The Merkava MBT was dark, but its air-conditioning system hummed quietly. There was no doorbell to press. Wilkes slammed his helmet repeatedly against the back of the tank. It bounced off with a dull thud, as if the monster was a solid ingot of pig-iron. Nothing. He crashed the helmet again and again against the tank, a wave of frustration building within him. If there were someone inside, would the thick hull even transmit the noise he was making?
A crack of yellow light appeared at the back of the tank as its rear door swung down. A rock and roll track blared out. AC/DC, an Australian band, for Christ’s sake, screamed out at a hundred decibels. A blond, bleary-eyed soldier poked his head out to investigate, pistol in hand. Wilkes kicked the gun aside, pushed the man back inside the tank and leapt in.
‘Speak English?’ asked Wilkes.
‘Y…yes,’ said the private. He stuttered with an unusual accent Wilkes couldn’t place. ‘Who –’
Wilkes cut him off. ‘Can you drive this thing?’
‘Yes, but who are –’
Wilkes found the tank’s comms suite, isolated the radio, and tuned it to the tactical frequency. ‘Kill the music.’
‘Er, okay, but…’ said the soldier. He punched a button on a communications panel and a guitar solo ended abruptly.
Wilkes dialled in the combat frequency and the tank was suddenly full of the battle raging three blocks away. Glukel was screaming at someone. Baruch came in over the top. The noise of a submachine gun firing nearby drowned everything out. It was suddenly cut short by a scream.
‘Your people are dying,’ yelled Wilkes. ‘Get this fucker started.’
The soldier nervously looked about for someone to tell him something different. He was young, inexperienced. The crew had gone off to a brothel and left him to guard the tank with a stack of American hot rod magazines for company. It had been so quiet he’d even been considering jerking off over the blonde leaning on the bonnet of a ’57 Chevy when movement on a video screen had caught his attention. He’d adjusted the tank sight system, external video cameras embedded in the Merkava’s armour, and saw this man pounding on the back door. He should have told him to fuck off over the PA, but instead he’d made a mistake and decided to do it face to face. He cursed himself for that now – his commander would kill him. He’d get back from doing the business and find the tank gone. The soldier pictured the look on his commander’s face and the subsequent anger that would be directed at him. But the explosions and the screaming coming through the internal speakers overcame his fear of his immediate superior’s retribution – that and the fact that the man who’d invaded his private world waving a Glock in his face was a more immediate threat.
The soldier lowered himself into the driver’s seat and tapped his access code into the computer’s touch screen. The beast’s engine still held a little heat. He tapped the green, warm-start option and the massive diesel roared into life.
Wilkes put on the commander’s helmet, which included integrated ’phones and mic. The driver followed suit. ‘What’s your name?’ asked Wilkes over the intercom.
‘Benyamin,’ the driver answered nervously.
‘Where you from, Ben?’ asked Wilkes quickly, turning the volume down on the bad news coming over the radio so that he could get the answer.
‘Originally…South Africa, sir,’ said Benyamin, deciding that the man who’d commandeered (the word ‘hijacked’ had entered his head but he killed it instantly) his tank had to be an officer – Sayeret, or maybe even Shin Bet.
‘Well, Ben, we’re going downtown to pick up some friends. If we do it right, we’ll get a big pat on the back.’ Wilkes chose not to add that if things went to hell there’d be faeces on the fan.
‘Which direction, sir?’ Benyamin asked.
‘You got a map of this city?’
‘Better than that, sir.’ The young man touched his screen several times and a similar screen in front of Wilkes flashed into life. On it was a colour road map of Ramallah with the tank’s location on it illustrated by a small tank icon. Cute. Stuck to the armour plate by his shoulder with Blu-tack was a collection of pictures of naked women torn from various sources, positioned around a buxom brunette suggestively riding the Merkava’s gun. Wilkes shook his head – the interior of the tank was no different to any other male workplace he’d been in.
‘GPS,’ Benyamin said by way of explanation.
Wilkes hit the transmission button. ‘Lieutenant Colonel, this is Tom Wilkes. I have a tank. Put me up on the system.’
‘Tom, where…?’ Baruch was momentarily confused, but Wilkes had chosen his words well, and the colonel grasped the Australian’s intent. He yelled at the technicians who relayed the frequency.
