Nicole’s body relaxed noticeably when she heard Nir say they had Dogan. Because of the proximity to Turkey’s Presidential Complex, there was no way they could employ drones as an overwatch. They were having to go old school. All you could see was what was right around you.
“Any luck over there?” she called to Lahav.
“Nothing. Not even a laser pointer or a wayward Wii wand.”
That didn’t surprise her. She figured that nothing would show up unless and until the Turkish drones were sent.
Two days ago, the analysts were sitting at the conference table talking through whether there was any way to bring down the drones when they were launched.
“You realize that the Bayraktar TB2 is a laser-guided drone, don’t you?” Yariv had asked.
Lahav rolled his eyes. “Is the pope Irish? It’s a laser-guided UAV that uses line-of-sight propagation, giving it a range of more than three hundred kilometers.”
“Leviathan is four hundred and fifty kilometers away from İskenderun.”
That simple fact hung in the air like the funk from fake Chewbacca’s decaying fur.
“My Lord, I’m an idiot,” said Lahav.
“We’re all idiots,” said Dafna. “But I will agree with you that you are the biggest idiot.”
“How are they doing it?” asked Nicole, staring down at the table. Turning to Yariv, she asked, “Does the primary signal need to be at the point of origin?”
“I don’t know. Ask Lahav. I’m just here to do simple math.”
Lahav laughed. “You know, I’m starting to like you. A bit. As far as I know, yes, the signal needs to be at point of origin. What I’m thinking is that they must have found a way to daisy-chain signals together. Bring up a map of the area.”
Liora typed quickly, and a map of the eastern Mediterranean opened. “Give me control.” A few more keystrokes, and Lahav’s mouse was moving on the screen. He put a tag in the water just east-northeast of Haifa. “That’s Leviathan. Tamar is right next to it. Again, we’re assuming they aren’t going after Karish because they need Hezbollah and Lebanon on their side.”
Using his mouse, he took a quick measurement, then drew a wide circle around the gas field. “That’s three hundred kilometers.”
“Beautiful. So all we have to do is find a laser source in Cyprus, Lebanon, northern and central Israel, or somewhere in the eastern Med. No problem,” Liora chided.
Nicole held up her hand. “Wait now. Let’s narrow this down. This is line-of-sight propagation, so I’m guessing that anything inland or behind large structures is out.”
“I’m taking control,” Dafna said, then began blacking out the areas Nicole had mentioned.
“That leaves us beaches and the water,” said Yariv. “But the other thing we need to remember is that this signal is for three hundred and fifty drones. We’re not talking about simply popping a laser pointer out of your pocket and aiming it. It’s a complex signal that has to be multiplied many times over.”
Nicole was jotting down notes as he talked. She said, “Good. Now, are we talking box truck size? Semi size? Or VW Beetle size?”
“It’ll be good sized, because there is computer equipment that will have to go along with it. I’m thinking troop transport size,” said Lahav.
“Or just a plain old boat. A fishing trawler. A pleasure yacht. Any decent-sized watercraft,” said Nicole. She tapped on her notes a few times with her pen. “That’s what I would do. I wouldn’t want to be cruising around on land, my escape limited by the roads that are around me. I’d want to be on the open sea, where I could run any direction I needed to.”
“I don’t know. I don’t think I’d want all that open water around me. No place to hide,” said Yariv.
That’s how Yariv and the girls had ended up scouring for signals on land, while she and Lahav searched for laser signals of any type appearing over the Mediterranean. The Israeli Navy Ship Atzmaut, a 6-class corvette, and the INS Sufa, a Sa’ar 4.5-class missile boat, had shifted to the waters south of Cyprus and had given permission for the analysts to tap into their signals.
Having permission to dig into someone’s signals is a whole lot easier. But it’s definitely not as fun as breaking in.
Nicole had satisfied her hacker’s need for stealth by sneaking into a number of different monitoring systems along the shores of Cyprus and Lebanon. She passed those leads on to the other three members of the team, and every now and then, they would bring her another source into which they wanted access.
Now, however, was one of those downtimes that she hated. Nothing was coming from the ships. The rest of the team was content listening to their sources. All of them understood that the greatest likelihood was that they would never hear anything because the Israeli Air Force would wipe out the drones before they launched, assuming they needed wiping out. CARL was part of the “just in case.” As Asher Porush, the deputy director of Mossad, had told them, they were the “last-ditch effort to avoid an economy-crushing blow” that would hopefully never be set into action.
Nir and Nicole hadn’t had any opportunity to talk again since that afternoon in his office. That broke her heart. No one could know the time when Jesus would return, but by all accounts, the time was short. While she was excited about the rapture and seeing Jesus face to face, she couldn’t help feeling an emptiness in her heart knowing that Nir wouldn’t be there with her. Then what would he have to endure? She just couldn’t think about it.
Before Nir had left for Turkey, they had a quick moment for just the two of them. He had promised Nicole that when he was back, they would go to Aroma to get coffee together. There, they would both put their phones on silent and just talk. He promised her that he was thinking about what she had said, and she knew he didn’t make such promises willy-nilly.
Taking her hands off her keyboard, she rested them in her lap.
Lord, please protect Nir. Watch over him and his team. Protect Your people in Israel from this attack. Bring Nir back home so we can talk. He belongs to You, and I trust You completely with him. Please, in Your time, bring him into Your kingdom.
“Nicole.” It was Dafna. She had a piece of paper with a company name and coordinates. “These folks have a serious array of antennae and other stuff like that. They may be worth checking out. Mind opening a door for me?”
Taking the paper, Nicole said, “You bet.” Then she began to type.