CHAPTER 18
E
ddie and Simon were exceptional trackers. Starting from where Decker had last been seen, they worked the ground inch by inch until they had picked up her trail.
Decker appeared to have started back toward the vehicles, but then had diverted for some reason. They couldn’t figure out why. Then, they came across another set of tracks. She appeared to be following someone.
Whoever it was, he was leading Decker due west, directly away from the pit. Harvath was pissed off at her all over again.
What was she doing?
He could not have been clearer with her.
Damn it.
She seemed determined to get all of them killed, including herself.
Walking off, though, was soon no longer the worst part. Two hundred meters into their hunt, Eddie picked up on a third set of tracks. Decker was being followed.
Ash signaled for them to split up. He took Simon and Mick into the jungle to flank, while Harvath and Eddie stayed on Decker’s trail and closed the gap with whoever was following her.
Despite his size, Eddie moved with incredible speed. He ran with his lips pulled back, his jet-black Van Dyke highlighting two sharp canine teeth that made him look like some kind of giant vampire.
While Harvath was tripped up twice along the overgrown path, Eddie never once lost his footing. It was like watching an enormous jaguar tear through the jungle.
And then, out of nowhere, he put on the brakes, thrust his left hand behind him, and signaled for Harvath to stop.
Harvath did as he was ordered and waited while Eddie surveyed something in front of them. Finally, he waved Harvath up to join him.
Cradling the shotgun he had taken from LC1, Harvath crept up to where Eddie was on his stomach peering through the foliage.
Through a quick series of hand signals, the Brit relayed to Harvath what he had seen. He parted a cluster of ferns and rolled to his left so Harvath could peer through.
In the distance, was a small village. There couldn’t have been more than ten, perhaps, thirteen individual huts, as well as a smattering of animal pens and some sort of communal pavilion.
“Which one?” Harvath whispered.
“The big one,” Eddie replied. “Three o’clock.”
He had a small monocular with him and he handed it to Harvath so he could surveil the village.
After the pavilion, the hut was the largest structure in town, which wasn’t saying much. There were pens, but they were empty. There were no animals, no signs of life at all. No children, no smoke from cook fires, no nothing. It was a ghost town.
“Are you positive?” Harvath asked.
Eddie nodded.
“Can you lase it for Ash?”
The man nodded and hailing his boss over the radio, relayed everything to him. He then removed a black tube the size of a half-smoked cigarette and depressing its switch, painted the roof of the big hut with a tiny green laser. Ash radioed back and confirmed the target. Now, all they had to do was come up with a plan.
Harvath snapped a mental grid over the scene and surveyed the village one slice at a time. He was trying to figure out two things—first,
where was everyone?
and second,
was this a trap?
What looked like heavy tire tracks on the edge of the village helped bring the picture quickly into focus.
Handing the monocular to Eddie, he showed him what to look for. Once the man had seen it, he radioed Harvath’s plan to Ash, who agreed. Stepping out of the jungle, Harvath and Eddie cautiously made their way down to the village.
There was sparse cover and concealment, and they took turns moving and providing overwatch for each other. In any other situation, exposing themselves by running through so much open space would have been insane, but the circumstances offered no other alternative.
When they made it to the village, they pulled up at the first hut, flattened their backs against the wall, and took several heavy, but quiet gulps of air.
Once their breath had begun to return, they tried to listen beyond the thudding of their hearts and the blood rushing in and out of their ears.
Was there any sound coming from inside that hut?
They waited and listened. After enough time had passed, Harvath directed Eddie to the hut’s lone window on that wall as he made his way forward in anticipation of hitting the front door.
At the edge of the wall, Harvath flashed Eddie the five-second signal and then disappeared from view. Coiled tighter than a jack-in-the-box, Eddie began counting backward, ready to pop into the window.
Harvath slipped beneath the hut’s front window and positioned himself outside the front door. As he mentally kept track of the countdown, he placed his hand against the door and applied a whisper of pressure. This was a village in the Ituri rain forest. It was amazing there were even doors. He didn’t expect to find any locks.
When his countdown hit zero, he applied pressure against the door. Encountering no resistance, he swung it open wide and spun inside. At the same moment, Eddie and his AK-47 announced themselves via the window.
