SANCTION: A Thriller

by S. M. Harkness

  The one who had asked the question recoiled at the response and turned his face from the captain as he passed them on the deck.

  “No.” He murmured.

  “Get inside and check the engine, it needs fuel.” He ordered brashly.

  Ben moved through the water toward the main walkway. He swam the length of the deck in search of a spot where he could get a glimpse of the group above them and access how the situation had changed. He doubted these men were aware of the scuba equipment inside the yacht but if they were, and one of them looked inside the engine room, things were liable to get bad quick. He found a vantage point at the opposite end of the walkway where the main deck merged with a smaller shoot that bordered a slip. He slowly popped his head out of the water and looked around. His eyes found the captain first. He watched him for a couple minutes as the man rummaged through a pallet of spare engine parts while he waited for the men to prepare the boat for its next run.

  Twenty minutes passed before the pilot of the catamaran was able to venture back into her and taxi out of the garage. Ben waited an additional five just to be safe and then swam out from under the deck. He helped Emily up onto the walkway. Her knees buckled slightly as she stood for the first time after treading water for nearly half an hour. Ben caught her and sat her down on the deck. “Wait here and rest.” He said quietly. “Massage your calves with your fist.”

  “What about the tanks?” She said, with a hint of nervousness.

  “We’ll get them when we’re ready.”

  Emily sat on the deck driving her palms into her calf muscles trying to release the cramped knots that had formed. She watched as Ben gathered tools and hardware from all over the garage to use in a plan only he himself knew. The Israeli disappeared into the yacht once more.

  Ben quickly made his way back to the engine room and then to a tiny closet where he could access the craft’s one control cable. He placed a breaker bar on a bolt that connected the steering linkage of the yacht’s rudder to the wheel in the control center. After several straining pulls the bolt gave and slowly started to spin. Once completely loose, he set the bar down and ran the bolt off the rest of the threads by hand. The steering linkage came undone and he laid it on the ground.

  Schweitzer grabbed a spare mooring line from behind the huge inboard engines and left the room for the last time. Outside the yacht, he walked over to a control button box that was suspended from one of the steel rafters by a tether and pressed one of four directional arrows. A pair of lifting straps began to tighten around the hull until the craft’s water line started moving upward. A low whine growled from the overhead crane as it lifted the craft from the water. Ben held the button until the hull was fully exposed.

  As a reporter, Emily would normally have taken the opportunity to chronicle the danger they were in and the crazy events that had occurred. But she was acutely aware of the fact that she might not be getting home and wanted to devote every ounce of her mental faculties to getting off the island. She would worry about capturing, ‘the story of a lifetime’, if and when she survived.

  “I think it might work.” Ben said.

  “What may work?” She asked, desperately hoping in the details of his plan.

  “I detached the steering linkage from the rudder, which controls the way the boat turns. I’m going to attach the mooring line to opposite ends of the rudder assembly via the pry bar which I’ll somehow wedge into the top of the rudder. Once I anchor the line to this bar, I will be able to pull back on one end or the other, turning the rudder from underneath the boat with the line.”

  “I don’t understand. Why can’t we just drive it the way it was designed?” Emily asked, as she tried to imagine what he’d just said.

  “Because they’re looking for us. That catamaran is patrolling this island.

  When they spot us, and they will, they’ll run us down. They will shoot enough holes in this cabin to make identification of our bodies impossible and we don’t have the firepower to get into a gun battle.” Ben said, sitting down on the deck. He undid the laces to his shoes and tossed them into the open cockpit of the speedboat.

  20

  Azraq Jiden Island

  Imam Nazari looked at his second in command. Hassan Bishara was pretending to be interested in his watch.

  “It shouldn’t matter to you what time it is.” Nazari said finally.

  Bishara looked up, his indifference hidden well. He really didn’t care if the Israeli spy had escaped the auditorium. Where could he go? They were in the middle of the Arabian Sea. There wasn’t a dry stick of land within two hundred miles of Azraq Jiden Island. The man had nowhere to go.

