Shakedown

by Newt Gingrich

  “Have you ever seen Khalid or Ibrahim speaking to this man?”

  He averted his eyes.

  Esther grabbed his throat and shoved him back, squeezing his cuffed hands against the chair, tightening her fingers around his trachea. “Do you know this man?”

  He gasped for air, so she released her grip to allow him to answer.

  “Fathi Aziz, the man with the bomb. I recognize him from television. His face is everywhere.”

  “Where is Aziz?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Where does the Jihad Brigade meet in Gaza City?”

  He lowered his head again and began sobbing loudly.

  Esther shot from her chair, clutched the sides of his chair with her hands, and jammed her right knee into his groin, causing him to scream in pain.

  “Where do Khalid and Ibrahim meet?”

  “In Shuja’iyya—in a house with a green Hamas flag painted by its door.”

  She waved to a colleague who produced a satellite-image map of Gaza City, including the Shuja’iyya neighborhood, one of the largest in the city, with up to a hundred thousand residents, and a Hamas stronghold.

  “Show me the house.”

  Two other Mossad agents pulled Seif up from the chair and cut his plastic cuffs, but remained next to him. He rubbed the red marks left by the restraints and examined the map.

  “Show me,” she demanded.

  He extended his index finger and pointed toward a house near the Shuja’iyya Primary School for Girls, a location the Israelis wouldn’t attack with missiles for fear of killing children.

  “Seif,” Esther said, “if you have lied, you will be taken to prison as a terrorist and executed.”

  “It is where they meet.”

  A hood was slipped over his head as he was taken away. Once he was gone, Esther said, “He pointed to the same house as the other two.”

  It was as difficult for an Israeli to enter Gaza as it was for a Palestinian to leave it. By land, visitors had to pass through the border wall and its military checkpoints. Israeli gunboats patrolled the sea. The Gaza airport was useless, having been repeatedly bombed by Israeli jets. Much of Palestine was a refugee camp; two-thirds of Gaza’s inhabitants were displaced persons who’d fled or been driven there when Israel became a Jewish state.

  The main route into Gaza was at its southern tip, where it shared a border with Egypt. Both countries were suspicious of individuals entering and leaving through the Rafah crossing there. The same was true of travelers in the north at the Erez crossing on the Israel border.

  Israelis entering Gaza had to be cleared by the Israeli army before passing through the border wall into a strip of no-man’s-land, a desolate, heavily mined stretch about a half mile wide. Beyond it was a Hamas checkpoint where all incoming traffic and travelers were stopped and checked. Israelis were not welcomed.

  The last time a Mossad team entered Gaza on a clandestine mission, it had been stopped at a Hamas checkpoint, and an Israeli and three Palestinians had been killed. Hamas’s armed wing, the Izzedine al-Qassam Brigades, fired a dozen rockets into Israeli territory in retaliation, hitting a bus and wounding a teenager. The Hamas rocket attacks caused Israeli fighter jets to bomb “known terror targets” in Gaza.

  If Esther and her team were captured in Gaza, they would be held as hostages or executed as spies.

  Shortly after 1:00 a.m., Esther and four Mossad operatives dropped into a tunnel that, ironically, had been dug under the border wall by Palestinians smuggling goods. On the Palestinian side, they made their way on foot to a badly beaten Ford van with a paid informant behind its wheel. The four males with Esther were disguised as women in traditional black kaftans, their heads covered with hijabs.

  They rode in silence. When they entered Gaza City, Esther saw firsthand the impact of her nation’s stranglehold on the besieged city. Third-world conditions. Open sewage in the deeply rutted streets. Webs of wires strung between buildings, providing infrequent electricity. In the quiet, interrupted only by a stray dog barking, they passed rows of bombed houses, rebar jutting upward from concrete chunks like long, thin fingers. Portraits of jihadist martyrs and free palestine graffiti covered walls pockmarked by bullets. Amid the ruins, makeshift shelters and an occasional white-painted house with bars on windows and doors. Only the minarets rising above the city’s concrete blandness appeared untouched, their red-and-gold spires intact for muezzins to call the faithful to daily prayer.

