed them and placed them on the floor beside me. Then I waited. If I blew the door now, I’d be putting Ami in immediate mortal danger. I tried to activate the radio and whisper to Froyke, but the thick walls of the refrigerated truck blocked the transmission. Several more minutes elapsed before the vehicles came to a stop and I could make out the sound of approaching steps. I tightened my grip on the launcher and tried to recall the last time I’d fired one of these.
The lock on the door rattled, and an armed young hostile opened the back of the truck, his jaw dropping when he found himself staring down the mouth of the launcher, a rocket trained directly on his face.
“Shut up, and you’ll live,” I whispered.
He offered no response.
I raised my shoulder and the barrel inched closer to his face. “Shut up,” I repeated, “and you’ll live.”
He nodded, eyes wide.
“Now hand over your weapon and get in the truck.”
He surrendered his short-barreled Kalashnikov and held out his hand. I grabbed his elbow and his wrist and twisted, flinging him inside and slamming his head against the wall of the truck. He fell silently. I checked his wrist and failed to recognize either a pulse or the lack of one. This was no time to take prisoners. I broke his neck, just in case.
They had Ami, and the possibility of catching up with the tanker seemed to grow more distant by the second. I had no time to figure out what to tie him with. I recalled the words of “Colonel” Mizrahi, something along the lines of, “It’s a real bitch, dealing with a death of an enemy you killed in close combat. But trust me, it’s a lot harder when you’re the other guy.”
I slid out of the truck, hefting the pair of armed missile launchers and the short-barreled Kalash’. I needed to act quickly, before they came looking for him. Contacting Froyke and mounting a rescue would have to wait until I got a grip on the situation and prepared for the encounter with Nawata and his tanker.
I got under the truck and crawled to a better vantage point. The Sausage was standing by the Ford Transit furthest from me, smoking a cigarette and holding abu Seif’s pink cell phone. The other hostile was leaning against the front of the van, the barrel of his gun pressed into the back of Ami’s neck. Any move I made at this point, I realized, would get Ami executed.
The Sausage was tossing worrying glances at the direction of my truck. The distance I’d have to crawl across to get a clean line of fire was too great. I considered getting into my truck, quickly and discreetly disposing of the driver, and then using the truck to charge into the other van. Every alternative I found seemed to leave Ami at the mercy of one of the two armed men beside him. I estimated that shooting the younger one would cause the Sausage to take Ami out before checking on him. On the other hand, a nonlethal shot at the Sausage would probably cause the kid to drop everything and come to the aid of his leader. That, most likely, was my best option.
I shuffled around on my belly until I was facing the Sausage. I pressed the barrel of the rocket launcher to the ground, upside down so that the trigger guard pointed upwards. This still allowed me to fire but rendered the sight useless. I tilted the launcher slightly to the side, setting both the trigger guard and the sight on the other side at a forty-five-degree angle to the ground. Now the mouth of the launcher was trained right on the legs of the Sausage, who was yelling at the guy in the truck to “move his ass.”
I engaged, taking the oddest shot of my life. The rocket singed the ground, sand billowing around it, taking his right leg. The Sausage went down, wailing horribly. The other one pushed Ami away, diving for his superior as expected. The other two rockets, I fired from a much more convenient crouching position, and the world lost two more saints. I hurried to cut Ami out of his cable ties. He looked around him, amazed, and, upon realizing what had happened, raised an imaginary hat and bowed deeply and theatrically
.
Abu’s pink phone had fallen from the Sausage’s dead fingers. I picked it up and tossed it to Ami.
“Nawata. Call him—now!” I yelled at him and raised Froyke on the comm. He expelled a sigh of relief and told me that half the Lebanese army was struggling to hold back a large Hezbollah force approaching our location.
“I’m sending in the extraction team!”
“Negative, Nawata isn’t here yet. Wait, I repeat, wait. Out.”
“Let’s go!” yelled Ami, leaping into the driver’s seat. I hopped inside and we headed back onto the road. “I talked to him. He changed the location. Twelve miles north, at the abandoned village. He won’t wait more than fifteen minutes. The army is on its way there.”
