SANCTION: A Thriller (21 page)

To his surprise, Ben found the craft was powered by twin sixteen cylinder, 2100 horsepower Harkin-Marine diesel engines. These particular powerplant’s would propel the yacht through the water at better than sixty knots, a steady clip by anyone’s estimation. A pile of scuba gear rested in the corner behind a medium sized boiler. There were six oxygen tanks with rigging and matching buoyancy compensator vests. Ben fumbled through the equipment until all of the tanks were upright and their gauges facing him. Three of them were full, while the others were between one third full and completely empty. He lifted one of the cylinders and bounced it in the palms of his hands, feeling the weight.

There were two immediate problems with using the yacht to escape. The first was that there was an empty slip in the garage. Assuming that another boat was usually docked in the slip meant that it was either somewhere else for repairs, or it was currently patrolling the perimeter of the island. If it turned out to be the latter, then Ben would have to contend with the pilot of that boat once he and Emily were sighted leaving the harbor. The second was that Nazari’s men were currently scouring the grounds in search of him and the rest of the reporters meaning they would have to fend off the attack they were sure to receive from the shoreline.

Ben hoisted the oxygen tank onto his shoulder and bent down to retrieve another. He carried the tanks through the boat and set them down on the walkway in the garage. He went back for two more.

“What are we going to do with those?” Emily asked when he returned the second time.

“Have any experience with scuba diving Ms. Stansborough?”

“Uh…some…well a little that I picked up in Hawaii. Of course, that was about ten years ago.” She said nervously. For the first time, a portion of her resolve seemed to melt.

“Okay pay attention, this will be a quick refresher.” Ben whispered as he picked up one of the steel bottles.

Emily listened carefully as the spy reminded her of how the tanks worked.

“You simply inhale like normal using the regulator and then breathe out through it. Try to control your emotions or you’ll consume more oxygen than you need and possibly be out before you’d like. The bubbles that you create by exiting air through the regulator might attract several fish. Don’t panic or your mask will fog up and you won’t be able to see, which will complicate matters.”

Ben set the tank down and went back to the engine room. He returned with two of the buoyancy compensator vests and a small spool of nylon thread. He lassoed two of the tanks with the nylon and began weaving an intricate net from the bottom of each tank up to the neck just below the threaded valve and then around the body of both cylinders. Once the two tanks were effectively one, he started working on the other two and then attached an air regulator to each rig.

Emily hesitated when he handed one of the heavy sets of compressed air, along with the buoyancy compensator, to her. She didn’t know what he was planning but just the sight of the underwater equipment formed a tight knot in her stomach.

“What are we going to do?” She asked again, partly knowing the answer.

Ben looked at Emily. She was pretty, especially in the dim light of the garage. He noticed the long locks of flowing dark blonde hair that fell just beyond her shoulders. She had a classic look and elegance to her that couldn’t be disguised. In Ben’s line of work, there was no time to cultivate relationships. He’d always considered this part of the sacrifice he’d decided to make in joining the Mossad. It had never really bothered him before but as of late, a lot of things were beginning to make him uneasy.

“We are going to be strapping these to our backs…I don’t have a plan for therest…yet.” He said.

Emily was about to make a suggestion when they overheard voices coming from outside the dry entrance to the garage.

Ben reacted quickly, grabbing the tanks and lowering them into the water between the boat and the dock. He turned on his heels and secured the reporter by the waist. Lifting her off of her feet, he pulled her in close and stepped off the edge of the dock. The two of them plunged into the water and grabbed the tanks that were kept from sinking by the compensators. Ben held onto his rig and vest with one hand and kicked gently until his head poked through the water on the other side of the empty slip. He pushed on the bottom of the walkway to keep his head below its level and out of sight, while he monitored the entrance to the garage. Two men armed with AK-47’s entered. They were speaking Farsi. Though the Iranian language had been a part of Ben’s extensive training, he couldn’t hear everything from his position in the water. He only made out enough of the conversation to know that they were arguing about a football match between two Iranian teams.

