He wrote his report in careful Farsi on a single sheet of very ordinary store-bought stationery, wiped it clean with a bleach-damp sponge and inserted it, folded many times, into a matchbox, also wiped free of prints. The box went into a cotton bag and would never again be touched by his fingertips. Then he took the Egged bus to Jerusalem.
He got off in the western half and joined the columns of tourists meandering through the Mandelbaum Gate into the warren of historic alleys and bazaars that make up the Old City. An hour later, the matchbox was in its hole behind the loose brick and a chalk mark had been placed on the stonework of a bridge support not a hundred yards from the Via Dolorosa. Neither city-dweller nor tourist noticed a thing.
His precautions were meticulous; he took no risks. But high in a garret window overlooking the latrines of the coffee shop, a young Mossad probationer had the boring chore of keeping the dead-letter drop under observation. He saw Motti make his drop and reported in. Hours later, he saw the swarthy collector slip past the latrines, turn the corner into the deserted alley and make the pick-up. He reported back again.
By nightfall, the swarthy man had crossed the Allenby Bridge back into Jordan, the matchbox was on its way to Tehran and into the possession of Hossein Taeb, head of intelligence for the Pasdaran. Outside Tel Aviv, Ben-Avi, indulging his taste for very old Scotch whisky, was sipping a Chivas Regal as he watched the last glimmer of a dying sun across the darkling Mediterranean.
He had done what he could. Now he could only wait. In espionage, there is an awful lot of waiting.
Chapter Fourteen
HOSSEIN TAEB, ALTHOUGH appointed Pasdaran head of intelligence, was neither a soldier nor an intelligence officer, nor had he ever been. He was a cleric, steeped in the theology of the Shia branch of Islam and utterly devoted to the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, and the revolution that had governed Iran since the fall of the Shah. The report from one of his only two sources inside the Israeli intelligence machine caused him to be consumed with rage.
He knew exactly what had been done to the great facility at Fordow and who had done it. He had been present at the extremely restricted briefing at which Iran’s top nuclear physicists had explained how many years it would take, and how many resources, even to approach the level of what had been lost at Fordow and the stored weapons-grade uranium that was no more.
He knew that years earlier, Israel, impressed by the skills and wealth creation of California’s Silicon Valley, had decided to create her own equivalent. His department had watched the creation of the cyber-city that transformed the once dusty desert township of Beer Sheva into an enclave of gleaming tower blocks. His experts had informed him of the steady recruitment of the finest young brains of his enemy, Israel, to live and work either above ground or below, in Unit 8200 – the best ultra-secret cyber-spy agency this side of Cheltenham or Fort Meade. And he knew Iran had nothing to match it.
But he also knew that it was not the teams of brilliant young Jews at Beer Sheva who were responsible for the destruction of Fordow. Yes, they had penetrated the master computer and primed it with those lethal instructions. But someone else had given them the access codes which they had tried for so long to discover – and had failed to do so. Now Moscow had kindly informed the Supreme Leader of the identity of the person who really had achieved the impossible – a youth from England who must surely rank as the most dangerous cyber-hacker on earth. And he had come to Israel to be rewarded with a free holiday by the waters of the Gulf of Eilat. The cleric summoned his head of operations.
Colonel Mohammed Khalq was not a cleric; he was a born and lifelong soldier and killer. As a youth he had joined the Basij, the Pasdaran reserve of eager volunteers who, in the Iran–Iraq war against Saddam Hussein had hurled themselves in suicidal droves on to the Iraqi minefields along the border to die for Allah and Iran.
His dedication and courage had attracted attention. He moved from the Basij into the Pasdaran regular forces, rising through the ranks in operation after operation, serving in South Lebanon with the Iranian-trained Hezbollah and more recently with Assad’s forces in Syria. He read the report from the Mossad renegade and his gaze met Hossein Taeb’s.
‘He must die,’ said the cleric.
‘Of course,’ said the soldier.
‘I wish you to take personal command,’ said Taeb. ‘I will secure all the necessary clearances. But do not delay. The English party will not be there for long.’
