79
The assignment went
to 69 Squadron of the Israeli Air Force, also known as the Hammers. Operating out of Tel Nof Air Force Base southeast of Tel Aviv in the Negev Desert, 69 Squadron was comprised of twenty-seven McDonnell Douglas F-151 Thunder aircraft. Powered by two Pratt & Whitney turbofan engines, the F-151 was capable of speeds up to Mach 2.5 or some 1,875 miles per hour, and had a range of two thousand nautical miles. It would be able to strike seventy percent of the prescribed targets inside Iran without airborne refueling. More important, the F-151 was the only aircraft in the Israeli Air Force capable of carrying the B61-11 EPW.
The nuclear-tipped bunker busters sat in their cradles on the gleaming concrete floor. The bombs were intimidating just to look at. Twenty-five feet in length, they bore four fins behind a sharp nose and four more on the tail. The B61-11 was slim as far as airborne munitions go. Its two-foot four-inch diameter corresponded exactly to the eight-inch artillery barrel of the deactivated M110 howitzer used in its manufacture. Equipped with a delayed-reaction fuse, it would strike the earth at a speed of two thousand feet per second and burrow through fifty feet of granite or reinforced concrete prior to detonation. Armed with a ten-kiloton warhead, the bomb and the seismic shock waves it would generate would destroy any structure up to two hundred fifty feet underground. It would also throw over sixty thousand tons of radioactive waste into the atmosphere.
“Just in time,” said General Danny Ganz as he walked alongside Zvi Hirsch inside the large hangar.
“A miracle,” Hirsch agreed.
Nearby, a team of airmen wheeled one of the bunker busters across the polished concrete floor. Positioning it beneath the plane’s bay, they jacked up the gurney and fastened the projectile to the internal bomb rack. Hirsch and Ganz watched as the team attached a second bomb, and then a third. Ganz sighed inwardly at the sight. He was tired of the fighting. Tired of the constant vigilance. He wondered if Israel would ever have the luxury of peace.
“The first wave will concentrate on the newly discovered enrichment facility at Chalus,” he said. “After that, we’ll go after their missile launchers and warhead fabrication plants. Some Sayeret men are going in tonight to paint the targets in advance of our birds. We’ll helo them in from our boats in the Gulf.”
“Tonight?” asked Zvi Hirsch, more than a little confused. “Isn’t that a bit rash? Remember what the president said: We can’t go off half-cocked. We need a reason.”
Ganz crossed his arms. “I received a phone call a few minutes ago from a friend in the Pentagon. A fellow pilot, actually.”
“Who?”
“Major General John Austen.”
“The evangelist?”
“I prefer to think of him as a friend of Israel.” Ganz leaned closer to make sure that no one overheard their conversation. “He has intelligence pointing to an attack against our interests within the next twelve hours.”
“Where?”
“Somewhere in Europe,” said Ganz. He stared into Hirsch’s bulging eyes. “I don’t think we have long to wait.”
80
“How will we find him?”
Jonathan asked.
“Look in the backseat and get my laptop,” said Emma.
Jonathan found the computer and turned it on. “Same password?”
“Same one. You know that you scared the hell out of everyone by cracking that code. They’re going to have to redesign the entire Intelink system because of you.”
“I don’t know whether that’s good or bad.”
They were driving beside the Lake of Zurich. It was six o’clock. Lights sparkled along the hillside like a fairy-tale landscape. During the ride down the mountain, she’d finally opened up and began to talk. If she wouldn’t tell him about everything she’d done in the past, she was more forthcoming about how she’d found him and about John Austen’s plan to shoot down the plane. It was a first step in repairing the split between them.
Emma instructed him how to open the software program. The laptop’s screen filled with a detailed map of Switzerland. She told him to enter the letters “VD.”
A flashing red dot appeared near the outskirts of Zurich. The map zoomed in until it reached street level.
“What is it?” he asked.
“LoJack on steroids,” said Emma. “I put a tracker on von Daniken’s car three days ago. I needed to keep tabs on him. The signal from his car is sent to a satellite and bounced right back down to us.”
“You’ve been busy.”
Emma smiled cryptically. “Where is he?”
“Close.”
“Glattbrugg?”
Jonathan studied the map. “How did you know?”
“Shit.” Emma punched the accelerator.
81
“Zurich Air Traffic,
this is El Al 8851 heavy commencing initial approach.”
“Roger El Al 8851. You are cleared for approach. Proceed to vector one-seven-zero and descend to altitude ten thousand four hundred. You are number six in the grid.”
“Copy.”
The Pilot listened to the communications between Zurich air control and El Al Flight 8851 with anticipation.
Shutting his eyes, he whispered a last prayer. He asked for His guidance and a steady hand. He prayed for the courage to see the job done. He was not an evil man. Faced with taking more than six hundred lives, he trembled. He knew that Christ had felt the same as he bore the cross upon his shoulders. Their deaths would be as painful to him as the Crucifixion.
