Tsunami Connection

by Michael James Gallagher

  They all started, as much as the topography permitted, to form the arrowhead once again. However, the hilly terrain made this figure more and more difficult. It was still dark, but the sun was starting to make itself felt. The carbon bicycles and riders advanced through the growing dawn over the hard packed surface. The team was not visible. The frames of the bicycles and the layered body armor contained life-giving liquid for drinking. A tube set in the handlebars accessed the liquid.

  Their target was a building complex recently abandoned by the Syrian military and not yet occupied by the militias of the freedom forces, the mujahedeen. It was imperative that Israel take possession of the stockpiles in this complex because no one could predict the behavior of the freedom fighters. They were ousting President Assad, a dangerous menace to Israel, but the mujahedeen represented another threat, possibly more dangerous in the long run.

  Satellite imagery affirmed that the target buildings were abandoned. Knowing, but not caring that Israel was interested in this data, the CIA had unwittingly forwarded the IMINT and GEOINT, or geospatial intelligence made up of information collected by satellite, and the analysis of this information by trained specialists to Mossad. Zak got the data via his mole, Lieutenant Colonel Tallingsworth. In turn, he had notified Sam and shared with Kefira. In addition, unknown to the CIA, was the fact that MacAuley had pinpointed the location for Kefira and Zak while they were in Argentina.

  A whispered phrase, "Camel turds," halted the progress of the group. They all braked and waited, losing precious time. Invisible nothings lay down beside their bikes. The point person, alternated much the way geese change the leader of the flying v-shape, tried to verify possible contact with other human beings.

  "Boy, grazing animals. Hungry," the point person said, meaning they had not been spotted. "Instructions?"

  Kefira waited, breathed deeply, balancing the cost of a life against the mission's success.

  "Water," she communicated a symbol using the eyewear, meaning use tranquilizer darts.

  The sheep started moaning, sensing something in the air. A silenced Heckler and Koch rifle, adapted for tranquilizer darts, let one round out making only a 'pht' sound. The boy fell, a dart in the center of his temple. His family home and his two sisters, father and mother were identified at 500 meters east. The group circled. Sleep was swift. The team returned to Kefira, who was guarding the transports from her position in the back of the arrowhead shape. They again moved forward in unison. Kefira felt proud to be able to save the lives of innocent civilians. The meditation took over, body and movement submerging cares.

  The Bedouin wandered content in their lifestyle. In the home of the Nadji Bedouin family, now sedated, a smoldering cook fire burnt two pieces of flat-rolled pita, barely smoking. No blood drained into the heat of the day, congealing in the dusty hard pack. The soldiers had been invisible as they entered the scene. Though the Bedouin family likely never would have even noticed the passing of the spear, erring on the side of caution dictated Kefira's strategy. All of us will feel safer now, thought Kefira.

  Kefira's eyewear reported in a burst of video. Her cloaking device exposed her to risk as she transmitted to the lurking Dolphin submarine. The submarine was patrolling in international waters with its antenna up to receive messages from the two teams as they penetrated Syria. In a classic pincer attack, the two teams of six highly trained Special Forces troops; one commanded by Zak; the other run by Kefira, converged on the target at a twenty-minute spaced interval.

  Their relative successes would always be a likely predicator of future leadership roles in the Mossad. Mission accomplishment rates were also an indicator of the potential winner of the years-old bureaucratic struggle between Sam and Yochana to be the one to recommend the future leader of the Mossad. An orthodox matriarchy versus an emerging patriarchy guided this struggle.

  In many ways, this insertion of troops was the climax of years of skirmishes between these two consummate bureaucrats. Yochana sent a second heavily encrypted message. It was a jpeg of an as yet unpublished, group military identification insignia patch. A Star of David with a spear altered by the fact that it was headed by the symbol of womanhood, a circle with a cross on it decorated her goggles screen. Kefira shook her head and erased it from her eyewear's memory. She was fighting a losing battle with Yochana. Her growing feelings for Zak, though clouded by a lesbian affair with Michael MacAuley, sometimes interfered with her ability to achieve at all costs.

