Carefully, he made certain that the front door did not lock automatically, since they did not want Ravi and Shakira to be locked out. They just hoped the couple would return before the midnight watch change.
Meanwhile, they regrouped in their observation post and watched. The small black box that would activate the bomb was resting innocently on the window ledge.
It was 2315 now, and there was no sign of the general. But Abraham saw it first, the lights of a taxi coming around the corner from Al-Bakry Street, swinging right into Bab Touma. It pulled up directly in front of the house they watched.
“Here we go, boys,” breathed Abraham, who was apparently unaffected by the double murder he had committed less than an hour previously. “They’re back.”
And all four men saw the lovely Shakira emerge from the back left-hand passenger seat of the cab. From the other side, there emerged her escort, who took her arm and walked up the steps.
They reached the front door and knocked, but the door opened even at Shakira’s light touch. She was doubtless mystified by the absence of the two guards, but she entered the house, followed by the man, presumably Ravi, who was somewhat lost in the shadows. But at least neither of them had noticed the two hidden bodies.
Colonel Joel saw the light flood into the front room. Toward the rear he could see a male figure. Shakira was nowhere to be seen.
“That’s it, John,” snapped Ben. “That’ll do for us. Set the timer for ten minutes and let’s go.”
John Rabin turned the dial, pressed the activate button. The residents of the house on Bab Touma were on borrowed time. The four Mossad men stampeded down the stairs and out into the dark. They ran through the back street behind the apartment and reached the garage. The key fitted easily, and they pushed the door open.
And there, inside, was the converted Mercedes Benz. Colonel Joel jumped in the front passenger seat. Abraham rummaged for the key and started the motor. Major Sherman jumped in the backseat, and John Rabin waited outside to shut and lock the garage door.
The car moved forward. The last member of the team climbed into the rear seat, and Ben Joel hit the button to inform the field agent Jerry that they were on their way. Abraham drove swiftly to the Bab Touma Gate and swung right onto the road that would take them down to the airport perimeter road.
But before they reached that crossroad, John Rabin’s bomb went off with a crash that ripped into the night sky. It was so powerful that it blew the roof thirty feet into the air. The entire building went up with a stupendous blast, exploding the ancient cement and brickwork into the street, outward and upward. Flames leapt into the air. Rubble, glass, and stonework rained down from the sky. The world’s oldest continuously occupied city shuddered on its sandy foundations.
“Holy shit!” yelled Abraham. “We just did it. Tel Aviv, here we come.”
Ten minutes later, as Abraham gunned his supercharged wreck down the airport highway, Ravi Rashood arrived back from dinner with the wife of his close friend Abdul Khan, one of Shakira’s half-brothers.
The scene of pure devastation was beyond belief. The entire street was blocked with rubble. Two police cars were already there; a fire engine was trying to get in from the wrong end of the street. Sirens were blaring, blue lights flashing, women screaming.
Ravi raced to what was left of the front of his house. But that was simply pointless. There was no front to his house. Rudy Khan was hysterical, but Ravi had no thought for anyone except Shakira, and he ran with a helpless desperation around to the back of his former home.
He reached the padlocked green gate, and, from behind it, he could hear a woman screaming, incoherently, plaintively. He spotted the white truck, and with one bound was on the hood, and then the roof, staring down into his own backyard. He could see that the inside door to the yard was open, and there, crouched on the ground, was Shakira, terrified, covered in blood, but alive.
Abdul, who had brought her home to make coffee, was not with her. Instinctively, Ravi knew he was dead. He also knew if he jumped over the wall, he and his injured wife would both be trapped. There was no way out through the collapsed house.
He jumped down to the street, and ran back around to the front of the house and yelled for help. The police and the ambulance crew were only too glad at least to save someone’s life. Six of them arrived at the gate and the cops blew the lock away with a submachine gun, taking care not to allow bullets to penetrate the green gate.
