What were Stratton’s SOPs? How was he going to strike?
To his left, as he faced the wall, there was a low arch leading into the building adjoining the plaza, about two metres at its highest point, and a single glance told him that the wall itself continued just as the tour guide had said, forming a kind of tunnel. Luke approached it. If the wall was not just the exposed section at the plaza, he needed to examine the rest of it. To put himself in the mindset of a terrorist and work out where the weak points of this target were.
He was in a dimly lit room with a vaulted ceiling. Beyond it the tunnel continued. There were thirteen people in here, all dressed in traditional black garb, sitting on seats. The atmosphere was quiet, prayer-like. One of the men looked over his shoulder and, seeing Luke – casually dressed and dirty – gave a look of disapproval. But then he went back to his praying and Luke passed through the room and along the tunnel.
He moved quickly, but as he went he took in the geography. The tunnel followed the wall, along which there were more men seated and praying. After another hundred metres or so, he arrived in a second, wider room that was more populated than the first one – thirty people, maybe more. Against the wall there was a Perspex plaque with white writing – in Hebrew at the top, and underneath in English: ‘opposite the foundation stone and the site of the holy of holies’. Luke edged through the little crowd, and continued his recce.
As he continued north, the tunnel became less well lit, the walls more roughly hewn. He passed a metal grille on his left, and anterooms off the main tunnel. Further on, the tunnel was held up by a series of wooden joists and columns. There were fewer people here, and he passed what looked like ancient water pits. A sign told him they were cisterns from long ago. Checking to see he was unobserved, he worked a small piece of loose mortar away from the opposite wall and dropped it into the cistern. It took a second or so before he heard the mortar hit the ground. Three or four metres deep, he reckoned. Possible to cache something there? Unlikely – to remove it would risk drawing attention to yourself. He continued down the tunnel. When he had walked about 400 metres in all, the tunnel ended abruptly. Perhaps there had once been an exit, but now it was blocked.
Luke hurried back along the tunnel. Past the cisterns. Past the joists and columns. Past the grille.
He suddenly halted and looked back.
The grille was ten metres behind him. Retracing his steps, he bent down to look at it. Where did this thing lead? Could it be removed? Could you stow anything behind it?
Then something caught his eye.
It was difficult to see in the dim light of the tunnel, but Luke’s eyes were sharp. Tied round the lowermost metal bars of the grille were lengths of fishing line. Worming his fingers in through the grate, he pulled at one of the lines. Weight at the end. He pulled the line up, and what he found puzzled him. A clear plastic bag, filled with coins. Tugging on each of the other lines, he found the same thing. What the fuck was this? Some weird ritual, like chucking loose change into a fountain? Or was it something more suspicious?
A few bags of shekels weren’t going to bring down the Western Wall. But something nagged at him as he returned to the plaza and checked his watch.
23.30 hrs. Fuck, the clock was ticking.
Think, Luke told himself. Think SOPs.
Think.
How had Stratton and Maya Bloom struck last?
He remembered the images he’d seen of the train bombings. The pictures of the Palestinian men who’d blown themselves up. He remembered the kid in Gaza, his body strapped with fuck knows what kind of explosive.
The Palestinians used suicide bombs. They were well known for it.
And Stratton? Stratton used the Palestinians.
Luke narrowed his eyes as a scenario formed in his mind. To bring down the Western Wall you had to get close. To get close, you had to remain unobserved. Suicide bombers would do that. And even if one was discovered, there’d be others to back him up. There were no countermeasures – you either spotted the bomber or you didn’t. And even if you did, you had to take him out before he knew you had eyes on.
But what about the security? How could you get past security – the metal detectors? Luke ran through the make-up of a suicide vest. Explosives – they’d get through the gates easily enough. It was the rest of it that would be problematic. A detonator – anything that could send a surge of voltage into the explosives. And most vests were packed with shrapnel to cause maximum collateral damage . . .
Shrapnel.
The bags of coins. Small, hard lumps of metal. Get one of those in the skull and you’d know about it. They’d cause just as much carnage as the usual nuts and bolts that got stuck into suicide vests . . .
‘Fuck,’ Luke breathed. The mist was clearing. What if the bombers had been bringing in the makeshift constituent parts of their equipment in piece by piece?
He was already moving back towards the tunnel when something else caught his eye. Two of the soldiers who had been patrolling the plaza were standing next to each other, almost exactly at the midway point between Luke and the Western Wall. They were conferring and looking very obviously in Luke’s direction.
He cursed again as several possibilities shot into his mind. Had the Regiment circulated his image to the Israeli authorities? Or were the military and police simply on high alert? Did Luke just look suspicious, standing there staking the place out? Either way, it wasn’t a conversation he wanted to have with anybody. He moved immediately, as fast as he could without running, in the direction of the security gates. His skin prickled as he went, but he resisted the temptation to look over his shoulder as he hurried out of the exit. He retraced his steps to the alleyway where he’d cached his weapon.
If he was right, and a suicide bomb attack was planned, he had to consider everything he knew, everything he’d ever learned, about such things. The bombers would be ordinary people without military training, but they’d be organised by someone who knew what they were doing. Was that where Maya Bloom came in? She’d been involved in the train bombings. She was, or had been, a Mossad agent. Somebody with a background similar to his own. If he was organising the bombers, what would
he
tell them to do?
It was rudimentary that they shouldn’t walk any further than necessary in a suicide belt. They’d be nervous. Sweating. Conspicuous. And with Jerusalem in a state of high alert, no one in their right mind would risk them being on the streets for any longer than necessary.
