4:37 P.M. Israel Standard Time
An olive grove outside Beit Shemesh
Israel
“Is it done?” the man asked, not even glancing back as Shoham approached through the grove—his eyes fixed on the west, toward the setting sun, out across the fields now barren of grain.
Faint tendrils of smoke escaping from between his lips, a cigarette in his left hand.
Shoham nodded, stopping as he came abreast of Eli Gerstman, glancing over into the man’s face.
Efraim’s lieutenant was only a couple years his senior, but he looked far, far older—his face lined beyond his years. They had both seen far too much.
“It is,” he replied, glancing back through the grove toward the road where Gerstman’s personal vehicle was parked—the same battered old Citroen he’d had for. . .over a decade, maybe longer.
“I’m telling you, Avi,” Gerstman had said on more than one occasion, “the French are the only people in the world who know how to make a decent car.”
“Well, you have to admit. . .you haven’t tried Volkswagen,” he would always retort—a jocular response which ever evoked a sharp, bitter laugh, punctuated by a flurry of obscenities about a country that had cost both their families dear. Dark humor, the kind that had sustained the Jewish people through nearly two millennia of exile—scattered across the face of the earth.
But today was no time for jokes, dark or otherwise. “The Kidon team has received their orders. They’ll depart for France in the morning.”
“Good,” Gerstman responded, taking a long, slow drag of the cigarette. “How long?”
Shoham shook his head, watching as the smoke drifted away on the cool evening breeze. “Impossible to say with any certainty, Eli, but I expect al-Shukeiri to be dead within the week.”
“Our intelligence on his current location,” Gerstman began, turning to look at him for the first time, “it came from the Americans. Do you consider it reliable?”
A challenging question, Shoham thought—thinking back to his meeting in Tel Aviv with David Lay—the CIA station chief’s reaction to the news about al-Shukeiri.
There had been something there. . .something off, in the way he responded. As if he knew more than he was saying—more than he was allowed to say.
That had been their last face-to-face—the flow of intel on al-Shukeiri being passed along through subordinates in the days since.
“It’s actionable,” he responded slowly. “The CIA will. . .bear watching.”
“Fair enough.” Gerstman dropped his cigarette and ground it into the dirt beneath the heel of his old, scuffed dress shoes as he turned to leave. “See that you do.”
3:49 P.M. Western European Time, December 17th
Av Jean Henri Fabre
Marignane, France
Ariel shrugged himself deeper into the folds of his light jacket, staring out across the wind-chopped waves of Étang de Berre. It wasn’t his first time in France, but then it had been in the middle of the summer.
It had to be at least sixteen degrees Celsius—not bad for a December day in Europe, but the breeze coming in off the waters of the lagoon was making it feel at least ten degrees colder.
He heard the sound of jet engines growing steadily ever closer and glanced up to the horizon to see the form of an Airbus coming in for a landing at the nearby Marseille Provence Airport, its landing gear already down—visible against the sky even at this distance. With a member of his team aboard?
Impossible to say.
He’d flown out of Ben Gurion to Ankara, from Ankara to Budapest, from Budapest to Brussels—before driving across the border into France and catching a regional commuter flight from Paris to Marseille Provence.
The passport he was now traveling under bore no trace of ever having entered the nation of Israel, which was precisely how it was supposed to be.
By way of deception, thou shalt make war.
A form seemed to materialize at his side and he glanced over to see Tzipporah standing there only a few feet in the sand of the beach, silent as a ghost.
“Good flight?” he asked, glancing back toward the large rocks which lined the avenue to the east as if he expected to see more of their team members behind her.
She just looked at him. “Which one?”
That was a fair question. And Mossad wasn’t exactly known for sending people first class. “Has anyone else been here?”
He shook his head. “You’re the first. Go on ahead to the hotel and sleep off the jet lag. We conduct our first reconnaissance of the target at 0730 hours.”
9:13 A.M., December 18th
Marseille, France
Surveillance. It was all about establishing patterns. Getting a feel for your surroundings. Your terrain.
Growing to understand what could be considered natural—and what wasn’t.
And those two men. . .Ken Weathers grimaced, adjusting the focus of the binoculars in his hands as he stared through the tinted windshield of the surveillance van. They didn’t belong.
He’d first noticed them nearly an hour before, on the street approaching the high-rise Marseille apartments. Just the two of them, clad in jeans and light jackets—the younger of the pair talking occasionally on a cellular phone. Swarthy skin, dark hair—very typical of the Mediterranean. Inconspicuous enough not to attract attention from any casual observer.
But try as he might, it was impossible to escape the conclusion that they were there for the exact same purpose he was.
Surveillance.
Quis custodiet ipsos custodies? He thought with a faint, ironic smile. Who watches the watchers?
In this case, that would be him. He’d joined the CIA straight out of college nine years before, in 1991—too late to have played any part in the Great Game that had once held sway in the rivalries between East and West. The intelligence services of NATO and the Warsaw Pact.
It was like volunteering to fight a war, only to have it end as you were finishing boot camp.
The Agency had been entering a new era back then. Downsizing, shifting focus to more asymmetric threats now that the great Russian bear was “vanquished.”
