Sword of Allah

Tel Aviv-Yafo, Israel

‘Buckle up, Spanky, we are GO,’ said Monroe, slapping shut his mobile phone and tossing it on the table.

‘Go where?’ said Wilkes calmly glancing up from the computer. Over the past week, he’d begun to find Monroe’s gung-ho attitude amusing at times, grating at others, his attitude uniform whether ordering a pizza or, apparently, crashing through a door with the enemy on the other side — at least if you believed his patter.

‘This is it, dude. Time to earn our pay. Informants gave up a bunch of terrorists to the Shin Bet. They’ve called in the Sayeret.’

‘Shit,’ said Wilkes. He was taken a little by surprise but he knew he shouldn’t have been. The call could’ve come through at any moment and the moment was now. Out of habit, he had a quick look around the two-room apartment before stepping out, but there was nothing to take, except for maybe a waterbottle. He grabbed it and waited at the door for Monroe. The Shin Bet was responsible for counter-terrorism and internal security within Israel. They often worked with the Sayeret, the tough, nononsense Israeli special forces. Experience had taught these people how best to deal with an enemy occupying a building. And that was to snipe as many as possible from a distance before bulldozing the structure down on top of any possible survivors. That they hadn’t done so already in this instance was no doubt in reluctant deference to the CIA’s clout, and its own desire to catch Kadar Al-Jahani alive.

Monroe walked out of his room strapping on Kevlar body armour.

‘Where the hell do you think you’re going, Atticus?’ asked Wilkes.

‘Listen, we’re not each other’s babysitter, okay?’ said Monroe, throwing a nickel-plated nine millimetre Ruger into his kitbag.

‘You’re mad, mate. You don’t know their tactics. They don’t even speak the same language, for Christ’s sake.’

‘I guess all that stuff about the SAS having big cojones is bullshit after all.’

‘It’s not that you’ll get yourself killed, Atticus, it’s that you might get others killed.’

‘That’s the idea.’ The American stuffed his M4 into his bag along with a stack of magazines. ‘You coming,’ he said, ‘or are there some TV programs on you don’t wanna miss?’

‘Okay…’ Wilkes said, capitulating. Atticus was right in one sense, he wasn’t the man’s babysitter.

Monroe stopped his frantic packing for a moment. ‘Look, Tom, sorry, but you weren’t at the embassy. You didn’t see what I saw,’ he said…It’s not your fault…not your fault… ‘Besides, you know what they say, if you want it done right, do it yourself,’ he said, zipping up the heavy Cordura duffel bag and swinging it over his shoulder.

There was no more time for argument. The distant hammering in the sky had grown persistently louder until it was almost deafening. And overhead. ‘Say goodbye to this as a safe house,’ Monroe shouted. Helicopters did not land on the rooftops of apartment blocks, even in middleclass Tel Aviv.

‘Where are they holed up?’ Wilkes yelled at Monroe’s back as they bolted up the fire stairs to the rooftop.

‘Beautiful downtown Ramallah,’ said Monroe as he pushed through the fire door into the dry, hot glare. A Bell 212 orbited the rooftop, its pilot no doubt assessing the safest approach in the fluctuating breeze. The 212 thumped its way into the wind, blades pounding the air. The pilot brought the helo to a hover a metre above the roof, just off one corner. Wilkes stepped across onto the skid and was helped aboard by the helo’s loadmaster. Monroe followed after passing up his kit. The two men sat on the hard checkerplate deck, their backs against a bulkhead. The loadmaster gave them the universal thumbs-up signal, which Monroe and Wilkes returned, and then handed them each a pair of headphones.

The Bell climbed until it was well clear of the surrounding apartment blocks and then dropped away, rotating one hundred and eighty degrees and picking up air speed. Wilkes looked out the open side door at a second helo that had taken up station barely fifty metres away, framed by the orange ball of the late afternoon sun. ‘That’s a Lahatut,’ said a heavily accented voice in his ’phones. Wilkes glanced at the LM. By law, the soldier had to be at least eighteen, but he appeared far younger. Wilkes wondered whether that was because at twenty-eight, he was getting older. Both men looked out at the Hughes helo. Wilkes was reasonably familiar with the Little Bird, as the US Army called the type. They used them extensively for reconnaissance, target acquisition and real-time battlefield management. The Birds were highly manoeuvrable and fast, and usually came with a six-barrel 7.62mm minigun, but not the aircraft in formation off their starboard side. A couple of TOW missiles hung from launchers mounted off its body. ‘Lahatut means “sleight of hand”,’ said the loadmaster. ‘A tank buster. One of those missiles can penetrate armour seven hundred and fifty millimetres thick,’ he said proudly, opening his arms wide to illustrate the point.

‘Do you get to bust many tanks around here?’ asked Monroe.

‘No, the Palestinians don’t have any.’ The Israeli added after a moment’s thought: ‘But they’re just as effective on bunkers, buildings, and you should see what they can do to a car.’

Wilkes was palpably aware of being in a country at war, which, of course, Israel was. He recalled the DIO briefing notes supplied by Graeme Griffin. Technically, it was still in conflict with its neighbour Syria who, up until the cease-fire that put the Six-Day War on hold in 1967, had owned the Israeli-occupied territory known as the Golan Heights. The two countries weren’t currently exchanging shots, but the neighbourhood wasn’t exactly welcoming. Then, of course, there were the Palestinians. They believed the Israelis had snatched away their land with the world’s blessing after World War II, leaving them stateless and homeless. As far as the Israelis were concerned, there were enemies inside and outside the gates. No wonder there was a siege mentality to the place, thought Wilkes. Any minute the Israelis expected to be either invaded by foreign armies or assaulted by desperados dressed in waistcoats stuffed with C-4.

‘You gonna…for us?’ The LM finished the question by holding an invisible carbine to his shoulder and firing a few rounds.

‘Bet your ass, kid,’ said Monroe, before Wilkes could answer that, no, they were just observers.

Wilkes shouted, ‘You’re one crazy son of a bitch, Atticus.’

‘You worry too much, Tom,’ Monroe answered, resting against the bulkhead.

‘You guys CIA?’ asked the Israeli.

That threw Monroe — the fact that the kid knew the score — but he recovered with his usual aplomb, mixing fact with fiction. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘The name’s Bond…James Bond.’

The young soldier grinned.

‘007 is British,’ said Wilkes.

‘Whatever…’ Monroe replied, shrugging.

The helo began to descend rapidly towards a dusty light brown city the same colour as the dry countryside around it. Wilkes’s ears popped with the rapid change in pressure. ‘Jesus, that was quick. Not that I’m complaining,’ he added. They’d been in the air less than ten minutes; not enough time to get uncomfortable. Ramallah was barely forty kilometres to the south-west of Tel Aviv, but it was like stepping across a fifty-year time zone. Tel Aviv was a worldly city, and wealthy. The town they were approaching was a dense collection of low-rise flat-topped buildings with very little greenery, nothing to break the monotony. There were no modern buildings that Wilkes could see. It was a small provincial town, and a poor one at that.

‘We’re from Sirkin AFB,’ said the LM through the ’phones. ‘The unit you’re working with, they’re from Sirkin, too. These are tough times but they’re good soldiers — Sayeret. Special forces. Don’t worry, Mr Bond. They look after your ass,’ he said playfully. Monroe smiled in return, acknowledging the jibe.

The 212 approached a section of town that had been flattened in a previous action. Three Humvees with mounted machine guns were parked off to one side. Several army types stood squinting into the sky. The helo flared half a dozen metres above the dirt loading zone, kicking up a wall of grit that forced the onlookers to turn away and hunch their shoulders.

Wilkes and Monroe handed the LM their ’phones and the thunderous noise of the 212’s twin turbines assaulted their ears. Sand and dirt swirled briefly through the open door, stinging their eyes. They grabbed their gear and exited. The two men walked quickly to the vehicles as the pitch of the swooping blades deepened and the sandstorm erupted once again under the climbing aircraft.