  “We must not be caught by the night patrols,” their driver said in a soft voice, switching off the van’s headlights.

  “You will arouse suspicion,” Esther replied.

  “No one wants to be visible at night.”

  There were no working streetlamps, only the stars and lights from inside houses. Esther used her night-vision goggles to make certain their driver was true to his claim that he knew the Gaza City streets so well, he could drive them in pitch blackness.

  She glanced up at the sky. Hamas had no aircraft, but Israeli Defense Forces were monitoring their mission from a drone high enough above the city to avoid those beneath from hearing it. The Shuja’iyya neighborhood was a maze of streets, some big enough for vehicles and others only for foot traffic. Esther was depending on aerial surveillance to help guide them through the spaghetti jumble. As they neared their target, a voice in her earpiece warned her that two Palestinian men had been spotted by the drone, loitering outside the suspected Jihad Brigade hideout. She whispered to their driver to pull over.

  He parked behind an unhitched donkey cart. Ten minutes passed, fifteen, twenty, as everyone in the Ford checked the street and rooftops for snipers, knowing they were easy targets.

  “They’re leaving,” the voice in Esther’s ear said.

  She checked her watch. Shortly after 2:00 a.m. At this hour, there would be no explanation for women walking unaccompanied on the streets, especially ones with men’s physiques. On Esther’s command, the men removed their hijabs, replacing them with tactical helmets equipped with night-vision goggles and cameras. They’d already cut slits in their kaftans, large enough for them to conceal weapons underneath the flowing dresses. Esther and two others were armed with Sig Sauer P229 pistols fitted with noise suppressors and loaded with .22-caliber long rifle bullets, deadly at close range but quiet, sounding much like a car door shutting when fired. The other two carried Israeli-made IWI X95 compact assault rifles that weighed less than seven pounds but could fire 850 rounds per minute. They too had noise suppressors, but in this war-seasoned neighborhood, residents would recognize the sounds for what they were.

  Esther guided the driver forward until the van was a quarter mile away from their target. They unloaded, three on one side of the narrow street, two on the opposite, all checking the rooftops. A footpath brought them to the back of the jihadists’ house. Two Mossad operatives positioned themselves behind the two-story dwelling as Esther and the other two continued to the front.

  Esther was the first to duck into the dark alcove entrance. Pieces of lumber had been covered with corrugated sheet metal that had once been part of a roof to serve as a front door. There was no handle, no lock, not even a rope securing it.

  Palestinian informants had watched the house during the day, and reported two men inside it: Khalid Basara and Ibrahim Antar.

  Esther slipped her gloved fingers behind the metal door and gently pulled it outward. It squeaked, and she froze. After a few moments, she tugged it open, exposing a flight of stairs that led to the second floor. That level now served as the house’s roof, its original roof having been destroyed. Esther used her night vision to inspect the ground-floor room.

  “I’m reading two hot spots,” a voice in Esther’s earpiece announced.

  The advanced infrared imaging on the drone monitoring had found heat readings on the ground and second floors, although there was no guarantee the images were human. Hamas had taught its soldiers that hard rubber tires have nearly the same heat signature as humans. On emissivity
scales, people register ninety-seven; hard rubber tires register ninety-four.

  “Could be tires they burn during protests,” the voice in Esther’s ear said. “Use the smoke to hide behind. But I doubt it.”

  “We didn’t come for tires,” Esther whispered.

  The main room that Esther was now entering served as a kitchen and meeting area. Plates on the floor still held food. A heavy cloth served as a room divider, separating the main room from what Esther suspected was a sleeping area. It was where the sensors had glowed hot.

  Esther and the other Mossad operative armed with a pistol moved to the curtain, while the third, with an assault rifle, remained at the bottom of the stairs. He could stop anyone coming down or inside the house from the street.

  This is where their training was crucial. Esther would be the first through, dropping to her knees so her partner could shoot above her. She would be responsible for the left half of the room, he the right half. She listened. Heard nothing. Took a cleansing breath and waited to feel her companion’s hand on her shoulder, signaling he was in position. He touched her, and in a sweeping move, Esther pushed the blanket to the side.

