Ops Files II--Terror Alert (2 page)

Maya placed her nearly empty Glock on the dirt next to her and waited for three fatigue-clad figures to approach along the road. Two men and a middle-aged woman with a perpetual frown on her face: Jaron; Solomon, the camp second-in-command; and Elana, her instructor, who didn’t look happy.

“Well, Wonder Woman, congratulations,” Elana said, her words dripping with mockery, her eyes on the target Maya had just drilled with two rounds spaced three inches apart. “You executed a nun.”

Maya’s eyes moved to the aluminum cutout that had sprung from the doorway on a track – the nun habit and clutched Bible unmistakable.

“And I took out the target,” Maya reminded them.

Jaron nodded. “That you did. But what everyone would remember would be you butchering one of God’s special children.” His words were quiet, but his message was unmistakable.

“You can’t behave as though there are no consequences to your actions,” Solomon added. “And what the hell was that with the terrace?”

“If I’d stayed in the street, I would have been pinned down,” Maya explained as Elana offered a hand to help her up. “So I improvised.”

“You could have killed yourself jumping across the alley,” Elana said, but Maya thought she detected a faint trace of admiration in the stern woman’s voice.

“I didn’t,” Maya said. “I took out the target. And yes, with regrettable collateral damage. But the target’s neutralized.”

Jaron shook his head. “I’m not sure what we’re going to do with you, Maya.”

“How did I score?” she asked.

“Top of all ranges…until you blew a hole through Mother Theresa there,” Solomon admitted.

“Then the lesson here is don’t kill nuns,” Maya said, brushing dirt off the knees of her pants. Elana tossed her a towel and she wiped her face. “I wasn’t expecting the truck explosion.”

“I’m glad our obstacle course is still capable of serving its purpose and surprising our recruits,” Jaron said drily. “All right. We’re done for the morning. Get cleaned up and meet Elana in the mess in twenty minutes.” He regarded Maya. “Are you hurt?”

Maya’s face was unreadable. “Just a few scrapes and bruises.”

“Very well. You’re dismissed.”

The three Mossad instructors watched Maya’s fluid stride as she left the scattering of buildings located in the remote reaches of a military base off-limits to anyone without a top-secret clearance. When she’d turned the corner, Jaron glanced at Elana. “Have you ever seen anything like that?”

“Never. She made it past every hurdle without incident. Nobody’s ever done that since we started using this simulation. The highest anyone ever scored was Itzhak last year, and he got tagged outside the shop. She actually ran the gauntlet and placed the grenade. That’s theoretically impossible.”

“Let’s not forget the nun, though,” Solomon said quietly.

“No, let’s not,” Jaron agreed. “Our Maya poses an interesting conundrum for us, doesn’t she? We all know what would happen in real life if she’d shot a member of the clergy. It would be in the papers for months. We’d be skewered. Heads would roll, regardless of how successful the mission was.”

“Perhaps her activities should be limited to more…surgical missions?”

Jaron nodded. “A sanitizer.”

“Some show more aptitude than others,” Elana said.

“We have no high-level female sanitizers. There hasn’t been one since you hung up your spurs,” Jaron said to her.

Elana nodded thoughtfully. “Yes, I know. It’s a specialized skill set that’s far more demanding than those possessed by our field agents.” Elana paused. “She’s too young and too green to be able to say for sure. She needs more field time, to be stressed in real-world scenarios, tested by life. Then…if she survives…perhaps.”

“What’s your formal recommendation?” Solomon asked her.

“For now? Continue with the training until an opportunity arises for her to go into the field again. I can believe her account of the mission on the island, after watching her for the last few months, but she still has much to learn.”

Jaron grunted, eyes fixed on the smoldering truck chassis. “Hopefully circumstances will cooperate, and she’ll get the time she needs.”

“Hope is rarely an effective strategy for anything,” Elana chided.

“I know.”

Hat Yai, Songkhla Province, Thailand

Chains of dry lightning flashed through plum-colored clouds that loomed over the distant jungle, illuminating the night sky above Hat Yai, a vibrant metropolis in the south of Thailand and the capital of Songkhla Province. The city was modern and prosperous by area standards, and shared the region’s racial and cultural diversity due to its proximity to the Malaysian border.