‘Lieutenant Colonel David Baruch, Sayeret,’ yelled one of the officers over the departing helo.

‘Major Richard Samuels, Shin Bet,’ said the other.

The newcomers quickly introduced themselves, shaking hands with the Israelis. Wilkes wasn’t usually welcomed in the field by high-ranking officers and felt like he should be saluting them, but he resisted the impulse.

The two Israelis were utterly different. Baruch, around fifty, had dark, almost Arabic features, whereas Samuels was in his early thirties with watery hazel eyes and fair, freckled skin.

‘We should go,’ said Major Samuels. He politely opened the rear passenger door of the centre Humvee, inviting the others to climb in. Monroe went first and opened the window. ‘I’d keep that closed if I were you, Mr Monroe,’ said the major. Monroe shrugged and wound it up.

The Humvee roared forward and Samuels began the sit-rep. ‘Technically, this is Shin Bet’s op, our op, but this one’s a little out of the ordinary,’ he said with a slight accent Wilkes picked as Russian. ‘The colonel’s people are familiar with this place so we’ve called them in. We don’t believe the terrorists know they’re cornered. When they do, all hell will break lose.’

‘We’re going to go with a helo insertion and extraction on the rooftop,’ Baruch said. ‘In and out hard and fast.’

‘How many terrorists are in the building?’ asked Monroe.

Baruch deferred the question to the major with a polite nod of his head. ‘We don’t know exactly, is the short answer,’ said Samuels. ‘We think maybe ten to fifteen, but it could be more.’

‘Or less,’ said Baruch.

‘Yes,’ agreed the major, ‘or less. Once the UAVs are airborne, we’ll have more definitive intel.’

Wilkes picked up on the tension between the two officers. ‘And Kadar Al-Jahani?’

‘Yes, he’s there. Positively identified by an informant,’ said Samuels. ‘There’s some kind of annual general meeting of terror going on inside. This is a real coup for us. And we don’t want to fuck it up,’ he said, glancing at the colonel, who was looking out the window. ‘We’ve got several high-ranking members of Hamas and Hezbollah all under the one roof.’ He frowned. ‘You know that taking prisoners is not going to be easy.’

‘Nevertheless, we have to take Kadar Al-Jahani alive. There’s a bigger picture here,’ said Monroe.

‘These people are fanatics,’ Baruch said. ‘With respect, I don’t think you realise exactly what that means until you’ve been confronted by it.’

‘I hear you, but that’s our mission.’

‘They will not come quietly,’ said Samuels, turning to look at Monroe, Wilkes felt, to see what kind of man he was dealing with. ‘They are not afraid of killing, nor of being killed. Death to them is an honour, especially if they are taking Jewish people with them. These are the men who strap explosives to their brothers and sisters, and send them into crowded movie theatres and bus stops. They are not soldiers, they are murderers. They rejoice in killing our grandmothers, our children.’

Wilkes saw the stress in the major’s face. Yes, indeed, they were a very long way from Townsville.

‘Shin Bet knows Kadar Al-Jahani, the man you want, well. He’s responsible for many deaths and much unhappiness in our country.’ Major Samuels cleared his throat again, something he appeared to do unconsciously when cutting to the chase. ‘I guess what I’m saying, gentlemen, is that I hope keeping him alive is worth the sacrifice. Good soldiers will die here today. For the sake of their families, I hope their deaths will be worth it.’

The major’s speech was sobering. It was patently obvious that he was against the operation to take Kadar alive. Wilkes wondered if that was the source of the tension between the two Israelis. There was nothing he or Atticus could say to reassure him.

‘Sir, I want to go in with your people,’ said Monroe.

‘That is not possible, Mr Monroe,’ said Baruch.

‘Sir, I think the CIA would want to know that this op has been done right. If things go wrong — not saying they will, but shit happens — it would be good to have an observer on the ground.’

An observer? An arse protector more like, thought Wilkes. Monroe certainly knew how to play the game.

Baruch considered the American’s request. The logic of it was flawed — his presence could be the cause of fuckups. But there was a certain appeal for political reasons. Baruch looked at Samuels. The major gave the slightest shrug. If the American wanted to die at the hands of terrorists, who was he to stop him?

‘I advise against it, Mr Monroe,’ said Baruch, ‘but I’ll leave the decision up to the unit commander.’

The Humvees zigged and zagged through the town, along streets that were alternately brightly lit by the sun and then darkly shaded. Wilkes saw small children shrink behind their mothers and men avert their eyes as the vehicles passed. A group of youngsters spat at them. Stones occasionally pinged off the vehicle’s bodywork, one striking the window by Monroe’s face with a bang that made the American jump. ‘See?’ said Samuels, vaguely amused. ‘Fresh air here can be dangerous.’

There was fear in this town, and defiance. This was a new experience for Wilkes. He’d only been involved in conflicts where an international force was seen as either stabilising or liberating — a ‘just’ force. From the looks on the faces of the people they passed, there was nothing liberating or just about their presence here.

The convoy slowed through a section of the town that had recently been flattened. Shell holes and blackened concrete rubble provided the executive summary of a recent action there. People picked over the piles of broken brickwork, hunting for valuables. They ignored the Humvees roaring past.

‘We fight against the Arab world, which says we have stolen the Palestinian homeland,’ said Samuels, providing a commentary to the scenery flashing past. ‘But did you know, before the Jews began to resettle this place, there was nothing here? It was all just dirt and rock.’

Wilkes didn’t answer. He was watching the children having a rock fight, hurling chunks of brick at each other, laughing.

‘The Arabs control ninety-nine percent of the Middle East. Israel is just one percent of the landmass. And still the Arabs want more. They want it all.’

Wilkes nodded, not necessarily because he agreed but rather out of politeness.

‘Britain, in particular, is losing patience with Israel. They say, “David has become Goliath.” And America says that we must accommodate a Palestinian homeland,’ the major scoffed. ‘But there has never been a Palestinian homeland. Never.’

The Humvee roared past row after row of basic low-rise tenements and shops. ‘Did you know that in 1917, the British were given a mandate by the League of Nations to create a Jewish National Home in an area that contained all of what is now Jordan and Israel, and all the land between?’

Wilkes did vaguely remember skimming through the written brief prepared by ASIS and the DIO and reading something like that.

‘And then Emir Abdullah had to leave the ancestral Hashemite lands in Arabia. So the British created a kingdom for him that included all the land east of the Jordan River. Our land. They took seventy-five percent of the land the world acknowledged as the Jewish national home!’ The history lesson was obviously something drilled into every Israeli, and from the major’s tone he was passionate about it. ‘Did you know that during the Second World War, the Jews who fought alongside the British were called Palestinians?’

‘No,’ said Wilkes. That was true, he didn’t, and his notes hadn’t mentioned it.

That Wilkes was ignorant of the fact fired the major on. ‘And even though we fought alongside the British, they closed the door to all Jewish immigration after the war, while encouraging the Arabs. The world talks about Israel displacing the Arabs in Palestine, but it was they who displaced us! And the Jews have been here a very long time. We were in Hebron even before it was King David’s capital. And then in 1929, their Arab neighbours set about slaughtering the city’s Jewish population. The British? They just stood aside and let it happen.’

‘The Brits sure have a lot to answer for,’ said Monroe, getting into the spirit of the major’s indignation.

Colonel Baruch leaned across and said, ‘I am sure our visitors would rather talk about the weather or something.’

‘Colonel, we are about to fight a battle on their behalf. I want them to know why good Israelis are prepared to die,’ said Samuels, his face flushed with a red heat.

Wilkes and Monroe exchanged a fleeting glance. There was clearly not a lot of love lost between the two Israelis.

‘No, it’s okay, Colonel. We’re interested, right, Tom?’ said Monroe.

