by By Jon Land
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The Blue Widows
[Kamal & Barnea 06]
By John Land
Scanned & Proofed By MadMaxAU
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PROLOGUE
Saudi Arabia, September 1973
S
o, we are certain there will be no mistakes this time.”
Hanna Frank tried to push the earphone deeper into her ear, hoping it would make the voices coming from her husband’s office seem less muffled. The identity of the speaker was a mystery to her; it could be one of any number of men with whom Abdullah Aziz Rahani did business. But her husband’s own voice replying was unmistakable.
“The government would not have agreed to sanction funding if proper assurances were not provided. The key element, this time, is utter surprise. “
“Attacking on the highest of their holy days...”
“Precisely.”
On her lap, Hanna’s three-year-old daughter began to sob again, and she covered the girl’s mouth with her hand, afraid to miss any part of the conversation two floors above the nursery. She glanced at the door, realizing she hadn’t locked it. One of the servants could walk in at any time and catch her holding the earphone. Hanna prepared a lie, ready to pretend she was listening to one of the two radio stations broadcasting from nearby Riyadh instead of the transmitting device she had planted in her husband’s office.
The device was voice activated, state of the art. Normally conversations were recorded by a tiny machine Hanna kept hidden in the false bottom of her jewelry case. But today she had seen her husband greet the unidentified man warmly in their palace lobby before ushering him upstairs, and decided to listen to their conversation as it transpired.
“Once the war is won,” came the stranger’s voice again amid the static, “the resources of the Bank of Rahani will be vital.”
“We have supported the buildup,” said Abdullah Aziz Rahani, “transferred all funds as requested. We are ready to assist in any way we can, once the enemy is vanquished. Inshallah.”
“Allah will be willing, my friend. Israel, this time, will not survive.”
Hanna removed her hand from three-year-old Kavi’s mouth and the toddler’s sobbing replaced the sounds of the conversation in her ear. Hanna had gone cold. Her hands trembled. Her mind raced, contemplating her next move. She had to get word out, use the procedure she had followed religiously to file her usual reports for the past six years. But there was nothing usual about this discovery, and she prayed her report would be taken seriously and acted upon.
Hanna would phone a number in Riyadh, be told she had the wrong number. Her contact would then wait at a drop point in the central bazaar every day at noon until she was able to appear. She checked her watch: eleven a.m. Too late to manage the task today. Tomorrow, then. She had to get there by tomorrow, Hanna thought as she hugged the sobbing Kavi tighter to her.
“Is she sick?”
The question startled Hanna and she turned to the doorway to find her five-year-old daughter, Layla, standing there.
“No,” Hanna replied, as the earphone fell to her lap.
“Then why is she crying? Is something wrong with her?”
“Of course not,” Hanna told Layla, tucking the earphone into her pocket with her free hand. “Nothing’s wrong at all.”
* * * *
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Chapter 1
D
anielle Barnea felt the submachine guns clacking against her as she ran through the woods. Brambles scraped at her face. Exposed roots and fallen logs tried to trip her up, but she rushed on through trees wet with the residue of a quick-moving storm.
She had no firm plan of action set in her mind. She had earlier committed to memory the plans of the People’s Brigade compound in the central-Idaho community of Pine Valley on Heydan Lake. The best way of getting inside without being detected, she had noted, was through a culvert, a long drainage pipe that bypassed the security sensors, trip wires, and booby traps that otherwise dotted the woods surrounding the compound. The culvert originated within the barbed-wire security fence, so that once inside Danielle would have only perimeter guards to contend with.
“America’s lost her fucking spine,” came a voice through her headset, which she recognized as that of Hollis Buchert, leader of the People’s Brigade. “You think the government would have learned from 9/11, but it hasn’t learned a goddamn thing. So you know what, son? If Washington can’t do the job, then we will. Gonna teach this country a lesson she’ll never forget. That why the FBI sent you to snoop around here?”
“I told you,” she heard Ben Kamal’s voice insist. It sounded raspy and nasal, as if his nose had suffered the first brunt of Hollis Buchert’s ire. “I’m not working for—”
A heavy whapping sound ended Ben’s words.
“We don’t like Arabs and we don’t like liars and you’re an Arab liar, son. Means we’ll have to kill you twice. Or make the first time last twice as long. You from the F, B, I?” the man repeated, drawing out the letters.
“No.”
“Because word is they’ve been trying to set us up. Why, I’ve even heard it told they got somebody on the inside. Maybe trying to learn something, you ask me. Shit, can you believe that?”
“I—”
The whap! that followed sounded like a strap striking flesh.
Danielle shuddered and quickly checked her watch. The interrogation was eleven minutes old. She wondered how much time she had left before Hollis Buchert tired of the process and simply used his gun.
Hold on, Ben, she willed, picturing the man she had known for seven years and wondered if she could live without. Just hold on. .. .
