Saleem stopped the vehicle. He got out and ran around to the passenger side and opened the door. Azim looked at the young leader before slowly lowering a leg until it dangled from the seat cushion of the 4x4 truck. Saleem reached in and grabbed Azim’s sleeve. He yanked the man out of the vehicle and forced his own rifle into Azim’s open hands. Azim’s face was frozen in a perpetually fearful wince.
Saleem wrapped his hands over the top of Azim’s where he held the rifle and squeezed.
“Azim, go after him. Do not come back until you are dragging his dead body behind you.” He ordered.
“Now!” He shouted, pointing in the direction that Rhinefeld had headed. Saleem got back in the truck and turned it around. He headed back to the main building. He lit one of the cigarettes he’d taken from the body of a U.N. soldier and tried not to think about what it would mean if the American made it out of the city. He almost turned around when he thought of the repercussions that such an oversight would bring. But he decided, no one could make it very far in the desert, especially in the professor’s condition. He would die inside a day. He affirmed his decision to allow Azim the chance to redeem himself.
17
Ramallah, the West Bank,
Palestine
Durrah Nejem was quickly becoming a burden. Brad released his grip on her arm and sat her down on a worn linoleum floor. The Defense Intelligence agent had pulled them through an open door in the alleyway. It led them to the common laundry facility of an apartment building. Thanks to the madness that raged outside, the laundry mat was empty. There was a pay phone on the wall, at the far end of the room. Brad left Durrah where she was on the floor and walked over to it. Several of the washers and dryers in the facility were running; he had to be fast. He picked up the phone and waited. An operator answered and asked where he was placing a call. He gave her the number to a travel agency in Pakistan. The front was maintained especially for situations like the one he was in. It was less risky to be routed through a neighboring country, whenever the location of the originating call had to be placed from a site that was hostile to the U.S.
“Islamabad Travel agency.” said the stranger in a choppy Indian accent.
“This is Render Six Alpha…password Moxley.” Brad said into the receiver. He kept an eye trained on Ms. Nejem across the room. She didn’t try to make a break for it, she didn’t even move. She knew the American would run her down.
“I need to be connected to this number.” He said giving the female voice the direct line to Edmond Bailey’s personal cell. Ten seconds passed and the phone began to ring.
The National Security Advisor pulled his vibrating smartphone out of its carrying case on his belt. The number was one reserved for intelligence emergencies only. He was having his morning egg sandwich at his desk. He put the food down and answered. The line was full of static. He had to tell the other person to speak up several times but eventually he heard Brad’s voice.
“Brad, where are you calling me from? Never mind that, what do you need?” The Security Advisor said, anxious to help and guessing that time was probably something Brad could not spare.
“I’m in the West Bank.” Brad replied.
Bailey pictured Palestine in his mind’s eye. The phone was silent for a while but then Edmond spoke.
“I’m sure that I don’t have to tell you that Imam Nazari is going to lift his ceasefire. That’s not a safe place to be right now. What kind of support can I give you?” Bailey asked, instantly putting his desire to know something about the students aside.
“The whole place is imploding. All the signs of a major riot are present. I think we will be reaching the pinnacle of it in about thirty to forty minutes. I’d say, that’s when things are going to turn extremely violent.” Brad breathed into the phone.
As National Security Advisor, Edmond Bailey had been receiving briefings on the Palestinians daily. Now that Nazari had threatened to lift the ceasefire, he was getting the updates by the hour. The high ranking intelligence executive annotated Brad’s opinion on a notepad on his desk and waited for the DIA agent to state his request.
“I need air support to extract a prisoner.” He said bluntly.
“What prisoner?” Bailey asked. “Do you have one of the kidnappers?”
