Kaesar nodded emphatically. Stryker gave him instructions on how to transfer information by use of a dead drop, and Kaesar once again indicated he understood. Rachel flashed a Gerber double-edged fighting knife and sliced the tape binding Kaesar.
As soon as he was free, Kaesar tried to move his hands, but neither functioned well. The pain was no doubt severe as blood began to return. Rachel cut loose his feet. It would be a while before he could walk.
“We’re leaving,” Stryker said. “If you want to keep breathing, you’ll remember what I’ve said.”
They returned to the safe house. With a weary exhale, Rachel sat at the table, and Stryker got her a fresh towel full of ice. She watched him. “Do you really intend to kill Kaesar’s family?”
“No.” He handed her the ice. “I’ll leave that kind of work to the Mossad.”
“We can handle it from here. You don’t need to get more involved. Our agents will follow Kaesar and find out whom he’s meeting, and I can let you know.”
“Like you did last time?”
Without giving her a chance to respond, he waved a hand to clear the air and sat across from her. “No, I want to continue. I think Kaesar can find answers to many of my questions, and I’d like to finish the job.”
Rachel nursed her split lip with ice for a moment and then looked at him, her gaze steady. “Go with me to Tel Aviv.”
“The Mossad?”
She nodded. “I think you should meet some people there who can help you.”
“Are your friends as charming as you?”
She lowered the ice. The left side of her face was already mottled in sickly shades of yellow and purple bruising, and her lip started bleeding again when she spread into a wide smile. “You wish.”
Chapter 8
Tel Aviv, Israel
September 2009
How do I get myself into these messes? Stryker thought. He was on a towering rooftop in downtown Tel Aviv, with a Barrett .50 caliber sniper rifle and a strong headwind that would make the shot difficult. This wasn’t what concerned him. It was the gunshots and cries of pain coming through his radio earbud from Rachel and her team below.
When they had touched down in Tel Aviv, a car had been waiting for them, its driver silent and its windows blacked out. Stryker had agreed to be blindfolded, though he still had a sense of where they’d gone from turns, vibration as the car picked up speed, and elapsed time. He guessed they were eight to ten miles northwest of the airport.
No sooner was the blindfold removed—a stark industrial space, bare walls—than a man rushed up to them, peppering Rachel with frantic updates. They’d lost three men, including their best sniper. They still had a small window for getting the target—it was act now or he would get away. Rachel had become all business, and when it was clear that Stryker was needed, she had asked him for his help.
So here he was, sniping a double agent from a rooftop while Rachel and her team secured stolen intel from a computer five floors below. Only they weren’t supposed to run into resistance. There had been a flurry of gunfire, shouts, and then only buzzing and silence on the radio. The Mossad had provided his gear—the rifle, a sidearm, and the earbud radio.
“Rachel?” He tapped the earbud. “Rachel, do you copy?”
“Stryker,” her voice came on, strained and breathing hard. “We were ambushed. They knew we were coming.” He could hear alarms through the radio now too. “We barricaded the door, so they can’t get to us. But the police will be here in minutes. We can’t be captured—we don’t exist.”
“Get to the roof.” He looked over to where four gliding parachutes were lined up at the roof’s edge, waiting for the team to soar east to an empty lot where a van waited.
“Security locked down the elevators. There’s one on our floor, but it’s not moving. My men are shot up. They can’t make the stairs in time. I won’t leave them.”
Stryker mentally ran through his options. They were limited. “Comms, how long until the target exits the building?”
The communication team, monitoring their progress from the evac van, had eyes and ears through the building’s cameras. “ETA five minutes.”
He could leave now, saving himself. He could stay on the roof and complete the mission. Or he could try to help Rachel and her men. Stryker looked over again at the parachutes.
“Comms, I’ll need the make, model, and color of the target’s vehicle.” He ran toward the stairwell. “I’m going after the team.”
Stryker leaped down the stairs. He ran to the elevator doors and used the blade of his fighting knife to pry them an inch apart. He wedged his hands in the gap, pulled the doors open, and braced them with his feet. He shrugged off his tactical jacket and wrapped one reinforced sleeve around each hand, hoping that between this and his gloves they would be enough. With one glance down the elevator shaft that he immediately regretted, Stryker jumped off and grabbed the cables.
The friction built as he slid down, but he kept his grip, plummeting along the cables toward the lower floors. As the walls of the shaft plunged past, it was clear that he was going too fast. His hands tightened further, and he saw the elevator below him stopped at Rachel’s floor. At the last second, he let go, tucking his legs and rolling when he slammed into the top of the elevator. He shot off the side of it and nearly fell the remaining forty stories to the bottom of the shaft.
He grasped at a ridge of metal on the wall, dangling there for several agonizing seconds.
The tactical jacket slid from his hands and fell down the shaft, the sleeves fluttering like flags and soon lost to the darkness below.
Stryker dragged himself higher and found handholds to pull himself to standing. After shimmying closer to the elevator, he climbed back atop it and opened the access panel. He dropped into the elevator and used the knife again to pry both sets of doors open, bracing one and then the other. He fell through onto beige carpet.
“Stryker!”
