The Caliphate
Page 30
He circled until he was facing the front of the building again but found that the dirt and smoke blinded his aim. Kicking himself for not having thought of this foreseeable problem, Karim flew to the left, came around to line up the sidewall of the building, aimed, and fired his second missile. It hit the ground about ten feet in front of the wall. The angle was so shallow the missile didn’t explode until its nose contacted the wall.
His bad aim turned out to be a lucky mistake. He then directed his Ranger directly south to get out of the way of the two other Rangers he knew were coming in behind him before heading back out to sea, hugging the waves, hoping to make it more difficult for any Israeli pursuit.
As Karim’s second missile exploded, al Khalil’s four vehicles drove down the access road toward the gate of the compound. The first van drew near and slowed, a guard came out appearing confused and looking over his shoulder toward the first explosion.
As planned, the driver had his window open and, as he got closer to the guard, who was holding his arm up, he shot him. He fired a burst at the guardhouse just as another guard came out. The driver crashed his vehicle through the bar across the road and headed for the main building.
Al Khalil saw the second Ranger fire its missile against the roof of the main building and he shouted in anger. The missiles were supposed to be aiming for the walls to make entrance easier to his fighters. The third followed quickly but overflew the building.
The driver of the van slowed down and stopped to stay out of collateral damage range. The UAV swung around and came at the building low from the side. Instead of firing its missile, it crashed and exploded against the structure.
People ran out of the building. Several fell, wounded or killed by the air strikes. Some of them were armed and uniformed. A tall man in front seemed to be giving orders. He pointed at the approaching vans and spread his few men in defensive positions hastily. The first van came under fire.
Hussein told the driver, “Pull over, quickly!” He turned toward the back of the van and shouted, “Everybody out!” He jumped out first and began firing at the Israeli security detail.
Hussein spread his men out and told them to move forward. “Don’t stop here,” he said.
Using the sparse cover, Hussein’s men quickly dislodged the outnumbered defenders. They were soon at the front steps of the building. Tariq, Hussein and their men ran up the steps toward the entrance. The Renault was following fifty feet behind the last van but was stopped just beyond the gate by a metal plate that had swung up out of the road, either automatically or activated by an alert guard.
Abdul and the other Hamas soldier jumped out of the Renault. One pushed Kella out and the other pulled Steve out of the trunk. With AK-47 muzzles prodding their backs, Kella and Steve, their blindfolds off but their hands still tied, ran toward the building.
07:20
Rashid, Karim, and their crews were busy flying their UAVs back to their Gaza bases when Mahmoud, who was with Karim to monitor the attack on the primary objective, said, “You have to ditch your drones at sea. You can’t return them here. The Israeli Air Force will find them and destroy half of Gaza. You should have used them Kamikaze style against the objectives. Call Rashid and tell him.”
“We can’t do that. We can use those UAVs again.”
“Trust me. The Israelis are taking off right now and they’re getting ready to retaliate. Don’t worry. What you’ve done is worth a hundred of your drones. Call Rashid and tell him, now.”
Karim beckoned one of his crew and turned away from the controls of the UAV he was flying south.
“What if we land them in Egypt, on the sands of the Sinai? We just fly them a few kilometers farther, past Gaza into the Egyptian desert?”
Mahmoud smiled and said, “That’s a political decision—above my head. But in the heat of combat, soldiers have to make difficult choices. I think we can handle the results. The Egyptians won’t be happy. They’ll confiscate your planes, but it might save Gaza from the usual overreaction of the Jews.”
“I’m calling Rashid,” Karim said as he grabbed his phone.
Mahmoud stood in front of the crews and told them, “Land all your drones in Egypt.”
Karim was pleased that Mahmoud had stopped using the word “toys” to describe his UAVs.
***
The fires started by the first Hellfire missile spread quickly. Flames surrounded the front entrance and smoke rose above the roofline. Al Khalil and his men reached the top of the concrete stairs leading from the parking lot to the entrance but were stopped by the fire.
Hussein yelled for his men to follow him around to the side of the building where the Rangers had created entry points. They complied and jogged around the building, finding only light opposing gunfire from the few survivors of the initial skirmish. They entered and spread out into what seemed to be a warehouse with offices at one end. The walls were decorated with agricultural posters, and there were signs over office doors in Hebrew and in English.
They split up and pushed further inside, peering around corridors and office cubicles. The two missile attacks against the roof had, against their initial expectations, caused considerable damage. They found bodies, apparently killed by falling chunks of the roof and walls.
An office door opened and two men ran out drawing bursts of gunfire from Hussein and his men. One of the runners was wounded but kept moving across an open lobby toward a corridor. The Israelis stopped and fired a few shots toward the Salafists to keep them from rushing them. Al Khalil’s men rushed their position as soon as the firing stopped. The two men were running down the corridor seeking the temporary safety of the next turn, but the Salafists won the foot race and gunned them down. When the attackers reached them, one was already dead. The other had chest wounds and would not live long.
