Target two, p.5
Target Two, page 5
“It is an honor to sit in your tent, Sheikh Abdelrahman ibn Rahim,” Carl Bryson said, taking another handful of succulent goat’s meat and popping it into his mouth.
“And an honor to have you with us again, Mr. Bryson,” the sheikh said, grabbing a fine morsel and putting it on Bryson’s side of the platter. Bryson picked it up and ate it to acknowledge the sheikh’s hospitality.
“I am afraid that I am going to have to be rude and start discussing business before we have finished eating,” Bryson said.
The sheikh shook his head. “Business before tea—”
“Causes stomach cramps. When food is before you, business can wait,” Bryson interrupted.
The sheikh smiled. “You have remembered our sayings.”
“You taught me well.”
“We never taught you how to live at a proper pace in life. Always in a hurry. But I suppose you have your reasons. To answer the question you will ask next, Mr. Bryson, yes, we did get the ANFO. Two hundred kilos of it.”
“Good. That’s good.”
ANFO, ammonium nitrate and fuel oil, was a common blasting agent used in mining. Pound for pound, it was as powerful as dynamite and much more stable. It could handle rough transport across open desert. Two hundred kilos were well more than they needed, not that Bryson was going to complain. You could really never have too many explosives, as Gerald Hunter, the explosives expert sitting to his right, had said many times.
One of the sheikh’s sons pulled up a tarp near the back of the tent to reveal a stack of heavy plastic bags marked ANFO in Hebrew and English. He hauled one over and slit it open with a curved knife hanging from his belt.
Hunter held out a hand and the Bedouin poured a heap of little pink beads into it. Hunter examined them for a moment, sniffed them, and nodded to Bryson. He then poured his handful of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil back into the bag, and the young Bedouin used some duct tape to seal it up.
“So, a thousand dollars per kilo, as we agreed?” Bryson asked.
“Yes, that will be acceptable,” the sheikh replied.
Ten times the market price, but regular citizens couldn’t buy ANFO, certainly not in Israel. The sheikh must have stolen it from one of Negev’s mining operations or bought it from an employee who had.
Brett Fisher, the man to his left, pulled out a wad of hundred-dollar bills and stacked them up. One of the sheikh’s brothers pulled out a battery-operated money counting machine and fed the hundreds through. The whir of the electric device sounded surreal in a tent adorned with rugs and swords that would not have looked out of place a thousand years ago.
The brother nodded and tucked the hefty stack of notes inside his robes.
“I’m glad that went well for both of us,” the sheikh said. “Eat, my friends. It is too long since you have had proper desert food.”
“Oh, but sheikh, I have some gifts for you,” Bryson said, patting a duffel bag by his side. A duffel bag that, given his position of trust in the tribe, hadn’t been searched by the Bedouin when they arrived.
“That is most kind of you, my friend.” The sheikh’s eyes sparkled with interest. Bryson’s gifts had always been good ones.
Bryson unzipped the duffel bag. No one kept a close eye on him. He was too well-known. Too well trusted.
“Firstly, a collection of fine perfumes from Paris to delight your nostrils when you visit the women’s tent.”
The unmarried younger men laughed nervously, elbowed each other, and whispered dirty comments.
Bryson handed over several ornate bottles.
“Next, a pair of high-powered handheld radios. Better for communication than cell phones, which have poor coverage here—as you know—and can be traced.”
He handed over the radios. They earned more interest than the perfume. The Bedouin were a practical lot. Living in such conditions, they had to be.
“And finally . . .” Bryson paused, searching his heart for feelings, and only finding determination. “. . . a Scorpion EVO 3 submachine gun with a hundred-round drum magazine and altered to fire at full auto.”
He pulled the Czech-made machine gun out of his duffel bag, flicked off the safety, and sprayed the closely packed Bedouins sitting at point-blank range in front of him.
The nomads screamed and flailed. To either side of Bryson, his companions pulled out pistols and added to the fire. A couple of Bedouins managed to draw their own weapons, but never got to use them before bullets tore through their bodies.
