MOSSAD SAFE HOUSE, ASTARA, AZERBAIJAN—22:58 / 10:58 P.M. AST
Why do the Iranians have to make everything so difficult? Nir thought as he watched the minutes count down.
Although the coastal town he was in sat northwest of Tehran, the time here was 30 minutes later. While everyone else in this global time zone slice added four hours to Greenwich Mean Time, the Persians had decided to add only three and a half. The way it was explained to him, long ago someone had noticed their nation was divided between two time zones and decided they’d split the difference.
It’s a good thing they hadn’t lived in Russia. Who knows what they would have done with that country’s eleven time zones?
Overall, a lot more important reasons to dislike Iran were at play, but this one certainly was a pain when trying to plan an operation that had to be timed to the exact minute.
In the next room Nir had a team of six Kidon agents. He was confident that if he needed them in action, they would get the job done. In the hierarchy of lethality in Israeli intelligence, Nir knew that the Mossad is the spear. On the end of that spear is the sharp, iron head of Caesarea, and at the end of the spear’s head is the nasty little tip of Kidon. The name itself meant “tip of the spear,” and when a target needed to be eliminated or an operation had to be swiftly and silently executed, Kidon regularly got the call. But as ready as he and his team were for action, Nir hoped they would have a boring night.
First, as an Israeli, he had no interest in crossing the border into Iran. But second, if he and his team were called, that meant the operation was collapsing and Nicole was in serious danger.
Still, you hope for the best and plan for the worst. So before he’d walked into this main room, he’d checked all his weapons and gear. And he knew that even as the operation was progressing, his number two man, Yaron Eisenbach, would be rechecking everything just to make sure Nir hadn’t missed anything.
A hush filled the room when the digital wall clock reached 22:59. The tension was heavy, and the anticipation was almost overwhelming. When the numbers transformed to 23:00, the room erupted in voices, most of them speaking Hebrew-accented Azeri into communications headsets. Nir pressed a button on his watch to start the timer.
On cue, a box truck appeared on the camera feed of the warehouse’s courtyard. The rear gate was gently dropped, and operators began to jump out. They were all dressed fully in black and wore odd-shaped helmets. While most of the men unloaded equipment, two of them ran to the large faded blue doors and started working on the lock. Nir tensed as he watched this part, hoping Nicole had been able to do her job with the alarm. A gap opened between the doors, and they were slid to the sides.
There was no panic, no running back to the truck. The alarm was off.
“She is good.” Elnur Isayev pointed to the monitor, then lit the cigarette dangling from his mouth. It smelled of the strong, harsh tobacco that filled the coffee shops he’d visited in Turkey, and Nir held his breath for a moment.
I wonder how many years of smoke are trapped in that oversized mustache. His wife must have no sense of smell.
As the last of the men ran in with the equipment, the rear gate to the truck was closed, and it pulled away. According to the plan, the driver would park in a lot four blocks away to await the time for pickup.
Once again, Nir checked his watch. It had taken only four minutes to get the team inside. That was good, because this group of Persian-hating Azerbaijanis had only six hours and 29 minutes before they had to be loaded up and on the road.
The time 6:29 had become completely familiar to everyone who was part of this operation. It was drilled into the operators as they worked their dry runs, and every meeting had ended with each person present calling it out. Six hours and 30 minutes? Too dangerous. The team would be in danger of being caught. Six hours and 28 minutes? That would be a minute wasted when more materials could have been removed. As it was, they’d already determined that emptying all 32 vaults wouldn’t happen in one night.
At 4:59 a.m. Tehran time, the trucks had to be rolling out of the gates. That would allow them two hours to get away, two hours’ worth of highway to help disappear into anonymity. When the guards arrived back at the warehouse at 7:00 a.m., discovered the damaged front doors, and sounded the alarm, this Mossad version of Danny Ocean’s team had to be well into the wind.
Now the team approached the doors to a long narrow room. The intel said the entrance to this structure within the structure had no separate alarm, a fact that once again amazed Nir. These are your nuclear secrets! You might as well have left the front doors open with a plate of falafel next to a guest book and a sign reading “Feel free to help yourselves.”
One of the operatives tried to force the door open, but it didn’t move. A second man worked on it while the first man checked the hinges. After a couple minutes of struggle, both men stepped back.
“The door is reinforced,” came a voice speaking heavily accented English through the com system.
“Can you remove the hinges?” asked Tzadik.
The two men looked directly into the security camera mounted above the warehouse entrance. “Negative,” one of them said. “They’re fully enclosed in steel. We can torch it open, but it will cost us much time.”
Tzadik cursed. The existence of a reinforced door had not been included in the intel.
