JET - Sanctuary (34 page)

So write it I did. The story begins nine years ago, before she’s recruited into the Mossad, when Jet is just Maya Weiss, no code name, a lowly private serving her mandatory time in the Israeli Defense Force, stationed at a checkpoint in the West Bank.

Let me state, for the record, that nothing in this adventure is intended to reflect reality – any resemblance to real people or institutions is purely coincidental, and as far as I know the Mossad doesn’t operate top-secret hit teams around the globe, nor does North Korea sell nerve gas to terrorists.

At least, I hope not.

Chapter 1

Ramallah, West Bank

An arid wind blew a beige dust devil down the desolate road that ran from Ramallah to Jenin. Ribbons of orange and crimson streaked the edge of the predawn sky as another long night drew to an end. The young Israeli Defense Force soldiers manning the checkpoint fidgeted near a baffle of sandbags, the final minutes of the graveyard shift fast approaching on a rural thoroughfare that saw little nocturnal traffic.

Maya rubbed a fatigued hand across her face and exchanged a glance with Sarah, her friend and confidante on the lonely duty, and the only other woman on the all-night vigil. Four soldiers, relaxing with their rifles hanging from shoulder slings, stood by the two-story tower that had been erected the prior month to afford a better view of approaching vehicles. A scraggly rooster strutted along the sandy shoulder, a solitary visitor on the deserted strip of pavement, its crimson-crowned head bobbing in determination as it strutted to a destination unknown.

“Only ten more minutes,” Maya said, stifling a yawn.

“Not that you’re counting every second or anything, right?” Sarah smiled, her cherubic features and bobbed whiskey-colored hair peeking from under her helmet a stark contrast to Maya, all angles and emerald eyes and black hair.

“Am I that transparent?”

“Why don’t you hit it a little early, and I’ll cover for you? If anyone asks, I’ll say you had to use the latrine.”

“I don’t want Kevod jumping down my throat.” Sergeant Kevod was their superior, a petty tyrant who routinely abused his authority by making leering passes at his female charges – always completely deniable but as palpable as a blow to the face. He’d made a clumsy proposition to Maya several weeks after she’d been assigned to the squad, and hadn’t taken her rejection lightly. Ever since that incident he’d had it in for her, and the past months had been an endless series of petty humiliations Maya had stoically suffered in silence, refusing to allow his misogyny to get to her.

“Don’t worry. Numbnuts is asleep in his bed. Your secret’s safe with me.”

Maya smiled and eyed the soldiers by the tower, who were murmuring among themselves, leaning against the support posts, occasionally glancing at their female counterparts. “I owe you one.”

“Such drama. Go on. Nobody will miss you. It’s dead out here,” Sarah said with a wink.

Maya shouldered her IMI Tavor TAR-21 assault rifle and made her way to the women’s barracks, next to where the all-male morning shift was preparing for its eight-hour duty. She pushed open the door and moved to her trim cot. She could hear the men in the adjacent building as clear as if she’d been standing in the same room, bantering and cursing as they shrugged into their uniforms.

Dim headlights approached the checkpoint from the north. The lamps flickered as an ancient red and white ambulance bounced along the rutted asphalt, its motor laboring with an asthmatic wheeze. The Israeli soldiers stiffened as the vehicle coasted to a stop, and Eli, a tall youth in his final year of duty, broke away and joined Sarah at the wooden barricade. The driver rolled the dusty window down and handed over his identification papers to Eli as Sarah slowly walked around the vehicle, looking it over.

Eli studied the license and registration in his flashlight’s beam, holding up the identity card and comparing the driver’s leathery countenance to that of the man in the photograph. The driver winced as the beam played across his face, and Eli lowered his flashlight.

“Where are you going?” Eli asked.

“The hospital. We have an injured boy in the back who’s in bad shape.” A fly buzzed from a nearby pile of refuse and drifted through the window. The driver waved it away with an irritated hand.

“What happened?”

“He fell off a ladder. We think his back might be broken.”

Sarah rejoined Eli and stared impassively through the windshield at the driver and the younger passenger, who looked ill at ease. Their eyes locked through the grimy glass, and after a long moment his gaze darted down to where a beige woven blanket rested on his lap. A butterfly of disquiet fluttered in her stomach, and she slowly reached for the grip of her weapon. Eli was oblivious to the change in her demeanor and was handing back the paperwork when Sarah called out to him.

