The Gamma Option Read online

  “Wait!” Evira responded, hand feeling for one of the pistols in a drawer that had been open through the course of their conversation. “Take this.”

  She was by his side when they re-entered the store, pressing a gun into his hand. Panicked bystanders rushed by outside, colliding with displays that had been set up on the sidewalk. Blaine and Evira stayed pinned behind the doorway and peered out. Beyond, all was chaos. A small group of gunmen dressed as merchants were firing upon two jeeploads of uniformed soldiers. The soldiers’ bullets cut indiscriminate lines through the crowd, their fire slowed only when sniper bullets rained on them from the roof of the building across the street.

  “Yours?” Blaine asked.

  “No! I don’t know who they are! I swear it! Let’s get out of here!”

  Pistols in hand they ducked out the doorway to be swept away by the crowd rushing from the area.

  Colonel Ben-Neser wasn’t thinking anymore, simply watching and reacting. He had drawn his pistol and rushed from the cover of the warehouse onto the sidewalk. He had seen at least three of the enemy’s number fall to the fire of his riflemen on the roof. But the fake soldiers had retreated behind the cover of their jeeps and were concentrating their fire upward in an incessant hail. After Ari, he had watched his aproned commando fall to a second barrage that commenced as soon as Ben-Neser had given the order to move in. He felt himself struck each time a bullet found one of his men. This was his fault, damn it, his fault!

  Above him, one of the marksmen found a clear bead on another of the soldiers, but the others honed savagely in on his position and blasted away. The man was pitched backward while the second marksman seized what he thought would be the advantage and showed himself long enough to aim. But the soldiers’ fire never let up. Bullets punched into the second man and sent his body headlong from the roof on to the street a dozen yards in front of Ben-Neser.

  “Bastards,” he moaned.

  The surge of the crowd reached him then and Ben-Neser was tossed about like a puppet in their midst. A hard smack to his arm tore the pistol from his grip and he lowered himself to feel for it amidst the sea of thrashing feet.

  The drop was what saved his life.

  The fake soldiers had turned to spray the crowd. The butchers! Of course, with the marksmen neutralized the only shots aimed their way were coming from figures disguised within the crowd. So they had taken the most obvious, and most barbaric, action. They must have come to protect Evira, he theorized with a guilty chill. And he had handed his team to them on a silver platter by having Ari approach.

  Bodies toppled over him while more of the panicked crowd struggled to flee. Two of his remaining men posted in the square, meanwhile, saw the direction the fake soldiers’ firings were taking. To save whatever lives they could, they broke off from the crowd and rushed into the center of the square to draw the bullets to themselves.

  Ben-Neser saw this just as he recovered his pistol and pushed himself on his elbows over a pair of fallen tourists, both near death. He fired a full clip in the time it took the imposters to cut down these two men and a third who had circled in from around the corner, leaving him as the last.

  “You fuckers!” Ben-Neser screamed as he lurched to his feet with a fresh clip snapped home. He was charging now, charging through the remnants of the crowd with pistol burning in his hand.

  He felt the hot gush of pain to his armless shoulder, and for that instant he was back in the West Bank the day he had lost the limb. The phantom itching was replaced by the same fiery agony he had felt when the grenade blew into him, and once again he was melting into nothingness, this time with nothing to pull him out.

  Evira and Blaine’s original aim had been to swing left outside the shop and rush away amidst the chaos. But their turn had brought them almost face-to-face with a pistol-wielding man shoving his way toward them.

  “Mossad!” Evira screamed, and instantly they swung around to head toward the center of the chaos that had overrun the market.

  The flow of panic was moving in all directions and they let themselves be swept up in it. The street was cluttered with wares abandoned by peddlers to the fate of the crowd, some of whom still managed to stoop to retrieve attractive items on their way. Maneuverability was cut further by the dozens of cars immobilized on the street. Windows and windshields had been punctured by bullets and most of the drivers huddled beneath their dashboards for dear life.

