Assassin's Silence: A David Slaton Novel (30 page)

The air traffic controller was familiar with such missions. There had been a constant flow in recent years, humanitarian relief flights from the Middle East and beyond to aid the beleaguered victims of the war. The Challenger was a regular customer, and while Iranian-registered jets usually rounded Iraqi airspace on their goodwill missions, a few paused for technical stops at the airfield in Basrah, a rare instance of cooperation between cranky Mesopotamian neighbors. Indeed, the controller had seen a Challenger arrive at Al-Basrah earlier that evening at the beginning of his seven-hour shift, and so the man only yawned as he passed the flight strip over to the controller working the adjacent sector.

It was roughly at this time, with the blip solidly in radar contact and having been cleared on direct routing, that the navigation lights on CB68H suddenly extinguished. Because the aircraft was twenty-two thousand feet above open desert, no one noticed.

Along the same lines, during the brief time CB68H had been on the ground there was but one person at Basrah International Airport who might have witnessed her stay. His name was Zaid, and he was the night security man. Yet because he was only responsible for what lay inside the terminal building, and because he was in the middle of a flaming row with his girlfriend and busy texting on his phone, Zaid never noticed the big jet’s arrival or departure. Nor did he see, roughly one hour later, a small Challenger business jet that quietly taxied, took off, and made a gentle easterly turn in the general direction of Iran.

Also unknown to Zaid, although he would soon be questioned thoroughly, was the matter of two bodies a mile away that were resting in the bed of a Toyota pickup, freshly executed and fast coming to one with the cool desert night.

*   *   *

It was two hours before dawn when the Lebanese Navy AMP-145 patrol boat,
Saida,
caught up with the shadow it had been chasing all night. They intercepted the Cypriot-flagged tuna boat,
Kosmos,
to find it trailing a wandering arc eight miles offshore and running at full throttle, this evident by a stream of black soot belching from her exhaust and explosions of white spray at her bow, all highlighted in reflections of drawn moonlight.

Saida
paralleled the fishing boat’s irregular course for ten minutes. She sounded her siren and followed established protocol by issuing verbal warnings using both radio and bullhorn, all while her searchlight danced a galloping pattern over the longliner’s old wooden hull.

There was no response, and
Saida
’s skipper, Commander Armin Gemayel, watched in amazement as
Kosmos’
crew ignored their warnings and continued an erratic course. The little ship battered mercilessly through a rising southwestern swell, sheets of spray flying over her decks. With the twelve-mile limit looming, and
Saida
herself taking a beating, Gemayel lost his patience and gave an order that surprised everyone. The patrol boat moved closer to issue a final radio warning, and when nothing happened the forward deck gun crew opened fire.

In a testament to either the crew’s marksmanship or good fortune, the second round issued struck a fatal blow to
Kosmos’
engine. The steady stream of black from her funnel became a torrent, and soon the old ship was bobbing listlessly on a choppy sea.

The boarding process was quick and efficient, and when the all-clear was given after ten minutes, Commander Gemayel followed his advance party aboard. By that time a woozy George Demitriou had been cut free of his bindings and was sitting with his back against a side wall. The Lebanese officer hovered over him.

“Where is this Israeli spy you promised me?”

Rubbing his reddened wrists, Demitriou jabbed a thumb toward the bow. The commander made his way forward, and on the starboard foredeck he saw an empty clamshell container the size of a barrel. It was orange and white in color—and quite empty.

An angry Gemayel stormed back to the wheelhouse. “He went ashore in your life raft?”

Demitriou gestured to his swollen temple. A large knot had risen and blood matted his thinning hair. “What could I do? The man is dangerous—he took me by surprise.”

“Where did he go ashore?”

“South of Tripoli … Batroun perhaps. I can’t say for sure. When I got my senses back
Kosmos
was running seaward.”

Gemayel was livid. At this point he had few options. He could tow
Kosmos
into the naval base, but a Cypriot tuna scow and her bruised skipper were hardly a prize. Worse yet, if he turned Demitriou in to the thugs of GDGS, Lebanon’s ruthless intelligence service, they would interrogate him properly. Under duress Demitriou would certainly divulge the insertion of an Israeli spy into their country, not to mention the relationship he kept with a certain midgrade naval officer who was fresh into his new command, and who had effectively allowed the Israeli to slip through after being forewarned.

