It sounded to Marshall as if the group had stopped and that the men were digging. He started to get closer but he could see no possible hiding places in case they turned around and came back. He stopped and listened. The men were still working. Then he heard them coming back toward him and he backed up. As he passed the steps, another group of men came down and they called out to him in Arabic in low voice. He hurried away past the steps along the beach. The man who had called out to him from the steps stopped once he reached the beach and looked in Marshall’s direction, hesitated, then walked away from Marshall toward the digging.
Now Marshall was trying to put some distance between him and the voices. But before he reached the steps to the main parking lot, he heard running steps behind him. He ran up the steps and heard the steps getting closer. He decided that the legs chasing him were younger and faster than his, and he jumped off the stairway, listened, and went back down toward the beach along the rampart.
Supporting beams were jutting out of the old wall and he lowered himself onto one, then another, and then dropped to the beach. He hoped his pursuers would continue into the parking lot and assume he had driven out. However, he realized that another person had stopped and was looking down in his direction. He froze at the base of the wall. He stayed there a minute without hearing any sounds above to indicate his pursuer’s intention or direction. He moved to the right, away from the suspicious group and heard one man calling the other above him. They were coming down to look for him.
He first ran farther to the right but knew they would catch him in a footrace, so he headed for the water’s edge and entered the shockingly cold Mediterranean. He submerged himself completely and pulled himself along the bottom toward deeper water.
He was about thirty yards out when he heard the popping sound of a small-caliber weapon outfitted with a silencer. He submerged completely and swam for his life toward deeper water. He hadn’t heard the bullet’s splash and wondered if the shot had been fired at random or at him when he surfaced.
He changed direction and swam parallel to the beach before surfacing again. As soon as he came up, he felt the sting of a bullet hit him in the shoulder, above the left collarbone. He was running out of breath but submerged again and tried to swim a few yards before he was forced to come up for air. His left arm suddenly was useless. There was no more shooting. He looked toward the beach but could see nothing except the black outline of the ramparts. If his pursuer was on the beach, he couldn’t see him. Perhaps he was kneeling. He tried to swim again, realized he was going against a light current and turned on his back. He floated with the current toward the area of the digging.
45. Gaza
Rashid visited Karim in his make-do hangar, an old warehouse used by a grocery store chain in the days when the Israeli border was open. For several weeks, they had been assembling the UAVs that Hamas had brought from Egypt through the tunnels.
Rashid’s message was simple.
“Karim, I want the planes technically perfect by noon tomorrow and fueled by 4:00. We’ll be up most of tomorrow night, and the next morning it will be show time.”
The next night, under orders from Hussein not to reveal the final details until the last possible moment, Rashid briefed Karim in the Gaza City apartment where they had been living.
“We have two targets and separate takeoff points. The dispersal will increase our security. Everything has to be ready by 4:00 a.m. tomorrow. This is what we’ve been working for all these months.”
There was knock on the door and a key turned in the lock. Mahmoud Salah walked in. He could see that Rashid had started to brief Karim.
“Go ahead, go on,” he said, as he pulled up a chair to the table Rashid and Karim were using. Papers and maps were on the table, as well as cups, a teapot, and a plate of sugar-coated cookies.
Rashid continued, “My target is Palmachim Air Base near Yavne, just thirty-four kilometers away. It is a base for helicopters, UAVs, and the Arrow anti-ballistic missile. Karim, my mission is to support your strike against the actual target, a secret defense installation south of Palmachim and close to the Nahal Soreq Nuclear Center. You will enable al Khalil’s fighters to take the objective. They plan their assault as soon as possible after sunrise to give you enough light to see. Tomorrow, sunrise will be at 06:20. I want you to be over your target as soon as possible after sunrise but no later than 06:40. Mahmoud has a sketch of the place.”
Mahmoud pulled a hand-drawn sketch from a manila envelope when Karim interrupted him.