  A man sleeping on a mattress, partially covered by a blanket on the floor. She recognized his bearded face. Khalid Basara—Seif’s cousin. His eyes popped open, and he jerked upward, reaching for an assault rifle next to him. Esther fired twice. His body slumped sideways. Keeping her pistol aimed at him, she nudged his feet with her shoe. No reaction. She holstered her handgun and focused on a laptop computer and papers also on the floor. Her colleague backed out to support the third Mossad operative at the base of the staircase.

  Esther inserted the laptop into a satchel that she’d brought with her. She next inspected the stack of papers, taking every scrap. She was about to retreat when something moved under the covers. Esther reached through the slit in her dress and grasped the Sig Sauer handgun holstered there.

  A naked woman sat upright next to Basara’s corpse, so petite that Esther hadn’t noticed her before under the blanket. The woman reached for Basara’s weapon.

  Esther was too quick for her. Two shots into the girl’s chest. She fell backward. Esther stepped into the main room just as one of her Mossad colleagues was coming toward her as backup after hearing the muffled pistol shots.

  Esther shook her head, indicating that there was no need for him to enter the bedroom. Suppressors and the quietness of .22-caliber rounds appeared to have kept the gunshot noises contained inside the house’s walls. There was no noticeable reaction on the street in the hostile neighborhood.

  “Girl in there with Basara,” Esther whispered. “Antara must be upstairs.”

  She motioned for the assault-rifle-carrying Mossad operative to remain at the bottom of the staircase as she and her fellow pistol-carrying colleague started up it.

  As they did, Esther glanced upward through what had been a roof at the black sky. Esther and her colleague entered the first room, with her ducking low and him high. Trash. Debris. Nothing else. They approached the second. “Getting a hot reading,” the voice of the drone operator told her.

  It wasn’t tires. A man was sleeping on a blanket spread on the floor. Antar. They needed him alive. Esther slipped quietly toward him. Even muffled, gunshots fired in a room without a roof would be heard.

  With her colleague aiming his pistol at Antar, Esther holstered her gun and slipped a syringe from under her dress. With her right thumb, she flipped off its plastic tip, then raised her hand and jammed the needle into Antar’s neck while covering his mouth with her left. Neuromuscular blocking agents, commonly used during surgeries to prevent patients from moving, swept into his bloodstream, causing near-instant paralysis. The Israeli chemists’ compound was so strong that two out of ten times, it killed rather than sedated. Antar’s eyes froze half open. His body shook, then went limp. The smell of his bladder and colon voiding caused Esther to nearly gag.

  She taped Antar’s mouth and, together with her partner, dragged his stiff body to the staircase, where the third Mossad agent helped cart him downstairs. The two operatives from behind the house joined them. Each of the four men grabbed one of Ibrahim’s limbs and lifted him while Esther checked the street. No one in sight. They moved outside and quick-stepped to the waiting van.

  An hour later they emerged with Antar from a Palestinian tunnel on the Israeli side, where a medical team was waiting with a stretcher and ambulance. Now she had to get Antar to cooperate.

  Thirty-Nine

  “The map I saw in Zharkov’s office showed the Virginia coastline,” Brett Garrett explained as he examined an East Coast shoreline map displayed on a table in Director Whittington’s office. He and Mayberry had been brought to Langley directly from the airport. “There were multiple fingerprints found in this area.” He touched the water off the shore in a direct line from Norfolk.

  Director Whittington didn’t immediately react.

  “I suspect,” Garrett continued, “this is where Zharkov’s Romeo-class submarine armed with its nuclear bomb will be heading.”

  “Tell me,” Whittington said, “how many maps did you see on Zharkov’s desk?”

  “They weren’t on his desk,” Garrett replied. “They were on a conference-room table in his private office.”

  “How many?”

  “A map of the Virginia and North Carolina coastlines had been placed over a larger map that showed the Atlantic Ocean.”

  “This stack of maps—”

  “Only two,” Garrett said, correcting him.

