Lion of God- The Complete Trilogy

by Stephen England

It was dangerous even to swim close to such a man, let alone be counted among his inner circle. He knew that. . .but too many years had gone by for any of it to be altered now.

  He could still remember the first time he had ever seen Siddiqi—only a colonel then—standing upright in the open hatch of his T-72 main battle tank as Iranian shells pounded Basra.

  Furiously cursing young conscripts fleeing the midnight attack of 35,000 Iranian Pasdaran crossing the Fish Lake, rallying every man he could make stand and fight.

  Service pistol drawn in his hand, shooting more than one who refused to fall in. Holding their part of the line as the Iraqi defenses crumbled all about them that night.

  Truly a soldier’s soldier, Hadi thought, walking through the concourse—his eyes searching the sea of faces in hopes of finding his contact. The young Palestinian who was to smuggle him across the Sinai and into Gaza.

  A man like that. . .you’d follow him anywhere. To the very gates of Hell.

  5:43 A.M., January 1st, 2001

  The coast

  South of Netanya, Israel

  Avi ben Shoham could hear waves crashing against the beach scarce half a kilometer distant as he turned off the engine, pushing open the door of the SUV and stepping out onto the gravel. The dark shape of a warehouse looming in the night not fifty meters away—the sea breeze tugging at his suit jacket, exposing the Browning Hi-Power riding in a leather holster on the Mossad officer’s hip.

  It was too dark for him to be able to glimpse the Mediterranean, but he could smell it—the taste of salt on his lips as he stood there for a moment, gazing out into the night. Coming to terms once more with the reality of what he had done.

  What he had ordered done.

  He’d received the confirmation of “Mission Success” over Mossad’s secure comms network hours before, but he knew all too well that this wasn’t success. This wasn’t the end.

  This was only the beginning, the moment when the dice flew out over the table. Their fate yet to be decided. . .yet irretrievably cast.

  Wars had been started over less.

  His face hardened at the memory of those they had lost, his dark eyes gazing out toward the black of the sea.

  For his country, this was a war which had already begun.

  5:57 A.M.

  Pain. It felt as though someone had taken an axe handle to the side of his head, Lay thought—coming awake slowly, his skull throbbing as if it had been split open—his eyes struggling to adjust themselves to the pitch darkness that surrounded him. Realizing only then that there was a hood over his face. His fingers reaching out, feeling something—like the fabric of a threadbare cot beneath him. The room was cool, but he was soaked with sweat all the same, his shirt clinging to his back.

  He’d never known a hangover this intense, he thought, attempting to process what had happened—not even in the old days at Berlin Station.

  Long nights in the dead of German winter he’d drunk himself into a stupor, trying to drown out the sorrow of a failed marriage.

  A child half a world away.

  But it had never been anything like this. This was—it hit him then, everything flooding back from the night before. The bar. The woman. The man in the crowd. The paramedics.

  The feeling of a needle being stabbed into his thigh—he’d been taken out of play, but by whom?

  He tried to push himself aright, a surge of unaccustomed panic seeming to flood through his body—his mind grasping too late that his hands were bound even as he lost his balance, crashing to the hard concrete of the floor.

  Pain shooting through his shoulder as he rolled over onto to his back, biting deeply into his tongue in an effort to keep from crying out. Struggling to maneuver into a sitting position. He wasn’t as young as he’d been in Berlin, either—the years of late nights and bad habits taking their toll.

  The Agency, well it was hardly a place for health nuts.

  The door opened without warning, the noise of his fall apparently having alerted someone without—booted footsteps against the concrete

  Multiple men—at least two, maybe three. Hands grabbing him roughly under his arms, hauling him upright. “What’s going on? What’s—”

  A sharp blow to the ribs silenced him as he felt himself hustled out the door and down a hall, his feet seeming to move sluggishly. As though the effects of the drug were still wearing off, dulling his reaction time.