  “What do you want me to do?” Bishara asked, dropping his hands down to his sides.

  “Hassan, I know that you think this is not important. I know that you think nothing can go wrong. But you haven’t been in this position before. I have. Something always goes wrong. Until the first shot is fired, we can’t give the slightest nod to our true plans. What do you think the Israeli agent plans to do if he can gain his freedom? Let me tell you. He plans to report to his superiors. Though they are our enemy, it does not benefit us to lie to ourselves about their strengths and weaknesses. If Ben Schweitzer were able to get ahold of someone in the Israeli state department, we would lose momentum and the whole plan would shift. I won’t risk that just for the sake of laziness.” Nazari said.

  “Again, what do you want me to do?” Bishara said stiffly.

  “Find him, now.” Nazari growled through his teeth.

  Bishara didn’t offer a reply but simply headed for the door to the bedroom in Nazari’s rented house.

  “Oh and Hassan. What did you decide to do with the gift from Uzbekistan?” Nazari questioned.

  “I’m going to put it in the water supply.” The younger man said as a matter of fact.

  Even for Nazari, a true radical, the measure seemed extreme. But he not only understood the point in Bishara’s plan but approved of it.

  “Good, just make sure all of our men know about this before we do it. We don’t want to impact our troops deploying our own weapon.” Nazari replied.

  Nazari walked over to the edge of his bed as the door to his bedroom shut behind Bishara. The Hamas leader appreciated many things about the island. On it, he needed little protection from his guards. The night before he had walked along its garden paths by himself. It was perceivably the last time he would have such seclusion and solace. The face of the world was about to change, at which point, Imam Nazari would become a hunted man.

  Sabha, Jordan

  Brad shifted the faded green BMW into neutral and stepped on the brake. The old engine sputtered and hesitated before it dropped down to four hundred RPM’s, where it struggled to keep running. The line at the border crossing in front of him stretched for a quarter of a mile as it snaked between piles of hastily stacked sandbags. In Ward’s possession were a forged passport, Jordanian driver’s license, three thousand dollars and a .40 caliber hand gun–which he had tucked into his waistband between several layers of traditional robes.

  Unofficially, Syria didn’t allow anyone to cross from Israel into their country. Officially, they had no policy on such matters but everybody knew better than to try. Even if you simply had an Israeli stamp on your passport, you weren’t likely to escape hours of intense scrutiny. The only other way to enter the Arab state by ground was to pass through a neighboring land, Jordan being the easiest and therefore preferred point of access.

  Brad pulled out his cell phone and dialed the number to the safe house in Bahrain. After he was cleared through the usual security measures, Tom Kingsley came on the line.

  “Brad, where are you?” Kingsley asked. His voice a mixture of surprise and relief. He hadn’t expected Brad to make it. The West Bank had virtually exploded after he and Efran had left.

  The violence in Gaza and the West Bank had been plastered all over the local and national news networks with Al Jazeera carrying it twenty-four hours a day. Pa
lestine had once again become the top story and focal point of global concern. The kidnapping of American college students had become a byline that was hardly worth mentioning.

  “I’m just east of a village called “Umm BinJimal”. I’m about to cross into Syria.” Brad said.

  “Are you kidding me? I’m looking at more sat photos right now. Saleem headed northeast toward Mt. Hermon before turning south. Brad, that’s all the satellite grabbed before it was out of range but he’s definitely in Syria. My guess is he’s either holed up somewhere in As Suwayda or Quneitra. I’m betting one of those cities will be pay dirt.” Kingsley said. The Green Beret knew that Durrah Nejem had to have given the lead on Syria to Ward but he didn’t want to know what he’d done to get it, so he didn’t ask.

