Lion of God- The Complete Trilogy

by Stephen England

  If Saddam ever learned of what they had done out here this night. . .

  He shuddered involuntarily, turning to face Thamir and finding the question clearly written in the captain’s eyes. “What is it, sir?”

  “Major Kazim’s unit,” Hadi responded, gesturing toward the radio, “picked up a pair of planes crossing into Iraqi airspace from Syria. Once they had entered the engagement range of his missiles, the major opened fire and, he believes, succeeded in striking one of the planes.”

  Captain Thamir shook his head, seeming nonplussed. “What does any of this have to do with us? We are in the no-fly zone, American warplanes fly over us every day and every night.”

  “But these, Raffi,” he began heavily, “were apparently not ordinary planes. I have never used radar equipment, but from what I understand—their radar cross-section was different than that of the fighter planes the Americans usually send. Major Kazim believes they may have been transports.”

  “Then. . .” Shock spread across Thamir’s face, his eyes opening wide. “Ya Allah. You mean—”

  He nodded. “I do. Put your men on alert, we are going to have to—”

  The lieutenant colonel broke off as the radio crackled once more from inside the truck and he reached in through the open window to retrieve it, hearing the voice of one of his soldiers through the static.

  “Sir, we have trucks inbound from the west along the border road.”

  And none too soon. Hadi shook his head, acknowledging the transmission with a curt reply as he retrieved his maroon beret from the seat of the truck. Adjusting it to his head as he nodded at Thamir. “Let’s go welcome our guests.”

  11:14 P.M.

  The drop zone

  “Did you see any sign of him, Tzipi?” Ariel asked, glancing back over his shoulder at Tzipporah and Nadir as he knelt down by Ze’ev’s side, a frown passing across his face as he tied the makeshift bandage tight around the older man’s upper arm.

  The former Shayetet-13 operator had jumped into the middle of a firestorm, flaming debris raining down around him as he descended. A red-hot piece of metal—from the plane, from the missile, only God knew which—embedding itself in the flesh of his upper tricep, the heat nearly cauterizing the wound.

  She shook her head, on one knee in the desert sand as she scanned the southern horizon through the night-vision scope of her SV-98. The sniper rifle was of Russian manufacture, deniable like the rest of their personal weapons.

  And a bolt-action, Tzipporah’s usual preference—trading speed in follow-up shots for unmatched precision.

  He grimaced, glancing up at the sliver of crescent moon as he straightened, getting to his feet. None of them had hit the drop zone precisely, the chaos surrounding the jump—debris from the explosion falling all around them—throwing them all off course.

  But he’d linked up with Tzipporah and Nadir quickly before coming across a wounded Ze’ev as they made their way south. The American remaining the only one unaccounted for.

  The American.

  Arguably the member of the team he most couldn’t do without as much as he would have preferred otherwise, the AN/PEQ-1 SOFLAM laser designator he carried vital to the success of their mission.

  “We drifted apart in freefall,” Ze’ev offered, gritting his teeth against the pain as he pushed himself up, leaning back on his good arm. “I had everything I could do just to focus on getting the ripcord pulled in time.”

  If he hadn’t. . .well, he’d rather have lost his own right hand than Ze’ev. It wasn’t something he cared to dwell on, not with so much yet hanging in the balance this night. He retrieved the night-vision goggles from his ruck, weighing once more the advisability of breaking radio silence in an attempt to contact Black.

  Their radios were encrypted and supposed to be secure. Supposed being the operative word in any such sentence, as you learned so quickly out in the field. The Iraqi SAMs weren’t supposed to have been there either.

  “Then we’ll have to push on without him, trust that he knows enough to catch up.” Move toward the sound of the guns. That was, after all, what Americans did. Wasn’t it? He shook his head, assessing his options. Without Silbermann’s team to screen their advance, they were going to have to do it themselves—just another piece of a night gone sideways. “Nadir, you take point. Tzipi, you’ll pull rear security and I—”

  Noise from behind him arrested his attention, and he turned on heel—his rifle coming up to confront the threat.