He looked up and saw Rachel and two men at the end of the hallway, staggering toward the stairwell. The sound of the alarm was deafening. One of the men was bleeding heavily from one leg; the other, from a serious gunshot to the chest. Rachel was trying to support this one, but neither man could walk well. Discarding the remains of his gloves, Stryker ran to them and took the man with the chest wound. His shirt was soaked with blood, but he still had good color in his face. Stryker pulled the man onto his back. Thankfully, he wasn’t a large man, although the stairs would still pose a challenge.
“Bring him.” Stryker gestured to the other man. “Try to keep up. We’re almost out of time.”
They made their way up the stairs as quickly as they could, Stryker carrying one man and Rachel supporting the other as he hobbled up the steps. When they finally reached the top, they were all dripping sweat, but no shouts or gunshots had pursued them up the stairwell.
“Can your men still use their chutes?”
She looked at them and nodded. “They just have to coast down.”
Stryker set the man down and tapped his earbud. “Comms, tell me you got the car.”
The radio crackled. “He’s in a black Chevy Tahoe, but you’re too late. He’s already driven around the corner, heading west. You don’t have a line of sight.”
“Get your men to safety, Rachel.” Although his legs were burning from the hike up the stairs, he broke into a run toward their parachutes. He snagged one without breaking speed and ran toward the other side of the roof, facing west.
“Stryker!” Rachel yelled. “Stryker, wait! Slow down!”
He didn’t wait. He didn’t slow down. At a dead run, he leaped off.
For a moment, he moved upward, and in that second, he slung the parachute around and onto his back. Then he was free-falling, plunging toward the crowded city street forty-five stories straight down. The wind blasted at him as he fell, the force making it hard to pull the sides of the chest buckle together before the chute was blown right off his shoulders.
The street r
ushed up at him, faster and faster, the tiny ant-people distinguishable now, the taxi cabs and city buses growing larger. He pulled the cord. The chute popped open, its folds spreading out like wings. Cords ran down to handles that he pulled to steer. He continued to drop. He had kept his momentum; only now he was moving both down and forward, rapidly, flying over the street and heading straight for a row of buildings. Stryker jerked hard on the cord, angling to the right and missing the building. He aimed for an impact point on the corner and drew up his legs expecting a hard impact. On the pavement, Stryker rolled and unhooked his harness. In seconds, he was on his feet and running around the corner looking for the black Tahoe. He saw it stuck in traffic three blocks away and sprinted, planning to come up on the driver side of the vehicle.
“Send an extraction team to the north end of Rothschild,” Stryker shouted against the wind.
“Is he serious?” someone in the van said.
Stryker was now one car length from the Tahoe, which remained still. In a flash, the driver side glass exploded as Stryker hit the window and jerked the driver out of the vehicle, throwing him to the pavement.
Stryker straightened and suppressed a groan of pain, his whole body protesting. He waited a moment to catch his breath and then tapped his earbud. “Target is down. Repeat, target is down.”
The driver turned to Stryker yelling, “This is not real. It’s only a test!”
“You’ve got to be kidding me?” Stryker said.
“I am so sorry,” Rachel said in his ear. “We had to know what you would do.”
From the far end of a side street, Stryker could see a vehicle accelerating toward them. The extraction van.
Over the radio, a new voice came on—low, gravelly, cold as a stone. “It appears your reputation is deserved, Mr. Stryker.”
The van pulled up, and a door on the side slid open. Inside were the communications team along with Rachel and the two men, who no longer appeared injured. His target, the alleged double agent, climbed inside. Rachel extended a hand toward Stryker.
“On behalf of the Mossad,” the gravelly voice continued, not connected to anyone in the van, “welcome aboard.”
Chapter 9
Tel Aviv, Israel
September 2009
“We had to know if you would stay or run if our people were in danger,” Rachel said. “Or when everything falls apart. We had to know where your loyalty lies.”
Stryker didn’t respond. The van carried them toward a Mossad facility in Herzlia, outside of Tel Aviv. Stryker didn’t say a word during the drive, although Rachel occasionally broke the silence, explaining that it was all staged and this was the only way she could get the others to even agree to meet with him.
“No alarms were really triggered; no police were on their way. You were supposed either to run or to take the shot or help my team, and as soon as you did, the exercise would be over. It was a controlled environment. We didn’t think you’d leave it.”
He watched her two teammates, who had peeled off their bloody clothes to reveal squibs wired underneath to release bursts of artificial blood. He wondered if the Barrett had been loaded with only blanks like the handgun.
They arrived at the facility, an unremarkable, two-story structure that Rachel explained was used for operational planning and private training. Inside Stryker was led down a maze of corridors until they reached a small conference room with a table and chairs. Some ten minutes later, a man entered the room and stood at the head of the table. He appeared to be about seventy years of age, trim, and just over six feet tall. His face had a chiseled appearance, hard and unforgiving, with a white scar running from the top of his nose down the left side of his jaw. He had no hair, and his eyes reminded Stryker of a bird of prey.
The man spoke with the same gravelly voice Stryker had heard over the radio, in accented but clear English. “So you are the famous sniper who has killed 163 men.”
