Page 21 of The Last Days

  The Hellfire missile exploded from the side of the chopper. It sizzled through the cold night air and devoured its prey. The fireball filled the canyon. The Apache pilot pulled up immediately and narrowly cleared the mountain pass ahead of him. The Renault lost control. It skidded from side to side, then careened off the right side of the road, down toward the banks of the Euphrates and barely coming to a stop before plunging into the fast-moving river.

  The Range Rover kept moving. Its driver and crew didn’t have time to worry about the fate of the men behind them, even Colonel Juma. They blew through the narrow mountain pass and figured they had the Americans beat. Until they came around the next bend. That’s when they saw Mongoose One Five. The other Apache. It was a half mile down the road, hovering no more than twenty feet off the road and exploding from its side was a Hellfire

  missile with their names on it. Every man’s eyes went wide with fear. And for good reason. It was the last image they’d ever see.

  The driver glanced back at some of the rowdies.

  They were throwing paper airplanes and singing “Ninety-nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall” in English and Hebrew. These kids were in college? It was pathetic. They were like a bunch of five-year-olds. The Americans should put all their high school graduates into the military for a few years, he decided. All of them. Put them through basic training. Make the guys serve at least three or four years. Make the women serve at least two. Just like in Israel. Teach them some discipline. Teach them some manners, if nothing else. It had worked for his kids—zapped the childish arrogance right out of them.

  It had worked for him, too. He’d loved the army—and his annual reserve duty. It had forced him to get in shape, and stay in shape. And driving a Merkava tank sure beat driving a bus. He wished he was mobilizing right now. He’d love to bulldoze his way into Gaza. He’d love to blow Mohammed Dahlan’s headquarters to kingdom come. Too bad he was too old.

  The driver noticed the young woman in the IDF garb sitting toward the back of the bus. She said nothing. She didn’t look anyone in the eye. She was soaking wet but didn’t seem to care. He looked back at the road, and stopped at the approaching red light. It was odd, he thought. She didn’t have a weapon with her. No sidearm. No M-16. Wasn’t it dangerous enough to be out, alone, on a night like this? And come to think of it, she wasn’t wearing boots, was she? Those were tennis shoes. Not even nice ones. They weren’t just soaked from the storm. They were filthy. And cheap. As the father of four and the grandfather of six, the man knew sneakers. He knew each brand and he knew how much they cost. After all, he’d been footing the bill for them for almost thirty years.

  He glanced in the mirror again. They weren’t American sneakers, or anything from Europe. They weren’t made in Israel either. Those shoes were from … where were they from? The light turned green and he pressed down on the gas and began turning right. Hebron. They were from Hebron, the kind you could buy for a few shekels in East Jerusalem if you were too poor to buy anything else. After his brother was gunned down by a Palestinian sniper in Bethlehem when he was a kid, he’d vowed never to buy any product made by the Arabs. And he didn’t care if he was just a lousy bus driver. He wasn’t buying his kids sneakers made in Hebron. He’d rather take out a loan from the bank and …

  Oh my God.

  He slammed on the brakes. Everyone lurched forward. He glanced back. The woman had fallen facefirst on the floor. He reached down under his seat and grabbed for his pistol. She was getting back up. Everyone was screaming. Her coat was off. She was wearing a suicide bomber’s belt. The driver found his gun. He flicked off the safety and wheeled around in the

  aisle

  “Allahu AkbarV she screamed. “No!” he screamed back.

  She pulled a long red electrical cord from her pocket and reached for the ignition switch. He fired his weapon again and again and again—but it was too late.

  The force of the explosion actually lifted the bus off the ground and flipped it over like a child’s toy. The thin metal roof was ripped off like the top of a can of tuna. The windows were blown out and the seats inside the bus simply melted away.

  Everyone on board was incinerated in a blinding flash of orange fire. Then glass and shrapnel and body parts began raining down in a 360-degree radius,

  just outside the Tel Aviv University dormitories. Dorm windows facing the street were shattered, and students not thrown from their beds were jolted awake by the enormous force of the explosion.