‘You got that, Ben?’ asked Wilkes.
‘Yes, sir. Seatbelt.’
‘What?’
‘Your seatbelt, sir.’
‘Oh,’ said Wilkes, vaguely surprised. He shrugged and buckled in. ‘And the name’s Tom, okay?’
‘Yes, sir…Tom.’
Several frames suddenly appeared on the screen, one atop the other. Wilkes moved them around with a trackball beside the screen. Benyamin did the same. The target building was one right turn and two hundred metres away. Benyamin touched his screen and the road ahead was captured by the TSS and projected onto separate monitors in the ubiquitous green of augmented light.
Wilkes heard Baruch ask him several questions but he ignored him. He was still working out in his own head exactly what he was going to do with the tank once he got it into position. The situation at the target building had stabilised somewhat, but only temporarily. The terrorists attempting to take the ground floor had been beaten back. But Dragon Warrior had picked up reinforcements in the vicinity, making their way to the battle with, doubtlessly, more RPGs. The Zefas were powerless, unless the terrorists had the bad sense to try again to take up positions on the rooftop giving the helicopter gunships a clear shot. Samuels’ men – the ground blocking force – had been slaughtered to a man. Glukel’s troop was gradually being whittled down. From the screen display he could see that four were wounded, two seriously. The soldiers were also running low on ammunition and resupply was not an option. Lieutenant Colonel Baruch had assembled an assault team from scratch, made up of nearby Israeli Defence Force soldiers on various security details, but they would be walking into a firestorm. Whoever these enemy soldiers were – Hezbollah or Hamas – they were not lying down without a fight. Samuels had been right.
‘What have you got – what sort of rounds?’ Wilkes asked.
Benyamin was well and truly on side now. The information coming in on his touch screen from the UAVs and helos presented a desperate picture. His eyes were now wide in their sockets, his mouth dry with the adrenalin rush. ‘Sir, we have APFSDS and HEAT multipurpose rounds, plus assorted anti-personnel and HE rounds.’
The armour-piercing fin-stabilised discarding sabot round would have been perfect if they were up against tanks, APCs or hardened bunkers. But a high-explosive anti-tank round, basically a high-explosive shaped charge, would clear the building in one massive blow.
‘Given ’em HEAT?’
‘That’d be my choice, sir.
‘Well, get it loaded.’
Benyamin slowed the Merkava, swung it round the right-hander then gunned it. The tank’s 1500 horsepower General Dynamics GD833 diesel thrummed as it launched the tank’s thirty tonnes down the road. The going was tough. The gap between the buildings was too narrow to allow the tank to pass freely between them. The left side of the tank ploughed into several buildings, causing them to cave-in as it charged through. Benyamin worked the touch screen. ‘Two rounds in the hopper, sir. One to do the job, and one for luck.’
‘Got an ETA?’ asked Wilkes.
‘Thirty seconds give or take, sir.’
Wilkes increased the magnification on the forward view. The target loomed large. Benyamin switched to infrared. The hot lead and tracer exchanges between the two buildings could be seen clearly, as c
ould the burning Humvees out front.
Machinery clanged beside Wilkes as the HEAT round was automatically pushed into the gun’s breech. An orange glowing diamond appeared on the building about to be reduced to landfill. Benyamin moved it around with the trackball. ‘I think the ground floor, sir. Give our people across the road some protection. But I’d give them some warning.’The Israeli tried to lock the gun on target but the street was too narrow, so he widened the angle by smashing the tank through an adjacent building. Benyamin brought the gun to bear again, this time with better results. Its stabilising system took over, automatically making minute corrections in all axes, compensating for the tank’s movement, to ensure the round, once launched, hit the spot.
‘Roger that,’ said Wilkes. ‘Lieutenant Glukel, Tom Wilkes.’
‘I hear you,’ yelled the lieutenant, partially deaf from the ordnance exploding all around her.
‘Get some cover now,’ said Wilkes.
‘What?’
‘Gotcha, Tom,’ said Atticus. ‘Whatever you’re gonna do, buddy, do it fast. No ammo…wounded.’
