IN THE AIR
Dewey sheathed the knife at his ankle and walked to the front of the cabin.
A steel door led to the flight deck. He grabbed the door handle and moved it slowly down, but it was locked. The door was hermetically sealed; the edges of the door were seamless, steel on steel, no edge.
He looked at the radio next to the door. He could pretend to be the terrorist in the hope of luring one of the pilots back. But if he failed, he would only be giving whoever was waiting on the ground more time to prepare. Dewey’s Arabic was nonexistent and as much as he wanted to risk it, he knew the odds were low. Right now, the element of surprise was his only asset. That, along with his trusty Gerber blade, and Youssef’s Glock no doubt reloaded, sitting on the canvas bench.
Dewey stepped past the blood-soaked corpse of the terrorist. Near the rear of the plane, there was a small bathroom. He stepped inside and flipped the light switch on.
Dewey looked in the mirror. From the nostrils down, his face, mustache, and beard were covered in blood and dried yellow vomit. Blood continued to drip from his nose. At the side of his face, the skin was broken where Bolin had kicked him; his boot had left a gash near Dewey’s ear that continued to bleed. The ear itself was caked in dried blood. He turned on the small faucet and splashed his face with water. The sink ran red with his washed-off blood and vomit.
Dewey looked at himself in the mirror. He had to think. Killing the young, overconfident Youssef was easy. What happened to him now, upon landing, would be beyond his control. A heavily armed team of Fortuna’s men would be waiting for him at the airport. If they caught him, he knew his fate. The revenge of an angry father, a man who also happened to be one of the world’s foremost terrorists. Dewey knew it would be more pain, more torture than any amount of training had ever prepared him for. There was torture designed to elicit information. That was torture he’d been trained to survive. There’s an advantage when your abductor wants something—information, ransom, whatever—because they must at all times worry about keeping you alive. But what waited for him on the ground was something altogether different. It was the torture of vengeance; a father’s vengeance.
He reached into his coat pocket. He felt the small white cyanide pill that he took off the terrorist in Cooktown. He removed it from his pocket. For several moments, he stared at the small white pill.
Dewey looked in the mirror. He focused his eyes, his head still clouded in concussion. He stared into his bloodshot eyes. There, he found himself. He tossed the small pill into the sink and watched it go down the drain.
If I die, it won’t be at my own hands,
he thought.
Dewey exited the bathroom. He searched the cargo hold for anything that might help him escape. A parachute would have been a godsend. On the right side of the hold were steel storage cabinets. Most were empty. One contained a first-aid kit. The last one held several round coils of wire.
He searched the other side of the cabin. But there was nothing of any use. He ransacked the bathroom, the space beneath the orange canvas troop benches, everywhere. He searched frantically for a parachute. But he found nothing.
Dewey had flown in so many Hercs in his life he’d lost count. During Ranger school, the interior of a C-130 became almost like a second home. This was an old one, but still, he couldn’t remember ever being in one and not being able to find a parachute. Above one of the troop benches, he found the switch box that raised and lowered the rear ramp. Dewey had run down enough Herc ramps to know exactly how these worked.
The plane arced right, then began a lazy downward descent. The pilot had begun his approach into Beirut.
If you have no options left, you must create opportunities.
Dewey moved to the storage cabinet at the side of the cabin. He lifted the steel door. He reached in and removed more than a dozen heavy coils of thick steel wire. Beneath the wire, he found a toolbox. Inside the toolbox, he found a large socket wrench.
Dewey moved to the middle of the cabin. A long, rectangular steel plate was bolted in place. He took the socket wrench and placed it on the nut, then, with all of his strength, turned the wrench. The bolt loosened and he removed it. He worked his way down the edge of the steel plate, removing bolts as quickly as he could. Sweat poured from his face and chest as he loosened the bolts. He removed eighteen bolts in all. He took his knife, pried it into the edge of the steel plate, then lifted it up, getting his fingertips beneath the small seam. He lifted the heavy plate and pushed it to the side.
Beneath was a dark compartment, the opening approximately the size of a refrigerator. He reached down and felt the hard rubber of one of the Hercs big wheels.
