‘Not sure about the kid, though,’ Finn mused. ‘Doubt he was spilling state secrets. Or the coffin-dodger. And it sounds like the priest just got clipped in the crossfire. Don’t reckon he’ll be rising on the third day.’ He carried on reading, his voice becoming slightly distant. ‘I’m telling you — train bombs, snipers — there’s something in the fucking water this winter.’ He looked up from his paper at Luke. ‘Christ on a bike, mate, you look bloody terrible.’
Luke had wondered for a moment whether he should share with Finn what had gone on last night. They went back a long way, after all. They’d seen some things together, and there was no doubt it would do him good to talk about it. But what would he say? He couldn’t even fit the pieces of Suze’s bizarre story together in his own head, let alone explain it to someone else. And to admit that he’d been in St Paul’s last night? That would be plain stupid. Finn was a good lad, but he’d be almost obliged to tell someone.
‘Thanks, buddy,’ he’d muttered. ‘You look like a pissing toad yourself.’
He’d turned away and spent the rest of the journey in silence, ignoring the banter that came from the other B Squadron men. As they travelled, scenes from the previous night kept flashing through Luke’s mind. He kept hearing fragments of the strange woman’s conversation.
You knew Chet. Do you really think he died in a simple house fire?
… she works for Mossad… Don’t you see? Doesn’t anybody see? First the Balkans, then Iraq, now this…
They sounded like the ravings of a paranoid fantasist, a conspiracy theorist. Luke wanted to believe that was what they were. But in the light of what had happened just minutes after she’d spilled her heart out, he couldn’t help thinking they had the ring of truth — whatever that truth might be.
Now it was time to debus. It didn’t take more than a few minutes for them to carry the crates which held the squadron’s weapons and ammunition up into the C-17 and secure them inside the webbing. The ops sergeant took a headcount and, once he was satisfied everyone had boarded, he gave the word to the loadie. The aft door closed up and the engines started to rumble.
It stank in the aircraft. Aviation gas wasn’t the worst of it. Luke could detect a vague whiff of rotten meat. The C-17 was a versatile beast. It wasn’t just suited to the wholesale movement of troops and equipment. As it could operate on short runways, and even had capability on those that were unpaved, it was suitable for use close to the battlefield. That meant it was a good choice for casevac, and for its evil twin: the repatriation of the dead. Impossible to say how many corpses this machine had ferried since it had been in service. Impossible, too, to say whether the stench inside the plane was related, but there was something sobering about being strapped into an aircraft which doubled as a hearse — two lines of men, facing each other, silent not only because the increasing noise of the engine made talking difficult.
Flight time to Ben Gurion International Airport, fifteen klicks south-east of Tel Aviv: four hours. Four more hours for Luke to try to make sense of things. But in the end, he tried to put it from his mind by running over the details of this morning’s briefing. The next twenty-four hours were going to be full-on and he needed a clear head.
It was a relief when he sensed the C-17 losing height, the wheels finally hitting the ground. The aircraft taxied for a full ten minutes after touchdown as the pilot manoeuvred it to a secluded part of the airfield. The aft door opened to reveal night-time and allow a blast of cool but humid air into the aircraft. A Mediterranean rainstorm was on its way.
A small convoy of unmarked black transit vehicles, covered with a thick layer of sandy dust, were waiting immediately behind the plane, and standing outside them were a handful of people. Luke immediately recognised the OC, Julian Dawson, and Sergeant Major Bill Thomas, who’d gone out as an advance party. The others were also in civvies but making no attempt to hide the assault rifles strapped round their bodies. They were clearly members of some branch of the Israeli Defence Forces, ostensibly there to help the squadron load up and escort them to their operational base, but nobody was under any illusion that they were there to control more than to assist.
Luke had never been to Ben Gurion before. His operations in the region had always taken him further east, into Jordan, Iraq and the Stan. He knew, though, that the Israelis had good reason to be paranoid. Their principal airport had long been a target for terror attacks, dating back to the early seventies when Black September — the same Palestinian terrorist group that later orchestrated the massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics — landed a hijacked 707 on the runway. The Israeli Government had called in their elite special forces, Sayeret Matkal, more commonly known as the Unit. The Unit was based on the SAS, even down to sharing the same regimental motto, ‘Who Dares Wins’. They had stormed the 707, taking control in less than ten minutes and nailing two of the four hijackers as well as one passenger. Since that day, Ben Gurion had been one of the most highly defended airports in the world, with both uniformed and covert police and the IDF operating round the clock.
Luke eyed up the Israeli soldiers as he unstrapped himself from his seat in the C-17. To a man they had shaved heads and tanned skin. Some of them were so dark as to look Arabic. Were these guys members of the Unit? Maybe. No way they’d tell him and he wasn’t going to ask. One of them shouted something in Hebrew as a passenger jet thundered overhead, and the others opened up the back of the transits while the Regiment men unloaded their gear from the aircraft and packed it into the waiting vehicles. Ten minutes later they were speeding across the airfield. At the perimeter they passed a checkpoint that made Heathrow look like a Center Parc. It was guarded not only by armed personnel, but by three open-topped technicals with. 50-cal machine guns mounted on the top, each one manned by a cold-eyed Israeli soldier. A regular level of security, or laid on in response to the volatile international situation? Luke didn’t know.
‘Hope no one’s over their booze allowance,’ Fozzie announced as the plainclothes IDF lads negotiated their way out of the airport. A couple of minutes later they were speeding away from the airport towards a wide, well-maintained main road.
They travelled for forty-five minutes before pulling off the main road. Five minutes after that they slowed down some more, coming to a halt at the edge of a high fence with rolls of barbed wire perched on top. There was a huge yellow sign — ‘Hebrew for “Fuck off”,’ Fozzie suggested — and at a break in the fence was a barrier, manned by two armed soldiers in olive drab. They were clearly expecting the convoy: one look and they opened the barrier and waved them on.
It was pitch-black outside. At first Luke couldn’t see much of the immediate surroundings. In the distance, though, he caught sight of the red lights of control and communications towers, and they were not far inside the perimeter when a chopper flew overhead. He had the impression of an immense military installation, and that impression was confirmed a couple of minutes later when the central hub of the base came into view.
It was a sprawling mess of low, single-storey buildings, aircraft hangars and equipment warehouses. Each building looked like it had been stuck there without much thought, as if the whole place had grown up randomly over a long period of time. Even though it was late, there was plenty going on. Military trucks were swarming round. As they drove past a hangar, Luke caught sight of an F-16, brightly lit and surrounded by engineers. There was even a missile of some description, mounted on the back of a mobile launcher and being moved from one side of the base to another, where there was a small forest of signalling gear — masts, satellites, the works. Men in olive drab were everywhere, illuminated by bright floodlights that wouldn’t have looked out of place at Old Trafford. No one seemed to pay any attention to the convoy. Hardly surprising, Luke thought to himself. The whole base had the air of being in readiness for war, so a couple of busloads of extra soldiers was hardly enough to get tongues wagging.