The Disciple

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The Russian-made T-54 tank was already in the square in front of the Hilton Hotel in Jakarta when four other tanks arrived. It was parked across the square from the hotel and sat with the turret hatch open and the engine idling. Inside, Hyman Fineberg sat at the gunner’s station sipping hot coffee. Ari Zameret was in the driver’s seat. Up top, in the commander’s chair, sat Ivan Davidov, who was wearing the uniform of a captain in the Indonesian army. Beside him on top of the turret sat a 12.7 mm DShK machine gun on a swivel mount; a belt of ammo led from the can to the breech, and a round was chambered. Fineberg had an armor-piercing round in the chamber of the big 100 mm gun.

The other four tanks took positions on the corners of the square. As they did so, Davidov said to Fineberg, “You didn’t brief us on tanks.”

Fineberg grunted.

Davidoff continued, “Man, something is going down. I don’t think Darma is an honest man.”

Sure enough, before long an officer, a captain, came striding over to talk to Davidov.

“I was told there were to be only four tanks here this morning,” the captain said, looking up at Davidov, who was trying his best to look bored and sleepy.

“We’ve been here since midnight on the specific orders of General Darma,” Davidoff said. He wiped his face with a hand and yawned. “If you have other orders for us…” Davidov left it hanging there, implying he and his crew were ready to leave immediately if the other officer wanted to take the responsibility of overriding the general’s orders.

The captain on the ground obviously didn’t want to run afoul of the general.

Davidov decided to play another card. “We were told we would be the only tank here.”

“Maybe that was the plan,” the captain said, “but we got our orders two hours ago and moved out as quickly as we could.”

Davidov merely nodded.

“They told us to stay off the grass,” the captain said, gesturing at the huge manicured park replete with trees and flowers that formed the setting for the hotel. “We’ll be on the corners,” he said, meaning the corners of the parking lot, and turned and walked away.

At the gunner’s station, Hyman Fineberg again put his eye to the telescopic sight. He used the knob to run it across the top floor of the Hilton. The crosshairs tracked nicely. Nope, every window had the curtains drawn. The structure that housed the presidential suite occupied half the top floor, and opened onto a patio that contained a pool. That patio formed half the roof of the main building. One could see it from three sides, but from this angle, one couldn’t see much.

Ah, if only Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would step onto that patio with a cup of tea. If he did, Hyman Fineberg would be delighted to see if he could cut him in half with a 100 mm shell.

He took his eye from the sight and looked again at his watch. Three of the shooters were just off the lobby, in the room behind the front desk. The desk clerk was bound and gagged in one corner. The fourth man, named Moshe, was behind the desk, casually keeping an eye on the elevator that serviced only the penthouses on the top floor.

“Turn up the radio,” Fineberg told Ari Zameret. “If this new tanker gets on the horn to headquarters, we have another problem.”

Inside the Hilton, Moshe looked at his watch. Still fifty-seven minutes before Ahmadinejad’s limo was due to arrive to take him to his appointment with the local Islamic clergy. He pursed his lips and whistled silently as he played with the reservation computer on the desk below the countertop. A Japanese man came out of the regular elevator and crossed toward the desk.

“May I help you, sir?”

“I wish to check out.”

Moshe was all business. “Your room number, please?”

The minutes crept past, and the radio in the tank remained silent. Of course, Fineberg thought, that captain could be calling headquarters on his cell phone. He used the periscope to examine each tank in turn, ensuring he knew their precise locations. Each had shut down its engine, which he thought was a good sign. If they restarted their engines, however…

Automatically he checked the cannon shells on the tray. All HE. “Ari, come change out these shells. I want AP instead of HE.”

“Yes, sir.”

In the Hilton, Moshe was checking out an Australian couple when his telephone rang. He picked up the instrument from its cradle and tucked it between his shoulder and his ear. “Front desk,” he said.

“Red, red, red. Soldiers are getting out of a bus in back and going into the basement. They are armed. I thought I saw the general.”

“Roger.”

Moshe hung up and said to the couple at the counter, “Please wait a moment. I’ll be right back.” He stepped into the room behind him and said, “Red. Soldiers are coming in the basement in back.”