  ZAK’S TEAM IN SYRIA

  March 25, 2012

  Zak's group rode point for the two teams. Much to Yochana's annoyance, he had drawn the short straw in the Dolphin submarine. They had the same means of transport and were progressing over the hard pack and shrub to a site about eighteen kilometers from the shore. It seemed an unlikely place to store weapons, the logistics of transporting them to waiting delivery devices would be a headache of planning. He had fleeting doubts about his earlier convictions in relation to the information he and Kefira had extracted from Michael MacAuley.

  "Not time for doubt," he thought in a whisper to himself, not touching his communicator.

  They pushed forward, knocking the kilometers off toward their destination. The satellite photos showed stone structures on the surface, an ordinary hamlet, built in the same place repeatedly through the centuries because of the location's proximity to a water source. It was the heat signature under the structure that intrigued.

  How was it possible that all the previous pictures from the 'eyes in the sky' had not identified the existence of a large underground cavern at this place? he thought, pushing on and sipping from his vehicle's supply of liquid. He was depleting his vehicle's supply first to help maintain his body temperature by leaving the liquid in his suit to keep him cool.

  The point man made a perfect imitation of a camel moaning, their agreed upon signal for visual sighting of the target. They all stopped after fifty more feet, also a prearranged pattern. No longer moving, the riders heard the silence around them loudly in their ears. Zak dared not use his communicators, as even momentary loss of cloaking could be disastrous at this point. All of them activated the alternate invisibility devices on their transport.

  Up to this point, they had been effectively using their personal units to conceal themselves and their bicycles in order to conserve battery power. The two lead point people of the arrowhead crawled forward in a pincer directed at the second entrance identified by the heat signatures in the imagery intelligence. They arrived at their destination and started digging, in alternating shifts, on the softer sand while the second operative actively surveyed ground zero, hands on her weapon of choice, eyes riveting in all directions.

  The young woman on guard watched the sand moving away, spread by an invisible force, and despite her training had a frisson on the back of her neck. A large flash vaporized her before she could think more. Her partner, who had been clearing sand from the theoretical second entrance to the underground chamber, disappeared in the same instant. The next two members of the team vanished in the same burst of explosive energy as the ground shook, leaving a gaping hole in the hard terrain that lay under the softer surface sand near the waterhole. Zak and the one remaining member of his team survived because they were partially buried behind the small hillock.

  The brunt of the detonation that killed four members of his team instantly and left Zak and one soldier severely concussed also left a gaping hole in the hard pack, exposing a limestone cavern that the sea had shaped perhaps centuries ago.

  Kefira's point person spotted this gaping hole first, just after the force of the blast knocked her off her transport. The other members of the Colonel's unit, being just that much farther from the center of the blast, got off their bicycles and waited. Kefira's heart pulsed. For the first time in her life, her emotions were overwhelming her training.

  He's gone, she thought, a sob filling her being as training snapped back into force.

  Kefira surveyed the scene in front of her. She c
ursed MacAuley. This had his signature all over it. He had booby trapped the site he told them about in Argentina. It was his sick revenge.

  We were too eager, she thought and then continued reflecting. It was too easy to get that information from MacAuley.

  Kefira had no time for personal thoughts. Her unit moved as one and spread out around the approaching hole in the desert. The third point of the arrowhead patrol formation briefly communicated, "Three friends," signaling at least some survivors.

  The smell reminded her of the day in the Sinai about a year earlier when she lost most of her team. The scars resurfaced. Visions floated in front of her eyes. She knelt on one knee, overcome by grief, then shook herself and stood. She could not endanger the unit by communicating more now. They needed to remain cloaked for their own safety. It was her job to video the evidence. After testing the strength of a peg placed by her second in command, she used thin, ultra strong climbing rope to rappel into the exposed chamber. Her compatriots stood guard. One of them, at a distance, comforted the two unconscious survivors, Zak and his lieutenant. Both soldiers were comatose, stinking of cordite; the explosion had blown off their headgear.

