The driver noticed the young woman in the IDF garb sitting toward the back of the bus. She said nothing. She didn't look anyone in the eye. She was soaking wet but didn't seem to care. He looked back at the road, and stopped at the approaching red light. It was odd, he thought. She didn't have a weapon with her. No sidearm. No M-16. Wasn't it dangerous enough to be out, alone, on a night like this? And come to think of it, she wasn't wearing boots, was she? Those were tennis shoes. Not even nice ones. They weren't just soaked from the storm. They were filthy. And cheap. As the father of four and the grandfather of six, the man knew sneakers. He knew each brand and he knew how much they cost. After all, he'd been footing the bill for them for almost thirty years.
He glanced in the mirror again. They weren't American sneakers, or anything from Europe. They weren't made in Israel either. Those shoes were from… where were they from? The light turned green and he pressed down on the gas and began turning right. Hebron. They were from Hebron, the kind you could buy for a few shekels in East Jerusalem if you were too poor to buy anything else. After his brother was gunned down by a Palestinian sniper in Bethlehem when he was a kid, he'd vowed never to buy any product made by the Arabs. And he didn't care if he was just a lousy bus driver. He wasn't buying his kids sneakers made in Hebron. He'd rather take out a loan from the bank and…
Oh my God.
He slammed on the brakes. Everyone lurched forward. He glanced back. The woman had fallen facefirst on the floor. He reached down under his seat and grabbed for his pistol. She was getting back up. Everyone was screaming. Her coat was off. She was wearing a suicide bomber's belt. The driver found his gun. He flicked off the safety and wheeled around in the aisle.
"Allahu Akbar!" she screamed. "No!" he screamed back.
She pulled a long red electrical cord from her pocket and reached for the ignition switch. He fired his weapon again and again and again — but it was too late.
The force of the explosion actually lifted the bus off the ground and flipped it over like a child's toy. The thin metal roof was ripped off like the top of a can of tuna. The windows were blown out and the seats inside the bus simply melted away.
Everyone on board was incinerated in a blinding flash of orange fire. Then glass and shrapnel and body parts began raining down in a 360-degree radius, just outside the Tel Aviv University dormitories. Dorm windows facing the street were shattered, and students not thrown from their beds were jolted awake by the enormous force of the explosion.
It took emergency vehicles and first responders less than four minutes to reach the blast site. Police cars, ambulances, and fire trucks came screaming from all directions. Shin Bet counterterrorism agents also raced to the scene, as did reporters from dozens of different news organizations and an FBI investigative team from the American embassy, They all descended upon a scene from a horror movie. Splattered blood and shreds of burnt human flesh were everywhere. Limbs and fingers and shoes and pieces of the bus were found in the trees and on parked cars and on apartment balconies hundreds of yards away. Emergency personnel, now numbering in the dozens, struggled to keep back dozens of local residents coming out of their homes to see what was going on and to offer whatever assistance they could.
In New York and Atlanta and Fort Lee, New Jersey, American cable tele-vision networks cut into prime-time programming with live coverage from the grisly scene of breaking news. The images were almost too horrific to broadcast in family rooms all over the world, and hard facts and actual, confirmed details in those early minutes were sketchy. The only thing certain was that the scene was absolute chaos, But the worst was not yet over. In the darkness and rain and chaos no one noticed — or bothered to pay attention to — the dark young man approaching from the south on the sidewalk closest to the dorms. He looked like any other Israeli grad student trying to look more Western than Middle Eastern.
If any of the dozens of local police officers on the scene had bothered to check his papers, they would have discovered that the twenty-six-year-old Mohammed Saleh was not Israeli but a native of Jericho. If anyone had bothered to check his duffle bag, they would have discovered it wasn't filled with clothes or books but five pounds of nails and broken glass and fifteen pounds of military-grade TNT, scraped out of Egyptian mines littered throughout the sands of the Sinai Desert. If anyone had bothered to check his Walkman, they would have discovered that it contained no cassette tape or CD but a sophisticated ignition device built in Iran and smuggled six months earlier through Saudi Arabia and Jordan and then into the West Bank. But no one bothered to check the young man at all. There was too much to do, too many to console.
So Mohammed Saleh moved almost invisibly through the crowd, maneuvering for the best view of the crime scene, on the opposite side of the street from the pack of hungry media wolves, in full view of the lights, cameras, and boom microphones. He worked his way to the center of the crowd, numbering at least fifty or sixty at this point. He closed his eyes, bowed his head, said a silent prayer to Allah. Then he pressed Play.
The second explosion was not as powerful as the first, but it was far more diabolical. The force of the blast melted torsos and decapitated victims closest to the flash point, as flying nails and broken glass, hurling through the air at the speed of sound, shredded bodies in the next perimeter, all in full view of a worldwide television audience. And little did anyone know that so much more was coming.
Yuri Gogolov watched the coverage without emotion.
He did not grieve for the victims or their families. But he could already imagine their reaction, and the visceral reaction of Israel's top leaders. Their rage was palpable, even from Tehran. So was their hunger for vengeance. Reciprocity.
They would force Doron to act. They would insist that he unleash the full fury of the Israeli Defense Forces on the Palestinian population centers, and Doron would oblige them. Because that's the way the game was played.
TWENTY-FOUR
Bennett sat bolt upright.
He was trembling, soaked with sweat. He felt clammy and disoriented, He gulped in oxygen and tried not to hyperventilate, not to succumb to the panic rising within him. The air was cool, even chilly. He couldn't smell any smoke. There were no flames, no trace of fire or burst pipes, no hint of any kind that Gaza Station was under attack or that the Hotel Baghdad had collapsed above them. So where was he? What had just happened? Where was McCoy?
The narrow, windowless room was pitch-black but for the luminescence of his wristwatch and the digital clock on the VCR a few feet away. Bennett ran his hands through his wet hair and tried to get his bearings. Had all that just been a nightmare?
It seemed hard to believe. It was too vivid, too real. But nothing else made sense. He was still alive. That much seemed certain. If it had been real, if he'd just been killed in a massive underground explosion, then… then what? The question terrified him. He wasn't sure if he believed in a higher power or a life hereafter. But what if he were wrong? How many times had he cheated death in the last few hours, the last few weeks? More than he cared to count. But he was gambling, and he knew it. One of these days — perhaps sooner than he realized — his luck was going to run out. One of these days he was going to know for certain the truth of what was on the other side because he'd be there, and that's what scared him.
"It's not that I'm afraid to die. I just don't want to be there when it happens."
It was an old Woody Allen line. He couldn't even remember where he'd heard it. But it suddenly resonated. So did another Allen quip: "If only God would give me some clear sign — like making a large deposit in my name at a Swiss bank."