“That’s what I’m going to do … make sure it won’t happen again.”
“Damn,” the pilot grumbled to himself. “Never seen a reading that high.” He checked the gauge again, confirming that the atmospheric sample he was collecting at seventy thousand feet contained a most disturbing amount of radiation. He duly noted the time and position on his knee pad and checked his flight plan. Time to go home. He tweaked the autopilot and banked the U-2 into a graceful turn back to the north, heading for his recovery base in Australia.
The pilot retracted the probes and started a gentle descent, still over two hundred miles out. He scanned the horizon in front of him, looking for a cloud to fly through. He wanted to do a little impromptu decontamination while airborne, but he would still call for a decon procedure after he landed. He groaned. That meant at least another twenty minutes before he could crawl out of the cramped cockpit. Well, he decided, the spooks were right about this one; that bright flash a satellite had recorded the day before was a nuclear test. Who in the hell was testing nukes in the South Atlantic? he wondered. The intelligence briefing he had received prior to takeoff hadn’t covered that.
“So much of this is little more than inspired guessing,” Tamir said, still not satisfied with his latest analysis. He threw the results of the latest computer run onto the neat piles of printouts in front of him and walked over to a porthole. The sea was still calm twenty-four hours after the test but he could see fresh clouds piling up on the western horizon. Another storm was coming through and it was time they returned to port.
“No more than twenty kilotons at the most,” Van Dagens said. “The force of the detonation exceeded our expectations by a factor of one point three.”
“It was bigger than that, Harm,” Tamir said, turning away from the porthole. “At least twenty-two kilotons, maybe twenty-three.”
“So we learn,” Van Dagens snorted.
“What have we created?” Tamir asked, not really expecting a reply.
“Only what is necessary if we are to keep our peoples safe,” Van Dagens told him. He had agonized over the same question himself and reached his own answer.
“I want to believe that you’re right and this is a firebreak we need.”
“A firebreak?” Van Dagens puzzled. He had never thought of their work in terms of a firebreak before.
Tamir’s brown eyes sought out the framed photograph of Shoshana, his twelve-year-old daughter, that stood in the corner of his desk. “An man-made barrier that contains a fire and keeps it from spreading and becoming much bigger, maybe uncontrollable.” He paused, thinking. “This is a firebreak the Arabs won’t cross.”
1
Gad Habish joined the crowd hurrying to work and pushed into the building with them. There was nothing to distinguish Habish from those around him; five feet eight inches tall, thinning brown hair, brown eyes, slightly overweight, a family man concerned about his kids and paying the bills. He was just another faceless bureaucrat entering another government building in the heart of Tel Aviv. Since he was only going to the second floor, he took the stairs, turned right down the corridor, and walked briskly to the end office. Once inside, the secretary sent him through another door with a smile of recognition. But that door did not lead to an office but to a steep stairwell that descended into the basement.
The stairs, the sequence of heavy doors at the bottom, and rigidly controlled access into the basement were the first signs that Gad Habish was not just another paper-pushing bureaucrat. Habish worked for Israel’s Central Institute for Intelligence and Special Missions, the organization known to the world simply as Mossad.
One of the secretaries was waiting for him. She nodded to the office in the rear and arched an eyebrow. The Mossad’s chief wanted to see him. Habish retrieved a thin file from a safe and ambled into the back office. The skinny, wizened gnome working at the desk did not look up and Habish sat down, waiting for his turn. The casual ways of the office were misleading, for there were strict protocols in dealing with the irascible, stubborn chief. Habish sat quietly until he was recognized.
“Are you making progress on our problem?” the chief demanded. He was staring at an expense account through the thick glasses perched on his prominent, red-veined nose. From the flush of the gnome’s face and the reddening of his ears, Habish judged that some agent had spent too much money on an operation. Around Mossad, the chief was nicknamed Ganef, the Yiddish word for “thief,” for the way he stole from his agents when he disallowed their expenses and made them pay out of their own pockets.
“Some. I think this is the key.” Habish handed the man a thin folder from his file. “She’s finished her first six months of training and has been given a field-training assignment with a citrus export firm.”
“Why is she the key?” the Ganef asked.
Habish handed over another folder. “Because this young Iraqi male, Is’al Nassir Mana, purchases magazines filled with nude photos of her type.” The silence on the other side of the desk warned Habish to be quiet as the old man scanned the folder. Habish had never heard of Mana until the previous week when the woman running the Baghdad station for Mossad had traveled to India for a routine debrief. One of the operatives she controlled in Baghdad had stumbled onto Is’al Mana and passed his name to her. She had checked on Mana and discovered that the young man possessed three qualities Mossad might find useful. He was from a wealthy and influential family, had a degree in chemical engineering, and was responsible for developing a new chemical plant outside Kirkuk. A tornado of violence and destruction had swept through Kirkuk in the aftermath of the Kuwait war and now the Iraqi government was hiding the plant’s construction amid the rebuilding going on around it. It was all carefully documented in his case folder and included in the new operations file that Habish had opened.
“He could be a target,” Habish explained. “He has a fixation on European women with big tits and, ah, rather classical figures.”
“So?” The Ganef stared coldly at his most experienced operations man.
“He’s going on a working vacation to Marbella on the Costa del Sol in Spain. He’s negotiating for petrochemical equipment the Iraqis claim they need for reconstruction. Some of it is very interesting because it could be used to make things other than insecticides. The tab is being picked up by the German chemical company WisserChemFabrik, which makes that type of machinery. Whoever gets the contract will make a very lucrative profit.”
The Ganef studied the space above Habish’s head. “It’s amazing,” he said, “how quickly it’s back to business as normal for our Western European allies. They have learned nothing.”
Habish agreed with his chief. Europe had easily reverted to its old habits of selling war-making machinery and techniques to Iraq once the threat to the Middle East oil had been removed and Kuwait liberated. “Well,” he ventured, his voice tinged with sarcasm, “the Iraqis did promise to never, never do it again.” The Ganef was not amused. “But,” Habish continued, “this does give us a window for an agent to make contact. We have to move fast.”
“Why her?” The chief was now interested.
“Besides her obvious physical qualifications, she speaks English with a slight Canadian accent. Her mother was Canadian. We can build a cover around that. Also, her psychological evaluation indicates she is capable of carrying out her assignment properly.” Habish was observing one of the more rigid protocols in the office — the Ganef had to be convinced that the right agents were assigned to a special mission. “True believers” who merely hated Arabs were unacceptable to the old man. He wanted agents who were trained to exploit, betray, seduce, and if need be, kill their target and still harbor a deep-seated aversion to what they were doing. It was his personal formula for what made a successful agent.