‘Sure,’ agreed Wilkes. They were guests in a foreign country and neither wanted to appear impolite. And Wilkes agreed with Samuels’ point: the least he could do was hear why Israeli soldiers were prepared to put themselves in harm’s way to achieve his and Monroe’s objective.

Samuels glared at Baruch. Baruch turned away and looked out the window. Why don’t you tell them that we won’t allow the four million Palestinian refugees — people we pushed into the desert — to return to their rightful lands, that we are scared to live beside a Palestinian nation with a population that exceeds our own? Why don’t you tell them that we assassinate all their leaders, making it almost impossible for these people to organise themselves, to care for themselves? Why don’t you tell them our jails are stocked with thousands of Palestinians held without being charged?

Samuels continued: ‘In 1948, the Arabs were offered half of Palestine west of the Jordan River for the creation of a state, but the Arabs rejected it. Instead, the Arab world attacked the struggling state of Israel on all fronts. They didn’t begin the war in defence of the so-called Palestinians to create the nation of Palestine. They went to war to take away what little land we had left so that they could carve it up amongst themselves. And they nearly succeeded. They tried again in 1967, in the Six-Day War, only this time we were ready for them and Israel won back the Arab-held lands. And do you know, at no time before that, during the nineteen years between 1948 and 1967, when Jordan and Egypt held the captured land of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, did they offer to surrender those lands to create the independent nation of Palestine?’

‘So where did all the talk about creating a Palestinian homeland begin?’ asked Monroe.

‘When the Palestine Liberation Movement was founded,’ said Samuels. ‘Its charter said its sole reason for being was the destruction of Israel. They’ve just changed their rhetoric to that of liberating Palestine. Why? Because it sounds better.’

‘Can’t argue with that,’ said Monroe.

‘That position has changed,’ said Baruch, suddenly turning away from the window. ‘The Palestinians now agree that Israel has the right to exist.’

‘Yes, but not as the homeland for the Jews,’ Samuels countered.

Wilkes and Monroe sat in silence.

The Humvee in front turned hard right and the convoy followed, circling behind a large, squat hunk of dirt-brown metal — a main battle tank. ‘That’s a Merkava Mk Four. Your M1 Abrams wouldn’t stand a chance against it,’ said Baruch to Atticus, breaking the silence. Wilkes didn’t know a lot about Israeli military equipment, and the tank was a complete unknown. ‘It can also carry around ten light infantry at a squeeze,’ Baruch added.

‘Beats the hell out of walking,’ said Monroe.

A brown Israeli army Mac truck blasting a cone of black diesel smoke into the air inched down a street off to their left pulling two enormous bulldozers. ‘They’re D-9 Caterpillars,’ said Samuels. ‘Big steel rolling pins.’

Monroe caught Wilkes’s eye and raised his eyebrows silently acknowledging the Australian’s earlier point about the army’s use of bulldozers here. There was very little room to manoeuvre in the narrow street, and the Mac appeared stuck like a cork in a bottle. No doubt the truck would eventually deliver its cargo, but getting the behemoths off the trailer was going to be another problem entirely.

Brakes squealed in clouds of brown dust as the vehicles pulled up behind a three-storey, newly whitewashed building. There were several other army vehicles parked in the vicinity guarded by half a dozen lightly armed soldiers. ‘We’re here,’ said Baruch.

‘Excuse me, please,’ said Samuels, kicking open the door and jumping out, anxious to rejoin his men. ‘I’ll catch up with you later, gentlemen.’

Wilkes and Monroe both nodded and mumbled their thanks.

‘My deepest apologies for the lecture,’ said Colonel Baruch. ‘History is Israel’s curse.’

‘It’s okay, sir,’ said Monroe.

Baruch turned, and led them towards a small shop at the base of the apartment block selling newspapers and bottled drinks. In the dark interior, stairs ran up one side of the room and a barber’s chair faced an old mirror that had lost much of its backing. The shop’s proprietor, a large bald man with a big voice, was arguing with one of the soldiers. Another Israeli soldier sat in the barber’s chair flicking through an ancient magazine. He jumped up and saluted smartly as Baruch entered. The officer ignored him and took the stairs three at a time. Monroe and Wilkes followed in his wake.

There was quite a crowd assembled on the rooftop. Several soldiers scanned either the rooftops of other buildings nearby or the sky above, casually resting on flimsy brick walls that crumbled, dropping masonry to the street five floors below. Other soldiers were gathered round a brace of laptop computers set up on trestle tables on the flat, concrete rooftop. Wilkes looked around. The skyline was as faceless and featureless as the streetscape. They were surrounded by a sea of flat roofs, some a storey or two higher, but most a storey lower. On a couple of buildings across the street, small crowds of onlookers had gathered. As Wilkes watched, soldiers arrived to disperse these audiences. Fair enough, thought Wilkes, the spectators’ interest in the Israeli army’s activity could easily tip off the terrorists. The terrorists could even conceivably have their own lookouts amongst the crowds.

Four helos circled lazily several kilometres away — a couple of Blackhawks and two Cobra gunships, the thumps of their rotors sharpening occasionally with the aircraft’s change in direction or a shift in the breeze.

The snarl of a small but powerful petrol engine bursting into life caught Wilkes’s attention. He watched as a circular grey contraption around two metres in diameter suddenly lifted off the roof and climbed rapidly straight up, trailing grey exhaust smoke. Wilkes followed it until he lost it against the blue of the sky. ‘Come,’ said Baruch.

Wilkes and Monroe followed him over to one of the soldiers leaning over the computers. ‘Lieutenant?’ said Baruch. The officer turned and then snapped to attention. ‘Lieutenant Glukel. I’d like to introduce Tom Wilkes and Atticus Monroe.’

‘Lieutenant,’ said Wilkes.

‘Ma’am,’ said Monroe. No one shook hands or smiled. It wasn’t a social occasion.

‘Lieutenant Glukel is commanding the Sayeret unit. She’s Israel’s first female special forces combat soldier. Lieutenant, Tom and Atticus here are…observers.’ The look the lieutenant gave Wilkes and then Monroe was more like an examination, but Wilkes liked her instantly. She had the same tough, no-nonsense self-assurance that was universally shared by combat-weathered soldiers. Wilkes was mildly surprised, and impressed. Surprised because he’d never met a female combat soldier before, and impressed because the lieutenant wore the scars of combat as well as any soldier he’d met.

‘How are you feeling, Lieutenant?’ asked Baruch.

‘Fine, thank you, sir,’ said the lieutenant, politely speaking English rather than Hebrew out of deference to these foreign ‘observers’.

‘How’s the rib, Deborah?’ asked Samuels, who had rejoined them.

‘It’s healed well, sir. No problems with it.’ She twisted left then right to demonstrate. Wilkes noted one eye twitch slightly with the movement. There was pain there, but she was in control of it. The woman was tough.

Samuels was called aside by an NCO.

‘This is Lieutenant Glukel’s first week back on operational duty. She was wounded,’ said Baruch, giving the soldier an avuncular pat on her armoured shoulder.

The lieutenant remained braced up, her face impassive. She was battle ready. Wilkes skimmed a professional eye over her kit. She carried the ubiquitous M16A2 assault carbine, but with a reflex sight, one of the new batteryfree units that utilised tritium and fibre optics to project its dot onto the target. The characteristic Israeli pudding basin helmet appeared heavy and was probably therefore one of the new bulletproof ceramic models. The vest too looked to be ceramic, offering protection from below the femoral arterial line to the mid upper arm. The hand gun she carried was compact and, from what he could see, probably a Glock 17 or 19. Then, of course, there was all the spare ammunition in those pouches on the vest and also, possibly, a brace of hand grenades. Lieutenant Glukel had to be strong to carry all that into battle. Survival in close-quarter street fighting could depend on her ability to move quickly. The gear was a trade-off. She was carrying a lot of protection and the weight of it all might negate the benefits of having it.