“Congratulations,” Stryker said. “I see you can read.”
“You are angry about our little test,” the man intoned.
“You haven’t seen me angry. I just don’t like risking my life for your stupid games.”
The man at last sat and spread out a stack of folders on the table. He flipped through the one on top, which appeared to contain an exact duplicate of Stryker’s operationally classified file. “Your time has not been wasted. Rachel tells me you have been busy hunting a man of interest to us both.”
“Yes, though for different reasons. But you already knew that.” Stryker nodded toward his classified file. “You seem to do your homework.”
“We have friends.” The old man looked up and smiled. “You can call me Daniel.”
“What do you want with me, Daniel?”
“It remains to be seen whether we can benefit each other. You need information, and it’s possible that our goals overlap. Before I can share more with you, though, I’d like you to meet other members of my teams.”
Stryker bristled. “You’re saying my performance on that test wasn’t enough?”
“You’re clearly good at leaping from high places,” Daniel said drily, “but some of us remain unconvinced of where your heart lies.” His gaze flicked to the woman seated to his right. She was fairly young and quite attractive, with blonde hair and blue eyes, unusual in this room. She watched Stryker coldly.
“Rest, Mr. Stryker,” Daniel continued. “We will speak again tomorrow.”
Stryker had been dismissed, and Rachel appeared at Stryker’s elbow. He let her lead him from the room, down more internal corridors, until they reached the living quarters. She showed him an empty room with a bed, bathroom, refrigerator stocked with water and food, coffeepot, and a closet.
“Homey,” he said. “Let me guess—you’re locking me in?”
“We both know you could break out if you wanted to,” she said, sounding almost apologetic. “But humor him, please. Daniel’s been at this game for a long time, since Munich actually, and he’s stayed alive by being careful.”
“I get that, Rachel. I do. I’m still not sure all this is necessary.”
She opened her mouth as if to say something in response, but then she just rapped her knuckles on the door and swung it closed. “See you in the morning,” she said through the crack, just before it closed and locked.
Stryker found dinner in the fridge, and on the bed were tactical clothing and gear similar to what he used during his Special Forces training. After a hot shower, he settled in for the night.
The next morning while he groggily drank coffee, he thought about Rachel and her invitation to come here. His anger at yesterday’s “exercise” had dissipated. He was a Delta Operator, which made him one of the best in the business, but he might still learn techniques from these people.
Just before 6:00 a.m., Rachel showed up in a black tank, cargo pants, and combat boots, her hair pulled back in a tight ponytail. She looked rested and eager. “Come on, let’s get breakfast.”
“And then?”
“Training.”
He knew better than to argue. After a light breakfast in the mess hall, they reported to the training center along with some thirty other men and a couple of women. Within minutes, three tall, stocky instructors entered the facility and ordered everyone to begin stretching exercises.
After twenty minutes, the instructors gathered everyone around a large mat.
Stryker watched with amusement as the first instructor demonstrated a classic blocking move and take-down on one of the students. The instructor then called two names, and both moved onto the mat. The combatants circled each other, and finally one made a move and the other blocked and took him down with a left fist to the jaw. Both were wearing head gear, so no one got hurt except for egos.
After the two left the mat, the instructor pointed at Stryker to come forward. He was a muscular, severe-looking man, and he glowered at Stryker as if the American was something he would like to scrape off his boot. “I suppose you think you don’t belong here i
n training.”
Stryker fought down his rising anger. “I’m here to learn.”
“Then here comes your first lesson.” The instructor rushed at Stryker, which was a bad move. Before the man reached him, Stryker swept both his legs and landed on top of him with his right forearm wedged tightly against his throat. The move happened so fast that everyone gasped. Stryker got up and went back to the sideline while the instructor rose to his feet, glaring and massaging his neck. Stryker glanced at Rachel and saw she was smiling. She gave him a wink and left the room.
The instructor conferred with the other two, about him Stryker suspected, so he walked over to them. His patience was running thin. “Let me save you some trouble. Dismiss the class on a break, and I’ll fight all three of you at the same time. If I win, this training or evaluation or whatever it is will be over.”
The three instructors exchanged glances and a few low words. A moment later, they dismissed the class, and the trainees left the room. Stryker strode back onto the mat and the instructors circled around him.
“We’re not going to go easy on you,” the first instructor said.
“Good.” Before the word had left his mouth, Stryker rushed the closest instructor. The man was startled and twisted away, but Stryker caught him in the side with a crushing blow to the kidney that crumpled him over. He reverse kicked as a man behind him charged, Stryker’s boot plowing into the man’s head and lifting him up off the mat. The third instructor drove his fist into Stryker’s right eye with vicious force, and he saw stars as pain lit up his skull.
Temporarily blinded, Stryker began to back away as his attacker moved forward to finish him. Instead Stryker lunged forward, making use of the man’s own momentum as they crashed together and slammed his fist into the man’s sternum.
The blow was so aggressive Stryker thought he had killed the man. The attacker collapsed to the mat, and the other two started calling for help. Stryker began chest compressions, pumping hard. The man’s heart started beating again. People flooded into the room, and the instructor was carried off to a medical facility. Stryker was ordered back to his room.
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