  When the soldiers turned their fire suddenly and inexplicably into the crowd, Blaine and Evira dove to the sidewalk together.

  “What the hell is this?” Blaine raged, grasping the Beretta Evira had provided.

  “They’re not soldiers!”

  “Obviously. But who then? Who?”

  “I don’t know! I don’t know!”

  Bullets continued to cascade above them while behind them the Mossad man they’d fled from was rushing the gunmen head on, pistol clacking futilely. He was blown backward at the same time a screech rang out from across the street.

  “You fuckers!”

  A one-armed man was charging straight for the remaining trio of soldiers. He had managed six shots before a bullet toppled him. The fall separated him from his gun, and somehow he had the composure to crawl for it as the uniformed figures spun from their positions of cover to finish him off.

  “Come on!” Evira urged, tugging on McCracken’s arm. “We can get out of here now!”

  “Not yet,” was all Blaine said as he pulled away and crawled stealthily toward the street.

  Colonel Yuri Ben-Neser knew he was dead. It came to him in slow motion as the trio of uniformed shapes swarmed his way with rifles angled down. He wouldn’t close his eyes, wouldn’t let them linger over the kill or enjoy it. The pistol was just out of his grasp and he shoved himself toward it, pain exploding in his shoulder with each push over the stones.

  His fingers had just struck the pistol’s sweat-soaked butt when his eyes caught the blur of a shape rising directly before him and just to one side of the uniformed figures.

  He’s not one of mine, was Ben-Neser’s only thought, as the man steadied his pistol and opened fire on the trio of fake soldiers. They tried to return it, but the man was in motion by then; twisting, diving, rolling, all the time shooting.

  His bullets seemed to jolt the fake soldiers all at once, almost simultaneously. He kept firing until they crumpled over, not more than a shot or two having missed the mark.

  Ben-Neser thought surely he was dreaming, or perhaps a guardian angel had been sent down to save him. No man could shoot like that. Yet it was a man who leaned over him and touched his pulse.

  “You’ll be all right,” came a voice attached to the shape, and Ben-Neser passed out before he had the chance to say how very much he doubted that.

  Chapter 8

  THE ROOM EVIRA LED them to was located in a block of apartment units close enough to the flea market to hear the constant blare of sirens arriving on the scene. The room was sparsely furnished with a pair of stained fabric chairs and a single day bed. There was a refrigerator, a stove, a small kitchen table, and a sink. The bathroom facilities in the building were limited to two per floor, one for each gender.

  Evira locked the door behind them.

  “We have little time,” she began. “I am due to leave shortly. For Tehran. For Hassani.”

  Evira sat down in the chair closest to the window. Blaine took the stained, rust-colored one across from her. At one time, he supposed, the fabric had probably matched, but now one chair was sun-bleached while the other retained a measure of its original color.

  “If Mossad’s on to you, lady,” he told her, “you’ll be lucky to see the outside of this country again.”

  She shrugged. “It’s not Mossad I’m worried about as much as Rasin. Those fake soldiers must have been sent by him. His penetration of my organization extends even deeper than I thought.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “He found me through you.”

 
; “Then you’ve got a double-edged problem: Mossad and Rasin. That makes them my problem, too.”

  “Yes, but the chaos in the square will take time to sort out. That will give us the hours we need.”

  “You maybe, but what about me? If that one-armed man didn’t recognize me on sight, it won’t take him long to pull my face out of an Identikit. I’m in lots of files over here. You’ve read most of them, remember?”

  “I’ll tell you what you need to know. You’ll have to move fast.”

  “Sorry, lady, it’s not that simple. See, this wasn’t part of the deal. The Israelis catch me and my son is fucked… .”

  “You’ll be out of the country before they start to look.”

  “You didn’t let me finish. You just admitted that the penetration of your network goes deeper than you think. How deep? All the way down to Fett, you think? You did say they found you through me. Think about it. What if Fett was working for Rasin? What if he set this whole thing up just to flush you out for the man himself?”

