“Yes, sir. Lieutenant Ebenezer here. It was shot down by PA gunners with RPGs just before it landed. No survivors. I’m sorry. The Authority men were out of their area; they shouldn’t even have been near there.”
“Your mission?”
“Mission accomplished, sir, down and out.”
“Thank you.” There was some dead air time.
“Grounded, you have transport to Be’er Sheva?”
“Yes, sir, a truck we borrowed from the PA.”
“Your ETA?”
“Two hours max. One of our guests is wounded, rather seriously. We should get him to a hospital in town there.”
“Yes, get him situated. An ambulance will be waiting for him. Then the rest of you come back here. We’ll have a good after-action debriefing. Go to the airport’s transient air section. An Army chopper will be there, probably about the same time you arrive. Good work, Ebenezer. We’ll see you later.”
“Thank you, sir. Out.”
“Who the hell is your guest?” Bradford yelped. “Hell, if that’s me you’re jawing about, I’m fit and ugly and ready for action.”
“I agree you’re damn ugly, but that’s not enough,” Jaybird shrilled. Most of the troops laughed.
Murdock relaxed in the front seat. Should be nothing to worry about now unless these armed jeep raiders traveled in pairs like rattlesnakes and had radio communication.
“You didn’t tell him about your Mossad team and it grabbing that turncoat,” Murdock said.
“Not the sort of thing I’d say over a non-secure radio transmission,” Lieutenant Ebenezer said. He grinned. “But it’s going to be worth a month’s pay to see these four gents walk into his office with that briefcase.”
Murdock tried to relax. He wasn’t sure it was over yet. Those marauders could still hit them hard.
“I want two men on lookout standing up by the cab,” Murdock said on the Motorola. “Ed, pick them.”
Even with that precaution taken he wasn’t satisfied. He knew he wouldn’t be until they were on board that plane heading for Rama.
The land was looking more productive. Here and there they saw settlements that led into green swatches that could be some kind of cultivation. Maybe irrigated.
By the time they came into the suburbs, Murdock realized that this must be a good-sized little city. Ebenezer told him there were over two hundred thousand residents in the town. They found the airport, and were directed to the military and transient section. An ambulance sat near a CH-46 look-alike chopper.
A darkly efficient nurse approached the truck as soon as it stopped.
“You have a patient for us,” she said.
“Right back here, miss,” Jaybird called, and they walked Bradford to the rear of the truck, removed one of the stake end gates, and helped him get down to the ground. He was put in a wheelchair, wheeled promptly into an ambulance with a ramp on it, and driven away at once. Murdock had time only for a quick talk with the efficient nurse. She said she would contact Colonel Ben-Ami about the patient’s condition.
Only then did Murdock notice the captain’s bars on her collar.
An hour later they were in Rama, had dumped their goods, and presented themselves to a half-dozen officers in Colonel Ben-Ami’s special office.
Lieutenant Ebenezer took the lead.
“Colonel, before we get to the palace mission, I’d like to introduce you to these four gentlemen who return from En Gedi after some serious problems. We had reported three of them dead.”
The men were greeted with shouts of joy and pleasure. One man rushed out to call Mossad in Tel Aviv and report the rescue.
The rest of the debriefing went quickly. They swore that The Knife was dead and that his support group there in En Gedi had been seriously depleted.
Lieutenant Ebenezer recommended that a permanent police presence be sent into En Gedi to maintain it as Israeli territory and to counter the strong point that the PA had just three miles away in the West Bank zone.
It was another hour before the SEALs made it back to their quarters, where Murdock enjoyed a long hot shower, a large dinner, and then a long nap. The other SEALs were fed at a special mess, and most dropped into bunks long before the next meal call.
Murdock slept until midnight, then got up, went to the soft-drink machine, and took out a Coke. He drank it, thinking about the last operation. It had worked, but it could have been better. There was no way they could know that those damn Palestine Authority men would have the Israeli radio. He finished the drink, and went back to bed. No telling what might happen the next morning.
Daylight came, and with it an order for Murdock and his planning team to be in the conference room they had used before. They were there: Ed, Jaybird, Sadler, and Lam. Murdock saw that the only other unit represented was the SAS underwater men.
Colonel Ben-Ami stood at the lectern at the front of the room. “Gentlemen, this may seem like a strange little task. Like a flotsam-and-jetsam child’s story. I assure you it is not. During the past year there have been twenty-four adult deaths, fifteen children killed, and over sixty adults and children seriously injured. All because they picked up attractive items that had floated up on the beach or were found in the water.
“This problem is no accident, or series of accidents. The items are highly sophisticated and attractive death traps. We know that they are released in a pattern sequence by ships along the shore with the timing so the items wash ashore on the incoming tide. We have tried everything to stop them: intense patrols just off the surf line, surveillance of casual boats just at the incoming tide time of day, a follow-up on the makers of the items.
“The makers are in Hong Kong, North Korea, and the Philippines. We have no recourse there. The items are planted, or floated, by members of the PLO and we have a few names, but we need much, much more. It is summer here in Israel, and we will have record numbers of our residents escaping to the beach to lie in the sand and enjoy the water. We also will have a record number of deaths and tragedies, if we can’t stop the booby traps.”
“How long has this been going on?” Murdock asked.
“Almost a year. They come in batches and bundles. Not on every tide. Not every week. Sometimes a month between incidents. Then they might hit every day for a week. It’s infuriating and frustrating. Local police have about given up.”
“Have you tried the military mine-flogging machine?” Ed DeWitt asked.
The colonel frowned.
“It’s a device that swings cables with weights on them in a pattern across a six- or eight-foot strip of land,” Murdock said. “It pulverizes the land and explodes over ninety percent of planted mines. Should work well on these devices.”
“But it would be too slow and too expensive,” the colonel said. “Any other ideas?”
“What sets them off?” Jaybird asked.
“Body heat. When one is picked up and held, it takes about ten seconds of body heat from a finger or two to explode the device. They can lay in the sun for two hours at a hundred degrees and not go off.”
“The best solution is to go after the ones who plant the devices,” Murdock said. “You undoubtedly tried that. What results did you get?”
“Two blank walls. Both ended with the fishing boats that were used to scatter the items. Both boats were owned by a large Israeli fishing company. The officials and the boat captains and crew had no clue about the explosives.”
“That still has to be the way to go,” Murdock said. “Let us shadow one or two of these boats from the water. They won’t see us, but we’ll know every move they make. We’ll have more people on the dock and on shore and in cars. We’ll grab every person who even touches the boat before it goes out and after it comes back. There have to be some leads to the supply point where the explosives are smuggled on board the ship. It could be a supplier taking in lunches for the fishermen. It might be the iceman or the mechanic who works on the boat. It has to be somebody there somewhere. And we’ll find him. If nothing else works, we’ll put men on board suspect boats as deckhands.”