Chapter One

 

 

Ramallah, West Bank, Palestinian Territories

June 9, 2:15 a.m.

 

Two Mossad operatives slithered in silence through the maze of crooked dark alleys stretching like spiderwebs through the city. They used shadows cast by two- and three-story cinderblock houses to conceal their advance. They dropped behind parked cars, garbage cans, and everything else that offered an amount of cover. Most of the neighborhood residents were sound asleep at this ungodly hour of the night. But a few people never let down their guard.

The Islamic Freedom Brigade called this area their home. The IFB was a powerful militant group, and one of their main safe houses was situated deep in this rundown neighborhood. Its militants were on constant alert. And for good reason. Mossad had methodically decimated their ranks and assassinated their leaders as soon as they were chosen. Amos and Saul, the Mossad operatives, were hoping to repeat their success of three nights ago. They had blown up the armored Jeep of an IFB senior commander, killing him along with his associate and their two bodyguards on the other side of the city.

But this operation was different.

It was more complicated.

More lethal.

Unauthorized.

Neither Amos nor Saul nor the other two members of their team of kidons, elite assassins, were supposed to be in Ramallah tonight. It was extremely dangerous to enter the city without backup, without an over watch team of a sniper and a spotter, who would neutralize any threats and alert the assault team of any complications. The city teemed with Palestinian militants. Virtually everyone living in Ramallah hated Israel and would not hesitate to kidnap or kill any Israelis foolish enough to trespass inside this part of the West Bank. The entire city was considered a war zone, and the Israeli army manned multiple checkpoints in and around the city. Violent clashes between the Israeli army and Palestinian protesters were almost a daily occurrence.

But the intelligence they had received was extremely reliable and presented them with an opportunity that was too good to pass up without taking any action. The second-in-command of the IFB, Yousef Nassar, the mastermind behind many terrorist attacks against Israel, was going to be at the safe house tonight, with only a handful of his most trusted men. Nassar never slept more than two nights in a row at a specific place. He always traveled with a horde of bodyguards, and often his wife and his children—two young sons aged six and nine and one daughter aged four—accompanied him. The potential for collateral damage was high at all times, with zero margin for error. And that imposed the need for a swift surgical strike by the small team of kidons. They had to act that night, without too much preparation, especially since neither Nassar’s wife nor his children were at the safe house.

Amos stepped around a large pothole filled with murky water smelling like raw sewage and glanced back at Saul, who was following about six feet behind. “All clear?” Amos whispered into his throat mike.

Saul nodded, then gestured toward a house rooftop across the alley with the barrel of his compact and silenced 9mm Uzi Pro submachine gun. “Thought I saw a shadow.”

Amos stopped and looked at the suspicious location. He did not make out any silhouettes, so he flipped down his night-vision goggles and studied the rooftop and the windows of the two-story house. The goggles’ grainy view with a greenish tinge revealed nothing out of place. The windows were shuttered and there was no movement.

Amos listened for unusual noises. The night air was warm and thick with humidity. The mercury had hit ninety-three degrees around noon, but had dropped to seventy-three earlier that night. The constant rumble of a generator echoed from the distance, followed by a dog’s high-pitched howl.

“It’s nothing,” Amos said. “Advance on target.”

“Roger,” acknowledged Dan, one of the kidons on his team.

Dan was moving forward, about a hundred yards to Amos’s left, along with his partner, Zev. Their objective was to reach the safe house from its opposite side. They were to cut off Nassar’s escape route, if Amos’s team was discovered before they hit the safe house.

Amos and Saul resumed their advance. They crept along the whitewashed walls of the next three houses and came to a small intersection. Amos raised his arm, signaling to Saul to stop. Then Amos peeked around the corner.

Three teenage boys were sitting on a low wall near a white pick-up truck in front of a house under construction, about fifty feet away. Their silhouettes were somewhat visible under a dim streetlight but Amos could not tell if they were armed. He could not make out their words, but one of them—the tallest of the three—was quite animated, waving his arms and bobbing his head.

Amos studied the group through his goggles, but he still could not make out any further details. In any case, his team would avoid the teenagers and anyone else they might encounter. The safe house was now about two hundred yards up ahead, and the team was soon going to come face-to-face with Nassar’s guards.

“What is it?” Saul said via his mike.

“Trouble. Three young men. Talking.”

“Hostile?”

“Unconfirmed.”

Amos pondered his options. Wait for the group to disperse and return to their houses, or risk being noticed as he and Saul crossed the alley. The two agents could walk with a quick pace and hold their weapons alongside their bodies, to hide them from view. Their black civilian clothes were indistinguishable from those worn by people living in the neighborhood, at least from the distance separating Amos and Saul from the group. But one of the teenagers had his face turned toward the intersection. He would notice the two men moving through the night. If he decided to approach them, Amos and Saul would attract unwanted attention. Any gunplay or even alarming noises at this point would alert Nassar’s guards.

A loud angry shout pierced the night. It came from one of the houses near the Palestinian group. The teenager whose eyes were glued to the intersection turned his head toward the source of the voice.

“Now,” Amos whispered a bit louder than he had intended.

He bolted across the street, followed closely by Saul.

The shouting continued while they reached the next dark narrow alley. The angry man was rambling on about the job he had lost, the money someone named Abdel owed him, and how he was not going to calm down even if he woke up the entire neighborhood. Amos understood spoken Arabic and spoke it quite fluently, but found it harder to write its complicated alphabet.

“We’ve got to hurry before everyone’s wide awake,” Amos said.

Saul nodded.

They rushed through the alley with swift silent steps. A baby began to cry inside one of the houses up ahead. Lights turned on and their rays cut through gaps in the curtains of a ground-floor window.

Amos stopped.

A door opened up with a loud bang behind them.

Amos rolled on the ground, barely missing the sharp fragments of a broken glass bottle, then crawled behind a pile of construction debris on the side of the alley. He looked up at Saul, who was hidden inside a house doorway. Amos whispered a quick prayer for the inhabitants of that house not to open their door.

An armed man appeared in the alley. Amos recognized the banana-shaped magazine of the weapon slung from his right shoulder—the ubiquitous Russian-made Kalashnikov assault rifle. The man cast a sweeping glance in Amos’s and Saul’s direction, then shook his head and sped in the other direction. It seemed he was going toward the house from which the earlier bellowing had come.

Amos thanked God and heaved a sigh of relief.

Saul climbed to his feet and glided toward his partner.

They resumed their advance and covered the rest of the distance separating them from the safe house without any incident. As they crouched near the thick walls of the house across from their target, a silver sedan parked about fifty yards away came to life with a loud rumble.

Amos and Saul flattened themselves to the dusty ground of the alley and pointed their Uzis toward the sedan. Their submachine guns were equipped with customized state-of-the-art sound suppressors, which muffled the gunfire noise. But the safe house guards would still hear their shots, and the kidons would lose the advantage of a surprise attack.

The sedan remained in its place. Someone must have turned on the sedan’s engine by using a remote car starter.

Amos examined the sedan through his goggles. No driver and no passengers. But someone was going to come out of that house at any moment.

“Team Two in position,” Dan’s voice came over Amos’s earpiece. “Eyes on two guards. One white Jeep parked at the entrance.”

“Roger. In position in thirty,” Amos replied.

He gestured to Saul to cross to the other side of the alley and got to his feet. He took a couple of steps. The front of the safe house came into view.