Kardar had never been to the United States, nor had he ever wished to visit. He assumed Whittington was stalling for time. That is why he had immediately departed from Tehran, so he could arrive ten hours before the Jihad Brigade’s midnight deadline. That would give him enough time to determine if the US was serious or playing games. He had no intention of easing the pressure off the Americans.
From his vantage point near the private jet terminal, the Roc watched the four vehicles. He knew the meeting between Whittington and Kardar was being held inside a former plantation near Point of Rocks, Maryland, and the only road there was Highway 15, a winding two-lane stretch of narrow asphalt. Once the Roc was satisfied that he knew this was the route they would follow, he drove his stolen BMW ahead.
The highway snaked through the cookie-cutter housing developments that edged Leesburg before they yielded to lush farmlands. About seven miles north of Leesburg, it entered the tiny town of Lucketts, home to a trailer park, rural school, volunteer fire department, one-story brick motel, and a smattering of curio shops. The biggest draw was a two-story antique store that attracted a steady crowd of Washington, DC, millennials eager to duplicate HGTV designs.
A single stoplight in the center of Lucketts controlled highway traffic. The Roc reached it ten minutes before Kardar’s motorcade. He crossed the intersection and immediately pulled to the side of the road, next to the antique store.
As he exited the BMW, a man hollered, “Hey, you can’t park there!”
The man was in his sixties, wearing a straw hat with an American flag above its brim, large sunglasses, a plaid shirt, and overalls. He was standing with a young couple outside the building where they appeared to be examining old iron gates and wooden shutters leaning against the store’s bright green painted siding.
“I work here,” the man declared. “You need to park in our lot around back.”
“I’ll only be a few minutes,” the Roc replied.
“You can’t leave your car like that,” the man insisted. “Your wheels are touching the highway. People have to drive around you.”
Ignoring him, the Roc hurried across the road toward the town’s only gas station, some fifty yards farther up from the store.
“I’m getting you towed!” the man threatened.
The first CIA escort car was approaching the stoplight.
“People nowadays,” the man grumbled. “Think they can do whatever they want.”
The CIA car had ventured about a half mile ahead of Kardar’s Mercedes-Benz. After crossing the intersection, its driver pulled to the side of the road behind the BMW so the others could catch up.
“Don’t that just take all!” the man complained. “Here’s another one who thinks he can just park there.” He left the couple he was helping and walked toward the Ford sedan.
“You can’t park here!” he shouted, rapping his knuckles on its trunk. “I just told the other driver that. Our parking lot’s around back.”
The CIA officer on the passenger side lowered his window.
“How long’s the BMW been parked here?”
“How long doesn’t matter. You got to move.”
The CIA officer who was driving checked the rearview mirror. Kardar’s Mercedes-Benz was nearing the intersection. “We need to get going,” he said.
“Where’s the owner of that BMW?” the officer in the passenger seat asked the clerk.
“That’s him, going into the gas station.” He pointed toward the Roc.
“The light’s about to change,” the driver said. “Time to go.”
“Hold it,” his partner replied.
“No, we’re going.”
The light turned green. Kardar’s Mercedes entered the intersection, but was forced to slow by the lead CIA vehicle, now pulling back onto the road.
Watching from the gas station, the Roc pressed a button on a remote hidden in his jacket pocket.
The force of the explosion from the BMW flipped the Mercedes-Benz onto its roof into the opposite lane. Steel ball bearings packed around the explosives in the BMW’s trunk ripped into the other vehicles. They tore through the windshield of the Cadillac that was carrying the Iranian security team, killing its driver. Still moving forward, the Cadillac rammed into the back of the overturned Mercedes, propelling it forward into the rear of the lead CIA sedan. Sparks shot from underneath the Mercedes’ roof as it skidded across the pavement, igniting the CIA car’s already ruptured gas tank in another loud explosion, and killing the two CIA officers inside. An oncoming car swerved to avoid the mayhem. Its driver slammed on the brakes and was rear-ended by a car following too close behind it.