“I want to search the vehicle,” she said, steel in her voice.

Time slowed to a crawl as silence followed her demand. The engine ticked a rhythmic staccato accompaniment to the burble of the exhaust. The passenger’s gaze flitted to his companion, who sighed and shook his head.

“With all due respect, this is a critical case. Minutes count.”

Sarah peered into the darkened ambulance interior and then returned her attention to the driver. She was about to repeat her demand when a tiny bead of sweat traced its way from the man’s hairline down the side of his face, in spite of the predawn cool. Her pulse quickened as she watched the errant drop of moisture, pulled inexorably by gravity toward his shirt collar, which she noted was soiled. He blinked, and Sarah stepped back and swung the ugly snout of her rifle at the ambulance.

Eli never saw the submachine gun that erupted from beneath the passenger’s blanket as the driver leaned back to give his partner room to fire while he simultaneously stomped on the gas. Slugs slammed into Eli’s chest as Sarah threw herself to the side, but not in time to avoid being hit even as she let loose a rattle of return fire.

The ambulance tore away, leaving a dense cloud of dust in its wake as it plowed through the wooden barricade. Sarah’s rounds shredded into its fender, blowing out the front tire and puncturing the radiator in a spray of steam. Her mouth flooded with a taste like copper pennies, and she struggled to breathe. The ceramic plates of her body armor had protected her from all the bullets except the one that tore through the top of her shoulder, ricocheting off her scapula and fragmenting into several chunks before lodging in her lung. Her vision blurred as her blood pressure plummeted, but she kept squeezing her rifle’s trigger even as she tumbled to the ground, landing with a grunt by Eli’s side, his sightless eyes staring at her like a startled lover, the puckered red wound in the center of his forehead just below his helmet an obscenity on his youthful face.

The rear doors of the ambulance swung open and gunfire belched from the interior. The distinctive low-pitched bark of AK-47s drowned out the screams of the startled soldiers as they returned fire from behind her. One of the detail cried out as a slug caught him in the upper thigh, and she heard the clatter of his rifle strike the ground as he collapsed. More shooting erupted from the back of the van as Israeli rounds pounded into the bumper and rear quarter panel through a cloud of dust and scorched rubber.

Bullets whined as they struck the hard-packed dirt near Sarah. She fired another volley and blinked uncomprehendingly when her weapon’s breech locked open, its ammunition spent. After a moment of shock, her numb fingers grappled at her vest for another magazine, and she’d almost worked one free when a small orb sail toward her from the bowels of the ambulance. It struck the ground two meters in front of her and bounced before rolling within reach: a hand grenade, only seconds remaining before it detonated.

Sarah forced herself to one knee and grabbed it and, with a final desperate effort, lobbed it at the ambulance, which was accelerating away from the checkpoint. It landed on the road behind the fishtailing van, missing it by four meters. When the grenade exploded, it sounded like a cannon, and the last thing she registered before the sky spun in a giddy cartwheel was a pink froth of foam bubbling from her nostrils.

Maya ducked instinctively as she ran from the barracks in time to see the blast. Her weapon chattered as she closed on the ambulance, aware that at over a hundred yards she was unlikely to hit it while moving. The van straightened as eruptions of dirt rose around it. More rifle fire burped from the back, and then it careened to the right and disappeared behind a collection of buildings as one of the emergency lights on its roof shattered in a spray of colored glass.

The soldiers stopped firing and stood motionless, unsure of what to do next. Maya froze when she saw Sarah crumpled in the road near Eli’s inert form.

“Call this in. Get a medic and reinforcements. Now.
Go
,” she screamed at a nearby soldier, who was slapping another magazine into his weapon. He nodded, dazed, and she rushed to her friend, eyes roaming over the surroundings, where timid locals were emerging from their shabby dwellings. Maya fell to one knee next to Sarah, who was gasping for breath, blood streaming from both corners of her mouth as her life seeped out of her. Maya took in the damage at a glance and set her weapon by her side before applying pressure to the entry wound in a futile gesture – but the only one she knew. Sarah winced in pain, and her eyes fluttered open.