‘Can I help you with something, Mr Wilkes?’ said the lieutenant.

Wilkes snapped out of his daydream and realised he’d been staring at the soldier. ‘No, sorry, Lieutenant…er, nice vest,’ he said lamely.

‘You want us to take someone alive from that snake pit?’ She didn’t wait for Wilkes to answer. ‘That means we’re going to have to clear the building room by room. The ceramics will make sure I see another sunrise.’

Jesus, the woman read my mind! The fact that she knew what he was thinking indicated that the lieutenant was every inch the professional combat soldier.

Lieutenant Glukel turned away before Wilkes could apologise again and spoke briefly and heatedly with Major Samuels. She then left the rooftop, sweeping several of the troopers and NCOs along with her. Baruch and Wilkes both watched her leave. ‘She’s good, Tom. One of our best. But she’s a bit…touchy at the moment. Lost her brother. Died in front of her eyes, on her last patrol in fact.’

‘Shit,’ said Wilkes.

‘Here, we say, “kakat”!’

‘Kakat!’ Wilkes repeated.

‘Perfect. You sure you’re not Jewish?’

Wilkes smiled. ‘The major and her seem pretty close?’

‘That’s probably because Lieutenant Glukel is Major Samuels’ younger sister. He wants her removed from combat status. He lost a brother and doesn’t want to lose another member of the family.’

‘Oh,’ said Wilkes. The fact that Glukel and Samuels were brother and sister was something he hadn’t expected.

‘The choice of combat status is the lieutenant’s. And it’s not my place to deny her that if it’s what she wants.’

Wilkes nodded. He could understand that. In a way, the situation wasn’t dissimilar to his own skirmishing with Annabelle.

‘Israel is a small country and everyone except the religious academics serves in the army at some point,’ Baruch explained. ‘It’s not unusual for brothers to fight together and, in this case, two brothers and a sister. As I said, the major and I don’t see eye to eye on the lieutenant’s combat status. Also, he doesn’t believe taking Kadar Al-Jahani prisoner is worth risking lives for. Especially his baby sister’s. I’ll be honest with you, Warrant Officer, neither do I.’

‘You know my rank?’ Wilkes said, taken aback.

‘And your regiment.’

‘Uh-huh.’ Wilkes didn’t know what to say next.

‘The Australian SAS has a formidable reputation. You of all people would know how difficult it is to storm a building occupied by a committed, well-trained enemy.’ Baruch suddenly brightened. ‘But today, it will go well. I can feel it. See here.’

The sun had set and night was coming down fast.

Wilkes allowed himself to be pushed to the front of the crowd gathered around the trestle tables. The fact that Baruch knew he was SAS rather than CIA relaxed him a little. He didn’t know how to behave like a CIA man — now he could just be himself.

Wilkes looked around for Monroe to tell him his cover was blown, but Monroe was nowhere about. ‘Brilliant,’ he said to himself.

The portable tables were groaning with monitors, laptop computers and a spaghetti of electrical connection cords and other computer-related paraphernalia. A generator hummed five metres behind this command station, with a backup beside it. Three technicians in civilian clothes sat at the tables and fussed over the gear like mothers over their first-born. One of the grey monitors flashed into life and the knot of spectators pressed closer.

‘Sorry, can y’all please just move back a little and give us some air,’ drawled one of the technicians, irritated by the pressing crowd. He was a young black American man of around twenty who wore a red Sikorsky-branded baseball cap, a yellow Hawaiian shirt and jeans that looked as if someone had tried to pull them off him and nearly succeeded, the top half of his Calvin Klein underpants showing. Wilkes thought he looked like a rapper. The halfdozen soldiers of assorted rank politely did as they were asked and moved back a pace.

‘Okay,’ the technician said, nodding, relaxing slightly. ‘So what we have here is an update on your Combat Forces Digitisation Program, bringing its efficiencies to the difficult-to-manage urban combat zone. The heart of the system is the Dragon Warrior UAV. We’ve had one Dragon Warrior up for some time, giving us the overall picture, and it has now been joined by a second Dragon Warrior — the one you just saw taking off. That means we can orbit the target building using the first Dragon Warrior as a relay platform, allowing us to obtain a wealth of information from the battlefield in real time. In short, we’ll know what’s going down as it’s happening, and be more able to deploy our forces where and when required.’

Dragon Warrior — pretty tough name for something that looked like a flying doughnut, thought Wilkes.

‘And the Dragon Warrior is not limited to urban conflicts either. It can be given an over-the-beach battlefield capability by simply attaching the winglets provided.’

‘Salesmen,’ said Baruch quietly in Wilkes’s ear.

‘The Dragon Warriors possess thermal imaging as well as infrared, refractive light and x-ray cameras, all with up to one thousand times magnification. Basically, from a thousand metres away, day or night, we can tell you whether the enemy have clipped their nose hairs. And we can relay that information to any other command set, be it a bunker, tank or hee-lo — anywhere on the battlefield,’ he said while he tapped several letters on the keyboard.

‘Although it beats me why the presence of nose hairs on the battlefield might be important,’ said one of the other technicians, sharing his observation with a snigger.

‘I don’t understand,’ said one of the Israeli officers.

The rapper continued with a grin. ‘Dragon Warrior is the missing link — integrating airborne assets with ground forces, improving overall operational capabilities and, of course, efficiencies. From this desk, we can provide situational awareness to nearly all manoeuvring components on the field of battle. We can also switch command centres as the battle develops. And for those of you who are not familiar with this form of battlefield management — an example. The two AH-1 Zefa gunships we have online are each equipped with four tube launched, optically tracked, wireguided missiles — TOWs. An old-fashioned weapon, really. As you all know, the Achilles heel of the TOW is that the firer has to keep the targeting crosshairs on the intended bullseye, virtually to the point of impact. That can make the firer itself vulnerable to enemy attack. Dragon Warrior, however, allows you to designate one hee-lo the firer, and the other the command centre. The launch platform can then skedaddle and the command vehicle can, from a position of relative security, direct the missile to its target.

‘Now, of course, most of this isn’t new, but what Dragon Warrior brings to the picture is. It’s a remotely operated platform that can hover, getting its sensors into all those hard-to-get-at places, and make this information available to all friendly forces…’

Wilkes thought the technician’s pitch sounded like an advertisement for a cross between a new computer game and a toothbrush.

‘And all of it can be presented picture in picture.’ He tapped the appropriate keys and the view provided by one of the monitors split into four smaller frames each with a different image.

The pulse of the helicopters suddenly grew sharper. Wilkes realised that it had been reasonably quiet for a time while the aircraft were on the ground picking up Lieutenant Glukel’s assault team. Now the helos were inbound on the target building.

‘It’s showtime,’ said the technician theatrically, glancing over the top of the monitors at the surrounding darkness, but there was nothing to see. The helos were coming in blacked out.

The technician’s associates began to work furiously over their keyboards.

‘This screen here will monitor the heart rates of the soldiers on the hee-lo and this one, those of the ground force,’ said the technician tapping each screen in turn. ‘This information is picked up by a wristband transmitter worn by each soldier and relayed to us via the Dragon Warriors. Twenty-four heart rates in all for the soldiers going in. The wristband also transmits a signal that the command centre here displays as a small, bright red sphere, replacing our soldiers’ heat signatures. We can thus differentiate between friend or foe on screen.’

In a quiet aside to Wilkes, Baruch outlined the attack. ‘There are twelve soldiers coming in on the rooftop, and another twelve providing a blocking force on the ground. At the appropriate moment, we cut the power to the building and —’ He finished the sentence by grinding his fist into the palm of his hand.

We hope, thought Wilkes.

‘On this other screen, we have the HUDs of the two accompanying Zefa attack helicopters, showing their fire control systems, plus a light-augmented view of the target building provided by the inbound Blackhawk. And, of course, we are in constant communication with every soldier in the battle through their tac radios. The only aspect of the battle we can’t give you is a view of the op from the ground. Unfortunately, the Humvees are not yet looped into the CFDP.’

