Assassin's Code

by Ward Larsen

  With everyone busy, Slaton buttonholed Bloch. “Did Uday mention the database?” he asked.

  “Yes, he says he’s carrying it.”

  “We need to tell the others about it.”

  Bloch gave him a severe look.

  Slaton stood his ground. “I’ve been on too many missions where things were kept from me. I can tell you unequivocally—secrets do not promote success.”

  Bloch relented. “All right, we will tell everyone Uday is carrying valuable information—make it a primary objective, if you want. But we can’t divulge the nature of the data.”

  Slaton decided it was a reasonable compromise. “All right. So let’s get to work.”

  Slaton went to the big map, and found himself alone for a time. Once again, it seemed all too familiar. Brown and tan topographic information, threat markers, coordinate grids. There were a lot of moving parts to this mission, and they would hopefully be held together by the binds of training, knowledge, and even chutzpah. All the same, Slaton knew better than anyone the most important determiner of success.

  Luck.

  FORTY-FOUR

  Uday’s plan went wrong minutes after they reached Nawa. It was a warm midafternoon, and Faisal slowed the weary Toyota on the outskirts of town. Enduring rows of olive groves gave way to a sleepy collage of low earth-tone buildings. They were one- and two-story affairs mostly, flat roofs topped by dish antennae, and in the gaps between the homes tough-looking trees sprouted desperately from the hard earth, their scant foliage offering little in the way of shade. Faisal veered onto a road that led to the heart of town, jogging left and right in an increasingly urban setting. That was when the trouble began.

  A turn around a sharp corner revealed a checkpoint.

  “Look!” said Faisal.

  A hundred yards ahead, four men stood casually around a truck. They seemed interested in the approaching Toyota, but hardly alert. All wore uniforms, yet no two seemed to match; one wore a helmet, another a beret, and two had different-colored kaffiyehs wrapped around their heads. It was the flag flying from the truck that cemented who they were—a yellow standard with green script, the first letter of “Allah” reaching up to grasp an assault rifle. This was Hezbollah, the self-proclaimed Army of God.

  “Turn around!” Uday ordered.

  “It’s too late; they have seen us! If I turn away they will only become suspicious.”

  Uday knew his brother was right. On either side of the road were homes with walled courtyards. There were no side streets or driveways into which they could divert. They were trapped, and worse yet, none of them had papers. On Faisal’s suggestion, they’d discarded their ISIS-issued identity cards in the desert hours ago, everyone agreeing there was more danger than value in keeping them. Now they faced a genuine roadblock, one Uday had not prearranged.

  “We will talk our way through,” said Sarah.

  “No, talk is not enough,” Faisal countered. “Quickly, give me all your money!” He pulled a wad of bills from his pocket—fortunately Syrian pounds and Turkish lira, and not the Islamic State’s failed gold dinar.

  Sarah’s pockets were empty, and Uday pulled out a meager handful of Syrian pounds. He handed them to Faisal realizing he should have brought more—the first obvious flaw in his rushed escape plan.

  Fifty yards from the checkpoint, Uday saw a fifth soldier. By then every set of eyes was on the approaching SUV. The two in the center brandished their weapons threateningly, and a third raised his hand in a classic halt signal. The Toyota slowed, and Uday saw Faisal slip the money into the small leather folder that had once held his credentials for driving a taxi. His brother had done this before.

  The traffic cop, who was evidently in charge, approached Faisal’s open window. Up close his uniform was dusted in brown, so too his untrimmed beard and ragged hair. A commander who’d been in the field for some time.

  “Papers,” he said, no rising inflection to denote a question. He held out a hand, and said, “Tell me where you have come from.”

  “Damascus,” said Faisal, handing over the leather folder.

  The man looked inside, paused a beat, then said, “Damascus? You took a very indirect path.”

  Faisal shrugged. “I am afraid I got lost.”

