“He did.”
“Did you read them?”
“I did.”
“Then how can you sit there and tell me Gogolov does not have a knife to my throat?”
Bennett said nothing.
“Jonathan, you and I have been friends for many years. We have been through much together, but nothing like this. So listen to me very carefully. You need to go back and tell the president three things. First, it is critical that the U.S. veto this resolution before events spin out of control. Second, I need him to reiterate publicly Israel’s right to self-defense and approve an emergency weapons and military aid package for us. And third, the president needs to mobilize NATO and beef up U.S. forces in the Middle East — and not only in the Mediterranean but in the Persian Gulf as well.”
Doron suddenly lowered his voice.
“You know as well as I do that this is not just about Israel, Jonathan. Gogolov is not just coming for us. He is coming to seize control of the world’s oil supply. He is coming to bring the world’s economy to its knees and to make Russia a superpower again. He has delusions of grandeur, Jonathan. And like a Hitler or a Stalin, Gogolov cannot be appeased. He cannot be contained. He must be stopped — now — at all costs, and your president must lead the way, or…”
Bennett waited, but Doron never finished.
Instead, the prime minister got up, walked to the window, and looked out over the Holy City.
“Or what?” asked Bennett.
Doron was clearly reluctant to say, but Bennett didn’t care. He could not go back to the president and the NSC with his own assumptions. He had to hear it from Doron’s lips, and then he did.
Doron came back from the window, leaned down, and spoke softly in Bennett’s ear. “Or we may have to resort to The Samson Option.”
McCoy heard the jangling of keys and a lock opening.
She opened her eyes only to be blinded again by the two bulbs hanging over her. She instinctively turned her head to the side and tried to refocus. It was the same guard pacing in the hall, and with him the same nurse. This time McCoy caught her name off the dangling ID card.
Tatiana Grizkov.
Who was she? Could she become an ally? If so, how? And how quickly?
Time, McCoy knew, was not her friend.
“Today you must use the toilet.”
The brusque order in Russian surprised McCoy. The woman’s voice was tougher than McCoy had expected, but her hands trembled as she unlocked the handcuffs and helped McCoy to her feet.
With the pain medication wearing off and the new booster shot not yet jammed into her badly bruised thigh, McCoy could, for the first time, actually feel the bullet wounds in her stomach and abdomen. Curious, she stepped into the bathroom, pulled back the bandages, and saw the two small holes, oozing blood and pus.
McCoy felt her forehead. It was hot and clammy. She had a fever. Whatever antibiotics they had her on were only barely fighting back the infection.
Still, she felt surprisingly strong, considering the trauma she’d been through. Her legs weren’t as shaky as she might have thought. She was making progress, though she wondered if that was such a good thing.
It was now clear she was in a Russian military prison. Solitary confinement. An armed guard with her around the clock. No windows. No fresh air. Just a damp, disgusting, cinder-block cell, and a cold metal bed frame to which she was chained twenty-three hours and fifty minutes a day.
Apparently she would be allowed at least a periodic bathroom break, but there was no sink, and the toilet was nothing more than a hole in the muddy porcelain tiles.
And this, she knew, was the best she could hope for. What lay ahead would be far worse.
The Samson Option.
Mordechai had explained it to him three years earlier.
It was the last option in the Israeli defensive arsenal — the Armageddon option — named after the last desperate act of a Hebrew warrior. And to Bennett’s surprise, he could suddenly recall the biblical story with striking clarity.
Samson was a fierce and effective Israelite warrior, blessed by God with supernatural strength. But he turned his back on God. Becoming involved with a prostitute named Delilah, he suddenly found himself surrounded by his mortal enemies, the Philistines.
The Philistines seized Samson, gouged out his eyes, and threw him into a dungeon. Later, they bound him in bronze shackles, brought him into their temple, put him on display for all of the rulers and some three thousand people to see, and prepared to sacrifice him to Dagon, their god.
But Samson was not about to go peacefully into the night.
“O Lord God, please remember me,” he prayed, “and please strengthen me just this time, O God, that I may at once be avenged of the Philistines for my two eyes.”
Blind but determined not to go down alone, Samson braced himself against the two central pillars upon which the temple stood and prayed once more.
“Let me die with the Philistines.”
Then he pushed against the pillars with all his might. The pillars gave way, bringing the roof of the temple crashing down. Samson, the rulers, and all the people in the temple were crushed. The mighty Samson had killed more Philistines in his final, fatal attack than he had during his life.
Was Doron really contemplating such a move?
Was he really prepared to unleash all of Israel’s nuclear fury to take as many of his country’s enemies with him to the grave as possible, knowing that such a move would ensure Israel’s own complete destruction?
He couldn’t be serious. It was madness.
Bennett put the question to the prime minister point-blank.
“I will give no official comment,” Doron responded without hesitation. “I will simply promise you this: Israel will never suffer another Holocaust alone.”
35
Bennett was going to need that rain check after all.
The Gogolov crisis was now spinning dangerously out of control. The president of the United States was running scared, unable or unwilling to stop a tyrant in his tracks. The prime minister of Israel felt cornered and hinted at a nuclear Armageddon. Perhaps a retired Israeli spymaster could help him navigate the minefields that lay ahead.
Bennett followed the cobblestone path and arrived under an immense, jagged limestone cantilever jutting out like a cliff over a spectacular view of the Old City of Jerusalem. As he approached the arched, cavelike front entrance, he remembered how intrigued he’d been the first time he had ever come to this Frank Lloyd Wright-ish home built into the side of the hill. McCoy had been with him. He could almost see her ringing the doorbell, almost hear the echo of chimes as beautiful as those in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in the valley below. Even now, so many years later, he still had the sense that Dr. Mordechai’s home was somehow a reflection of the man inside, a man shrouded in mystery and murkiness and a hint of magic.
Three years before, Bennett, McCoy, and Dr. Mordechai had almost been killed in this house; tonight, the dozen DSS agents with him were taking no chances. They set up a perimeter as Bennett rang the bell.
Bennett was quickly greeted by two armed Mossad agents, neither of whom had any idea he was coming. They required him to present his driver’s license and put his thumbs on an electronic touch pad that was tethered to a notebook computer. Bennett couldn’t see the well-hidden security cameras, but he assumed they were still in place, running his image through facial-recognition software that scanned eighty different facial landmarks, measured pixels on his eyes and lips, analyzed his cheekbones and skull structure, then cross-checked his three-dimensional “face-print” against a Mossad database of thousands of international spies, criminals, and terrorists.