“Help’s on the way. Just hold on,” Maya whispered.

Sarah shook her head and reached out with a limp hand. Maya took it, and her stomach dipped like she’d fallen from a great height when she felt how cold it was. Sarah tried to speak but only coughed blood.

“Don’t. Stay still. You’ll get through this,” Maya said, gently setting Sarah’s hand down. Maya fumbled at Sarah’s uniform, searching for the flaps that would free her of the bulletproof jacket as a corporal came running up, the thud of his boots on the road barely audible over bursts of static from his radio. He eyed Eli’s dead form and turned to Sarah. Maya peered up at him, and he glanced away.

“Reinforcements are on their way,” he said, his voice seeming to come from a great distance.

“How long?” Maya demanded.

“Five, maybe less.”

Maya leaned toward Sarah, her hand still pressing on her wound. “Do you hear that? Hang on. Just five minutes. That’s all. Hang on, do you hear?”

Sarah’s breath burbled in her chest, and she coughed again. Her eyes widened with a look of surprise, and she gasped like a beached fish. Maya’s breath caught in her throat as Sarah groaned softly and then shuddered and lay still.

Maya inched closer and hovered over Sarah and then removed her hand from the wound, her fingers slick with blood, and pushed on her friend’s chest with both hands, as though through sheer will she could force life back into her. She continued for several seconds before the corporal’s hand touched her shoulder. Maya started, a wild look on her face, and the corporal shook his head.

Tears ran down Maya’s cheeks as she shuddered. Sobs racked her body until it felt like her abdominal muscles would cramp. The corporal stepped back with his rifle at the ready, taking in the hostile expressions on the Palestinians watching from their doorways, their children gathered around them as the last of the smoke from the grenade blast drifted lazily across the road. At a crackle from his radio he snapped back to the present, leaving Maya to grieve over Sarah’s crumpled form. His boots crunched on the gravel as he marched to where his men stood shell-shocked, his training the only thing keeping him from emptying his weapon at anything that moved.

Chapter 2

The checkpoint was back to a semblance of normalcy by the following afternoon. The investigation team had concluded its re-creation of the event, and the bodies had been carted away. A long line of cars waited their turn under the watchful eyes of agitated IDF soldiers as a desultory road crew toiled in the swelter, repairing the pothole blown in the road by the grenade as vehicles detoured around them. Heat waves distorted the dun-colored surroundings. The outskirts of town baked under the sun’s intense glare, and only a few pedestrians shambled along the blistering roadside, their robes coated in a film of the pervasive dust that was a constant in the inhospitable high desert.

Inside the main building, Maya waited at silent attention as Sergeant Kevod sat at his desk. An air-conditioning unit throbbed behind him with a monotonous hum.

“These are very serious charges,” he intoned as he read from a hastily prepared report, pausing occasionally to glance over the top of the paperwork at where Maya was standing stiffly. “What do you have to say for yourself?”

“Regarding what, sir?” Maya asked, refusing to cede an inch.

“The claim that you deserted your station, contributing to the death of two of your fellow soldiers.” Kevod’s face reminded Maya of a baked ham, perennially pink and bloated, eyes like black marbles peering from beneath hooded lids. He sat back and touched a hand to his thinning, oily brown hair, a career soldier and petty tyrant with no future above his current rank as he approached thirty.

Maya cleared her throat, biting back anger. “Deserted my station? I have no idea who would make that statement. I was using the latrine. I cleared it with Sarah beforehand.”

“Who is conveniently no longer with us. So it’s just your word we have to go on, versus the word of one of your peers who claims to have seen you emerge from the barracks, not the latrine, when the attack was over.”

Maya took a deep breath. “With all due respect, sir, that person is mistaken. For starters, the attack was still very much underway. If anyone bothered to check my magazine, they would find that I emptied most of it at the ambulance as it was firing at us.”

“That proves nothing.”

“Sir, it proves that I fired while everyone else was firing – unless your ‘witness’ also claims I was shooting in the air after the ambulance disappeared. Which would be easy to verify, because I would have been the only one doing so, and there are dozens of Palestinian witnesses in addition to our men. That leaves only one possibility: that I participated in the defense of the checkpoint, which is underscored by the fact that I was the first person to reach Sarah on the access road.”