Residents from the nearby mobile trailer park dashed outside. Others came running onto the highway from the antique store and gas station. The antique store clerk and his two customers had been tossed by the blast against the side of the building and were now splayed on the road.
The only vehicle to escape harm was the second CIA car at the end of the caravan. Its two officers ran to help.
“I’m a doctor,” the Roc hollered as he darted to the overturned Mercedes.
Locals stepped aside as the Roc dropped onto his belly and peered into the upside-down luxury car. The inflated front, side, and rear airbags had not saved the driver, who was dead.
“Help me!” General Kardar pleaded, held upside down by his seat belt, his head cut and bleeding.
The Roc crawled through the car’s back passenger window on the other side from Kardar. Inches separated them. The hope on the general’s face changed to fear.
“No!” Kardar yelled. He wasn’t supposed to die this way. This couldn’t be happening.
“This is for my daughter,” the Roc said, thrusting his knife forward. “By my hand.”
Whittington broke the news over a secure telephone line to President Fitzgerald. “General Kardar has been killed by a car bomb on the side of the highway in Lucketts, coming to meet me. A doctor at the scene tried to help him, but he was already dead—a puncture wound in his neck, apparently caused by fragments.”
President Fitzgerald’s temper flared. He checked the time. “What the hell are we going to do now about Aziz?”
Forty-Six
Esther removed the heavy bulletproof plates from her vest. It wasn’t only to lighten her load. Early in her military career, a Palestinian sniper had shot an Israeli soldier standing next to her. The bullet had entered his side, passed through his chest, and become trapped by the protective vest. Instead of exiting, the slug bounced off his breastplate and reentered his abdomen, striking the soldier’s back plate, where it was redirected into his midsection. When medics removed his armor, it was as if he had been struck by multiple rounds. From that day on, she’d always detached the plates.
Now Esther and a ten-member team from Kidon, Israel’s most secret assassination unit, approached the farmhouse outside Dera Ghazi Khan in the Punjab Province of Pakistan in the early-morning darkness. It took an hour for them to crawl unseen through a hundred yards of furrows in the wheat fields surrounding the house.
There was no cell phone service here. Any signal to detonate a nuclear bomb seven thousand miles away would have to be done by satellite. An advanced electronic warfare system was being used to jam that signal, and prevent Aziz from carrying out his threat against the Americans.
Because Esther and her team didn’t have the luxury of time to develop and practice an attack plan, Director Levi had pulled one from the past. Operation Bramble Bush had been devised to kill Saddam Hussein when he was Iraq’s president. It called for firing a portable guided missile at the dictator while he was attending a relative’s outdoor funeral. That plan had been abandoned after five Israeli soldiers, pretending to be Saddam and his bodyguards, were accidentally killed during a final drill exercise at the Tze’elim training base in the southern Negev. A commando had mistakenly fired an actual missile, code-named Obelisk, at the men rather than a dummy round.
Lying on her belly, Esther watched the two sentri
es making their rounds outside the farmhouse through night-vision goggles. The house was a two-story, rectangular building without decoration, made of bricks covered with adobe mud. Three trucks were parked near the front doorway. To the north, in the open yard, were farm machinery and a barn.
It had been difficult slithering through the knee-high wheat. Sweat matted Esther’s hair under her helmet despite a cool morning breeze. Her throat was dry. She fought the urge to cough.
The team intended to kill Aziz when he came outside to lead his followers in Salat al-Fajr, the first Muslim prayer of the day. Satellite surveillance had revealed that this was the only time the terrorist left the farmhouse.
Jihadists began emerging, armed with individual prayer rugs and AK-47 assault rifles. Only after the men had formed a line facing Mecca did their leader join them. He walked forward to lead the first rakat—prescribed movements required in praising Allah.