Colonel Khalq knew at once the kill operation would have to be mounted from the sea and that he had an enormous range of sea-going options. The Pasdaran is not only an army within an army, a cohort of secret police, a national enforcer, a purveyor of terror and a guarantor of national obedience. It also has its own air force and navy, its own widespread industrial and commercial empire and its own merchant fleet. Khalq left his superior and went to confer with the general commanding all Pasdaran ships, military and commercial.
The selected vessel was the SS Mercator, formerly bearing an Iranian name, now retitled and flagged out of Valletta, Malta. That tiny republic inside the European Union appreciates the fees it can charge for registering merchant vessels whose cargoes it never needs to examine.
The selection was aided by the fact the Mercator was only a 2,000-ton tramp steamer, scruffy and rust-streaked, unlikely to draw attention to herself as she chugged from port to port with her small cargoes. More, she was currently lying empty in Bandar Abbas, in the deep south of Iran.
The first task was to replace her skipper and entire crew with a team of combat-experienced fighting seamen drawn from the aggressive torpedo boats that regularly harass Western shipping in the Persian Gulf. This was achieved by Ali Fadavi, head of the Pasdaran Navy, within twenty-four hours. The Mercator was then loaded with a cargo of planks, poles and beams, with papers showing they had been ordered by a construction company in Aqaba, Jordan, a thriving port a few miles across the bay from Eilat in Israel.
To cover the last five miles from Aqaba to Eilat the colonel commandeered two of the fastest speedboats in the world, Bradstone Challengers, of which Iran had recently acquired a dozen for no explained purpose. Hammering at over fifty knots across flat water, they are normally the playthings of the rich and self-indulgent. Colonel Khalq had two driven south to be hoisted on to the Mercator with their crews. The racers were hidden beneath tarpaulins on the deck-covers.
Now, he needed his men. He chose twelve marine commandos; all experienced in shore-landings and skilled with small arms at close quarters. The entire party went south by helicopter to meet the Mercator, already at sea, twenty miles offshore, in the Strait of Hormuz. Led by Colonel Khalq, the attack party rappelled from the choppers on to the foredeck of the Mercator and were shown to their cramped quarters among the timbers of the cargo. It would be a five-day run with labouring engine to the Gulf of Aqaba.
Motti in his report had related that security around the villa was assigned to the Eilat police, which had allocated a rotating force of two officers in order not to cramp the holiday of their country’s guests. That was what Motti had been told as the Mossad team flew north. It was not quite true. Meyer Ben-Avi had in fact assigned twenty men from the very special Special Forces unit called the Sayeret Matkal.
The Matkal usually operate outside the borders of the republic and are skilled in penetrating unseen and unheard anywhere in the Middle East and remaining there until they go operational. Their speciality is invisibility, but when they choose to become visible they can be very lethal indeed.
The Mercator had passed the port of Aden and entered the narrows of the Bab-al-Mandab when she was finally identified. For the Israeli aircraft overhead it was a question of elimination. She was the right size, her Maltese flag fooled no one and her wake showed she was churning along as fast as she could. A quick check in the office of the harbourmaster of Aqaba revealed that this was her destination. There were canvas-shrouded humps on her deck and the Jordanian constructor which had supposedly ordered a cargo
of timber had gone into receivership several months earlier. Hossein Taeb’s intelligence unit was seemingly long on motive but a tad short on detail. After Jeddah, the SS Mercator was monitored all the way to Aqaba.
When the ship reached her destination she did not berth in the inner harbour but moored in the roads. Using the Mercator’s davits, the two speedboats were lowered into the water and tethered beside her. Fully fuelled, they could cross the five miles to the Gulf of Eilat in minutes, then race south to make rendezvous with the much larger and more heavily armed Pasdaran warship steaming north.
Before leaving Iran, Colonel Khalq had instructed the agent who had serviced Motti’s dead-letter box, now in Jordan and posing as a tourist, to cross the land border into Israel. Thence, still a harmless tourist, he would head south to Eilat and reconnoitre the villa described by Motti, south of the resort and close to the bar that had once been run by Rafi Nelson.
