by Nir Hezroni
“What??”
“He died during the rescue operation. I’ll tell you when I get there. They’re going to take me home to shower and change clothes and I’ll come there in my own car soon. They told me you were admitted to Tel Hashomer.”
“The Surgical Ward, fifth floor. And are you okay?”
“A few scratches. They wanted to take me to Tel Hashomer for medical and psychological examination but I refused. Told them I’m going there anyway to see you and that they should leave me alone. Don’t worry. From what I’ve heard, I’m in much better shape than you are.”
“I’m sure they exaggerated. I’m fine. Can’t wait to get out of here but they won’t let me out yet. Come quickly, I’m waiting for you. Is Grandpa there? Can you put him on the line?”
“No. They’re all in pursuit of the nutcase.”
“I thought that if you’re there at the house with them, then they must have killed him.”
“No. He fled in a van and everyone here disappeared after him. I’m here with someone who’s going to take me home; and another vehicle or two returned to your base. All the others are in pursuit.”
* * *
“Heads-up. He’s on our network, relaying false reports. Everyone switch to the alternative frequency.” The police forces and the SWAT team and Organization team members involved in the chase switched to a different frequency, and 10483 could no longer hear their radio communication on the device in his possession. He was nearing the HaShalom Interchange and he stuck to the right lane in preparation for turning off the Ayalon Highway. One of the unmarked cars on his tail started to pass him on the left, and the two Organization agents sitting on the right side of the vehicle opened their windows, produced two automatic weapons and sprayed the left side of the carpet van with bullets. The door on the driver’s side was dotted with holes, the driver’s window cracked but remained in place and didn’t fall to the ground, and the MASHANI—CARPET CLEANERS logo toward the rear of the van was riddled with bullet holes. The tires absorbed the bullets and remained unimpaired.
“He’s done something to that van. Nothing’s happening to the tires and he’s driving on despite all the holes we’ve made in the driver’s cab.”
“Stay on him. Ram him. Run him off the road! Some of the explosive devices he installed are in the area of the HaShalom Interchange. Don’t let him get there.”
The armored van protected 10483 almost perfectly. No bullets pierced the armor plating fitted to the driver’s door and the bullets were stopped by the armored glass fixed to the driver’s window. But two of the bullets did penetrate the driver’s cab through the small gap between the steel plate fixed to the door and the armored window, striking 10483 in his left side. But his protective suit stopped the two bullets. He felt them strike him like two powerful punches, but they didn’t pierce the protective suit. He sped on, exiting the highway, turning left toward the HaShalom Bridge, and swerving to force the Organization vehicle racing alongside him to his left into the path of an oncoming car and a head-on collision, with a loud bang and flying bits of glass. He raced ahead, reaching the middle of the bridge over the highway and spotting several police cars waiting for him on the other side, blocking the road, and behind them armed policemen with their weapons drawn. The two sidewalks on either side of the bridge were deserted.
- Zing
- Zing
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Bullets struck the windshield of his van. The unarmored outer glass shattered, and the armored glass stuck behind the windshield with epoxy held the broken pieces in place.