One of Gemayel’s men came from below and spoke quietly into his ear. More bad news. Not only had Demitriou botched the rendezvous, but he wasn’t even carrying anything worth appropriating. No drugs, no guns, no money. Unable to hold back, Gemayel kicked the toe of his boot into Demitriou’s good temple.

“Your father and mine knew how to do business,” he snarled. “During Chamoun and the insurrection, they knew how to make a profit while keeping out of trouble. Clearly you did not inherit this gene. Don’t ever come near my waters again without the tax!”

The boarding party loaded into their inflatables and crossed back to
Saida
.

George Demitriou stood slowly, his stance wavering, more from his spinning head than the rough seas. He watched the naval boat churn away, and when it was a hundred yards distant, he reared back and spit a mouthful of blood toward the ship and her mother country.

Just as his father had done so many years ago.

FORTY-THREE

“Maybe this airplane really
did
crash,” said an analyst to Sorensen as they went over the latest reports.

Davis, who was officially part of the hunt now, had staked out a comfortable leather armchair for the night. He said, “There was no crash. We’re just not looking in the right place.”

The air in the room was heavy and scented in coffee—not the boutique aroma of a five-dollar-a-cup blend, but the burnt-bean odor of a cheap diner.

“What about camouflage?” Davis asked. “You know, like tarps or netting. The Russians and Cubans used to do that kind of thing, right?”

“The Cold War was a long time ago,” Sorensen responded.

“Are you calling me a dinosaur?”

She smiled good-naturedly. “I’m saying that kind of deception works with visible imagery, but it’s pointless against radar.”

“And everybody has radar sats these days,” said another analyst.

Davis watched a bank of monitors where technicians were scrolling through images. Airport after airport flipped by in God’s-eye views, a few warranting a pause and magnification before being discarded.

“It’s a big world,” said Sorensen from behind his shoulder.

Without looking at her, he replied, “Yeah, but it’s also a big airplane. And you’re not going to find it at CDG.”

“Where?”

Davis pointed to the image currently on the central monitor—a tremendous airport with four parallel runways. “That’s Paris Charles de Gaulle. Someone went to a lot of trouble to steal this airplane. They simulated a crash, for Christ’s sake, so they’re not going to turn around and fly it into a major European hub. We need to narrow things down, which means putting ourselves in their position.”

“All right,” Sorensen prodded. “How would you hide a wide-body airplane?”

“First let’s assume this scheme is not being run by a country. I think we can rule out the Chinas and Russias of the world. Of course, Iran or North Korea are always possibilities, but even they’d use a surrogate—no country would want its fingerprints on something like this.”

“So we can stop looking in Iran and the PRK?”

“I would. This jet has to be in some out-of-the-way place.” Davis stared silently at the screens as images snapped past. He finally broke out in a smile. “But you know where I’d hide it?”

Sorensen looked at him, and the photo-surveillance slideshow paused as an entire bank of analysts who’d been listening turned around. Davis told everyone his idea, and within minutes the battery of screens went blank as a new search was prepared.

*   *   *

Slaton paddled onto the beach in darkness and immediately dragged the emergency life raft into the dunes above the high-tide line. He stabbed the raft with a knife from its own survival kit, and buried the rubber remnants in a sand swale.

He set out on a course perpendicular to the sea, knowing it would eventually intersect the coastal north-south highway. Slaton moved as quickly as the terrain and predawn darkness allowed—he doubted an all-out manhunt was underway, but he suspected someone in Lebanon was aware of his arrival. An hour earlier he’d seen a Lebanese Navy patrol boat heading in the direction of
Kosmos,
and he thought it might be Demitriou’s doing, perhaps a junior naval officer whose career would benefit greatly from single-handedly apprehending an Israeli spy. If so, Slaton was in the clear, because no self-promoting officer would document failure in his nightly watch report. A remorseful Demitriou would be chastised and sent packing, bringing the whole matter to a close.

