With the guard dispatched, Arielle grabbed the guard’s car and drove the short distance to her compatriot. Running up to free her friend, she noticed he wasn’t so much pinned under the car as he had a compound leg fracture below the knee. Despite her own injuries, Arielle all but carried him into the back seat of the car, secured him there, and then got back in front and took off.
“Jonah… mission accomplished; ahh…,” Arielle winced in pain, “we’ll need to meet at Jericho as soon as possible”—a reference to a prearranged site where a medic is required.
“Roger that; we’ll see you at Jericho in five minutes,” came the prompt response.
“How’d the other teams do?” Arielle asked.
“Mission accomplished,” came the succinct reply. And with that, Arielle knew that three of Iran’s leading scientists, each working on different components for the development of a nuclear bomb, had just been assassinated.
If someone didn’t know any better, the man walking out of the meeting could have been in his eighties. As it was, his aged appearance came from the news he had been anticipating, well not really anticipating in the sense that this was something he wanted to hear. No, he had dreaded hearing this news, expecting that it would be coming but still nonetheless hoping against hope that it would not. In point of fact, and try as he might, he still hadn’t recovered from hearing it: Iran would have a nuclear bomb in just a couple months! This couldn’t happen. The Americans had repeatedly stressed that they would never allow this. Now, given the present administration, that threat didn’t look all too ominous. However, the Israelis would never allow this — and everyone in every Western intelligence agency knew that they had been practicing for just such a raid. This would not be just any normal raid, though. This could lead to the total destruction of much of the Middle East: Israel, to be sure, but also his beloved Iran. He couldn’t let this happen. He knew what he had to do, and the weight of this burden almost paralyzed him. He knew that some, perhaps many, of his fellow citizens would die by his actions but in the end, he would be saving a great deal more. Getting into his car, he quietly advised his driver to take him to his home in the resort area of Bashgah-e Savarkri-e. Once there, he would make a phone call on a very secure, and very secret, satellite phone.
II
“Jim? What’s up?” Thomas ‘Stonewall’ Jackson asked answering his cell phone. “It’s got to be, what, two thirty in the morning over there?”
“Stonewall, have you left London yet?” Jim Carmichael, the head of the CIA’s Intelligence Directorate asked him.
“Just about to leave for the airport; I have a ten thirty flight to Dulles and London traffic can be horrendous so I figured I’d try and give myself some extra time just in case. Looking forward to getting back home; it’s been unseasonably cool and wet all week — even by London’s standards. It’s supposed to be summer, right; be nice to get back home to some dry weather, warm temperatures, and sunshine!”
“Well, I’m afraid you’re going to have to delay that trip back home for a little while.”
“What's up? I haven’t heard of anything pressing at the moment. Our friends on this side of the pond really didn’t have anything new on our Persian friends. We know they are pursuing a nuke but the general consensus is that they are still a couple years out. I don’t believe that for a second but I don’t have anything to base that on other than my gut instinct — there’s just too many unanswered questions.”
“Well, you’re going to get that chance to prove your instincts right. I’ve booked you on a 9:45 British Airways flight to Tel Aviv. General Pardo just called and he’s expecting you later this afternoon,” referencing the head of Mossad. “Tamir mentioned that they have something really hot they are working on and wanted to know if we wanted in on it — he knew we would — I think he just wanted the chance to get me out of bed at two in the morning. I told him you’d be on the first flight out of London.”
“Any idea what this is all about?”
“He wouldn’t say over the phone — though we were on a secure line — which leads me to believe it’s extremely sensitive. I realize you’ve never worked with him but he’s a personal friend of mine and he was at K2 with us,” a reference to Karshi-Khanabad Air Base in Uzbekistan, “in the first few months after 9/11 while you were in Afghanistan with the Northern Alliance. He knows you’ve recently taken over as my lead on Iranian intelligence and nuclear proliferation and I’ve told him that you’re still active duty, a colonel with the Fifth Group”—that is, Fifth Group Special Forces, whose area of concentration is the Middle East—“so whatever they have for you, he knows you’re more than qualified.”
“Okay, I’m all packed and heading to check out of the hotel right now. Any idea as to who’s picking me up in Tel Aviv? Someone from the embassy or one of the general’s folks?”
“Her name is Danielle Yaniv and, yes, she works for Tamir, but that’s all I know. Go ahead and wear your patch and she’ll find you.”
“Okay, will do.”
“Colonel Jackson?” Danielle asked, leaning towards — and somewhat yelling through — the open passenger window, as she saw someone standing by the curb who she thought fit the description her boss, General Tamir Pardo, had given her: kind of tall, dish-water blonde, well chiseled features — and sporting an eye patch.
“Yes, Ma’am,” Jackson replied. “Call me Tom.”
“Hop in, Tom. I’m Danielle; call me Dani. The Prime Minister scheduled an urgent meeting with Tamir for five thirty so he told me to get you over to his office right away so he’d have the opportunity to meet you before he went in with Bibi,” an informal reference to the Prime Minister. “I’m not sure what his meeting’s all about but I’ll get you there so you’ll have a few minutes with Tamir before he has to leave. By the way, welcome to Israel; have you ever been here before?”
“No, I haven’t but I’m looking forward to the visit,” Jackson replied.
The tail end of Dani’s pony-tail whipped across her face as she snapped her head back towards Jackson, caught completely by surprise on hearing that he had never been to Israel before. This guy came highly recommended by Jim Carmichael, a close friend of Tamir’s from the CIA, yet he had never been to Israel? What was up with this, she wondered.
Jackson, seeing Dani’s expression, partially obstructed by her long hair, sensed this was the wrong answer, though he had no idea why.
“Stonewall, Jim speaks very highly of you. Nice to finally meet you. You’ve obviously met Arielle; I trust the drive over from the airport wasn’t too eventful,” General Pardo added, somewhat facetiously.
“Tamir! You made it sound pretty urgent that I get him here just as soon as I could, so I did,” Dani interrupted.
“Likewise, General, I’m glad to be here,” Stonewall replied, somewhat surprised by Dani’s interruption.
“Arielle, you won’t believe what this guy did in Afghanistan. In the first few months after 9/11, the US only had a couple teams in Afghanistan; Jackson, here, commanded one of them. His team had joined the Northern Alliance up in the Panjshir region of northern Afghanistan. Remember, the US role was just getting started so the Taliban thoroughly outnumbered Stonewall’s team and his allies. At one point, they came across a Taliban force of, I think, around nine thousand men bivouacked in a relatively narrow valley; Jackson’s twelve man team and the Northern Alliance force amounted to something like 1,500 men. Stonewall, here, then a relatively junior captain, comes up with this incredibly bold and brilliant idea — I mean, it’s Gideon out of the Old Testament all over again: Sometime in the middle of the night, something like two in the morning, he takes three hundred of his men and marches them up and down the canyon trail — with torches fully lit so everyone in the Taliban encampment can see them. The other 1,200 were set up in a blocking position at the other end of the valley. The really cool thing about this is that the three hundred men with torches — each one only marched about a couple hundred feet along this trail. Stonewall, go ahead and tell her about this.”