Final Stop, Algiers: A Thriller

by Mishka Ben-David

  At the end of the route I came to the Umschlagplatz, the square where Jews were herded together before being transported to the death camps. I tensed up when I saw a row of blue and white Israeli flags. Then I heard the sounds of Hebrew on a loudspeaker, and I saw that a group of Israeli schoolchildren, dressed in blue and white and probably freezing, were standing in the square and holding a memorial ceremony of their own. I didn’t get any closer, and I didn’t know if the shiver that ran through my body was because of the cold or the powerful effect of what I was witnessing.

  From the ghetto I went straight to the hotel, where Ronen and I had arranged to meet and plan our next moves. I tried to warm myself up in the lobby, where the heating was quite effective. While I was waiting for the bowl of soup that I’d ordered, I was happy to see Udi walk in. He joined me without any unnecessary ceremony, and Ronen came in directly afterwards. Their handshake showed me there was a closeness between them that I had yet to develop with Udi.

  My soup came, and they had a little laugh at my expense, with remarks like, “What does the son of a Polish mother order when he’s in Poland” – a Polish mother being the butt of many Israeli jokes. I wanted to tell them that my mother was in fact a Jerusalemite through and through, but we were, of course, speaking English, and I didn’t know the English words for through and through. Neither did I want to say the word “Jerusalem” out loud, so I took their teasing in silence.

  Their coffee arrived, and Udi moved on to business. The Russian delegation was due to arrive the next day at the Metropol Hotel, which wasn’t on our list. He had not only inspected it, but had also checked in there. “It’s a three-star hotel, right in the centre of the city, not as nice as yours,” he said, letting us know that the Office had been generous by putting us up at four-star hotels. “Looks like there are cutbacks in Russia, and also prices here are going up as Poland’s entry into the European Union approaches.” He wanted the two of us to pay a visit to the Metropol as well. His room there would be our base from which we would set out and to which we would return after doing what we had to do. There we would also practise on the lock, and do whatever else was necessary.

  The Russians had taken a whole floor of the hotel. I was sitting with Udi in the lobby when they came in, while Ronen was outside in the car checking the delegation’s security arrangements. A Russian security man and a Polish police officer came in before the group, and surveyed the lobby, taking a good look at us as they did so, and then the Russian went out and signalled to the others to enter the hotel. Udi drew my attention to the way the cop asked the receptionist who we were, and we assumed he was told that Udi was a guest at the hotel. There were some twenty men and four women in the delegation, with five security men and two police officers watching them. They waited patiently in the lobby while their keys were handed out and then they waited silently for the small, rickety elevator to take them up to their rooms. I didn’t want to watch them too blatantly, but I was curious to know which one was Alex. From the glimpses that I took, two or three looked something like the pictures I’d seen. It was actually a glance that he threw at us that helped me to identify him. He apparently assumed someone from Mossad would be there, and although he didn’t know who Udi and I were, he didn’t look too pleased.

  When the last of them had gone, a Russian security man and a police officer remained in the lobby.

  “I’m going up to my room,” said Udi, “and to take a look at what’s happening on their floor. We’ll meet at nine in the evening in the café across the street.”

  We stood up and shook hands. Ronen picked me up outside and we drove away.

  “Their security sticks to them like sheepdogs. Not one of them can make a move,” Ronen said irritably. “I don’t think we’ll be able to get close enough to Alex for him to hand us the disc anywhere but in his room.”

  When we met Udi at nine, he told us Alex had managed to get a message through to HQ. He was in room 428, with a roommate, and that he’d leave the disc in the narrow space under a cupboard, on the right hand side.

  “Why couldn’t he leave it somewhere neutral, like the cloakroom off the lobby?” I asked.

  “I also would have preferred something like that, but our connection with Alex is one-way,” said Udi. “He transmits to HQ, but there’s no way of replying or giving him instructions. That’s what he chose, perhaps because he didn’t want to take unnecessary risks. That’s the way it is, and having to get into his room isn’t the end of the world. I peeked into their corridor twice, when they were still in their rooms and when they were downstairs having dinner, about an hour ago. When they were in their rooms, there were two guards in the corridor, and when they went down there was only one. The other one went down with them.”

  The delegation left the hotel, apparently to sample Warsaw’s night life, and Udi sent me to check the situation on their floor. The moment the elevator door opened, the guard was facing me, a very suspicious look on his face. I pretended I’d made a mistake, and went back to report. Udi decided we’d do the job the next day. “I’ll keep the guard busy, and you two will break into the room,” he said.

  “What do you mean by ‘keep him busy’?” I wondered aloud.

  “Nicely, but if that doesn’t work, not nicely,” he replied and it was obvious that he didn’t like my question.

  We met in Udi’s room after the Russians left for their morning tour. “I counted them, and there were two missing, but our Alex got on the bus,” Udi told us. “So apart from the guard, there are two people still in the rooms. Take that into account.”

  “That means we may have to deal with one in Alex’s room,” said Ronen.