10483 stopped his van in the middle of the bridge. The vehicles closed in on him. The police up ahead held their fire so as not to hit the security vehicles parked behind him. For a moment there was silence, and everything stood still, aside from the flow of traffic along the Ayalon Highway under the bridge that the police had yet to block. Police forces with their weapons drawn began advancing slowly and cautiously toward the carpet van, closing in on him from in front and behind. 10483 remained in the van and turned on the radio to Reshet Bet. The station was broadcasting ongoing reports about an incident involving a driver on a rampage through the streets of Tel Aviv who the police were describing as extremely dangerous, probably an Islamic State terrorist, armed, carrying out a shooting attack. The Middle East really is a dangerous region, he thought to himself, before releasing his seatbelt, crouching down to the floor of the vehicle and reaching for the model aircraft controller that had fallen off the front passenger seat during the course of the chase and was lying now on the floor of the vehicle. He grabbed it and moved the two control levers while still crouched on the floor of the van. A rapid series of explosions shook the HaShalom Interchange and sent a spray of nails flying into everything in the vicinity of the bridge and within a hundred-meter radius. The bottom sections of the two glass walls on the eastern side of the triangular and square Azrieli Towers, shattered up to a height of around twenty floors, and crashed to the ground in a downpour of glass. 10483 got back into the driver’s seat of his battered and bullet-riddled carpet van, returned the Micro-Uzi and model aircraft controller to the seat next to him, and continued driving forward across the bridge. He rammed into two empty police cars in his path and drove over the bodies of the police officers sprawled on the asphalt behind the vehicles, turning left onto Begin Road. When he again heard approaching sirens and the sound of bullets striking the back of his carpet van, he came to a stop some fifty meters before the turning right onto HaArba’a Street, crouched down again inside the vehicle and worked the controller. Another series of powerful explosions shook the street. Cars in the vicinity caught fire, pedestrians who happened to be in the area fell victim to the flying shrapnel, and then everything went quiet again. The carpet van’s engine died. 10483 tried quickly to start it up again several times, but without success. He fired a few shots with the Micro-Uzi into the two jerrycans of gasoline in the back of the vehicle and they burst into flame. He crouched down again on the floor of the van in front of the passenger seat, retrieved the notebook he’d been writing in since regaining consciousness at Lowenstein Hospital, and threw it into the fire. Grabbing the Micro-Uzi and model aircraft controller from the van, he turned around, fired a few rounds in the direction of the police officers behind him, and headed off on foot. A police helicopter was hovering above him and a second wave of Special Forces had crossed the HaShalom Bridge, littered now with wrecked vehicles and bodies, and was heading down Begin Road and past the ball of fire that was once 10483’s van.
* * *
Mario, the head of the Organization’s Operations Division, yelled into the phone. “I know it’s drastic, but we have no choice if we want to avoid hundreds of fatalities.”
“We’ve never done anything like it before,” the head of the Home Front Command’s Operations Division barked in response. “No one sounds air-raid sirens in Tel Aviv because of a terror attack.”
“It’s a rolling attack—ongoing. Pay close attention. We’re dealing with an Islamic State terrorist who has spent an entire year preparing an infrastructure attack in Tel Aviv, and now he’s set it in motion. If you don’t have real-time intelligence, then simply turn on Channel 2 on the TV and you’ll see that the HaShalom Bridge and Begin Road look like the backdrop for Mad Max or a scene from Terminator. We need to get all civilians into bomb shelters and stop all traffic in the area of the HaShalom train station, Azrieli, the Defense Ministry compound, Rabin Square from the north and also from the square to the west, all the way to Rothschild and Shenkin. You guys don’t know him. We do. We know who we’re dealing with; and I’m telling you now, the dozens who’ve been killed and injured thus far are only the beginning if we don’t get everyone off the streets. It’s my head on the line. This call is being recorded and I’m talking full responsibility. The Organization takes full responsibility. The only thing that’s going to empty the streets of Tel Aviv right now is an air-raid siren.”
The conversat
ion ended and Mario replaced the receiver. “Good thinking,” he said to Rotem. “You just saved a whole lot of lives.”
Rotem looked at the control screens in the Operations Room. “Too bad you can’t say the same about those chasing him,” she said. The screens around them were displaying live feeds from the cameras of the teams in the field. Some showed long-range shots of the clouds of smoke from the bombs and burning cars. Those closer to the action, the cameras mounted on casualties, remained fixed on a single image, some at an odd angle such that most of the screen was filled with a close-up of the road or a piece of sky.
The wail of air-raid sirens sounded in the skies of Tel Aviv. And the city’s residents—well-versed in real-time Code Red alerts from the last war with Hamas during Operation Protective Edge—disappeared off the streets. Pedestrians went into designated protective spaces in surrounding buildings, vehicles stopped on the roads and drivers abandoned them, with some fleeing to public shelters if there were any nearby, and others lying flat on the ground on the side of the road with their arms shielding their heads. They were all waiting to hear the telltale booms from the Iron Dome’s interceptors and the rockets from Gaza, and mistakenly thought that the explosions were indeed the booms from the interceptions. The ominous ascending-and-descending tone of the siren, which usually didn’t last longer than a minute, didn’t stop this time.
