Pandora's Grave (Shadow Warriors)

by Stephen England

  She took the reins of Kejal from his hand and swung herself into the saddle with the grace of a bird.

  Oh well, here goes, Thomas thought, placing one foot in the stirrup in an attempt to swing himself up.

  Something went wrong—he would never quite figure out what—but he ended up on the dirt floor of the cave, rolling over in a crude approximation of the parachute landing fall as Bahoz shied away in fear, a loud whinny of protest issuing from the stallion’s mouth.

  “What is going on?” cried Estere, grasping the reins of Bahoz in one hand while trying to calm her own mount.

  Thomas picked himself up and stared at her, a hot flush of embarrassment once again spreading across his face. “I—I’ve never ridden a horse before,” he responded.

  “You haven’t?” Her tones were filled with disbelief.

  He shook his head with a wry grin. “Never actually been this close to a horse before, let alone ridden one.”

  She muttered something in Kurdish under her breath—what, he didn’t know, but he was sure it wasn’t complimentary.

  “Let me dismount,” she said after a long moment, “and I’ll show you. And here—give me your gun, we don’t need that going off.”

  10:39 A.M. Local Time

  The Eilat Marina

  Israel

  “It’s been thirty minutes,” Yossi Eiland announced, checking his watch. “Time to shift over.”

  Moving cautiously in the small confines of the hide, the two men traded places, Chaim Berkowitz taking his place behind the bipod-mounted Remington. “I have the gun,” he announced into his lip mike. It was standard protocol to rotate shooter and spotter every thirty minutes. Any longer and field studies showed a degradation in situational awareness.

  He nestled down, pressing the buttstock against his shoulder as his eyes focused in on the scope.

  Suddenly Eiland reached over and tapped him on the shoulder. “We’ve got a subject at your two o’clock. Is that him?”

  Chaim swung the barrel of the M24 around, the cross-hairs resting on the subject’s face. It matched the file photo they had been shown, older, to be certain—but a positive match.

  “We’ve got Harold Nichols at the south entrance of the hotel. He appears to be making a phone call. Do you copy?”

  Gideon’s voice came crystal clear over the comm channel. “Yes. I’ve got Nathan following him. Sarah tried to tap into his cell phone frequency, but she’s not getting anywhere. Our best guess is that it’s the new-gen CIA TACSAT.”

  “What are we looking at, Tex?” Harry asked, looking out over the palm-shadowed courtyard of the hotel. A swimming pool nestled in the middle of the courtyard and it was already crowded with tourists taking advantage of a mid-morning swim. Or splash, which seemed to be what most of them were doing.

  “Hard to say, really,” came the Texan’s laconic reply. “I’ve been on the scope for an hour—no sign of the Israeli agents yet.”

  Harry cast a cautious look back inside the lobby restaurant. “I’ve got one of them on my tail if I don’t miss my mark. Youngish guy, mid-twenties I’d say, medium-build. He’s wearing a photographer’s vest, my guess is he’s packin’. Carries himself like an operator.”

  “I’ll keep an eye out.”

  “You do that, I’m going to call Langley and give them an update. Hour and fifteen minutes till showtime.”

  “Blast it!” Sarah Halevy exploded, pulling off her headphones and throwing them to the floor in frustration. “I almost had him.”

  “Easy, love,” Gideon replied. “What were you able to get?”

  “I ran a trace on some of the diplomatic communications channels that American intelligence typically uses. Sure enough, he’s using one of them. Here’s the thing—it’s a satellite phone, so I can track the satellites he’s using to bounce the signal.”

  “So?”

  “So, I was able to ascertain that he’s placing a call to someone here in Israel. Another couple minutes and I could have run a locator trace on their phone as well.”

  “You’re saying he may have back-up here in Eilat?”

  “Maybe. Just two or three more minutes and I could have known for sure.” She glared at the laptop as though it was responsible for the failure.