  Uday didn’t like the trajectory of things. He gripped Sarah’s hand, and felt her squeeze back. He couldn’t read the man’s reaction to the cash, but he noticed that the folder was still in his hand. He’d also not shown it to the men behind him. Is that important? Uday wondered. A feeling of helplessness overwhelmed him, and for the first time he regretted getting Sarah involved. He should have taken a less perilous escape route. He should have brought more cash.

  “You are from Raqqa,” said the officer accusingly. His eyes were on something on the windshield, and Uday realized it was the old taxi sticker. It had been issued by the Syrian government, and was probably coded for a particular city.

  “The vehicle is from Raqqa, yes,” said Faisal. “But we are from—”

  The man cut him off with a wave, and those behind him tensed perceptibly. The leader gave a signal, and one of the men who’d been standing back came forward with a mirror mounted on a stick. He began to inspect the undercarriage.

  The man in charge shifted to the back window, bent down, and stared at Uday, then Sarah. He circled to the rear of the SUV.

  “This is not good,” Sarah whispered.

  “I know,” said Uday. He quickly pulled out the sat phone. A voice call was out of the question, so he pecked out an urgent message to Baland. He was about to put the phone back in his pocket when Sarah said, “Give it to me!”

  He gave her a cautious sideways stare.

  “Give it to me, Aziz!”

  The harshness of her tone surprised him, but with the men busy searching, he slid the handset across the seat. He watched Sarah tap the screen a few times, then slip it into the folds of her abaya.

  Before Uday could ask what she was doing, the leader came back to Faisal’s window, and said, “Open the tailgate.”

  Faisal reached for the remote unlocking latch.

  “No!” the man shouted. “Get out and do it yourself.”

  Faisal got out warily and went to the back. The Hezbollah squad stood back as he unlocked the tailgate and swung it open. The leader ordered him to uncover the compartment beneath the floor. Faisal did so, and when no explosions resulted, the leader closed in, pushed him aside, and performed an inspection.

  Uday knew there was nothing incriminating in the vehicle—they themselves were the contraband.

  The leader shut the tailgate and came back to Uday’s window. “Get out!” he ordered. “We are taking you for further questioning!”

  Before Uday could protest, Sarah said in a loud voice, “Enough of this! Does Hezbollah have nothing better to do than accost innocent travelers? We have come to Nawa to see my sister. You should let us pass!”

  The leader seemed put off by her tone, but only for a moment. He yanked open the rear door, dragged Uday out, and sent him stumbling across the dirt siding. He ended up next to Faisal. The man reached for Sarah, but she saw it coming and exited the opposite door, doing what little she could to keep control of the situation. Uday had never seen this side of her—nor had he ever been more proud.

  Sarah walked around the car to face the commander. With a look of defiance on her exquisite face, she said, “Where are you taking us?”

  He replied by slapping her on the cheek, then pushing her toward Uday. It wasn’t a forceful shove, but Sarah seemed to lose her balance and went tumbling against an old cobbled wall. She let out a yelp as she struck the wall, and came to rest in a heap.

  In a move he would later reflect on as chivalrous, if grossly inadvisable, Uday lunged at the commander. Two soldiers seized him by the arms, and one sank a rifle butt deep into his ribs. Uday grunted and doubled over in pain. When he finally lifted his head again, he met Sarah’s gaze. He saw that she was all right. She then gave Uday an almost imperce
ptible nod.

  The technician in him tried to decipher what she was saying, and his best guess was: The phone is still on.

  He was only half wrong. The phone was still on.

  But that wasn’t what she was trying to tell him.

  FORTY-FIVE

  Slaton had few recollections of his father, who had died when he was a boy. One of his sayings, however, he remembered well: Dreams are forward-looking. Nightmares only relive your past.

  Slaton was looking down on himself as he played the memory game with Davy, the two taking turns uncovering tiles stamped with pairs of animals. Giraffes, lions, zebras. The field of play was tremendous, an array consuming the entire table in Windsom’s salon, at least a thousand pieces. Davy seemed unbothered by the complexity—on the contrary, he was unstoppable, unearthing matching pair after matching pair as fast as his tiny hands could collect them. As the array dwindled, Slaton got his chances, and on every opportunity he turned over the same tile—the one with Ali Samir’s picture. Try as he might, a match never came. At the end Davy had run the board, and Slaton was left staring at two tiles. He turned over the one with Samir’s picture. Then he turned over the other and found it blank.…

  “David!”