As he moved east, it struck Slaton how different this insertion was from the last one he’d done. That mission had been bold even by Mossad’s standards, a plan to assassinate a top Hezbollah captain. Their target, a man more deserving than most of an accelerated journey to the afterlife, was scheduled to appear at a rally in the Ras Beirut district. The intelligence was solid, and the mission drawn with care. Slaton’s team had planned and trained for over a month, while Mossad’s facilitators, the best on earth, had provided faultless passports and visas, and virtually unlimited funding. Transportation, a safe house, even groceries were put in place by an advance team. Easy in, take the shot, easy out. And if anything went wrong, Slaton had an army behind him—quite literally if necessary.

Everything had gone smoothly, and when the moment of truth came he had been situated under a concrete beam in a construction site six hundred yards from where the target was to appear—a simple shot on the firing range, but considerably more complex when perched on loose gravel in light rain at dusk, and when your bullet was to fly over a busy market square with smoke wafting from meat carts and people shouting and car horns blaring. Slaton never got a shot that day. As was too often the case, their solid intelligence proved wrong. The target had simply never shown, and Slaton and his support element vaporized into the lingering late-September heat. Weeks of training, men put at risk—all for nothing.

He hoped his assumptions for this mission were more accurate.

After two miles Slaton found the old coast highway, which was little used since a more modern motorway had been built years earlier to the east. At the shoulder he turned south and assumed a modest pace. He paused near a grove of olive trees, and pulled out a flashlight and a nautical chart he’d found in
Kosmos’
wheelhouse. The map was twenty years old, laminated against the sea and bent with folds by a skipper who still plotted courses on paper and measured distances with a pencil and mileage scale. But the chart depicted the coast in good detail, and as expected he was near a place called Baachta, forty kilometers north of Beirut.

Slaton began moving again.

*   *   *

It was well before daybreak when Slaton encountered a gas station along the southbound shoulder, and as he approached it a small delivery truck pulled off the road and parked in front of the diesel pump. A man got out of the driver’s seat and stretched.

Slaton mussed his hair, more than what the Mediterranean and a sleepless night had already done, and made his approach.

“Hello there.”

The man looked up, and in the yellow cast of a floodlight Slaton saw that he was quite young. A good sign, furthered when he replied in English, “Good morning.”

“Is there coffee inside?” Slaton asked.

“Always. Boutros runs his place all night, and he needs it to keep his eyes open.” The man appeared casual. Paradoxically, he would likely have been more cautious if Slaton had been Lebanese. An out-of-sorts European here was a curiosity, but hardly a threat. It was the displaced Syrians and the asylum-seeking refugees who would cut your throat for a few dollars.

“I’ve had a tough night,” Slaton said. “Drank a bit too much. As best I can remember, two very pretty girls took me for a long drive. Where the hell am I?”

“Near Baachta,” the young man said, not without sympathy, as he opened the truck’s fueling door and removed the cap. “And they left you here?”

“I’m afraid so.” Slaton pulled out his wallet and opened it just wide enough to show a ripple of cash. “Say, can you tell me if there’s a bus nearby that runs to Beirut?”

It took another five minutes. Slaton paid for a full tank of diesel, two cups of coffee, and soon after found himself in the truck’s passenger seat listening to the driver’s take on the new Lebanese prime minister who was, in his opinion, no better than the old one. Slaton was receptive at first, but soon slumped drowsily against the window. He needed the rest, and at any rate, a degree of lethargy was perfectly in character.

The driver soon gave up, and through heavy eyes Slaton looked out across the sea. The coastline was still dark, a black-velvet canvas flecked by clusters of lights. The forty kilometers to Beirut would pass quickly now, and with little physical effort. Ever so lightly, he slept.

*   *   *

The dump truck received its last load from the once-sleek skeleton at Wujah Al Hajar Air Base at twenty past five that morning. The city elder from Hamat had long ago departed—by now either asleep in his warm bed or being harangued by his querulous wife—leaving Mohammed and his son to finish things.