The rumbling sound of an approaching boat filled the garage. One of the men headed over to a fixture on the wall and depressed a large, green, square button. The door in front of the empty slip rolled upward in its tracks and stopped when it was parallel with the roof of the floating parking structure.

Ben dipped below the surface as light burst through the open door. He pulled Emily to himself and swam under the walkway next to the yacht. They emerged below the wooden planks and treaded water with their legs.

A blue catamaran with broad yellow pinstripes slid into the empty slot. The men on the walkway grabbed the mooring lines and tied them to two cleats embedded in the deck. Several men walked around on the deck of the boat.

“Did you find them?” one of them asked the pilot of the ship as he stepped out of the tiny standalone wheel house and onto the slender walkway. The man replied in Arabic. “Does it look like we found them, you idiot?”

The one who had asked the question recoiled at the response and turned his face from the captain as he passed them on the deck.

“No.” He murmured.

“Get inside and check the engine, it needs fuel.” He ordered brashly.

Ben moved through the water toward the main walkway. He swam the length of the deck in search of a spot where he could get a glimpse of the group above them and access how the situation had changed. He doubted these men were aware of the scuba equipment inside the yacht but if they were, and one of them looked inside the engine room, things were liable to get bad quick. He found a vantage point at the opposite end of the walkway where the main deck merged with a smaller shoot that bordered a slip. He slowly popped his head out of the water and looked around. His eyes found the captain first. He watched him for a couple minutes as the man rummaged through a pallet of spare engine parts while he waited for the men to prepare the boat for its next run.

Twenty minutes passed before the pilot of the catamaran was able to venture back into her and taxi out of the garage. Ben waited an additional five just to be safe and then swam out from under the deck. He helped Emily up onto the walkway. Her knees buckled slightly as she stood for the first time after treading water for nearly half an hour. Ben caught her and sat her down on the deck. “Wait here and rest.” He said quietly. “Massage your calves with your fist.”

“What about the tanks?” She said, with a hint of nervousness.

“We’ll get them when we’re ready.”

Emily sat on the deck driving her palms into her calf muscles trying to release the cramped knots that had formed. She watched as Ben gathered tools and hardware from all over the garage to use in a plan only he himself knew. The Israeli disappeared into the yacht once more.

Ben quickly made his way back to the engine room and then to a tiny closet where he could access the craft’s one control cable. He placed a breaker bar on a bolt that connected the steering linkage of the yacht’s rudder to the wheel in the control center. After several straining pulls the bolt gave and slowly started to spin. Once completely loose, he set the bar down and ran the bolt off the rest of the threads by hand. The steering linkage came undone and he laid it on the ground.

Schweitzer grabbed a spare mooring line from behind the huge inboard engines and left the room for the last time. Outside the yacht, he walked over to a control button box that was suspended from one of the steel rafters by a tether and pressed one of four directional arrows. A pair of lifting straps began to tighten around the hull until the craft’s water line started moving upward. A low whine growled from the overhead crane as it lifted the craft from the water. Ben held the button until the hull was fully exposed.

As a reporter, Emily would normally have taken the opportunity to chronicle the danger they were in and the crazy events that had occurred. But she was acutely aware of the fact that she might not be getting home and wanted to devote every ounce of her mental faculties to getting off the island. She would worry about capturing, ‘the story of a lifetime’, if and when she survived.

“I think it might work.” Ben said.

“What may work?” She asked, desperately hoping in the details of his plan.

“I detached the steering linkage from the rudder, which controls the way the boat turns. I’m going to attach the mooring line to opposite ends of the rudder assembly via the pry bar which I’ll somehow wedge into the top of the rudder. Once I anchor the line to this bar, I will be able to pull back on one end or the other, turning the rudder from underneath the boat with the line.”

“I don’t understand. Why can’t we just drive it the way it was designed?” Emily asked, as she tried to imagine what he’d just said.

“Because they’re looking for us. That catamaran is patrolling this island.

When they spot us, and they will, they’ll run us down. They will shoot enough holes in this cabin to make identification of our bodies impossible and we don’t have the firepower to get into a gun battle.” Ben said, sitting down on the deck. He undid the laces to his shoes and tossed them into the open cockpit of the speedboat.