  She looked at him, didn’t protest.

  “Then it would be Rasin holding my son’s life, not you.”

  She thought quickly. “Fett still has the boy. I know where. I’ll make arrangements. He’ll be safe. I promise.”

  “And that’s supposed to mean something to me? If you don’t have the kid, I’ve got no reason to do business with you.”

  “Except you know that even if you’re right I’m the only one who can help you get him back. I’ve learned to trust no one, just as you have. Fett doesn’t know I’ve kept tabs on his movements. I can get the boy away from him. You must believe that.”

  “I do believe you’ll try, but that’s not worth much with that pair of murderous women running around, possibly working for Rasin. So here’s how we’re going to play it. I’m gonna send a message to an old friend of mine back in the States, briefing him on what’s gone down. If anything happens to me, and the boy doesn’t end up back in Reading, he’ll come after you, all of you. That’s a fate I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy, but I’d wish it on the kidnappers of children.”

  “He’s that good?”

  “Lady, he makes me look like a green recruit.”

  She nodded, forming fresh thoughts even then. “Would he have risked everything to save the one-armed man just as you did?”

  “Would’ve used less bullets to get it done, too.”

  “It was a stupid move, you know. You could have been killed. What of your son then?”

  “Frankly, it didn’t cross my mind. There was a man out there who was about to get butchered. In the context of the moment, that was all that mattered.”

  “I’ve heard that about you,” she commented reflectively. “But to see it, to see you …”

  “Save the praise. It’s what I am, what I do. Hell, you’re the one who had to have me working on this with you. You know my philosophy. Saving an individual life is as important to me as saving a million.”

  “I know that. What I don’t know is why.”

  Blaine started to smile, then stopped. “Matt asked a lot of the same questions yesterday. I didn’t tell him the whole truth about what his daddy did in the war. I gave him the standard Phoenix Project story and conveniently left out the fact that plenty of the people we killed didn’t deserve to die. Just innocent victims who happened to be in the wrong place when our bombs went off or our assassination squads hit. What did we care? Our philosophy was win at any cost, and if the whole war had been fought that way we might have won it. I got caught up in it but I wasn’t there all that long, and when I came out I swore I’d never take another innocent life again.” Blaine’s eyes became cold. “Which is why I’ll work with you but you’ll never get my respect. You broke a cardinal rule when you nabbed the boy, you broke the only rule.”

  She leaned forward abruptly in her chair. “Would you like to hear about point of view, Mr. Blaine McCracken, about perspective? Before the ’73 war I lived in one of the finest houses in the West Bank. My father was a businessman and local leader. We had nothing against the Israelis. We co-existed peacefully without incident. Even when the war came, we did not take sides. My brothers rotated constant shifts to bring the Israeli soldiers nearest us additional water and fruit.

  “But when victory came, more soldiers, or maybe they were the same ones my brothers had brought food to, came to our house with an order from the government to seize our property. We were thrust out into the streets, first to a tent in what had become the occupied zone. From the tent we could look out and see the grand house where we had tried to live in harmony with our neighbors.”

  “So you hate the Israelis for what they did. Is that what your crusade has been all about?”

  “At first, I suppose, it was. I left my family at eighteen and went into Lebanon, to one of the terrorist training camps. I was filled not so much with hate as a desperate desire to act, against what I did not know. I guess my original aim was violence, but that changed. You see my father was still a politician, a diplomat. He still had Israeli contacts and he did his best in those early years to negotiate on behalf of the vast displaced peoples. Factions resulted. The militants saw him as a collaborator. He was beaten almost to death and forced to flee. And you know what the worst of it was? It was my brothers who turned him in… .”

  McCracken scowled in disgust.

  “You assumed I hate the Israelis, Blaine McCracken. Perhaps I do. But I hate the Palestinians for the same reason. These past years of bloodshed in the occupied zones have only reinforced my hatred of the entire system, along with the response of others to it. Guns are not the answer; that much has been shown already. Peace can be achieved only from the inside out, organizing the Arab voice within Israel into an assertive, powerful one in a way that makes Jewish citizens understand and accept us without resenting us. The radicals accuse me of choosing means that will take too long to achieve anything. But the violence has raged for two thousand years and where has that gotten us?