  He heard the harsh scrape of metal against concrete, even as his captors thrust him into a folding chair—ripping the hood away from his head, slicing away the zip-ties from his hands.

  Leaving him sitting there blinking in the bright glare of utility lights surrounding his chair and the small table before him. Disoriented. Rubbing his wrists to restore the circulation, still struggling to find his bearings as a figure walked in from the darkness beyond the lights. A voice, so familiar. Chilling him to the very bone.

  “So, David. . .why don’t you tell me what we’re both doing here?”

  6:08 A.M.

  The desert

  Sinai Peninsula, west of Al-Arīsh

  A barren land, Lieutenant Colonel Hadi mused, gazing out over the Sinai—the desert veiled in pre-dawn darkness as the battered old Renault flew down the road, seeming to threaten to shake itself apart more violently with every passing mile, its engine murmuring in protest.

  All of which seemed to be of no concern to his driver, a young Palestinian in his early twenties who hadn’t stopped talking since they’d left Cairo—seven long hours and nearly two hundred miles before. An endless stream of excited and angry commentary on the state of the intifada, his people’s ongoing struggle against the Zionist state.

  “. . .and that day the tanks rolled into Jenin—I was standing right there, looking at one of those Jews through a pair of binoculars, standing in the hatch of his tank. Looking right at him—him looking back. If only I’d had a rifle, I would have. . .”

  Been cut in two by the tank’s machine gun, the soldier thought, shaking his head as he listened. As he would have done if it he had been the tanker.

  Young men like this—this. . .boy, seated there across from him in the driver’s seat of the Renault. They thought they had seen war. Thought they knew what it was.

  They had no idea.

  For all the talk of brutality and oppression current in the Arab world concerning the Israeli occupation of Palestine, few of them could have imagined what it would look like to see a modern army truly unleashed against a civilian populace.

  Crushing an uprising. . .the way Saddam would have done it, Hadi reflected—his dark eyes shadowed at the memory.

  Rolling into Basra back in ’91 at the head of a column of Republican Guard loyalists. Iraqi Army deserters crushed beneath the treads of his T-72—the massive tank recoiling on its chassis as its main gun fired, sending a 125mm shell through the upper floors of an apartment building. Outnumbered and outgunned, the rebels hadn’t stood a chance as Guardsmen moved street to street, killing anyone who resisted—executing many who surrendered.

  It had all been over in a month, leaving thousands dead. Thousands more living only in fear of their lives.

  That was war. The kind of war the Jewish state might find itself employing against the Palestinians if they were to learn the details of his own mission, he realized, glancing out through the dusty glass of the Renault’s windshield into the first rays of the dawn—only too aware of the repercussions that could result from the deployment of this kind of weapon.

  But he was a soldier, and he had his orders. Just as he had back then.

  6:10 A.M.

  “Avi!” David Lay exclaimed in surprise, the familiar face of his Israeli counterpart coming into view as the man emerged from the darkness surrounding the table. “What is the meaning of all this—what’s going on?”

  “That’s what I was hoping you would be able to tell me, David,” the Mossad officer said slowly, pausing with his hand on the back of the opposite chair. His eyes still veiled in shado
w.

  He knew, Lay thought, the instincts of a career intelligence officer rushing to the fore—even through the drugged haze. Everything becoming clear to him in that moment. Deny. Deny everything.

  The stratagem of the spy, every bit as much as it was that of the politician.

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Lay responded, anger in his voice as he pushed himself to his feet—swaying slightly as he put a hand on the table to steady himself. Anger. Righteous indignation. Not to have displayed it would have as much as admitted he was lying. “I was kidnapped and brought here—”

  “On my orders,” Avi ben Shoham returned evenly, his eyes never leaving Lay’s face. A dangerous calm pervading the Israeli's features.

  “Oh, for God's sake, Avi.” Lay shook his head, glaring across the table. “Have you absolutely lost your mind?”

  “Sit back down, David.”

  It wasn't a suggestion.