The assignment undertaken on behalf of their company, Security Concepts, had gone horribly wrong. Ben and Danielle had been retained by one of Detroit’s most influential Arab businessmen, Victor Rantisi, to surveil the compound and provide proof that his kidnapped son was inside. Rantisi had sought out their private security agency after being repeatedly rebuffed by the FBI, settling upon Security Concepts specifically because an ex-Palestinian-American detective, Ben Kamal, was in the company’s employ.
Danielle had been against the job from the start. Her missions for the elite Sayaret, the commando teams forming the Israeli Special Forces, had invariably been accompanied by firm intelligence on the positioning of targets. Not so this time. She loathed the notion of undertaking even a simple reconnaissance mission without intelligence on where the People’s Brigade’s guards were posted, or how many she and Ben would have to confront.
The plan was for her to infiltrate the lake side of the compound, while Ben entered from the land side to the north. She had just begun her sweep along the shoreline when Ben’s jaw-mounted microphone broadcast the sounds of his capture. Fearful there would be too much open ground to cover from that point of entry, Danielle had looped around to the eastern side of the compound and located the culvert from memory, a bit distressed to find it was smaller than the scale map had indicated. She had no other choice but to shimmy inside on her stomach and pull herself along through the rank-smelling muck that had accumulated inside the pipe.
The culvert was no longer functional, just a leftover relic from a time when the People’s Brigade’s twenty-acre compound had been a farm. Danielle shifted her submachine guns so they rode atop her back, stilled now. But her pistol dug into her side and she tried to reposition it as well, to no avail. Fortunately she had clipped her knife sheath far enough back on her hip to keep it out of her way.
Reaching the other end of the culvert, she peered out and found herself just inside the tree line on the compound’s eastern perimeter. She guessed the barbed
-wire fence would be a hundred to a hundred and fifty feet back. Beyond her, trails sliced through the thick woods hiding the open stretch of land that led to the complex of buildings noted on her schematic.
No guard stood in her line of vision. Danielle pulled herself from the culvert and dropped in snakelike fashion to the moist ground, pushing forward until she heard the booted footsteps of the first guard patrolling. She stayed prone, camouflaged by a thick patch of brush adjoining the trail down that he was striding. An M-16 dangled from the guard’s shoulder, too far from his grasp to cause Danielle much concern. His combat boots crunched the twigs and underbrush scattered along the path, and she waited for him to pass her position before lurching to her feet, knife in hand.
Danielle swept the blade forward at the same time she wrapped a hand around the guard’s head, closing her palm over his mouth as she jerked the killing knife through his ribs into his heart. The man thrashed briefly, then stilled. Danielle lowered him softly to the trail and dragged him into a thick patch of underbrush, where his body was likely to remain hidden.
Her hand was soaked with the guard’s blood and she wiped it off on her pants. The coppery stench hung with her as she dashed along the line of the trail, drawing deeper into the compound. The barbed-wire fence ran inward at an odd angle here, and Danielle found herself pressed against it briefly before the woods widened again and she heard a branch snap ahead.
A second perimeter guard stood facing away from her. A plume of smoke lifted over his head as he shook a match free and began puffing away on a cigarette. Drawing closer, Danielle could see he wore headphones over his ears, the muffled din of rock music wafting up lightly when she closed.
This guard’s frame was slighter than that of the first, his fatigues a bad fit, as if he had not yet grown into them. She knew as she made her final lunge he was young, barely out of his teens. But the gun on his back and walkie-talkie clipped to his belt concerned her more. She had killed for the first time herself when she was not much older than he. Still she blocked his youth from her mind, focusing instead on Ben, whose plight denied her the luxury of conscience. Danielle used her hands this time, breaking the guard’s neck. But she avoided looking at his face when she dragged him into the damp overgrowth that rimmed the fence line.
Danielle drew the first of her Heckler and Koch submachine guns around in front of her and made sure the silencer was screwed in properly. After so many years using an Uzi, the heft and added length of this gun discomforted her. But it was well balanced and carried a reputation of shooting truer at moderate distances than any other gun in its class.
She smelled wood smoke burning on the wind and angled toward it. She clung to the trees as much as possible, knowing she would have to take the next guards from a less comfortable distance.
The first one saw her an instant before Danielle saw him, M-16 leveled straight and ready instead of slung. But he hesitated for a second, and that was all the time she needed to fire a silenced burst into his chest. A mist of blood sprayed into the air, settling atop his body.
Danielle ran on, took the next two guards as they walked side by side. Her heart felt strangely quiet in her chest after the initial thundering against her rib cage. Her brain had settled in, found the zone she recalled so well from her tenure with the Sayaret.
