by Andy Maslen
Gabriel reached the car first. He saw what had happened at a glance. A Revolutionary Guard lay slumped over the steering wheel, blood still leaking from a gaping wound in the side of his head. In the rear seats, a second Guard sat with his head against the window. He’d taken a bullet to the throat and bled out. And there, wedged between the front seats, a bruise already forming on his forehead where it had smashed against the rear of the driver’s headrest, was the man he had come to kill. Abbas Darbandi. The man’s face was speckled with blood from the dead. His teeth gleamed through the red mask.
With a convulsive twist of his torso, Darbandi threw himself backwards and grabbed a pistol that lay beside him on the back seat. He stuck the gun out through the window.
Gabriel squeezed his own trigger. Nothing happened.
He looked down at the black barrel of the pistol pointed at his gut.
The shot was immensely loud.
Two-Up
As Gabriel looked down and waited for the bolt of agony, Darbandi’s right hand flew away, trailing blood and still gripping the pistol. Darbandi screamed and carried on screaming, clutching the stump of his right wrist, from which thin jets of bright red arterial blood were jetting up onto the roof lining of the car.
Gabriel couldn’t figure out what had happened. Until he looked to his right.
Eli was getting to her feet from a kneeling position. She slung her own rifle, which clearly hadn’t misfired, across her shoulder and ran to him.
“Don’t kill him,” she panted.
“Why?”
“We need to know where the missiles are.”
She yanked the door open and dragged Darbandi out and onto the dried-up, sandy soil of the river bed.
Then she sat astride him. He was clutching his right wrist to his chest. The combined effects of adrenaline and the elastic properties of the blood vessels she’d just shredded with a bullet meant he was in no real danger of bleeding to death. Not if he co-operated.
“Where are the missiles?” she yelled into his face, gobbets of spittle flying from her lips and hitting his right cheek. She used both English and Farsi.
Darbandi was shaking his head, his eyes rolling in his skull, white showing all the way round his dark-brown irises.
“This isn’t going to work,” Gabriel said.
“Yes, it is. It has to,” Eli said.
She pulled her Gerber from its nylon sheath, showed the blade to Darbandi, then stabbed down into the soft place between his left shoulder and his pectoral muscle. He screamed.
“Where are they?” she shouted.
Darbandi grimaced up at Eli, and tried to buck her off. He uttered an oath in English.
“Fucking Jewish cockroach! I’ll never tell you!”
Gabriel watched Eli’s face darken. Darbandi presumably wanted her to kill him. Instead, she leaned closer to Darbandi’s ear and murmured a few sentences.
“If you don’t tell me, right now, I’ll strap a tourniquet on your arm and we’ll take you back to Israel with us. We’ll put you on TV and tell the world you defected, to work for us against Iran. Then we’ll turn you loose. How long do you think it will take them to find you?”
His face contorted, lips drawn back to show his teeth, whether from the pain of his missing hand or the thought of what Iranian security agents would do to a traitor, Gabriel wasn’t sure.
It took a few seconds before Darbandi responded in a grating monotone.
“They’re in a cave half a mile south of here.”
Eli stood. Stepped off Darbandi’s supine figure. Took a couple of steps away.
Then she turned and drew her Glock.
“You got this far, Darbandi,” she growled. “But no further.”
The rounds hit Darbandi in the face. His skull exploded in a welter of blood and tissue.
Without pausing, Gabriel drew his pistol and put two rounds into each of the dead Guards. Headshots. Just to be sure.
“You got him,” he said to Eli. “Now let’s go. We need to finish the job.”
“Wait,” she said, sending a text.
Fox dead.
Set Target
SECRET MILITARY INSTALLATION, CODENAME “JUDITH,” NEGEV DESERT, ISRAEL
LOCAL TIME 3.20 P.M. 40 MINUTES TO LAUNCH
Sara Moreno had spent the previous ninety-five minutes monitoring the progress of the launch on a bank of screens on a huge wall in the command centre. Everything she needed to know or interrogate was displayed in green, yellow, red and electric blue. Guidance, navigation and control subsystems; thrust vectoring; arming protocols; targeting software; fuze timers and detonation sequences; motor pressure and temperature. It was a long list.
Every few minutes, she’d look anxiously at the red desk phone, willing it to ring, but so far it had sat mutely on the clear black space. Orders to launch – codeword “spear” – or cancel – codeword “shield” – would also arrive by encrypted messaging systems on a screen, and she also had a mobile phone and a satellite phone, both military issue and encrypted.
It was time to give a new order. She leaned forwards and grasped the stem of the mic with a clammy palm and spoke with a firmness and resolve she didn’t feel.
“Targeting Controller, Command, set target, confirm.”
“Copy, Targeting Controller confirms. Setting target.”
In its dark silo, the Jericho ballistic missile’s targeting software received a string of ones and zeroes corresponding to a point on the globe some 810 miles to the east: Vareshabad, Northern Iran.
Going Down
VARESHABAD
LOCAL TIME 4.50 P.M.
Eli helped Gabriel lift his bike upright then ran for her own, which she’d leaned against the riverbank, making it a hell of a lot easier to pull up. He depressed the starter button. Nothing. Just the whine of the starter motor churning.