  Defeat. The CIA officer collapsed into the folding chair, feeling the cold metal through his thin, sweat-soaked dress shirt as he leaned back.

  “Mustafa al-Shukeiri,” Shoham began, placing a folder on the table between them, “what can you tell me about him?”

  Lay shrugged. “He is—or rather was—a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council. Served by Arafat’s side all the way back in Beirut, one of his closest advisers. And he was—”

  “A CIA asset.”

  6:14 A.M.

  The warehouse

  He was standing on-guard outside the door of the warehouse, listening to the waves of the Mediterranean break against the beach when a pair of headlights swept across the entry road.

  His eyes narrowed, his body straightening as the vehicle turned in—his hand closing around the butt of the Jericho 941 holstered on his hip.

  A blue Toyota coming to a stop twenty meters away, a woman emerging from the driver’s seat, the club dress she had worn into the bar long since exchanged for old Madei Aleph service fatigues—the kind she had worn during her years with the Israeli Defense Forces. “Ariel,” she began, coming up to him, “is the general inside?”

  He nodded, stepping aside to let her pass. “Ariel” wasn’t his name, but it might as well have been, given how long it had been since anyone had used his real one.

  David Shafron, dead and buried long ago—a name chiseled into the granite of a tombstone in Har HaMenuchot. Dead, disowned by his ultra-Orthodox parents the day he’d enlisted in the IDF. Long before he had become a member of a Mossad Kidon. An assassin.

  “I would give him a moment, Tzippi,” he said, using the diminutive of her codename, ‘Tzipporah.’ “He’s still interrogating our man.”

  Interrogating might have been a little strong. Their orders had been to handle the CIA officer with care. They weren’t, after all, actually trying to start a war here.

  She shook her head, holding up a cellular phone. “Eli Gerstman wants to speak with him. At once. Shin Bet came through for us, one of Dichter’s informants in the PA reporting that there’s a man coming through the tunnels from the Sinai this morning—perhaps even within the next few hours. They’re calling him ‘the Iraqi.’”

  6:17 A.M.

  It was all here, David Lay realized, sifting through the papers before him—cursing once more the day the good idea fairy had paid a visit to Langley’s seventh floor. Good intentions, so ever out of place in this business.

  He had argued strongly against recruiting Mustafa al-Shukeiri, warned that the risks of him playing them were far too high. That the potential for blowback was real, should anyone—on either side—realize they had been running him.

  As they just had. All of it here in black and white. Scarce even worth the trouble of denying. And he had been playing them. . .from the very beginning.

  Lay swore softly beneath his breath. Even he couldn't have predicted it ending this badly, proving that not even cynicism sufficed in the Middle East.

  “So,” he began, looking up to meet Avi ben Shoham's gaze, “where do we go from here?”

  “There is no we, David,” the Israeli responded, finally taking his seat across from him. “Not any longer. We're both professionals—we know how this game is played—so I'm going to spare you the outrage. What you did. . .I have no doubt you did in the belief that it was in your country’s best interests.”

  He paused, shaking his head as if incredulous that anyone could have thought such a thing. “Americans have always been hopelessly optimistic in their dealings with Arafat and those of his inner circle. But none of that changes the reality that, if you hadn’t already served out your term as chief of station. . .we’d be revoking your diplomatic status. Declaring you persona non grata.”

  A thunderous finish to what had once been a promising career, Lay reflected bitterly, staring across the table at his counterpart. And so much of it due to decisions which had been made for him.

  Out of his control.

  He could have said as much to Shoham—could have protested—but doing so would have displayed weakness. The one thing you could never do.

  “Then what was your purpose in all. . .this?” he asked, glancing around him into the empty darkness of the deserted warehouse. “You don’t think you could have accomplished the same thing with a phone call—lunch at Hatraklin?”

  “Bringing you here, David, was about sending a message. Making clear to your government just how seriously Israel takes such a threat to her security. The administration is in office a mere nineteen more days—they need to start deciding just how fraught with scandal they want those final days to be.”