Within seconds, they were all dead.
But the firing did not stop. It was all over the camp now, as Bryson’s other men took out the rest of the camp—the men who had stood sentry watching for Israeli patrols, the women and girls who had cooked dinner, and the boys who had served it.
Bryson and his companions double tapped the Bedouins in the tent, then rushed out to help with the fight.
But it was already over. Half a dozen of his men were finishing off the last of the wounded, cursing and raging as they did so.
A moment later, Bryson saw the reason for their anger. Smith lay dead with a gunshot between the eyes. Didier lay gasping and thrashing in the sand, shot in the gut.
“Damn it, I told you to be careful with the sentries. These guys are good!” Bryson raged. He couldn’t afford to lose men, not before the big operation.
“Sorry, sir,” one of the survivors said. “They were so quick.”
“Like I told you! What did I tell you?”
“Inferior races are still dangerous races,” the man repeated the phrase Bryson had drilled into them over and over again.
Bryson jerked a thumb toward the tent. “Go in there, get the explosives, and load them into the backs of the Jeeps. Fisher, retrieve those radios. We’ll need them. And get our money back if it isn’t too bloody.”
The men hurried to do what they were told.
Bryson walked over to Didier as he writhed in the sand. A good fighter. Ex-French Foreign Legion. It was a shame that they couldn’t take him along.
Didier looked up at him with eyes that had trouble focusing. Bryson saw disappointment there, and frustration, but no fear. Not with someone like Didier.
“You know the agreement,” Bryson said. “We don’t have time for wounded. The mission is too important.”
“H . . . help me stand,” Didier said, his heavy accent and halting breath making the words almost incomprehensible. “I . . . I want to die standing.”
Bryson slung his machine gun over his shoulder, knelt down, and draped one of the Frenchman’s arms over his shoulder. Then he lifted him up. Didier cried out in pain, knees buckling, and Bryson struggled under the man’s full weight. He carried him a few steps before Didier got his legs working and, gasping and leaking blood down Bryson’s trouser leg, made it to the nearest tent, where he leaned heavily against a pole. Bryson made sure he was standing on his own and backed off.
Didier tried to stand a little straighter, composing himself.
Bryson unslung his machine gun and leveled it at him. “I’m sorry you didn’t get to see it, my friend.”
The Frenchman snapped out his right arm in a Fascist salute.
“Heil Hitler!” he cried.
Bryson gave him a burst to the head.
CHAPTER SIX
Trains are slow and inefficient in the UK, and so despite leaving Durham in the early afternoon, Jacob Snow didn’t make it down to London until evening.
That suited him fine. It gave him time to puzzle through the archaeological report and hear back from the research guys in the CIA that the crewmember who died in a car crash was Mosche Cohen, a graduate student studying ancient languages at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. The chancellor had the date wrong. In fact, Cohen had died the previous year, only ten months ago.
The narrow gap of time made this accident seem even less like a coincidence.
While the CIA didn’t have access to the police reports, newspaper accounts said that Cohen had been driving through a mountainous region at night when he swerved suddenly off the road, broke through a barrier, and rolled down into a ravine.
Standard hit. Have a watcher radio ahead when the target drives past, then up the road is the other half of the team, a guy in a big truck who times it so that he comes on the target at a sharp bend. The truck swerves into the target’s lane, the target panics, and boom. Game over.
Jacob spent the rest of the journey reading through three volumes of archaeology in Hebrew. It gave him a headache, and he wished Jana Peters was there to take this part of the job. She’d read through it quicker and get more out of it.
But she wasn’t there, and she wasn’t going to be. It was bad enough that he lost Aaron Peters, his mentor and savior. He wasn’t about to lose the man’s daughter too.