  Gideon placed his hands on her shoulders and began to knead the tight muscles there. “Don’t be so tense,” he admonished, leaning over her. “Just relax.”

  “Right…”

  4:15 A.M. Eastern Time

  NCS Operations Center

  Langley, Virginia

  “What’s the latest?” Barney Kranemeyer demanded, arriving in the NCS op-center like a gust of wind.

  Carter looked up from his terminal. “Not much. According to a call we got from Nichols about thirty minutes ago, everything’s still on course. He’s got a Mossad agent tailing him, but that’s to be expected.”

  “As much for his protection as anything else,” Kranemeyer added.

  Carter acknowledged that comment with an affirmative nod. The senior analyst yawned and took another sip from the coffee mug at his desk. The clothes he wore looked like they had been slept in, his tie pulled loose from his throat, the shirt wrinkled like an accordion, his pants devoid of crease, giving him the over-all appearance of a bedraggled starling.

  Kranemeyer stared at the bank of screens filling one wall of the op-center. “We should have positioned more assets,” he stated, filled with sudden misgivings.

  “How?” the analyst asked rhetorically. “What did you want to do, activate Station Tel Aviv’s strike team? The Israelis don’t miss that much. I think we were lucky to get Richards in the back-door.”

  “Maybe so.” Kranemeyer never looked away from the screens in front of him. “It’s important that we emerge from this one on top. This isn’t a game anymore.”

  Carter drained his mug and cast a weary look in the direction of the DCS. “I don’t think you need to worry. Nichols doesn’t know how to play games.”

  11:25 A.M. Local Time

  Crowne Park Plaza Hotel

  Eilat, Israel

  The cleaning cart rumbled down the hall on the fifth floor of the hotel, its wheels creaking ponderously.

  Fayood al-Farouk’s eyes roved from left to right as he proceeded along the hallway, scanning for threats.

  A door opened behind him and he looked carefully back just in time to see a young couple exit, the man’s arm wrapped around the waist of a dark-haired Sabra girl. Farouk smiled. Such would serve him in paradise.

  Five rooms down, he stopped and knocked on the door. The rattle of a chain greeted the knock and the face of a young man stared out.

  “Salaam alaikum.”

  “Alaikum salaam, my brethren.”

  With another judicious glance down the corridor, he pushed the cart inside and closed the door behind them, hearing the lock click into place. Two men occupied the hotel room, both young Palestinians in their early twenties.

  The bag on the side of the cart held a pair of stripped-down Kalishnikov assault rifles and loaded magazines for both. With a quick, cat-like movement, Farouk moved to the balcony door of the suite, pulling the blinds aside just long enough to glance out.

  It was eighty, maybe a hundred meters to the courtyard where he had been told the meeting would go down.

  “Remember,” he instructed, turning back to his men. “Do not fire until our brother has given his life.”

  11:45 A.M.

  “He’s at your eight o’clock,” the voice in Sarah’s ear observed. The young woman withstood the temptation to turn her head in the direction indicated. Instead, she focused her attention on massaging the sunscreen lotion into the skin of her arms, protection against the sun beating down upon her body through the spotty shade of the palm fronds above.

  “He’s coming your way,” Yossi’s voice announced once more through the earbud.

  She glanced over to where Gideon reclined on a pool chair a few feet from her own. He looked deceptively relaxed, the sunglas
ses hiding his eyes.

  “Do my back,” she asked, extending the bottle of lotion toward him. Gideon stood and walked over to her, suddenly alert at her use of the prearranged code. She handed him the bottle of lotion and sat up, leaning forward on the lounge chair.

  “Where?”Gideon asked, his mouth close to her ear.

  “Ten o’clock,” Sarah whispered back. “Moving this way.”

  “Coming in early?”

  “That’s what it looks like.”

  “That would be Nichols,” Gideon admitted with a wry smile. He wiped his hands on the front of his khaki shorts and turned back to his chair, deliberately not looking in Nichols’s direction.