The hut, as they had expected, was empty.
Harvath did a quick reconnaissance, while Eddie extricated himself and took up a defensive position outside.
There was nothing at all to tell Harvath what had happened. Everything seemed to be normal. As best he could tell, the family in this hut had been living their lives the way they normally did until something had happened, and they had all disappeared. Seeing a doll lying in the corner, Harvath corrected himself. The people of this village hadn’t disappeared. They had been cremated.
Death dripped from the thatched rooftops of this village. The sooner
they could get Decker and get the hell out of here, the better he was going to feel.
Stepping back outside, he waved Eddie up to the next hut and let him clear it.
It was empty—as was the one after that, and the one after that. The only hut that appeared to have any life was the big one, and that was where Eddie had seen a man rushing a woman, who they all believed to be Jessica Decker, inside.
One hut away from the big one, Harvath and Eddie stopped and crouched down.
“I guess we now know why the burn pit was so large,” the Brit said.
It didn’t make any sense. “Why would they need to take out an entire village?”
“Maybe they were all infected.”
Harvath hoped that wasn’t true. Not that it made any difference. These people were all dead. Their children were dead. Those were the little skulls they had seen back at the pit. There might be even more, just waiting to be uncovered. The idea of going through that little lake of ash with a rake was more than Harvath could take.
He held up three fingers, counted down, and spun into the hut. It was empty. Just like he knew it would be. With this side of the village secure, they waited inside for Ash and Mick to come down and join them. Simon would remain out of sight in the jungle to provide overwatch.
Once the rest of the team arrived in the hut, Ash deferred to Harvath.
“She’s your colleague,” he said. “How do you want this to go down?”
It was a sign of respect. Technically, she was his colleague and he should be the one making the call as to her recovery.
Harvath gave Ash a nod. “Okay,” he said. “Here’s how we’re going to do this.”
•••
The improvised flashbang grenade Harvath had fashioned created more
bang
than
flash
, but it did the trick. Before the occupants of the hut knew what was happening, the entry team was already inside.
Harvath moved to cover Decker while Ash and Mick took down the two tangos.
No sooner had Harvath gotten to her, than she began screaming.
“No!” she cried. “Stop!”
She fought to push Harvath out of the way and get around him.
He grabbed her wrist and tweaked it, just enough to get her attention.
“That hurts,” she protested.
“Good,” he replied. “Now back up.”
It wasn’t a request.
When she failed to move, he applied more pressure. The pain brought her up onto the balls of her feet, and he stepped her out of the hut, to allow Ash and Mick to finish securing the two inside.
“Don’t hurt them,” she ordered.
Harvath let her go.
“Who are they?”
“The son’s deaf,” she replied. “The father used to help at the clinic.”
“Why did you wander off?”
“I spotted the boy and I wanted to see where he was going. I thought he could tell us something.”
“You should have gotten me first.”
“And what if I had lost him? What if he hadn’t come back here?”
She had a point, but Harvath didn’t feel like debating with her.
“I don’t care what the situation is,” he answered. “You don’t go off by yourself. Now, why was the father following you?”
“Because he was worried.”
“About the boy?”
“
About everything
,” she exclaimed. “Look at this village. There’s no one left. What do you think they filled that oven with?”
“Did he tell you that?”
Decker nodded.
“Does he know what happened?”
“He knows more than we do.
A lot
more.”
CHAPTER 19
G
ENEVA
, S
WITZERLAND
H
elena was angry. She was angry with everyone—with Bentzi, with Damien, with her father for never finding her, never rescuing her after she was kidnapped. The one person she wasn’t angry with was herself.
She had an excellent quality of life in Israel. She had an apartment and a car. She shopped pretty much wherever she wanted and went to the best clubs and restaurants. She made more money in two months than she would have back home in Eastern Europe in a year.
She had thought about modeling. In fact, she had been asked countless times by photographers to sit for them, but Bentzi had forbidden it. He claimed it wasn’t good for her to have photos floating around out there. It made sense, but as was usually the case with Bentzi, there was what he called the “truth” and then there was reality.
Israel was everything to him. He would say or do anything to protect it. Bending or flat out breaking the truth was all just part of the job.
Whatever needs to be done.