Esther had split her team into groups that formed a three-pointed spear. The outer two prongs each had two soldiers, one armed with a modified Spike-SR, an Israeli-made “fire and forget” guided antipersonnel missile. The center prong was Esther, coordinating the attack. Directly behind her, the team’s sniper and his spotter had claimed higher ground in a treed area. Esther counted eleven jihadists—one short of what intel had told her.
“You a go?” she whispered into her headset.
“Negative,” her sniper reported. He didn’t have a clear shot at Aziz.
“Green light,” she said.
Two ground-fired missiles flew from the outer prongs of the attack spear, their fragmentation charges shattering the early-morning silence. The pellets bursting from them cut a swath through the jihadists. Miraculously, after the blast, two managed to rise to their knees. Both fired their assault rifles wildly. Both were easily dispatched by the sniper in the tree line. Esther could hear moans and cries for help from those still alive and critically wounded. She looked for Aziz but couldn’t spot him from her prone position. Rising slowly from the protective wheat, she began moving toward the farmhouse, half bent over, armed with her pistol.
“We’re one short,” she warned through her earpiece.
“Eyes on the house,” her sniper responded.
Esther had gone about twenty yards when a jihadist lying on the ground fired at her. She slid on the ground like a baseball player stealing second base while her sniper returned fire. For a moment it was quiet, and then the jihadist fired another burst, this time at the tree line where the sniper was hiding. At the same time, a gunman inside the house began firing into the wheat field, pinning down Esther and the others.
Esther spoke into her headset, and a third Spike-SR missile slammed into the upper story of the house. It blew a gaping hole, silencing the jihadist hiding there.
Although they were in a rural setting, three explosions and repeated gunfire would soon draw Pakistani police and military soldiers. “We need to clean this up!” she ordered.
She stood again and made a run toward the farm, shooting at the bodies on the ground, unsure who was alive, who was wounded, who was dead.
“Allahu akbar!” the lone surviving jihadist who’d fired at her earlier hollered, leaping to his feet, clutching a grenade. Now less than five yards away, Esther shot him, sending him face-first into the dirt. The grenade exploded underneath him, his body shielding her from its blast and shrapnel. In that moment, she regretted removing her armor plates. She’d been lucky.
The morning became silent again. She stepped cautiously between the corpses. Human bodies proved surprisingly elastic, and even though the missile strike had torn off the right arm and severed a leg of the prayer leader, the remainder of his torso was intact. He was lying facedown, badly burned and specked with red shrapnel wounds. Esther grabbed his shoulder, turning him over to look at his face and compare it with photos of Fathi Aziz.
The dead man looked nothing like the terrorist they’d come to kill.
She moved methodically from body to body, examining each face. Most were teenagers, about half her age, who’d grown up being fed a steady diet of hatred toward Israel and those who supported it.
When she reached the last one, she realized Aziz was not there.
“He must be inside the house,” she told the others.
She was the first through the ground-floor door, and she immediately heard movement coming from the second level—the sound of an object banging, bouncing down the stairs. Although she couldn’t see it, she knew what was happening.
“Grenade!” she yelled, diving behind a wall. A deafening explosion and a sudden jab in her back. She cried out in pain. Dust-filled air clogged her lungs. She reached backward, trying to touch the wound, but it was impossible to reach.
One of her fellow fighters scrambled beside her while the others unleashed a flurry of automatic weapon fire up the staircase.
“Don’t move!” the other fighter ordered her. He grabbed a piece of metal that had embedded itself and pulled it free. From his medical kit, he applied gauze and tape.
“You’re not wearing your plates,” he said.
She nodded.
They were joined by a third fighter.
“Anyone else hurt?” Esther asked.
“Only you. Where’s your plates?”
