“Excellent. Arielle, initially, your job will be to get confirmation as to where they’re at — if they haven’t left the area by the time you get up there. If a situation presents itself to actually rescue them, you are fully authorized to do that. However, you are on your own for this. If you get in trouble, the soonest we could get a team in to help you is a couple hours. Jonathan Dayan and Avraham Levy will be joining you two.”
“I know them both well. I’ve worked with both of them before,” Dani replied.
“I thought you had. You’ll meet up with them up at Camp Yitzhak in the Golan Heights. From there, you’ll be in two teams where you’ll each have either a Toyota 4Runner or Highlander, licensed and registered in Syria. It’ll take you about five, maybe six hours to drive up there. We’ve got papers for you, Stonewall, and you can pick them up on your way out.”
“How long do you expect us to be up there?” Dani asked.
“It’s pretty open ended. If you discover they’ve left and can get word to the teams in Raqqa, we wouldn’t need you there any longer. However, I don’t expect you to break into Tadmur so if they decide to leave them there, which I doubt they will, you could be there several days. If that’s the case, we’ll send a relief team to keep you from arousing any suspicion. Again, this all assumes that they won’t have moved them before you get up there.”
“Understood. Anything else?”
“No, just be careful. Neither of you will have any trouble blending in with the local populace but ISIS is very unpredictable. I assume you speak Arabic?” Tamir asked, looking at Jackson.
“I do. With all of my time with the Fifth Group over here, it kind of became a necessity.”
“I thought as much,” Pardo replied. “Do not take any unnecessary chances. The rest of your team is already up at Latakia. When you get back, I expect we’ll be sending you up there.”
“You can count on that. We’ll see you in a few days,” Jackson added.
“I wasn’t expecting that,” Jackson admitted to Dani as they headed back out to the parking lot.
“Sorry he put you on the spot like that,” Dani said as they both got in her car. “It doesn’t surprise me, but I wasn’t expecting that, either.”
“Is Tamir comfortable with you being in the Unit?” Jackson asked. “He seemed almost a bit overly concerned. On the Tehran operation, he simply asked if I’d be interested to go along. This time, he actually asked if I thought you were ready to go.”
“Well, in Tehran, we had a much bigger team and we were pretty well established with our safe house. Here, it’s just the four of us out in the open so to speak. Plus, I’ve told you my sister and I are practically his daughters.”
“Yeah, you said your family was close but your sister’s not in the ‘family business.’”
“No, she isn’t, but you don’t know the full story. Tamir has three boys. He never had a daughter. I told you that my dad served with Tamir in the paratroopers, and that my grandfather and Tamir’s father served with General Arik Sharon in the Sinai in the ’67 war. After that, both of them, that is Tamir and my dad, served in the Unit and they each took part in the raid at Entebbe.”
“Wait a minute — you mean your dad and Tamir both took part in the Entebbe raid?” Jackson asked unbelievably. “No wonder your families are so close.”
“Oh, yeah, ever since I was a little girl, Tamir has been like a second dad to both my sister and me. When our dad was away — which was quite often by the way — Tamir always looked out for us — I guess he always wanted to make sure there was a ‘father-figure’ in our lives when dad was away. After I graduated from college and wanted to pursue my Ph.D. at Texas A & M, Tamir is the one who secured the visa for me. I mean, your State Department isn’t going to just let any foreigner study nuclear engineering in the States. When I finished my degree, I came home and wanted a new challenge.”
“Of course, you did, Miss Overachiever,” Jackson added.
“Well, you know how it is,” she added with a guilty-as-charged grin. “I was technically still a part of the IDF so I asked Tamir if I could try out for the Unit. He was floored, and my dad was livid, but they both knew I’m more than a bit determined once I have my mind set on something. It was actually Tamir who gave me the name ‘Arielle’—Lioness of God.”
“Yeah, from what I’ve seen, ‘fearlessly tenacious’ seems a bit of a mild understatement describing you,” Jackson added.
“Well, you know what it’s like. You’re in the Special Forces, and I know you’re training wasn’t exactly a walk in the park. Ours wasn’t either. You have to be incredibly, almost laser focused or you won’t stand a chance, and that’s for a guy. You can’t imagine how tough it was for a woman. Women had never been a part of the Sayeret Matkal but we’ve had raids where a couple women on the team would have really helped — Ehud Barak even went on a raid onetime disguised as a woman — and your own Delta Force has had women on some teams, so I was able to persuade Tamir to give me a chance. I’m glad Zivah was there with me, otherwise, I’d have never made it through. She’d probably say the same thing about me. At one point, each one of the recruits is ‘captured’—I imagine it’s probably not unlike your SERE training — only worse, as our trainers didn’t have the same moral and ethical standards yours do.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure of that. Our SERE instructors didn’t exactly have the highest ethical standards. I remember a few times when I thought they’d crossed the line.”
“You think so, huh?” Dani asked, somewhat rhetorically. “As a woman, imagine being held captive, completely naked. Then, we were water boarded, naked, and held down by four men. I’m not sure how long your SERE ‘captivity’ lasted but ours lasted close to a week — and we remained naked for the duration — always in the presence of our male captors — and our teammates, as of course, everyone gets ‘captured.’ And…, at one point, someone learned of my relationship with Tamir — no one likes a teacher’s pet, right?”
“Uh-oh, this doesn’t sound good — they didn’t rape you, did they?” Jackson asked rather reluctantly.
“Oh, no, they couldn’t do that. But, Zivah and I were the first women in this ‘Boys Club’ and… to drive home our vulnerability, and humiliation, they actually shaved me — and I’m not talking about my head.”
“They WHAT?!?” Jackson blurted out.
“Oh, yeah, and they did this in front of the rest of my team — and mind you, I’m an officer. Obviously, in this training, there’s no distinction between officer and enlisted — everyone’s treated the same, except the women. And, of course, the focus was on humiliation, and do you have what it takes to get through everything. Fortunately, Zivah didn’t have to go through that, but being completely naked for several days served to remind both of us just how perilous of a position we could be in. We both knew that if we were ever captured, we’d be in store for much worse.”
“Wow! And I thought we had it bad.”
“Oh, I’m sure yours was bad, and I’m sure requalifying was no cake walk,” referring to Jackson’s need to requalify to lead his team after losing an eye in Iraq. “But women have it just a little bit tougher. I’m not complaining as Zivah and I both knew what we were getting into, well, kind of anyway.”
“Sounds like we might be out for a bit. I’ll get working on what might be our last decent meal for a few days,” Jackson said to Dani as they walked into their apartment. By mutual agreement, Stonewall was the cook so when they picked out their apartment, he had insisted on a gas range. He did all of the cooking with cast iron and the two just seemed to go together better than an electric stove top would. He grabbed a ten inch pan from the hanging rack situated over the kitchen island, set it on the stove top and then began looking through the refrigerator and the cupboards for breakfast ideas. “I really need to shed this shirt,” Jackson added as he took his sweat-stained T-shirt off and threw it around the corner into the laundry room. “Thought it would have at least dried out by now.”