‘Ideally, we’d have brought a couple of battle tanks in to support the operation,’ Baruch said quietly, ‘but the streets here are too narrow for the MBTs to manoeuvre effectively.’

Wilkes nodded. He’d never been involved in an action at this level of command. It was like watching a video game.

‘And over here, presented in glorious plasma screen colour,’ the technician said, absently tapping keystrokes, ‘we’ve got the target building itself. Watch this.’ The building housing the terrorists switched from being presented in the green glow of light-accentuated mode to that of bright technicolour. ‘Thermal imaging overlaid with x-ray.’ The external brick and plaster of the building was revealed and, beneath it, various joists, beams, electrical wiring and plumbing. There were also red, yellow and green blobs moving about. ‘Those are people,’ said the technician, pointing to the moving blobs. ‘Dragon Warrior is extremely sensitive. See those occasional fireflies of red with yellow outlines? They’re cigarettes moving from ashtray to mouth to ashtray.’ The technician was obviously proud of his baby. ‘Okay, so let’s switch to the tactical radio frequency and see how the troops are doing. Colonel?’ He turned and looked about for Baruch. ‘Here, sir, have some headphones.’ There were a couple of spare sets on the bench. He gave the one set with a boom mic to Baruch. Wilkes helped himself to the other pair.

Wilkes ignored the continuing sales pitch and looked at the tactical situation presented by the remarkable technology. Inside the four-storey building he counted twenty-four contacts. The enemy and the Israelis were evenly matched in numbers. Three of those enemy were on the roof; thirteen were strategically placed at window and door openings. Sentries. On the second floor, there were eight men seated. This was no lodge meeting. The technology was great, but Wilkes wondered whether the Israelis had enough of a force to overwhelm the enemy. Sure, the Israelis had surprise on their side, but that would be given away with the first shot fired. From the positioning of people in the building, it appeared to him that the enemy was prepared for the worst.

The Saudi smiled at Kadar and gave him a nod. It was risky for him to have come all the way from Asia for this meeting with Hamas and Hezbollah command, but it was a further demonstration of the man’s commitment and loyalty. The atmosphere in the room was jovial. Things appeared to be swinging their way. At last.

The Palestinian clapped a Syrian comrade on the back and the room roared with laughter. Comparing Americans to chickens running about the coop as the farmer’s wife chopped their heads off one by one was a wonderful punchline, and a worthy image.

‘I have one,’ said Kadar.

‘Tell us,’ said the Palestinian, eagerly leaning forward. It had been so long since he’d had anything to laugh about, but Kadar’s bombing of the US Embassy had lightened his heart.

‘An American couple comes to the Holy Land to see the sights. They’re having dinner and suddenly the wife gets something stuck in her throat. He slaps her on the back, trying to dislodge it. The waiter is called and he too begins to slap the woman on the back, but alas, she chokes and dies.

‘Well, the next day, the husband is with his wife’s body at the embalmer’s, discussing costs. “How much to bury her here?” asks the American.

‘ “Only a hundred dollars,” says the embalmer.

‘Next, he goes to the US Embassy. He explains the situation and asks how much it will cost to fly his wife’s body home for burial there. “A lot,” says the embassy. “At least ten thousand dollars.”

‘ “Okay, that’s fine,” says the husband. “I’ll put her on the first plane out.”

‘ “But why don’t you bury her here, in the Holy Land?” says the embassy man, puzzled. “It won’t cost you much at all.”

‘ “That’s true, only a hundred bucks,” he says. “But once upon a time a man was buried here and several days later he came back to life!”

‘ “Well?” says the embassy man, not getting the point.

‘ “So,” continues the widower,“now I’ve finally got rid of her, there’s no way I’m going to risk putting her in the earth here!”’

The men grouped around the table, and even a couple of the soldiers standing guard, burst into laughter when the penny finally dropped. Tears rolled down the Palestinian’s cheeks. He put his cigarette down, got up and walked around to where Kadar Al-Jahani was sitting. Kadar stood and the two embraced. ‘Thank you, my brother, for bringing us new hope…as well as a few good jokes.’ They all laughed again. Kadar welcomed the affection from the Palestinian — it was certainly a refreshing change from the outright negativity and scepticism that he’d shown in the past. Since the loss of his son, The Cause had become a personal vendetta for the man — the taking of individual lives superseding the desire to establish a homeland. How many deaths would even the scales for the man, balancing the loss of his son? Twenty? One hundred?

‘And so, my friend,’ said the Saudi, ‘how did you manage to outwit the Americans in Jakarta? The whole world is talking about it.’

‘We had God guiding our hands,’ said Kadar.

‘Ah, the man has trade secrets he doesn’t wish to divulge,’ the Yemeni said.

‘Tell us about Indonesia,’ said the Syrian. ‘What is the reaction there?’

‘You’ve seen the television reports. Demonstrations, effigies and flags burned…other western embassies, consulates and businesses under siege…’ the Palestinian said, lending his support openly to Kadar Al-Jahani for the first time.

‘Yes, but…the feeling on the ground?’ the Syrian insisted.

‘My friends, Indonesia is ready,’ Kadar said, nodding slowly, seriously.

The three men smiled at Kadar Al-Jahani. Duat would be pleased, he thought. As he had promised, the bombing had been a risk worth taking.

Dogs began to bark in the street below and one of the Hamas bodyguards closest to the window leaned out to investigate. At that moment, a corpse dropping from the rooftop sped past him and thudded onto the street below, the dead man’s rifle clattering on the road and cartwheeling away.

The guard blinked as his brain attempted to catch up to real time. He watched as Humvees rounded the corner a block away and sped towards the building while, overhead, the air filled with the deafening roar of a large helicopter.

‘Fuck,’ said Kadar as the bodyguard at the window suddenly spun backwards into the room with no head on top of his shredded neck, spraying the wall with blood.

And then the lights went out, plunging the room into darkness.

The Blackhawk roared low over the observation building. The reflected glow from the town below provided enough light for Wilkes to see it bank sharply to the right, inbound for a landing on the target building’s rooftop. Everyone then switched their attention from the night sky back to the computer monitors.

Suddenly, two of the three coloured blobs, men on the rooftop, were propelled rapidly backwards. The third body scribed a small arc then accelerated down the side of the building until it hit the street. Another blob on the second storey sunk to the floor, taken out. Thus, in a matter of seconds, the main sentries had all been sniped.

Another monitor presented a second, more distant view of the building in the green of night vision. He watched the Blackhawk flare and counted thirteen soldiers rappelling from the aircraft onto the flat rooftop. He also counted the individual vital signs of the airborne force — there were thirteen — and noted that the individual heart rates had soared. There are twelve soldiers coming in on the rooftop, and another twelve providing a blocking force on the ground. That’s what Baruch had said. The name of a trooper was provided under each heart rate, all except for one. Number thirteen. That had to be Atticus Monroe. Jesus! Wilkes wasn’t superstitious, but that didn’t stop him having an ugly premonition.

The technician fiddled with a box from which two small sticks projected. He tweaked them left and right, and the angle of the view changed — lowered. ‘Just repositioning one of the Dragon Warriors for a ringside seat,’ he explained. ‘You’ll have to excuse the crude controls. We’re working on an integrated computer control unit featuring touch control pads. But that’s for Generation Two. They’ll probably release that model and drop the price a year into the production run, screwing up the resale value,’ said the technician, snickering.

‘Shut the fuck up,’ snapped Baruch. Wilkes couldn’t have agreed more. On the screens, men were dying. Wilkes shook his head, trying to clear it of the unreality.

The airborne force hit the roof and ran for the stairs. At street level, soldiers jumped from the Humvees. Percussion grenades — two — were thrown in through the front door. They exploded seconds later, the heat flaring bright red, yellow and green on the monitors.