“Not exactly, I can explain later but right now, there’s just no time. We need to get out of the West Bank.” Brad said. The phone line was quiet as they each waited for the other to speak. Edmond Bailey was going to have to make a decision without knowing any of the details. In the back of the Advisor’s mind, a flicker of apprehension begged to be heeded. Jobs were lost and careers were ruined over decisions made on the spur of the moment, though they had to be made in this way much of the time. He would have to trust Brad, someone he barely knew, to be making a legitimate call in extraditing this prisoner. He had to know more.
“Brad, I want to help. I can have a Blackhawk, from Tel Aviv there inside ten minutes. But I’m going to need to know who the prisoner is before I can authorize this.”
Brad thought it over. Durrah Nejem was still sitting on the ground, right where he’d left her.
“The Mossad have identified Saleem Nejem as being the terrorist on the end of the tape that they recovered from the site. My prisoner is his mother. I know Durrah Nejem knows more than she’s saying. I just need time to get it out of her.” He said, certain that Bailey was going to object to his request for the extraction. Edmond didn’t even hesitate.
The Advisor stood behind his desk and thrust his left hand up to a tensed forehead.
“Brad, there is no way that we can pull her out. The media would eat us alive. I’m sorry, I can’t allow it. I’ll get the transport but you can’t board her.”
Brad held onto the phone. He looked at Durrah, his heart sinking with the realization that he wasn’t going to get what he wanted from her. He placed the earpiece back up to his head.
“Right. The best extraction point, as far as I can tell from the ground, is on the top of this building.” Brad proceeded to give Bailey topographical landmarks that he had observed on the way in to the alley.
Brad placed the phone back on its cradle and turned to his captive. As he approached, he tried to imagine what could possibly motivate her to give up her son, or some minute detail about his location.
“Get up.” He barked as he bent over, cupped his hand underneath her elbow and lifted her to her feet. There was venom in her eyes. She probably felt that she had beaten him. She had probably resolved in her mind that she was not going to cave to any tactics he employed. Saleem would not be caught because of his own mother.
“I am leaving. Of one thing I am certain. I will not give up until I find my brother and those students. I don’t want your son but if I have to take him down to get those students back, I will. He will die like a dog in the dirt. Unless you tell me where he is right now. If you make this easier on me and I get those students back before he does anything to them, I will show mercy on him, for your sake. If not, then I can make no such deal. He will die in a strange land, far away from his family, cold and alone.” Brad couldn’t be sure but he thought he detected the subtlest reflex to his emotional antagonism.
“You do not need to tell me precisely where he is. I can fi…” He was cut off in the middle of his sentence. Durrah Nejem didn’t cry or show any emotion, she just blurted out a word.
“Syria.” She spat.
Brad pulled a small pocket knife out from his cargo pants beneath his robe. He anchored the blade against the edge of the plastic zip tie that he had bound her with earlier and pushed it through. The plastic easily divided into two pieces and Durrah’s hands were free. Brad already suspected that the hostages had been taken across the Israeli border and into Syria. But that had been nearly three days ago. They could have been anywhere at this point. If Durrah Nejem believed the students had been destined for Syria, it had to be because Saleem had told her beforehand that he was taking them there. That meant that Syria was Saleem’s fin
al destination. Now Brad had narrowed his search area to some 72,000 square miles. But at least it wasn’t the whole Middle East.
“Go back down the alley, the way we came. Do not look back.” Brad added before opening the rear entrance they had entered through and shoving her outside. He closed the door behind her and stepped back into the laundry mat. He found a stairwell through a door near the wall phone and started to climb it. As he placed each foot on the steps, for some reason, maybe because of his interaction with Ms. Nejem, he began to think of his wife. He tried to shake her loose, so that he could concentrate on the task at hand but it was useless.
He got to the last landing before the roof access and waited for the sound of the helicopter.
Brad hadn’t seen Nancy in weeks. They had officially separated months ago but had both been finding reasons to sneak a peek of the other ever since. Nancy lived on the decommissioned farm they had bought, while Brad rented a small one bedroom apartment up the road. She often found things that were wrong with the house, things that were rarely an emergency but always referred to as such. Brad had been visiting his doctor -who worked in the same building as his wife- with more frequency. Brad was in his office at least once a week with some new ‘concern’. Even though his wife’s office was on an entirely different floor, he’d made it a point to walk by it, sometimes it dovetailed into an impromptu lunch and sometimes it didn’t.