  A distant voice.

  “David!”

  Slaton blinked his eyes open. Anton Bloch was standing above his bunk, a look of concern etched on his face—even more than usual.

  “Yeah … what’s wrong?”

  “We have a problem.”

  * * *

  It was requisite, Slaton had always thought, that to become director of Mossad one must have a penchant for understatement. What they had was far more than a “problem.”

  The team gathered in the kitchen around their mission map. Bloch aside, the others looked much the way Slaton felt—fuzzy and sleep-interrupted. With the mission scheduled to begin just after midnight, they’d all expected to sleep into the evening. It wasn’t an easy thing to do, given both the violation of circadian rhythms and the nature of the mission. Bloch had been prepared, providing no-go pills for each member of the team—essentially a high-dose ration of Ambien. All four of them partook, and it did the job. Now they’d all been awakened out of a hard sleep, but yawning and shoulder-scratching aside, no one asked for a go pill. That too was an option in any special ops pharmacy, but it was hardly necessary. They were about to breach one of the most heavily guarded borders on earth, and thereafter engage Israel’s most hated and persistent enemy. That was enough to get everyone jacked up.

  “It happened less than an hour ago,” said Bloch. “Uday was taken into custody by Hezbollah.” His grimace seemed to deepen, spreading across his face as if by some tectonic process.

  “Hezbollah?” Slaton remarked. “Are you sure?”

  “Nearly so, and it’s not a surprise. As you’re all aware, Hezbollah has long been aligned with Syria’s Ba’athist government. They’ve helped fuel the civil war by contributing thousands of fighters. In recent months, some units have taken up patrols along the border with Israel, freeing up government troops to deploy elsewhere.”

  “That complicates things,” Slaton remarked.

  “Welcome back to our little corner of the world.”

  “Where did this happen?” Aaron asked.

  “They made it to Nawa, but were picked up at a checkpoint.”

  “How do we know?”

  “The satellite phone—Uday fired off a short message as they were being taken into custody. Thankfully, Baland called us right away. We were able to capture and isolate the signal. We discerned a muted female voice for about twenty minutes, then the connection was terminated. We think it was the girl, judging by the audio, so Uday must have given her the handset. Apparently her name is Sarah.”

  “Do we know if she still has the phone?”

  “Unknown. She might have ended the call for tactical reasons, or perhaps the battery was getting low.”

  “Or someone searched her and found it,” Slaton suggested.

  “Very possibly. Talia is working on it. As long as the phone remains turned on, with some battery power, she thinks she can track it—not continuously, but an occasional ping that can be triangulated.”

  Aaron said, “Even if we know where the phone is, we can’t be sure that’s where they are.”

  “True,” Slaton seconded. “And we can’t be sure they’re all together.”

  “I agree,” said Bloch, “there are serious gaps in our understanding of the situation. I can tell you we’ve been monitoring communications channels closely. There has so far been no increase in message traffic to the outpost in Nawa. To me that implies they were taken by a local crew—I doubt they even realize who they’ve got.”

  Aaron exchanged a look with Tal and Matai. “And who do they have?”

  Bloch didn’t even glance at Slaton—he could no longer sidestep the question. “The principal we are trying to rescue … his full name is Aziz Uday.”

  After a pause, Aaron said, “ISIS … a leadership position.”

  “Correct. Aziz Uday is, or I should say was, the head of the Islamic State’s information and technology section. For reasons that are not yet clear, he wishes to defect.”

  Someone cursed in Hebrew, before Aaron said, “Okay. That means the longer we wait, the greater the chance that Hezbollah will find out who they’ve got. Looks to me like we either gear up and go at sundown…”

  “Or we don’t go at all,” Slaton finished.