  “Right. The odds are about one in seven that you will. I’ve consulted HQ. Alex has reported that the Russians’ departure has been put forward to this evening. That means it’s now or never, and HQ wants that disc.”

  “Why don’t we wait until they leave?” I asked.

  “I brought that up, but it was decided that we do not wait. We have no way of contacting Alex, and he may take the disc back to Russia, or destroy it. Since he suspects they are listening to his transmissions and are trying to zero in on him, if we don’t pick it up now we may never get another chance to get the information. HQ has decided it’s worth the risk.”

  “What do we do if we find his roommate there when we break in?” I asked.

  “What did you do for a whole year during your course?” Udi asked, but it turned out that he wasn’t relying on our hand-to-hand combat skills. He produced two compact stun guns from a compartment in his suitcase. “They may look like the vibrator you gave your girlfriend, but they pack double the voltage of a regular stun gun. Use only if there’s no other option.” He gave one of them to Ronen, and he gave me a short length of rope, for strangulation. He kept the other stun gun, probably to use on the guard. He also gave me a key he’d fashioned to get into Alex’s room. “It may stick a little but it should work. Just do it quickly – I don’t know how long I’ll be able to keep the guard busy.”

  Then he gave us small two-way radios with wireless earpieces, and we tested them.

  We rehearsed the operation twice, once entering Udi’s room and getting the disc without opposition, and once with Udi “surprising” us.

  “Any questions?”

  “The escape route from here, if there’s a hitch?” I asked.

  “As per the operational order,” Udi chided me. “What does it say?”

  “We go back to our rooms, check out properly and take the first flight back to Vienna,” I said, “and if necessary, the first flight out to the west.”

  “You reckon we have to change that?”

  “For us, not …”

  “And for me, don’t worry,” Udi interrupted me.

  We left his room, which was one floor below the delegation’s. Udi took the elevator and Ronen and I the stairs. We heard him breathing over the radio, the elevator groaning and its door opening. We stood by the door from the stairwell into
the hallway, and we heard Udi’s voice addressing the guard. He said the drinks dispenser on his floor was broken, and asked if the guard knew if there were cokes in the machine on this floor. The two apparently walked over to the machine which was at a corner of the hallway, and we heard the click that was Udi’s signal for us to get going.

  I went first. Room 428 was the second door on the right. The elevator was about five rooms away and Udi and the guard were moving further in the other direction. If the key worked, we would be in the room before they got to the dispenser.

  I took rapid, careful paces, the wooden floor creaking under me, and in the distance I saw Udi putting his hand on the guard’s shoulder, probably to distract his attention from the noise Ronen and I were making behind them. At first, the key didn’t turn, but then the lock gave and we slipped inside, me with fists clenched and Ronen with the stun gun at the ready. The room was empty. Ronen closed the door and bent over in front of the cupboard, holding a bent wire that we’d prepared. It looked to me that he wasn’t managing to hook the disc. I leaned towards him, when suddenly we heard the toilet flushing in the bathroom. “We are not alone,” I notified Udi over the radio. It was clear what we had to do, and I didn’t think about it, even for a second. Because I was closer to the bathroom door and Ronen was still on all fours next to the cupboard, I quickly took up a position next to the door. The moment it opened, I saw a naked man standing there and I punched him in the gut with all my strength, exactly as our instructor had taught us, imagining my fist going all the way through his body. I heard the wind wheezing out of his lungs as he fell forwards and began retching. I whipped the cord out of my pocket, looped it around his neck and pulled it tight, pushing in the other direction with my knee in his back. He fluttered helplessly, made horrific gurgling sounds as he tried desperately to suck air into his lungs. Ronen put the stun gun to his temple. He stopped moving.

  Ronen checked the man’s pulse and signalled he was dead. Then he knelt down again by the cupboard, and pulled the disc out.

  Ronen clicked and Udi clicked back, the sign that the corridor was clear. We left the room and saw Udi standing over the unconscious body of the guard.

  “He heard the noise and began running towards the room,” he said. We dragged him into the room.

  Then it transpired that Udi had a back-up plan. He switched on the dead man’s laptop and plugged in a USB stick.

  “This will tell the whole story. The guard caught the ‘agent’ red handed while transmitting classified information, and in the fight that ensued they killed each other.” He went up to the guard and stomped hard on the back of his neck. The sound of crunching bone was heard, and I felt a wave of nausea rising inside me. Udi moved the bodies so that it would look as if the two men had been fighting.

  We cleared out, after hanging the Do Not Disturb sign on the door, and without pushing the lock button. The sign would attract the attention of the next guard when he came to begin his shift.

  “See you at the airport,” said Udi and he went to his room. Ronen and I left the hotel, with an interval of two minutes between us. Only when I got to my hotel room did my legs begin to tremble.

  I was in a really awful mood. We’d just killed two innocent men. I could call it bad luck, I could call it dereliction in our intelligence gathering or mission execution. The end here had justified the means, and that was an approach to which I did not entirely subscribe. It may be that in the situation we found ourselves in we had no alternative, but I shared the responsibility for that situation.

