(Wrath-04)-Breathless (2012) Page 11

  He knew what was coming. There was no doubt in his mind. He had prepared for this day for almost thirty years.

  But still, in his gut, he quivered with fear. He had to move carefully. He had to be sure. So much depended on what he decided now.

  His assistant, a colonel, moved toward him, an unlit cigarette in his mouth, his eyes burning with rage. He stood before the general. The two men stared at each other, but neither of them spoke. The colonel hunched his shoulders as if he expected something, but the general only watched him, giving nothing away. The colonel turned angrily, and then walked behind his general, pacing like a wild dog on a chain. He stopped suddenly, swept his eyes across the control center, and leaned toward the general’s ear. “They’re gone,” he said simply, his voice grim with rage.

  The general’s face remained passive, almost unnaturally so, though he did move his head until he could see the younger man out of the corner of his eye.

  “They’re gone, Marshal, gone!” the colonel repeated. “The prime minister! The legislators! This isn’t an act of terror. This is a savage act of war!”

  The general turned away. “What’s the final count at the Knesset?” he asked.

  “Who cares?” his aide hissed. “If it turns out some survived—and I’m sure some of them will—none of that matters; our response must be the same. This isn’t an original scenario, General Malka. We’ve thought this thing through. We’ve war gamed this option for how many years? You know what to do now. What are you waiting for?”

  “Have you talked with the Home Defense Network?” the general demanded.

  The colonel hesitated, and then nodded.

  “What is the current tally?”

  “They really don’t know.”

  “What is their best estimate? I want to know!”

  “Fifty, maybe sixty, dead. Another thirty wounded, most of them critically.”

  The general sat back and exhaled.

  It would have taken a very powerful bomb blast to kill that many members of the Knesset. How did they do it? He wondered for the thousandth time. How, when had they been able to plant the bombs in the building? Security was so tight. The entire government complex secure! How had they done it?

  Then his brain shifted gears.

  He quit wondering how they’d done it and started wondering why.

  His assistant moved around his chair, standing before him again, tiny beads of perspiration forming on the top of his bald head. He looked at the general, and then lowered his voice. “You’ve got to Pinball this and you’ve got to do it now. They’ll expect us to be paralyzed by indecision, unable to move. But you know what to do.”

  “We should wait to find out if the president survived before we—”

  “No, General Malka,” the colonel hissed impatiently. “There’s no one left to consult with. This is up to you!”

  The general shook his head. “I cannot act alone. And no one has confirmed that the president is dead or the senior leadership of the Knesset is wiped out.”

  The other man huffed, his rage burning through. “Are you kidding?!” he stammered. “Do you think they would hesitate? You know what any of them would do! We have our instructions, general, and every minute you wait makes it that much more difficult. Every minute you hesitate makes it less likely that we are going to be able to finish this job.”

  The general thought for thirty seconds, then exhaled a long breath. “All right,” he answered slowly. “It is time. Light the Pinball.”

  THIRTEEN

  Hatzerim Air Base

  Hatzerim has been the primary Israel Defense Force/Air Force air base since its construction in the late 1960s. Located in southern Israel, with the rocky Mount Dimona rising dimly in the east, it is a modern military installation with huge aircraft hangars, hidden bunkers, an enormous and busy aircraft parking tarmac, and dozens of administrative buildings running parallel to the main runway. On a normal day, the taxiways and parking areas would have been packed with dozens of fighter and attack aircraft. With thirteen flying squadrons, the sound of screaming jets and the smell of burning jet fuel constantly filled the air. But the stop-launch orders had been given when the prime minister had been killed. The military needed time to increase combat sorties, time to get their pilots and their fighters ready to fight, so the parking ramp had fallen silent throughout the long afternoon.

  As evening fell, the wind had picked up, blowing in from the Mediterranean Sea, kicking dust and humidity into the air. As the sun set, the western sky began to burn like a bloated fireball, the entire horizon turning an eerie purple and red. But then the wind suddenly quit, taking a breath before the storm.

  Shortly after 10 P.M., the aircraft parking ramps became suddenly crowded again as hundreds of crew chiefs and maintenance workers started preparing their aircraft for the sorties ahead.

  Twenty F-16 pilots were given the initial orders to attack. Their targets were an assortment of terrorist training camps, administrative buildings, homes, businesses, logistic centers, safe houses, and weapon storage facilities. Anything identified as being associated with any terrorist group—from their girlfriends to their families, from their businesses to their cars, from their guesthouses and retreats to their military training camps—they were going after them all.

  The list of terrorist organizations they could target was depressingly long: Hezbollah, Ansar al-Islam, al Qaeda, Qa‘idat al-Jihad, the Islamic Army, World Islamic Front for Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders, the Islamic Salvation Foundation, the Usama bin Laden Network, ‘Asbat al-Ansar, Hamas, Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiya, the Islamic Resistance Movement, the Organization of the Oppressed on Earth, the Revolutionary Justice Organization, Fatah Revolutionary Council, the Abu Nidal Organization, Islamic Jihad, the Arab Revolutionary Council, the Arab Revolutionary Brigades, Black September, the Revolutionary Organization of Socialist Muslims. All of these organizations (and an unknown number of other unidentified terror groups) were pledged to the destruction of Israel, and any one of them could have masterminded the attacks against the Israeli government. Half had already claimed responsibility, eager to get their names in the news.

