10

There was stunned silence at the other end of the line.

“Come again?” the QRF commander finally asked.

Kidron knew full well that what he was ordering was not simply controversial but might very well be illegal. But he did not care. The Hannibal Protocol had once been Israeli army doctrine for handling kidnappings and potential kidnappings of military personnel. The policy gave field commanders full authority to do everything in their power to prevent the seizure of Israeli soldiers by enemy forces. In the event that a kidnapping did take place, the protocol permitted commanders to use overwhelming firepower to stop would-be kidnappers from fleeing the area with their captives. It also authorized the use of extraordinary tactics to get those captives back. Such tactics included massive aerial bombardments of the area in which a kidnapping had occurred. In theory, this would slow down, disorient, and paralyze the enemy, and it would give IDF ground forces time to mobilize and mount an effective rescue.

The rationale was simple. The kidnapping of an Israeli soldier wasn’t simply a tactical problem for Israeli generals. It was a strategic nightmare for the State of Israel. Not only could captive soldiers be tortured by the enemy to give up sensitive intelligence, but terror groups could also use captives as bargaining chips to force the release of scores of terrorists held in Israeli prisons.

In 1985, for example, the Israeli prime minister and his security cabinet had made an unbelievable deal. They agreed to release 1,150 Palestinian prisoners to get just three captured Israeli soldiers back.

In 2011, another Israeli prime minister and his government agreed to an even more astonishing deal. Israel released 1,027 Hamas prisoners to get back just one of its soldiers, a twenty-five-year-old corporal named Gilad Shalit who had been kidnapped in a Hamas raid along the Gaza border and held for more than five years.

Everyone knew Israel simply could not afford to release blood-drenched terrorists en masse every time a kidnapping occurred. Thus, the Hannibal Protocol gave IDF commanders a clear policy—don’t ever allow such a situation to occur again. They were to use every means at their disposal to disrupt a kidnapping in process, even if that cost the lives of the Israeli soldiers being captured.

There was just one problem.

The Hannibal Protocol was no longer IDF policy.

Yet Kidron did not care. “Listen up, people,” he said, his voice now calm and firm.

The general was no longer speaking merely to his field commander. He was demanding the full attention of every officer and staffer in the operations center.

“This is the most critical situation we’ve faced since the 2006 war, and we are thus left with no other choice,” he continued. “I am activating the Hannibal Protocol. I want you to unleash everything we’ve got—and I mean everything. I’m ordering you to rain hellfire and brimstone on the savages who initiated this attack. Shut down all movement within twenty kilometers of the breached fence line. Cut off every path of escape. Then find these three and bring them back to Israel—dead or alive—or the next thing you’re going to see is two Americans and one of our own, live from Beirut, bound, tortured, bleeding, and hanging from lampposts.”

Kidron paused a moment and found himself staring at one of the soldiers under his command. The young man, evidently religious, was wearing a kippah and had just begun putting on tefillin—traditional Jewish phylacteries—when everyone had been ordered to stop what they were doing.

“You all know I’m not exactly the most religious guy in the army,” Kidron conceded. “But for everyone who is, now might be a good time to send up a prayer.”

A pair of F-16 Fighting Falcons were the first in the air.

From the moment they lifted off from Ramat David air base in northern Israel—in the heart of the Jezreel Valley, not far from ancient Megiddo, the biblical site known as Armageddon—the two fighter jets banked hard to the left. Their pilots then pushed their Pratt & Whitney engines to maximum thrust. Seconds later, they were penetrating Lebanese airspace and unleashing a salvo of air-to-ground missiles on four known Hezbollah sites not far from Avivim, the Israeli community closest to the breach in the fence line.

The shock and awe came hard and fast.

The first target—a command-and-control facility located in a farmhouse near the village of Aitaroun—was obliterated in a blinding flash and deafening roar.

The next two targets were weapons caches. Located in barns near the town of Maroun al-Ras, they, too, were suddenly consumed by massive balls of fire.

The fourth target was an apartment complex in Bint Jbeil. Israeli military intelligence had recently determined the complex served as housing for nearly two hundred Hezbollah fighters. Moments later, it was a burning crater, spewing smoke and ash.

The four strikes in such rapid succession destroyed the breezy calm of an otherwise-lovely spring morning. To the locals, the attacks came without warning or rationale of any kind. Word of the border raid had not yet made the news on either side of the fence. To many, the earsplitting, ground-rocking booms—one after another—felt like a series of earthquakes. Windows shattered. Bookcases, chandeliers, indeed whole ceilings, collapsed. Terrified masses were screaming and scrambling for cover wherever they could find it.

And this was just the beginning.

Eight more pairs of Israeli fighter jets soon streaked into Lebanese airspace, thus far unchallenged by Hezbollah’s surface-to-air missiles or antiaircraft artillery fire. One by one, the Israeli jets took out power stations, bridges, electrical substations, and fuel depots in a twenty-kilometer semicircle from Avivim they dubbed “the zone.” Additional waves of fighter jets were soon bombing major and even minor roads in and out of the zone, creating so many—and such large—craters that the roads became impassable. The IDF’s hope was that this would cut off all possible escape routes for vehicles that might be trying to move the hostages northward.

Most traffic in the zone came screeching to a halt. Terrified drivers abandoned their vehicles, searching for shelter from the firestorm. Israeli drone operators hunted every truck, every car, every vehicle of any kind whose drivers were foolish enough to be on the move, especially those trying to come into or go out of the twenty-kilometer grid. With each vehicle identified, the operators zoomed in the high-resolution cameras to see if its passengers were carrying weapons. If they were, Kidron’s rules of engagement were clear. The operators were authorized to fire. So fire they did, and every AGM-114 precision-guided Hellfire missile hit its mark.

On the ground, the QRF commander ordered his troops to direct mortar fire at the nearly two dozen houses located within sight of the breached section of border fence. All of them had been abandoned years earlier. No Lebanese citizen in his or her right mind wanted to live within a stone’s throw of the “Zionist criminals.” Fewer still wanted to be caught in the cross fire of the next war and be treated by Iran as human shields. Still, the IDF knew that all the structures were frequently used by Hezbollah scouts and other operatives.

Throughout northern Israel, roads soon became clogged with mile after mile of flatbed tractor trailers transporting Israeli battle tanks known as the Merkava—Hebrew for “chariot”—to the front. Also clogging the roads were hundreds of buses transporting thousands of active-duty combat soldiers who would soon be pouring over the border.

It was now ten o’clock.

Marcus Ryker, Kailea Curtis, and Yigal Mizrachi had been missing for the better part of thirty minutes, and the head of the IDF’s Northern Command was pulling out all the stops in the effort to get them back.