A black Sikorsky S-92 helicopter raced two hundred feet above the Elbe River, its four rotors beating the icy air for both lift and velocity.
The aircraft had been cleared to overfly the Hamburg industrial districts of Hafen City and Kleiner Gasbrook at low altitude; below the helo’s belly were several square miles of fat warehouses and spindly train tracks, open container lots butted up against a webbed network of harbor channels where massive cargo ships occupied seemingly every nook and cranny of the narrow waterways.
The pilot ignored the landscape below and concentrated on flying just above tall Portainer cranes loading and unloading the freighters, and he kept his eyes on the city lights on the north side of the harbor. He’d reported to air traffic control that he did not yet have a destination determined, but he presumed he would be heading somewhere near the Hauptbahnhof, the main train station.
Inside the Sikorsky, fifteen Israelis sat bathed in green interior cabin lights. Most of them were male and although they wore civilian attire, the XM35 rifles hanging from slings outside their coats gave away the fact that they were no regular members of the population.
They were Metsada, Mossad Special Operations.
For now there was nothing for the assault team to do but enjoy the ride. They sat alone with their thoughts; some looked out the window at the lights of the city below, and others fiddled idly with their gear.
In the rear of the cabin two female targeting officers sat together looking over a laptop, reading data from Mossad case officers already in the city and coordinating data flows with computer hackers back in Tel Aviv who had broken into Hamburg’s network of municipal traffic cameras. So far they were having no luck identifying their target, but the operation was only a few minutes old.
And next to the two women was one additional male. Yanis Alvey was the oldest on board, at fifty, but he’d spent decades serving as one of the men with a rifle around his neck and a mandate to kill Israel’s enemies. Now he was management, not labor, a liaison between the Collections Department and Special Operations, a job that gave him command authority over the targeters and command-and-execute authority over the spec ops boys.
Alvey carried a weapon himself, a CZ pistol in a shoulder holster under his coat, but at this stage of his career it was really more of an affectation. He was no longer a triggerman, but carrying the semiauto served to remind both himself and his team that he would always remain an operator at heart. He also wore a simple Kevlar vest under his shirt, same as his Metsada men, although Alvey’s days of shooting and scooting through dangerous environs were well past him.
One of the female targeters had been in comms with an informant in the local police. She nodded into her phone and turned to Alvey.
“The plane was found alongside a golf course just northeast of the city. Shall I tell the pilot to proceed there?”
“Negative,” Alvey said. “They will be long gone from the aircraft by now. We’ll stay aloft over the city till we get a hit on the traffic cameras or a police report.”
Yanis Alvey had begun to accept the troubling fact that Ruth Ettinger was now working with the Gray Man. He had begun to suspect it after she reported in to him this afternoon from Helsingborg. She fully believed in Gentry’s innocence, and Ruth wasn’t one to follow the official line if it diverged from her beliefs, but still it was a shock to Alvey that she had become so irrational after Dillman’s death.
Her collaboration with Gentry had been made clear to him when Babbitt called him an hour earlier and reported them fleeing Travemünde together. Yanis caught himself wishing, for everyone’s sake, that there was some evidence that Gentry was holding Ettinger against her will, but that was just fantasy. This was no kidnapping; on the contrary, as well as Yanis knew Ruth, he halfway suspected she would be leading Gentry around by the nose at this stage of the game.
He blamed himself for not forcing her away from fieldwork after Rome.
Now Tel Aviv was ordering Yanis to kill Gentry and to bring Ruth back. They wanted Gentry dead because they bought the CIA’s assertion that Gentry was in play and about to assassinate Ehud Kalb. The reasons for bringing Ruth home had nothing to do with altruism. The graybeards at Mossad were concerned about word spreading that a decorated Mossad officer was working with the Gray Man to conspire in the assassination of the prime minister.
That just would not do.
It was insanity, of course, and Alvey knew it, but he’d been unable to persuade his superiors that their officer in the field had not gone completely off the rails. He had, of course, conveyed Ruth’s warnings about Whitlock to Tel Aviv, but Tel Aviv was in bed with Langley on this, and Langley had a quick counter to every one of Ruth’s allegations. The Mossad believed the CIA, not their officer in the field, and this put Alvey here, now, over Hamburg with a mandate to kill the Gray Man.
This directive was his actual primary mission, but it was not his greatest personal concern. Even though Tel Aviv did not care about Ruth, Yanis did, and he would do everything he could to extract her from the danger of this situation with all the resources at his disposal.
He knew her career was over now, but tonight he would do everything in his power to save her life. He doubted the Townsend men would check their fire if they had Gentry in view, and Ruth Ettinger could well become collateral damage.
He had to find Gentry before Townsend did. Alvey saw himself as Ruth’s only chance.
Court and Ruth climbed out of the bus at the Hamburger Strasse U-bahn station and immediately descended into the underground tunnels toward the trains. From here Ruth would head to the Hauptbahnhof and catch a train to Brussels, and Court would descend deeper into Hamburg’s dirty underbelly to go hunting for a weapon.
They shook hands, told each other they would meet again in a few hours, and then separated in the busy subway station.
Minutes later Ruth walked through the Hauptbahnhof with her head low and covered by a hood. She climbed aboard a train to Paris via Brussels. She bought a couchette in a sleeper car, and as soon as they left the station she crawled into her couchette and lay on her back, and she fell asleep within minutes, haunted with dreams of what lay ahead in Brussels.
The Mossad Sikorsky S-92 had been circling the city of Hamburg for nearly half an hour, trying to get some actionable intelligence as to the location of Gentry. Yanis Alvey left much of the communications with local assets up to his targeting officers, while he looked out the window and thought of Ruth.
He snapped out of his repose when he felt the helicopter climbing. He put on a headset and switched to the cockpit channel on the intercom. “Pilot, why are we ascending?”
“We’ve been ordered to flight level two thousand by air traffic control. There is another helicopter circling the city, and they have been given the lower clearance.”
Alvey looked out the window on his right, then crossed the cabin to look out the left. There, a thousand feet below and a mile to the west of where the S-92 now circled, a blue Eurocopter EC175 moved in a wide arc over the St. Pauli district.
“Pilot, can you hear the transmissions of the other helo?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Who are they? What are they doing?”
“They are American; they say they are a film crew and will be doing some low-level work for the next hour.”
Alvey turned to the two female targeters sitting with him. In a grave tone he said, “Townsend is here.”