One of the men tossed Moshe an Uzi.

Fineberg’s cell phone rang, and he answered.

“Red, red, red. Soldiers going into the back of the hotel. Looks like Darma’s with them. They came in a bus.”

“It’s blown. Let’s try to get our guys out of there.”

Behind the hotel in a car parked in a service area, the man who made the call reached behind him and pulled an AT-4 light antitank weapon from under a blanket on the backseat. He stepped out of the car, pulled the telescoping tube to full extension, aimed the weapon at the bus and pulled the trigger. The 84 mm warhead shot across the hundred yards that separated the car from the bus and hit it dead center. The explosion knocked down the two soldiers standing at the front of the bus.

The man who fired the antitank rocket dropped the empty tube and pulled an M-16 from the backseat. He opened up on the soldiers in semiautomatic aimed fire. He dropped them both before they could find cover. By now a hot fire was burning in the middle of the bus, giving off a lot of smoke.

General Syafi’i Darma found Ahmadinejad in the presidential suite dressing for his daily appointments. He was admitted by one of Ahmadinejad’s security team, who carried a pistol in his hand even though Darma was in uniform.

Darma delivered the message in a rush. “The security ministry has uncovered an assassination plot aimed at Your Excellency. The assassins are in the lobby.”

As Ahmadinejad stared, Darma turned and motioned with an arm, directing a squad of soldiers to enter the suite. All were armed with assault rifles. They arranged themselves in front of every window and the sliding glass door that led to the huge patio and pool. Two men went out onto the patio and looked toward the street twenty-four floors below. Two more soldiers carried a light machine gun out onto the patio and set it up on a tripod. Men carrying ammo boxes followed them. In less than a minute, the gun was in position to shoot down any helicopter that might approach the building.

While all this was going on, Ahmadinejad asked, “Who are these assassins?”

“Israelis, we believe,” said General Darma. He started in on a convoluted tale of how he and his men uncovered the plot to murder the president of Iran, but Ahmadinejad turned away, apparently uninterested.

Israelis!

“They’re going in. Start engines,” came the command over the tank’s radio.

Hyman Fineberg swung the turret until the optical sight of the 100 mm gun rested on the side of the tank to his right. He pulled the trigger, and as the tank recoiled, the armor-piercing round blew up the target tank.

“Reload,” he roared as he spun the turret, and Davidoff, who had anticipated him and dropped down into the turret, slammed another round home.

Fineberg settled the crosshairs on the tank to his left across the square, which was facing him almost head on. He lowered the crosshairs to rest on the forward right tread wheel and pulled the trigger. The tank rocked under the impact.

Davidoff opened the breech, the spent shell was ejected and he slammed home another round.

The four Israelis in the lobby managed to get out just as soldiers came rushing in from the stairwell. One of the Israelis paused in the door and triggered a burst at the first three soldiers he saw in order to slow them. Then he let the door slam shut and followed the others along the hallway past the administrative offices toward the employees’ entrance on the side of the building.

Moshe opened the door a crack and looked out. Soldiers in uniform, at least a dozen, were running to take cover behind cars.

“Grenades,” he said to the men behind him. Each took a grenade from his pocket and pulled the pin.

“We are going to have to fight our way out. I’ll open the door, you throw the grenades, then we go. Now!”

He banged the door open, and the grenades sailed through. Someone outside fired a short burst into the doorway, which tagged one of the men. He took two bullets in the chest and one in the neck. He fell, bleeding profusely.

Moshe and the other two charged through the door with Uzis blazing just as the grenades exploded. Moshe was shot as he ran; then the man who had blown the bus shot three of the Indonesian soldiers, turning them around to face this new threat.

Bullets spanged into cars and skipped off pavement and tore at flesh. Another Israeli went down. The survivor ran like the wind.

With the door to the patio open, the sounds of small-arms fire, grenade explosions and 100 mm tank gunnery washed into the presidential suite. Ahmadinejad strode out onto the patio and found himself looking down into the parking lot in back of the building, far below.