It was his one and only directive. And he applied it without remorse.
After what he had experienced at the hands of the enemy, she couldn’t blame him. But she wasn’t the enemy.
He didn’t want her modeling because he wanted to keep her dependent upon him, for
everything
. The schedule, the insane travel, the assignments—all of it conspired to keep her isolated. Even when she did meet men from the Mossad, it was always when they were in the field. And the ones she liked were never assigned to her team more than once.
And then there was the work. While the pay was better, she was still in the sex trade. Bentzi, for lack of a better word, was simply an overeducated, government-employed pimp. He paid her, housed her, picked out her clothes, and told her where to go and what to do. She wasn’t a Mossad agent, she was a Mossad
asset
and she carried no delusions to the contrary.
She was nothing more than a tool—a tool that Bentzi, and on a grander scale, Israel, could use to secure things it wanted. Tools were hard, cold objects that waited to be picked up for a job. Once that job was through, they were hung up, put in a box, or cast aside.
Maybe some affection from Bentzi would have made a difference. She caught snatches of it from time to time. It was why she liked to drink with him.
If they were someplace he felt safe, like the house by the sea, sometimes she could get him to go beyond a second drink. That’s when the real Bentzi came out. Unfortunately, those times were too few and much too far in between. They weren’t enough to nourish a person. She needed more and there was a very good chance that Bentzi didn’t have more in him. The only way she was ever going to find what she needed was to get out.
But to get out, she needed a plan. Pierre Damien was it.
The fact that Bentzi believed she had fallen for him stunned her. She was a good actress, probably better than most, but she had never been able to fool him about anything. When she said she hadn’t fallen for him, she had meant it.
Nevertheless, he had decided to recall her. It wasn’t like Bentzi. Some jobs took longer than others. He knew that. She had never failed him before. She wouldn’t start now. She just needed more time.
This wasn’t about Bentzi. It wasn’t even about Israel. This was about her. If she had given him what he wanted, the assignment would already be over. She wasn’t ready yet. There was still something she had to put in place. When it was done, she would gladly give Bentzi everything, and then she would disappear.
Sitting in her apartment, she understood the pressure he was under. And though she had not seen Bentzi’s boss, Nava—she could sense that she was in Geneva. Bentzi always acted differently when she was around.
More than likely, Helena figured, it had been Nava who had pulled the plug on the assignment and had moved to have her recalled to Israel. That would explain a lot.
Most of all, it would explain the high-level of concern the Institute—as the Mossad was known—was expressing over Damien.
Before being inserted into the United Nations, Helena had been given a heavily redacted file on him. The product of a Canadian father and an American mother, Damien possessed dual citizenship and had made his initial fortune in oil and natural gas, eventually branching out into petrochemicals and pharmaceuticals. He had been married only once and had lost his wife to cancer. They never had children, and he never remarried. Business and philanthropy were his passions.
Up until his forties, Damien’s philanthropy had helped fund research into illnesses, like the cancer that had taken his wife, and had provided money to hospitals and universities, which saw his name placed on the wings of several buildings. Then, something changed.
It started with a book—a small, scholarly treatise that cracked a mental door. That book led to others, which led to lectures and documentaries. Those led to a reexamination of who and what he was supporting through his generous donations. He had made his money by taking from the earth, but he had never given anything back. It was an epiphany packed with revelations, one of the greatest being that he had done the world a favor by never having children.
When interviewed by the media, Damien was always quite candid about his conversion, and his belief that the earth couldn’t sustain its current rate of human growth. Even with technological advancements like fracking, crop management, and vaccine production, there were a finite amount of resources being divided up among an exploding population.
People were not only breeding like rabbits, but thanks to advances in sanitation and medicine, they were no longer dropping like flies as one researcher had put it. Left unchecked, it was a death sentence for the planet. Damien had committed himself to doing everything he could to make sure that didn’t happen.
In one of the articles Helena had read, an interviewer had labeled Damien a Neo-Malthusian—someone who advocated for population control programs in order to preserve existing resources for current and
future generations. Damien, as he always did when people tried to put labels on him, laughed it off. The Mossad didn’t, because they knew what Damien really was.