Twenty minutes later, Shakira and Ravi were on their way to the President Hassad General Hospital, where fifteen stitches were required to repair a cut on her head, sustained in the basement-level kitchen when a part of the ceiling had caved in.
She was also in severe shock, and the surgeon decided she should stay overnight. Ravi remained with her, and most people in the drama were happy. The Hamas terrorists were merely thankful that Shakira lived.
And the Mossad men boarding the Learjet were in self-congratulatory mood. Mission accomplished. Nearly.
CHAPTER 4
The shuddering blast which knocked down the entire northeastern end of Bab Touma Street caused newspaper editors and television stations to work most of the night. Reporters swarmed around the site of the bombing and quickly realized that many neighboring houses and apartments were either crumbling or dangerously shaken on their foundations.
Miraculously, while there were several people injured in adjoining houses from falling debris and collapsed floors, there were no deaths, except for Abdul Khan, who was known to have been in the house where the bomb went off, but whose body had not yet been recovered.
Ironically, the bodies of the two murdered guards were currently buried under the rubble that had cascaded into the street when the blast detonated outward from the house.
The front-page headline in the English-language Syria Times read:
MIDNIGHT BOMB BLAST ROCKS OLD CITY STREET
Homes destroyed. One dead. Many injured. Police mystified.
Beneath this was a photo taken at the scene, in the dark, showing the lights of the police cars and ambulances illuminating the pile of rubble. The caption read: CHAOS ON BAB TOUMA AS OFFICIALS SEARCH FOR BODIES.
On the eight o’clock morning news broadcast, on Syria 2, the reporter stated, “Among those saved and admitted to hospital was Mrs. Shakira Rashood, who was believed to have been in the house where the blast went off. She survived mostly because she was in her kitchen, downstairs on the basement level, and that lower floor had held up while the rest of the house was blown sky-high.
“Mrs. Rashood’s half-brother, Mr. Abdul Khan, was also in the house and police say there is no possibility he could have survived. Early this morning, she was too upset to make a statement, but is expected to leave hospital with her husband, Mr. Ravi Rashood, sometime this morning.”
Jerry, the Mossad field agent, watching the broadcast at his home in the Saahat ash-Shuhada area (Martyr’s Square), was astounded. His apartment was in the far end of the Old City from Bab Touma, but he had heard the blast. When he moved in to clear out the hit team’s apartment, he had stayed west of the devastated area, keeping to the dark side streets.
He could not believe that proven special operators like Ben Joel and John Rabin could possibly have made such a mistake. The entire plan, he knew, had been to wait and watch for the Rashoods’ return.
He accepted that Shakira was alive. The journalists must have picked up her name from the hospital register. But General Ravi? How could that possibly have happened? The guys must have seen him enter the building. Otherwise they would not have detonated the bomb.
Jerry was mystified, like the police. But he walked out into the square and called the office in the Hada Dafna Building on King Saul Boulevard, reporting what the Damascus news services were saying. The Mossad chiefs had not yet seen the Syrian newspaper, nor had they heard the broadcast, but they knew Ben Joel and the team were safely home and had reported in during the small hours, mission accomplished.
As sc
rew-ups go, considered Jerry, this one was well on its way.
At 11 o’clock that Wednesday morning, February 8, Ravi and Shakira walked out of the hospital toward a waiting taxi. They were greeted by a scrum of reporters and photographers, yelling questions. how did you escape?. do you have any idea who could have done this?. Shakira! Shakira!. this way. Mr. Rashood! Did you save your wife’s life?
This was a terrorist commander’s nightmare. Personal publicity, photographs, questions. But he faced the media with equanimity. “Yes, I am the husband of Shakira Rashood. no, we did not leave the restaurant together. my wife came home with her stepbrother to prepare coffee and pastries. twenty minutes later I followed with Abdul’s wife, Rudy. Yes, of course, both women are extremely upset.”
In answer to the question Mr. Rashood, do you think someone was trying to kill you? he replied, “I doubt it. This was either a complete accident, or a badly mistaken identity.”
