"There is one among you who will have the honor of carrying this object, both in reality and metaphorically. Does anyone know what this spear is or where it comes from?"
Kefira raised her hand and stood after being addressed, "It conveys the impression of being very old."
"That is correct," said her adoptive parent who was one of the two officers in front of the group. Kefira knew Yochana would be in their class today and had been told not to acknowledge her stepmother in front of the others. A young man that Kefira did not spend much time with raised his hand next. The other officer took his answer.
"It was carried at Masada," said Zak, also not acknowledging his stepparent in front of the group.
"Perhaps it was carried in spirit at Masada, but there is a more positive tale behind this relic. Joshua used it at the tumbling of the walls of Jericho. It is suggested that he carried the laws given down by Moses and this spear as the ark of the covenant was carried around the walls seven times before the horns blew seven times to bring victory to the people. It is also believed to have been used to guard the ark during the exodus from Egypt. Please come forward, all of you. Move the desks out of the way."
The students spontaneously formed two concentric circles around Sam and Yochana, the Generals, and reached into the center to each be able to hold the spear. There was an air of solemnity in the room. Each of them somehow understood that they had been brought together for a higher purpose.
Yochana spoke next. "You are the Vanguard. You will be dispersed over the world and act as the ark acted to protect Jews and Judaism. One of you will become the spear, the one that holds all the others together in a single purpose."
"Where have the missing students gone?" asked one of the group.
"They were judged not to have the strength to continue in training. They did not possess the potency to serve and protect the State of Israel in the clandestine manner that is planned for you."
The two ex-IDF Generals started chanting in barely audible voices. They said two words in Hebrew, meaning 'Vanguard-spear', and began walking around the spear in the center of them. The young people joined in, their voices growing as they turned and reversed the direction. Sam and Yochana broke the trance, speaking urgently:
"Link arms, form two concentric rectangles around the spear. Maintain the chant. Face outward, remain linked. Silence."
The room was electric with energy. Without a pre-planned choreography, they had all followed instructions and performed the movements requested of them.
"You are linked emotionally and chosen to protect Jews and Judaism throughout the world. Today your individual training begins. You may never see each other again, but the words 'spear' and 'vanguard' will link and identify you as you complete your training and are deposited in different locations all across the globe, but mostly in the United States. You will be 'sleepers' with a purpose as old and holy as the laws that came with the Ark of the Covenant. Each of you will slowly enter different walks of life based on your strengths. You will each lead a squad of twenty-one fighters, which you will train with regularly in the harshest of conditions. One of you will become the spear and lead the whole group."
The young people were taken out of the Kibbutz Na'an school system. They met in separate buildings and the nature of their schooling changed to include Krav Maga, a threat neutralization technique that dates back to the 1930s in Hungary, where its founder taught the methods to help Jews defend themselves against fascist groups in Bratislava. Most of them were in their mid-teens, ideally sixteen years of age or older. They spent hours in language simulators, mostly learning English and multiple dialects of Arabic. Instructors in Krav Maga came from the Mossad. They also received specialized training in interrogation methods that played on psychology, using seemingly brutal, though harmless techniques to get confessions.
All the while, psychologists tested for native skills and strengths, with the goal of helping the young people choose careers early that would allow them to travel at will, as it was necessary to their role as sleepers representing Israel outside her borders. Their targeted role was terrorist detection and elimination. In every country in which they operated, the groups had access to false documents, money and weapons equal to their extensive training.
At age eighteen, they were placed in many different societies and cast a large web of agents around the globe, all of them having access to Mossad HUMINT, ELINT, GEOINT, IMINT, SIGINT and MASINT, all acronyms for the various means of collecting information for the use of espionage agencies. Despite all of their sophisticated preparation, the clandestine teams missed the Twin Towers and Al Qaeda. As a result, there were severe budget cuts, and 2003 saw the disbanding of all of the units except Kefira's twenty-one. Zak was also retained and moved more permanently to Mossad Headquarters, making the number of active moles a total of two, attached to twenty-one specialists, regularly trained in and around Israel.
Once she reached adulthood, Kefira lived in California, but used her cover as a professional dancer to return as many as three times per year to Israel to train her group, the sole surviving members of the vanguard. She had become the spear, a surprising turn of events given that she was not Sabra, first generation, born in Israel. This reality was surprising to anyone who did not know Kefira's adoptive mother, Yochana, but totally understandable to anyone who had made the General's acquaintance in security circles. Yochana was relentlessly persistent and heartless in matters of defense.
In 1994, Kefira had her first chance to prove her usefulness. Just before dawn on the morning of the Muslim festival Eid ul-Adha, six Mossad agents, disguised as anglers, including Kefira, entered the port of El Mina, Lebanon, in commandeered fishing vessels. With their catch displayed in shallow baskets hiding tasers, all six fishmongers strolled toward their objective just off Port Saide Street. Her team succeeded in their set task of assassinating a prominent Palestinian leader that they deemed a threat and a terrorist.