The plane dipped and lurched to the right.
Dewey stood and ran to the small porthole window at the left side of the cabin. Through thick glass he could see the lights of buildings. They were still a few thousand feet in the air, but were descending quickly.
Dewey ran back to the rectangular opening. Next to the opening was the round coil of wire he had found in the storage locker. He unfurled the wire. At one end was a round eyelet. Dewey took the eyelet and reached down into the wheel compartment. He threaded the eyelet through a hole in the steel hubcap at the center of the wheel. He pulled the eyelet through. The thick wire was now threaded through the center of the wheel.
Dewey pulled the eyelet across the cargo hold. Protruding from the wall was a steel hook. He put the eyelet over the hook.
The plane turned again, this time to the left.
Dewey found the other end of the steel coil. He went to the other side of the cabin and wrapped it around a steel pipe along the wall until it was tight, then placed the other eyelet on a hook. The wire now ran from one side of the cabin to the other, through the hub of the wheel, taut as a guitar string. But would it hold? He’d find out soon enough.
Dewey moved to the window. Beirut was lit up like a Christmas tree.
From the canvas bench, Dewey grabbed the terrorist’s handgun. He checked the magazine, then tucked it into the back of his jeans. He sat down and strapped himself into a seat near the ramp. He reached up and opened the box containing the ramp controls.
A green light flashed inside the cabin. A loud bell chimed three times.
There was a loud cacophony as the landing gear hatches opened to the air. Wind abruptly blew into the hold from the one open compartment.
Seize the opportunity.
Dewey reached up and placed his hand on the ramp switch. He flipped the switch down. The ramp at the rear of the C-130 cracked open. Slowly, like an alligator’s mouth, the ramp opened wide to the Beirut sky. He felt the vacuum as his body was pulled toward the open air. But the seat belt held him to the canvas bench.
As the landing gear descended, the steel wire he’d strung through the wheel went tight. The cabin was filled with a loud grinding noise as the wheel hydraulic fought against the coil. But it held.
The C-130 struggled to maintain a steady landing course as the back of the huge plane lurched violently to the left.
Youssef’s bloody corpse rolled, then bounced through the open hold.
The seat belt was strapped across Dewey’s chest and he held it with both hands. It was the only thing preventing him from being blown out the back of the plane. He closed his eyes as dirt and debris blew through the furious hurricane of wind. The plane was nearly sideways, lurching nearly vertical as the pilot struggled to right the craft.
Dewey braced himself. He had either just committed suicide, or he’d created an opportunity; the opportunity he would need to avoid the clutches of Fortuna, whose men, he knew, would be waiting on the ground below.
MEDITERRANEAN OCEAN
OFF THE COAST OF LEBANON
A mile from Beirut’s rocky coast, due east of the now empty public beach called Ramlet al-Baida, the black waters of the Mediterranean glimmered under the starlit sky.
Moving across the water’s surface, four dull yellow embers of light coursed steadily toward the shore. Eight feet below the surface, four specialized delivery vehicles—SDVs—moved at a fast clip. These SDVs were bottle-shaped objects designed to deliver Israeli commandos as quietly, as invisibly, as quickly as they could to enemy shores.
The front of each SDV was lit by a pair of powerful halogen lights. At the rear of the slender, six-foot-long units, water churned in a bubbleless, frenetic eddy.
On the back of each SDV were two steel handles. Clinging to each handle was a frogman; two commandos per SDV, eight men in all. A squad from Shayetet 13—S’13—Israel’s elite special forces unit, their version of the U.S. Navy SEALs.
Each frogman was as black as the ocean itself. Each man wore tactical combat wet suits, light-duty scuba packs, and carried airtight weapons caches. The commandos kicked their flippers in a steady rhythm, helping move the submersibles through the cold water toward Beirut’s heavily patrolled coast.
They ranged in age from twenty-one to twenty-seven. They were young, but the men of S’13 were the most fearsome and the most fearless soldiers that Israel dispatched to the most dangerous of places. They were the cutting edge of a deadly conflict that had no end.
The commandos swept into Ramlet al-Baida. The SDVs slowed, then shut off a hundred yards from the coastline.