“Eli!” he yelled, before she could roar back towards the factory.
She turned.
Not bothering to shout again, Gabriel just ran over to her.
“It won’t start. Give me a lift, will you? We need to go back and get the mines.”
Space was tight, but Gabriel grabbed her round the waist and held on as she started the bike and rode over to Gabriel’s Tiger. He climbed off and unloaded the four magnetic mines from his left-hand pannier and slotted them in wherever he could find gaps in Eli’s.
Back aboard, he tapped her on the shoulder. She rode hard towards the shallower bank they’d come in from and raced up the sloping sand before jumping the bike out onto the flat ground.
She gunned the engine, and they hurtled through the gates before pulling up right outside the building where Gabriel had gone looking for Darbandi. She released the straps holding the Bergen in place on the side rack and ran for the doors, the big rucksack banging against her left hip.
Gabriel thought for a moment of the scientists he’d encountered in the below-ground weapons lab. Were they still there? Or had they run? It didn’t matter. They knew what they were engaged in. Now they’d have to take the consequences.
He took Eli’s rifle and stood beside her, sweeping left and right. Watching. Hyper-alert. Heart bumping in his chest.
Eli unsnapped the catches on the straps.
“Stand on that,” she ordered Gabriel, pointing to a loop of webbing on the base of the Bergen. He did as he was told. She stood and reached inside before lifting out the contents: a black object roughly the same size and shape as an office watercooler bottle.
With bent knees, and arms wrapped tightly around the bomb, she carried it to the lift and used her left elbow to hit the call button. The steel doors slid apart. Crouching between them, she pushed the cylinder inside, tapped a code on an alphanumeric keypad screwed to its curved side and pressed a green button. She looked up at Gabriel.
“It’s armed and locked. We’ve got ten minutes.”
Then she pressed the “-2” button and stepped out of the doors’ embrace. They closed with a hiss and Gabriel listened as th
e machinery kicked in, taking the bomb where it would do the most damage. He watched as Eli set a timer on her watch, a chunky, black Casio G-Shock.
They ran back through the doors and climbed astride Eli’s Tiger. Gabriel watched as she closed her right fist around the throttle and pushed her thumb down on the starter button. He held his breath. The engine caught on the first turn of the starter and Gabriel breathed out.
He felt the clunk as Eli engaged first, gripped her round the waist with his left arm and held his pistol in his right. As she let the clutch out and roared towards the gate, he pushed his gun hand between her bicep and ribcage, aiming forward.
She wove expertly between the blackened corpses of the Revolutionary Guards before leaving the factory behind and pushing the big bike through all six gears until they were racing south at seventy.
Initiate Arming Sequence
ISRAELI NUCLEAR INSTALLATION, CODENAME “JUDITH,” NEGEV DESERT
LOCAL TIME 3.30 P.M. 30 MINUTES TO LAUNCH
Moreno gave her third major order.
“Strike Controller, Command. Arm missile, confirm.”
“Copy, Strike Controller confirms. Arming missile.”
A string of LEDs in front of Moreno switched from red to yellow, then, one by one, they turned green.
“Command, Strike Controller. Missile is hot.”
“Thank you, Strike Controller. Thirty minutes to launch, confirm.”
“Copy. Launch in thirty – three-zero – minutes.”
Spelunking
VARESHABAD
LOCAL TIME 5.01 P.M.
The cave was easy to spot. Gabriel supposed the Iranians hadn’t really expected any serious infiltration. Alone in the flat landscape, a hundred yards ahead and off to their left, a rocky escarpment poked up out of the sandy soil like a ramp. He pointed over Eli’s shoulder. She nodded and leaned the bike over a little to make the turn.
The far side of the escarpment had been hollowed by wind or some ancient sea, long since dried out. Its face was a hundred feet tall or more. The scooped-out roof sloped down to a pitch-black cave mouth forty yards back inside the escarpment. Keeping the throttle almost closed, Eli rode right into the cave, flicking on the headlight. The lamp wasn’t really up to the job of illuminating the cathedral-like space inside the rock. But its beam had enough power to pick out the stubby nosecones of a quartet of gigantic, olive-green missiles on their launch vehicles.
She brought the Tiger to a stop, steadied it with both feet flat on the ground and waited for Gabriel to dismount. Then she pushed out the kickstand, settled it onto a flat rock Gabriel had kicked into position, and dismounted. Working silently, they unsnapped the catches on the panniers and began unloading the eight magnetic mines. As they worked, they talked in urgent sentences.
“One on the nose cone and one on the motor?” Gabriel asked.
“Or two amidships?” Eli replied.
“Let’s do both. Two and two. OK?”
She nodded.
“OK.”
“How long have we got?”
Eli checked her watch.
“Eight minutes, fifteen seconds.”
“Set the timers for eight minutes reducing by thirty seconds per mine.”
The mines didn’t weigh much, just a few kilos each. Each mine was two inches thick and six across. Digital timers occupied the centres of their upper surfaces. Underneath, square steel magnets a quarter-inch thick were let into the polished casings.
They took two each and ran towards the missiles.
