“I never had that in mind,” said the Tracker.
“I just want us to be clear on that, Tracker. Are we clear?”
“As the ice in your glass. No missile strike unless Opal is miles away.”
“Excellent. Then I will see the instructions are given.”
You want to go where?” asked Gray Fox.
“Only London. They are as keen to see the Preacher silenced as we are. His apparent outside man is in residence there. I want to be nearer to the center of events. I think we may be moving toward closure with this man Preacher. I have mentioned this to Konrad Armitage. He says I would be welcome, and his people will do everything they can. It’s only a phone call away.”
“Stay in touch, Tracker. I have to report up to the admiral on this.”
On the fishing dock at Kismayo, a dark-skinned young man with a clipboard scanned the faces of the fishermen arriving from the sea. Kismayo, lost to government forces in 2012, had been regained by al-Shabaab after bloody fighting the following year, and the vigilance of the fanatics was ferocious. Their religious police were everywhere to ensure absolute piety from the population. The paranoia regarding spies from the north was pandemic. Even the fishermen, normally boisterous unloading their catch, were subdued by fear.
The dark young man spotted a face he knew, one he had not seen for weeks. With his clipboard and pen poised to note the size of the catch being landed, he approached the man.
“Allahu-akhbar,” he intoned. “What have you got?”
“Jacks and just three kingfish, inshallah,” said the fisherman. He gestured to one of the kings, which had lost the silvery glitter of the fresh-caught and had a slash across its tail. “From your friend,” he murmured.
Opal signaled that all were permitted for sale. As the fish were removed to the stone slabs, he slipped the marked one into a burlap bag. Even in Kismayo it was permitted for a tally clerk to take a fish for supper.
When he was alone in his cabin by the shore, just out of town, he extracted the aluminum tube and unscrewed the top. There were two rolls, one of dollars and one of instructions. The latter would be memorized and burnt. The dollars buried under the earthen floor.
The dollars were one thousand, in ten hundred-dollar bills, the instructions simple.
“You will use the dollars to acquire a reliable scooter, trail bike or moped and canisters of fuel to attach to the pillion. There is motoring to be done.
“Second, acquire a good radio with a range able to pick up Kol Israel. On Sunday, Monday, Wednesday and Thursday, there is a late-night talk show on Channel Eight. It comes on at 23.30. It is called Yanshufim (The Night Owls).
“It is always preceded by the weather report. Somewhere up the coast highway toward Marka, there is a new rendezvous spot marked out for a face-to-face meeting. You will find it on the attached map. It is unmistakable.
“When you hear the coded instruction, wait until the following day. Set off at dusk. Motor to the RV spot, arriving at dawn. Your contact will be there with fresh funds, equipment and instructions.
“The words in the weather report you are waiting for are: ‘Tomorrow there will be slight rain over Ashkelon.’ Good luck, Opal.”
Chapter 8
The fishing boat was old and battered, but that was the idea. She was rusted and needed a lick of paint or more, but that also was deliberate. In a sea full of inshore fishing boats, she was not supposed to attract attention.
She slipped her mooring in the dead of night from the cove where Rafi Nelson used to have his beach bar outside Eilat. By dawn, she was south of the Gulf of Aqaba, chugging her way into the Red Sea and past the scuba-diving resorts of the Egyptian Sinai coast. The sun was high when Taba Heights and Dahab went by; there were a couple of early dive boats out over the reefs, but no one took any notice of the grubby Israeli fisherman.
There was a captain at the wheel, his first mate making coffee in the galley. There were only two real seamen onboard. There were also two real fishermen, who would handle the long lines and the nets when she took up her drifting role. But the other eight were Sayeret Matkal commandos.
The fish hold had been scoured and cleansed of the old stink to create accommodation for them: eight bunks along the walls and a common mess area on deck. The hatch covers were closed so that the air-conditioning in the cramped space, as the burning sun rose in the sky, could do its job.
As she cruised down the Red Sea between Saudi Arabia and Sudan, she changed her identity. She became the Omar al-Dhofari, out of the Omani port of Salalah. Her crew looked the part; all could pass for Gulf Arabs by appearance and mastery of the language.
In the narrows between Djibouti and Yemen, she skirted the Yemeni island of Perim and turned into the Gulf of Aden. From here on she was in pirate territory but virtually immune from danger. Somali pirates look for a prey with a commercial value and an owner prepared to pay the price of recovery. An Omani fishing boat did not fit that pattern.
The men onboard saw a frigate from the international naval flotilla that had made life extremely hard for the pirates, but she was not even challenged. The sun caught the glint of the lenses of the powerful binoculars that studied her, but that was all. Being Omani, she was of no interest to the pirate catchers either.
On the third day out, she rounded Cape Guardafui, the easternmost mainland point of Africa, and turned south, with only Somalia to starboard, heading on down to her operational station off the coast between Mogadishu and Kismayo. When she reached her station, she hove to. The nets were cast to continue the pretense, and a brief and harmless message was sent by e-mail to the imaginary girlfriend, Miriam, at the Office, to say she was ready and waiting.
The division chief Benny headed south also, but much faster. He flew El Al to Rome and changed planes there for Nairobi. Mossad has long had a particularly strong presence in Kenya, and Benny was met by the local head of station, in plainclothes and in a plain car. It had been a week since the Somali fisherman with the smelly kingfish had handed over his cargo to Opal, and Benny had to hope a motorcycle of some type had been acquired by then.
It was a Thursday, and that evening, close to midnight, the talk show The Night Owls was broadcast as usual. It was preceded by the weather report. This one mentioned that, despite a heat wave in most parts, there would be light rain over Ashkelon.
Full cooperation with the Tracker from the British was a foregone conclusion. The United Kingdom had sustained four murders by young fanatics seeking glory or paradise or both, inspired by the Preacher, and the authorities wanted him closed down as eagerly as the Americans did.
Tracker was lodged in one of the U.S. embassy’s safe houses, a small but well-appointed cottage down a cobbled mews in Mayfair. There was a brief meeting with the J-SOC chief of the defense staff at the embassy and with the CIA chief of station. Then he was taken to meet the Secret Intelligence Service at their HQ at Vauxhall Cross. Tracker had been in the green-and-sandstone pile by the Thames twice before, but the man he met was new to him.
Adrian Herbert was much the same age, mid-forties, so he had been at college when Boris Yeltsin terminated Soviet communism and the Soviet Union in 1991. He had been a fast-track entrant, after a degree in history at Lincoln College, Oxford, and a year at SOAS, the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. His specialty was Central Asia, and he spoke Urdu and Pashto, with some Arabic.