  In front of Kefira were heavy pine boxes. Their labels were in Arabic, Chinese or Russian. The explosion had blown away the tops of some of the boxes. She proceeded to film. Her camera captured a second chamber opening up as she descended a steep staircase made of limestone. She noticed the telltale signs of the bomber. This bomber was an expert. He had shaped the explosion to kill anyone who entered without destroying the contents. The booby trap was very professional. Again, she thought of MacAuley. Shaped charges were his specialty.

  The cave in front of her was visible, because the bomber designed the blast to save the inside of the cave. Then she saw them, the crates for which Sam and Yochana had told her to look. Their markings listed clear indications of their content. It was the weapons of mass destruction, the nerve gas canisters even showed some symbols suggesting radioactive isotopes. Her camera captured the evidence that was needed to justify an airstrike in a foreign country.

  Moving some crates, she noticed a door built into the back of the exposed cave. It was metal and out of place in the dusty debris. There was an electronic keyboard on the lower surface. It glowed green.

  "Lieutenant. Down here. Plastic necessary," she signaled with eyewear symbols, her cloaking disappearing for the time she communicated.

  She heard scraping sounds behind her. Her second appeared. Without any instruction, he applied a small piece of rounded putty to the area near the keyboard and some more near the four places where hinges likely sat on the inside of the door. They both stepped aside and the plastic blew out the door.

  Kefira entered the room, expecting a large stockpile of identifiable warheads. To her surprise, she saw rows of computer consoles and large Chinese-made monitors. She captured all of the equipment in front of her on video. There were instruction manuals, all in Chinese. The purpose of the room was not readily evident to her. She took as many of the manuals as she could, broke open one of the computers and removed its hard disk, and then she saw it. There was a laptop computer near a router controlling a Wi-Fi networking system. She picked up the laptop and stored it under her weapon on her chest, in a pouch specially designed for this purpose. She then opened the manuals and filmed the first few pages, and placed one manual under her weapon belt.

  She signaled "leave" to the lieutenant accompanying her. They returned to the nylon rope and climbed to the surface, having seen the entrance to several other rooms underground. All the rooms contained crates with markings suggestive of weapons of mass destruction. On the surface again, she pressed the part of her belt that permitted encrypted comms with the Dolphin submarine. She relayed the whole video message and signaled on the coded video relay: "Strike."

  It was her confirmation for Sam and Yochana that the cave contained the weapons they had believed it would. They were to look at the evidence and make the final decision about launching an airstrike to destroy the cache of weapons. It was Kefira's expert opinion that they should strike. The Colonel, however, was not a politician. This decision had so many political ramifications that the Dolphin would be in communication with the Prime Minister and the Cabinet. Kefira had something more important to do. She had to patch her disintegrating life back together. Her mission accomplished, she had to get her teams back to safety.

  The reduced stress brought on by reaching the mission objectives washed over her as she groped to get out of the hole left by the explosion. Kefira was organizing their retreat. She knew how she could take Zak out. The bikes were equipped with specially designed, collapsible, wheeled stretchers that could drag the wounded behind them. Furthermore, Kefira could tow Zak's amphibious transport by attaching it after hers. The realization that she might be able to bring him home comforted her. The rhythm of accomplishing that task helped her overcome her uncertain emotions. Her team had practiced this kind of operation many times. 'Leave no one behind' was their motto.

  In minutes, they were striving to move as fast as possible, as the crow flies, across the terrain. Zak and his second officer were unconscious. Later, Kefira and her second officer would tow them behind their amphibious transports. The risk was high at that moment because the trailers were visible. They were too long for the cloaking system design. The riders were still invisible. Pushing to the limit, the young men and women strove to reach their underwater transports on the seashore.

