Dead Eye

THIRTY-TWO

Ruth woke at four A.M. She’d slept less than four hours, a fact her body made clear to her before she’d even had time to pick up her phone to check the time.

Right now Mike would be huddling for warmth on a bench about eighty yards away from the target’s location on Radmansgatan, tucked into a covered bus stop in the dark and away from any line of sight on the windows of the building. Ruth had to get up and go relieve him for three hours, and then Laureen would come and relieve her.

Ruth pushed her team hard, she knew it, but it was the only way to avoid a repeat of what had happened the previous spring in Rome.

In Rome her intelligence had been perfect; she and her team had tracked a Hezbollah gunman to a home in the Monte Sacro district of the city, and their surveillance determined that he would attempt to strike Ehud Kalb at an upcoming climate conference.

Ruth passed her information on to Metsada, along with a request for a few more days’ surveillance to get better visibility inside the Monte Sacro home.

But she was vetoed, and Mossad leadership ordered an immediate raid. An internal report issued after the fact suggested that an increased Special Operations funding request in the Knesset the following week was the cynical impetus behind the order for immediate action.

Whatever the reason, Metsada hit the house, ignoring the request of the targeting officer on sight.

Five innocent people were killed. A father, a mother, and three children. The Hezbollah assassin had kidnapped them and kept them prisoner in case he needed a bargaining chip. When the commandos burst through the front door of the home, he pushed the family down a staircase; the Israelis mistook the rushing falling figures in their weapon lights as threats, and they gunned them all down before exchanging fire with and killing the Hezbollah terrorist.

Ruth was a basket case after the catastrophe. But she was almost immediately cleared of any wrongdoing, and she demanded to go back to work. Yanis had pushed back against this; he forced her to spend some time in counseling. But, damaged or not, she was damned proficient at her job, and there were many threats to Prime Minister Kalb, so she was cleared for duty within days, and she had been working twice as hard ever since.

Ruth rubbed her eyes and checked the local temperature on an app on her phone, and she rubbed them again, making sure she was seeing the screen correctly.

Out loud she groaned, “Three degrees Fahrenheit? Really?”

As she rolled out of the warm bed she heard noises in the living room of the safe house. Male voices. At first she thought it was just Carl and Lucas in conversation, which surprised her, considering the hour. But within a few seconds she was certain there were new speakers in the mix.

Next to where Ruth had been sleeping in the queen-sized bed, Laureen did not stir.

“Who the hell is that?” It was Aron asking from the bed on the far side of the room.

Ruth did not answer; she headed out of the bedroom, slipping her glasses on, and fumbled her way up the hall in the dark, toward the bright lights of the living room.

The voices were louder as she approached, and she also heard the thumping and slamming of equipment being moved around. She began to suspect she knew what was happening even before she saw it for herself.

Oh no.

Ruth walked into a room full of men, ten in all, including Lucas and Carl, who themselves had clearly only just awakened moments before.

She did not know the new guests, but Ruth didn’t need thirteen years working in the intelligence field to determine she was looking at the Townsend kill team.

“Mornin’,” a burly and bearded American man in a knit cap and a ski jacket said in a gravelly southern twang. He talked and moved like he was in charge of this entourage, and he crossed the room to her like he owned the place. “John Beaumont. You must be Ruth.”

She shook his hand, but it was a gesture of obligation, not amicability. “Don’t tell me you are planning a raid on that tenement.”

“I go where they send me, ma’am. Do what they tell me. Just the same as you, I’ll bet.”

She shook her head violently. Ruth liked to be in control, and she felt the growing panic of losing control. “We don’t know anything about the positioning of the target inside the building. What room he’s in, how many others are in there. We know there are families. Kids. It’s way too early for action.”

“We’re hitting it at oh six hundred, which is late in my book, but first light ’round here isn’t till oh nine twenty-five.”

Ruth’s panic grew. “No! You’ve got to give us more time. At least half a day.”

Beaumont pulled a tin of dip from his back pocket and began a snapping motion with his hand to tamp it down inside the can. “I don’t work for you, honey, so I ain’t gotta do shit.”

“Excuse me?”

“You need to chill out. We aren’t going to shoot any kids. Look, I’d like a better picture of the interior layout of that place myself, but we’ll just have to adapt and overcome. We’ll be going in light, civilian dress.” He smiled a crooked grin. “We’ll be super friendly to everybody who stays the fuck out of our way.” Beaumont put a pinch of dip in his mouth and winked at her.

A couple of his men chuckled behind him. She looked at the others and saw the weapons for the first time. Micro Uzis, a small sub gun of Israeli manufacture, and pistols that she did not recognize in holsters festooned with extra magazines. Ruth herself had been trained on weaponry, of course, but she did not carry firearms in the field, nor did she have any desire to.