Hussein told one of his men, “We’re going to finish clearing this floor. You stay here and find out where the rest of them are. We’re looking for a door that will take us downstairs. Kill him after you’re done.”
Hussein first made sure there were no other live occupants on the ground floor. Then he told four of his men, “Go back to the front gate and hold off the first responders, whoever they are. They might be firemen or they might be assault troops. It’s important that you slow them down. We need time to find out where everyone is, where the real work of this place is done. Then withdraw back here. You have your radio.”
Turning to another squad of men, he instructed, “Find defensive positions around the building. Keep me informed.”
He instructed the rest to go look for locked doors.
“The most secure-looking door is probably the one we want.”
They found two doors with numeric keypads. Al Khalil ordered the wounded man brought to the door and asked him, “Where does this go?”
The bloody employee mumbled, “It’s just a closet; nothing in there.”
Al Khalil took the Beretta 38 from his holster and shot the man in the left foot. He said, “I’ll give you another chance. I don’t have time for your heroics. Where is the entrance to the underground? Is there an elevator, stairs?”
The man implored, “The door is behind you and to the right. It’s in the back of an office marked ‘Director.’”
“Carry him,” said al Khalil. “He’s coming to the door with us.”
They quickly found the director’s office. Behind an imposing desk was a door leading to a small private bathroom. In the bathroom was another door with an electronic pad.
“What’s the combination?” Tariq asked.
“I don’t know. I’ve never gone down there. I’m not authorized.”
He was a tanned, middle-aged man in overalls and ankle-high leather shoes. His fingers were short and thick, his fingernails stained by soil.
“You’re staying alive as long as you’re willing to help us,” Al Khalil said. “If that’s all you have to say, you’re on your way to your heathen hell.”
He raised his pistol.
Tariq ordered, “Go look into Yoram’s pockets. No, bring him here. We’ll need his thumb.”
In a few minutes, Yoram’s body was on the director’s desk, the blood from his shirt staining the wooden surface. Yoram had been a thin man, balding, in a white shirt. His dead eyes stared at his killers from under stylish rectangular glasses. One of the fighters handed Tariq an address book, which he looked through. On the last blank page were a series of prices in shekels. They were added and the sum was a six-digit number.
Now they could all hear firing outside. Hussein guessed that the first counterforce had arrived and had tried to come down the main access road.
With the sound of machine gun bursts in the background, al Khalil had one of his men stand the body up so that he could press the dead man’s right thumb against the vertical screen. Then he punched the six numbers in the order of the sum derived from the address book. He tried the handle but the door didn’t open. He reapplied the corpse’s thumb against the screen and tried the series of numbers backward. A green light went on.
“Get the body out of the way, and get ready,” Hussein ordered.
He pulled on the handle and stepped back for two of his men to fire into the opening. He had the door open about three feet when a blast from the other side of the door blew it completely open, knocking two men off their feet and killing the man closest to the door.
Hussein said, “Booby-trapped, in case the combination was obtained under torture.”
He took charge and went through the doorway first and ran down the stairs to his left. His men followed. Looking for other booby traps, they reached the bottom where Hussein saw another door down a narrow corridor. He told one of his men to fire at the lock, which had little effect. Another one placed Semtex against the hinges and the lock below the handle, and blew the door.
Hussein again rushed through the opening, staying low. His men followed on the run and, with guns raised, spread into the rooms on the right and left. They found twenty-two men and women lying face down in a large room equipped with several rows of computer terminals that faced a twenty-by-thirty-foot electronic map of the Middle East. Tehran and several other locations in Iran, Mecca and Riyadh in Saudi Arabia, and Damascus in Syria were lit in red, with all the other capitals in green.
***
Last to go downstairs after the takeover of the building were Steve and Kella. They were marched first into the large, general-purpose computer center, which reminded Steve of a visit to the Houston Space Center, and then into a small side room that contained the building’s fuse boxes, spare computers, and computer boards.
Abdul, their driver and now their guard, who Steve could see wanted to get them out of the way where he could watch them easily, found this room and decided it was the electronic equivalent of a broom and mop closet.
08:30
At 5:30 a.m., Lieutenant Colonel Moshe Avidan and his fifty Shaldag troops had begun their day. They had just completed ten days of joint training with the British Special Air Service, the senior special-operations unit in the world. Avidan was pleased that the SAS had chosen to hone its desert fighting capabilities against his Shaldag troops. Each unit had learned from the other.
Avidan had begun the week with a briefing to the SAS in Building 12, the compound from which the Shaldag worked and trained.
“This base was named for the Palmach, the first Israeli Special Operations unit. In 1974 Palestinian terrorists took over a school in Northern Israel. During the rescue, twenty-one children and four adults died. As a result, the Israel Defense Forces reorganized the special units that had grown as a result of the many terrorist attacks.