  As they drove, Kefira remembered the video of MacAuley's interrogation. He had kept on saying, "The room. The room." Zak had been unable to figure out his words at the time. She had one more piece of the puzzle. He had given Zak the longitude and latitude of the weapons cache and he had talked about the training room, but having seen the so-called room, she still was none the wiser.

  The smell of the sea brought her back to the present. She had traversed the hard pack with her team. They had switched to alternating carriers for the two wounded as they progressed over the sand-covered limestone interspersed with low, gnarled shrubs. She touched the device that controlled their amphibious transports. The lurking amphibious carriers materialized from their underwater hiding places. The morning sun was already hot.

  One by one, the soldiers climbed into their vehicles. Kefira and her second in command remained behind as the others submerged and made their way back to rendezvous with the Dolphin in international waters. The ex-IDF Colonel attached the towing device. Her second attached the breathing cables and electricity sharing control cables. The two of them carefully poured Zak into one of the vehicles, and his second in command into a vehicle behind Kefira's second in command, and then sealed them in place. They then got into their own transports and prepared to submerge. Just as she was closing her seal, Kefira heard the screech of low flying fighter-bombers crossing overhead at the speed of sound, getting set to launch bunker bombs. Kefira and Zak had succeeded. They had the proof to justify their act of war for the international community. The cost for Kefira was high. She wept the whole way back to the Dolphin.

  MELCHETTE STREET AGAIN

  April 4, 2012

  Bo nibbled affectionately at Kefira's ears. Yochana stretched out on a new, down-cushioned sofa. The color was pale yellowish, burnt orange. Her throw cushions were pure silk, respecting the heat outside. Yochana's cigarette smoke had the same stale, rancid smell that was a part of most of Kefira's life. Kefira had brought her favorite chair from the fifteen-by-fifteen air-conditioned sunroom. She loved this chair because it brought back memories, fond reminiscences of her childhood, except for the tar-filled cigarette odor. The stroking of Bo's beak through her hair augmented these feelings.

  "Put that cheeky thing back in its habitat, will you, Yakiri? We must talk. You have refused to let me debrief you up to now. I am getting pressure from on high to get more info. I can't hold them off forever. It has been almost ten days since the incident. They said I need a doctor's report tomorrow if you don't cough up tonight.
"

  "It's amazing that Bo is still alive, Imma. After you, he is the only constant in my life that hasn't been killed by associating with me."

  "That's nonsense. Don't be so morose."

  "Do you know that in the wild, Kea parrots often live only 5 years? Bo will be 24 years old this year."

  "We built a wonderful habitat for him here. Remember collecting all the things he loves and making the sheds and passageways with rubber edges and breakable parts just to satisfy his curiosity? You were so adamant about challenging him with his environment."

  "Did you know the oldest known living Kea is almost fifty years old?"

  "You're not paying attention, Yakiri. Come to me. Let me hold you. Look at this."

  Yochana opened her palm and revealed the locket that she had given to the orphaned child all those years ago in Greece at that prim schoolhouse on the Island of Anti Paros. Tears streamed down Kefira's face.

  "You're wearing the perfume," she said.

  "Yes, it was your Mother's favorite. Now, you see. You have started the process. Crying is essential to recovery."

  "He is a vegetable. It is not a life. I killed him as I kill everyone who touches me. However, this time it is worse. I didn't kill him. I destroyed him and he remains alive. He was so warm, caring."

  "I talked to the doctors this morning. They informed me that his condition is common enough in cases of explosion shock. Many come out of it."

  "You saw him. You saw the pallor of death."

  "I admit he doesn't look good, but my faith in him is not shaken. He is a strong man. He will recover. You must visit him every day and touch him. Speak to him, my child. Here, put this perfume on and keep the bottle. It is a positive fragrance."

  "Thank you, Imma. I have been talking to him every day. I brought some of his favorite music, too."

  "Smell the scent, my love. It will calm you."

  "I could not live without you, Imma, even though your plans for me have always been too ambitious. You are my connection to continuity, but you did some stupid things," said Kefira, breathing in the luxurious smell of Yochana's homemade perfume.