  There would apparently always be aspects and phases of operations that the commander would know about, and I wouldn’t. I wasn’t aware at all of the plan to incriminate another member of Alex’s group, with that USB stick that Udi had produced. I had no idea what was on it. Perhaps some of the material Alex had sent us in the past. Udi kept that to himself, leaving only the “clean” part of the mission to us. That’s what was planned, at least.

  I could come to terms with the way I punched and strangled the Russian, as well as Ronen’s lethal use of the stun gun on him. Perhaps, in retrospect, there was also justification for breaking the guard’s neck. But the cold-bloodedness with which Udi had done it appalled me. I remembered his words in my hotel room in Toronto: “I’m an asshole who has killed people, blown them up, burned them, framed them” and his assertion that he did the crying before the deed itself, and not afterwards. From that day on I didn’t believe what he said about the crying. There was something in him that was beyond the stage where he would cry. The only point I could find in his favour was that he had done it himself, without saying anything, without waiting to see what we thought about it. He could have ordered one of us to do it. I wondered if I would have been able not to cry after doing it. I wondered if I even wanted to reach his level of toughness – or was it obtuseness? A maelstrom of emotion was raging inside me.

  On the way back, when everything seemed to be behind us, Ronen tried to correct what he had said about missions being like picking up women, and once again he got me wrong. “And sometimes, there are quickies that get you into trouble, and affairs that blow up out of proportion. But in any case, in a few hours’ time, when my head’s stuck between her thighs, I’ll forget everything.”

  For the first time in days, I thought about Niki again. While Ronen would head straight for his waiting girlfriend, I’d be going to my empty apartment, alone with all these sights and sounds, and Niki, on the other side of the globe, as far away and as unattainable as if she were on the dark side of the moon. And in truth, it was I who had been on the dark side.

  9.

  Getting Ready to Go Solo

  THERE WAS A sense of failure when we returned. I certainly felt it, and I think I detected it in Udi and Ronen as well, although they didn’t speak about it. A minor mission to pick up a disc had turned into a fully-fledged double elimination. On top of all that, for me, came my return to an empty apartment where I felt so alone that I travelled to Haifa, quite late in the evening just to sit with my parents for a while, and when they went to bed I surprised my two sisters with unannounced visits. One of my nieces was still awake and when I hugged her I almost burst into tears. Never before had I felt this need for a little girl of my own.

  My mood improved when I heard about the reaction at the technical branch of Military Intelligence, after they deciphered the material on the disc. This included all the specifications for several types of missiles that had been supplied to Iran – the technologies used not only in the Shihab-3, but also in anti-aircraft and sea-to-sea missiles that Syria had received, and would in all likelihood get to Hezbollah too. The data was detailed enough for Israeli hi-tech specialists to begin working immediately on ways to counter and jam the missiles.

  “You’ve saved the lives of many civilians, as well as pilots and seamen,” said Eli who’d invited the head of the MI tech branch to tell us what was on the disc. I was sure that he mentioned the “many lives” we’d saved in order to minimize the fact that we’d taken two lives – but it turned out that the old-time MI colonel was quite pleased about that too. One of the dead men, Leonid Sholokhov, was one of Russia’s top missile scientists and had been personally responsible for training Iranian technical crews.

  In the debriefings, Udi took the blame for what he called “the lacuna” between the information we had and our plan, a gap which led to our not knowing that Alex’s roommate had remained in the hotel. We could have remedied this with a preliminary move, such as calling the room on the phone, or knocking on the door after distracting the guard.

  Somewhere deep inside me, I suspected that Udi didn’t see it as an operational or intelligence defect. Since he had prepared us for a fight in the room, and readied himself for a fight with the guard, I presumed he had taken the risk knowingly, out of the assumption that if we’d known the room was occupied, and reported it to HQ, our mission would die and the disc would return to Russia or be destroyed. This was why he’d also provided us with
suitable accessories. I also assumed that in order to overcome the robust and well-trained young guard so elegantly and quietly, it had been necessary to plan several steps in advance. The actual killing was ugly but I had nothing prettier to propose.

  I asked if we’d received any message from Alex about what had happened when the delegation got back to Russia, and I was told that communications with Alex were the concern of “Junction” and they only told us what we had to know. There had been an item in the Polish press about “mysterious deaths in a hotel” and that official intervention had prevented local police from investigating, as it was “an internal matter of a friendly country”.

  Udi complimented us on our work. Our quick thinking and neutralization of the roommate had been professional, he said, but we had slipped up by not making sure the whole arena was clear, including the bathroom. It sounds pretty basic, but it was somehow neglected in the briefings and the preparatory run-throughs we’d had in Udi’s room, as well as in the actual operation.

  We returned to a routine of training and studying. Jerry got back from his African trip, and a fourth operative, Dudu, joined our squad after completing the preparatory stages. He was a plump, friendly guy who’d immigrated from Argentina some years before and had done his army service in the artillery.

  Then, one day, Udi summoned me to his office. “The time has come for you to carry out a solo mission in a target country,” he told me.

  “What’s known as a ‘baptism’?” I asked.