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“I might know somebody, and they might still owe me a favor.”
“You calling this actionable?”
“Best lead we have. I need every scrap of information on the bombing in Haifa, news feeds, internet rumors and anything else we can cajole out of the Israelis through normal channels. Contact Jack, tell him to pull Cal out of Texas, and tell Able to sit tight.”
Tokaido nodded. “I’ll do it! Anything else?”
“Tell Barb I want Phoenix Force assembled in the next six hours, and I want them in Israel in twelve.”
Jerusalem, Israel
“IT WAS VERY STRANGE.”
Dr. Galina Rabovskya looked every inch the Jewish grandmother she was. She had been a military doctor with medical degrees in both neurology and psychology. The doctor maintained a small private practice and on the side was an Israeli military intelligence medical “asset.”
She poured coffee from an ancient copper ibrik for David McCarter and Calvin James. “Extremely jet-lagged” barely described the two Phoenix Force men.
“You would think there would be a matrix for predicting terrorist inclinations,” McCarter, the leader of Phoenix Force, noted.
She arched a thick eyebrow. “I assure you it takes all kinds.”
McCarter sipped his Turkish coffee and his eyes nearly rolled back in his head. James matched the doctor and perked her eyebrow for eyebrow. “But?”
“But this was very strange. Oh, on the surface it made perfect sense. A pair of young Palestinian lovers decide to cement their love into eternity with a suicide pact against their hated Jewish oppressors. All very romantic. They strap on explosive vests they made together, go to a nightclub full of innocent people, and...”
“But?” James repeated.
“But the girl’s vest malfunctioned. The boy, Hamdi, rode the elevator to martyrdom and took ten club patrons with him. The girl? Lena? She managed to launch most of her right arm into the VIP room. The emergency medics stabilized her and she was turned over to military intelligence.”
James conjured up Lyons’s new favorite-hated word. “And things started getting anomalous?”
“That is a good word,” the doctor admitted. “And highly accurate.”
“She denied all knowledge of the attack?”
“Not at first. After being captured, she was completely unresponsive. This was naturally attributed to the trauma of her boyfriend’s death and her own survival and self-mutilation. Despite her injuries, some of the Mossad boys got rough with her. They got nothing. Then she went into what I would describe as a fugue state, which lasted for approximately an hour. When she came out of that she was responsive.”
“How did she respond?”
“Miss Labaki responded exactly like a seventeen-year-old girl who woke up in terrible pain to learn her boyfriend is dead, she is missing an arm and accused of capital crimes.”
“She denied being involved in the crime?”
“She denied all knowledge of the crime. She begged us to tell her who we were, what was going on and where Hamdi was.”
Cal saw where this was going. “And the men from Mossad were not amused.”
“They got rough with her again.”
“How did she react?”
“React? She was like a hothouse flower suddenly thrown into the desert. They could have broken her just by yelling at her. They overrode my objections and turned off her morphine. She confessed. She confessed to everything.”
James mimicked Lyons. “But if you hadn’t seen the security camera footage from the nightclub?”
“I would have believed her story before her confession.”
“You don’t believe her confession?”
“I believe she would have confessed to anything, including the Kennedy assassination, to stop the pain. But they got their confession and their case tied up neatly in ribbons and bows. They were satisfied.”
“And Miss Labaki went into a coma and died,” James concluded.
“Miss Labaki is currently in a persistent vegetative state.”
McCarter sat straighter. “She’s alive?”
“She’s alive,” Rabovskya confirmed. “But I would not call it living. I use the term vegetative state loosely. I was so alarmed by what I saw that before my medical team was taken off the case I ordered both functional magnetic resonance imaging and arterial spin labeling scans.”
McCarter blinked.
The doctor smiled sympathetically. “These scans rely on the paramagnetic properties of oxygenated and deoxygenated hemoglobin.”
McCarter looked to James for a lifeline.
The Phoenix Force medic smiled smugly. “It means you can see images of changing blood flow in the brain associated with neural activity.”
Rabovskya nodded. “I see you have had some training. I also ordered a magnetoencephalogram.”
“How many letters are in that word?” McCarter asked.
