A moonless night on the Gulf of Aqaba is a very dark place. No night, however, is dark enough for four operators on a hastily planned mission.
The ersatz dive boat pounded through three-foot swells. They were making good time, with Matai at the helm, but the ride was punishing. Slaton would have preferred calm seas—not because he minded the discomfort, but for more practical reasons. The DPDs, the dive computers, the guns. How many times had he seen missions fall apart because equipment had failed under harsh conditions?
As they beat a path southward, Slaton used the time to plan for contingencies. What happened if they had only two operable DPDs to begin? What if one failed midway through the mission? Did they need a rendezvous plan in case someone lost their GPS signal, an old-school backup based on dead reckoning and light signals? If everything went to hell, could they swim to the shores of Saudi Arabia?
They’d covered half the distance to their target, and in an hour Argos would begin to show up on radar. Aaron was in constant communications with Mossad headquarters, and he relayed the disappointing news that their mission would have only partial drone coverage—the Israeli Air Force was leery of encroaching on Saudi airspace.
The three men going in the water—Slaton, Aaron, and Tal—would have full facemasks with comm while they were submerged. Even so, coordinating an underwater assault at night required extensive planning. To begin, they studied information Bloch had provided regarding currents in the designated area. The team spent twenty minutes hanging on to a bulkhead and going over comm protocols and visual signals. A precise course between the drop point and Argos was loaded into everyone’s GPS unit, and it was agreed that no high-intensity lights would be used—a dead giveaway in the crystalline Red Sea waters—but that chemical glow sticks would be mandatory in the initial approach.
Sonar on the DPDs could be used to approach Argos, which would stand out like a mountain against the otherwise barren seascape. Sonar would also be critical on egress to rendezvous with the dive boat. On one point everyone was in agreement—given what they were attempting, nothing would lead to disaster more quickly than three divers floating twelve miles out to sea, out of air and ideas, and trying to find their ride home.
The team coordinated how they would stay together using signals with the light sticks, and how to rejoin if they became separated. They covered the rules of engagement if they were seen or attacked, and how to respond if one of them was captured. On this last point there was no argument, nor any request for direction from headquarters—either they all came back, or none of them did.
Matai, who would stay with the boat during the underwater approach, gave a heads-up that they were ten minutes from Argos’ position. On that cue, everyone began gearing up. Wetsuits were donned, scuba rigs checked, and each DPD was powered up and put through a system test cycle.
“Battery is eighty percent on number one,” Aaron said.
“It showed one hundred back in port,” Matai responded.
“Is that enough?” Slaton asked.
“Maybe,” said Tal. “If things go as planned, we can run slow on the egress.”
“And if they don’t,” said Slaton, “we’ve already briefed how to handle it. Two men on whichever sled has the better charge, and we sink the bad DPD.”
Nods all around.
The engines slowed abruptly, and the boat settled on the sea.
“I’ve got a hit on radar,” said Matai.
All four men went to the helm and looked at the screen.
“Right where she’s supposed to be,” said Aaron.
“All right,” Slaton said. “I think this would be a good time for one last sit-rep.”
* * *
The Red Sea mission was being overseen by Mossad’s headquarters operation center. Deep in a bunker in the Glilot Junction complex, sixteen sets of eyes—intelligence chiefs, analysts, and sensor operators—were watching both Argos and a small dive boat in real time. A drone was giving maddeningly intermittent coverage as the operator did his best to navigate the latticework of airspace at the mouth of the Gulf of Aqaba. It wasn’t a particularly busy area in terms of air traffic, but the skies were monitored closely by suspicious neighbors all around—the never-ending “Game of Thrones.”
Also under watch at the ops center was the Saudi shoreline, and it was activity there, near a place called Gayal, that generated the first outbound message of the night. The town lay behind a spit of sand—the outline of which vaguely resembled a shark—that reached seaward to form a natural harbor. Just after midnight, three small vessels, between twenty-five and forty feet in length according to analysts, set out from the docks. Everyone in the ops center watched the tiny flotilla round the edge of the peninsula, and within minutes two salient points became clear. First was that the boats appeared to be staying together, an amateur convoy of sorts. Second was that they’d set a course that led straight toward the freighter Argos.