  As the Israeli pilots prepared for combat, none of them knew for certain who was responsible for the assassination of the prime minister or the brutal attack on the Knesset. But they didn’t care anymore. They were going after them all.

  The Pinball had been fired. They were free to bounce around now, hitting wherever and whatever target they could find.

  The first twenty F-16s had been divided into five flights of four. Some were tasked to fly north toward Damascus or Lebanon, while others were going east toward Amman. Two flights were heading south toward Egypt and the south Jordan border. And these would be only the first of many sorties. Dozens of other jets were already in pre-flight operations. Hundreds of sorties would be flown in the first twenty-four hours. Thousands of sorties in the coming weeks. Israel Defense Forces were massing in defensive positions along their eastern and southern borders. Soon they would move into offensive operations. Special Forces teams, some of the best and most dedicated in the world, had already been deployed deep into Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Syria, Egypt and Iran.

  The monstrous wave of activity made one thing clear.

  This wasn’t an operation. This was a full-out war.

  *******

  Captain Aharon Elnecave felt a tightness in his gut as he walked to his jet. His flight suit was soaked, and he could feel tiny drops of perspiration running down the side of his ribs. It was almost full dark now, and cool, but he continued to sweat.

  His F-16 was ready to go. He walked around the aircraft, lovingly touching the jet. The little fighter felt cool, the metal and composite materials smooth to his touch. He did a hurried preflight inspection, concentrating on the weapons tucked under the belly of the jet. Two two-thousand-pound bombs. He stared at them, his throat tight and dry. Looking up, he nodded to the security man. The soldier watched him carefully, the overhead li
ghts casting his eyes in dark shadows under the brim of his helmet. Aharon glanced left and right. Up and down the flight line, the security soldiers were everywhere, all of them dressed in full battle gear. He grunted a hurried greeting to the sergeant, and then turned back to his jet.

  Fourteen minutes after walking to his aircraft, the captain had completed the walk around and preflight inspections, strapped himself in, run up the engines, and completed all of his pre-takeoff checks.

  He turned to his right, where his flight leader was sitting in another F-16. At 10:56 P.M., the leader nodded and released his brakes, and the jets started to move. Turning east on the taxiway, two other fighters fell in with the flight, taking up the third and fourth positions behind their leader and Aharon. After taxiing onto a position at the end of the runway, the flight leader stopped and the other jets pulled into his side. The munitions crews were ready, six guys in fluorescent yellow vests standing off the right side. The four pilots gave the “clear” signal by placing their hands on the cockpit, always keeping them in view. Confident the pilots couldn’t hurt them by mistakenly moving the flight controls or inadvertently hitting the wrong switch, the munitions crews ran under the jets, where they pulled the arming pins from the weapons, then turned and ran back to the side. While they worked, Captain Elnecave glanced behind him and saw another group of fighter jets lining up behind him on the taxiway.

  Once the munitions crews were clear, the flight leader signaled the other pilots and the four jets moved forward again. As the fighters began to accelerate down the runway, the pilots hit their afterburners, and a solid orange-and-yellow flame sprouted at the engines, then shot back fifteen feet. The calm night shattered as the sound echoed through the air, rolling over the airport like a long, thunderous roll.

  The little fighters climbed to three hundred feet, then turned west, following in a half-mile trail.

  It was a very short flight to their targets, and they had a lot to do. The pilots started their bombing checklist almost as soon as they were in the air.

  White House Situation Room, Washington, D.C.

  The Presidential Situation Room is a cramped series of offices built underneath the West Wing of the White House. Unlike the Presidential Emergency Operations Center underneath the East Wing, which had been designed for use as a command and control center during a nuclear war, the Situation Room is fairly small. Through the 1980s and 1990s, it had hardly been used. But now it seemed the president used it regularly.

  There were several men and three women inside the main conference room. They sat around a large table that was cluttered with empty Coke cans, a coffeepot with plastic cups, scratch pads, and red-bound, top-secret security files. Three digital clocks on the wall showed the local times in Washington, D.C.; Jerusalem; and Riyadh. Behind them, the faux wood panel walls hid various communications gear and television screens. A white curtain at the front of the room had been pulled back, exposing an enormous flat-screen monitor, which was presently showing a real-time relay from an American AWACS command and control aircraft orbiting sixty miles west off the coast of Israel, over the Mediterranean Sea.

  Everyone watched the tactical screen as five blue triangles emerged from the Israeli air base at Hatzerim, each triangle representing a flight of four fighters. The flights took off thirty seconds apart, and then headed in different directions, flying north, east, and south.

  A Marine four-star general, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, stood at the head of the table and to the right of the screen.

  “What are they?” the president asked.

  “F-16 fighters, sir. Block 60s. Air-to-ground role.”

  “So all of them are strikers?”