Pedestrians roved the teeming sidewalks as three-wheeled tuk-tuks buzzed along the clogged streets, their whining singsong engines like the atonal mating cries of gigantic insects. A string of multicolored lights streamed up the side of the mountain the city surrounded, at the top of which a golden Buddha silently watched over the sprawl.

The city center boasted a plenitude of multistory buildings, hotels, offices, banks, and government edifices vying with one another for prominence. Office workers heading home after a grueling day streamed along the arteries, mingling with tourists and pleasure-seekers out on the town for dinner or cocktails. Horns honked in protest as indifferent motorcycles jockeyed for advantage in the dense traffic, the boulevards a kind of controlled pandemonium of near misses and suicide acceleration. Outraged shouts and squeals of brakes punctuated the din of motors and horns.

The Lee Gardens Plaza Hotel was a white monolith that towered over the neighboring buildings, its oversized beige marble columns framing the entryway with palatial splendor. Outside on the sidewalk, street vendors hawked their colorful wares, indifferent to the security forces lounging near the McDonald’s at the side of the hotel entrance.

The narrow cobblestone street that provided access to the hotel was swarming with humanity at rush hour. Waves of pedestrians hurried on their way home, and nobody noticed the scarred motorcycle with a delivery box mounted on the back when it pulled onto the sidewalk in front of the hotel and parked near the restaurant. The rider took his time shutting off the motor and checking the area before making for the far corner and sauntering into the intersection on foot.

Abreeq Zulfi checked his watch as he crossed the street. His timing couldn’t have been better. The security forces were usually lazy, he knew from days of painstaking surveillance, and the police stationed in the area were even more so, especially at dinnertime when their minds were on filling their bloated bellies rather than protecting their flock.

He’d been in Hat Yai for a week, planning the series of bombings that would rock the city, as part of his contract with the BRN – a local Islamist extremist group that, while lacking nothing for motivation, didn’t possess the necessary skills to conduct an effective reign of terror.

Enter Abreeq, who had made a career out of terrorism for his brothers. Abreeq had no specific area of operation, no particular affiliation – he was an equal opportunity mass murderer who was willing to work for any Islamist group that could afford him.

Not that he was in it for the money. Base financial concerns were above him; ideology was his primary motivator. But he had costs to cover and travel and equipment to consider, as well as the maintenance of an extensive network of informants and spies.

Fortunately, the BRN had been able to scratch up the fifty thousand dollars the operation would require, and he’d gone to work, promising a group of bombings that would have the city reeling and put the fear of God into the population, as well as into the foreign interests that used Thailand as their handmaiden, corrupting its good people with consumerism and a reprehensible lifestyle condemned by all who were righteous and holy.

It didn’t give him pause that he was about to murder innocent tourists. In the battle for hearts and minds, there were no innocents. He’d long ago reconciled that the lives of infidels were fair game in the war to further the one true religion. His ideology was flexible enough to enable him to deny that their lives were as precious as those of his employers, and he slept soundly, his conscience untroubled. His psychopathology was perfectly suited to his vocation, at which he was widely considered to be the best.

He paused on the far side of the street and took a final long look at the hotel entrance, and then removed a disposable cell phone from the pocket of his leather jacket and placed a call. The voice that answered was gruff. Abreeq’s was surprisingly high in timbre, his words soft, the tone almost feminine.

“It is in place. Unless you have any final requests, I’ll start the timer,” he said.

“Make it so, my brother.”

“It shall be done.”

Abreeq hung up and dialed a different number – the burner cell phone connected to the timing device and detonator. The call went to voice mail, which was blank, but the ringing was the activation mechanism, and he knew that sixty seconds later the bomb in the delivery box would explode. He wished he’d been able to construct a more deadly device, but the locals had been unable to provide anything save the most primitive of explosives. Still, he’d done his best, and it would kill. The only question was how many.

He would read all about the results of his efforts later, online. For now, he still had two other bombs to place before he was done for the evening.

Abreeq was climbing onto the seat of another stolen motorcycle he’d parked in a garage a block away when the muffled boom of the bomb shook the ground and triggered the alarms of nearby vehicles.