I made some quick calculations and realized that we were exiting the area agreed upon with the scouting team that was supposed to provide us with cover and extraction. Also, in all likelihood, we were driving into a trap. I comforted myself with a timeworn IDF mantra—“It is what it is, and it’ll have to do.”
Ami pushed the engine to its limits. The speedometer showed 112 miles per hour, and the tachometer was well into the red.
“If the engine doesn’t explode, we’ll be there in eight or nine minutes, and…”
He nodded, and his foot went all the way to the floor.
45.
The sky was beginning to gray. We would lose the cover of darkness in about an hour, at which point we would find ourselves in the middle of Lebanon, in full light, outside the area defined for our scouting team. Ami was asked to call Nawata again so that the UAV could identify his vehicle. Three Lebanese military APCs passed us, probably on their way to where we had just come from. Some distance behind them was a Toyota pickup with a heavy machine gun mounted in the back and a small green-and-yellow Hezbollah flag—only then did I notice that a similar flag was tied to our own radio antenna. I waved at them, and they waved back.
I received a transmission from the intelligence officer. The UAV identified the tanker. “The heat signature seems to be a match,” he said. “‘Seems to be’ is the shitty cousin of ‘maybe.’”
“Check again,” I hissed.
Ami-Seif brought the van to a screeching halt next to a black Mercedes, and he and Nawata engaged in the local sequence of kissing and hugging. I stood in the back, my weapon cocked and ready—as abu Seif’s bodyguard, I was expected to. I scanned the perimeter and noticed some movement in the windows of the abandoned houses surrounding us.
We contacted the bank. Froyke informed me that the heat signature was approved as a match, and we were okay to proceed. We each brought an eye to the camera of his laptop for the biometric scan. One hundred and thirty nerve-wrenching second later, Nawata received electronic conformation for the rest of the payment, four hundred thousand dollars. I hoped Albert managed to get into his account as planned. Nawata handed us a folder with the vehicle license and registration, along with the keys. He then drove away, along with the four snipers he had hidden in the houses around us during the exchange. We removed the camouflage net from the tanker and headed out. Ami took the lead in the van, and I drove the tanker.
“They’re laying out roadblocks on the southern roads, including yours. When you approach, we’ll take it down,” reported Froyke, sounding stronger and happier than he had in a long time. I laughed, despite myself, when I was suddenly struck by the image of him charging the roadblock and smacking the Hezbollah around with his prosthesis. There was nothing funny about our situation, however. They’d recognized us—and they were concentrating their forces. I slammed on the gas pedal and sped past Ami’s van. According to Froyke, they were preparing another Egoz unit to fly in for backup. I was driving too fast to plan anything properly. I told Ami to pull over, then asked if he knew of any way to blow up the tanker. He did not.
In the distance, we could just make out the APCs and Toyotas that made up the roadblock, a combined effort of the Lebanese military and Hezbollah. We decided that I would turn the tanker around and drive it in reverse into the roadblock, hoping that their fire would ignite it, and then run to Ami’s van and we’d drive back north, away from the roadblock and the possibility of being stuck in crossfire between them and the incoming Egoz team.
About five hundred yards from the roadblock, I took some small-arms fire. A barrage of mortar fire, 52 and 81 millimeter, was immediately returned from the direction of the supporting Egoz fighters. I exploited the resulting decrease in gunfire to turn the tanker around to face north. The radius of the turn was too small, and the tanker rocked alarmingly from side to side before steadying. I straightened it toward the roadblock and put it in reverse.
Ami drove behind me in the van. Around two hundred yards away, I pinned down the gas pedal with the Kalash’ and jumped out. The tanker lost speed but kept rolling toward the roadblock. Ami sped toward me, also in reverse, and I had to leap to the side to avoid from getting hit. When I climbed in, he grinned at me and told me he’d spoken to the bomb squad. “We need to heat the inside of the tanker to detonate the stuff. Now, MacGyver, any idea about how to generate that much heat?”
“Yeah. Stop the car.”
We stepped out of the car, each holding a rocket launcher.