  “Shalom,” a distinctly non-Hebrew voice said from the darkness, the American’s empty right hand raised in greeting as Black advanced, his paint-darkened face just recognizable in the faint moonlight. “I got here as quickly as I could.”

  “Your gear survived the drop?” Ariel asked, his eyes searching the American’s face.

  “Everything’s still in one piece,” came the reply. Black winced. “Can’t say the same for the second transport, looked like they took a pretty close one.”

  Too close. He could only hope they could manage to limp back to Incirlik. But they had to.

  Just like they had to accomplish their mission. Time to move out.

  “All right then, let’s get going,” Ariel said, looking around at his team. What remained of them. “Sergeant Black, you’re on me.”

  He glanced toward where Ze’ev sat, seeing a grimace of pain cross the former Shayetet-13 operator’s face as he started to rise.

  “You good?” he asked, shifting the Kalashnikov to his left hand as he extended his right.

  The older man nodded, ignoring the proffered hand as he pushed himself painfully to his feet—straightening to look Ariel in the eye. A look of determination. Defiance.

  “I’m good.”

  11:19 P.M.

  The rendezvous point

  “We will tread them down until the strong are humbled.”

  “Until the spoils are divided,” Lieutenant Colonel Hadi replied, watching the smile broaden across the Palestinian’s wide face as he finished the code response.

  He was a big man, and heavy—the loose civilian shirt he wore doing nothing to disguise his fleshy bulk.

  “Major Walid Halawa,” the man said, extending a hand. “Of the Force 17 commando.”

  If the man before them had ever been a “commando”, it had been many years and a very many meals prior, Hadi thought, trading a glance of thinly-veiled contempt with his subordinate.

  The Palestinian security forces were rabble, nothing more. Corrupt, undisciplined, fanatical. Not to be relied upon under any circumstance.

  Which caused him to question once more what Siddiqi was thinking in allying himself—and them—with such degenerates. But the general had a plan, of that he had no doubt. Whatever it was.

  He pointedly didn’t respond to the introduction, instead sweeping his hand back toward the trucks. “We have the shells that you asked of us. And you, you have our money?”

  “We do,” the Palestinian major responded, waving forward one of the men who stood behind him, gesturing toward the briefcase in the man’s hand. “All of it.”

  “Relief money,” he said, laughing as if he had made some huge joke. “From the United States.”

  There was an irony there, that much was impossible to deny. Perhaps most of all that money intended to help the Palestinian people was instead being used to ensure their destruction. For there could be no other outcome to this.

  Hadi shook his head, gesturing for Captain Thamir to take the briefcase as he turned to lead the way back to the trucks.

  Casting a wary glance toward the dark shadows of the northern ridge even as he did so. As if he expected any moment to hear the crackle of small arms fire break out from the soldiers he had dispatched to take up positions on its height.

  They couldn’t wrap up this business any too soon. And if they could do so without the Palestinians realizing anything was wrong, so much the better.

  10:21 P.M.

  Incirlik Airbase

  Adana, Turkey<
br />
  The night without was cool, the winds of early winter swirling down out of the Taurus Mountains to the north—but Lay’s shirt was damp with sweat in the operations tent, a thin sheen of perspiration forming on his brow as he adjusted the radio headset, staring at the radar screens.

  “Baton, this is Control,” he began, catching the eye of the Air Force sergeant whose seat he had taken, “give me your sitrep. What’s going on?”

  “Control, this is Baton-One-Zero,” the voice of the pilot of the lead, undamaged C-130 responded—considerably calmer now, the immediate danger passed. Now that missiles were no longer filling the air. “We’re in Syrian airspace now, heading three-one-five—maintaining our position off Baton-Two-Zero’s wing.”

  Close enough to mark their position if they ditch, was Lay’s morose, unvoiced observation. Wasn’t much else they could do.

