The Gamma Option (32 page)

“I hear you, Blainey, but your words fail to consider the realities of the limitations before us. We have looked to the obvious. Now the time has come to look deeper.”

“We’re deep now, Indian. Over our heads, as I make it.” Blaine stopped suddenly, obviously struck by something. “Okay, Indian, make believe you’ve got access to all the tech hardware in the world. Everything considered, could you find a way to get us on top of that rock?”

Wareagle turned his attention back to the map. At last he looked up and nodded emotionlessly.

“Yes, but it would take men as well as machines.”

“But there
is
a way?”

“A means without any guarantees. The spirits provide alternatives, not certainties.”

“That’s good enough for me, Indian.”

“
Fudo-san,
”
Hiroshi said. “I can hardly hear you.”

“We’ve got a strange connection, Hiroshi. I’m talking to you from a Bedouin camp in the Judean Desert. Blame the bad reception on a radio signal traveling via land-line patch-through.”

“And that is where your trail has led you?”

“Among other places, yes.” McCracken paused. “Did you mean what you told me in Japan? Would you really do
anything
to right the wrong of your aiding Rasin?”

“I have violated my honor,
Fudo-san.
In days past that would be grounds for taking my own life.”

“There’s a way to regain your honor far more worthwhile than that.”

“Anything,
Fudo-san.
If it is within my power, it will be done. Just name it.”

“It’s a long list, Hiroshi. Better grab yourself a pad… .”

When he was finished and the connection broken, Blaine acknowledged Johnny Wareagle’s slight smile and Isaac’s flabbergasted expression.

“Can this really be done?” the old man asked, incredulously.

“Hiroshi can pull it off. The only thing that might stop him—and us—is time.”

“A foe we will have difficulty staring down,” Wareagle reminded them.

McCracken checked his watch. “It’s one o’clock now. Hiroshi says he can be here with the equipment within ten hours. We’ll be cutting it close but we’ll have time. We can’t stop Rasin and the others from releasing their allotments of vaccine. But if we grab him on Masada, he won’t be able to unleash Gamma on the world on Independence Day.”

“And just how do you think he plans on doing that anyway?” Isaac wondered.

“If I’m right, the key is Tehran. Can you get a message to your people in the city?”

“I was about to contact our team leader. He can’t reach the individual cells directly, but there’s a signal he can employ meaning abort.”

“No! You can’t abort. Do you hear me? Firestorm is more important now than ever!”

Isaac looked totally confused. “Maybe you forget that the government was supplying the Apaches, and without them Firestorm has no chance of succeeding.”

“We’ll worry about them later. For now you’ve just got to trust me. Operation Firestorm
must
go on as planned.”

“Then why did you ask if I could get a message into the city?”

Blaine looked him in the eyes as he spoke. “You know where Evira is. I want her rescued. Send the word.”

“The risk! The danger!”

“It’s like this, Isaac. Without her, I might never be able to find my son. If she dies, he probably dies too. Sound simple? Let me put it another way. If I can’t save the kid, I might just help Rasin empty his cannisters filled with the Gamma virus.” And then he added to Wareagle, “I just can’t see the fucking point anymore.”

“But you see something the rest of us as of yet cannot, Blainey.”

“My eyes may be playing tricks on me, Indian. Let’s hope to hell they are.”

“Is there anything else?”

“No,” Yosef Rasin replied to the leather-clad Lace, “I believe you have everything covered.”

“Not quite,” returned the tall woman with the hard-muscled body. Her eyes turned toward the base of the mountain, where motion was visible amidst the floodlights the army had set up for itself. “But our friends down there are sure to cover anything we may have missed.”

“You still believe McCracken is alive?”

“I don’t believe he could have been killed as easily as your reports indicate.”

“So if he comes …”

Lace smiled and her neck muscles tensed. “Let him.”

