SHARJAH, UAE—02:50 / 2:50 A.M. GST
The dock drew close, which both excited and worried Abbas. “How do we know Emirati police won’t be waiting for us?” he asked the boat’s captain.
“First, everything about us is legit. We’re just a fishing boat that’s been out fishing. We may be unloading our catch at an unorthodox location, but that’s what our client wanted. Or at least that’s what I’ll tell any coastal patrol who may be tracking our course.
“The second reason I know we’re safe is because earlier this evening our men visited the home of the dock manager for the company who owns this property. While two of our IRGC brethren wait at the house with the wife and children, he will be here with two others making sure your path is cleared for unloading and departure.”
That certainly gave Abbas some peace. But still… “Won’t he be a loose end? He’ll just go to the police when he’s set free.”
The captain smiled. “There will be no loose ends, neither here at the dock nor at the manager’s house.”
“Excellent.” Abbas felt relief. He’d known there had to be an IRGC presence here in the UAE, just as there was in most other nations worthy of their interest. He was glad to know they were involved.
But the positive feelings he’d been experiencing were quickly wiped away when he thought again about Abu Dhabi. While not a complete failure, it was close enough. How had the Emiratis known? The drone show team was not a surprise; al-Aiyubi had always been a fool. But what had happened with Razzak? How could they have possibly tracked down that boat?
It was a blessing to have already disembarked from the cargo ship for the boat he was on now. Here, he was under radio silence, which meant Qaani and all his people couldn’t contact him. Once Abbas finished in Dubai, the failure of Abu Dhabi would be forgotten.
The boat pulled alongside the dock, where a man dressed all in black and wearing a black balaclava waited to tie the rope to the bollard. Abbas jumped to the cement dock and said, “As-salaam ‘alaykum.”
“Yalla, yalla!” the man replied from behind his mask, hurrying him in Persian-accented Arabic. He jumped onto the boat, and Abbas followed behind him seething at the IRGC soldier’s rudeness.
Two of the boat’s crew members were lifting the heavy cases out of the hold and setting them on the deck. Mohamed Hassan and Omar Ali each took a side of the first one and hauled it off the boat. Abbas and the unnamed soldier took the next. They stepped onto the dock and walked the case ten meters to where a large moving truck stood with its rear door already open. Twenty meters beyond the truck knelt a man. His head was covered in a hood, and the barrel of a pistol was pressed against it. Blood stained the front of his shirt. Standing behind him holding the gun was a second IRGC soldier dressed identically to the man helping Abbas unload.
Ah, that must be the dock manager—the loose end that will soon be “tied up.”
After hefting the case into the back of the truck, the two men returned to the boat. A dozen times they made the round trip while Hassan and Ali made it one more. Then they moved on to the crates. The four boxes Abbas estimated to weigh 60 kg each had him wishing they’d started with them. He was exhausted and nearly stumbled several times, each shift of the weight eliciting a hard look from the eyes of his balaclava-wearing partner.
By the time they’d tied down the cases in the rear of the truck and walked back out into the cool air, the boat was already gone. The IRGC soldier approached Abbas and handed him a set of keys. After Abbas took them, the soldier swung hard toward his face. The blow connected, and Abbas dropped to the ground. Behind him, he heard Hassan and Ali racking their pistols.
“Wait! Put down your guns!” he said, the coppery taste of blood in his mouth.
The Persian soldier stepped forward so that he was towering over Abbas. “Do not fail like you did in Abu Dhabi. If you do, we will not only ensure your slow death but utterly destroy every last remnant of your little militia, starting with your tottering leader Falih Kazali. Do you understand?”
Abbas spit blood onto the dock, then looked up at the man. “I will not fail.”
“You best not. Because you cannot be fully trusted, I will be there for the launch to ensure that everything is prepared properly. Do not initiate before I arrive.” The man kicked him in the ribs, lifting Abbas’s mid-section off the ground. Then he turned and walked away.
Ali rushed forward to help, but Abbas pushed him away. “Iranian filth,” he said quietly as he stood. Then he slowly walked to the truck.
Ali jumped in first and slid to the middle. Hassan got behind the wheel, and Abbas closed the passenger door after painfully pulling himself up into the cab.
“Want me to run them down?” Hassan winked. He nodded his head to where the four IRGC men were gathered around the kneeling dock manager.
Abbas laughed, sending another wave of pain through his side. “Let’s just go.”
Hassan started the truck and put it in gear. As they neared the gates, they heard a single gunshot from the direction of the dock.
MOSSAD HEADQUARTERS, TEL AVIV, ISRAEL—02:10 / 2:10 A.M. IST
This could be big. Maybe. Yossi was excited—but cautiously so.
“Hey, everybody! Come here!”