“If you have the coordinates, why not look at the Google Earth satellite photo on the computer?”
Mahmoud turned abruptly toward Karim.
“I have better information right here. You can look at your damn computer later. Besides, I bet the Israelis would not allow their sensitive locations to appear on a publicly available system. The official front, the cover, for the installation is that it is an experimental agricultural development center. All this over here,” he said, pointing with a pencil, “is fields. They are growing everything from giant watermelons to giant carrots. This is the main road and this is the access road that goes directly to the gate and to the installation. Al Khalil’s commando force will be here,” and he pointed again. “They are known to show the place to foreign visitors, mostly from Africa, but once they brought Indians from America, to teach them about drip irrigation. Over here are the buildings for farm equipment. Do not waste time and ammunition on them. Here is the main building. Very large. Looks like a warehouse. Actually, nothing happens here, above the ground anyway. The real classified work takes place in underground spaces. We don’t know how many stories there are down there. Tariq and Hussein are going to find out tomorrow.”
Turning toward Rashid, Karim asked, “What is your plan, where will your planes be when I come in from the sea?”
“I will attack first because we want the Issies’ attention to be elsewhere than at the main location. Also I won’t need as much light and I assume Palmachim has security responsibilities for your target. We want them to be very busy when you attack the farm.”
Mahmoud, holding a cookie in one hand, said, “At the same time, I have three suicide bombers attacking Israeli checkpoints and two mortars will be set up to fire at the air base just before your attack. It will cause casualties and distract the Israeli response.”
He took a bite of the cookie. Sugar stuck to the bottom of his mustache.
Karim picked up Mahmoud’s penciled sketch and studied it.
***
The sun was threatening to appear on the horizon, as Karim prepared to taxi a RUAG Ranger UAV down a field outside Jabaliya, in the Gaza Strip. It reminded him of Colonel Spaceck’s words during an early meeting in the El Djazair Hotel in Algiers:
“The advantage of the Ranger over the Predator is first of all the price. Then, it’s going to be easier to transport. The Predator has a wingspan of fifty feet, as opposed to nineteen feet for the Ranger. Also the Predator is sold as an entire system of four platforms with a large ground command station. The Predator has a crew of fifty people, more than you can handle!”
Rashid had asked about the craft’s armament—missiles.
“Yes, that’s a problem,” Spaceck acknowledged. “The Ranger’s payload is fifty kilos and one Hellfire weighs forty-five kilos.”
They had eventually settled on the Ranger. Later, Rashid had customized the UAVs to allow them to carry Hellfire missiles and small bombs.
Karim soon had the Ranger in the air and turned it over to the other two men on his team. He instructed them to “Get it up to five-hundred feet heading directly west, two-seventy degrees.” Then he put two additional Rangers up and told their crews, “Fly them west at altitudes of four-hundred and three-hundred feet. One-hundred feet of separation will give us an increased margin of safety when we maneuver them.”
A few miles away, Rashid was going through a similar protocol from a beach between the Shati Refugee Camp and the border with Israel to
the north.
PART III
And fight them until there is no temptation, and the religion is for Allah.
—Quran 2:193
All our problems come from the Muslim Brotherhood.
—Prince Naif bin Abdul-Aziz Al Saud
06:25 HOURS
Hussein looked at his watch as their small convoy pulled off under trees on a side road. It was 6:15 a.m. They were less than ten minutes from their objective. Hussein thought it would give them at least five minutes more than they needed. His cell phone signaled that it was receiving a text message and he flipped it open: GREEN.
He said to al Khalil, “Rashid’s UAVs are up. On time.”
“Good.”
He looked at the men in back of the covered delivery truck they were using, and told them, “We have twenty-five minutes.”
Hussein opened the window, still looking at his watch. He waited. He strained to hear. At 6:25, the faint sound of an explosion came through, and then another.
“The mortars,” he said looking at al Khalil.