‘You’ve got a five countdown.’ Wilkes counted back from seven until he reached five. He turned off the radio and finished the countdown in his head: four…three…two…one. Wilkes yelled, ‘FIRE!’
The Merkava leapt as the HEAT round erupted from the gun. An instant later, a massive percussion wave swept over the tank. Benyamin stood on the anchors and the Merkava skidded to a halt sideways, clipping a building and knocking out a large corner of it. Wilkes was almost thrown out of his seat and was grateful for the seatbelt. All went strangely quiet, and then a pitter-patter sound emanated from the hull like a light sun shower on a tin roof. Wilkes looked about, unsure of the noise.
‘It’s raining, sir,’ explained Benyamin. ‘Concrete.’
Wilkes checked the monitor. Sure enough, chunks of concrete, stone and bricks were striking the road all around the tank. A large ‘thunk’ gently rocked the Merkava, and Wilkes, with the help of the TSS, watched a three-metre corner section of a wall tumble off the tank’s turret and onto the road. The dust had a while to settle but the cameras, in light-augmented mode, revealed a hole where once a building stood.
‘Bloody hell,’ said Wilkes quietly.
Benyamin nodded. ‘Yeah. Cool, huh?’
Kadar viewed the surf suspiciously, but the joy that seemed to possess everyone who swam between the peaks was infectious. He dived in and struck out for the green water beyond the white, beyond the breakers where the waves lined up like soldiers, obedient to the orders of some invisible drill sergeant. Kadar rose as the first wave in a set lifted him up, its energy encouraging him to catch the next. As the wave passed, it set him down gently in its trough. But then the following wave approached, bigger than the first. It sucked him through the water as it neared, dragging him up its towering face. For a moment he was poised on its crest. He looked down and saw that there was no water on the reef below, just the points of the coral reef with one small fish flopping and twitching between its jagged fingers. The face of the wave became concave and Kadar saw the wave for its true self: a malignant force with a conscious and grim determination. He looked down on the reef below as if from the roof of a four-storey building and saw his death. The lip of the wave curled under, taking him with it. It drove him into the reef and rolled him over those jagged peaks.
It was as if he had no strength to resist, for the wave’s power was beyond resistance. It drove him down and tumbled him around, over and over. It pummelled him senseless, rolling him so that he had no sense of up or down, and all the while the air in his lungs soured, his desire to inhale growing by the moment so that his chest burned and his head pounded with an irresistible craving to breathe, breathe, breathe. Yet, round and round he was driven, the surf careless of his life, which must surely slip from his grasp at any moment. It was as if a great hand had forced him to the bottom and held him there, grinding his limbs and his face on the coral, slicing, piercing, the water reddening with his ebbing life force.
And then suddenly he burst to the surface at the last moment of desperation to inhale the sweet clear air. Only this time, there was nothing but sand to breathe; mouthfuls of rasping sand that filled his lungs with a dry burning. Kadar Al-Jahani regained consciousness as he coughed and hacked to free his lungs of the concrete dust. There was silence in his head, the silence of the deaf. He began to crawl slowly. His shoulder was torn and loose, the ball rolling freely in soft muscle made him want to cry out, but he bit down on it, channelled it, harnessed it to his will to survive and escape. His hands were secured behind his back, so Kadar fell on his face several times as the rubble shifted under his bloody knees. And still the dust choked. He crawled for days and weeks like this, stumbling, falling, searching for air, air that was sweet, a clean breath above the roiling dust.
‘Son of a bitch,’ Wilkes heard Monroe say.
‘Let’s roll,’ said Wilkes with a nod of his head to Benyamin.
The Israeli gunned the diesel and the Merkava bucked forward, rearing over the scattered debris like a frightened horse. The soldiers waiting in the building choked as the billowing waves of grit coated their lungs.
‘Where’s Kadar?’ asked Monroe.
‘He’s with you,’ said Glukel.
‘Shit,’ said Monroe.
Some long seconds of silence followed. ‘Okay,’ said Monroe. ‘I do not have the prisoner. REPEAT! THE PRISONER HAS ESCAPED!’
‘Kaaakaaaat!’ yelled Glukel.