He was the first one to spot a tank coming at a good clip around the corner of the building, diesel smoke pouring from its exhaust.

Someone was standing in the turret, and he opened up with the swivel-mounted machine gun.

Almost at the same instant, the barrel of the tank’s big gun swung toward the hotel and a belch of fire and smoke erupted. Through his feet, Ahmadinejad felt the building absorb the blow of the huge shell at point-blank range. What he couldn’t see was the carnage the shell caused among the eight soldiers who were in the hallway off the lobby trying to get out of the employees’ entrance. That outside door was obliterated, and bricks rained down into the yawning chasm the shell’s explosion had caused.

From his perch high above, Ahmadinejad saw a man running on the asphalt jump onto the back of the tank, then clamber up onto the turret and disappear inside as the tank accelerated away from the hotel and vanished under the foliage of a stand of trees.

When the tank reappeared in a small clear area, it was going quickly. Even as Ahmadinejad watched, the turret spun, steadied up and belched forth another shell. The concussion of the report was surprisingly loud.

The Iranian looked to see what the gunner had fired at… and saw a tank to his left that had just cleared the edge of the building stopped and on fire, with a great greasy cloud of black smoke roiling aloft.

The fleeing tank accelerated away from the hotel across grass and flower beds, disappearing momentarily under the foliage of the lush tropical trees that dotted the grounds.

Ahmadinejad turned to find himself looking at General Darma, who was intently watching the scene below. Darma had thought Hyman Fineberg and three other men were going to be in the lobby-and had discovered that at least one tank was involved. The smoke from the burning bus wafted skyward. Two of the tanks in front of the hotel had been destroyed; the crews were presumably dead. Syafi’i Darma felt a bit overwhelmed.

He wondered about helicopters. Maybe Fineberg had a helicopter. He scanned the sky, looking…

The sky was empty. He looked again for the tank that had been shooting and realized that, although it was going away from the hotel at almost 25 mph, the turret was turned this way, backward, and the 100 mm gun was elevated. Pointing at him.

He screamed and pushed Ahmadinejad sideways onto the patio just as fire flashed at the muzzle of the gun.

Both men felt the supersonic wash of the huge shell passing just inches over their heads. The boom of the report came a second later.

Then the tank turned onto the main road leading into the city and was lost amid the surrounding buildings.

Both men got slowly to their feet.

“They escaped,” Ahmadinejad roared and pointed in the general direction in which the tank had disappeared. “You incompetent fool-they escaped! They’ll try again. They’ll burn this hotel to the ground with us in it if you don’t get them.” He gave the general a push toward the door, still shouting, “Go find them! Arrest them! Kill them, you incompetent fool, before they kill us!”

Of course, Ahmadinejad was wrong. Spectacularly wrong. If Hyman Fineberg could have gotten permission from his superiors to burn the hotel down with Ahmadinejad in residence, he would have done it, but the Israeli government would never approve such a plan. They wouldn’t even approve a plan that endangered any significant number of bystanders. This abortion was the best Fineberg could do in light of his instructions. As he rode the tank along the road toward the waiting escape cars, Hyman Fineberg consoled himself with the thought that the plan would have worked…

It would have worked, bad as it was, if General Darma hadn’t betrayed them.

The Zionists almost killed me!

Yet their assassination attempt failed. Obviously Allah has other plans for me. Allah knows the depth of my commitment to jihad and wants me to have the glory of martyrdom and taste the pleasures of Paradise.

The Israelis or Americans may try again to kill me, but since I am under Allah’s protection, they will not succeed.

Oh Allah, hear me. I am only one man, a mortal man, yet I wish to serve you as have the prophets and martyrs before me. I want to unite the believers in a holy war against the infidels, a final battle in which the forces of Satan shall be once and for all time destroyed, totally defeated, never to rise again. The believers shall proclaim your glory in every corner of the earth, on the land and the sea, in the great places and the small, in the plains and the mountains, in the deserts and forests. Woe to the unbelievers, who shall be utterly defeated.

I, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, pray that you help me do this thing. Help me to serve you. Let me be the agent of your triumph.