“It’s time,” said John Austen.
He walked into the garage. His men had removed the coffins from their storage lockers and rolled the steel containers to the center of the floor. With the precision of a pit crew, the team assembled the drone. The wheel struts came first, set down and locked onto the fuselage. The long, flexible wing sections were bolted to one another, then attached to the fuselage. Austen rolled the cradle holding the nacelle and its contents of twenty kilos of Semtex plastic explosive beneath the aircraft and fixed it to the UAV’s belly.
“Fly well,” he said, brushing his fingers against the drone’s steel flesh.
He returned to the living room with its view of the airport. One wall of the living room was given over to his instruments. Monitors for the radar and nose camera. Flat-panel arrays broadcasting speed, altitude, position over ground. In the center of the array was a keyboard with a joystick positioned to either side. He climbed into the seat and spent a moment getting comfortable.
“Engines on,” he called as he flipped on the ignition. A red light blinked five times, before burning steadily. Though he was not inside the drone, he could feel it shudder as it came to life. A thread of excitement ran along his spine. He’d waited twenty-eight years for this moment. The date was inscribed in his mind, no different than a plaque at a historic site. April 24, 1980.
Operation Eagle Claw.
He, John Austen, then a major in the United States Air Force, had been chosen to fly the lead Hercules C-130 into the Iranian desert on the first leg of a desperate, overly ambitious plan to rescue fifty-three hostages from the United States embassy in Teheran. Aboard were seventy-four members of the newly created Special Operations detachment trained by Colonel Charlie Beckwith and led by Lieutenant Colonel William “Jerry” Boykin.
The flight into the desert had gone according to plan, the only incident being a period of seven minutes when the plane had passed through a haboob, a blinding dust storm in the Dasht-e-Kariv, the Great Salt Desert, that spanned four hundred miles in the southwestern corner of the country. The plane negotiated the dust storm well enough, the turboprop engines holding up despite the onslaught of grit and sand. He landed without problem at a preordained spot christened Desert One. Eight Sea Stallion helicopters followed, inbound from the aircraft carrier USS
Nimitz
in the Arabian Sea. The choppers were to ferry the elite soldiers into Teheran, where they would free the diplomats and bring them back to Austen’s aircraft for the return flight across the Persian Gulf to Saudi Arabia.
Disaster soon struck.
One of the helicopters landed disabled, its hydraulics severely damaged by the same dust storm that Austen had himself flown through. Another had turned back in mid-flight, lost and fearing a systems failure. With only six functioning helicopters instead of the eight planned, there would not be enough space to carry all of the rescued hostages out of Teheran. The mission was called off.
As one of the helicopters took off, its rotor wash stirred the fine desert sand into a maelstrom. Blinded, the pilot lost his bearings and flew into Austen’s C-130, parked fifty meters away. The chopper’s rotor blades sliced through the Hercules main stabilizer. Unbalanced, the helicopter toppled over the aircraft, gushing fuel and engulfing the plane beneath it in a fierce inferno.
Austen remembered the unexpected jolt to his plane, the burst of anger and confusion—
What the hell’s the problem now?
he’d wondered—the thoughts seared by a blinding flash and cauterized by a wave of intense heat that in the blink of an eye had swallowed him entirely. Strapped into his seat, the flames licking at his flesh, he repeated the words, “I’m dead, I’m dead.”
But he wasn’t dead. Unstrapping himself from his seat, he clawed his way out of the inferno. He walked out of the wreckage, his flight suit, his hair, his entire being engulfed in flame. An apparition from hell.
Several troopers knocked him to the ground and rolled him in the hard desert sand, extinguishing the fire.
He woke up inside a helicopter taking him to the USS
Enterprise
. A navy corpsman was hunched over him. Austen reached up and grasped the cross dangling from the corpsman’s neck. A jolt of salvation ran from his hand up his arm and through his body. Light surrounded him. Not flame, this time, but a healing light. In that moment, Austen saw Him. He saw the Lord, his Savior. He listened to His words and he promised to obey them. He knew that he would live. He had been given a mission to fulfill.
He, John Austen, who had not set foot inside a church since his confirmation at the age of thirteen, a user of alcohol, a womanizer who trampled on the sacred vows of marriage, a gambler who took the Lord’s name in vain, a heathen in all senses of the word, had been chosen to usher in the Second Coming of his almighty Lord, Jesus Christ.
That was twenty-eight years ago.
Austen ran through his preflight check. Ailerons. Flaps. Oil. Antifreeze. The nose camera came to life. He was presented with a view of the street outside his home. A series of lights had been set down on either side of the runway to act as boundary markers.
He pressed the throttle and the drone edged forward.
The
Mahdi I
was ready to fly.
