By this point all seven of Nico’s men had rushed down the spiral stairway to the basement. He turned to Bashir, who stood at the edge of the manhole, aiming his Heckler & Koch at the corpse. Now Bashir’s small size would give him an advantage. “You first,” Nico ordered, pointing at the entrance to the tunnel. “Go down there and kill them.”
THE TUNNEL ZIGZAGGED UNDER THE STREETS OF THE MUSLIM QUARTER
. Every fifty feet or so it turned to the left or right, and because the tunnel was pitch-black there was no way to see the turns coming. David could hear Monique up ahead, cursing every time she had to change direction, and even though he could use the sound of her footsteps as a guide, he kept banging his elbows against the tunnel’s rough walls and slipping in the foul puddles underfoot. Although the tunnel may have been dug by Jordanian smugglers, it now doubled as a sewer and the smell was appalling. To make matters worse, after they’d gone a few hundred feet the tunnel abruptly narrowed. David smacked his head into a stone jutting from the wall and the blow made his ears ring. He began to wonder if there was a light at the end of this tunnel. No smugglers had come this way in decades, and there was a good chance that the exit had been sealed long ago.
Then he did glimpse a light, but it wasn’t ahead of them. It was behind. David looked over his shoulder and saw a flashlight beam jerkily illuminating the turn they’d just passed. At the same time, he heard footsteps behind him, clomping rapidly through the puddles. It was one of the gunmen, David thought. And the son of a bitch was moving a lot faster than they were.
David leaned forward and shouted, “Go, go!” at Monique, but she was already sprinting ahead. They ran as fast as they could, caroming painfully against the walls, but the pursuing footsteps only grew louder. Soon the light behind them was strong enough that David could see the outline of Monique’s body within the tunnel, her back sharply bent to keep her head low, her legs striding furiously. She came to another turn and dashed to the left. Just as he reached the same point, their pursuer rounded the corner behind them and the walls of the tunnel turned horribly bright. For a fraction of a second David saw his own shadow looming in front of him. Then he cut to the left and a gunshot boomed down the tunnel. The bullet struck the wall where his shadow had been a moment before. Shards of stone and clods of dirt flew through the air like shrapnel. “Fuck!” David yelled. “Fuck, fuck, fuck!”
The next turn was only twenty feet ahead, and Monique had already rounded it. But when David turned the corner he saw no sign of her. The tunnel widened here and the ceiling was higher, but there was just a blank wall in front of him, a dead end. He stood there, panicking, as the clomping footsteps drew closer. Listening carefully, he could tell there was more than one gunman in the tunnel now. Several flashlight beams were approaching, casting their jiggling light on the walls.
Then he heard a loud thump and the sound of wood splintering. He looked a few feet to his right and saw Monique standing beside a door-size plywood board that she’d just slammed her left shoulder against. “Come on!” she shouted. “It’s boarded up, but I think we can break through!”
She stood aside and David aimed his shoulder at the center of the board. He threw all his weight against it and to his surprise the plywood cracked and gave way. He burst through the split pieces of the board and tumbled onto the smooth floor of a long corridor.
Monique rushed over, offering her left hand to help him up, and as he rose to his feet he saw a row of giant stone blocks, running alongside the corridor like monstrous bricks. They were in the Western Wall Tunnel again, somewhere between the Holy of Holies and the emergency exit that Aryeh Goldberg had found. Then David heard another gunshot and a bullet whizzed through the split plywood board and smacked against one of the stone blocks. He dove to the side and grasped Monique’s good arm and started running down the corridor, heading north toward the Holy of Holies.
“Wait! Stop!” she cried. “The emergency exit is the other way!”
David shook his head. They were at least a hundred yards from that exit, and unlike the last tunnel, this one was brightly lit and as straight as a target range. As soon as the gunmen stepped into the corridor, they’d have a clear shot. But the Holy of Holies was less than fifty feet away and there was still a crowd of
kippot srugot
praying in front of the blocked-up archway, rocking back and forth with their black prayer books in their hands and their Uzis hanging from their shoulder straps. Some of the zealots at the edge of the crowd had noticed the commotion down the corridor. They’d stopped praying to gawk at the strange man and woman running toward them. David waved at them madly.
“Hamas!” he screamed. “Hamas! They’re right behind us!”
