I called after him. “And set it up to give us somewhere between twelve and fifteen minutes after we pull out.”
“Gotcha.” Wonder turned to leave. Again, I stopped him in midstride with my voice. “And set a booby trap on it.” I didn’t want anybody defusing Wonder’s handiwork.
He paused, hands on hips. “Anything else, Captain Dickhead—maybe you’d like whipped cream and a cherry on top? Or can I get to fucking work already?”
I saluted le prodige rouge with my middle finger to remind him he was still Number One with me. “Get the fuck outta here.”
I looked down at the bound-and-gagged Hood, who was still writhing in pain on the deck. “Avi—what do you want to do with him? It’s gonna be hard to bring him along making all that noise.”
Avi, who was shooting pictures with the autofocus camera, pulled his eye back from the viewfinder. His face was a mask. “Oh, I think Ehud should stand watch this morning,” he said. “Somebody has to make sure that the demolition charges work properly.”
We pulled out at 0745. Before we departed, we opened two dozen shipping crates in the basement and photographed the contents. We made sure that Werner and Ehud were in most of the pictures. We left everything behind except for a handful of documents Avi took from Ehud Golan’s pockets, the thick sheaf of waybills from the dual-use material crates, the weapons, the pair of laser targeting devices in their suitcases, and a few other goodies. The five of us fit comfortably in Werner’s Mercedes. It was also nice to see that Werner had been supplied with the kinds of papers that get folks through roadblocks. Avi looked them over carefully, then pronounced them authentic—and valid.
There was even a current road map in the Mercedes’ glove compartment. We picked the route of least resistance—took the highway to Qatana, and from there straight up the mountain road to Burqush, on to Rakhle, and from there across the Lebanese border through one of the mountain passes just to the north of what the Syrians call Jabelech Cheikh, and the Israelis call Mount Hermon. It was not the most direct way—but it was the one least likely to arouse anyone’s suspicion.
The route was Koby’s suggestion—he’d finished his reserve duty less than a month before and had been assigned to the northernmost quadrant of the Lebanese security zone. His thick index finger pointed out the Syrian positions he remembered—positions just beyond the Israeli lines, across the international border.
So, instead of taking the most direct route, which would take us through those Syrian army checkpoints, we fishhooked north toward Dahr el Ahmar, then turned southwest at Nabi Safa, then put pedal to metal and drove hi-diddle diddle, right down the middle, paralleling the Litani River—and headed straight for the Israeli Army headquarters just outside Hasbaiya. Avi drove, and I rode shotgun, just like the old days. Werner sat between Koby and Wonder in the backseat, riding the hump. He actually smelled like shit and I wondered whether he’d soiled himself. Not my problem. But we still opened the windows. We were maybe fifteen kliks from the plant when I heard the reverberation of the dull explosion. Werner Lantos winced at the sound. He was the only one who did.
We drove the first half hour in silence. Then Werner began to find his sea legs. He was a hell of a salesman, believe me. I mean, if I hadn’t known what I knew, and if he hadn’t smelled so fucking bad, I might have started half believing him.
He was one of the good guys. He’d put his life on the line for us—that’s the Americans—and them—that’s the Israelis—hundreds of times. Sure, he stole—but he never stole from us. Only from no-goodniks like Viktor Grinkov, or Andrei Yudin. Honest, he promised. The only people who were really getting screwed were bad guys.
I turned toward him. “Only bad guys.”
He nodded. “Yes, yes.” And you know what? The cockbreath probably believed what he was saying.
“What about my friend, Paul Mahon? What about his wife and kids? What about the enlisted Navy driver who died? What about the people in Paris who were blown up in those three bombings?”
That shut the sonofabitch up for a while. But by the time we were cruising up the long, curved road to Rakhle, he was at it again.
I finally told him to shut the fuck up. “Werner,” I said, “I’m gonna make you an offer you can’t refuse.” I turned in my seat and draped my arms around the headrest. “If you flap any more lip during this drive, I’m going to start breaking your appendages. Joint by joint, starting with your right big toe and working all the way up to your left thumb. Got it?”