Liora and Dafna stood and shuffled over. None of them had slept more than two hours in the last three days—except for Lahav, whose head was currently on his keyboard. An ever-expanding repetition of the letter L ran across his monitor. He’d been asleep long enough that duplicates of the letter likely numbered in the tens of thousands.
“Apparently, he’s used to a better sleeping schedule in prison.” Yossi tossed an empty Coke can that bounced off of Lahav’s left ear.
“Ow.” Lahav lifted his head and looked around.
“Yalla, achi.”
“What? Now? Come on, I can’t live like this. I’ve got to sleep.” When he got no sympathy and no reprieve, he reluctantly stood.
“It’s about Dubai,” Yossi told him.
As though a switch had been flipped, Lahav was fully energized. He rushed the rest of the way to Yossi’s station, almost knocking over his Wookie in the process. “Achla, I told you! I told you!”
“Slow down, achi. I’m not even sure if it’s anything yet.”
Yossi clicked a button on his computer screen, and a split-screen map of the Persian Gulf appeared. Shapes of various sizes and colors littered the waters. “Okay, this is a live map of all the active shipping in the Gulf. Each one of these shapes represents a boat. The bigger ones are tankers.” He clicked a red arrow, and a picture of the New Hellas popped up. The information included stated it was a crude oil tanker flagged in Greece. It was currently underway using its own engine and was traveling at 11.7 knots on a 130˚ course.
“That’s cool,” Liora said. “Does it work for, like, yachts and noncommercial boats too?”
“All traffic.” Yossi clicked on a purple dot. “It says here that this is the Samach, a class B pleasure boat flagged out of Japan.”
“Dubai, achi. Let’s get to Dubai,” Lahav said.
“Patience. Okay, so, Dafna, ever since you tracked that boat that got missiled back to Bandar Lengeh, I’ve been checking into every ship and boat that’s sailed from there to the UAE in the last week. So far they’re all legit. But then I got thinking. What about any that sailed from BL but not to the UAE?”
“Seems like that would be less than helpful.” Dafna popped a handful of seeds into her mouth.
“Normally, yes. Especially if we were looking at any other country.”
Liora started bouncing in her seat. “Ooh, I know where you’re going with this.”
“Don’t steal my thunder.” He smiled. “One thing we’ve learned about our Iranian friends is that when they want to do something shady with their ships—you know, drop an arms shipment here, launch a raiding party there—they shut off their automatic identification system. They’ll be on a map like we have here, then suddenly, abracadabra, they disappear. A little while later they’ll reappear saying, ‘Sorry, our AIS went out. But we have it fixed now.’”
“Exactly.” Apparently, Liora couldn’t keep herself out of the conversation. “I was part of the team that tracked an Iranian cargo ship last year when it went dark in international waters near Haifa. When it reappeared, it was all the way up by Syria. We never did figure out what they were doing.”
Yossi continued. “So I went digging around, and wouldn’t you know? Yesterday evening the Iranian-flagged cargo ship Samia suddenly disappeared in the Persian Gulf…near where?”
“Dubai!” shouted Lahav.
“Well, almost but not quite. It was just past Greater Tunb Island, which is about 130 km north from Dubai.”
“When will you get to Dubai?” Lahav’s impatience was on full display.
“Wait for it, young Padawan. From where Samia went dark, it’s about an eight- or nine-hour trip to Dubai. So I looked for any vessel that was around Greater Tunb Island at the time the Samia disappeared that then headed right for shore. And once again, wouldn’t you know, the UAE-flagged Murban, which had been fishing off the island, just pulled into dock in Sharjah, a suburb of…” He signaled to Lahav.
“Dubai!”
“Exactly! It landed about 25 minutes ago, which is exactly eight hours and 45 minutes after the Samia vanished into thin air. And what’s doubly odd is that the dock it pulled into isn’t a fishing port. It’s owned by an import/export company called Ultra.”
“I told you it was Dubai! I told you!”
“Yes, you did, Lahav. As a reward, I promise to put 150 shekels on your canteen account when you go back to prison.”
“Sababa, achi!” Lahav gave him a huge smile.
Liora stepped in. “Yossi, get Nir and Nicole on the line right away. Fill them in. Dafna and I will try to find some footage around Ultra. We’ll see if we can figure out what they’re driving. Make sure to let Nicole know we’ll probably need her help. And, Yossi, great work!”
She leaned around him and gave him a peck on the cheek. Yossi swiveled his chair just in time to see Lahav standing next to her with his lips puckered.
“Ew. No.” She skirted around him.
“What? I came up with Dubai. Dubai was all me. Doesn’t that deserve at least something? A hug? A handshake?”
“Or this?” Dafna punched him in the arm. “There you go. Enjoy it.”