  Sarah capped the bottle of lotion and reached down, unzipping the pack beside her chair and dropping the bottle in, right beside her 9mm Glock.

  She had no sooner finished zipping up the pack than a shadow fell across her chair and she looked up into the startlingly blue eyes of the American.

  “Good morning,” Harry said, flashing a quick smile at the bat leveyha before turning his attention to Gideon. The Israeli commando waved his hand casually and removed his shades. “Early, Harry?”

  “As always,” was the reply. “Still looking for the Messiah, Gideon?”

  Gideon laughed. “Tell you what, Harry. If He shows up and says ‘This place looks familiar’, put in a good word for me. On the other hand, if He hasn’t been here before, I’ll tell him you’re a mensch.”

  A chuckle escaped Harry’s lips as he pulled up a lounge chair and sat down across from the couple. What had started as a joke before their mission into the Bekaa four years previous had become their own personal code. The meeting was cleared to proceed.

  “I’m glad you could make it,” Gideon said with a smile, sitting up in the chair. It was only then that he realized he no longer had Harry’s attention.

  Sarah looked up to meet the American’s gaze, suddenly aware of just why Nichols was not wearing sunglasses. His eyes were weapons.

  She found the expression on his face as difficult to place as it was unsettling. It was not the sort of look a man might typically give a woman. She knew that look all too well. Rather it carried an air of cool, detached confidence. A threat assessment, she realized with a start.

  He broke the stare after a long, awkward moment and when he next spoke, it was to address Gideon. “Would you tell your lady friend to get rid of the wire?”

  Laner just stared back at him for a moment, a look of disbelief on his face. Then he started laughing. “Take it off, Sarah.”

  Harry held out a hand as the woman removed a tiny earbud headset from her right ear. She shot a look at Gideon as though awaiting orders. He nodded, and she placed the small headset in Harry’s palm.

  “May I ask how you noticed?” Gideon asked, still chuckling.

  “You may,” Harry replied, placing the earbud on the concrete of the courtyard and casually crushing it with a downward thrust of his foot, “but I’m not going to tell you.”

  “Fair enough,” Gideon agreed, glancing over at Sarah. Her attention was still focused on Nichols, the expression on her face somewhere between anger and annoyance.

  “Now, let’s get down to business,” Harry continued, “why did you ask to meet with me?”

  “I think we have something you want. And you have something we need.” Gideon paused for a moment, well aware of the ambiguity of his statement. It was only the opening dance.

  “Is that so?”

  11:53 A.M.

  “Do we have two? I know, I know—but we need two,” Farouk protested, the cellphone tight against his ear as he moved along the promenade.

  “Hold off a few more minutes—maybe the other American will show up. Yes, we must get both of them. No, you may not. Move on my command only.”

  11:55 A.M.

  “And what would be the nature of this exchange you speak of?”

  Gideon looked across at Harry, aware that he must answer the question, and quickly. This was poker—sometimes you needed to play it close to the vest, sometimes you needed to bluff—let the other fellow believe you were holding a full house.

  Time to bluff. “Five days ago, you took a CIA strike team into the Alborz Mountains of Iran. Your mission: to rescue an international team of archaeologists.”

  The American’s expression didn’t change. For a moment Gideon wondered if he had even heard the statement.

  “That a fact?” Harry asked, his face slowly breaking into a grin. “It’s always fascinating to hear the stories of what I’ve not done.”

  He leaned forward in his chair, staring intently into Gideon’s face. “Listen, you need something, so why don’t you cut the bull and tell me what it is?”

  Harry watched the Israeli’s eyes, clearly reading the struggle there. A child ran between their chairs, chasing an over-sized beach ball, and the conversation fell silent for a moment.

  A few hundred meters down the street, a Jeep Grand Cherokee pulled out of traffic and parked near the entrance to the resort, almost seeming incongruous among the expensive European cars that swarmed the waterfront. Harry took note and logged it away before turning his attention back to the matters at hand.