One of the commandos decoupled a coil of wire cable from his belt, then hooked it through the nose of his submersible. He passed the lead to the next diver. Soon, all four subs were linked by the cable. The first diver cinched the cable taut. He and another diver dove down beneath the water. They searched the murky seafloor with a small halogen flashlight for more than a minute. Finally, they found a small steel ring sticking up from the ocean floor, a red LED glimmering on its side. One of the frogmen clipped the end of the cable to the ring, then cinched down the other end until the four units were submerged and secure.
They moved along the wave break to the far west side of the resort beach where an old pier still stood on barnacle-covered, withering timbers. The S’13 team knew the beach like the back of their hands. Infiltration of Beirut’s unfriendly shores was a core part of the frogman’s training and ongoing activity. Each commando removed his fins, then jogged up the wet sand to a dark break beneath the overhanging pier.
Cloaked in the shadows, the eight commandos quickly removed oxygen tanks, masks, fins, weapons caches, and wet suits.
Quickly, each man pulled a pair of running shoes from backpacks and put them on. Nylon ankle sheaths were strapped on next, one for each calf; the left for an SOG double-serrated combat blade, the right for a Glock 26. Next each commando pulled on a pair of black Adidas running pants. Each man removed a Heckler & Koch MP7A1-Z customized fully automatic submachine gun, retractable stock, Zeiss RSA reflex red dot sight on top, silencers screwed into the nozzles, then strapped the weapons over their shoulders and across their chests. Each man strapped a Colt M203 combination carbine and grenade launcher across his back and fastened a nylon ammo belt around his waist. Finally, they put on matching black Adidas running jackets, which loosely covered the weapons that now covered their torsos like armor.
They did it all in silence. It took each man less than two minutes to complete the wardrobe change.
A trained soldier, looking at any of the men, would have noticed the telltale bulge of the weapons. A trained operative would also have identified the look in their eyes. It was the death-cold stare of the trained killer now mission operative.
The leader of the S’13 squad, Lieutenant Colonel Kohl Meir, was a twenty-four-year-old Israeli from Bethlehem. He gathered his team in a circle. He wrapped his arms around the men on his left and right. The others followed his lead. Soon, they all stood in a tight huddle.
They stood in silence, praying.
Meir removed his arms while the others held the huddle tight. In the center of the huddle, he flipped a small wrist light on. He pulled a sheet of paper from his waist pocket. He shone the light on the paper. It was a photograph of Dewey.
“He has a beard and long hair now,” said Meir.
“What’s his name?” asked a commando to Meir’s left.
“Andreas,” said Meir. “Dewey Andreas. He’s American. He was Delta. He was on the team that killed Ayatollah Khomeini’s brother.”
Every commando knew exactly what Meir meant by this comment:
He’s a brother.
Meir then showed them photos of Millar and Iverheart.
“These are the other Americans who were with him and might be with him now, if they are still alive. Let’s move.”
BEIRUT RAFIC HARIRI INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT
BEIRUT
A cell phone in Khalid’s chest pocket vibrated.
“Yes,” said Khalid.
“The plane is on approach. Less than fifteen minutes. A C-130. Try not to damage the plane; it’s ours when this is all done. A gift from Aswan.”
“That’s nice,” said Khalid.
Khalid stood next to the white bus. He could hear the faint, rhythmic chant of some of the men on board, praying. While he believed, of course, he certainly didn’t have time for such things at a time like this. Every thought, every ounce of his being, was instead focused on the mission at hand. In this case, an easy job: picking up a package, delivering the package.
“After the pilot lands, he’ll taxi, turn back to face the terminal, then stop. He’ll lower the rear ramp so it’s out of sight line from the tower. That’s when you move. The prisoner will have to be carried. He’s in very bad shape. Carry him to the bus, then move him to the project building at al-Aqbar.”
“What about airport security?”
“Be careful and be quiet. The police won’t notice a thing. You’re almost two miles away from the main terminal. They’re focused on security inside the building. Grab the American and move. The plane is large enough to hide any movement should someone be observing.”
“Who are we delivering?” asked Khalid.