He looked at me and saw that I was serious. “Yes,” he said.
“Good.” I relaxed the intensity of my stare. “Now—because I am a tough man but a fair man, if we get where we’re going and I haven’t broken any more of your joints, I will let you try to convince my boss that you’re on the right side, and I will abide by what he says.”
“You are? You will?”
“Yes.”
The dirty look Wonder gave me was unbelievable. But I didn’t care. I knew what I was doing. You see, friends, there are times when—as Werner himself had explained to me in Paris—geopolitics plays a role in the outcome of situations, and you cannot allow personal feelings to interfere with a global Weltanschauung. Besides, my remarks brought us some blessed peace and quiet for the next three-quarters of an hour.
I wish I could titillate you, gentle reader, with news that we had to run half a dozen roadblocks under fire, blast our way through a bunch of Syrian commandos sent out to pursue us, and generally outfox the whole Hizballah guerrilla organization in eastern Lebanon. But the fact of the matter is that we did not. Both in Syria and in Lebanon, one can, most of the time, move from one location to another with no interference, and very little delay. We saw two military police jeeps in Rakhle—but nothing else. Not even at the Lebanese line.
At the sleepy, one-man Lebanese border station a klik and a half inside the border near Kfar Oouq, the unarmed official motioned us through with a cursory wave and a pro forma “ahlan v’Lubnan”—welcome to Lebanon. Our only real problems began when we crossed the first of the SLA checkpoints, just north of Nabat, at 1015. The SLA—the acronym stands for the Southern Lebanese Army—is a creation of Mossad. It is made up mostly of Christian gunsels, who are paid, trained, and equipped by Israel. They are not nice people, and they have heavy weapons. Well, they have heavier weapons than we did.
And so we sat in the blistering sun for half a fucking hour while the CIC—that’s capo in charge—went to find his capo dei capi, who in turn, had to go looking for his fucking capo del tutti capi, so that some provision could be made for escorting us the last ten or so miles to the IDF regional headquarters at Hasbaiya. There had been ambushes, the capo said. It was dangerous, he insisted. We needed protection, he emphasized.
And so we sat, and we waited. Koby excused himself and wandered into the SLA checkpoint, looking for coffee. Wonder went off to drain the lizard. Avi and I sat in the car, keeping an eye on Werner. Still, it occurred to me that maybe we shouldn’t waste time, which was, after all, kind of precious. I turned to Avi. “Will your phone work here?”
He shrugged. “If we’re far enough south to pick up one of the IDF cells.” He reached down for the pack that sat between my feet.
“I’ll get it—” I unzipped the rucksack and rooted around until I came up with the phone, put it to my ear, punched the keypad, and hit the “send” button. Nothing.
Avi held his hand out. “Let me see.” I handed it over to him. He extended the antenna, and played with the switch but couldn’t get the damn thing to work either. “Battery’s dead.” he opined. “I think I may have left it turned on.”
Werner Lantos either had to take another crap real bad, or he looked like he wanted to say something. “Okay, Werner,” I said, “Now, you can talk—what is it?”
“That’s a Nokia—same as mine. I have a twelve-volt power cord in the console.”
I opened the center console and found the cord, plugged it into the phone’s receptacle, then jammed the p
ower plug into the Mercedes’s cigarette lighter. Immediately, the phone’s lights came on.
“Why, thank you, Werner,” I said.
“You’re very welcome,” he replied.
I handed the phone to Avi. “You want to try Tel Aviv?”
“I’d better, don’t you think?”
I nodded. Avi punched a series of numbers into the phone and then hit the “send” button. He waited, silent, as the call began to transmit. Then, abruptly, he hit the “end” key and handed me the phone
“I was just thinking, he said,” it’s probably more important for you to get hold of your people than it is for me to get hold of mine. Besides, there’s nothing I want to say on an open line. So. you make your call—I’ll have a secure telephone as soon as we get to Hasbaiya—that won’t be more than half an hour.”