  “Dr. Moshe Tal,” Gideon began slowly. “He was the leader of the team of archaeologists I mentioned.”

  Harry nodded, his face betraying no signs of recognition.

  “Tal was an archaeologist, but he was also a patriot. And a Mossad agent.”

  “Was?” Harry asked, moving with caution. “Tal has died?”

  Laner shook his head. “No. He was sent into Iran to excavate the ancient city of Rhodaspes. That was his cover. In reality, he was in communication with the Ayatollah Isfahani, helping subvert the Shirazi government.”

  “The Supreme Leader?”

  “The same. There are—there were rifts to be exploited. The potential for actionable intelligence, if not regime change on a massive scale.”

  The Jeep was still parked in the same place, Harry noticed, a sense of disquiet growing inside him. Something didn’t seem right. From where he sat, he could see the driver out of the corner of his eye, still seated behind the wheel. He hadn’t moved.

  There were no passengers.

  “May I ask why it had to be Tal?” he asked. “Why did he need to be in-country?”

  “Isfahani has a passion for archaeology that is only surpassed by his love of Persia. It was necessary to place Dr. Tal inside Iran so that they would have a reason for communication.”

  “Code, I take it?”

  “To be sure. And something went wrong,” Laner added.

  “I see.”

  “We lost all contact with the archaeologists on the 13th, after an odd distress call was received from Tal. As you know, satellite imagery showed the Iranian Revolutionary Guards setting up a base camp on the plateau near the dig.”

  Harry’s face didn’t change, though inside he was chuckling. The Israeli had lost none of his wiles. “How would I know that?” he inquired innocently, casting a sideways glance toward the entrance of the resort. The Jeep was still there. The driver still inside.

  “As you said earlier, Harry, let’s cut the bull,” Gideon replied, his voice level. “You know I’m right.”

  “I know you’re fishing,” came the reply. Harry held up his hand as the Israeli started to continue. “I know this is a sensitive question, but—”

  “Since when has that stopped you?”

  “First off, you didn’t tell me that you would have surveillance teams in place, shadowing my every movement.”

  Gideon laughed. “I would have considered it an insult to your professionalism to have done so. You know the score.”

  “That I do,” Harry replied evenly, gesturing with a quick jerk of his head. “Tell me, the guy in the Jeep, is he one of yours?”

  Laner looked toward the entrance of the Crowne Park Plaza resort, his eyes narrowing as they focused in on the parked vehicle. “No. Been there for awhile?”

  �
��Long enough to make me uncomfortable,” Harry replied.

  The two men exchanged glances, an almost telepathic communication. “Sarah,” Gideon began, turning his head toward her, “be a love and get Yossi on the phone.”

  Sarah nodded and reached over to where her cover-up lay on the chair, extracting a satellite phone from a pocket of the robe.

  “Everything going all right?” Yossi asked, motioning for Chaim to take the gun. “We got worried when your comm unit went off-line.”

  “The American spotted the wire,” Sarah replied, irritation in her voice. “We may have a problem–I need you to scope out the entrance. See the Jeep there about fifty feet from the entrance?”

  Sarah listened for a couple moments, then turned off the phone. “The driver is a young Arab, probably late teens, early twenties. Yossi says he keeps looking down, as though he’s checking his watch.”

  “Fits the profile,” Harry said finally.

  “Yossi says they can take him out if you give the word,” the young woman added. “Chaim’s got a clean shot.”

  Gideon shook his head. “We need more than that. Send Nathan over to check it out. Why don’t you go along to provide back-up,” he amended, after a moment’s thought.

  Sarah nodded, pulling on the robe over her swimsuit. Harry cleared his throat, an odd grin spreading across his face. “Why don’t you take your handbag? Might not hurt to have that Glock.”

  She opened her mouth to speak, then apparently thought better of it, shooting Harry a dirty look.

  12:11 A.M.