“Twenty. In layman’s terms it is an imaging technique used to measure the magnetic fields produced by the electrical activity in the brain.”
James leaned forward. “What were the results?”
“Before Miss Labaki went brain-dead? Her brain was like Fallujah on a Friday night. Or in American terms—the Fourth of July. I was ordering a positron emission tomography when I was suddenly thanked for my work and informed my services were no longer required.
“I do not know what the interrogators did to her after that, but I can tell you I do not believe it could have made any difference. I can only describe it as a cascading series of brain malfunctions. Machines currently breathe for her, keep her heart beating, clean her blood and feed and hydrate her. The only reason she is being kept alive is that she is such a medical anomaly.”
McCarter shook his head. “Hate that word.”
The kitchen went silent as they all brooded.
The landline phone on the wall rang and the doctor rose. “Excuse me.”
James considered what he had heard. “I am definitely putting it in the wheelhouse.”
“Definitely,” McCarter agreed.
Dr. Rabovskya answered the phone and her face went blank. Her expression grim, she covered the receiver with her hand. “It is for you.”
The two soldiers looked at each other. “Who is it?” McCarter asked.
“A woman, asking for the American in charge. She has a European accent.”
McCarter looked at his partner. The spook factor was at 4 percent and rising. James smiled and shrugged. “Doesn’t know you’re English.”
McCarter stood and took the phone. He had long ago learned to mask his accent when needed. “Hello?”
A woman spoke. McCarter tried to place her accent and couldn’t. “You are inquiring after the Labaki woman?”
“I am.”
“Give me your cell. I will contact you. You will need to come to Beirut.”
McCarter gave her his cell number. The phone went dead in his hand.
“And?” James asked.
“We’re going to Lebanon,” McCarter announced. “And we’re going to need guns. But I don’t want to raid the US Embassy armory here or across the border. Someone knows we’re here and they’ll be watching.”
Rabovskya smirked over her coffee cup. “I might be able to help you with that.”
Nahariya, Israel
AS PHOENIX FORCE drove along the coast, McCarter looked left from the driver’s seat out into the Mediterranean.
An Israeli Navy Sa’ar 5-Class warship patrolled close to shore. Tensions were high. Hezbollah rocket attacks out of Lebanon had hit Israel just seventy-two hours ago and the idyllic Mediterranean beach community of Nahariya was only six miles from the border. Tanks, APCs and military vehicles were everywhere. Armed IDF soldiers loitered on every street corner. Israeli F-16 fighter jets in ground-attack configuration screamed low overhead with monotonous regularity. Smoke from their guided bomb and missile strikes rose into the sky over the border like the output of Industrial Age smokestacks.
McCarter left the strip and headed inland. He happily worked the gears. The Škoda Yeti was a VW-owned, Czech-manufactured SUV and technically a five-seater. However, none of the five members of Phoenix Force could be described as lithe or dainty. It was a little crowded for Manning, Encizo and Hawkins in the back.
The Yeti was a four-cylinder but it came loaded with a variable geometry turbocharger, a direct-shift, seven-speed gearbox and had torque on loan from God. It had a sunroof and decent windows to shoot from. That was if they could get guns. Trying to smuggle guns into Israel was mildly suicidal.
Buying them on the thriving internal Israeli black market was a more viable option but only slightly less dangerous.
McCarter pulled up to what could only be described as an automotive stalag camp. Three Quonset huts squatted behind a twelve-foot-high, chain-link fence topped with razor wire. A fourth hut, looking like a twisted and blackened beer can, appeared to have been hit by a rocket.
A sixteen-foot scaffold stood behind the pair of connected trailers that formed the office. The scaffold had a satellite dish and a ham radio antenna on top, but it sure smelled to McCarter like a currently unoccupied machine gun tower. McCarter drove beneath a weathered sign covered with strings of Christmas lights that read Corkie’s Autohaus in Hebrew, Arabic and English.
Maan Korkaz stepped out of a trailer.