“As a part of the reorganization,” he continued, “Sayeret Shaldag, also called Unit 5101 or Shaldag, was created and based at Palmachim under the air force and as part of the Southern Command headquartered at Beersheba. We are now the country’s primary counterterrorist and hostage-rescue unit, and the only one with its own small helicopter fleet. Our workhorse helicopter is the AH-64, which also fires the Hellfire missile.”
Avidan kept to himself that his command was also responsible for long-range patrols outside of Israel, and for marking targets for fighter-bomber-launched, laser-guided bombs. He also did not reveal that his troops had fought the Hezbollah in Southern Lebanon.
Moshe Avidan wanted to pattern his career after former Prime Minister Ehud Barak, Israel’s most highly decorated soldier, who famously had led the Sayeret Matkal, Israel’s primary special-operations unit during the 1970s.
That morning, Lieutenant Colonel Avidan was leading his men on their daily run. They reached the beach. He always led them where the sand was softer, which required more effort. Today they were running without their equipment because they had been on maneuvers with the SAS until the middle of the preceding night.
Avidan loved this part of the day. He had learned from his girlfriend while at Stanford that the runner’s high was not produced by an increased level of endorphins, a seventies idea, but because the body naturally produced a chemical similar to THC, the psychoactive property of marijuana. Whatever the cause, he always looked forward to prolonged physical exercise and imagined bliss-inducing chemicals flowing to his brain.
He and the Shaldag unit were several miles away from Building 12 when a UAV flew over their heads. Seconds later, they heard explosions. Avidan made an immediate U-turn on the beach and they started running back, as fast as they could. At 0700 hours, Avidan called the operations center on his radio but there was no connection.
He sent his second in command with his men back to Building 12 to get ready for action and he headed toward the Ops Center. He first saw the smoke before coming around a block of living quarters and he realized that the building had been a target of the attack.
A firefighting unit had just reached the building and was deploying its hoses. Other unit commanders were arriving at the same time but no one had concrete information. The stories they exchanged ran the gamut from a full attack on Israel by the surrounding Arab states, to one single coordinated attack against the primary air bases, to the assassination of the Israeli Prime Minister, to UAV attacks against the country’s nuclear center at Dimona.
At 7:40, Avidan and the other officers who had met outside the destroyed Ops Center learned that the base commander had died in the attack. They all made their way to a crisis center half a mile away. There, the ranking officer took charge. Through the communications at the center, they learned that Palmachim was the only base to have been attacked and that there was no general invasion. However, someone at the Soreq Nuclear Center near Yavne had received a phone call saying that a Rafael center had also been attacked.
Avidan was pulled aside by the acting commander, together with the base’s air police chief and Avidan’s friend, head of Unit 5707. The unit had been created in 1996 to obtain pre- and post-bombardment intelligence during the continuing war in southern Lebanon, a mission that Unit 5707 took from the Shaldag.
Unit 5707 sometimes trained with the Shaldag, used similar armament, and could be used to supplement the Shaldag unit if necessary. The acting base commander, General Uri Shomron, said, “This attack seems to have come from Egypt. Our aircraft were able to shoot down two or three of the UAVs as they tried to get away but the rest crossed into Egyptian air space. Our pilots asked for hot pursuit authorization but they didn’t get it from the national command authority, so far. They are authorized to follow them but not to conduct aggressive operations over the Egyptian border.”
A colonel brought him a message, which he read. He then told his men, “Jerusalem is getting in touch with Cairo and with the United Nations. A retaliatory attack against Egypt is not out of the question. Our aircraft are already in the air over international waters waiting
for a decision to attack. That’s the big picture. Now here’s your part.”
He turned and looked at Avidan.
“There is a hostage situation developing just south of here at the Agricultural Experimentation Center.”
He walked over to a map and pointed to the location.
Avidan, still in his running gear, had obtained a towel which was slung around his neck.
“Is that where I heard the other explosions when I was running on the beach? Is it part of the attack on the base?”
“It looks that way. It all took place at the same time. The ground attack was preceded by UAV strafing and bombing. There were also suicide bombings at the border checkpoints in Gaza, all within a few minutes of each other—well coordinated. As I told you before, we received a few mortar rounds on the base. They hit the runway and the canteen. Ten wounded, four killed. We’re looking for the mortars. They were probably fired remotely. In any case, Moshe, I want your unit to get ready for a takedown operation against this location,” and he pointed to the agricultural station on the map.
He turned to the Unit 5707 commander.
“Your unit will be in support. Go to your units, I’ll get you maps as soon as I can. Now I’d like to see Colonel Avidan alone, please.”
When they were alone, the general said, “You need to know that this is not exactly an agricultural station. It’s really a Rafael installation. I don’t know myself what they do there, but it’s related to national security. So you’re probably not trying to save farming experts—the hostages are most probably scientists and the like. I know it makes no difference, but I thought that I’d tell you. I’ll send the maps over.”
“Not to worry, sir. We have maps of all government installations in Israel in Building 12.”