  It took emergency vehicles and first responders less than four minutes to reach the blast site. Police cars, ambulances, and fire trucks came screaming from all directions. Shin Bet counterterrorism agents also raced to the scene, as did reporters from dozens of different news organizations and an FBI investigative team from the American embassy, They all descended upon a scene from a horror movie. Splattered blood

  and shreds of burnt human flesh were everywhere. Limbs and fingers and shoes and pieces of the bus were found in the trees and on parked cars and on apartment balconies hundreds of yards away. Emergency personnel, now numbering in the dozens, struggled to keep back dozens of local residents coming out of their homes to see what was going on and to offer whatever assistance they could.

  In New York and Atlanta and Fort Lee, New Jersey, American cable television networks cut into prime-time programming with live coverage from

  the grisly scene of breaking news. The images were almost too horrific to broadcast in family rooms all over the world, and hard facts and actual, confirmed details in those early minutes were sketchy. The only thing certain

  was that the scene was absolute chaos, But the worst was not yet over. In the darkness and rain and chaos no

  one noticed—or bothered to pay attention to—the dark young man approaching from the south on the sidewalk closest to the dorms. He looked like any other Israeli grad student trying to look more Western than Middle Eastern.

  If any of the dozens of local police officers on the scene had bothered to check his papers, they would have discovered that the twenty-six-year-old Mohammed Saleh was not Israeli but a native of Jericho. If anyone had bothered to check his duffle bag, they would have discovered it wasn’t filled with clothes or books but five pounds of nails and broken glass and fifteen pounds of military-grade TNT, scraped out of Egyptian mines littered throughout the sands of the Sinai Desert. If anyone had bothered to check his Walkman, they would have discovered that it contained no cassette tape or CD but a sophisticated ignition device built in Iran and smuggled six months earlier through Saudi Arabia and Jordan and then into the West Bank. But no one bothered to check the young man at all. There was too much to do, too many to console.

  So Mohammed Saleh moved almost invisibly through the crowd, maneuvering for the best view of the crime scene, on the opposite side of the street from the pack of hungry media wolves, in full view of the lights, cameras, and boom microphones. He worked his way to the center of the crowd, numbering at least fifty or sixty at this point. He closed his eyes, bowed his head, said a silent prayer to Allah. Then he pressed Play.

  The second explosion was not as powerful as the first, but it was far more diabolical. The force of the blast melted torsos and decapitated victims closest to the flash point, as flying nails and broken glass, hurling through the air at the speed of sound, shredded bodies in the next perimeter, all in full view of a worldwide television audience. And little did anyone know that so much more was coming.

  Yuri Gogolov watched the coverage without emotion.

  He did not grieve for the victims or their families. But he could already imagine their reaction, and the visceral reaction of Israel’s top leaders. Their rage was palpable, even from Tehran. So was their hunger for vengeance. Reciprocity.

  They would force Doron to act. They would insist that he unleash the full fury of the Israeli Defense Forces on the Palestinian population centers, and Doron would oblige them. Because that’s the way the game was played.

  TWENTY FOUR

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sp; Bennett sat bolt upright.

  He was trembling, soaked with sweat. He felt clammy and disoriented, He gulped in oxygen and tried not to hyperventilate, not to succumb to the panic rising within him. The air was cool, even chilly. He couldn’t smell any smoke. There were no flames, no trace of fire or burst pipes, no hint of any kind that Gaza Station was under attack or that the Hotel Baghdad had collapsed above them. So where was he? What had just happened? Where was McCoy?

  The narrow, windowless room was pitch-black but for the luminescence of his wristwatch and the digital clock on the VCR a few feet away. Bennett ran his hands through his wet hair and tried to get his bearings. Had all that just been a nightmare?