OFF SYRIA
March 25, 2012
The water was tepid but flowing in strong currents around the sandbars, forcing the dark, undetectable, amphibious vehicles to adjust their trajectories continuously as they floated silently, cloaking and uncloaking at regular intervals to save battery power. To the unschooled eye, it was an odd flotilla of slightly larger-than-human-size sea mammals.
Kefira knew better as she pulled her own transporter to a stop on the seaward side of a large coral covered reef, not far off the Syrian coast. The device had transported her to the shore where she now sat commanded, via a submarine, by an unseen central military command deep underground in Israel.
The vehicle uncloaked and was visible to the naked eye for an instant as she stepped out of its shell. On her waist, she touched a small hard box the size of her hand. She was now invisible. It took a signal from the central command and then she became invisible to even land or aerial-based radar systems. There was a weakness in the design of the cloaking software. There was an instant of vulnerability as the vehicle and the occupant separated from each other, likely due to a software problem. The vehicle now drifted on its own power back into the water, itself once again cloaked in attack mode.
As if participating in the charade, Mother Nature displayed a colorful natural tapestry around the transporter as it broke below the surface and rested just under the water, waiting for Kefira to recall it. Sea plankton surrounded its descent into the sea in the moonlight, giving the whole scene an ethereal quality.
The commander looked toward the coast of Israel. She checked her compass on her invisible wrist and it became visible, displaying a second bug in the software. Her directional GPS, when activated, became visible. She quickly shut it down, and with its low-frequency, digital signal off, it now acquiesced to the field, becoming invisible again.
This was the most dangerous point of the mission, mainly because it was necessary to break communication silence and step out of cloaking to receive final mission approval. Over the water, she saw it. Her ultra-l
ight, night-vision glasses permitted her to see its glint as it skimmed over the water, guided by the single burst made by her compass.
Here, so near the Syrian coast, any unusual signal was dangerous as the Syrian military was vigilant and paranoid, constantly sweeping the whole spectrum of possible electronic frequencies for out of the ordinary possible communications.
Tonight, though, the Syrians had their hands full as the Free Syria movement repelled attack after attack of government forces in every major city and hamlet in the country. At least that is what Kefira hoped and believed. She awaited her signal. The messenger approached her less than a meter above the water. It was a predator probe, about one meter long and very thin, possessing no radar detectable surfaces. It had the same weakness as Kefira and her vehicle. It became visible for an instant as it used digital signals. These signals were, however, ultra-fast bursts and the window of vulnerability was very small, a danger that more than justified the risk. War is, after all, just a balancing of unpredictable risks.
Her eyewear received the message burst as the small communications-only drone vehicle hovered near her. The vehicle now became invisible again. The video and audio message flashed over the left side of her glasses in the top left corner, allowing her to receive orders even under battlefield conditions.
Her communications with her group were always on the upper right of all of their vision goggles. The phrase, 'we own the night', coined years earlier by American Special Forces troops, especially Navy Seals, had now gone one step further.
Cloaking devices made it possible for properly equipped troops to 'own the day'. Kefira watched her orders unfold as she crunched a high-energy food pellet based on coca leaves, which had been developed by a small, relatively obscure Israeli company during the long battle to control the Medellin cartel in Columbia. She could feel the energizing pulse of the drug coursing through her body. She touched her cloaking device, became invisible, and stepped into her recalled amphibious transporter. When she was inside, all except her head, she tapped a button on her console.
A slightly altered video was stored in the goggles of all of her team. Kefira's voice, a husky whisper, said: "Go" into the ears of every member of her team. A small green triangle flashed in the upper right corner of all of their eyewear or communication glasses. The signal for abort would have been a hexagon flashing red. For a second, they were all visible as the digital message transferred. All of them were floating on the seaside of the small reef, protected from spying Syrian military radar, both by their closeness to the water and the slight rise of the sandbar. This part of the sea was in Syrian territorial water, distantly adjacent to the country that the Syrians called the Great Satan's pawn, Israel.
Today, Kefira's team would threaten a longstanding peace between Israel and Syria, won by bloodshed in an earlier war on the Golan Heights. Once again, Machiavellian logic prevailed, sending the spear into Syria to clandestinely confirm the existence of weapons of mass destruction.
Heads sealed into their craft once again, they spaced out and made their way around the natural reefs in the shallow water. As they turned the northeast corner of the shoal, the stronger current buffeted them all. It was 3:30 am Syrian time. Sharks lazily eyed the vehicles as they passed close to the coral between dozens of marauders and the steepening underwater cliff. Here, sharks had plenty to eat. None tested the silently propelled man-carriers as they made their way to the shore, over the 200-meter-wide gulley between the coral island and the water's edge.
A kilometer out to sea, Yochana sat at the command table of an attack submarine. She was silently praying, a habit she had taken up again after years of agnosticism. Her head rocked back and forth. The submarine Captain, Claude Astruc, watched his instruments. Using GPS, the submarine was monitoring a 6-person team Zak had led into the waters around Syria twenty minutes previous to Kefira's 6-person team's insertion. The Captain tapped a tune he loved on the navigation table between them. He spoke, breaking the trance in the room.
