Authors: Russell Blake
Three Nagmachon troop transport vehicles sat by the side of the checkpoint, the soldiers aboard grim-faced and sweating in full combat attire as the TV camera panned across them before settling on the tower, where a watchman swept the line of waiting cars with a .50 caliber machine gun.
Maya was inside the communications shack, leaning over a large monitor as the gangly uniformed man seated in front of it worked a mouse.
Her breath caught in her throat. “Wait, Yosef. Freeze it right…there.”
“Done,” he replied.
They both stared at a still image of the ambulance driver and the passenger, blurry due to the distortion from the windshield and the angle of the security camera.
“Have you given this to the investigation team?”
“Of course. That’s how I knew which time stamp to look for,” Yosef said, rolling his eyes.
“Why haven’t they passed the photos out to everyone?” she asked.
“They don’t consult me on their strategy, Maya. But if I had to guess, it’s so the killers don’t go underground. If we’re obvious about it, they’ll disappear into the camps and we’ll never find them.”
“Hmm. Can you print this for me?”
He nodded and tapped some keys, sending the file to the printer before swiveling to face her. “If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were just after me for my audio-video skills,” Yosef joked. He’d made no secret of his admiration of Maya and often contrived reasons to be around her when she was off duty. Her exotic looks and caramel skin were the stuff of dreams and had made the latter part of his tour of duty bearable. But for all his efforts to ingratiate himself, he couldn’t read her, and when she departed a moment later, the image clutched in her hand, the atmosphere in the room felt lifeless, leaving him feeling depressed and alone.
Maya sat on her cot in the deserted barrack, studying the photograph of two Arab men, unremarkable except for their paramedic uniforms. A fog of anger clouded her vision as she confronted the likenesses of the assassins who’d cut her best friend down in cold blood. She shook it off and concentrated on committing every contour of their faces to memory. The outline of a plan percolated in her mind.
Not so much a plan as a refusal to stand by helplessly and do nothing, hoping that the investigators would make progress penetrating a society that was as off-limits to them as if it were located on the moon. What would likely ultimately happen would be a generalized response that acknowledged the security force’s inability to single out the terrorists, who were minted daily from a disenfranchised population where hopeless youths eagerly signed up to become martyrs or murderers.
Survival in subsistence conditions was the norm in the region, the crushing poverty an insult to the population given the apparently limitless prosperity just across the barrier wall in Israel. Discontent was fanned by the inflammatory rhetoric of the civic leaders and exacerbated by a steady inflow of Israeli settlers whose very presence was a daily reminder of the region’s occupation by hostile forces.
The area was a hotbed of seething resentment and impotent rage that periodically manifested in violence like that which had claimed Sarah’s life. Maya knew it would be almost impossible for the investigators to make headway in locating her killers – anyone even remotely resembling an Israeli would be instantly shunned, regardless of circumstances. Which left Sarah dead, pointlessly slaughtered, and her murderers likely to get away with it.
The walls of her sleeping quarters closed in on her, and she became suddenly restless. She stood and paced in front of the window, a tepid breeze stirring her hair. The sound of motors from the checkpoint reminded her how close she always was to random disaster.
She stopped in front of the window and stared out, her eyes unfocused as the bile that had been stewing in her guts all day rose in her throat. Sarah wasn’t just another digit on an endless list of the expendable, a faceless casualty to be forgotten like a particularly nasty bump on a long road. She was – had been – Maya’s friend, and whoever had taken her life would pay in kind.
Maya wasn’t sure how she would find the killers or how she would bring them down, but one way or another, she would avenge Sarah.
She swore to herself that she would, if it was the last thing she ever did.
Chapter 6
Pulau Numbing, Indonesia
Clouds brooded in a black line on the horizon, one of the frequent daytime storms that were inevitable during monsoon season. Lightning branched through the thunderheads as they neared the emerald mass of Pulau Numbing. A quarter mile from the island’s shore, a heavy steel cargo ship, eighty meters long, blue hull streaked with rust, pulled at its anchor chain as it rose and fell in the increasingly rough swell. A plume of white floated from its smokestack as men with skin the color of beaten bronze moved along the deck, eyes on the approaching squall as they hurried to finish their work.