  Brad hadn’t spent much time in Syria during his tenure with the DIA; the cities Kingsley mentioned were not familiar to him. He opened the car’s glove box, hoping to find a map. There was nothing but a few spotty maintenance records and flashlight batteries.

  “Which is closest?” He asked.

  Kingsley had a map of the Syrian desert unfolded in front of him. After a few seconds of searching, he found the point where Brad was.

  “You’re about fifteen miles south of As Suwayda and seventy from Quneitra. I’d head north to As Suwayda.”

  Brad put the car back into first gear and inched forward as the truck in front of him pulled ahead. Several camels loaded in the back of the truck lurched rearward, crashing against the gate. He flipped his passport open and laid it on the top of the car door as he got closer to the checkpoint.

  “You know, Quneitra is an abandoned city. If I were Saleem, I would take my hostages there. But the United Nations patrols that place daily. Still, it’s worth looking into.” Kingsley said.

  “Thanks Tom. Hey, I’m glad you guys left the palace.” Brad said in Arabic. He didn’t want anyone near the checkpoint to hear him speaking English. ‘The Palace’ was a coded reference to Palestine, again, used for discretion.

  “Same here buddy. When this is over, you’ll have to tell me about your little adventure.” Kingsley replied.

  Brad thanked Kingsley for sticking his neck out and hung up the phone.

  At the checkpoint he got a simple once over and was allowed to pass through. Brad put the passport away and slid the pistol out from beneath the folds of his robe once he’d put a safe distance between himself and the checkpoint. He laid the gun on the seat next to him and rolled down the passenger window. The German car bounced along a paved blacktop on worn springs as it headed into the Syrian desert. As far as the eye could see the earth was brown and tan, made permanently infertile by the burning Arabian sun.

  Brad had some time before he got to As Suwayda. His thoughts soon began to drift to his wife.

  He was remembering a trip they had taken to Aspen. It was his favorite memory of the two of them. Neither of them were avid skiers but they both had a love for the outdoors. It was a great vacation, the first one they had taken in their marriage. He tried to think of where they had gone on their honeymoon but kept remembering Aspen.

  He scoured the deepest channels of his memory but couldn’t recall a honeymoon. He couldn’t remember any other trips either. Then, in a flash, he saw himself standing in line at Heathrow airport. He was investigating a Saudi National in one of the London Boroughs. The man was a cleric and one of the 1300 professors that had been disavowed by the Saudi Royal Family after a vicious terrorist attack in their homeland. The investigation into the professor was a multi-faceted venture between the British government, INTERPOL and the DIA. The guy had been saying some pretty radical things but in the end proved to be nothing but hot air.

  Brad had forgotten about that being the day after his wedding. He was forced to leave Nancy in the middle of the night in order to be in London the following day. He remembered the overwhelming feeling that interrogating the professor would lead to stopping a terrorist attack. He remembered the intensity of the moment when he’d gotten the call from his superior at the Agency. At the time, nothing else was more important than getting to London. Even Nancy had felt the same way. Of course, had either one of them known it was merely a precursor to the way their lives together would be lived, perhaps they would have felt different about London and all the other last minute excursions to far off lands. Perhaps, things could have been different between them.

  “Hindsight.” He said aloud in the empty car.

  Thinking of the situation as being out of his control was a mechanism for justifying what he knew to be a poor decision. He should have stayed with his bride. It was much easier to think that he was just doing the “right thing”, no matter how painful, than to think that he had sacrificed his marriage a thousand times for his job.

  Sand drifts covered parts of the road Brad was traveling. Every once in a while he would hit a small pile of it and his back tires would lose traction and fishtail out to the side a few inches. He stayed on the accelerator regardless.

  After a half hour, the first buildings of As Suwayda started to come into view. The town was small, with a population of less than 10,000. It wouldn’t be too difficult to find his brother and the students, if they were there. Human nature prevailed where cultural differences divided; small towns were prevalent to loose lips.