McCarter and James shot each other a look. The Druze auto mechanic and reputed arms dealer bore an extremely disturbing resemblance to the bearded, evil, mirror-universe Spock from the original Star Trek series, save that he didn’t have pointed ears and he wore a blue mechanic’s boiler suit. Unlike Spock, he also smoked unfiltered Turkish cigarettes. McCarter and James climbed out of their SUV.
McCarter tipped his cap. “Morning, guv.”
Korkaz snorted. He spoke with a British accent. “I know someone who has spoken for you.”
“Then sell me some guns, mate.”
Korkaz eyed McCarter astutely. “Brighton Beach lad?”
“You are a gentleman of discernment. This is my friend Cal.”
“Pleased to meet you. Your friends can stay in the car. Follow me.” McCarter and James shot each other another look. The Middle East was a barter culture. Usually tea and hospitality and a feeling-out process preceded deals. Manning, Encizo and Hawkins gave WTF looks from the backseat. McCarter and James rolled the dice and followed as Korkaz led them behind the covered car bays to a small, weed-choked automotive graveyard of rusting hulks. “I don’t know what you have heard, Mer—?”
“David.”
“Call me Corkie. But things are a bit crazy around here of late.”
“Aren’t they always?”
“More than usual.”
“Even for around here?”
“Even for around here.”
Korkaz led them to a rusting yellow school bus. He clambered inside and yanked up a hatch in the floor. A short flight of wooden steps led down into darkness. The Druze hit a switch and cheerfully bright track lighting illuminated a low but spacious bunker full of crates.
“So you want to go into Lebanon?” Korkaz asked.
“No, I don’t.” Phoenix Force had operated in Lebanon on a number of occasions. They had found answers there. Usually at terrible cost, and they were answers that nobody wanted to hear. “But I have to. What’ve you heard?”
“Nothing good. Killings. Inexplicable ones. Bad ones, even for this—how do you say?—neck of the woods.” The Druze suddenly grinned disarmingly. “I would not go there unarmed were I you.”
“So what have you got?”
“I have something for you. I am not sure if it fits the bill, but you may recognize it from your salad days of youth.” Korkaz opened a crate and McCarter felt a twinge of nostalgia as he gazed upon the contents. Korkaz nodded. “No one wants submachine guns anymore. Everybody wants PDWs and ARs.” Korkaz sighed at the dully gleaming cast-steel weapons. “Dying breed.”
McCarter took up one of the submachine guns. The Sterling was a weapon he was well familiar with. Unlike most automatic weapons the magazine curved out from the left-hand side rather than down from the bottom, which made it look vaguely like one half of a backward crossbow. The beer-can-thick, fattened, black metal tube of a built-in sound suppressor modified the barrel of this example. The weapon was a Sterling Mk-5. McCarter had carried just such a weapon during his stint in the British SAS. “Brilliant. Where’s it from, then? India?”
Korkaz blew out a long, thin stream of smoke. “Iraq. Republican Guard security detail.” The Druze nodded at James. “Got them from some Yanks a while back.”
McCarter pulled out a massive wad of Euros. “I’ll take them, and every spare magazine you have. Pistols?”
“Browning Hi-Powers, manufacture.”
It was all old-school British gear and what McCarter had been weaned on. “I have a lad who is something of a sharpshooter. You have anything with a scope sight? Preferably sighted in?”
“I might have something, but most likely old.”
“That’ll do.” McCarter sighed hopefully. “Got any grenade launchers?”
“I wish.”
McCarter’s cell rang. He didn’t recognize the number. He answered in a neutral English language accent. “Hello?”
“The Minerva Hotel. You have ninety minutes. If you are not there, there will be no further communication.” It was the same woman’s voice with the same accent he couldn’t identify.
The line went dead. Korkaz and James looked at McCarter expectantly. McCarter shrugged at Korkaz. “You know the Minerva Hotel?”
The Druze nodded. “I do, Hezbollah took unofficial ownership a decade ago. The IDF has bombed it dozens of times. It is mostly a pile of rubble with a rats’ nest of tunnels beneath that put my poor cellar to shame.”
McCarter just didn’t see his job getting any easier. “You wouldn’t have any hand grenades?”
Korkaz stroked his beard. “There might be a few Indian manufacture Mills bombs lying about.”
“I’ll take all you have.”
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