  “Yes, sir, they are. We’ve been in constant contact with the Israeli commanders, and they have assured us that this first wave of attackers will be hitting well-established terrorist targets. After that, they will spread out, but we’ve got no problem with what they are going after right now.”

  The group watched in silence as the blue triangles spread across Israel, seeming to saturate the skies. The country was so little, and the fighters moved so fast, it would take only seconds before they would be tossing their bombs.

  The television monitor suddenly shifted, seeming to jump in its tracks, as the satellite feed from the AWACS burned through some electromagnetic static in space. The picture returned, a little more hazy and gray, but the president continued to study the screen. “Review the target list,” he demanded for the second time.

  The Marine general looked down at a sheet of paper and read the targets again. “The training camp at Rafah, General Karak’s home in Khan, Hezbollah facilities along the Lebanon border . . . .”

  The target list was long. Twenty aircraft. Forty bombs. Eleven separate targets in all.

  The chairman finished reading the list, and then looked up at the president. “Sir, we have maintained regular communications with General Malka, acting director of the Israeli National Security Committee—”

  The president lifted his hand impatiently. He wasn’t interested in General Malka; he needed to talk to the new prime minister or the president. He needed to talk to some kind of civilian leadership, not a military man. He turned in his chair, brushing his hands across his face. “Still no word out of Jerusalem?” he asked his secretary of state.

  The gray-haired woman leaned forward. “I’m afraid nothing, sir.”

  “We don’t know who is in charge there?”

  “It seems that General Malka is, sir. At least for the moment, he appears to be in command.”

  The president hesitated as he considered the subtle meaning of her words. “In command.” Yes, that was right. Civilians were “in charge.” Military leaders were “in command,” which was only one of the reasons he was nervous. His stomach fluttered again.

  “What about Secretary Rabin?” the president questioned.

  “No word from him, sir.”

  “The senior member of the Cabinet of Ministers—”

  “—was presiding over the Knesset,” the secretary of state interrupted. “He hasn’t been seen or heard from since the explosion. The Israeli press is reporting he is dead.”

  The president was desperately searching for someone inside the Israeli government that he could talk to. The last thing he wanted was for this thing to blow out of control. And who knew what the Israelis were planning to do?

  “Defense Minister Fuad Ben-Eliezer?” he asked in desperation.

  “We do have some information on him,” the secretary of state replied. “Although he hasn’t tried to contact us, we believe he is being evacuated to a secure command center west of Jerusalem. We’ve been told he’s en route, but we don’t know for sure.”

  The president fell silent, his shoulders slumping at the thought. He had a pencil in his hand and he rolled it absently, twirling it between his fingers, and then letting it fall into his palm. “And you’re certain,” he demanded, “that you’ve tried every possible means of establishing communication with President Bier?”

  “Yes, sir, we have. We have no word of his status, which is clearly bad news. If he had survived the bombing of the Knesset, I think he would have emerged. We would have seen him, he would have made a statement, and we would have heard something by now. The silence indicates—and this is just my opinion, sir—but I think we have to assume he is incapacitated if he survived the bombing at all.”

  The president moved his eyes around the table, inviting disagreement. No one said anything. It seemed they agreed.

  “Then who’s in charge over there?” he demanded in a gruff voice.

  “No one knows, Mr. President. The Israeli people, the military, it seems that none of them know. Try to imagine, if you could, a parallel situation here in the United States. Imagine, Mr. President, that one day you were assassinated, and the vice president as well. Then later that night, during an emergency session of Congress, an enormous bomb goes off, killing most—at least half—of the senators and congr
essmen inside. Our lines of succession would be in tatters. Who survived? Who was ranking? None of us could say. Yes, we have doomsday operations and contingency plans, but we have never envisioned our chain of command being severed two hundred leaders down the line. We would reach the end of the line of authority in very short order, sir.

  “That is the situation Israel finds itself in right now. So it will take a little time for them to figure out who is really in charge.”

  The room fell into dreary silence, and the air seemed suddenly stuffy and warm.

  “It doesn’t really matter,” a quiet voice then said in almost a whisper.

  All eyes turned to look at General Brighton.

  He lifted his eyebrows, looking back at all the faces that were staring at him now. “It doesn’t matter who’s in charge,” he said again. “Their response has been pre-determined. Whoever is left will carry out the same orders. It doesn’t matter who it is.”

  The president shook his head. “Explain that,” he demanded.

  Brighton was sitting two chairs to the right of the president and he placed his elbows on the table, looking down the line of men. “They knew that exactly this might happen, that they might have their chain of command severed at a significant location down the line. Knowing this was a possibility, they put contingency operations in place. The decision of how they’d respond was made a long time ago. The plan of operations is very specific. Who is in charge then, it hardly matters. He will have no choice. The plan is automatic. He’ll almost be an observer, just the same as we.”

  The president shook his head and looked away in frustration.

  As Brighton watched his leader, he noted the heavy droop of his shoulders. Sitting this close he could feel it, the nearly unbearable weight that crushed the president down. The president’s light hair had turned grayer over the past couple of years, the lines on his face were a little deeper, the flesh under his eyes less healthy and firm. Still, his eyes remained resolute, and his motions were quick and alive.