  It seemed hard to believe. It was too vivid, too real. But nothing else made sense. He was still alive. That much seemed certain. If it had been real, if he’d just been killed in a massive underground explosion, then … then what? The question terrified him. He wasn’t sure if he believed in a higher power or a life hereafter. But what if he were wrong? How many times had he cheated death in the last few hours, the last few weeks? More than he cared to count. But he was gambling, and he knew it. One of these days—perhaps sooner than he realized—his luck was going to run out. One of these days he was going to know for certain the truth of what was on the other side because he’d be there, and that’s what scared him.

  “It’s not that I’m afraid to die. I just don’t want to be there when it

  happens.”

  It was an old Woody Allen line. He couldn’t even remember where he’d heard it. But it suddenly resonated. So did another Allen quip: “If only God would give me some clear sign—like making a large deposit in my name at a Swiss bank.”

  Bennett had spent his whole life avoiding any serious thought of death. Now it was catching up to him. In a sense, God had made a large deposit in Bennett’s account, hadn’t he? Nine-point-six-million dollars, to be exact. He’d been feverishly stashing away cash for years. But what good would it do him if he died tonight in Gaza?

  Bennett stared into the darkness. His heart rate was slowing, but his mind wrestled with unsettling thoughts. In a way, God and the afterlife were kind of like gravity, weren’t they? It didn’t matter if he believed in gravity or not. Gravity was a fact, a simple physical law, a force of nature. A person could stand on the top of the Empire State Building shouting, “/ don’t believe in gravity. I can’t see it. I can’t taste it. I can’t touch it. Gravity be damned.” And then jump. But what then? Would his lack of belief in gravity cushion his fall? Of course not. He’d smash on the pavement and die.

  Gravity couldn’t be seen. But that didn’t mean it wasn’t true. The truth about gravity could be discovered. And wasn’t it smarter to discover gravity before it was too late? Maybe the same was true about God. Maybe it was smarter to find Him before jumping blindly into eternity like a fool without a parachute.

  Bennett looked at the clock on Ziegler’s VCR. The numbers read 4:53, but that didn’t compute—A.M. or P.M.? Bennett’s eyes struggled to adjust. It was A.M. Had he really slept so long? What day was it? He squeezed his eyes shut, trying desperately to focus. It was Monday—no, it was Tuesday— December 28. His body wasn’t rested. The impending sense of danger was so acute it was almost physically painful. He reconciled himself to the fact that he’d just experienced a nightmare—not reality—but somehow it didn’t make the anxiety any less real.

  Something told him evil was coming. He couldn’t see it. He couldn’t prove it. But he had no doubt Gaza Station faced a new threat. But what should he do about it? What exactly was he supposed to say to Ziegler and McCoy when he found them—if he found them? He’d had a little nightmare so they should all abandon ship?

  It sounded ridiculous. He was a strategist, not a fortune-teller. His job was to trade in facts, not premonitions. Why then did he feel so certain? He often acted on less than complete information. He often went with his gut instincts. It’s what kept him ahead of his competitors. It’s what got him so

  farat GSX. He’d trusted his instincts, advised others to put their faith in them, and made a lot of people, including himself, very rich in the process, That’s what finding buried treasure was all about.

  But this was different. The decisions he made in the next few hours, the

  decision the United States made, had enormous consequences. He needed to

  domore than simply find a way to save his own life and the lives of his

  friends from the evil that was coming. He needed to find a way to get the

  peace process back on track and to stop the evil already unleashed. But how?

  He’d never prayed before. He felt like a hypocrite for even thinking about

  it. But maybe McCoy was right. Maybe he’d get an answer. Every fiber of

  his being doubted it. But what could it really hurt?

  “God, if You’re there, if You really exist, please help me. Get us out of here alive. I’m scared of dying, scared of what’s coming. I admit it. But I’m askng You to please protect Erin, wherever she is. And my mom, she’s suffered enough already—amen.”

  Bennett finished his prayer and waited. He’d done it the best he knew how. The room was dark and quiet. He wiped sweat away from his eyes and neck. He wasn’t sure if he should expect an answer—a voice, a light, some

  thing.

  The longer he waited, the more stupid he felt. He had a job to do. He

  reached over to the desk, picked up the phone, and dialed Orlando again.