Watching through field glasses from the shore, the agent saw the Mercator arrive and, in a rented boat, went out to confer with his commander.
In the captain’s cabin he was able to describe the target villa minutely. He had seen the two Eilat policemen on guard at the gate. He had not seen the Sayeret Matkal hidden inside the villa or in the surrounding landscape.
He had noted the English party of six: three men, the mother and her two sons, one of whom, shy and nervous, had to be encouraged into the warm blue water. He had not produced a camera near the villa but was able to create accurate sketches, which he now passed to Colonel Khalq. The colonel planned his attack for the following night.
It was two in the morning, the hour of the night assassin, when the two speedboats slipped their moorings and eased out into the gulf. There was no need for speed – that blistering pace would be needed for the escape down the gulf to the Red Sea. Since darkness had fallen at nine the previous evening, the lights of the tourist magnet of Eilat city had blazed to the west and the music from a hundred bars, restaurants, clubs and parties could be heard across the silent sea. Behind them, the industrial port of Aqaba, once liberated from the Turks by Lawrence and the Hashemites, was quieter and, by 2 a.m., asleep. The powerful but muzzled engines of the two Challengers made little more than a burble and they drove the speedboats westwards at under ten knots.
The scattered lights of the out-of-town villas came into sight south of the town, set in their own grounds. Earlier, in daylight, crouching in the rigid inflatable that served as the Mercator’s lifeboat, should its crew ever have to abandon ship, the colonel had mingled with holidaymakers and cruised off the beach, noting the location of the target house. A lone beach bar acted as a marker. They would make landfall a dozen yards to one side of it, with a clear hundred-yard run to the target.
Each Challenger had a crew of two. In each speedboat, with them were six armed commandos. There was room for more, but Colonel Khalq wanted no colliding as they leapt into the knee-deep water and raced up the beach. The firepower of twelve experienced shooters would be more than enough to eliminate the targets.
He did not know that other eyes, aided by powerful night-vision lenses, had noted the speedboats emerging from the blackness of the sea and heading for the beach. Quiet orders were issued inland, not in Farsi but in Hebrew.
The colonel’s men made perfect landfall and were almost in line abreast as they began their race across the sand. They could have been dropped by the snipers much earlier, but the Matkal also had their orders. There was no one in the villa but the dummies, curled up, seemingly asleep, in their beds. The Pasdaran reached the villa, with its open doors and windows, raced inside and ran upstairs. Then the firing started, shattering the quiet of the night, causing others a hundred yards away to jerk from their slumber with yells of alarm.
The other tourists, waking in their villas up and down the beach, dived for cover. The last two drinkers at the beach bar swore and went for the floor, joining the barman.
Inside the target villa there was no resistance. Every bedroom was invaded, the sleeping figures sprayed with bullets. The youngest commando ran into a bedroom as Colonel Khalq rushed out. By the watery-green half-light of his night-vision goggles, he clearly saw the form of a blond youth in white cotton pyjamas, soaked in blood from chin to waist, sprawled across the dripping sheets. He turned and followed his colonel. Job done. Mission accomplished.
The dozen assassins ran back out of the villa the way they had come – through the front doors and windows. The silenced rifles of the snipers made no sound. The panicking tourists heard nothing. Colonel Khalq wondered just before he died why the two Eilati policemen had not been where he had seen them during the afternoon cruise offshore. His query was never answered.
Like the Special Forces men at Chandler’s Court, the Matkal were using hollow-point ordnance. Each round penetrated the running body and then expanded to leave an exit hole the size of a saucer. All but two died. The orders had been quite clear. One, maybe two, had to make the shoreline and scramble aboard the boats. The other ten made no more than fifty of the needed hundred yards.
The young one who had been with the colonel in the boy’s bedroom was a survivor. He realized his comrades were dropping around him but thought for a few seconds they were merely stumbling and wondered why. Then he was knee-deep in seawater, reaching for the hands stretching towards him. The two Challengers, engines roaring, swerved away from the beach and raced for the darkness. No bullets pursued them.