The field report talked about excavations at Tel Shimon. A tel was an artificial hill created by centuries of human habitation. People living on the same spot would build atop previous foundations, fill in cellars in order to have more ground space, and cover up refuse pits with fresh soil. All of these actions over the centuries would slowly raise the ground level and after enough time, the current town would be atop a hill made entirely of the remains of previous settlements. Tels were found all across the Middle East and were a treasure trove for archaeologists.
Tel Shimon near the River Jordan in eastern Israel was special for a couple of reasons. Although inhabited since the Neolithic, it had never been a major center for trade or political power, and yet, it was still inhabited when Bar Kokhba started his revolt. Local legend had that it was here that he gave a speech that rallied thousands of troops to his cause, bringing the entire region into revolt against the hated Romans. Thus, the place became known as Tel Shimon, after Bar Kokhba’s first name Shimon.
Jacob looked up the meaning of the name and found it meant “one who has heard.” Perhaps because he heard the call of God to rebel? Bar Kokhba meant “son of the star” in Aramaic, another language used frequently by Jews at the time, and referred to something called the Star Prophecy. This was a verse from Numbers 24:17: “There shall come a star out of Jacob,” which was interpreted by some rabbis as a prediction of a coming messiah.
Shimon Bar Kokhba’s followers certainly believed that and fought with tenacity against the local Roman legions for three long years. For a time, Bar Kokhba carved out his own state and issued coinage, but once the full weight of the Roman Empire turned against the Jews, they didn’t have a chance. The rebellion was crushed, its leaders executed, and the Jews scattered or were sold into slavery. Tel Shimon was burnt to the ground and remained unoccupied for three hundred years until a small Byzantine town was founded there.
All of this was in the report. What wasn’t in the report was what had been in the damn jar that had been so important that the Israeli government suppressed it. Woburn hadn’t even put any notes in the margins to give Jacob a clue.
There was a hint in the text, however, something the censors missed.
In the introduction to volume two, the volume devoted to translations of the papyri, Woburn mentioned that the documents “discussed the preservation and protection of Jewish holy objects.” But when Jacob read through the translations, he found nothing of the kind. There was a specific papyrus that discussed who should replace a couple of rabbis killed in a Roman massacre. Another document was a request for four different plants needed for the celebration of the feast of Sukkot. There was also a bundle of letters between one of Bar Kokhba’s generals and a rabbi about how to present the rebel leader as a messiah. The rabbi’s flock had many doubters, and the rabbi and the general talked about how to bring these people around.
All interesting stuff, but nothing about preserving Jewish artifacts from Roman pillage.
That must have been the document the Israelis barred from publication.
But why?
He didn’t know anyone down in London who he could ask, but he did know a place where he could ask around for information on hits in the UK. In fact, it was the same place where a lot of those hits were planned, and a hitman was hired.
The train pulled into King’s Cross station in central London as the sky turned from the deep blue of dusk to black. The Two Duelists would just be getting into a swinging night.
The Two Duelists was a pub near Elephant and Castle on the south bank of the Thames. It had the reputation of being a dangerous boozer, but only to the civilians. Those in the know knew it to be a center of information and illegal deals.
Jacob had known a place like that in Beirut—Hassan’s basement bar. The bar wasn’t actually called that, he wasn’t sure if it even had a name, and he was pretty sure it wasn’t licensed as a business, but that was what everyone called it. A great place to listen to the pulse of the Middle East. Too bad that the last time he went there a Kyrgyz killer-for-hire named Chingis Beshimov exposed him as CIA, which nearly got him killed.
And Jana. She’d been tagging along. It was amazing how much he’d been thinking about her since seeing her.
Jacob looked out over the Thames as his cab crossed Waterloo Bridge. The city on both banks was brilliantly lit in the night—the solid-looking Victorian offices and government buildings, the soaring skyscrapers, the giant Millennium Wheel all lit up, and a horde of rushing pedestrian and vehicular traffic. Jacob liked how London teemed with life. For a home, he preferred the rural idyll of his place outside of Athens, but visits to big cities always filled him with excitement. It was a shame that he wouldn’t have a chance to enjoy any of London’s nightlife.
