ONE DAY LATER
MOSSAD HEADQUARTERS, TEL AVIV, ISRAEL—JANUARY 24, 2020–11:15 / 11:15 A.M. IST
Okay, hit me,” Nir said to his logistics team. They were all gathered around the conference table, and the bowl in the middle held pistachios today. A smaller bowl sat next to it for empty shells.
“We’ve been tracking down IRGC proxy militias who were near Baghdad Airport the night Soleimani played catch with a Hellfire,” Liora began. “There must have been some kind of insurgent trade show going on there, because we counted 12 militias. Everyone from Asaib Ahl al-Haq and Hezbollah al-Nujaba to Kata’ib Sayyid al-Shuhada and the Badr Organization. I started tracing the movements of these groups to look for any intersections with the IRGC while Dafna took it from the other side.”
Dafna jumped in. “I put my eye on Esmail Qaani, the motherless goat turd that took over for Soleimani.”
“Motherless goat turd—that opens a whole box of questions,” Yossi said.
“Exactly,” Liora said. “Which is motherless? The goat or the turd?”
Lahav waved. “I know this. It has to be the turd. A goat must have a mother to exist. The turd, however, is resigned to a digestive creation process as opposed to a parental lineage. It is thereby utterly motherless.”
Nir barely held back a sigh. “Fate of the world, people. Remember, we’re dealing with the fate of the world. Dafna, please go on.”
“Qaani has been staying close to home ever since he ascended to Quds royalty. Seems things tend to fall out of the sky when Quds commanders go to other countries. Then suddenly, yesterday, he hops on a private plane and flies to Abu Kamal.”
“Syria?” Nir asked.
“That’s the place. A lovely tourist destination right across the border with Iraq along the lush Euphrates River.”
“It’s a lovely place if you like rocks,” Yossi said.
“And dirt,” Lahav added.
“And goats,” Liora said.
Dafna followed up. “And motherless goat—”
“Stop!” Nir looked at Nicole, who was laughing. “It’s like running a day care.”
“Ooh, that reminds me. Snack time.” Liora reached for the bowl of pistachios. Sadly, her short arms didn’t quite reach, so Dafna grabbed it and pulled it to her.
“Gotcha, girl.”
“Dafna, how were you able to track him?” Nir asked. “I’ve got to think he keeps his movements very hush-hush.”
“For that, we have our Gentile giant to thank.” Liora turned to Nicole.
“And Yossi,” Nicole added. “While Dafna followed Qaani’s movements forward, Yossi looked backward. For every location where we could pin him down, we pulled up all the cell phone numbers that pinged the towers in that area. It was a ridiculously high number. But with each successive location, we were able to compare that list with the previous ones and cut out all the numbers that didn’t match. It was surprising how quickly the possibilities shrank. Finally, after 14 locations, we had our number. We test ran it for a couple of days until we were sure it was his and it matched his known movements.”
“Achla,” Nir said.
Lahav leaned toward Nicole and said in a loud whisper, “That means ‘amazing’ or ‘great.’”
“I know what it means.”
It may have been sweet the first 15 times he’d defined Hebrew slang for her, but now it was well past the helpful point.
Nir continued. “When we’re done with this operation, remind me to send that number up the chain. The bosses may want to forward the information to the Americans. See if they want to rain down on Qaani’s parade someday. So we’ve got Qaani in Abu Kamal. What now?”
“Oh, it doesn’t end there.” Liora grinned. “The militia movement information we could track down was way too thin to create any patterns. Life would be so much easier if we could just GPS chip all the terrorists like my family did to our Mini-Schnauzer.”
Lahav was about to comment on that idea when Nir snapped his fingers and pointed to him. The analyst furled his brow but remained silent.
Liora continued. “Anyway, I thought maybe we could narrow the list some by looking at those who’ve been involved in UAV attacks. You know, something drone-y like Efraim said. There were four. Ashab al-Kahf, Kataib Hezbollah, Asaib Ahl al-Haq, and Kata’ib Sayyid al-Shuhada.”
Dafna picked up the story again. “We’re still running on speculation, but when we saw that Qaani had gone to Abu Kamal, we turned to our girl again.” She used her thumb to identify Nicole as our girl. “Somehow using her keyboard artistry, she was able to get us a feed from the surveillance cameras at the Al-Qa’im border crossing. And who do we spot there?” She pressed a button on a remote control she must have had hiding in her lap. The huge screen hanging over their workspace lit up, and a bearded man stood next to a black car as he spoke with two members of the Syrian military.
“Oh, it’s that guy,” Nir said—with no clue who he was looking at. “Does that guy have a name?”
“He sure does,” Dafna said. “Abu Mustafa al-Sheibani.”
“The Sheibani Network guy.”
“The same. One of Iraq’s 41 Most Wanted.”
“Why 41?” Lahav asked.
“What?” Nir immediately regretted asking for clarification.
“Why 41? Why not 40? I could even understand 14, but 41? It’s just so random. Was there a tie for fortieth place, so they added an extra one? Or did they have their 40, then they were like, ‘Oh, wait, we’ve got to get this guy on the list too’? I kind of feel like we should do the Iraqis a favor and take one of them out so they can go back to having 40 like normal people would.”
At some point I’m going to either shoot Lahav or shoot myself.
Everyone just stared at the man.
“What?” Lahav asked.
Nir shook his head, then turned to Dafna. “We’ve got the Sheibani Network guy at the border crossing. So what?”
“He’s not just the Sheibani Network guy. If you remember, he’s also Abu Mustafa, commander of the Kata’ib Sayyid al-Shuhada militia.”
“Hello.” A smile spread across Nir’s face. “Okay, before we get too wild, did you watch for any other familiar faces at the border crossing?”
“Yes, but there were none we could see,” Liora answered.
“Are there other ways across the border?”
“There are always ways across the border, but none without a lot of risk. And there would be no reason to go a different way. If General Qaani asked for someone to be let through, they would be let through.”
“This could all just be coincidence,” Nir said.
“But it could also be an ays ratzon, a favorable moment we’ve been given,” Liora said with a smile.
Nir couldn’t depend on favorable moments from God, not when lives were at stake. Still, it would be quite the coincidence.
“Liora, do we know when they left?” he asked.
“One of the two cars went back across the border three hours later. That’s just long enough to hold a meeting to talk about a drone attack… theoretically.”
“What happened to the second car?”
Yossi answered this question. “When the ladies started talking Sheibani, it triggered something in my brain. I dug through some old SIGINT I’d read, and I came across a bulletin talking about laying groundwork for a northern smuggling pipeline to get weapons from Iran through Kurdish Syria and to Hezbollah in Lebanon. Want to guess who was organizing it?”
“Abu Mustafa al-Sheibani?”
“The one and only.”
“Could he have just been crossing the border there to drive up to the meeting?”
Yossi thought a moment. “I suppose he could. But that wouldn’t explain the second car, and the pictures at the border show they were definitely together.”
Nir tapped his pen on the table a few times. “So we think he went north while the others went back east across the border. That would make sense.”
Silence settled around the table, and Nir was sure everyone’s mind was racing the same as his. He started tapping his pen again—until Dafna grabbed it and threw it across the room.
An idea that was either brilliant or would get him killed was formulating in Nir’s brain. Maybe both.
“You know, there’s really only one way we can know if this Sheibani is involved in the attack.”
“How’s that?” Nicole said.
“I can ask him.”