  “The two maps were out in the open for anyone to see.”

  “Yes,” Garrett said. “What’s your point?”

  “That Zharkov and his people either wanted you to see them, or those maps didn’t have anything to do with the threatened attack. Zharkov owns the largest yacht in the world. He could have been planning a pleasure cruise.”

  Mayberry joined the conversation. “Zharkov wouldn’t think he’d need to hide them. It wasn’t easy to get inside his guarded office.”

  “And yet you did,” Whittington said. “Tell me, are either of you aware of SOSUS?”

  “I’m not,” Mayberry said.

  “It’s our nation’s sound surveillance system—hydrophones installed at key locations on the ocean’s floor. It’s been around for decades. We used underwater listening posts to track Soviet submarines during the Cold War. Since then we’ve updated it with IUSS, the Integrated Undersea Surveillance System. It’s part of our superior technology, a warning system unmatched by any other nation’s. It’s darn near foolproof. If a whale farts, we know it. It’s that failsafe. Because our Atlantic Fleet is based in Norfolk, the entire seafloor, from the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay extending several hundred miles out into the Atlantic Ocean, is blanketed with hydrophones and sensors. Unless Zharkov’s submarine dug a tunnel, it can’t get anywhere near where you are saying it is headed.”

  Whittington walked toward his office door, where an aide was holding a suitcase for him. “The president is convinced this threat by Aziz is real.”

  “Him and everyone else in America!” Garrett said.

  Whittington frowned. “Based on our analysis of Aziz’s video threats and a computer model that we developed, based on thousands of possible attack scenarios, the highest probability for a submarine attack is the New York area, and that is where I am recommending we focus. I’ll pass along your report, but from now on, you need to leave this up to the experts. Now, I need to catch a flight. An escort will show you out.”

  An agency-provided driver was waiting outside.

  “Leave it up to the experts. If we dragged Fathi Aziz into Whittington’s office and tossed him at his feet, he’d find a way to criticize us,” Mayberry said. “All he ever talks about is his stupid computer models and superior technology.”

  Garrett grinned.

  “I don’t find this funny,” she said.

  “I’m supposed to be the hothead. You’re the one who respects authority,” he repl
ied. “We need to contact Big Jules. Find out if Esther needs our help.”

  “No! Listen, Garrett, the entire Israeli intelligence service and their army are helping her. I’m going home. After I get cleaned up, I’m pouring myself a glass of wine and booking a flight west. I’ve always wanted to see, I don’t know, Nebraska.”

  “Nebraska. We’re being threatened with a nuclear bomb attack, and you want to go to Des Moines?”

  “Des Moines is in Iowa.”

  “I know you, Valerie—you’re not the type to run away.”

  “Garrett, weren’t you listening? Whittington doesn’t want our help. No one does.”

  Their CIA driver arrived outside the Midtown, Reston’s most exclusive high-rise condo building, where Mayberry lived.

  “I’ll call you after I speak to Big Jules,” Garrett said.

  “Don’t,” she said. “Remember? Nebraska.”

  She turned to leave, but he reached out and touched her left hand, stopping her.

  “I think we need to talk about what happened in London between us.”

  “This again? Why? Garrett, it was a high-stress situation. What happened isn’t a big deal. We both said it was a mistake.”

  “Was it?” he asked.

  She stepped from the car.

  Traffic slowed leaving Reston, and an hour passed before Garrett reached his Arlington condo. Through the front windshield, he saw Calvin Russell, his building’s security guard, hollering at the homeless veteran whose blanket Garrett had “rented.”

  “What’s going on, Russell?” he asked.

  “Bunch of your fellow condo owners don’t like him hanging around all the time. I’m supposed to shoo him away, but he’s been refusing to stay gone.”

  “He’s mentally ill.”

  “Yeah, he is, but that ain’t my problem now, is it, Mr. Garrett? I didn’t go to medical school.”

  “You a vet?”

  “Vietnam. Tet.”

  “He’s a vet too. Operation Enduring Freedom.”

  “Didn’t know that and don’t much care. I got a job to do.”