And he’d found himself shunted from one station to the next, none of them exactly what could be viewed as career-enhancers. His college sweetheart had left him in the middle of a three-year stint in Kingston working against the narco-trade, dissolving their marriage and moving back home to Nebraska.
He smiled tightly at the memory. Liv should have stuck it out with him. . .she would have loved Paris, even if he didn’t.
And that, he thought, lifting the binoculars back to his eyes, was the problem with surveillance—it gave you far too much time to think.
A third man came walking in from down the street, pausing for a moment to talk hurriedly with the pair before he continued on, glancing frequently back at the high-rise. He was young, but there was something unmistakable in the way he carried himself. An air of authority.
No doubt about it. “Get Paris Station on the phone,” Weathers advised, reaching over to hit his dozing partner in the middle of the chest. “Tell them we have eyes on the Mossad team.”
1:14 P.M.
The hotel
Marseille
“With due respect,” Ariel began, his voice low as he gazed out over the lights of the city from the hotel balcony—the only place he’d been able to get cellular reception, “what you’re asking unnecessarily complicates realities here on the ground.”
There was a moment’s pause before Shoham’s reply came through, the edge in the general’s voice clearly audible even through the static. “I assure you, this is necessary.”
“Is there a problem with the information we received about the package?” Ariel asked, his mind racing. It wasn’t an impossible request to fulfill, but it was going skew their timeline beyond anything they had made allowance for. Increasing the danger of something going wrong—as field operations tended to do, if given half a chance.
“Our inform
ation. . .was received from a third party,” came the aluf’s unsettling response. “We need to be certain.”
“. . .no visible security at the service entrance,” Tzipporah stated, laying the photograph on the low table between them. Taken with a telephoto lens, it showed the area around the door in sharp relief, down to the lock itself. “I think we can reasonably assume an alarm of one sort or another—that will need to be defeated before we can progress into the building itself.”
Ze’ev leaned forward, his eyes scanning over the photo. “According to the blueprints, the service elevator is ten meters past the entrance. From there, it’s a straight ride to the eleventh floor—maybe a minute, on the outside.”
“And the weapons?” Nadir asked, speaking up from his position near the suite’s door.
“It’s been arranged,” the older operator responded, glancing at his watch. “Our personnel in Spain should be acquiring them from Matveyev within the hour. They’ll be delivered to the marina tomorrow evening.”
Tzipporah nodded slowly, her fingers brushing lightly over the photos until they were fanned out before her like a deck of cards. Her dark eyes seemed to contract into glittering points, hard as obsidian. “Then we’ll be able to strike on the night of the 20th.”
“Not necessarily,” her head jerked up at the sound of Ariel’s voice, the glass door sliding shut behind their team leader as he stepped in off the suite’s balcony—the phone in his hand. “Tel Aviv. . .wants independent verification of al-Shukeiri’s presence. Eyes on. Before we go in for the kill.”
5:56 P.M. Israel Standard Time
The United States Embassy
Tel Aviv, Israel
“I understand, Paul. Thanks for keeping me in the loop.” David Lay replaced the STU-III in its cradle and leaned back in his office chair, musing over the words of his counterpart in Paris. If Renninger’s people knew what they were talking about, the Kidon unit was already in France—nearly on al-Shukeiri’s doorstep.
Shoham had moved fast, even faster than he had expected—but the Israelis weren’t known for taking casualties lying down. Particularly when they had been inflicted in such a shockingly horrific manner.
An atrocity beyond words. And that only made what he had to do all the harder.
He slid open the desk drawer to one side of his chair, eyeing the unopened bottle of bourbon Vukovic had given him as a going-away present. Wild Turkey Rare Breed, distilled in the hills of Kentucky.
He’d intended to save it for his return to the States, to celebrate the end of three long years, but now he just needed the drink.
There was no black and white in this business, he had come to learn—just a haze gray the color of ash. No way to keep your hands clean of it, not if you stayed in.
He removed the cork and tilted the bottle forward, watching as the amber liquid splashed into his glass.
In the end, you traded the ability to look yourself in the mirror—for your service to your country.
And that. . .well, that was something he was just going to have to learn to live with.
4:51 P.M. Western European Time, December 19th
Marseille, France
“We have a woman approaching from the west,” Nadir announced, adjusting the pair of binoculars to his eyes as he aimed through the windshield of the small Renault toward the entrance of the apartment building across the street.
Across from him in the passenger seat, Tzipporah operated the camera, her telephoto lens focused on their target through the trees.
Its shutter opening and closing with the speed of a semi-automatic weapon, the series of clicks clearly audible across in the quietness of the parked car.
“It’s not her,” she announced after a moment, glancing at the pair of photos taped to the dashboard, a clear note of disappointment in her voice.
That was becoming a theme. They’d been here for nearly ten hours, taking over from Ze’ev and their team leader. With no sign of al-Shukeiri’s wife. Or the man himself.
The litter of fast food cartons from Brioche Dorée in the backseat serving as testament to the boredom that came with this work.