As the woods dipped, Danielle found herself nearing a slight hill beyond which she could now see clouds of wood smoke floating into the sky. She heard voices, laughter, multiple footsteps slashing through the brush. Five men, maybe six or even more, lumbered unsuspectingly across the compound. Too many and too far away to rely on any submachine gun’s limited range of accuracy. And she was out in the open, no viable cover to rely on before they crossed the ridge.
Danielle tossed her nearly spent Heckler and Koch to the ground and tore open her shirt to expose her sports bra. She staggered forward, moaning, muttering, clinging to branches to pull herself along when the men reached the crest of the hill.
“What the fuck,” she heard one of them say.
Six, Danielle counted as she collapsed to her knees, making sure her second submachine gun was hidden behind her. The men above froze briefly before starting down the hill en masse. She whipped the second Heckler and Koch around the moment they drew within her killing range and emptied its clip into them.
Danielle slammed a fresh clip into the submachine gun and charged upward, the men’s bodies tumbling past her to the foot of the hill. It dipped slightly at the top, offering a clear view of the buildings comprising the center of the People’s Brigade’s sprawling compound.
The farmhouse and barn were covered in weathered silvery shingles, standing out amid the dull brown bunkerlike buildings, barracks, and storage depots that were products of more recent construction. Danielle clung to the cover provided by the last of the trees, watching a few men in military uniforms traipsing about between buildings. She knew the bodies she’d left in the woods wouldn’t go undiscovered for long, meaning she had to act fast. So she studied the activity coming to and from the various buildings, ultimately focusing on the barn, where three men stood before the heavy door as if to guard it.
The strap had left Ben’s jaw swollen, the teeth on the right side of his mouth loose, and one eye puffy and closing. Ben coughed and spit out blood. He closed his eyes and thought he might have passed out briefly. When he opened his eyes, Hollis Buchert was still standing before him. Buchert was short and stocky. He had a thick neck, straw-colored hair oiled to his scalp, and a face like worn shoe leather crisscrossed with prune-deep wrinkles. He was wearing jeans, boots, and an army fatigue jacket.
Buchert took a step forward and stooped down close enough for Ben to catch the stench of dried sweat rising off him. He grabbed a chair that was a twin of the one Ben was laced to, spun it around, and sat down leisurely. “See, here’s the thing. You’re gonna tell me what I want to know. Everybody I bring into this barn does. I’m making it my mission to send anybody the government sends after me back to them in pieces. Whether I do it while you’re alive or dead, well, that’s totally up to you.”
Buchert dragged his chair a little closer.
“So what do ya say, son? How we gonna play this?”
Ben remained silent.
The wrinkles on Buchert’s face seemed to stretch a little. “Ain’t nobody coming to your rescue, son. You best put the possibility outta your mind. Only one thing you gotta concern yourself with now and that’s how much you wanna take. You thirsty?”
Ben wet his lips.
“Yeah, you’re thirsty all right.”
Buchert drew a nine-inch hunting knife from a sheath on his belt and cut Ben free of the chair, though his arms remained bound. The man had an iron grip, his body hard and densely packed with muscle. Buchert effortlessly dragged Ben to the water trough and shoved his face down so it rode just over the ripples on the surface.
“Here, son, have a drink.”
Buchert pushed his head under the water, Ben straining his neck to fight him, to no avail. His chest heaved and his lungs begged for air. His brain clouded up, felt as if it were going to explode, when Buchert jerked him back out. Ben gasped for breath, managed to catch it an instant before Buchert plunged him under again. He waited a little longer this time before yanking Ben back out and letting him catch his breath again. Rancid water pasted Ben’s hair to his scalp. His stomach quaked. He retched and coughed up a stream of greenish trough water. Then he smelled Buchert’s stench looming over him once more.
“Man,” Buchert said, jerking Ben back into his chair, “you’re a fucking mess. Washington oughtta be able to do better.”
He launched a boot into Ben’s chair and it tipped over backward. Ben’s head smacked against the hard barn floor. A series of flashes exploded before his eyes. He was upside down, half in the chair and half out, arms still bound behind him.
The People’s Brigade soldiers surrounding him laughed hard and kept laughing, until the gunshots sounded outside and suddenly the bar
n went dead quiet.
A man had emerged from the barn. Another had gone in. Danielle estimated there was a hundred feet of open ground to cover between the tree line and the barn. She waited until there were three men standing in view before she charged.
Danielle began her charge across the ground and opened fire the moment they spotted her. Her bullets punched them backward, and the barn door opened a crack from the force of one of them crashing into it. Danielle kept firing until the submachine gun clicked empty. Then she drew her nine-millimeter pistol and kicked the barn door open all the way, crouching as she entered and measuring her shots at shapes partially lost to the dim light of the barn.
A soaked figure stirred on the dusty brown floor near a trough of water.
Ben! she thought, as a shape near him lunged for a shotgun leaning up against a beam.