82
Inside the command center,
von Daniken put the binoculars to his eyes and studied the residence from behind the protection of lace curtains. The home purchased by the Excelsior Trust was located at Holzwegstrasse 33. It was a sturdy two-story residence designed without the least imagination. An ivory stucco box with a gray slate roof. A garden surrounded the property. A balcony extended from one of the bedrooms on the second floor. But what interested von Daniken most was the road passing in front of it. Cleared of snow, it ran straight and level for five hundred meters. To his eye, it made the perfect runway.
He moved his binoculars to the left. A stand-alone shed occupied a corner of the property. It didn’t appear large enough to house the drone, but then again, Brigadier General Chabert had told them that the drone could be assembled quickly. Otherwise, the house appeared quiet, giving no clue to any activity within.
The airport security fence began hardly ten meters away. In one direction, it climbed a mild rise then turned north and ran in a straight line for three kilometers bordering a lush evergreen forest. In the other direction, it cut through a broad meadow buried in snow. Farther on, the meadow yielded to a vast apron of concrete lit by tall, blinding lights. The southernmost edge of Zurich Airport.
Somewhere a plane was taking off. The noise grew in volume as the aircraft approached. Within seconds, the roar of the engines had drowned out every other sound.
He lowered the binoculars and returned to the dining room. “They chose well. No neighbors. A good view of the airport. Unobstructed line of sight.”
“And not just of the airport,” added a short, stocky man with curly black hair and a gambler’s pencil-thin mustache. His name was Michael Berger. He was captain of the Zurich police department’s special assault team. It would be Berger who would be first in the door to storm the house. “Whoever’s inside will be able to see us coming for one hundred meters. How many do you reckon there are?”
“We don’t know for certain, but we’re estimating that there are at least five. There may be more.”
“Armed?”
“Count on it. They’re professionals. They took possession of twenty kilos of Semtex-H plastic explosives a few weeks ago that’re almost certainly in the drone.”
Berger nodded grimly, his eyes calculating his odds of success and survival. “We’ll go in from the air. Two choppers. Rope down our team. We’ll time it to coincide with the takeoff of a passenger jet. The helicopters are equipped with engine baffles that permit them to fly in near total silence. We’ll send a second team up the main road and hit the house from the front. Your friends won’t hear a peep until we break down the doors. The entire operation should take less than sixty seconds.”
Von Daniken made a show of studying the drawings. “How many times have you done this?”
Berger squinted his eyes. “Never. But we do a very good job in practice.”
Von Daniken could only nod.
“We’ll be ready in forty minutes,” said Berger. “Let’s say seven-twenty.”
The men synchronized their watches.
Von Daniken strode to the front window where Myer had taken up position with the binoculars. “Has anyone in the neighborhood seen or heard anything?”
“Apparently, there’s been a lot of activity in the place the last few days. Men coming and going. Cars zooming up and down the street, parking in front of the house.”
“Any sign of the van?”
“Everything except the van.”
Captain Berger signaled from the back door that it was time to move out. Von Daniken joined him and they jogged to a waiting van and pulled the door closed behind them.
It was a two-minute drive to the local firehouse where Berger’s men were staging. Two Aérospatiale Écureuil helicopters sat on a soccer field adjoining it, their rotors turning slowly.
Inside the firehouse, the tension was palpable as the policemen pulled on midnight blue jumpsuits and Kevlar body armor, followed by nylon harnesses to hold their equipment: radio, grenades, ammunition. This was not practice.
There were twenty-five assault troops in all. It was not as young a group as von Daniken might have hoped for, and he observed more than one officer struggling to secure his vest over a sizable paunch. The standard armament was a compact submachine gun, the Heckler & Koch MP-5. Two men hefted large, ungainly rifles called Wingmasters, used to blow doors off their hinges.
Von Daniken’s two-way radio crackled. It was Myer. “Lights just went on inside the house.”
“Lights on in the house,” boomed Berger to his team.
The room reeked of sweat and anxiety.
“Any conversation?” asked von Daniken.
One of the tech teams had trained a laser microphone at the target’s windows. The device was able to read vibrations in the glass caused by persons speaking inside the home and translate them back into something approximating the original sound.
“Television’s on,” responded Myer. “Let’s hope they keep the volume nice and loud.”
Berger divided his men into two squads, eight men each, with eight in reserve. “I need an official green light.”
“You’ve got it.” Von Daniken extended his hand and wished him good luck.
Berger turned and went back to his men. “We go in five minutes,” he called out.
Von Daniken set off to the command post along a path that skirted the forest. He looked into the sky. It was a beautiful night, a velvet curtain punched through with stars, a crescent moon hanging low in the sky. The time was 7:16. Night had fallen. Behind him, he heard Berger ordering his men into the helicopters. He dug his hands into his pockets and quickened his pace.
“Von Daniken.”
He halted, then turned in a circle, trying to locate the speaker. But nobody was there.
A tall, broad-shouldered man emerged from the shadows.
“My name is Jonathan Ransom. I believe you’re looking for me.”