All of the cat and mouse games however, had come to an abrupt halt when Brad had seen Nancy at their favorite restaurant with another man. At first, he had been angry but soon his anger turned to indifference. Currently, he was back to anger.
Nancy had called a few times since then, leaving voicemail messages about broken garbage disposals and malfunctioning hot water heaters. He replied after a few days, suggesting that she call a local handy man. Eventually, the calls didn’t come and he suddenly didn’t need to see his doctor anymore.
The whooshing sound of a helicopter’s rotor blade cut through the silence and brought him back to the present. He popped open the roof access door and looked out into the sky. A lone Sikorsky helicopter hovered seventy feet above the roof. The sun was starting to go down to the East. Brad stepped out onto the gravel roof. He didn’t go near the edge but could see droves of rioting Palestinians as they converged on the building. They took unskilled shots at the approaching helicopter with their rifles. The crew chief inside the Blackhawk threw a cluster of white smoke grenades out of the helicopter before throwing a fast rope repel line out of the aircraft’s side door. The crew chief then turned to a door gun and fired off a volley of nine round bursts from a 240B belt fed machine gun. He fired into the air far above the heads of the rioters, who scattered briefly before regrouping and returning with a staccato of ground fire that threatened the life of everyone on board. Brad raced across the roof to the dangling rope and leapt with everything he had. His fingers tickled the bottom of the braided nylon and he closed a tight fist around it. He hung for a brief second with one hand, before he could lift himself up to hold on with both. Not many things scared Brad Ward. But at the moment, there was nowhere else on earth he wouldn’t rather be.
Brad continued to hang from the bottom of the rope as the aircraft rapidly ascended to a safe altitude; where the shots from the ground became ineffective. At around thirty-five hundred feet, the earth was just starting to look like a paper map and he could feel the aircraft begin to level off. Brad wrapped his right leg around the rope and pinned it between his two feet. Securing a tighter grip with his hands he loosened his hold with his feet and brought his knees up to where they were nearly level with his chest. He tightened his grip with his feet again and stood. Then he slipped his hands up to where they were a couple feet higher than before. He started the whole process again and inch wormed up the long repel line. Once he reached the helicopter door the crew chief placed both of his hands underneath Brad’s armpits from over his shoulders and pulled him into the bird. Brad lay there for a while, catching his breath. He looked outside of the helicopter at the sight below. The rioters looked like a swath of ants moving on a river bed as they concentrated their efforts on the Israeli border again.
The pilot of the aircraft banked hard to the left and headed in the direction of Israel’s capital city, Tel Aviv. Brad picked himself up off of the hard metal deck of the helicopter and stumbled toward the cockpit.
“Where are we headed?” He shouted over the deafening rotor wash. The pilot didn’t turn around to acknowledge the passenger.
“Sit down.” The voice was female. Brad frowned but did as he was told.
The helicopter landed a few minutes later at Tel Nof air base, 18 miles south of Tel Aviv. The pilot exited the aircraft while the rotor was still spinning. She yanked her helmet off and threw it in her empty seat. She turned toward the rear of the helicopter and approached the side door where Brad was sitting in one of the helicopter’s collapsible seats against the rear of the airframe.
“We have been told not to ask you who you are, or what you were doing in the West Bank. So, whoever you are, please exit the aircraft and leave.” The pilot said testily.
Brad didn’t want his presence to be exposed any more than Edmond Bailey did. As a DIA agent that specialized in counterterrorism and unconventional warfare, Brad Ward had scores of enemies in the area. But since the pilot and her crew had risked their necks to save his life, they should at least know why.
“I’m searching for the hostages that were taken from Zefat two days ago. I followed evidence into Palestine. This thing’s personal for me.” He said, reaching back into the aircraft and securing the small duffle bag he had managed to hold onto.