And then she took her leave to rejoin Tilly in a sweep of the fortified positions she had arranged on Masada before night had fallen. Rasin had elected to concentrate his base on Masada’s northern front, just above the remains of Herod’s palace. Much of the large bathhouse, terraces, and labyrinth of storehouses had undergone extensive reconstruction and regained a measure of their original fortification. The remainder of structures on Masada were scattered across its rock-littered vastness. Rasin had expected the posting of their forces to begin at the guardhouse two hundred yards from the northern edge. But, fearing an attack, Lace had elected to disperse a number of guards along the entire perimeter so security could be maintained from all directions. If an attack came, they would know about it well in advance.

All the lights atop the mountain had been turned on, casting ancient Masada in an eerie, modern glow. Rasin was amazed by it. He could almost see to the ends of the mountaintop from his perch on the bathhouse roof. He had been wise to listen to Lace, wiser still to bring with him his personal commando force composed of outcasts like himself—a carefully chosen group of men tossed out of the military for brutality to Arabs. In short, a band of cutthroats. He did not fear an attack from McCracken as much as one from the government should it change its mind. His men were there as a deterrent against that. There was no way even the army’s most elite units could succeed in any assault on him. No way at all. Several of his commandos were armed with anti-aircraft weapons, for if an attack were to come, it would be from the sky.

Rasin breathed deeply and drank in the dry air. The power he had long sought, the power it had been his destiny to achieve, was now within his reach, thanks to Gamma. He checked his watch. Just five hours until he would fire his portion of the vaccine into the air. Around the same time a dozen others, placed strategically across Israel, would release their allotments to be swept by the wind across the small nation to render her safe from the imminent release of the Gamma virus. Since exposure to the ultraviolet rays of the sun would kill the vaccine organism instantly, the key was to time its release so it might spread as close to Israeli borders as possible by sunrise. It wasn’t an exact science, but it was close enough. Besides, fate was on his side.

He had outmaneuvered them brilliantly, of course; he had outmaneuvered everyone. If they ever suspected the lengths he had gone through to assure the success of his plan, if they ever realized the charade he had enacted for the world … Oh well, no sense in pondering over that. The charade was rapidly drawing to its conclusion.

The wind blew over the Dead Sea, smelling vital and alive to him. Perhaps even it would live again with the coming of the morning. Perhaps Moses had not performed the last miracle at all.

What Rasin was about to do proved that much at least.

“Well, old friend, can we pull it off?”

Hiroshi’s attention was so entrenched in Wareagle’s map of Masada spread over the crates in the tin Bedouin house that he barely heard McCracken’s question. Without speaking, he moved to a rip in the house’s metal that served as a window. In the desert land just beyond the camp, bathed in the spill of floodlights powered by portable generators, Hiroshi watched two dozen of his finest men assembling and preparing the incredible stores of equipment they had transported from Japan. A jet transport had managed the flight in eight hours, landing in a private field in Egypt where a pair of commandeered Israeli Sikorsky troop-carrying helicopters were waiting. The equipment was transferred and the flight to the Bedouin village negotiated without incident, arriving just after midnight.

“It can be done,
Fudo-san,
” Hiroshi replied finally without turning back. “The idea is brilliant, but …”

“Yes?”

“The elaborateness of it confuses me. A strafing run aimed at obliterating the stronghold would seem a far more logical strategy.”

“Too random,” McCracken explained. “If Rasin dies or makes it off Masada in all the confusion, we lose our chance of getting the Gamma cannisters back. That’s priority one.”

“I understand,
Fudo-san,
but the fact remains we’re going to be dropping into heavily fortified positions with little or no cover behind us.”

Blaine looked at Wareagle. “Leave that to the Indian. I’m more concerned with how we’re going to stop the soldiers at the base of the mountain from calling in the cavalry once they realize what’s going on.”

“Leave that to me,” Hiroshi said.

The flat desert plain beyond the Bedouin camp lay bathed in a darkness broken only here and there by the floodlights. The only sound breaking the still cool of the night was that of the Sikorsky armored troop carriers warming their engines as the moment of takeoff approached. Hiroshi was kneeling, hands on knees, facing his troop of samurai warriors who knelt before him in a straight line. All had dressed in black tops and black baggy skirtlike bottoms called
hakama.
Though most would be outfitted with modern automatic weapons, their focus now was rooted on the sheathed swords lying before them. On Hiroshi’s cue, they grasped the ancient weapons and pushed them through their belts, the collective motion eerie in its singular calm. McCracken stood nearby, reviewing once more the details of Johnny Wareagle’s plan.