Except for the sleaze pit he was going to visit right now.
He had the cab drop him off a couple of blocks from The Two Duelists and walked the rest of the way. In this business, you never take a cab straight to a sensitive location, and it’s always good to get a feel for the neighborhood anyway.
The feel of the neighborhood was the same as the last time he’d been here.
He walked down a poorly lit street littered with trash. On either side stood old Victorian brick buildings and the occasional concrete replacement, put up after the Blitz or to satisfy the optimistic and ultimately fruitless dream of some developer who thought he could make something out of this area. The ground floors were taken up by second-rate businesses—grimy kebab shops, unlicensed taxi companies, Thai “massage” parlors, liquor stores, and discount stops for cheap Chinese imports. Upstairs were narrow windows with grimy, tattered curtains veiling grimy apartments and the tattered lives that lived in them.
But Jacob’s eyes stayed mostly on the crowd, a mishmash of working-class English and immigrants from a dozen different countries. He caught conversations in English, Urdu, Somali, and Bengali. There were few women about, all of them accompanied by men. A crowd of a dozen burly Pakistanis stood on the street in tracksuits, the current style for street thugs in London, glowering at everyone who passed.
At least that gang wouldn’t be in The Two Duelists. He’d once seen an Italian drinking at the bar get a bottle broken over his head for not being white enough.
And there it was up ahead, a shabby pub on a corner next to a burnt-out block of apartments and an all-night laundry with a puddle of puke blocking the front door. The Two Duelists had windows, but you couldn’t see through them because they were covered with English flags. Not the UK Union Jack, but the red Cross of St. George on a white background. Some English people flew the flag out of patriotism. Some flew it to support the English national football team. Some flew it because they hated foreigners.
The owners of The Two Duelists were from the third category.
The sign above the door was one of those fake vintage pub signs you see all over the UK. It showed two bewigged men in hose and tricorner hats duking it out with swords. One has just been skewered by the other, blood spurting out of his chest and back.
Truth in advertising. While Jacob had never seen someone stabbed by a sword in this pub, he’d seen people stabbed by just about everything else.
Even a bicycle spoke through the eye. That had been a particularly nasty thing to witness.
Just as he got to the door, a pair of well-off men in their early twenties, looking as out of place as a pair of zebras, came out, looking nervous.
Jacob snorted. They didn’t need to worry about The Two Duelists as long as they were buying and leaving. They had to worry about the neighborhood. Jacob gave them a fifty-fifty chance of getting mugged before they made the nearest Tube station.
Jacob pushed through the door and entered a large front room. It was almost empty, the splintered and scarred wooden floor only having a few puddles of beer and none of blood. Several tables were spaced around the room, and at each table sat a lone man with a beer in front of him, staring at their phone.
Drug dealers. You come in here, go up to the man who sells what you want, make the deal, and get gone, like those two clubber kids who just left. The guy with the jigsaw puzzle scars on his face sold ecstasy. The man in the center of the room giving him a cold stare sold opioid painkillers. The guy with the mohawk sold ketamine and Rohypnol. The fat guy in the corner sold speed. He obviously didn’t use his own product.
Jacob walked straight across the room to the bar, where the impressively muscled barman wearing a dress shirt two sizes too small for him stared at him impassively.
“I’ll take a beer and a shot of Jamison,” Jacob said.
“We don’t have Jamison.”
“Then give me two beers.”
The man nodded, poured a single beer, and reached under the counter. There was a soft click to Jacob’s left, and a door labeled “Employees Only” opened. Using the right password got you temporary status as an employee.
Jacob handed over a fifty-pound note. The price to be a temporary employee. He grabbed his beer, hefting the weight of the pint glass in his hand. A handy weapon, especially if smashed into someone’s face. “Glassing,” they called it. Yes, the English had a verb for smashing a glass in someone’s face. Jigsaw Man in the front room had obviously been glassed once upon a time. Jacob wondered what the other guy looked like.