What about the bombers themselves? Would he trust them to go ahead with their suicide mission? He thought back to Gaza, to the kid with the remote detonator. Truth was, even the most idealistic nutter could bottle it at the last minute. If Luke was organising this thing, he’d give the bombers as little information as possible, and only issue their final instructions at the very last minute. He’d make sure they got as close to the target site as possible before leaving them to their own explosive devices . . .
His Sig was where he’d left it. Luke shouldered the Bergen and hurried from the alleyway. Slowly, he was working on a plan.
If the squadron was here with him, he’d have eyes on every gate in the city and the Western Wall plaza would be surrounded by snipers. But there was no squadron. No backup. Just Luke. And if he let anybody know where he was, there’d be a team on its way to lift him within minutes. All he could do was watch the gate nearest to the Western Wall.
The tourist map of the Old Town was a photograph in his mind. He headed south between the city’s Jewish and Armenian Quarters. When the road forked, he headed south-west and five minutes later he found himself approaching the Zion Gate. It was small – barely the width of a car – and as Luke passed through it he looked back up at the city walls. The area around the stone entrance was pockmarked with bullet holes – a reminder of Jerusalem’s violent past.
Luke kept his head down as he skirted east round the city walls. In just a couple of minutes he arrived at another gate. His mental map told him that this was the Dung Gate, the closest access point to the wall. It formed a lower entrance than the Zion Gate – about three metres – but at five metres was a little wider. To its left was an olive tree; to its right, three palms. There were no bullet marks here. But more people were walking in and out. Cars. Pedestrians. It was late, but still busy.
He stood for a moment and stared at the gate. If he was right, any bomber heading for the Western Wall would be likely to pass through here.
If
he was right.
From somewhere nearby, the smell of cooking food reached his nose. A couple of old men passed him, speaking loudly and clearly arguing. A kid went by with a pile of postcards that concertinaed out into a long strip.
Just ordinary life and it made him pause. He remembered the way his Regiment colleagues had looked at him back at the base. Like he’d lost it. Luke closed his eyes for a moment. He couldn’t be imagining all this, could he? He couldn’t be mad? Was he on the wrong track? About Stratton? About the bombers?
But then he remembered Chet and Suze and the troops mobilising around the Middle East. He remembered the ruthlessness of Maya Bloom and the madness in Stratton’s eyes.
A church bell rang somewhere in the distance. He counted the chimes. They were sombre. Stately. Twelve of them.
Midnight.
Hanukkah had arrived. In eleven hours, he would know.
In the meantime, he couldn’t loiter here. With the military presence so high he’d soon be observed. But he needed to set up surveillance on the Dung Gate, and quickly.
And that meant finding a workable OP.
TWENTY-NINE
10 December.
07.00 hrs.
On the eastern outskirts of Tel Aviv, in a well-to-do suburb where the roads were gated and the houses large, the previous evening’s storm was just an unpleasant memory. The sky was clear and crisp, and a white bus was waiting outside the Scheiber Elementary School for Girls, its engine running. The front door of the bus was open and a pretty young woman with dark, curly hair and almond eyes stood just next to it with a clipboard in her hand. On the pavement in front of her was a well-behaved line of little ladies, all aged either seven or eight. They wore home clothes, and little backpacks over their shoulders which contained lunches that would no doubt be eaten before they’d gone a few kilometres.
Today was a holiday, of course. The first day of the Festival of Lights. The teachers were glad to sacrifice one of their precious holiday days to give the girls the chance to travel to Jerusalem, to see the celebrations in that holy place for themselves. A visit to the Western Wall and then back to their families, to light the first of the eight candles of Hanukkah, eat a special meal and sing festive songs. No wonder they’d all looked excited as they said goodbye to their mums before joining their schoolmates in the queue and filing into the bus. There were thirty-five girls in all, with four teachers to look after them. Miss Leibovitz ticked each child’s name on her clipboard as they boarded the bus and then, when she was sure everybody was there, she climbed up into the long vehicle herself.
The driver was a man in his forties with a small paunch and an open-necked shirt. He pressed a button and the door closed.
‘All ready?’ he asked above the children’s babble.
‘All ready,’ the teacher replied with a smile. And as she strapped herself into her seat at the front – her three female colleagues having already installed themselves among the party – the bus moved off.
‘How long till we get there, Miss Leibovitz?’ a voice asked from behind her.
She looked round to see the face of one of her favourites – an earnest little girl called Natasha, who wore red ribbons in her beautifully plaited pigtails.
‘Two hours, Natasha darling. Just two hours. We’ll be there before you know it.’
Natasha smiled, then sat back down in her seat and gazed out of the window just as they passed a green sign with a white arrow and a single word in Hebrew.
, it read.
Jerusalem.
Jerusalem.
A city divided. A Jewish Quarter. A Christian Quarter. An Islamic Quarter. An Armenian Quarter. A place for everyone and no one.
And then there was East Jerusalem. Occupied by the Arabs and governed by the Palestinian Authority. Adjoining the Old Town and the West Bank, a symbol of the city’s warlike past and fractured present.
It was in East Jerusalem that four people found themselves now, in the basement of a poor and unassuming house. Three men, one woman. The men were naked apart from their underpants; the woman had covered herself with a long white T-shirt that did little to hide the swelling of her five-month-pregnant belly. Their semi-nakedness didn’t embarrass them. They had more important things to think of.
A single, bare bulb hung from a ceiling which bowed under the weight of the building above; and beneath the bulb, a table. They stood in silence, staring at the table’s contents.
There was a kitchen rolling pin, a roll of heavy-duty electrical tape and next to it a wooden box, its lid beside it. Inside the box were tightly packed blocks of what looked like brown modelling clay.