“They’ve got to blow it,” Nir told him. “They carried charges with them in case there was a problem.”
“I was really hoping not to use those. Making that much noise is a huge risk.”
Tzadik was right, but it was a risk they had to take.
“Ha’mefaked,” the second operative said, “we could lose five or six vaults in the time it will take to torch open that door.”
Tzadik repeated his earlier curse. “Yeah, I know. Okay, apply the charges and send someone out to the front gate to check the road. He needs to give you an all clear before you blow the door.”
In a rush of activity, a couple of packs were opened and several lines of malleable explosive were attached to the door. Meanwhile, Nir watched one of the team sprint across the courtyard of the warehouse toward the gate.
When everything was ready and the man at the fence gave the all clear, the rest of the team tucked themselves away from the blast radius. Blinding light filled the screen, making Nir wish he’d thought to look away. Once he could see clearly again, the picture, now at a severe angle, showed an open path into the vault room.
Nir shifted his gaze to another camera view, and a light showing a long, tight room switched on. Against either wall was vault after vault—large, gray, Iranian-made, and each with a wide, black-numbered dial set into it.
It would take forever to try to crack the combinations, and they’d never had an ample supply of time. So they had decided to do away with subtle.
The team broke into seven pairs while, on Tzadik’s order, the man at the fence remained in his position. The same inside source who’d told them about the non-alarmed door had diagrammed which vaults contained the most valuable information.
Each pair moved to their designated target, fired up a torch, and flipped down the front of the welding helmets perched on their heads. Although the torches burned at 2,000 degrees Celsius, the doors were thick enough that they took a long time to cut through. The flares made the video feed difficult to watch, and Nir soon found his vision filled with blue dots of various sizes and intensity.
Walking away to give his eyes a break, he moved into the next room and gave his Kidon team a quick update. Then closing the door as he left, he decided to pour himself a cup of coffee. But the pot was empty, and the plate once filled with pastries now held only crumbs. Both thirsty and hungry, he returned to watch the monitors.
“We have headlights,” whispered a voice through the coms.
Nir quickly turned toward the screens.
“Everybody, stop your work,” Tzadik demanded.
Nir watched as all activity in the vault room halted and every torch was extinguished. Hopefully, someone just happened to be innocently driving by. But this could also be a police car with officers sent to check out the loud noise someone reported.
The view from the security camera across the street from the warehouse wasn’t wide enough to show anything yet, and Nir caught himself holding his breath again.
Then an arc of light slowly spread into the picture, followed by the hood of a white car. The car’s cab entered the screen next, including a bar of lights attached to its roof. Even though they were 400 kilometers away, no one in the safe house moved or said a word.
Finally, the red taillights passed the camera, and the car was gone.
Tzadik waited a full five minutes before he said, “Okay, back to work. You’ve got time to make up.” Then to the man outside, “Keep your eyes open at the gate.”
Because of the narrowness of the space, it would be impractical to empty contents as each vault was opened. So as soon as one was breached, that team moved on to the next on their list. The men were efficient and very good at what they did. Even though it was winter, Nir could only imagine how hot it must be in that narrow room.
It took more than five hours of the six hours and 29 minutes to breach all the selected vaults. Then the unloading began. Stack after stack of binders—most of them black—were piled on the floor near the front doors. Nearby, towers of CDs began to grow.
When the operation clock hit six hours, the box truck returned to the courtyard and backed up to the building, followed by two more. Four cars pulled into the carport on the right side of the property. The warehouse’s metal doors slid open, and the loading began.
Nir’s anxiety ticked up. They were out in the open, and all they needed to get caught was another policeman in a cruiser or soldiers in an IRGC jeep or just someone who worked in a neighboring warehouse to drive by and get suspicious.
“Matt,” called Tzadik.
Nir turned to see his team lead pointing at him. He followed his finger and realized he’d been nervously tapping a pen on the table in front of him—a habit hard to break. Tossing the pen aside, he stepped back from the temptation.
The haul was divided between the three trucks, and then their cargo doors were shut tight and locked. One team member walked around to the passenger side of each truck and climbed in. After the warehouse doors were closed, the rest of the team hurried to the cars in the carport and loaded up. Then one by one, the vehicles left the courtyard.
When the final truck cleared the gate, Nir pressed a button on his watch to stop the timer—6:29.
Cheers erupted throughout the safe house. Nir spotted Yaron poking his head into the room, and he gave the man a thumbs-up. This had been an immaculate operation.
But the elation Nir felt was muted. Nicole was still out there. Tonight had gone well—yet maybe too well. A shoe could still drop, and he just hoped if it did, it wouldn’t land on the woman he was pretty sure he loved.