I
mam Nazari looked at his second in command. Hassan Bishara was pretending to be interested in his watch.

“It shouldn’t matter to you what time it is.” Nazari said finally.

Bishara looked up, his indifference hidden well. He really didn’t care if the Israeli spy had escaped the auditorium. Where could he go? They were in the middle of the Arabian Sea. There wasn’t a dry stick of land within two hundred miles of Azraq Jiden Island. The man had nowhere to go.

“What do you want me to do?” Bishara asked, dropping his hands down to his sides.

“Hassan, I know that you think this is not important. I know that you think nothing can go wrong. But you haven’t been in this position before. I have. Something always goes wrong. Until the first shot is fired, we can’t give the slightest nod to our true plans. What do you think the Israeli agent plans to do if he can gain his freedom? Let me tell you. He plans to report to his superiors. Though they are our enemy, it does not benefit us to lie to ourselves about their strengths and weaknesses. If Ben Schweitzer were able to get ahold of someone in the Israeli state department, we would lose momentum and the whole plan would shift. I won’t risk that just for the sake of laziness.” Nazari said.

“Again, what do you want me to do?” Bishara said stiffly.

“Find him, now.” Nazari growled through his teeth.

Bishara didn’t offer a reply but simply headed for the door to the bedroom in Nazari’s rented house.

“Oh and Hassan. What did you decide to do with the gift from Uzbekistan?” Nazari questioned.

“I’m going to put it in the water supply.” The younger man said as a matter of fact.

Even for Nazari, a true radical, the measure seemed extreme. But he not only understood the point in Bishara’s plan but approved of it.

“Good, just make sure all of our men know about this before we do it. We don’t want to impact our troops deploying our own weapon.” Nazari replied.

Nazari walked over to the edge of his bed as the door to his bedroom shut behind Bishara. The Hamas leader appreciated many things about the island. On it, he needed little protection from his guards. The night before he had walked along its garden paths by himself. It was perceivably the last time he would have such seclusion and solace. The face of the world was about to change, at which point, Imam Nazari would become a hunted man.

Brad shifted the faded green BMW into neutral and stepped on the brake. The old engine sputtered and hesitated before it dropped down to four hundred RPM’s, where it struggled to keep running. The line at the border crossing in front of him stretched for a quarter of a mile as it snaked between piles of hastily stacked sandbags. In Ward’s possession were a forged passport, Jordanian driver’s license, three thousand dollars and a .40 caliber hand gun–which he had tucked into his waistband between several layers of traditional robes.

Unofficially, Syria didn’t allow anyone to cross from Israel into their country. Officially, they had no policy on such matters but everybody knew better than to try. Even if you simply had an Israeli stamp on your passport, you weren’t likely to escape hours of intense scrutiny. The only other way to enter the Arab state by ground was to pass through a neighboring land, Jordan being the easiest and therefore preferred point of access.

Brad pulled out his cell phone and dialed the number to the safe house in Bahrain. After he was cleared through the usual security measures, Tom Kingsley came on the line.

“Brad, where are you?” Kingsley asked. His voice a mixture of surprise and relief. He hadn’t expected Brad to make it. The West Bank had virtually exploded after he and Efran had left.

The violence in Gaza and the West Bank had been plastered all over the local and national news networks with Al Jazeera carrying it twenty-four hours a day. Palestine had once again become the top story and focal point of global concern. The kidnapping of American college students had become a byline that was hardly worth mentioning.

“I’m just east of a village called “Umm BinJimal”. I’m about to cross into Syria.” Brad said.

“Are you kidding me? I’m looking at more sat photos right now. Saleem headed northeast toward Mt. Hermon before turning south. Brad, that’s all the satellite grabbed before it was out of range but he’s definitely in Syria. My guess is he’s either holed up somewhere in As Suwayda or Quneitra. I’m betting one of those cities will be pay dirt.” Kingsley said. The Green Beret knew that Durrah Nejem had to have given the lead on Syria to Ward but he didn’t want to know what he’d done to get it, so he didn’t ask.