“You’re right.” I punched the international access code onto the keypad, followed by the country code, area code, and then Kenny Ross’s number. Yes, I know it was way before normal business hours back in the U.S. of A. But I also knew that Kenny would be waiting to hear from me—and so would Chairman Crocker.
Kenny picked up on the second ring. “Ross.”
“It’s me.”
“Where are you?”
I told him.
“Sit-rep?”
He wasn’t wasting any words on me, so I didn’t waste any on him. I gave him the requisite no-shitter.
I could tell from the tone of his voice that he liked what he heard. “Evidence?”
“Yup.”
“Verification?”
“We have pictures.”
“Great.” There was a muffled thwop as Ken Ross cupped his hand over the receiver and spoke to someone in his office. Then he said, “We’ll be able to take it from here, Dick.” Then there was another pause on the line. Finally he came back. “Let me sit-rep you. First, I can tell you we acted on your faxed information from this end,” he said.
That would be the $50 mil in Russkie money he was talking about. “And?”
The satisfaction in Ken Ross’s voice was evident. “Without going into detail on this phone, Dick, I say that there are a lot more poor Ivans in the world today than there were yesterday—and they know enough about how they were ripped off to be mighty pissed about it, too.”
That was terrific news. I love it when Russkies are pissed off. But there was another loose end I wanted to see tied off. “What about changes at our embassy in Moscow, Admiral?”
“The DCM with the trust account?” Ken Ross reported gleefully. “SECDEF showed your fax to the secretary of state, who went ballistic. That sonofabitch is looking for a job because of you.”
My friends, there are times when one feels like celebrating, and this was one of ’em. But there was business to do first.
“Admiral,” I said, “When I came out, I brought the project’s prime contractor with me—a fella named Werner Lantos. Maybe you’ve heard of him?”
Ken Ross, who of course knew all about Werner Lantos, interrupted me: “Whoa, Dick. We don’t want anything to do with Lantos—anything. At best he’s a double agent. At worst—who knows.”
I smiled encouragingly at Werner Lantos. “You’re absolutely right,” I said to Ross. “Which is why Werner wants to talk to you—to prove just how valuable he might be to us.”
There was evident irritation in Ken Ross’s voice. “As I just explained—”
“Precisely,” I said, a soothing expression directed toward Werner. “Which is precisely why he wants so badly to speak with you now.”
“I don’t want a goddamn thing to do with the man,” Ken Ross shouted in my ear.
I paid no attention to him. “And so, here he is—in person.”
I put my hand over the phone’s mouthpiece very loosely, so my words could be heard in Washington. “Werner,” I said, “just like I promised, I am going to let you speak with my boss. Admiral Ross. You may even call him by his first name—Admiral. I want you to tell him everything. And I mean, everything. When you’ve finished, if you can convince him that your ass is worth saving, your ass may get saved.”
I handed Werner the phone. He looked like the original drowning man who’d just been tossed a life preserver.
Then I opened the car door. Stepped outside. Stretched. Avi did the same.
It was, actually, a glorious day. At its best, Lebanon can look just like a layout in one of those glossy magazines about lifestyles of the obscenely rich—the ones that cost ten bucks a copy and are edited by people named Paige or Muffy. And it certainly did today. The sky was Kodacolor blue. Big, puffy white clouds moved regally, high over Mount Hermon. Deep blue-green cedar trees—those fabled cedars of Lebanon—dotted the rocky hillsides. I looked up the slope, beyond the checkpoint, to where a dozen or so sheep were feeding on thistle in an olive grove of gnarled trees that must have been a hundred years old. Make no mistake, friends, there is a reason that for more than five thousand years, people have been fighting over this patch of ground we currently call the Middle East. God, it was a perfect day.
At which point it occurred to me, in the way things that have nothing whatsoever to do with your present situation occur to you, that Paul Mahon would never, ever, experience a perfect day like this one. Paul was gone—forever. His family was gone—forever. My godson, Adam, was gone—forever.
Y’know, it’s funny, the little things you remember about people. Like the time Paul and I had been ordered by our respective bosses to steal the Army mascot from the Pentagon lobby the week before the Army-Navy game.