“You can call me a
schlemiel,
” Isaac said, suddenly by his side, “but I thought you said dropping out of the sky was suicide.”

“I said parachuting down was suicide. This is different.”

Isaac humphed. “It’s still the sky.”

“And you?”

“I’m leaving now to pay Isser a visit. He won’t be able to dismiss me after what Eisenstadt told us. We don’t want you to succeed at Masada only to be killed by the real army.”

“The thought had crossed my mind, but you’ll have to reach him first.”

Isaac winked. “I got my ways. It’s just like checkers and now it’s our move. The enemy might have more pieces, but we’re the ones doing the jumping. Have a nice flight.”

“Shalom, you old devil.”

The Sikorsky helicopters streaked through the night sky at a routine altitude, making no effort to disguise themselves from either radar or visual contact.

“Two minutes to showtime, Indian,” McCracken said to Wareagle in the cockpit, the floodlit expanse of Masada growing as they drew closer. “Time to join the others in the back.”

Wareagle took a deep breath and Blaine noted the slightest smile force its way onto his features. “The hellfire, Blainey. Once again we join it.”

“You sound almost glad.”

“No, nor am I sad. I have learned that all exists to provide scale. The hellfire lends definition to who we are and were. The spirits are closest in times like these. They rise into the chaos, but to feel them you too must enter it. Never are their words clearer. Never do I feel closer to my ancestors.”

“Just so long as you don’t pick tonight to join them, Indian.”

Major Ben Shamsi, commander in charge of the security force deployed around Masada, lifted the walkie-talkie to his ear.

“I read you, Corporal.”

“Sir, I have a pair of troop carriers approaching from the south.”

Just then Shamsi’s ears picked up the familiar
wop-wop-wop
of two Sikorskys and he could see the flashing lights marking their path through the night.

“Lieutenant,” he called to the man behind him, “are we expecting reinforcements?”

“Not that I’m aware of, sir.”

The troop carriers dipped out of sight from the officers’ viewing angle at the mountain base station on the eastern side of Masada.

“Raise them on the radio,” Shamsi ordered. “Let’s find out what—”

“Sir!” came the frantic voice of the corporal based on the southern edge. “One of the troop carriers has released objects over Masada!”

“Objects?”

“Bats, sir, they look like huge bats!”

The guard Lace had posted on the southern wall of Masada had actually raised his hand to wave at the lead Sikorsky passing overhead when he saw the black figures plunge out and soar instantly over him. He ducked out of instinct the way one does from a swooping bird. The guard was still fumbling for his walkie-talkie when the first
poof!
sounded from the northern flank of Masada. When he turned back, the entire sky seemed filled with the black shapes spilling out from the guts of the Sikorskys.

The motorized hang gliders had been the centerpiece of Wareagle’s plan from the beginning. They were the only vehicles both quick and maneuverable enough to permit approach to Masada from above. Hiroshi had happened upon this lot by intercepting a shipment originally bound for Delta Force at Fort Bragg. But since he steadfastly refused to deal with the only market for them—terrorists—they had remained in his warehouse until now.

The gliders were truly a magnificent creation, far more technologically advanced than those used by Palestinian terrorists in raids over the Israeli border with Lebanon. Their black wingspan was barely six feet, and the weight of the small motor that propelled them was easily dispersed across the middle. Maneuverability was permitted in all directions, as well as rapid drops and climbs.

In the last moments before the initial drop, McCracken considered the strategy they were employing and how it had been arrived at. He and Wareagle had assumed from the start that Rasin would have lookouts posted all over Masada, not just to the north where his forces were concentrated. This ruled out making their way over by glider from a nearby ridge and necessitated an air drop from the Sikorskys.

“My greatest concern is the lights,” Hiroshi had warned from the outset. “The problem is double-edged. If we shoot them out, my warriors will have nothing to guide their landing. If we leave them as is, we’ll make inviting targets in the sky.”

“What about dropping gas ahead of our approach?”