  You’re talking about a President who got it on with an intern young enough to have been his daughter, Lay thought, keeping his face studiously neutral. The bar for scandal was rather. . .high.

  But this—the summary destruction of everything they had tried to achieve in the Middle East, already jeopardized by the unrest of the intifada—this was something different entirely. “So, what do you want?”

  “We want the CIA to turn over its files on al-Shukeiri to Mossad. Everything they have. Anything that could enable us to further establish the connections between him and this Iraqi general.”

  “I don’t know if that’s going to be possible. The kind of files you’re talking about are strictly NOFORN, Avi,” the CIA station chief said, holding up a hand. No foreign nationals. “Highly classified stuff.”

  “I am talking about the preservation of the Jewish state!” Shoham spat, his eyes flashing as he leaned forward. “I—”

  “General,” a familiar voice interrupted—Lay’s head snapping up just in time to see a woman in IDF service dress enter the circle of light surrounding the table. “My apologies, but we have a situation developing.”

  The woman from the bar, Lay realized, anger flooding across his face as he watched her lean down, speaking to Shoham in a hushed voice. “. . .coming in from the Sinai. . .an Iraqi. . .”

  “This morning?” he heard the Mossad officer demand, and she nodded, continuing, “Gerstman is asking that you to call him immediately, wants the Kidon team to stage for the operation.”

  “All right,” Shoham said finally, pressing both hands against the table as he rose to his feet. “I’m going to have to cut this short, David. Something has. . .come up. Do we understand each other?”

  Lay nodded, still unsure how to play this. What Langley would agree to. “We do.”

  “I should hope so,” the Israeli replied, his dark eyes hard and unrelenting as he stood there, staring at Lay. “If not, the repercussions will be serious.”

  He turned to leave, glancing at the woman as he did so. “You’ll see that Mr. Lay receives an escort back to Tel Aviv. . .”

  7:09 A.M.

  Rafah

  On the border between Egypt and Gaza

  “Come in, come in,” the man whispered urgently from the doorway, placing his hand on the shoulder of Hadi’s driver and pulling him inside.

  Hadi took a final look around him before heedi
ng the man’s admonition, taking in the dusty pavement of the street—Arabic graffiti sprayed on a nearby wall. The rising sun filtering across the rooftops from the east past lines of clothing hung out to dry, intermingled with the looming, incongruous shadows of satellite dishes.

  He had hoped to be across the border and inside Gaza before the breaking of dawn, but that had proven an impossibility.

  With the ever-increasing unrest, Mubarak’s soldiers had stepped up their patrols near the border, one such unit passing them only a few blocks back—a squad of soldiers in the back of a Toyota pick-up truck, a Russian-made DShK machine gun mounted in the bed.

  His presence in Egypt might have been perfectly legal, but that didn’t mean he wanted to be answering any more questions as to the reasons for his trip than were absolutely necessary.

  He wouldn’t be the first visitor to Egypt to find himself “disappeared” by the Mukhabarat.

  His eyes adjusted slowly to the gloom as they followed their host deeper into the dwelling, the man not turning on any lights—as if himself afraid to attract attention. He saw a young boy, no more than four or five years old, peering out the door of a side room—seeming to regard his father’s visitors with a curiosity not unmixed with fear.

  “Here,” the man said, pushing open a door and letting them into a small storeroom—dust flying everywhere as he cast aside a rug which had been spread across the floor, exposing a square outline in the center.

  His fingers digging under the slab of concrete and heaving it aside to reveal a hole, opening up into the darkness beneath.

  A tunnel, Hadi thought, eyeing the man as he took a step back. One of literally hundreds which had honeycombed the border between Egypt and Gaza since the ‘80s—used to smuggle in everything from medicine and spare parts to the weapons need to carry on the fight against the Jews.

  The Palestinian moved over to a low shelf mounted near the wall, fumbling briefly through assorted detritus before his fingers closed around a small flashlight, handing it over to the lieutenant colonel.