“Yes and three shaheed just reached paradise. I hope they took a lot of Jews with them.”
Hussein noticed cars were beginning to appear. He didn’t want to stay parked any longer.
“We’re right on time,” al Khalil said. “Move, go,” he commanded the driver.
The men in the back checked their weapons again.
***
Following his brief meeting with al Khalil, Steve had been taken to the bomb shelter of the house in Ashqelon. The room was pitch-dark. He knew very well, having gained insights into al Khalil’s operation when he was running Karim, that al Khalil’s men were killers. Whatever the purpose for keeping him alive, he doubted al Khalil had any intention to keep him alive longer than necessary.
Although his eyes had become accustomed to the dark, Steve could still see nothing. He assumed there were no windows. His wrists were still bound but he could use his hands to explore by moving along a wall. Then a familiar female voice in the room said something in Arabic.
“Kella? Kella? Is that you?”
“Oh, my God! Steve!”
He moved toward the voice and heard her move, apparently getting up. They touched against each other in the dark.
“What the hell is going on? How long have you been here? Are you okay?”
Kella sobbed briefly. In a quiet voice, she recounted her experience since her capture. She had spent one night in another location. She had not gone through any checkpoint and assumed that she had not left Israel. With one exception, no one had said much to her. She was just a tool, a commodity, to be minimally maintained until she could be used.
“At first, I thought that, as the American ambassador’s daughter, they would try to exchange me for Palestinians being held by the Israelis. Now, I’m not so sure. Anyway, no one is saying anything to me or asking me anything. Someone gave me a lecture. I thought I recognized al Khalil’s voice. He told me about the crimes Americans were committing every day against Muslims, and about the Jewish occupation of Arab land, and that the Americans and the Jews were the real terrorists. But it wasn’t a conversation. Al Khalil wasn’t interested in a dialogue. How about you, how did you end up here?”
Fearing that whatever he said was being recorded or somehow being listened to, Steve stuck to the same story he had given al Khalil. He was careful not to mention that his father had come to Ashqelon with him.
They slept little, their handcuffs rubbing their wrists raw. At one point, when he determined Kella was still awake, he tried to raise her spirits.
“Did I ever tell you about the first time I was kidnapped in Israel?”
“This has happened to you before?” she asked in amazement.
“Yeah, I was in high school when my older sister came to stay with us from college for the summer. A friend stayed at my house one night. Around midnight, my older sister woke us up. She had brought an Israeli girlfriend with her. They said they were kidnapping us. I remember that the Israeli girl was doing her military service and hoped to go to some Florida college on a tennis scholarship. They snuck us out of the house—with no resistance from us I should add—and drove us to an orange grove. For a couple of hours we just hung out and drank beer.”
“Sounds like quite an adventure,” Kella said, sounding a bit cheered. “Given your prior experience, I expect you to get us out of this mess.”
***
In the middle of the night, Kella and Steve were walked out of the house and put into the trunk of a Renault. It was a tight fit. Steve protested, “We can’t breathe in here. If you want to kill us, just do it. If you want us alive, you have to give us more room. Tell them Kella.”
Kella translated in Arabic and one of the men agreed. They left Steve in the trunk and moved Kella to the floor of the back seat, covered with a blanket. Other men talked quietly as they loaded into other vehicles. Steve could hear the occasional metallic sound of weapons hitting against each other, of magazines being loaded, and of breeches chambering the first shell. They were moving for about forty minutes. Then they stopped, apparently waiting for something.
As they were waiting, Abdul, the driver of their car, stepped out and called his wife. Kella could hear enough of Abdul’s side of the conversation to make out that the driver seemed to be saying goodbye.
“Tell my father that today I will serve Allah’s cause well, that he will be proud of me. Tell our son when he grows up; they will be talking about me. I will be known in our history as one of Allah’s warriors.”