  Slaton exchanged a look with each of the other three. There was never any hesitation. “Smash and grab?” he said.

  “Smash and grab,” Aaron replied.

  “Fair enough.” Slaton readdressed the map. “So let’s try to figure out where they are.”

  FORTY-SIX

  Their hostages were, as verified by a Predator drone that was loitering four miles overhead, somewhere inside a sprawling two-story villa on the outskirts of Nawa.

  “At least that’s where the phone is,” Aaron remarked.

  Bloch gave an overview. “We’ve been watching the villa continuously for the last hour. There are three vehicles in front, all military, two guards outside. The good news is that we know this place, and it correlates to our situation. Hezbollah has been using this villa for months as a base for a regular contingent that rotates in and out of town.”

  “And the bad news?” Tal asked, knowing like any good operator that was coming as well.

  “There are usually close to twenty men in these units. We also believe the villa serves as their armory—they’ll have no shortage of guns or ammo.”

  Before anyone could grumble, Slaton said, “Having weapons available isn’t the same as having them in hand. As long as they aren’t expecting us, we’ll have a brief window when we can work quietly.”

  “Reinforcements?” Aaron asked.

  “The nearest Hezbollah unit we know about is thirty kilometers away. There are government units closer, including a remote outpost five kilometers away, north along the border. A contingent roughly the same size.”

  “That gives us fifteen minutes after any alarm is raised,” Slaton said.

  Bloch turned taciturn. “And here I should remind you of something. Each of you knows the importance of this mission. Director Nurin—on the instructions of the one man above him—has given strict orders. This is not a strike against either the Syrian government or Hezbollah. If you come under attack, you are authorized to return fire. But remember—the objective is to bring three individuals to safety with the least amount of collateral damage.”

  “Three?” Slaton was the first to remark. “I thought we were bringing out Uday and a woman.”

  “Yes, as did I. In going over the feed from the phone, however, we’ve identified a third person working with them. It is only conjecture based on captured audio, but it may be Uday’s brother. Whoever it is, if this man helped them flee Raqqa, he would be at dire risk if left behind. I think we have an obligation to include him. Plan to bring back three�
��if it turns out to be two, all the better.”

  Bloch waited, and no one protested. “Good.” He looked pointedly at Slaton, and then Aaron. “If things get difficult, it is essential that you prioritize. Uday must be extracted. The girl and this other man are of secondary importance—do not risk his safety for them.”

  “I think that’s a mistake,” said Slaton.

  “Why?”

  “Because Uday himself is a secondary objective.”

  Slaton stared at Bloch, but not as intensely as did the other three.

  Aaron, speaking for Tal and Matai, said, “Whatever you two are talking about, I think we have a damned good need to know.”

  Bloch nodded. “Yes, David and I have already discussed this. You should all know that Uday claims to be carrying some very valuable information.”

  Matai asked, “As in papers or a computer?”

  “Possibly, but we don’t know for sure. It’s most likely an electronic file carried on a memory device. I can’t divulge anything about what these files contain—but trust me when I say it is vital we obtain them.”

  Aaron suggested, “Any of them might be carrying it.”

  “Or for that matter,” added Slaton, “it could be sitting in that building on the desk of a Hezbollah captain.”

  “I agree, these are all possibilities. Hopefully once we have Uday, he can tell us.”

  The team was wide awake.

  “All right,” said Slaton, “three hours until dusk. Let’s do this.”

  Everyone began their private preparations. Soldiers everywhere had their rituals: weapons checked and loaded, holsters tight, batteries charged. Lucky charms pocketed and “last letters” placed in footlockers. When Slaton finished with his gear, he found himself trying to remember his parting words to Christine. I love you both—that was what he should have said, but he remembered something less profound. Something along the lines of, I’ll be back before you know it. At the time it had seemed enough.

  He walked outside, pulled the phone Bloch had issued him from his pocket, and studied it thoughtfully. He dialed Talia, and she picked up right away.