  He drove the BMW into the town and quickly found the city’s small business district. Open air shops lined both sides of the street making it difficult to maneuver the car. He parked on the side of the adjacent road and slipped the pistol back under his robe. He walked the length of the market slowly, taking in his surroundings.

  Most of the transactions that were taking place were between neighbors. Brad overheard one man offering a lamb to another for the price of a new window for his house. The two brokered an equitable deal and the goods were exchanged. This meant that cash, specifically American currency, was extremely valuable. The dollar, in towns like these, was worth as much as two to three times what is was valued at by the same country’s national bank.

  Brad combed through the shops pretending to be interested in the items that the vendors were hawking. What he was really doing however, was listening for the loudest loudmouth on the block. That’s who he wanted to talk to.

  Brad had traversed almost the entire length of the merchant corridor before he found the group’s self-proclaimed Alpha Male. Unlike the others in the crowded square–who concentrated on one or two particular goods or services–this man was selling everything from VCR’s and used mattresses to soap and American candy bars.

  Brad looked at the candy, suddenly noticing his stomach was churning violently. He couldn’t remember the last time he had eaten. As he approached the man’s table he pulled a twenty dollar bill out of his pocket and laid it on the surface. He pointed to the candy bars.

  “All of them.” He said in Arabic and a perfect Middle Eastern accent.

  The man’s broad smile disappeared. He didn’t appreciate Brad’s attempt to subvert the ubiquitous and often timely negotiations ingrained in Arab culture. What Brad had offered was, in fact, far above the value of the twelve candy bars but traditions were traditions.

  “I will give you half of these bars for that.” He countered.

  Brad reached for the twenty and said. “They aren’t worth nearly what I am offering and we both know it.”

  The man made some grunting noises before placing his hand on the other end of the twenty and pulling it back.

  “That is an acceptable bargain. These are fresh from America.” He exclaimed with a jubilant grin.

  “I doubt that.” Brad thought to himself.

  “And this is for information.” Brad said as he passed a one hundred dollar bill across the merchant’s table. The man looked suspicious but quickly laid his hand on it.

  “What kind of information?” He asked. He held his ample belly over the edge of the table scratching it with his other hand, as if this helped him think.

  “I need to know about the college student
s.” He said loud enough for the neighboring vendors to hear him. If they were apt to lie, their knee jerk response to the mentioning of the hostages would tell him more than they would. At first the man hesitated, he looked as if he had no idea what Brad was speaking about but then his eyes rolled up toward the sky as if he was searching his memory. He looked down at Brad without lowering his upward tilted head.

  “You mean the ones taken from Israel?” The man asked.

  Brad looked at the men in the booths to his left and right. They were paying close attention to their conversation now, straining their heads to get within earshot of their fellow Syrian’s reply without appearing interested.

  “Yes, the American college students that were abducted from Zefat.” Brad answered continuing to watch the men on either side of the fat boisterous Arab.

  “What was that…three days ago?” The man asked.

  “Yeah, know anything about it?” Brad questioned again.

  “No.” He said finally and whipped the hundred off of the table. He stuffed the bill into his shirt pocket. The man began to fiddle with some of the smaller items for sale on his table, signaling that he wasn’t planning on talking with the DIA agent any further.

  Brad placed another hundred before him but this time kept it wedged between his palm and the purple cloth that was spread over the table’s length. He placed his other hand next to it and leaned in toward the man.

  “What is your name?” He asked almost whispering.

  The man smirked and looked down at the bill. His face melted back into the same phony smile.

  “Abbas.” He said, with pride. It meant ‘Lion’ in Arabic, a name he felt fit him perfectly.

  “Well Abbas, I need that information. I have plenty more of these.” He said looking down at the hundred.

  “Tell me where they are and you will be rewarded handsomely.” Brad said. Again he made sure the merchants at the surrounding tables could hear him. The men closest to Brad and Abbas were no longer pretending not to be listening to their conversation, with the injection of large bills, they now stared openly.