* * *
Carmit got back into the front passenger seat of the car and shook off the glass fragments from her shirt. The front window on the driver’s side of the car she was in was gone and the head of the driver next to her was slumped forward. She looked at him and saw a wound in the center of his forehead. She put two fingers on his carotid artery. No pulse. Carmit got out of the car, walked around to the driver’s side, opened the door, and dragged the dead driver out. She looked at the car. Both its front tires were punctured and the left side of the vehicle was dotted with small holes. It was a good thing that she ducked in time when she saw 10483’s van come to a halt in the middle of the bridge. She yelled “Duck!” to everyone in the vehicle. But they didn’t listen or didn’t react in time. The two policemen who were sitting in the back were dead, too. She left them there, got into the car, and started it up. The car moved slowly with its two punctured front tires, but she didn’t need speed. She only wanted to maintain eye contact with him. She watched him ram two police cars with his van, continue straight along the bridge, and then turn left onto Begin Road. She made a point of remaining at least 50 meters behind him. With their sirens wailing, two military vehicles passed her and rapidly approached the carpet van up ahead. She watched as Military Police forces aimed M-16 assault rifles out the windows of their racing vehicles and opened fire on 10483’s van. It stopped. Carmit immediately crouched beneath the steering wheel and pressed her hands tightly to her ears. The blasts around her were extremely powerful, and the car she was in shook. She felt a sharp pain in her left arm. One of the flying nails had penetrated the driver’s door and caused a deep laceration below her shoulder. Blood was trickling down her arm. She opened the glove compartment of the vehicle and found a first-aid kit with a roll of an ACE bandage, which she used to close the wound with a few quick loops around her arm. It was more like blocking a leak in a garden hose, but she didn’t have time to dress the wound properly. 10483 had emerged from his van and was continuing on foot, and she left her vehicle and followed him from a distance. He wasn’t running or in a particular hurry. He simply walked leisurely along Begin Road and then turned right onto HaArba’a Street. She realized he was waiting for his pursuers to get close to him, and she kept her distance. If she had a radio, she would have warned everyone, but she didn’t have time to look for one before leaving the vehicle, and now her attention was entirely focused on 10483, who was strolling down HaArba’a Street ahead of her.
* * *
10483 headed down HaArba’a Street. The street was deserted and someone called to him to come hide in one of the restaurants, but he didn’t respond and walked on. That was a nice move they pulled on him with the air-raid siren. But they’re still going to try to take him down, and they’ll have to move in close to do so. A bullet from a sniper’s rifle struck him in the back and rocked him a little, but the protective suit he had on stopped it from penetrating his body. “Come in here and lie down on the floor. We don’t have a bomb shelter,” someone called to him from a restaurant on the left side of the street. He went in, lay down on the floor, and activated his model aircraft controller once more. The shockwave hit him like a blow from a heavyweight boxer. One of the trashcans was fairly close by, and the blast blew in the restaurant’s glass storefront, spraying the people who were hiding inside with shards of glass and bits of shrapnel. Against the backdrop of screams and cries for help, 10483 left the restaurant and continued down HaArba’a Street, at a faster pace now, before turning right into the Sarona area. The suit he was wearing and the helmet on his head were impeding his progress somewhat, but they were essential and he didn’t remove them. He ran his hands over the various pockets in his protective suit to make sure everything was in place. Still on the move, he took out his cell phone and checked the status of the battery—88 percent. He opened the browser page with the two shortcuts, one of which he had already used, left the browser open, and locked the cell phone. The back of his hands displayed lacerations caused by the fragments of glass. He looked at them. Perhaps he should have prepared a pair of gloves, too. Peering between the low-rise structures around the Sarona Market he spotted a group of soldiers running toward him from the direction of the Defense Ministry compound. Two rounds struck him in the chest. He pulled out the Micro-Uzi, sprayed a volley of rounds in their direction, released the empty magazine and allowed it to fall to the floor, inserted a full one, and walked on ahead, continuing to fire as he moved forward. He had Amiram’s pistol in his other hand and was using it, too, against the approaching troops, who were shooting back at him. Additional police forces and soldiers closed in. He dropped flat to the ground once more, took the controller out of its pouch and activated it, again spraying the entire area with nails. He then stood up again, slipped the pistol into its holster, and continued walking in the direction of the Azrieli Center. Two black crows landed on the grass nearby and proceeded to engage in a raucous squabble over something that looked like a piece of red plastic. He observed them for a moment and walked on.