  “Baton-Two-Zero reports that the fire in No. 3 engine has been extinguished, with power levels back to forty-five percent. No. 4 engine is still dead, and the wing surfaces appear to have taken major damage, really chewed up. They’re going to be cutting it close on fuel. Requesting authorization to divert to Ramat David.”

  An Israeli Air Force air base located in northern Israel, southeast of Haifa, Lay thought, wincing at the realization. Only a couple hundred miles to the southwest of the planes’ current position—far, far closer than Incirlik.

  Far easier to make on the damaged aircraft’s remaining fuel. Minimize the risk of losing both plane and crew.

  He glanced over at Avi ben Shoham, the unspoken question clearly visible in his eyes.

  The Israeli shook his head, his face grim with the knowledge of what the decision could mean. But they’d been over all this, a dozen times before.

  If Syrian radars picked up the planes entering Israeli airspace, it would be only a matter of time before that intelligence reached Baghdad. And when it did. . .

  Their cover would be blown, all their efforts in vain.

  “That’s a negative, Baton Flight,” Lay said finally, toggling the mike. “Request denied.”

  To hold life and death in your hand, weighed in the balances. And found wanting.

  “Control, that is going to be—”

  “Absolutely necessary,” the CIA officer responded, a cold edge entering his voice with the words. “You must make it back to Incirlik. Control out.”

  He sat there in silence for a long moment as the transmission ended, staring straight ahead. The weight of what he had done, bearing down upon him.

  “Sir,” he heard a woman’s voice begin, glancing up to see an airman first class standing there behind his chair, “we’ve just heard from the Navy. A pair of EA-6B Prowlers from the Abraham Lincoln have responded to our warning about the Iraqi SAMs and are inbound on the target, ETA six minutes. They’ll be taking the launchers off-line then.”

  Taken off-line. Such a tidy, sterile way to refer to it. The death and destruction those Navy pilots would be bringing with them. But there was no help for it.

  You pays your money, and you takes your choice. And the Iraqis manning those launchers had made theirs.

  “Good,” Lay said, shoving back his chair and removing his headphones as he stood. “Make sure the helicopters get the all-clear—we need them ready to go in as soon as the SAM threat has been neutralized.”

  As soon as we’ve heard from the field team, he thought, mentally acknowledging the elephant filling up the room.

  With the Mossad team under strict orders to maintain radio silence until they called in the plane, they were flying blind here. No way to determine how things were actually progressing on the ground.

  Or if they were.

  “I am sorry, David,” Shoham said quietly as he approached, pushing past him to the map table—Lay’s knuckles resting against the hard metal as he leaned forward, surveying once more the terrain their men were going to have to traverse. “Your men, they have risked so much for my country. . .it seems ungrateful. I wish there was another way.”

  But there wasn’t and they both knew that.

  “Save it, Avi,” Lay responded, shaking his head. “No one’s dead—yet. And if we’re lucky, we can keep it that—”

  “Sir,” the airman first class broke in, an urgency in her voice, “You need to hear this. We’re receiving a transmission from Palmetto Flight.”

  “And?” Lay demanded, hustling across the tent and taking the headphones from her outstretched hand.

  “He’s over the target.”

  11:25 P.M. Arabia Time

  “Palmetto One One”

  Nothing but darkness met Capano’s eyes as the young lieutenant put the F-15 over into a steep bank, gazing out through the bubble canopy.

  Darkness stretching down through the faint moonlight to the ground, twenty-eight thousand feet below the strike fighter’s wings.

  “Copy that, Control,” he responded, checking his heads-up display once more as he toggled his headset mike. “We have no targets. I say again, no targets.”

  “Just sit tight, Palmetto,” came the terse response from the man on the other end of the line. “It’ll be there, give it time.”

  Time. The Air National Guard lieutenant took a deep breath, clearing his throat. “That’s not something we have a lot of, Control. Used up quite a bit of fuel just getting here, what’s left is only going to let me remain on-station so long.”