He started the engine and putted down the ramp to where the attendant waited, the man’s attention on the street and the scream of emergency vehicles making their way to the hotel.

All too late, Abreeq thought as he paid.

“What was that?” he asked the attendant, the helmet hiding his features.

“Don’t know.”

Abreeq pulled into the crush of traffic, leaving the downtown area behind. By the time anyone had the presence of mind to seal off the area, he would be long gone, putting the other bombs into position. He wished he could trust the locals with that low-value part of the operation, but he didn’t dare. The authorities couldn’t stop something about which only he knew the details. In his business, secrecy was essential to survival.

Abreeq was on every developed country’s list of most wanted men, and the price on his head varied from insultingly trivial to a king’s ransom. One slip on even a small mission like this could cost him his life. In order to assure his safety, he’d worked through cutouts, never meeting his employers, leaving the materials in dead drops, and ensuring the targets were, in the end, of his own choosing.

In another hour Hat Yai would be shattered from the attacks, and Abreeq would have vanished into the ether, his involvement nothing more than a whispered rumor, on to his next operation, the business of terror never-ending, his services in constant demand.

He checked the time: ten minutes to the next location.

Four police motorcycles rolled past a truck blocking the street on the far side, their sirens in full wail and their lights flashing. He watched as they roared away, rushing to the crime scene, presumably to close the barn door after this particular horse was long gone.

He smiled behind the motorcycle helmet’s tinted visor and imagined the scene at the hotel. The nails and screws he’d affixed to the inside of the delivery box would have sliced a swath of death through the bodies of the bloated tourists, who would never know what had hit them. Like fat, spoiled children, they’d believed themselves safe, insulated from the worldwide struggle of which he was an integral part.

They couldn’t have been more wrong.

At the next stoplight, he pushed the visor up and wiped sweat from his face, and then lowered it back into place with a small smile. The few existing photographs of him were all dated, and he’d had surgery on his nose and chin in Lebanon, altering his profile so he looked nothing like the images. Not that it was a concern – he’d taken care to wear his helmet when within range of the surveillance cameras he’d spotted early on, so even a methodical investigation would yield nothing.

Abreeq would leave it to his contractor to claim responsibility for the attacks, or not, as they liked. Fanfare and credit weren’t his style and didn’t interest him.

His was a pure ambition, his motivation simple: to rid his world of the interlopers who’d lied to his people for generations, who’d robbed them of their heritage and their birthright. Every explosion, every death, was another step toward that goal, and he wouldn’t rest until he’d achieved his aim or died in the process.

But not today. Today he was striking a blow that would have his enemies quaking in fear. Today it would be others who paid the ultimate price in blood, while Abreeq slipped away like a ghost.

Dhaka, Bangladesh

Trash blew along the boulevards of the urban sprawl that was Dhaka, colorful brochures scattered to the winds comingling with discarded wrappers, plastic bags, and bits of unidentifiable material best left unexamined. The entire city suffered from a stench often described as a combination of raw sewage and rot. The Buriganga River, which flowed past the outskirts, was little more than a polluted greenish brown sluice dotted with smokestacks belching poison into the heavens, rendering the stinking water in which the locals bathed and dumped their waste an environmental hazard that could blister skin.

The capital of Bangladesh, Dhaka and its surrounding suburbs were home to over fifteen million souls, many of whom lived in extreme poverty. A pall of pollution blanketed the city as the sun rose, coloring the sky orange and mauve. The juxtaposition of modern green glass skyscrapers against a backdrop of shanties served as a constant reminder of the economic disparity that defined the nation.

Uri Efron shifted on the uncomfortable seat of an ancient Nissan sedan as he and his companion, Gil Rubin, thirty-two years his junior, watched the doors of one of the city’s many mosques. As a senior operative of the Mossad, Uri had been stationed all over the world, but it was difficult to mistake his current posting as anything but a career backhand that he endured with stoic calm. Gil, on the other hand, only with the Mossad for nine years, was less accepting of his fate, and spent a large amount of his day cursing his luck for winding up in a fourth-world slum that made hell sound appealing.