“Focus fire on the engine and the gas tank,” I said. “We need to ignite the gasoline.”
The tanker had come to a stop in the meanwhile and was now surrounded by Lebanese soldiers and Hezbollah. The UAV circled above us. I fired the first rocket at a Hezbollah Toyota that made it way toward us, and the second one at the tanker’s engine, which was destroyed but did not burn. Ami fired and gas started flowing out. He fired once more and the gas ignited.
Now all we could do was wait.
The UAV suddenly made a sharp turn and dove, nose first, with a force that tore the tanker open—there was a loud crash, but the PETN still didn’t ignite.
The fire grew taller, bluer. Hotter. And…
The explosion was magnificent.
Finally. Flames rose into the air like fiery snakes, burning anything they touched. They were getting closer to us as well, and we drove away. Five hundred yards from the explosion, Froyke told us that they were bringing down smoke, a hundred behind us and ahead of us, and ordered us to hold our position.
I managed to hear the commander of Egoz barking orders at the backup team. They created a thick wall of black smoke masking us from the roadblock, and another one around a hundred yards to our north. I felt like Moses, walking in the rift on the floor of the Red Sea.
“Move, I’m coming down.” Froyke’s voice sounded practically giddy on the comm. The CH-53 Sea Stallion helicopter landed at our feet, with Froyke standing on the landing skid like goddamn Colonel Kilgore.
46.
The chopper took to the air once we were safely inside, and after a hug from Froyke and a handshake from the Egoz commander, “Colonel” Mizrahi lunged at me out of nowhere and, upon noticing Ami, pulled him into his arms as well.
“My boys, get in here, my brave boys! RP and Kahanov, I planted these beautiful flowers,” he proudly announced to anyone who would listen.
“Aren’t you supposed to be in the West Bank?” I asked.
“Affirmative. But I heard my boys were here and I came right over.”
I tried to imagine the winding, unsecure route that the intel had taken, all the way from Northern Command to the West Bank. The helicopter crossed the border, distancing itself from the fire and the plumes of black smoke that rose up from the site of the explosion, obscuring the sun.
“This is what I call high-intensity conflict,” chuckled the Egoz commander. Mizrahi shook his head.
“No, this is what they call RP. Two hundred and thirty pounds of rage and power.”
The words took me back to Ya’ara. Brahms’s German requiem played in the background, and she was half-singing, half-reciting an odd recitativo in her low, sincere alto:<
br />
“To achieve the cruel and absolute justice he demanded, Michael Kohlhaas, our brave protagonist, burned the mansion of the evil nobleman Wenzel von Tronka, and then the entire kingdom.” And suddenly, barefoot and floating, Ya’ara was gone.
Ami suggested we head to Babai’s, but I was already sinking, deeper and deeper into my abyss. Seeing them together, Ami, Froyke and Mizrahi, threw me back to that terrible day, when they came up to my porch in Agur.
That night I sat beside Eran. I uncorked a bottle and told him that I had only managed to get out of the cable tie thanks to the small Browning knife he had given me. Eran smiled and said nothing. At Eran’s bris—a procedure I had initially objected to, and it was Ya’ara, of all people, who’d insisted—our friends came to celebrate. I didn’t invite them; Ya’ara and Bella had become close friends over the years, and this was most likely their doing. The DM came, and Froyke, the “Colonel,” Ami, Bella, Nehemiah—who had come all the way from Princeton—and even Amaziah, the organization’s rabbi, who came for his pound of flesh. He did circumcise Eran, eventually, but only after an exhaustive array of warnings delivered first by me and then by Ami, who threatened violent retaliation in case of “even the smallest damage to the goods.”
When the uninvited guests scattered, the rabbi approached me and asked to speak privately.
“Ya’ara must be converted to Judaism,” he said. “Otherwise Eran will not be acknowledged as a Jew.”
“I won’t put her through that Mikveh bullshit with the frogs. She’s happy the way she is, and that’s enough.”
The rabbi spoke at length about the problems Eran might encounter for no fault of his own. I explained that Eran was not, nor would he be, a Jewish criminal in need of the Law of Return22.