The trunk opened and Steve felt his blindfold being moved to his forehead. The driver leaned over him and showed him the ravaging effects of forty-five years without dental care. Steve recognized his cell phone in the driver’s hand. It had been taken from him shortly after his capture. The driver talked to him in a low voice and held the phone open for Steve to see the text message that he had found. The text read:
31 degrees, 43 minutes N – 34 degrees, 49 minutes E; 31-55-59N – 34-42-26E. 06:30 hours tomorrow.
Steve felt confident Karim’s message meant nothing to the driver. The driver’s gestures and body language indicated he thought he was doing Steve a favor. Steve assumed that his Good Samaritan was putting some credits in the bank. If the operation failed, he would need a friend on the other side. It also occurred to Steve he might have shown the text message to al Khalil first.
The blindfold was replaced and the trunk closed. They began to move again.
06:40
At 5:34 a.m., Lieutenant Schlomo Gazit had scanned his screen. He had been on duty in the Palmachim Air Base SIGINT center building near the beach for nine hours. He knew from the clock on the wall that he had one hour to go. His mind drifted to Sarah, his young bride, who was at home waiting for him. He would be with her in an hour and a half.
Gazit noted that the call originated from outside Israel to a number not registered in Israel. The key word that triggered the message to surface must have been the coordinates, he reasoned. He had hundreds of other messages to screen and not enough time to research the location. The antennae field and the giant satellite dishes located on the base collected millions of messages, most of which were irrelevant to Israel’s security.
Gazit looked at the clock again, then at Sarah’s photo on his desk. He went back to the message, and the word “tomorrow” gave him a reason to put it in the queue rather than to forward it for action.
An hour later, as he was going off duty, Gazit’s eye caught the text of an Arabic language call from a number originating in Israel but from a phone not registered in Israel. The call was to a Gaza number. Leaving it for his relief to take appropriate action, Gazit walked out to his car and hurried home.
***
At the controls of his first UAV, Rashid looked at the smooth waters of the Mediterranean on his screen. He lowered the Ranger’s altitude slightly to better evade detection by Israel’s coastal radars. As his drone flew over the beach of the Palmachim Air Base from t
he sea, he could see the space center to his left. He let it go. Rashid’s targets were of a tactical nature, Israel’s helicopter fleet, its 200th UAV Squadron, and any aircraft that could be called on to counter al Khalil’s ground attack.
He headed straight for the two-thousand-meter runway. As he got closer, he could see hangars on its far side and several AH-64 helicopters parked close together. He knew that, even if the rest of his mission failed, and his UAVs were shot down or crashed, the cost of these three battlefield helicopters meant he was more than even. He fired then circled back and dropped a bomb on another group of the aircraft.
Rashid handed the controls of the first Ranger to someone else to bring back to base and he took command of the second Ranger closing in on the beach. He aimed at HH-65 Short-Range Recovery helicopters parked near a hangar. All five machines were evidently ready to go, because their full fuel tanks exploded and became wicks for thirty-foot-high flames with a rising wall of black smoke.
He then focused on anti-aircraft positions and devoted his last UAV against what looked like the base’s headquarters building. He ran out of UAVs before he ran out of targets.
***
A few miles south, Karim brought his Ranger over the beach and, within seconds, he was looking at the experimental farm on his screen. He brought the UAV up a hundred feet for a quick look at the overall target, anxious not to hit the wrong building. He identified the access road and looked for the vans he expected to see there. He didn’t see them and assumed they were hidden by vegetation near the road. But he only spent a couple of seconds looking for al Khalil and his fighters. He could see the extent of the fields and quickly located his target.
With Mahmoud’s sketch next to him, he identified the large parking lot to the side of the main building. He lowered the Ranger’s altitude, swung it around to approach the building from the front, lined up the computer-game-like aiming device on the front entrance, and fired his first Hellfire missile. He saw it strike before he raised the nose of the UAV to fly over and to the right of the building.
The Caliphate Page 29