  He needed to talk with the president. But first he needed to talk with his mom. No luck. The phone kept ringing. No one was answering. He looked at

  his watch again, then put the phone down. He called his own voice mail again in New York, at home and the office. He again called his voice mail at the White House. He rechecked the front desk at the Willard Intercon tinental Hotel where he was staying in Washington until he found a place to rent. Lots of messages—colleagues worried for him, Marcus Jackson from the Times trying desperately to track him down. But none were from his mom. How long should he wait before worry turned to action? And what then?

  The radio receiver crackled to life.

  “Shlomo Six to Shlomo One, do you read me? Shlomo Six to Shlomo One,

  do you read me, over?”

  The Hebrew coming into his tiny earpiece was but a whisper. But even

  amidst the driving rains and rumbling thunder, the voice was still clear and

  audible. The ferocity of the storm did seem to be lessening somewhat. They’d

  been able to get the small prop plane up in the air, after all, and their overpaid pilot hadn’t been shot down by the Israeli Air Force. Now he and his team were descending rapidly, almost at the strike point.

  All systems were go. They were about to actually do what for years they could only dream about. They were witnessing one miracle after another. This was history in the making, and he was in the driver’s seat.

  “Shlomo Six, this is Shlomo One, I read you loud and clear. Go ahead.”

  Akiva Ben David glanced at his wrist. With his gloved left hand, he wiped the rain off his goggles, then off his altimeter. They were passing down through three thousand feet, he told his colleague, who quickly passed the information to his fellow commandos in position not far from the Western Wall. As expected, the cross winds were intense, but all six of them were handling their chutes well. He expected they would all be hitting the Temple Mount—Har Habayit in Hebrew, Haram esh-Sharif in Arabic—any moment.

  “Shlomo One, give me a status check—what’s your ETA?’

  Altogether, there were only twelve of them—six coming in from the air, six more on the ground. It was not a large force, and he would have liked more. But most of his followers were ultra-Orthodox and very few of them had any military training at all. He had more than fifteen thousand dues-paying members worldwide. Some were sabras, native-born Israelis. Others lived in Australia, New Zealand, or in Central or South America. Most lived in the U.S., predomina
ntly from New York, New Jersey, and New England. But very few of them had ever held a gun, much less fired it, or done so on a daring assault on the most holy site in all of monotheism. And jumping out of airplanes at eleven thousand feet in the middle of the night in the middle of a raging electrical storm? As his friends back in Brooklyn might say, Fugghedaboudit.

  “We’re in position. We think we can get to you in less than six minutes.”

  “What about the others?” Ben David asked, the tension in his voice rising.

  “Everyone’s in position. We’re ready to move, over.”

  “Tov. Stand by one.”

  His team thought he was crazy for moving tonight of all nights. But Ben David was adamant. The civil war in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza was a godsend. It meant the Palestinians’ attention was elsewhere. By the time they organized a counterattack, it would be too late. Doron was moving Israeli forces to the borders, sealing them off from the rest of Israel, and Jerusalem in particular. No Palestinian would be able to get to the Temple Mount tonight. Not from the territories.

  Besides, the Temple Mount Battalion would have already succeeded.

  They’d have destroyed the Dome of the Rock and the mosque. With any luck, they’d begin to erect the new Jewish Temple. The raging storm was just more divine icing on the cake. IDF patrols weren’t flying. Security per sonnel on the Mount were staying inside, their feet up on their desks, watch ing TV, playing cards, drinking coffee, doing everything possible to stay out of the whipping winds and bone-chilling rains. Ben David and his men wouId have the critical element of surprise, and that should make all the diffe:rence.

  Ben David made visual contact with his fellow paratroopers. They’d be on the ground inside soon and it was time for a weapons check. He double-checked his own M-4 carbine 5.56-mm machine gun with laser scope, and his 9-mm Glock side arm. He clicked the safeties off both, and adjusted his night-vision goggles. The others followed suit. Then he checked his altimeter again and strained to see something—anything—through the heavy rain and fog. A moment later, there it was.