For several hours, this innocuous statement held good. Ravi and Shakira moved, temporarily, into the Barada Hotel, on Said al-Jabri Avenue. But as the afternoon wore on, the police were wrestling with one problem: this was one hell of a bomb — who the hell detonated it, and why?
It was plainly not some Molotov cocktail put together by a disparate group of jihadists. This was a major, professional weapon, assembled by an expert, and somehow smuggled into that house on Bab Touma and detonated within minutes of Shakira and Abdul’s return.
This was no accident. This was a plan, which may have gone wrong, but was nevertheless a premeditated action. There was not the slightest sign that it was a suicide bomb. In the opinion of the Damascus Police Department, this bomb had been detonated by a remote-control device and it was meant to kill Mr. Rashood, and perhaps his wife. The trouble was, no one knew who the devil Mr. Rashood was.
And while the Syrian police pondered the mystery, the Hamas War Council moved with lightning speed. They sent a car and two jihadist warriors into Damascus from an outpost they maintained in the southern border city of Der’a and scooped up General Ravi and his wife with military efficiency.
They headed back south and crossed the border into Jordan, providing for their esteemed guests passports upon which the ink was barely dry. They kept going south for another fifty miles until they reached the capital city, Amman, where the Rashoods checked into the Rhum Continental Hotel as Mr. and Mrs. Anwar Mehadi, in accordance with their passports. The men from Hamas had, in fact, moved so fast that Mr. and Mrs. Rashood had vanished from the face of the earth.
Which left the Syrian police, and the media, in something of a quandary. Senior law-enforcement officials understood perfectly well that the bomb had been executed with great precision. They also believed someone wanted to kill, at least, Ravi Rashood very badly.
But like the journalists, they had no idea who he was and why he might have such determined, maybe fanatical, enemies. He had, apparently, lived in Damascus for a few years now, and there had never been one hint of trouble before.
By 1900 something had, however, become clear. The police not only had no idea who he was, they also had no idea where he was. They posted men at the airport and at the train station and the bus station. They checked out the Barada Hotel, but he had very obviously left.
As for the Mossad, they were following events blow by blow through the guile of Jerry, who, not wanting to call attention to himself, could do no more than follow events through the television and radio news and the afternoon newspapers.
Thus the Mossad, in the split second of the midnight blast, had lost all of their advantages. So far as they were concerned, General Rashood was as elusive as ever. They no longer had an address for him, they no longer knew even the country he was in, and they no longer knew under what name he was traveling.
BOMB SURVIVOR AND HUSBAND VANISH, confirmed the Syria Times. “Jesus Christ,” said Jerry.
It took another twenty-four hours before journalists cottoned on to the fact that this Ravi Rashood and his wife might well have had sinister connections. The principal clue came when the bodies of the two guards were found. They did not have the AKs with them, since Abraham had “confiscated” those. But they both had spare ammunition clips, and neighbors stated there had often been armed guards in front of the house. On Thursday evening, the police confirmed that both men had been knifed through the heart, which suggested that the bombers had first unloaded the sentries.
Whichever way anyone looked at it, this was a military-style hit, one that had only narrowly missed succeeding. And there were two outstanding questions that badly needed answering — who was Ravi Rashood, and who wanted him dead?
The trouble in Damascus was that anyone who actually knew who he was, most definitely was not divulging anything. And the only other person in the city who knew the identity of the assassins was Jerry.
Which left the media to speculate, blindly. Was it a gangland killing concerned with drugs? Was Rashood a terrorist the West wanted removed? Had he been attacked by Muslim extremists for whatever reason? Or was this just a local dispute between families or acquaintances?
The latter might have been the favorite explanation but for the enormous size of the bomb. And since no one had any real information, the story quickly died the death. By the weekend, nobody gave it much thought, except for those whose houses had been wrecked.