An expensive sport fishing yacht bobbed in the water next to the ship, its bow and stern lines secured to metal eyelets. A massive crane whined above; its motor strained as it lowered a pallet containing three wooden crates to the waiting craft. The crew of the smaller vessel guided the cargo to a clear area of the deck under the watchful eye of the captain, who stood silently by while his men unhooked the steel cable and swung the hook to the side. The captain waved at his counterpart aboard the cargo ship and then turned to face the gray wall of rain bearing down on them. He calculated they had five minutes to make it to land, which would be cutting it close.
“Tie a tarp over the cargo while we get underway. I don’t want it getting wet,” he ordered in rapid-fire Bahasa Indonesia, and his men scrambled to obey.
Satisfied they were doing everything they could, he mounted the stainless steel ladder to the flybridge. After a final glance below at the cargo, he signaled to the crewman on the bow to retrieve the lines. When they were clear, he engaged the transmissions and eased the throttles forward. The fifty-five-foot Viking sport fisher pulled away from the ship and began moving through the increasingly large seas, the surface the color of pewter. The rising wind churned the wave crests as the bow moved on a perpendicular course from the Korean tramp steamer toward the green rise of the island, where a protected harbor awaited them behind the safety of a rock breakwater.
The men lashed the tarp in place. Angry gusts tugged at it as they secured the covering, and the captain goosed the throttles, giving the twin MAN diesels more fuel. The boat leapt forward and then leveled out, and was soon cutting through the four-foot slop, sending sheets of spray into the darkening heavens.
A deafening roar reverberated across the sea as thunder exploded from the angry line of clouds, and the captain pushed the speed up several more knots. The agile boat slammed through the waves, and the skipper craned his neck from his perch to ensure that his precious load wasn’t shifting on deck.
Another peal of thunder boomed, and a tree of lightning seared down upon nearby Pulau Telan island, only seven miles west. The air smelled of ozone and rain and the crisp astringency of open sea as the yacht closed the distance to the breakwater, the curtain of rain pursuing it ominously dark.
The captain slowed as he neared the opening and guided the boat through the gap with a confident hand. The waiting crewman worked his way to the bow with a boathook in hand as the yacht approached a bright red float bobbing on the surface. The man retrieved the orb and hauled on a heavy nylon mooring line, which he wound expertly around a cleat, securing the vessel in place as a second crewman worked the other end of the submerged rope to the stern. He had just tied off the stern when the rain hit with thirty-knot force, blasting sideways, sheets of water blinding everyone on board.
The captain watched the show from the enclosed flybridge, visibility down to only a few feet while nature doused the island. The crew took grateful refuge in the cabin below as the deluge pounded the boat’s topsides with the ferocity of artillery fire.
Half an hour later the storm had blown by, leaving a breezy calm and a sweet freshness to the humid air. The captain lowered himself to the deck and called out to his crew.
“Come on. We don’t have all day. I want this stuff off the deck, do you hear?”
The men emerged from the cabin, blinking in the sunlight as the patchwork of clouds overhead thinned. The captain returned to the flybridge while the crew cast off and guided the boat to the wooden pier at the far end of the harbor. Three armed guards in white uniforms stood on the worn planks next to a crane with a manual winch, and within fifteen minutes the three crates that had been strapped to the pallet rested on two carts in the center of the pier. The sport fishing yacht returned to its mooring, job now done.
“The boss wants this in the main storage building. He’ll be there shortly,” the lead guard said, shouldering his weapon and glancing at the crates with trepidation.
A wiry Malay with a sparse goatee and skin the texture of beef jerky examined the top of the nearest crate, running his blunt fingers over the biohazard symbol stenciled on the lid in red, the black Korean lettering beneath it meaningless to him.
“For God’s sake, be careful. I don’t know what exactly is in these, but I do know I don’t want to find out the hard way. Easy does it on the way to the compound,” the guard cautioned, and then murmured into his radio, his eyes darting from the crates to the tense faces of his peers.
Their employer was accustomed to receiving unusual shipments from passing ships, but this was the first time in the four years they had worked there that they’d seen the biohazard logo. Usually it was shipments of weapons or explosives, either from North Korea, China, or Russia.