* * *
The security guard at the entrance to the Azrieli Mall left an orphaned chair outside and also fled into the shopping center. The wail of the air-raid sirens continued uninterrupted; and the incessant booms, which had started nearby, shattered the glass walls of the towers, and had then moved farther away, were now starting to sound closer and closer again. Strange that the Iron Dome system is missing the rockets from Gaza, he thought. And he couldn’t understand how their accuracy had improved so much. The mall was full of people—some who’d rushed in from the street after the initial blast and were still inside due to the ongoing air-raid siren, some who were shopping before it all started, and some were soldiers from the nearby Defense Ministry compound who had popped into the mall for something to eat and hadn’t made it back to the base before everything kicked off. Everyone was trying to move as far inside the mall as possible, into the shelters and protective areas, and as far as they could get from the structure’s glass walls. 10483 approached the entrance to the Azrieli Center in quick strides.
* * *
“Get hold of the bunker.” Rotem was sitting next to Mario and watching the feeds from the cameras around the HaShalom Interchange. “I know what he has in mind. We have to get the Air Force to send a helicopter to the roof of Azrieli.”
“Why?”
“From what I’ve observed until now, whenever he decides to detonate his devices, several explode at once, those in his immediate vicinity. It’s been the same since the first time, on HaHarzit Street in Savyon, and then again at his house, and then here in the streets. He must have a remote controll
er with a limited range. That’s why he’s going up.”
“He wants a wider range from the roof of Azrieli?”
“Precisely.”
“But he’s backing himself into a corner. If he goes up to the roof, he won’t be coming down again.”
“That’s true. He surely knows that.”
“Okay, I’m getting the bunker on the line to tell them to get the Air Force into action. And also to instruct all forces still on the ground to get the hell out of there. Whatever hasn’t exploded until now is going to go off soon.”
“What’s the situation in Rabin Square?”
“It’s been evacuated. It’s clear of civilians. The air-raid siren sent everyone scattering for shelter.”
“Tell them to get the police out of there, too.”
* * *
10483 walked into the mall and grabbed a small bottle of mineral water from a deserted kiosk. He drank it down, placed the empty bottle on the counter, and walked toward the lobby of the circular Azrieli Tower, which was deserted. He went over to the elevators and looked around. There were three on each side of the hallway. He pressed the button to call the elevators and the doors of one opened immediately. He stepped in and pressed the button to the highest floor. He recalled the elevator on Rue de Delices that took him up to the floor on which Adriana Karson lived before filling her apartment with water and bringing down the building on his first target. The first envelope out of three. That was the seventh floor. This building has forty-nine floors, which is seven squared. That’s interesting.
While riding up in the elevator, he took his cell phone out of its pouch, checked something on the Internet, quickly typed an email and sent it, and put the phone back in its place. After getting to the top, he stepped out of the elevator, opened the door to the stairwell, and walked up to the door leading to the roof. The door was locked. He went back down to the bottom of the flight of stairs to avoid any ricochets, pulled out the Micro-Uzi, replaced the spent magazine with a full one, and emptied it into the lock of the door at the top of the stairs. He went back up and kicked the door, which opened onto the roof. He inserted a new magazine and went to the door of the nearby elevator room and shaft. It was locked. He backed away a few meters and fired at the locking mechanism of the door, kicked it in, went inside, and emptied another magazine into the fuse box, disabling the building’s six elevators in a dance of electrical sparks.