  “I have the skills of a terrorist, yes, but I vowed never to use them except in defense of my own life, for otherwise I would be reduced to the level I hated the most.”

  “But something changed your mind. You’ve decided to go after Hassani with those very skills you denounced.”

  She looked at him more closely. “I had no choice in any of the actions I authorized. We made overtures toward you a month ago. When you resisted our contacts, I turned to Fett, who discovered the existence of your son through an informant in Dejourner’s network.”

  “Fine. So let me get to work so the boy can be returned. Where do I start my search for Rasin?”

  Evira leaned back again and the sunlight caught her dark, vibrant features. She looked suddenly young to him, even innocent, long hair framing a face that in that moment might have been a schoolgirl’s.

  “There is a man named Moshe Traymir,” she told him, “a soldier who was part of the Lebanon refugee camp massacres. He was stripped of rank and court-martialed in disgrace, but he became one of Rasin’s bodyguards. My people saw them leaving the country by plane on several occasions. If anyone knows where Rasin can be found, it is Traymir.”

  “Where can I find him?”

  “He’s taken a most fitting job. He is an animal keeper at the Safari Park in Ramat Gan.”

  Colonel Yuri Ben-Neser walked slowly down the Tayelet on his way to Atarim Square. His left shoulder was bandaged and wrapped, and to his dismay the phantom itching intensified with the coming of this fresh wound. It was only ten hours earlier that his planned taking of Evira had ended in disaster. Ben-Neser had responded as the soldier in him dictated. From the hospital, he had reported everything, confessed everything, through proper channels. Disgrace was certain now, perhaps even imprisonment. Yet that prospect did not weigh as heavily on the colonel as the fate of his team did. Six had died in the square and a seventh was not expected to live through the night.

  Atarim Square contains a cluster of open-air cafes, restaurants, and sn
ack bars, each featuring a different menu, design, and atmosphere. Lying between the Carlton and Mariah hotels just above the shores of the Mediterranean, it is normally reached by way of the HaYarkon Street. But Ben-Neser came by way of the Tayelet’s long stretch of asphalt promenade because the sounds of the sea just below calmed him. Compared to its vastness and power, he was nothing, and what had happened in Jaffa today was also nothing.

  Mossad, of course, thought otherwise. The founder of Mossad had been named Isser, and since then all of his successors had taken the same name. Unlike their counterparts in other intelligence services, heads of Mossad took a direct interest and involvement in the affairs of their organization. It was not a political or bureaucratic appointment. They were all field men first and brought that perspective to the job. Ben-Neser hoped that would work for him. That was his only hope.

  He found Isser waiting for him just as planned, in Atarim Square beneath the blue-canopied table in the largest of cafes. It was not isolated, but the tables immediately around it were unoccupied. Isser was sipping what could have been either a weak drink or club soda. As he approached, Ben-Neser felt his heart quicken and breath become short.

  Isser was a short, barrel-chested man with menacing blue eyes. His hair was strangely thick on the sides but thinning on top. His bulging forearms rested atop the table, a manila folder pinned beneath one. He did not acknowledge Ben-Neser’s approach until the one-armed man was right before him.

  “Sit down, Yuri.”

  Ben-Neser did so stiffly. Every speech he had rehearsed fluttered out of his mind, and he simply gulped down some air.

  “You are probably wondering why I asked to meet with you personally.”

  Ben-Neser gulped more air.

  “There will be no inquiry on this, Yuri, no formal hearing. It must remain between just you and me. Is that clear?”

  Ben-Neser nodded. He felt a small hope rising in him.

  “I have read the report on this afternoon’s affair. I will not dwell on what you have done. You understand the impropriety of your actions, as well as the ramifications. But there are other matters involved here that are more pressing now.”