  There was a long pause, only static filling the silence. And when the man spoke again, his voice had changed. Become guarded, wary. “How long are we talking about, Palmetto?”

  Capano shook his head, glancing down at his gauges. “Fifteen, twenty minutes at the outside. Then we’re bingo-fuel.”

  11:26 P.M.

  Al-Anbar Governate

  The night-vision goggles revealed the rugged terrain of Anbar in stark relief as Ariel moved forward, his Kalashnikov held at low ready. Every detail picked out in ghostly shades of green, dark and granular.

  His team spread out on either side of him in the darkness, forming a skirmish line as they pressed on toward the ridgeline, now less than a third of a kilometer away. A dark shadow, looming before them in the ambient moonlight.

  And then he saw it, a line of soldiers moving up the western slope of the ridge, their shapes just visible as a light green against the darker landscape. At least eleven men, maybe more.

  A low hiss escaping his lips as he dropped to one knee, glancing left and right—gesturing for his team to take cover.

  Had the Iraqis seen the explosion? Been alerted by the mobile SAM unit? He swore beneath his breath, only too aware of the reality. Why didn’t matter, what mattered was that they were reinforcing the ridgeline in strength.

  And they were going to have to root them out before they could accomplish their mission.

  “Move in and pass the word along,” he whispered, finding Ze’ev on his left and the American on his right. “Pick your targets and take them out on my mark. Do it quietly.”

  11:29 P.M.

  “Nine 130mm artillery shells,” Umar Hadi announced, throwing back the canvas to allow one of the junior Palestinian “officers” to climb into the back of the truck and inspect the two massive footlockers resting on the bed. This was eating up precious time, but he couldn’t very well refuse. “Designed to be fired from the Russian-built M-46 field gun. And filled with sarin gas by Iraqi scientists during our war against the safawi.”

  Iran. It seemed so long ago now. And yet all that they had done then remained with them to this day. Embodied in nothing, perhaps, so much as these shells.

  “Good, good,” Major Halawa grinned, clapping Hadi on the shoulder in an unwelcome gesture of familiarity. “May God be praised. This will give us the ability to strike back against our oppressors at last.”

  And be crushed for your pains, the Republican Guard officer thought, adding his own perfunctory “Insh’allah.”

  As anyone could reasonably expect following the deployment of such weapons. Madness, all of thi
s.

  “If you would take my advice, you—” Hadi began, cut off suddenly by Captain Thamir’s voice, his subordinate emerging from the darkness near the front of the trucks.

  “Sir, you’re wanted on the radio,” came the urgent warning, a chill sense of foreboding darting down the lieutenant colonel’s spine with the words.

  He excused himself briefly from the Palestinians, leaving his soldiers to stand guard as he hurried after Thamir. “What is it?”

  “It’s the army missile commander. He says we have a plane in the air above us. An American fighter.”

  11:30 P.M.

  The ridge

  Sergeant Saleem Jabouri paused on the crest of the ridgeline, only the silence of the night surrounding him as the Republican Guard NCO took his left hand off the foregrip of his AK-47, glancing back over his shoulder as he signaled for his men to spread out further across the ridge.

  Paratroopers? It seemed hard to imagine—unfathomable, almost—but there had been no mistaking the tension in the captain’s voice when he’d given the order. He’d served with Thamir too long not to recognize that tone when he heard it.

  His hand slid along the Kalashnikov’s receiver, his finger resting against the safety as he dropped to one knee, peering out into the darkness as he searched for targets—for any sign of life—and finding nothing. His men passing behind him as they moved to take up positions.

  It was then that he heard it, a muffled sound like hands clapping together—something warm and wet spraying across the back of his neck.

  He rose half out of his crouch, catching the sight of one of his men toppling backward, his rifle clattering to the rocks—half his head blown away.

  Jabouri’s mouth opened in a cry of warning, his own rifle coming up, but the sergeant never made it—a 9mm slug slamming into his temple, smashing through the dense bone of his skull as it mushroomed into his brain.

  He was dead before his body hit the ground.