Wilkes heard a woman’s voice shouting instructions: Glukel. There were other voices. Wilkes assumed they were speaking Hebrew — he didn’t understand the words. The tone was urgent but controlled, cool. No panic.

The Israeli troop on the ground went through the front door after the grenades. Samuels’ people. Submachine-gun fire and other small arms fire. Shouts. A scream. Baruch said something into his boom mic. No response. He said it again. Nothing. A barrage of yelling. Two of the vital signs on the monitor were flat-lining. Christ. More screams. A clatter of small arms. On the screen, Wilkes watched ten Israelis come back out the front door, retreating. Two soldiers were dragged and another was carried. Others dropped to their knees behind the Humvees, covering the retreat of their comrades, and emptied their magazines into the front door of the building. All three of the mounted light machine guns on the Humvees began pouring fire into the ground floor through the windows, the doors and even the brickwork. There was shouting, yelling through the ’phones. The sounds of chaos, fear.

Baruch shouted something into the boom mic. No answer. He repeated the question. Again, no answer. He rubbed his face with his hands.

‘Go!’ someone said in English through Wilkes’s headphones. That must have been Atticus, thought Wilkes. He checked the monitors. Glukel’s people were faring better. No flat-lines. The view was in infrared/x-ray mode. flash-bangs. The Israelis entered the target room. A brief gun battle. Red spheres swarmed in like angry blood cells. ‘Target secured,’ yelled Monroe with an accompanying whoop.

Lightning balled in the room. The flashes blinded Kadar Al-Jahani and punched the air from his lungs. He tried to stand, only to be thrown against a wall by a massive force, the power of which momentarily blotted out his consciousness.

He coughed and choked with the dust filling his lungs. Kadar felt himself lifted up, this time by men, and then thrown face-down on the floor. His arms were wrenched behind his back dislocating a shoulder, and a ball of spinning white heat wrapped in the barbed wire of pure pain exploded inside his head. He screamed, but the sound scarcely reached his deafened ears. Vomit seared his throat and made him gag on the mouthfuls of dry grit skinning his insides like coarse sandpaper. Soldiers, Israeli soldiers, were around him. His hands were secured behind his back. Somewhere in Kadar Al-Jahani’s head the reality of the situation found a chink in his armour of disbelief. He was captured.

A massive explosion echoed through the narrow streets as a rocket-propelled grenade blew up the lead Humvee. ‘Jesus,’ said Wilkes, ‘where did that come from?’

Baruch snapped at the technician to reposition the Dragon Warrior. ‘Kakat!’ said Baruch, the veins in his neck pulsing like excited worms. The UAV revealed that the building opposite the target was garrisoned with yet another twenty or so enemy. ‘Fuck!’ Baruch shouted, slipping in and out of English. RPGs ripped through the air leaving smoke trails. The rear Humvee bounced as it exploded in a mushroom of fire, landing upside-down. Wilkes heard the sound of whimpering men coming through his ’phones. Others were yelling. He glanced at the monitor — nine flat-lines amongst the Israeli ground force, Samuels’ people.

The gunships hovered above the scene. They couldn’t get off a shot at the floors occupied by the enemy across the street from the target building. The streets were too narrow. The action was now out of the Israelis’ control, despite all the technology.

Glukel’s people began to pull back. The Blackhawk settled on the rooftop. The Israelis had three flights of stairs to relative safety. Three enemy shooters popped up on the rooftop of the building across the street. The orbiting Zefas cut them down with miniguns, their tracers a river of molten metal. RPGs answered, roaring across the narrow street and into the target building this time. BOOM! Strangely, the enemy’s target appeared to be the vacant floor above Glukel’s and Monroe’s men.

‘Shit, man, why they doin’ that?’ asked one of the techies, thinking aloud the question also on Wilkes’s mind. ‘How dumb is that? They’re firing at their own people.’

A barrage in the ’phones from Glukel followed that could only be swearing.

More enemy RPGs made the characteristic sound of tearing paper as they streamed across the narrow street, exploding against and inside the building. Someone was coughing, gagging. Wilkes realised that the air must be thick with concrete and clay pulverised to dust by the concussion, making it impossible to breathe.

‘The staircases!’ Wilkes heard Monroe yell.

‘Shit!’ said Wilkes, suddenly grasping the enemy’s move. That’s why the terrorists were firing into the building. Their targets were the staircases. With all of them demolished, Atticus and the others now had no way out. They were trapped. They couldn’t get up to the Blackhawk, nor could they leave out the front door.

Machine gun fire was now raining down on the Humvees from the heavily defended building across the street. It was a killing zone. Wilkes saw that there were now twelve flat-lines, Major Samuels one of them. The buggers never had a chance. Glukel barked an order. Wilkes watched it carried out on screen — brightly coloured red spheres took up position at the windows. One of the spheres only made it halfway, then turned blue. He glanced at another monitor. One of Glukel’s people had flat-lined. Jesus, this was murder. Small arms fire illuminated by hundreds of tracer rounds was being exchanged across the narrow street.

Baruch roared into the ’phones. Glukel yelled back. Dragon Warrior picked out half a dozen enemy about to make the dash across the street into the building held by the Israelis. Now Glukel, encumbered by dead and wounded, outnumbered and under pressure, was going to have to defend her position against an enemy on the assault.

Wilkes had seen enough. He grabbed a helmet and a tac radio off the table, and ran for the stairs. He brushed past an NCO whose mouth was open, enthralled by the monitors. ‘Thanks, mate,’ he said as he lifted the man’s sidearm from its holster. He took the stairs in a series of jumps and burst onto the street. There was a Humvee, motor idling across the street. He sprinted to it, opened the door. An Israeli grunt with his mouth open sat behind the wheel. Wilkes pulled him out by the collar, climbed in and stood on the accelerator. The vehicle jerked forward. He wrenched the wheel and the Humvee oversteered down a narrow side street, the back end flicking out and slamming into a wall. Wilkes floored it, took a left and a right and hoped his sense of direction hadn’t failed him. The vehicle shot out of the narrow lane like a bullet from a gun barrel. He threw the thing sideways then stamped on the brakes. The cloud of brown dust rolled forward obscuring his vision momentarily. And then he saw it not five metres directly in front, lit by the Humvee’s dirt-caked headlights: the Merkava main battle tank.

Wilkes kicked open the Humvee’s door and ran to the tank. The panic heard over the combat frequency was coming in waves. Baruch was shouting orders — Wilkes had no idea what was going on, but it was obvious that there was no contingency plan in case things went to shit. He also knew that what he was about to do was downright illegal and that he could be imprisoned for it, or even shot. But Atticus was a friend — even if he was occasionally a pain in the butt, and he liked Lieutenant Glukel. What am I going to do? he asked himself wryly. Ask the colonel to pass the popcorn while I watch them die on telly?

The Merkava MBT was dark, but its air-conditioning system hummed quietly. There was no doorbell to press. Wilkes slammed his helmet repeatedly against the back of the tank. It bounced off with a dull thud, as if the monster was a solid ingot of pig-iron. Nothing. He crashed the helmet again and again against the tank, a wave of frustration building within him. If there were someone inside, would the thick hull even transmit the noise he was making?

A crack of yellow light appeared at the back of the tank as its rear door swung down. A rock and roll track blared out. AC/DC, an Australian band, for Christ’s sake, screamed out at a hundred decibels. A blond, bleary-eyed soldier poked his head out to investigate, pistol in hand. Wilkes kicked the gun aside, pushed the man back inside the tank and leapt in.

‘Speak English?’ asked Wilkes.

‘Y…yes,’ said the private. He stuttered with an unusual accent Wilkes couldn’t place. ‘Who —’

Wilkes cut him off. ‘Can you drive this thing?’

‘Yes, but who are —’

Wilkes found the tank’s comms suite, isolated the radio, and tuned it to the tactical frequency. ‘Kill the music.’