Shit! Wilkes resisted the temptation to say it into the mic. Without Kadar Al-Jahani, the mission would be worse than a complete disaster. So many pointless deaths… Wilkes checked the monitor in front of him and cycled through the various levels of information. Major Samuels and all his men were dead, according to their flat-lines. And if they weren’t dead before his arrival with the Merkava, only a miracle would have saved them during the explosion of the HEAT ordnance. He again counted the signatures of Samuels and his people and the lines were as before – all flat. But there was something unusual. Lieutenant Glukel was in the process of conducting a search of the demolished building to find Kadar, ordering teams of two to perform a systematic search of the various rooms. The Saudi could well have just been hiding somewhere amongst the rubble.
‘Lieutenant Glukel?’ Wilkes said.
‘I’m busy.’
‘Lieutenant. How many in your troop?’
‘Twelve. No, thirteen, including your friend Monroe.’
‘Atticus,’ said Wilkes. ‘You wearing a wristband?’
‘No,’ said Monroe.
‘Okay, well I’ve got thirteen signatures here on screen. So why is that?’
‘Christ! I forgot. I put my band on Kadar after we cuffed him,’ said Monroe.
‘I’m with you,’ Baruch said, interrupting. ‘Give me a minute.’
Wilkes heard him talking heatedly with the technician. Wilkes wondered whether the American had pulled up his daks now that the stress levels were elevated. A refreshed view of the building flashed onto the screen in front of Wilkes and on it floated twelve bright red dots, each representing a soldier’s homing beacon. But there was one missing. Unlucky number thirteen.
‘Tom, we’re going to have to send Dragon Warrior on a bit of a fly-around. The target couldn’t have gone far,’ said Baruch.
The view of the building changed as the UAV swept around it slowly, stopping every dozen metres or so in a hover to scan the surrounding buildings. And then, suddenly, there it was, or rather, there he was, Kadar Al-Jahani. There was a brightly coloured red sphere inching down the street behind the target building.
‘You got that?’ said Baruch.
‘We’re on it,’ said Wilkes. ‘Benyamin?’
The tank moved forward, swung right, then advanced slowly. It was a tight fit in the side street. It took out the front wall of a two-storey dwelling that promptly collapsed around the tank. The Merkava stopped in the T-intersection at the rear of the build
ing, Benyamin rotating the turret so that it fitted between the buildings. There was not enough room to turn the tank through ninety degrees without destroying more buildings. The tank’s TSS cameras revealed a small dust-coloured mound moving slowly down the middle of the street. Benyamin targeted the main gun on the lump and loaded the spare HEAT round into the breech.
‘I think you’ve got him covered, Ben,’said Wilkes. ‘Crack the doors and leave the motor running.’ Wilkes released his safety harness, picked up the Glock and disappeared through the rear. The tank’s floodlights snapped on. Wilkes gagged on the thick dust boiling around the tank. It stung his eyes and made them water. The atmosphere in the tank had been cool and clean, purified by the air-con. Wilkes pulled himself up on the tank, picked his way over it and then jumped back down into the rear lane. He walked up to the lump, a man with his hands snap-locked behind his back, crawling along on his knees, his skinned face and broken shoulder pushing into the dirt as he tried in vain to escape.
Glukel’s people materialised from the target building, dragging their feet slowly, exhausted, crunching the rubble and grit collected on the road. Seven faces, seven pairs of white eyes blinking from black faces. They carried their people who were too badly wounded to walk. One of the men carried a dead comrade over his shoulder.
‘I hope he’s fucking worth it,’ said Glukel too loudly, her ears clogged with the thunder of battle. She didn’t wait for a reaction, but pushed past Wilkes towards the tank.
‘What kept you, Mr Cojones?’ said Monroe, the smile for once wiped from his face.
Lieutenant Colonel Baruch stood in silence as he watched the monitor, the green clouds of dust settling. He knew this would be his last op. He would be retired, probably with yet another medal. In the words of the American technician beside him, it had been ‘a cluster fuck’. A nice term. He couldn’t have put it better himself. All the technology in the world and still, at the battle front, flesh and blood had stopped the bullets. That crazy Australian bastard. If not for him, more body bags would have been required. But how the hell was he going to keep the warrant officer’s involvement from leaking? If it was important enough, someone else higher up could worry about that.
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