"Three forty-nine. Landing accomplished."
The rarefied air of the command deck of the attack submarine crackled a bit. Yochana and Sam looked at each other.
"The information that Zak extracted from MacAuley may kill us all," said Sam.
"Or save us all," retorted Yochana. "Remember," she added, "They were working together, our stars. They concurred on the analysis. It's not just my word or yours or the word of either one of them. It's all of our funerals if they are wrong."
"I know. I know. It just somehow seemed too easy when I think back now," said Sam.
The captain shrugged unconsciously, mimicking his great grandfather, a French Jew who did not survive Treblinka extermination camp. His family somehow beat the odds and they became Holocaust survivors. Their family line made it to Israel in 1946 to bear an infant in 1947. A child that would sire the youngest Israeli submarine captain of the fleet, carrying on a proud tradition to never let genocide happen again.
As Kefira's group approached the shore, their amphibious vehicles surfaced. They exited their transporters and spread out in an arrowhead-shaped formation on the beachhead about twenty-five feet apart, crouched, weapons with external safeties set to off on their combination dart and live ammunition magazines. They looked towards their unseen target in unison, checked the GPS map guiding them via a blue directional arrow centered on their eyewear, and awaited Kefira's signal on the eyewear. Behind them, directly behind her, their vehicles submerged, seemingly having a life of their own.
One by one, the personal amphibious carriers formed a pattern on the bottom amongst the sharks to the leeward side of the underwater dunes and coral reefs. Essentially, each of the vehicles became a large mammal, and in doing so disappeared on the bottom in a kind of holding pattern, conserving battery power, like so many jets stacked up above the airport of a great city, awaiting the communication of the air traffic controller. The vehicles would resurface to take the team home at Kefira's command upon their return, mission accomplished or not. Their batteries could sustain them in this holding pattern for up to 7 days.
Feeling the pull of destiny, looking from the center behind the waiting arrowhead formation, Kefira prayed briefly, raised her arm as if to throw a javelin in the Olympic Games, then whispered into her communication device while touching it on her vocal chords: "The spear flies."
They left at once, over the salt-flats-like beach near Latakia, Syria. The team moved in front of her, roughly keeping formation, trying not to change the distances between them. She fell back slightly, waited, thinking of all the years of training coming to a head today, remembering that she had doubted her purpose rarely, but still not believing the strength of the symbolism she represented. She was the spear.
Her body melded into the movement of progressing across the rough, arid terrain in Syria and the mission became a kind of tantric meditation. It was ironic that the team moved for her, but that she was the only weak link. If she were not in such perfect shape, her age may have slowed the group down. They moved in this contour because they were on patrol, each protecting the other from a calculated distance. In case of capture, they didn't know their actual goal. They just knew that WMD's that could destroy Israel were stored at the target. It was their job to get video proof of these stockpiles so that an airstrike could be ordered with impunity and neutralize the weapons. Their GPS systems contained only streaming information that could not compromise them if captured.
Only Kefira knew the target. Her breath faltered, but they had accomplished the first leg of the journey. The soft sand of the beach area gave way under her feet to the hard pack and scrub that makes up the landscape in this part of the world. Behind them, the flats of the beachhead gave way to the rising, hilly topography that would comprise the rest of their journey. The terrain was the same here as at the objective. It was only at this early stage of the penetration that she was a weak link.
A signal from the point person meant she had risen to the task. She had succeeded
. The point of the arrowhead stopped and dug vigorously in the sandy soil beneath his feet. He touched something hard. He reached down into the cascading side of the last dune before the hard pack started. He touched his throat and whispered the Arab word for camel into his communicator. He used a local intonation pattern in case someone was somehow listening to them on their special frequency.
Training left nothing to chance. Yochana and Sam were the best of the best in this business. Thirty-some years of work came to a climax today in the dark in Syria. Kefira breathed hard as six bicycles materialized out of the sand. Another insertion team had planted them one day before. The 30-geared mountain bicycles were made of a ceramic-based, nano-enhanced fiber knit from carbon, like the wings of a fighter jet. The bikes' wheels were virtually indestructible. Clandestine pre 'Desert Storm' troops in the first Iraq war had used these bikes extensively.
Again forming in an arrowhead shape, the group spaced and waited for Kefira to signal. The cool night air filled her lungs, now relaxed after the brief pause to dig out their wheeled transport. She sipped sparingly a bittersweet mixture of coconut water and ginger root from the tube beside her mouth under her armor, to counter the effects of dehydration. Her armor was cooled by a layer of this liquid, ensuring both her body temperature and her water content. Her silenced Heckler and Koch submachine gun was secured to her chest by carbon Velcro and easily accessible. The automatic weapon had been specially modified to permit tranquilizing darts as a choice of projectile.
All of them could ride their vehicles with no hands, shooting as they moved. Kefira would rely on her team to do the shooting, though. She was the mind and had to stay focused on planning and execution.
"I'm following," signaled Kefira, using coded eyewear symbols.
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