The zealots’ reaction was immediate—they threw their prayer books to the ground and grabbed their Uzis. When David was ten feet away he flung himself to the floor and dragged Monique with him, rolling past the zealots’ feet toward the safety of the archway. An instant later, the
kippot srugot
opened fire.
The shots thundered in the stone corridor. David and Monique huddled against the blocked-up archway, the fractured, gray wall that had absorbed so many of the zealots’ prayers. Closing his eyes, David added his own plea to the Holy of Holies—God Jesus Lord, help! The juddering gunfire pounded his eardrums.
Then someone yelled something in Hebrew and the bearded Jews stopped shooting. David opened his eyes and peered down the corridor. Seven bodies, all dressed in black, lay twisted on the floor.
Miraculously, none of the
kippot srugot
were hurt. One of them, a curly-haired giant with a rainbow-colored knitted yarmulke, approached David. “Don’t worry, we radioed the army,” he said. Then he pointed at Monique’s right arm. “We told them you’ll need an ambulance.”
Monique nodded. She was shivering and her lips were bluish. David grew alarmed. He wondered how much blood she’d lost. “Hey, you should lie down,” he said, gently gripping her shoulder and lowering her to the floor. “Take it easy. You’ve earned a rest.”
She didn’t protest. She lay on the floor and let David put her in the shock position, elevating her legs by placing a stack of prayer books under her heels. When he was done, she let out a long breath. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“Sorry? Baby, you don’t have to—”
“I’m not apologizing to you. I’m apologizing to God.” She shifted her head on the floor and gave him a weak smile. “And to all of His wackos.”
AS SOON AS THE JEWS STARTED FIRING THEIR UZIS, NICO DOVE BACK INTO
the smugglers’ tunnel. He’d been so focused on chasing the Americans, he hadn’t noticed the crowd of Israelis until it was too late. His stomach twisted as he lay on the tunnel’s stinking floor and heard the gunshots in the corridor just a few feet away. His men were being slaughtered, all of them. Including Bashir, his friend and comrade-in-arms, whom he’d known since they were teenagers in the slums of East Beirut.
For a moment he considered joining them in death, charging down the corridor and trying to kill as many Jews as he could before they cut him down. But when he got to his feet he turned away from the broken plywood board and retraced his steps through the smugglers’ tunnel, running back to the basement of Beit Shalom Yeshiva. If he hurried, he could reach the safety of the Muslim quarter’s alleys before the Israeli police arrived. Then he would go to the safe house and contact Brother Cyrus.
Nico knew that Cyrus wouldn’t be pleased. But he also knew that the man was relentless. Cyrus would give him new orders, a new plan. And this was the surest way for Nico to get his revenge. One way or another, he would kill the Americans. The Almighty would guide his hand as he slit their throats.
12
CAMP COBRA WAS LESS THAN TWELVE HOURS OLD, BUT IN COLONEL BRENT
Ramsey’s humble opinion it was already the best damn army base he’d ever seen. More than seven hundred Rangers from the 75th Regiment and two hundred pilots and crewmen from the Eighth and 160th Aviation squadrons were hidden inside a cavern in the Kopet Dag Mountains, just ten miles north of Turkmenistan’s border with Iran.
Ramsey, a Special Forces man with twenty-two years in the service, stood on the granite floor of the cavern and watched his soldiers unload the trucks that had come from Afghanistan the night before. The cave was close to a Turkmen road that ran across the mountain range, and its mouth was big enough that the Rangers could drive their trucks right inside. Past the entrance, the cave widened enormously, forming a huge natural garage more than two hundred feet across. Dozens of Humvees and flatbed trucks were parked along the cavern’s rocky walls. The loads on the flatbeds were covered with tarp, but Ramsey recognized them by their shapes. Each of the smaller loads was a Black Hawk helicopter. The larger loads were Ospreys, tilt-rotor aircraft that could carry twice as many men as the helicopters and fly nearly twice as fast.
And that was just the front section of the cave—the foyer, you could say. About sixty yards farther inside, the cavern’s floor sloped down to an even more spacious chamber where the Rangers had erected a tent city. They’d already set up a mess hall and an armory and a field hospital, not to mention the long rows of tents that served as their barracks. Beyond this section, the cavern narrowed a bit and descended to a lower chamber and a crescent-shaped pool of greenish water, an honest-to-goodness underground lake. The water smelled sulfurous and wasn’t exactly potable, but it was geothermally heated to a toasty ninety-five degrees, and some of the soldiers had already swum laps down there.