What I remember was not the snatch—when we tackled the damn mannequin it almost broke in half—or the chase (we must have had twenty MPs on our tails, and lemme tell you, folks, that despite the fact that we were ossifers and they weren’t, if they’d caught us they would have tried to beat the shit out of us). No, what I remember was right after we burst through the shiny mahogany double doors of the vice CNO’s suite. The MPs couldn’t follow because we’d made it to sacred ground—ground that was protected by Marines. Big Marines. Very, very big Marines.
Paul had the mannequin by its shoulders. I had it by the knees. He turned and looked at me, his lungs heaving from the long run, his uniform collar tinged with sweat, his hair in his face. And he had this gnomish, dumb smile on his face—it was really a totally dumb smile. A moronically dumb yet euphorically twinkly smile. And he said to me, laughing so hard that it gave him hiccups, “Do you know that it has cost the American taxpayers four and a half million dollars so far to train me”—then he hiccupped—“so that I could do … this?”
What I remember, friends, is that dumb, twinkly smile, and the hiccup.
The sun was bright. The sheep were grazing. I looked at Werner Lantos in the backseat of the Mercedes. He was gesturing, somewhat pathetically, it seemed to me, as he tried to convince Kenneth Patrick Ross, Rear Admiral (Lower Half) and submariner, of the impossible. To wit: he, Werner Lantos, was one of the good guys.
I looked at Avi. He’d moved away, toward the checkpoint barrier, where he was impatiently staring south down the road.
I tapped on the Mercedes’s window.
Werner Lantos looked up, an impulsive expression of annoyance flashing across his face. He cupped his hand across the mouthpiece, the artery in his neck throbbing, and he looked angrily over at me, as if to say, I’m talking, you twit.
Y’know, my friends, it occurred to me that, once an asshole, always an asshole. It occurred to me that we’d already put Werner’s account numbers and passwords to good use. It occurred to me that almost all the scores I’d vowed to settle up, had been settled up.
And so, my friends, it occurred to me that it was time to get … personal. I reached into my pocket and extracted the detonator. With my left hand I released the arming safety.
It was at that point in what remained of his life that Werner Lantos realized what I was doing.
I smiled at him as I pressed the button.
It was actually a smaller ch
arge than I’d thought. Very little noise, too. Werner’s head—what there was of it—didn’t even go through the window glass, although it did leave a shallow impression—a sort of quasi-death mask. But they were gonna have to hose the interior of that car down before they used it again.
I looked over at Avi. He started to say something, then stopped.
I tossed the detonator at him. He caught it, one-handed, and slipped it into a pocket.
Now it was time to move. “Yo, Avi, why don’t you rustle us up some fresh transportation,” I said. “We’ve got better things to do than stand around here with our fingers up our asses—Wonder’s got a chiefs test to study for, I’ve got to get my goddamn men back before they go soft on me, and you, hell—you’ve got dogs to walk.”
Tzahal is the Hebrew acronym for Israeli Defense Forces.
7.62 by 39 milimeters, to be precise.
He was one of the European contract employees working on the installation. A piece of Ossirak trivia: the lead pilot on that raid was ultimately employed by Israeli intelligence to “run” the American spy Jonathan Pollard.
Glossary A2
aforementioned asshole.
Admiral’s Gestapo:
what the secretary of defense’s office calls the Naval Investigative Services Command. See: SHIT-FOR-BRAINS.
AK-47:
7.62×39 Kalashnikov automatic rifle. The most common assault weapon in the world.
AMAN:
Hebrew acronym for Agaf Modiin, Israel’s military intelligence organization.
ATS route:
Air Traffic Service route. Commercial airspace.
AVCNO:
Assistant Vice Chief of Naval Operations.
BAW:
Big Asshole Windbag.
BDUs:
Battle Dress Uniforms. Now that’s an oxymoron if there ever was one.
ben zona (Hebrew):
sonofabitch.
Beretta:
.22-caliber semiauto pistol favored by Israelis.
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