She stepped to the bottom of the staircase and gingerly began climbing. At the top, she found an empty hallway. To her immediate right was the gaping hole the missile had blown through the house’s wall. Through it, she could see dawn light appearing. Chunks of plaster and adobe bricks littered the hallway floor. A blood smear. She followed it with her eyes to a closed door on her left. Dropped to her knees and fished a black cable from her pack, which she slid underneath the door. Standard procedure before entering. A camera on its tip gave her an unobstructed view.
Directly across from the doorway was a half-naked man holding an AK-47. Part of his left leg was missing. He’d used his shirt as a tourniquet to slow the bleeding, but it was obvious that he was dying. He’d propped his back against a wall for support.
She checked her photo of Fathi Aziz. It was him.
Through the closed wooden door, she could hear him repeating, “Allahu akbar! Allahu akbar! Allahu akbar!”
Esther slowly pushed the door inward.
It had opened less than two inches when Aziz began firing. His rounds splintered the wooden door but failed to hit Esther and her fellow Israeli fighters, who were protected by the thick adobe walls on either side of it. Esther lobbed a flash bang inside. Its exaggerated boom and blinding light temporarily disoriented Aziz, who sprayed the area blindly until he’d emptied the rifle’s magazine. Esther darted inside.
With her right foot, she kicked his right hand, causing him to yelp in pain as the AK-47 flew from his grasp. She dropped to a knee and stuck her pistol against his chest.
“Fathi Aziz,” she declared.
He glared at her. Hatred. But he made no effort to fight. A strange smile appeared on his lips. She looked at his left hand and saw that it was resting on an electronic tablet. He pushed a final digit on its screen. It was obvious to Esther that he’d been told six numbers that he believed would detonate the nuclear bomb.
“Allahu akbar! Death to America!”
A satisfied look swept across his face as he lowered the tablet and stared up at Esther.
“Fathi Aziz!” Esther said in a calm voice. “You have failed. We are jamming all signals. You are impotent.” She looked directly into his eyes. “Know the last words you will hear are from a Jewish woman.” She fired twice into his chest before pulling back her pistol and firing a third round directly into his forehead. Quickly, holstering her weapon, she photographed him and collected a DNA sample before scrambling from the room.
“Target’s eliminated,” she reported to Big Jules through her headset. “No casualties, and only one minor wound.”
“Can you make it to the drop site?”
“Yes. Leaving now.”
It was now light enou
gh to see a Pakistani convoy coming toward the farmhouse. Overhead, the sound of an approaching helicopter.
The Israelis slipped across the wheat field to where their sniper and spotter were waiting. By the time the Pakistani soldiers arrived, the Israelis were gone without a trace. Only the corpses of Fathi Aziz and his jihadist followers remained.
Esther used a secure satellite connection to send the photos of Fathi Aziz to Big Jules, and he in turn relayed them to Director Whittington, who immediately contacted the White House.
“It’s over,” Whittington said. “The Israelis have terminated Aziz.”
Forty-Seven
“They told us you were wounded,” Valerie Mayberry said.
She’d come to the Norfolk airport to pick up Esther on a beautiful Sunday afternoon.
“A shrapnel gash in my back, but nothing serious,” Esther replied. “Where’s Garrett?”
“He’s out on the ship, along with a Russian—Boris Petrov—the commander who piloted the submarine here.”
Esther joined Mayberry in a waiting chauffeured SUV.
“A helicopter at the Naval Station will fly us to join Garrett and the others,” Mayberry explained. “The station is about a fifteen-minute drive from here.”
As they exited the airport, Mayberry added, “Garrett says the situation out there is dangerous and chaotic.”
“Chaotic?”
Mayberry handed Esther a copy of that morning’s Washington Interceptor.
Naval Experts to Remove Nuclear Bomb
from Sunken Submarine off Va. Coast
By Investigative Reporter Robert Calhoun
EXCLUSIVE!
Norfolk, Virginia—Naval experts will attempt to remove a nuclear bomb from a sunken former Soviet submarine today off the coast near here, the Washington Interceptor has learned.
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