In addition to being a supporter of overpopulation theory, he was a eugenicist who believed that favorable genetic qualities should be advanced while unfavorable traits should be limited, or discontinued altogether. He dreamt of an earth with a much reduced, “healthier” population.
That, in and of itself, would never have been enough to rise to the attention of Israeli intelligence. People were free to subscribe to any crackpot ideas they wanted. But what had piqued the Mossad’s interest in Damien was his particular enmity toward the Jewish state and the considerable wealth he was applying against it.
Via multitudinous foundations and so-called “advocacy” organizations, he was waging a global public relations campaign bent on painting Israel as the source of all the Middle East’s problems.
In the United States, he sent groups into American churches to poison congregations. On college campuses, his organizations recruited addle-brained university students to spread the message about “the real Israel.” Then he funded similar propaganda organizations in Israel, targeting young Israelis and convincing them their nation was evil.
Was it anti-Semitism?
the Mossad wondered.
Anti-Zionism?
A combination of both?
The more the Institute looked into Damien, the more astounding the extent of his efforts became.
The man seemed particularly committed to weakening Israel’s relationship with the United States. Billboards and newspaper ads had been taken out exploiting low points in their relationship and highlighting events such as the spying of Jonathan Pollard.
He had established a legal foundation that paid American lawyers to go after U.S. Defense contractors with class-action lawsuits on behalf of Palestinians wounded and killed by U.S.-made weapons.
Prostitutes were paid to sleep with and then threaten to blackmail pro-Israel Members of Congress while on Congressional delegations to the Jewish state. Ultimately, the hookers would back off, claiming that they had been hired by the Mossad and couldn’t go through with it.
And then there was the UN.
Over his adult life, Damien had been offered plumb international ambassadorships by three different Canadian Prime Ministers. Each of which he had declined. Despite his professed love of Canada, where he made his home, he had been too busy running his businesses to focus on running an embassy.
That changed, though, in his sixties when he stepped back from the businesses and spent more time focused on his philanthropy. When Damien was asked to serve Canada at the United Nations, and was told which position he would get, he accepted.
He already had a good relationship with the Secretary-General and was honored when the General Assembly voted to appoint him to be Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations Population Fund.
The Fund touted itself as the lead UN agency for delivering a world where every pregnancy was wanted, every birth was safe, and every young person’s potential was fulfilled. They prided themselves on shrinking the size of families while simultaneously making them healthier. It was the perfect place for Damien.
As an Under-Secretary-General, he not only received diplomatic immunity, but he was also admitted to one of the most exclusive clubs in the world, Secretary-General’s Senior Management Group, or SMG for short.
The fifty-member SMG acted as a quasi board of directors, advising the Secretary-General and helping to ensure the coherence and strategic direction of the entire United Nations organization.
The UN had always been a hotbed of anti-Zionism, but Damien was like a bellows when it came to fanning the flames. Whether it was his charisma, or the esteem that members held him in because of his vast fortune, he possessed tremendous sway. He never missed an opportunity to harm Israel.
He was also very anti-America.
Normally, this would have provided an opportunity for the Israelis and the Americans to work together. A foreign diplomat working behind the scenes to undermine the efforts and image of both countries cried out for a concerted effort. Though his tactics were different when it came to the United States, Damien was working even harder and pump
ing even more money into weakening it. The sticking point was his dual citizenship.
But because he held American citizenship, the United States was limited in what it could, and would, do to him.
Had Damien been palling around with terrorists in Yemen, they would have droned him. But America took its rights of free speech and free association very seriously. Damien was free to donate to whatever causes he wished. If no laws were being broken, American intelligence made it perfectly clear that it had no desire to begin an investigation. Israel was on its own when it came to Pierre Damien.
It was incredibly shortsighted on the Americans’ part. While the Israelis respected the United States’ views on its freedoms and founding documents, it was the height of negligence to allow those same freedoms and documents to provide cover for subversion. It was like Palestinian terrorists using hospitals and schools from which to launch rocket attacks. At some point you had to make a choice. Do you sit still and absorb the attacks? Or do you go in and eliminate the threat?
As far as Israel was concerned, there was too much at stake to just sit back. The threat needed to be eliminated. And so, they had decided to go after Damien and take him out.
But on the night they did, something happened that changed everything.