‘Er, okay, but…’ said the soldier. He punched a button on a communications panel and a guitar solo ended abruptly.

Wilkes dialled in the combat frequency and the tank was suddenly full of the battle raging three blocks away. Glukel was screaming at someone. Baruch came in over the top. The noise of a submachine gun firing nearby drowned everything out. It was suddenly cut short by a scream.

‘Your people are dying,’ yelled Wilkes. ‘Get this fucker started.’

The soldier nervously looked about for someone to tell him something different. He was young, inexperienced. The crew had gone off to a brothel and left him to guard the tank with a stack of American hot rod magazines for company. It had been so quiet he’d even been considering jerking off over the blonde leaning on the bonnet of a ’57 Chevy when movement on a video screen had caught his attention. He’d adjusted the tank sight system, external video cameras embedded in the Merkava’s armour, and saw this man pounding on the back door. He should have told him to fuck off over the PA, but instead he’d made a mistake and decided to do it face to face. He cursed himself for that now — his commander would kill him. He’d get back from doing the business and find the tank gone. The soldier pictured the look on his commander’s face and the subsequent anger that would be directed at him. But the explosions and the screaming coming through the internal speakers overcame his fear of his immediate superior’s retribution — that and the fact that the man who’d invaded his private world waving a Glock in his face was a more immediate threat.

The soldier lowered himself into the driver’s seat and tapped his access code into the computer’s touch screen. The beast’s engine still held a little heat. He tapped the green, warm-start option and the massive diesel roared into life.

Wilkes put on the commander’s helmet, which included integrated ’phones and mic. The driver followed suit. ‘What’s your name?’ asked Wilkes over the intercom.

‘Benyamin,’ the driver answered nervously.

‘Where you from, Ben?’ asked Wilkes quickly, turning the volume down on the bad news coming over the radio so that he could get the answer.

‘Originally…South Africa, sir,’ said Benyamin, deciding that the man who’d commandeered (the word ‘hijacked’ had entered his head but he killed it instantly) his tank had to be an officer — Sayeret, or maybe even Shin Bet.

‘Well, Ben, we’re going downtown to pick up some friends. If we do it right, we’ll get a big pat on the back.’ Wilkes chose not to add that if things went to hell there’d be faeces on the fan.

‘Which direction, sir?’ Benyamin asked.

‘You got a map of this city?’

‘Better than that, sir.’ The young man touched his screen several times and a similar screen in front of Wilkes flashed into life. On it was a colour road map of Ramallah with the tank’s location on it illustrated by a small tank icon. Cute. Stuck to the armour plate by his shoulder with Blu-tack was a collection of pictures of naked women torn from various sources, positioned around a buxom brunette suggestively riding the Merkava’s gun. Wilkes shook his head — the interior of the tank was no different to any other male workplace he’d been in.

‘GPS,’ Benyamin said by way of explanation.

Wilkes hit the transmission button. ‘Lieutenant Colonel, this is Tom Wilkes. I have a tank. Put me up on the system.’

‘Tom, where…?’ Baruch was momentarily confused, but Wilkes had chosen his words well, and the colonel grasped the Australian’s intent. He yelled at the technicians who relayed the frequency.

‘You got that, Ben?’ asked Wilkes.

‘Yes, sir. Seatbelt.’

‘What?’

‘Your seatbelt, sir.’

‘Oh,’ said Wilkes, vaguely surprised. He shrugged and buckled in. ‘And the name’s Tom, okay?’

‘Yes, sir…Tom.’

Several frames suddenly appeared on the screen, one atop the other. Wilkes moved them around with a trackball beside the screen. Benyamin did the same. The target building was one right turn and two hundred metres away. Benyamin touched his screen and the road ahead was captured by the TSS and projected onto separate monitors in the ubiquitous green of augmented light.

Wilkes heard Baruch ask him several questions but he ignored him. He was still working out in his own head exactly what he was going to do with the tank once he got it into position. The situation at the target building had stabilised somewhat, but only temporarily. The terrorists attempting to take the ground floor had been beaten back. But Dragon Warrior had picked up reinforcements in the vicinity, making their way to the battle with, doubtlessly, more RPGs. The Zefas were powerless, unless the terrorists had the bad sense to try again to take up positions on the rooftop giving the helicopter gunships a clear shot. Samuels’ men — the ground blocking force — had been slaughtered to a man. Glukel’s troop was gradually being whittled down. From the screen display he could see that four were wounded, two seriously. The soldiers were also running low on ammunition and resupply was not an option. Lieutenant Colonel Baruch had assembled an assault team from scratch, made up of nearby Israeli Defence Force soldiers on various security details, but they would be walking into a firestorm. Whoever these enemy soldiers were — Hezbollah or Hamas — they were not lying down without a fight. Samuels had been right.

‘What have you got — what sort of rounds?’ Wilkes asked.

Benyamin was well and truly on side now. The information coming in on his touch screen from the UAVs and helos presented a desperate picture. His eyes were now wide in their sockets, his mouth dry with the adrenalin rush. ‘Sir, we have APFSDS and HEAT multipurpose rounds, plus assorted anti-personnel and HE rounds.’

The armour-piercing fin-stabilised discarding sabot round would have been perfect if they were up against tanks, APCs or hardened bunkers. But a high-explosive anti-tank round, basically a high-explosive shaped charge, would clear the building in one massive blow.

‘Given ’em HEAT?’

‘That’d be my choice, sir.

‘Well, get it loaded.’

Benyamin slowed the Merkava, swung it round the right-hander then gunned it. The tank’s 1500 horsepower General Dynamics GD833 diesel thrummed as it launched the tank’s thirty tonnes down the road. The going was tough. The gap between the buildings was too narrow to allow the tank to pass freely between them. The left side of the tank ploughed into several buildings, causing them to cave-in as it charged through. Benyamin worked the touch screen. ‘Two rounds in the hopper, sir. One to do the job, and one for luck.’

‘Got an ETA?’ asked Wilkes.

‘Thirty seconds give or take, sir.’

Wilkes increased the magnification on the forward view. The target loomed large. Benyamin switched to infrared. The hot lead and tracer exchanges between the two buildings could be seen clearly, as could the burning Humvees out front.

Machinery clanged beside Wilkes as the HEAT round was automatically pushed into the gun’s breech. An orange glowing diamond appeared on the building about to be reduced to landfill. Benyamin moved it around with the trackball. ‘I think the ground floor, sir. Give our people across the road some protection. But I’d give them some warning.’The Israeli tried to lock the gun on target but the street was too narrow, so he widened the angle by smashing the tank through an adjacent building. Benyamin brought the gun to bear again, this time with better results. Its stabilising system took over, automatically making minute corrections in all axes, compensating for the tank’s movement, to ensure the round, once launched, hit the spot.

‘Roger that,’ said Wilkes. ‘Lieutenant Glukel, Tom Wilkes.’

‘I hear you,’ yelled the lieutenant, partially deaf from the ordnance exploding all around her.

‘Get some cover now,’ said Wilkes.

‘What?’

‘Gotcha, Tom,’ said Atticus. ‘Whatever you’re gonna do, buddy, do it fast. No ammo…wounded.’

‘You’ve got a five countdown.’ Wilkes counted back from seven until he reached five. He turned off the radio and finished the countdown in his head: four…three…two…one. Wilkes yelled, ‘FIRE!’

The Merkava leapt as the HEAT round erupted from the gun. An instant later, a massive percussion wave swept over the tank. Benyamin stood on the anchors and the Merkava skidded to a halt sideways, clipping a building and knocking out a large corner of it. Wilkes was almost thrown out of his seat and was grateful for the seatbelt. All went strangely quiet, and then a pitter-patter sound emanated from the hull like a light sun shower on a tin roof. Wilkes looked about, unsure of the noise.

‘It’s raining, sir,’ explained Benyamin. ‘Concrete.’