The pilot’s frown disappeared as understanding filled her mind.
“You can catch a taxi inside the city. It will take a good hour to get there by foot. I hope you find them.” She said, turning toward the open doors of the hangar at the end of the helipad.
Brad was surprised that there was no police presence to arrest him. But then again, he had called the sixth highest ranking person in the American government. He wondered if Edmond had had to give some backdoor political concession for the favor or if he had just called on a friend in the Israeli administration.
The crew chief from the helicopter nodded to Brad. The agent looked up and saw two IDF guards advancing toward him. He raised his hands up in the universal surrender and walked toward them. The three met halfway between the helipad and the hangar. One of the men signaled for Brad to lower his arms.
“We will take you where you need to go.” The man said, reaching for Brad’s rifle as he spoke. Brad lifted the hard canvas sling off of his shoulder and offered it to the Israeli.
The man thanked him and said that he would only hold onto the weapon until they were off of the base.
“Do either of you know any of the details on Nazari’s ceasefire?” Brad asked.
The guard that had taken his M4 carbine shrugged his shoulders.
“I know the same as everyone else. The video was released on the internet an hour ago.” The man said.
The two men led Brad through the hangar and back outside the runway fence to the motor pool. They got into an old Toyota sedan and headed north. Brad was glad to be out of the hostile West Bank but he knew full well that circumstances could lead him right back to the place. He would follow any lead, no matter how dangerous. He leaned back in the seat and closed his eyes. His shoulders relaxed and within minutes he was on the verge of dozing off, his body racked with exhaustion. Before he faded completely, a single word entered his cloudy mind…Syria.
18
Azraq Jiden Island
Imam Nazari focused on the dark television screen in front of him. He couldn’t see anything. Technology frustrated him.
“Imam Nazari, you will be able to see an image when the link is accepted on the other side.” Said a small, whiny little tech geek. Nazari knew he needed the IT gurus in his organization but he preferred dedicated infantry fighters; the gritty hard
faced youth guerillas that filled the screens of American households on nightly news broadcasts. Those were the soldiers the Imam truly appreciated.
The thought of ‘rebels’ made Nazari reflect on Ben Schweitzer. The Jewish spy had cut his important speech short by announcing his desperate attempt at escape. It was foolish really. Azraq Jiden was hundreds of miles away from any land mass in the Arabian Sea. That’s why Nazari had chosen it.
The cleric’s tech geeks had deployed signal scramblers all over the island. There was no place that Schweitzer would be able to place a call, except in Nazari’s own private room. Whether he knew it or not, Ben was trapped. Yet, only one of the reporters was accounted for.
“It doesn’t matter,” he thought to himself. “My men will catch them within the hour.”
The giant Samsung monitor came to life. The clean, well groomed face of the American President filled the screen.
Graham Vanderbilt had never spoken to Imam Nazari. In truth, he had never wanted to. But the Hamas commander had become more of a pain in his side than the President had thought possible.
“Imam Nazari, I am sorry that we have to meet for the first time under such regrettable circumstances.”
The President was out of his comfort zone with the cleric. Usually he had some level of acquaintance with his guests and could dally in some disarming small talk before getting to the point. It was rare for the President to face circumstances that forced him to sit down with an individual whom he had no previous association with. In the event that the administration found themselves in such a predicament, droves of staffers were deployed in an effort to gather every detail on the individual so that the President might exploit something to garner a sense of trust that could eventually be turned into leverage. This method, along with President Vanderbilt’s affable personality, meant that he was fast friends with everyone he met. Often as a consequence, people found it difficult to go against him on a given policy. It was a simple but effective political calculation. It didn’t always work but it often reaped huge rewards. Vanderbilt was born to be a politician. He just didn’t know how to make policy or run a country. That was why he had people like Kenneth Paine lurking in the shadows of the White House.
SANCTION: A Thriller Page 14