Placing one mine on the upper curve of one of the transporter’s massive tyres, Gabriel climbed up onto the roof of the transporter before attaching the mine to the nosecone of the nearest missile. The magnet clunked as it met the smooth steel surface of the missile. He set the timer for eight minutes, jumped down and grabbed the second mine.
This time, he slammed the mine onto the rear of the missile between two of the fins. Seven minutes thirty.
The third mine pulled itself onto Gabriel’s second missile halfway between the rocket motor and the nosecone. Seven minutes dead.
He placed his fourth mine opposite the third. Six minutes thirty.
He turned to see Eli arming her fourth mine.
“Ready?” he shouted.
“Ready!” she shouted back, running for the Tiger.
She mounted the bike, flipped up the kickstand, and he joined her. She pressed the starter. Nothing happened. Gabriel’s pulse ticked up. Keep calm , he told himself. Eli shook out her right hand then tried again, turning the key to the OFF position, then back on again before pushing the starter button. Dead silence. No starter motor.
Gabriel climbed off.
“Wait! Don’t try yet,” he said. “It’ll probably be either fuel or spark. A fuel line might be blocked, but let’s start with spark.”
He crouched down on the left side of the bike and pulled the kickstand down. Where it joined the frame, a black plastic cover covered a join between the wires.
“What is it?” she asked.
“It might be the sidestand safety switch. It won’t start if it’s on. Hold on.”
He pulled the male and female halves of the plastic cover apart. Each hid a white plastic connector, one with three pins, the other with three matching holes.
“I need a piece of wire,” he said. “Got anything?”
Eli reached up and, as if this was an everyday occurrence, pulled a hairpin from the bun at the back of her head. She handed it to him without a word.
My God, you’re a cool one , Gabriel had time to think, before straightening it then adding two right-angled bends to create three sides of a square. He pushed the ends into the outer terminals then yelped as a spark leapt across the wire. Leaving the improvised bypass bridge in place, he resealed the connector and stood.
“Try it now,” he said, sounding more relaxed than he felt.
Eli checked the throttle kill switch was off, checked the bike was in neutral, turned the key and thumbed the starter button.
With a roar from its triple-cylinder engine, the big bike started immediately.
“Come on!” she shouted. “We’ve got two minutes.”
Gabriel climbed on, and Eli dumped it into first before spinning the rear tyre in her hurry to get away.
Emerging from the gloom of the cave into blinding sunlight, Eli swerved to the left but kept the bike upright. Maxing out the revs in each gear she powered away from the cave, reaching eighty before Gabriel patted her on the shoulder: Ease off .
After a couple of miles, Gabriel saw a rocky bluff towering over a dried-up riverbed to their right. He pointed and yelled in Eli’s right ear.
“There. Cover!”
Eli nodded, leaned forwards and added another ten miles an hour to her speed. If they hit anything now, they’d be spilled, if not killed, but Gabriel trusted her. She leaned the bike over to skirt the bluff on the right side, then back the other way. On the lee side, she brought the bike skidding to a stop, nearly dumping them both on the sand, before retrieving the slide and sticking her booted feet out to each side. Gabriel climbed off. Eli followed, this time lugging the bike’s weight up and back onto the centre stand. Then they clambered up the rocky slope to watch the results of their handiwork.
Eli looked at her watch.
“Ten seconds.”
Open Hatch
ISRAELI NUCLEAR INSTALLATION, CODENAME “JUDITH,” NEGEV DESERT
LOCAL TIME 3.40 P.M. 20 MINUTES TO LAUNCH
“Strike Controller, Command. Open hatch, confirm.”
“Copy, Strike Controller confirms. Opening hatch.”
The five-foot-diameter steel disc swung open on its lubricated bearings, startling a herd of Dorcas gazelles grazing the red-berried cashew trees nearby. Leaping high into the air, the caramel-and-cream antelopes scattered, looking for a quieter spot for lunch.
Playing Dirty
VARESHABAD
LOCAL TIME 5.10 P.M.
Gabriel shaded his eyes w
ith his hand and kept his gaze fixed on the white buildings of the factory.
“Nine.”
Do I hope the scientists got away?
I don’t know. They were civilians.
But so was Darbandi.
One of them might have taken his place.
They were working on a fucking nuclear bomb designed to destroy a whole city – a whole country, for God’s sake. So they should have—
The explosion interrupted his train of thought. The sound reached them before the flash. Usually, it would be the other way round, but the flash was forty feet or so underground. The boom rolled over them and away into the desert behind them. Then secondary explosions kicked in. Tympani and snare drums to the initial blast’s bass drum. Gradually, the whole explosive orchestra tuned up and joined in a crescendo of dull crumps, high-pitched cracks and hammer blows.
Finally, the visuals. A fireball blossomed like an orange rose, directly over the low rectangular block where they’d planted the bomb. A column of smoke rose vertically after it, rolling out into an oily, black cloud. The white sphere to the left of the block suddenly cracked open in a huge explosion, three or four times as bright as the fireball. Flames shot high into the sky above the ruined complex.
Eli turned to Gabriel.
“The missiles should have blown by now.”