“You’re going in with Uzis? Yeah, that’s friendly.”

“I’m about to make breakfast,” he said. “I’m thinking about an omelet. You know what they say about how to make an omelet?”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Ruth was lost.

One of his other men answered the question by raising his Uzi. “You gotta break some eggs, boss.”

“That’s right. Now, sweetie, we’re going to do our best to avoid civilian casualties. Seriously. But we damn well will neutralize Court Gentry in that building at oh six hundred.”

“You’re a prick.”

Beaumont ignored her; he’d tried his hand at international diplomacy and failed. He turned away and began helping his team with the equipment.

This felt like Rome all over again, and Ruth had to find a way to stop this. She turned to Lucas and Carl. The two men looked small and out of place in this room full of snake eaters. They did not seem happy about the new guests in their living room, but they certainly did not air any objections.

She rushed to her room and yanked her phone off the end table. Her first thought was to call Yanis in Tel Aviv, but instead she dialed Babbitt in D.C., where it was just after eight in the evening.

She started the conversation in the softest tone she could muster. “Mr. Babbitt, I am begging you to give us a few hours to continue surveillance.”

“Why would we do that? Lucas says you know where he is. He says you’ve got an operative watching his place right now.”

“Outside, yes. It would be idiotic to do surveillance inside the location now.”

“No need for that. All we have to do is go in and get him.”

“Kill him, you mean.”

“That’s up to him; however, I will say this. He murdered several of our people the other day, so I’ve ordered my direct action team to take no unnecessary chances.”

Ruth was certain their plan was to kill Gentry, and there was no plan whatsoever to bring him in, but she did not make the accusation. Instead she pressed on with her campaign to get Townsend to wait. “At open of business today I’ll send one of my guys into the building to rent a room, and with a little luck we’ll have a live covert feed from in there by noon.”

“I trust you’ve met Jumper Actual?”

“Beaumont? Yes.”

“Well, he’s my guy, and I’m sending him in there this morning. They aren’t going to get video, they aren’t going to rent a room. They will simply move through the property, locate the target, and neutralize him by whatever means are most expedient.”

She said, “You know there are kids in there. Immigrant families, probably packed in like cordwood. There will be illegals; they’ll scramble when they see white guys with guns. It could become a bloodbath if Gentry starts moving through all that!”

“We can’t lose the target again. It’s as simple as that.” He added, “Beaumont and his team are quite good. This is how your Metsada operators do it.”

“Metsada goes in only after I provide them all the information they need to do their job without collateral.”

“Like in Rome, Ms. Ettinger?”

Ruth forced herself to take a deep breath. “Rome was a mistake. Honorable people can make a mistake. Metsada has honor. American SF soldiers have honor, too. I’ve worked with them before. But these guys of yours? Who the hell are they? They act like a posse heading out on the prairie to collect Indian scalps. You can’t just run through a capital city with your guns blazing! This isn’t the Wild West!”

“I beg to differ. These times are difficult. America’s enemies are certainly more far-flung than they were back in the Old West and, I would argue, the threats are more pervasive and their impact more profound on my nation than anything that went down back then. But our mind-set here at Townsend is very similar to the deputized lawmen of that day and age.”

It sounded to Ruth like Babbitt was reading from a bronze plaque on the wall at Townsend House. She said, “I have a feeling you don’t even know what Court Gentry did to earn the shoot-on-sight. Whether you know or not, I am certain that you do not care.”

“I have to go now, Ms. Ettinger. You and your team can feel free to stand down from this operation if you don’t feel comfortable with it. We thank the Mossad for your help in this matter.”

“I’m calling Carmichael. I’ll put a stop to your operation right now.”

“Ms. Ettinger, I seriously doubt you have the clout to get Denny on the phone, but assuming you do, I will save you some trouble and frustration. Carmichael has almost single-handedly carried the banner on the Gentry operation for the past five years. Whatever the fuck Gentry did — I am speaking about what he did previous to killing his field team — it was clearly something very personal to Denny Carmichael. If you call him right now and tell him you need Team Jumper to stand down ninety minutes before they neutralize Court Gentry, either he will laugh in your face or, and this is what worries me, he will call me and ask me to have Mr. Beaumont hog-tie you and your team so that you don’t get in the way of their operation.”

Ruth Ettinger fumed.

Babbitt let out a long, audible sigh that sounded to Ruth about as phony as his company’s pseudo-cowboy image. He then said, “It’s an ugly thing that’s about to happen there, Ruth.” He paused. “Let’s not make it any uglier.”