Ramsey shook his head as he thought about how goddamn perfect this base was. For one thing, it was only sixty miles north of the Iranian nuclear facility. The Black Hawks and Ospreys could reach their target in less than twenty minutes, which was a hell of lot quicker than flying from Afghanistan or the Persian Gulf. Even better, the whole operation was hidden from view. Although Iran had spy satellites that monitored military activity near the country’s borders, Camp Cobra wasn’t going to appear in any of their images of Turkmenistan. The Iranians wouldn’t see any unusual activity on the Turkmen roads either, because the Rangers had transported everything at night. And Turkmenistan’s president-for-life had sent his secret police to the area and discreetly evacuated all the nearby villages. It was a brilliant plan, and General McNair deserved a hell of a promotion for coming up with it. McNair wasn’t Ramsey’s favorite person in the army—the general was a straitlaced God-and-country type, whereas Ramsey was more of a hell-raiser—but the colonel had to give credit where credit was due. If Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda could hide in caves, then the U.S. Army damn well could, too.
After a few minutes the soldiers finished unloading the last truck and returned to their tents. Ramsey headed for the mouth of the cave, exchanging salutes with the pair of sentries posted there. McNair had gone back to Afghanistan before daybreak, leaving Ramsey in charge of the base, and now the colonel was going to stretch his legs a bit. Because of the need for secrecy, McNair had ordered everyone to stay in the cave during daylight hours, but he’d positioned a few snipers in well-camouflaged locations on the mountainsides, and Ramsey wanted to see for himself how those boys were doing. It was still early in the morning and the fog was thick in the mountain pass, so there was no chance that any satellite or spy plane would spot him. Besides, the colonel had been on duty for the past twenty-two hours, taking army-issue Dexedrine pills to stay alert, and now he needed a little exercise to calm himself down.
Outside the cave’s mouth was an arid plateau covered with hard-packed dirt and prickly desert plants. The bare brown ridges of the Kopet Dag loomed all around. Ramsey liked the look of these mountains—they reminded him of his boyhood home in West Texas. The Kopet Dag weren’t particularly high, but they ran straight and true like a long earthen wall, rising above the flat expanse of the Karakum Desert and forming a natural barrier between Turkmenistan and Iran. The Iranian nuclear facility was on the opposite side of the wall, inside a cavern very similar to the one that concealed Camp Cobra. As Ramsey marched across the plateau he turned his gaze in that direction. The mountains blocked his view but he kept looking anyway, feeling as cocky and eager as an eighteen-year-old recruit. Ramsey got this same feeling whenever he prepared for a mission, this powerful sense of anticipation. He knew that they wouldn’t actually launch the surprise attack for at least another two days—in a final diplomatic move, the White House had given the Revolutionary Guards forty-eight hours to voluntarily surrender their nukes, which of course they would never do. But in his mind’s eye Ramsey could already see the assault beginning, the Ospreys and Black Hawks rising from the plateau and racing south to their target.
Ramsey was so juiced that he walked all the way across the plateau, a brisk half mile. From this spot he could look directly south through a gap in the mountains. He couldn’t glimpse Iran—the fog at the lower elevations was too thick—but in the foreground he saw a stream threading the mountain pass, flanked by junipers that looked extravagantly green against the brown surroundings. He also heard the unmistakable sound of a waterfall.
Intrigued, he made a foray down the slope, heading for the sinuous stream. He thought again of his boyhood in Brewster County, all the mornings spent exploring his father’s ranch in the Del Norte Mountains, constantly scanning the ground for rattlesnakes and arrowheads. When Ramsey reached the line of junipers he started searching for the waterfall, following the sound of the plashing stream through a dense tangle of undergrowth. And then he heard someone behind him say, “Stop right there, Colonel.”
It was an American voice, no foreign accent. Ramsey assumed it was one of his snipers. He raised his hands in the air and turned around, making a joke of it. “Good work, soldier,” he said. “You got me, fair and square.”
But when he saw the soldier he did a double take. First of all, it wasn’t a man. It was a young woman, quite tall, with ample breasts and a pretty face. She wore a standard-issue army uniform, but there was no unit designation on her shoulder and no name tag on her chest. Most disturbing of all, she was pointing a Heckler & Koch nine-millimeter at his head, and there was a silencer attached to the gun’s barrel. Ramsey stared at her in disbelief. “What the hell’s going on?” he shouted, lowering his hands. “Put down that weapon!”