Wilkes checked the monitor. Sure enough, chunks of concrete, stone and bricks were striking the road all around the tank. A large ‘thunk’ gently rocked the Merkava, and Wilkes, with the help of the TSS, watched a three-metre corner section of a wall tumble off the tank’s turret and onto the road. The dust had a while to settle but the cameras, in light-augmented mode, revealed a hole where once a building stood.

‘Bloody hell,’ said Wilkes quietly.

Benyamin nodded. ‘Yeah. Cool, huh?’

Kadar viewed the surf suspiciously, but the joy that seemed to possess everyone who swam between the peaks was infectious. He dived in and struck out for the green water beyond the white, beyond the breakers where the waves lined up like soldiers, obedient to the orders of some invisible drill sergeant. Kadar rose as the first wave in a set lifted him up, its energy encouraging him to catch the next. As the wave passed, it set him down gently in its trough. But then the following wave approached, bigger than the first. It sucked him through the water as it neared, dragging him up its towering face. For a moment he was poised on its crest. He looked down and saw that there was no water on the reef below, just the points of the coral reef with one small fish flopping and twitching between its jagged fingers. The face of the wave became concave and Kadar saw the wave for its true self: a malignant force with a conscious and grim determination. He looked down on the reef below as if from the roof of a four-storey building and saw his death. The lip of the wave curled under, taking him with it. It drove him into the reef and rolled him over those jagged peaks.

It was as if he had no strength to resist, for the wave’s power was beyond resistance. It drove him down and tumbled him around, over and over. It pummelled him senseless, rolling him so that he had no sense of up or down, and all the while the air in his lungs soured, his desire to inhale growing by the moment so that his chest burned and his head pounded with an irresistible craving to breathe, breathe, breathe. Yet, round and round he was driven, the surf careless of his life, which must surely slip from his grasp at any moment. It was as if a great hand had forced him to the bottom and held him there, grinding his limbs and his face on the coral, slicing, piercing, the water reddening with his ebbing life force.

And then suddenly he burst to the surface at the last moment of desperation to inhale the sweet clear air. Only this time, there was nothing but sand to breathe; mouthfuls of rasping sand that filled his lungs with a dry burning. Kadar Al-Jahani regained consciousness as he coughed and hacked to free his lungs of the concrete dust. There was silence in his head, the silence of the deaf. He began to crawl slowly. His shoulder was torn and loose, the ball rolling freely in soft muscle made him want to cry out, but he bit down on it, channelled it, harnessed it to his will to survive and escape. His hands were secured behind his back, so Kadar fell on his face several times as the rubble shifted under his bloody knees. And still the dust choked. He crawled for days and weeks like this, stumbling, falling, searching for air, air that was sweet, a clean breath above the roiling dust.

‘Son of a bitch,’ Wilkes heard Monroe say.

‘Let’s roll,’ said Wilkes with a nod of his head to Benyamin.

The Israeli gunned the diesel and the Merkava bucked forward, rearing over the scattered debris like a frightened horse. The soldiers waiting in the building choked as the billowing waves of grit coated their lungs.

‘Where’s Kadar?’ asked Monroe.

‘He’s with you,’ said Glukel.

‘Shit,’ said Monroe.

Some long seconds of silence followed. ‘Okay,’ said Monroe. ‘I do not have the prisoner. REPEAT! THE PRISONER HAS ESCAPED!’

‘Kaaakaaaat!’ yelled Glukel.

Shit! Wilkes resisted the temptation to say it into the mic. Without Kadar Al-Jahani, the mission would be worse than a complete disaster. So many pointless deaths… Wilkes checked the monitor in front of him and cycled through the various levels of information. Major Samuels and all his men were dead, according to their flat-lines. And if they weren’t dead before his arrival with the Merkava, only a miracle would have saved them during the explosion of the HEAT ordnance. He again counted the signatures of Samuels and his people and the lines were as before — all flat. But there was something unusual. Lieutenant Glukel was in the process of conducting a search of the demolished building to find Kadar, ordering teams of two to perform a systematic search of the various rooms. The Saudi could well have just been hiding somewhere amongst the rubble.

‘Lieutenant Glukel?’ Wilkes said.

‘I’m busy.’

‘Lieutenant. How many in your troop?’

‘Twelve. No, thirteen, including your friend Monroe.’

‘Atticus,’ said Wilkes. ‘You wearing a wristband?’

‘No,’ said Monroe.

‘Okay, well I’ve got thirteen signatures here on screen. So why is that?’

‘Christ! I forgot. I put my band on Kadar after we cuffed him,’ said Monroe.

‘I’m with you,’ Baruch said, interrupting. ‘Give me a minute.’

Wilkes heard him talking heatedly with the technician. Wilkes wondered whether the American had pulled up his daks now that the stress levels were elevated. A refreshed view of the building flashed onto the screen in front of Wilkes and on it floated twelve bright red dots, each representing a soldier’s homing beacon. But there was one missing. Unlucky number thirteen.

‘Tom, we’re going to have to send Dragon Warrior on a bit of a fly-around. The target couldn’t have gone far,’ said Baruch.

The view of the building changed as the UAV swept around it slowly, stopping every dozen metres or so in a hover to scan the surrounding buildings. And then, suddenly, there it was, or rather, there he was, Kadar Al-Jahani. There was a brightly coloured red sphere inching down the street behind the target building.

‘You got that?’ said Baruch.

‘We’re on it,’ said Wilkes. ‘Benyamin?’

The tank moved forward, swung right, then advanced slowly. It was a tight fit in the side street. It took out the front wall of a two-storey dwelling that promptly collapsed around the tank. The Merkava stopped in the T-intersection at the rear of the building, Benyamin rotating the turret so that it fitted between the buildings. There was not enough room to turn the tank through ninety degrees without destroying more buildings. The tank’s TSS cameras revealed a small dust-coloured mound moving slowly down the middle of the street. Benyamin targeted the main gun on the lump and loaded the spare HEAT round into the breech.

‘I think you’ve got him covered, Ben,’said Wilkes. ‘Crack the doors and leave the motor running.’ Wilkes released his safety harness, picked up the Glock and disappeared through the rear. The tank’s floodlights snapped on. Wilkes gagged on the thick dust boiling around the tank. It stung his eyes and made them water. The atmosphere in the tank had been cool and clean, purified by the air-con. Wilkes pulled himself up on the tank, picked his way over it and then jumped back down into the rear lane. He walked up to the lump, a man with his hands snap-locked behind his back, crawling along on his knees, his skinned face and broken shoulder pushing into the dirt as he tried in vain to escape.

Glukel’s people materialised from the target building, dragging their feet slowly, exhausted, crunching the rubble and grit collected on the road. Seven faces, seven pairs of white eyes blinking from black faces. They carried their people who were too badly wounded to walk. One of the men carried a dead comrade over his shoulder.

‘I hope he’s fucking worth it,’ said Glukel too loudly, her ears clogged with the thunder of battle. She didn’t wait for a reaction, but pushed past Wilkes towards the tank.

‘What kept you, Mr Cojones?’ said Monroe, the smile for once wiped from his face.

Lieutenant Colonel Baruch stood in silence as he watched the monitor, the green clouds of dust settling. He knew this would be his last op. He would be retired, probably with yet another medal. In the words of the American technician beside him, it had been ‘a cluster fuck’. A nice term. He couldn’t have put it better himself. All the technology in the world and still, at the battle front, flesh and blood had stopped the bullets. That crazy Australian bastard. If not for him, more body bags would have been required. But how the hell was he going to keep the warrant officer’s involvement from leaking? If it was important enough, someone else higher up could worry about that.

Besides, Baruch no longer cared and his knees trembled with the realisation. He felt a great despair within. More letters to mothers and fathers explaining the hero’s death earned by their sons. Baruch headed from the rooftop to the stairwell, and checked the magazine in his sidearm as he walked. It was full. No doubt someone would find a use for the nine rounds that remained.