“All right. Let’s do this,” the lead guard said, his confident tone belied by his nervous demeanor. His companions each maneuvered a cart like they were traversing a cliff edge, hopeful that whatever toxic cargo they were moving hadn’t been damaged in transit – they had little doubt that in the case of a leak or a spill, they wouldn’t live to see another morning.
Chapter 7
Ramallah, West Bank
Maya adjusted her hijab as she sneaked out of the barracks. Like every day for the last three weeks, she had dressed in native garb to blend in with the locals, her Jericho 941 9mm service pistol and two extra magazines hidden beneath her black robe. Ramallah wasn’t huge, with a population of only eighteen thousand, and she believed that it was just a matter of time before the men responsible for Sarah’s murder surfaced.
She skirted the front of the checkpoint and moved to the rear gate of the barracks area, where one of her admirers was on guard duty from three p.m. to eleven. Samuel was handsome, with intelligent brown eyes set into a determined face, his high brow topped with wavy chestnut hair, and skin tanned a deep bronze from countless hours in the sun. Under different circumstances there could have been something there, but as it was, she preferred to keep her life uncomplicated, even if there was undeniable chemistry between them. Checkpoint duty in the IDF was neither the time nor the place for entanglements, and as a rule she maintained a cautious emotional distance from her male counterparts.
Samuel looked up as she approached, and smiled. “You look marvelous, as usual. Very authentic. I like what they’re doing with shapeless women’s fashions these days.”
“Ha ha. It’s hot in this damned thing. The only good part is that I could be toting a grenade launcher under it and nobody would know.”
He nodded. “How long are you going to keep this up?”
“As long as it takes.”
He shook his head. “They could be long gone by now.”
“They’re here. Emboldened at getting away with shooting up the checkpoint. Trust me. I can feel it in my bones.”
“Hey, it’s your funeral. Just get back before my stint’s over.”
Maya moved through the gate. “Thanks for covering for me.” Her duty on the graveyard shift started at 11:00, and she’d been making it to the barracks by 10:45 every evening, surviving on too few hours of sleep to count.
“Remember – call if you get into trouble. It’s better to have to face Kevod’s wrath than be torn apart by an angry mob.”
She’d begun her hunt for the terrorists in the mosques, mentally cataloguing the men who arrived for prayer. When after two weeks that failed to yield any promising results, she altered her approach by questioning women, showing them the photograph of the two men, telling a story about her husband’s death and needing to get in touch with his family – the driver and passenger. Three days later she hit pay dirt, when a fruit market vendor nodded as she looked at the image.
“I think I’ve seen the younger one. But I can’t be sure.”
“Where? Please. I’m at my wit’s end.” Maya had mastered the local accent, having heard it nonstop for the last nine months, and she was confident she sounded like a native.
“My cousin has a café over by the mosque. Maybe in there. I wish I could remember.” The woman mentioned the name of a nearby hole-in-the-wall Maya knew from her wandering in the city center. “I’m sorry. It might be nothing.”
Maya had spent the last four evenings watching the café, most of the time from across the street, but sometimes from within, sipping hot tea as she waited – for what, she had no idea. She didn’t want to question the proprietor. It was one thing to gossip with women as a native, but another for a woman to try to get information out of a Palestinian man.
Yesterday, just after dusk, as she’d sat in a corner of the café nursing her cup, three men entered and moved to one of the tables near the window, glancing around periodically in a guarded manner. One of the men could have been the ambulance passenger – it wasn’t a definite match, and his scraggly beard made a definitive identification tough – but it was close enough to set off alarms when she spotted them.
It was possible that they were just petty criminals – there was no shortage of pickpockets and thieves working the square, given that over sixty percent of the population was refugees – but her instinct said otherwise. The owner of the café had deferred to the group when they arrived. He’d never been anything but grumpy on her prior visits, a dour expression fixed in place, but he’d lit up when they walked in, their eyes roaming over the interior, apparently dismissing her. Which was integral to her plan – women were routinely ignored and were almost invisible in public places, especially when dressed modestly.