Patrick Robinson - To The Death

“Right here,” he said, “we have rented an apartment on the third floor. It’s pretty basic, but it has a bathroom, cold water only, and electricity. Our field agents have moved in a couple of mattresses and some blankets. But you’re going to be uncomfortable. There’s no workable kitchen and nothing to cook on. We have installed an electric kettle and a coffeepot. There’s not much else.”

Before him, sitting at the conference table, were four ex-military secret service officers. All of them, for the moment, wore olive-green uniforms and had duffel bags slung on the floor next to them, alongside their M-16 machine guns. Two of these men wore the coveted wings signifying membership in Israel’s elite parachute division. They both wore officers’ bars on their shoulders. All four of them had the distinguishing three small Hebrew letters stitched in yellow above the breast pocket.

“You will see from the map, gentlemen, that this apartment has a commanding view of the big house directly opposite, and we were damn lucky to get it. An old Arab man used to live there, and we paid him generously to get out. While you are in residence, you will ignore his mail, answer the door to no one, and use cell phones only under the most dire circumstances.

“You will eat a proper meal only once a day, and that will be after dark. For that you will leave by the back door, and never, under any circumstances, use the same restaurant twice. Fortunately, Damascus stays open very late.”

One of the paratroopers asked about the getaway, and the general answered sharply. “Right here,” he said, pointing with his baton, “one street back, is a locked garage, right before house number 46. You will of course recce this, and inside that garage you will find a very old, battered-looking wreck of an automobile, plainly on its last legs.

“However, it has been expertly converted, four new tires, new transmission, brand-new Mercedes engine, everything directly out of the show-room. When you leave, you will be in Arab dress and you will make your escape in the old car, which will run like a Ferrari and attract the attention of no one. There will be two heavy machine guns in the back in the event of an emergency.

“You will drive out of the east gate and turn hard right down to the circle, and then it’s marked, straight down the highway to the airport that lies to the southwest of the city.

“Two of our field agents will meet you. One will get rid of the car; the other will escort you to a private Learjet, and you will take off immediately for Israel. The agent already has your passports. You will not need them for entry into Syria. There will be no record that you were ever in the country.”

The general, whose name was never mentioned, stood before them in full uniform, his steel-gray hair cropped tight, his posture still rigidly upright. His face was a picture of military sternness as he outlined the operation designed to execute Ravi and Shakira Rashood, the sworn and proven enemies of Israel.

There have always been officers in the Israeli Army whose determination borders on fanaticism. They are men who will stop at nothing to keep their nation safe, and this particular general was most certainly one of them.

As a twenty-year-old infantry lieutenant, he had fought shoulder to shoulder against the invading Egyptians with General Avraham Yoffe, when they smashed their way through the Mitla Pass in the Sinai during the Six-Day War in 1967. They were six bloodstained days of pure heroism by the Israelis. In less than a week, they destroyed four armies and 370 fighter-bombers belonging to four attacking nations.

The general had not been brought up to drop his guard against enemies of the state.

And here in the plain white-walled briefing room, in the heart of Israel’s Institute for Intelligence and Special Operations, he was once more planning a deadly strike against a couple of Palestinian terrorists who had posed more trouble for his nation than the Egyptian Second Army had done thirty-nine years previously.

It was a typical Mossad briefing. Two guards on the door, no cell phones permitted. The four men who were going in tonight had made their wills and had their last contacts with home. They would not carry any written notes with them when finally they were released, and they would leave from the rooftop, by helicopter, to the Israeli Army’s Northern Command HQ base for a short stopover. The sixty-mile onward flight to Damascus would take them over the Golan Heights, along the north-running 1974 Ceasefire Line, and then east over the desert into the southern area of the city.

The leader, sitting pensively, listening to the general, was Colonel Ben Joel, fortyish combat veteran, unshaven, former Special Forces, who had been involved in the revenge attack on Yasser Arafat’s house in Gaza. Ben was an infantryman, a ground-to-air communications officer, and an explosives expert, more accustomed to fighting with a club and tear gas against rioting crowds of Arab youths.

His number two was Major Itzaak Sherman, son of a true Israeli patriot, the legendary, highly decorated Sergeant Mo Sherman, who had gone into Entebbe Airport alongside Jonathan Netanyahu to rescue the hostages in 1976. Sergeant Sherman was a choral conductor in Tel Aviv, and no one in the aircraft ever forgot him, standing up as the commandos screamed in from the east, low over the pitch-black northern waters of Lake Victoria. Sergeant Sherman conducted these armed daredevils as they sang at the top of their lungs that most haunting patriotic song of Israel, “Onward-we must keep going onward!”-shutting out the fear of the great unknown that faced them when they landed.

As they dropped below a hundred feet, howling toward the runway, Mo Sherman hooked up the sound system to the bittersweet anthem written by Paul Ben-Haim and each man grappled with his onrushing task to the glorious strains of “Fanfare to Israel.”

Those who were there swear to God that that music made them all feel fifteen feet tall, revved them up for the murderous firefight to come in the airport, the fight in which Yanni Netanyahu was mortally wounded. Mo Sherman, brokenhearted, helped carry the young leader’s body into the aircraft for the homeward journey.

And here was Mo’s son, Major Itzaak, preparing to go into another hostile foreign country and carry out his unquestioning duty on behalf of his government. His father’s last words to him were simple: “Go bravely, son, and make sure you do not let anyone down.”

The third man was another ex-member of the Israeli Special Forces, a newly promoted Mossad agent, Lt. Colonel John Rabin, aged forty-one. His own father had died in the Sinai on the opening morning of the Yom Kippur War, along with hundreds of young soldiers facing the Egyptian tanks. John never knew him, but followed in his footsteps as a career combat soldier. Like Ben Joel, he was an explosives expert, but a specialist, said to be the best in the Israeli Defense Force.

The fourth member of the team was one of those Mossad hard men whose background was not publicized. He was a five-foot, ten-inch iron man from a small town south of Hebron. He was massively strong, skilled in close combat, and a maestro with a knife, a man who’d kill you as soon as look at you. His name was Abraham, and he was on the team as a personal bodyguard to the other three.

His wide smile and cheerful manner did not provide any clue to his true disposition. But the others liked him immensely and were delighted, to a man, that Abraham would be with them.

The wide single rotor flailed the cold night air as the Texas-built Sea Panther lifted slowly off the runway. It rose vertically for fifty feet, then tilted north toward the Sea of Galilee and rocketed away into the night, climbing to five thousand feet. When it reached the Ceasefire Line, it would drop down drastically, in order to come in under any Syrian radar that might be active. Unlikely, but remotely possible.