From a bunker above and behind the target villa Avi Hirsch watched the cream smudges of the two wakes fade into the darkness. He had been allowed to leave his number two in command of the station in London so that he could fly home and control the Eilat operation. After all, he had reasoned to Meyer Ben-Avi, the idea had resulted from a talk in a bug-proof room off Palace Walk between himself and a wily old knight who had spent his career with MI6 with which Mossad had done joint operations before.
It took the two Challengers an hour, racing flat out down the Gulf of Aqaba, to rendezvous with the Pasdaran warship. The speedboats, short on fuel, were craned aboard for the cruise home; out of the Red Sea, along the coast of Oman and back to the Strait of Hormuz. But radio waves are faster.
What the debriefed commandos had to report, eavesdropped by the young listeners of Unit 8200 under Beer Sheva, reached Hossein Taeb within an hour. He in turn reported to the Supreme Leader in his frugal apartment on Pasteur Street. There had been heavy loss of life among the commandos when the infidel Jews woke up and fired back. But they had been too late. The English boy was dead – there had been eyes-on identification by one of the Pasdaran survivors.
This fiction was maintained in Israel. Jubilation would have leaked sooner or later. For the media based in Eilat, it was a big story – a clash between two rival criminal gangs on a beach outside the town in the middle of the night. Tourists were reassured. The gangsters had all been caught by the police, who had been tipped off and were waiting for them. Like most media stories, it lived and then it died. Tourists have the delightful habit of going home when their holiday is over. No one had even seen a body – they had all vanished before dawn.
The warmest congratulations were offered to the six actors from the Israeli Film School, especially the lookalike youngster with his blond-dyed locks who had mastered his role as Luke Jennings. And also to the technical department of Spiro Films, who had created the six dummies which, when shot full of bullets, exploded into buckets of very real-looking blood.
The former were also praised for maintaining their fluent English on the flight from Brize Norton to Ovda airport and to the villa. Even Motti had been convinced.
There were celebrations in Tehran, which remained convinced that the destroyer of the Fordow centrifuges was at last rotting in the hell of infidels.
In Moscow the Iranian ambassador asked for a personal reception with the Vozhd. He intimated that he had significant information to impart and that it should be directly to the ears of the master of the Kremlin. When they met it was th
e Russian who was initially sceptical. His mood turned to congratulations and pleasure when the Iranian diplomat disclosed that, during a putative holiday visit to Israel, the cyber-genius Luke Jennings had been assassinated by a group of Iranian commandos.
When the ambassador had left, after politely declining a toast in vodka, the Russian put in a personal call to his spy chief at Yasenevo. Yevgeni Krilov accepted the congratulations with pleasure. But when the call ended he demanded some files from the archive. It is a simple fact that espionage centres the world over keep tabs on their known friends but far more detailed files on their enemies. The archives at Yasenevo contained copious information on known staffers with the CIA, the FBI and other American agencies. It was matched by the information on those in Britain’s MI5 and, even more so, in MI6. And they went back many years.
Sir Adrian Weston had come to attention when he was promoted to head the Eastern Europe department during the Cold War. That might have ended, officially at least, but interest in him had not. His elevation to deputy chief of MI6 was also very much on file. This was the file Yevgeni Krilov called for. When it arrived, he studied it for an hour.
It reported that the then Mr Weston had been quietly but spectacularly successful against the USSR and later against the Russian Federation. It was known that he had recruited two major Soviet and Russian traitors, and the recruitment of others was suspected. It seemed his speciality was deception: misleading, diverting attention, trickery. There was even a reference to a possibility that, after retirement, he had been quietly recalled as adviser to the new British Prime Minister.
Was he back in harness? Everything that had recently gone wrong for Russia and her allies bore the hallmark of the man whose file in front of Krilov was an inch thick. And there was a photo, another shot snatched through a buttonhole camera at a diplomatic reception years earlier. His suspicion hardened into near-certainty. It had been Adrian Weston who had visited Fritsch at the Vaduz Bank – he had been photographed crossing the lobby, and the photo in the file was obviously of the same man. But he had clearly not swallowed the bait. Disaster had followed disaster. Krilov stared at the photo and began to have doubts about the Gulf of Eilat massacre.