Tzipporah reached over, taking a once-warm leerdammer from the open box between them and biting into the small, breaded round of cheese. She shook her head, gesturing toward the apartments towering above them in the slowly gathering dusk. “I had expected something more. . .impressive, I guess.”
As had he. Marseille’s economy had seen brighter days.
“Apparently, she’s not his favorite wife,” he responded, shaking his head in dark amusement. The man had three, each one of them younger when he’d married her than her predecessor.
Moments like this were when the differences between the Mossad and his time in the IDF became the most apparent. A matter of gathering the intel, rather than simply acting upon it.
He winced, attempting without success to straighten his legs in the cramped quarters of the driver’s seat. Remembering Ariel’s words from the previous night. His relaying of the message which had up-ended all the mission plans they had laid out back in the Golan.
“. . .need us to obtain independent verification of the target’s presence.”
It wasn’t that plans didn’t survive contact with the enemy, it was that your allies shredded them before they could even reach that point.
“Take a look at this,” Tzipporah whispered urgently, gesturing briefly to the parking lot across the way from them before lifting her camera in one hand—the shutter clicking rapidly as Nadir followed the direction of her gaze toward the figure of a smartly-dressed woman in Western clothes stepping out of a Peugeot sedan, dark, nearly jet-black hair framing her face.
Zainab al-Shukeiri, he thought, hearing Tzipporah breathe, “Got you.”
One down. . .one to go. Time to find her beloved husband.
6:29 P.M.
The marina
Marseille
“You said he’d be here.” Ariel shook his head, glancing about them in the semi-darkness, the dusk held at bay by the marina lights. A forest of masts obscured the horizon, hundreds of sailboats riding at anchor.
“He will be,” Ze’ev replied grimly, glancing about them. A few meters away down the pier, loud music poured from within a cabin cruiser, along with the sound of women laughing.
Americans. They were all over the marina, loud and boisterous, apparently celebrating Christmas early—tourists with enough money for a holiday abroad, and not enough to spend it on the actual Riviera.
A few police patrolling the piers, nothing out of the ordinary. None of them in sight at the moment. And then he spotted it, the glow of a pair of chemlights in the stern of a powerboat anchored about eighty meters off down a long pier. Red left, yellow right.
The signal.
“There,” he said, inclining his head toward the lights. “We’ve got him.”
The Russian had been thorough, Ariel thought, hoisting the heavily loaded duffel bag over his shoulder as they walked back toward the car, feeling the wrapped weapons within jostle against each other as the bag shifted.
Inside there were another pair of Beretta 92s like the one he now wore in an inside-the-waistband holster within his jacket, along with long, black can-style suppressors specially designed to be screwed into the semiautomatics’ threaded barrels and spare magazines for both weapons.
A suppressed Russian Bizon submachine gun rounded out the armaments they had secured—all of them deniable, nothing that could be traced back to Israel, or their supplier in Spain.
Not unless they got caught.
He smiled grimly, glancing over at Ze’ev as they approached the car, parked thirty meters or so from the waterfront. That was the cardinal rule of their business, the only one that mattered, when it came right down to it.
Don’t get caught.
“I’m driving,” he announced, unlocking the car as the older man moved around to the passenger side.
He had opened the rear door and started to place the duffel
on the back seat when a voice from behind him arrested his movements, speaking in rough, accented French.
His head jerked back, seeing three men standing there, spread out in a loose semi-circle—silhouetted against the marina lights in the distance. No weapons visible, but the men’s openly aggressive posture indicated more clearly than words that they possessed them.
“They’re Maghrebis,” Ze’ev breathed in English, causing Ariel to glance over his way for a brief moment. “He says he knows we’re smuggling in drugs—says this is their territory, wants you to hand over the bag.”
It was always the scenario you hadn’t planned for that came back to trip you up. They’d been on the lookout for the police, not Marseille’s dominantly Algerian criminal element.
“You can tell him that’s not going to happen,” Ariel replied. Nothing could blow their mission more surely, the loss of the weapons—their very existence if they fell into the wrong hands—could lead to more questions than any of them cared to have asked. Or answered.
“You told me yourself,” the man in the center announced in the same language, taking a step forward. His dark eyes never leaving Ze’ev’s face. “But you’re wrong—you will be giving me the bag. In exchange for the lives of you and your friend.”
The Israeli shook his head, keeping his hands away from his sides as he faced the leader. No sudden movements. “You’re making a serious mistake. We’re not smugglers. There are no drugs in the bag.”
“Then open it up,” the man sneered, taking another step in close. Just one more, Ariel thought, forcing himself not to look Nadir’s way—his partner’s torso still largely hidden by the body of the Passat.
“That’s simply not something I can do,” he responded, putting out a hand in a gesture of non-aggression. “I’m sorry.”
“You will be.” The blow came fast, faster than he even expected, crashing into his stomach and driving the wind from his body.
He stumbled back against the open door of the car, trying to recover his balance—his hands out in front of him as if to beg mercy, feigning weakness. And then he felt the ice-cold muzzle of a pistol jammed against his temple. “I am not going to say this again, imbécile. You will give us—”
Lion of God- The Complete Trilogy Page 6