In Washington the story was barely covered. The agencies picked it up from the Syria Times and transmitted a short item headlined BOMB BLAST IN DAMASCUS. It read:
Damascus. Tuesday. A bomb that detonated in the Old City at around midnight killed at least one man and injured several more. Many houses in ancient Bab Touma Street were damaged, and one was destroyed. The police refused to confirm that it was the work of a jihadist group. But they stressed that it was a very large explosive device, much bigger than those usually associated with suicide bombers.
The New York Times used it at the low end of one of the Middle East pages. The Washington Post used it way inside on an international page. And the Boston Globe omitted it altogether.
Lt. Commander Jimmy Ramshawe caught it in the Post, and instantly thought that was the end of General Ravi Rashood, since Bab Touma Street was the name stated by the imprisoned Ramon Salman.
He called Admiral Morgan, who had already spotted the news item, and had a call in to David Gavron at the Israeli embassy. When the ambassador called back, however, Admiral Morgan detected an air of uncertainty in his responses that was highly atypical of the Israeli general.
Arnold Morgan smelled a rat. And one hour after Jimmy Ramshawe, David Gavron called back and said, “Strictly between ourselves, old friend, there’s been a bit of a foul-up.”
He recounted in some detail how the plan had misfired, and explained that no one really held the Mossad team to blame. “It was a hundred-to-one chance they would return home at different times, with different people,” said the ambassador. “I’d say anyone would have made the same mistake.”
“Yeah. I agree,” replied Arnold Morgan. “And I guess we’ve now lost him. I’ll have the guys in Guantánamo check whether Salman can give us that cell phone number he called in Syria, but I expect he’ll say he can’t remember it. Even if we persuade him differently, you can bet it will have changed after an attempt like that one on Ravi’s life.”
Meanwhile, Ravi and Shakira, now wearing Arab dress, were given exquisitely forged documents and the passports that identified them as Mr. and Mrs. Mehadi, who were supposedly Jordanian travel authors, working on a new publication highlighting the historic wine-growing districts of Egypt, Israel, and other Middle Eastern vineyards. Shakira carried a long-lens camera for authenticity.
Any journey into Israel is fraught not with peril, but with eccentricity. It’s only twenty miles from Amman to the King Hussein Bridge, which straddles the Jordan River north of the Dead Sea. But the Jordanians insist that you are not leaving Jordan at all, even though they declared, in 1988, that they no longer had any ties with the West Bank.
The Israelis immediately stamp you into their country, just as soon as you set foot on the West Bank. But they do it on a separate sheet, since everyone knows passports with an Israeli stamp are bad news when traveling in Arab countries. So right there, standing on the West Bank, you are in two countries at once, never having officially left Jordan.
This was all slightly nerve-racking for the world’s most wanted terrorists; but, coming out of Jordan, the King Hussein Bridge is the only way over the river. There is also only one way to make it over the bridge. You take one of the JETT minibuses, which are the only vehicles permitted to make the crossing. You can’t walk. You can’t drive, you can’t cycle. And you sure as hell can’t hitchhike.
Ravi and Shakira came by taxi to the foreigners’ terminal and proceeded to the minibus. They crossed the Jordan and went into the Israeli terminal, avoiding as much as possible the closed-circuit surveillance cameras. Both were in heavy disguise, Ravi with a full beard, Shakira wearing spectacles and walking like an elderly woman in black robes.
They were each issued a government-stamped document that welcomed them officially into Israel. The problem for their pursuers was the documents did not reveal they were Mr. and Mrs. Ravi Rashood. And they did not look anything like Mr. and Mrs. Ravi Rashood.
They walked for about a mile, carrying only one small leather bag, and then paused as a black sedan, bearing the blue license plate of “The Territories,” pulled up beside them. A chauffeur signaled them to climb aboard and immediately drove west. In the plush backseat, Ravi and Shakira removed their disguises and sank back gratefully, traveling once more in the style of a commander in chief and his greatly revered wife.
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