It was in East Jerusalem that four people found themselves now, in the basement of a poor and unassuming house. Three men, one woman. The men were naked apart from their underpants; the woman had covered herself with a long white T-shirt that did little to hide the swelling of her five-month-pregnant belly. Their semi-nakedness didn’t embarrass them. They had more important things to think of.
A single, bare bulb hung from a ceiling which bowed under the weight of the building above; and beneath the bulb, a table. They stood in silence, staring at the table’s contents.
There was a kitchen rolling pin, a roll of heavy-duty electrical tape and next to it a wooden box, its lid beside it. Inside the box were tightly packed blocks of what looked like brown modelling clay.
One of the men stepped forward. He was just seventeen. But he had been waiting for this moment for as long as he could remember. Certainly since he was a boy, playing war games with decommissioned rifles on the streets of Gaza City. He gingerly removed a block — ten centimetres by ten centimetres by five centimetres — from the box and laid it on the table. He was breathing heavily as he picked up the rolling pin and he closed his eyes when he pushed it down on to the block of C4 plastic explosive. He didn’t fear an explosion — none of them did — but they wanted it to occur at the right place and the right time.
As the young man continued to roll out the explosive, it became more malleable, until eventually he had a sheet just a couple of millimetres thick and the size of a piece of A4 paper. He carefully picked it up, then turned and nodded to one of his male companions before pressing the C4 against his torso. His companion took the tape, removed a long piece and stuck the explosive to the young man’s skin, repeating this another three times for each edge of the sheet.
Ten minutes later the young man had a second sheet taped to his back, with the two sheets joined by a flat strip of the explosive, and a second strip running down the inside of his right arm. He moved to the other end of the room, where some clothes were hanging. First he put on a white cotton vest which had a pouch sewn into the front. After that, a white shirt, then black trousers, black jacket, a wide-brimmed black hat and black slip-on shoes. His companion then picked up a black electrical wire and pipe detector of the kind that could be bought in any hardware store. He switched it on and carefully brushed it up and down the young man’s body to check nothing caused it to beep.
Nothing did.
He put the detector down on the table, nodded at his friend and started to frisk him like an airport security guard. He paid special attention to the torso, back and right arm, but came away clearly satisfied that the sheets of explosive were contoured so closely to the young man’s body as to be undetectable.
The young man stepped back. He knew he was wearing enough plastic explosive to take many people with him. Without a detonator to deliver a charge, however, the C4 was inert and useless. There were no detonators in the room and he didn’t know how they’d be supplied. Or where. Or when. He’d find out soon enough, though. They all would. In the meantime, the other two men and the pregnant woman needed to undergo the same process. They did so in solemn silence, in the full and certain knowledge that soon they would be four walking weapons. Unrecognisable. Untraceable.
And, inshallah, unstoppable.
08.00 hrs.
Luke’s OP was far from perfect, but it was his only real option.
He’d been here since just after midnight, staking out the Dung Gate from the top of a three-storey concrete building on the other side of the perimeter road and approximately 100 metres from the gate itself. The building was a detached office block. On approaching it he’d peered into the main entrance — a pair of wide, smoked-glass doors that looked into a bland reception area with a shiny tiled floor and pot plants. A security guy sat at a desk in front of a bank of CCTVs, but he was listening to an iPod and his nose was in a book. Luke hadn’t entered the building, but skirted round the back to where there was a parking lot and a line of empty metal bins. More doors, too, all locked. But Luke saw that a metal ladder was fixed to the back of the building and ran all the way up to the roof. It echoed as he climbed up it.
The rooftop, was about twenty metres square, and it suited his purposes well enough. The perimeter of the roof was surrounded by walls a couple of metres high. The roof itself, sealed with pitch, was covered with bird shit, and in the centre there was a glass skylight measuring about two metres each way. On the western side of the roof was a small corrugated-iron hut, similar in size to the one he’d taken cover behind in Gaza City. A quick examination told him that it contained the guts of the building’s power supply.
He’d taken up position on the northern edge of the roof. His first move was to wolf down the two MREs in his stolen Bergen — kosher meals of beef and pasta that tasted like shit but at least replaced some calories. The energy and warmth were sapping from his body and he needed all the help he could get to stay alert.
Once he’d eaten he removed the scope and the Sig from his bag and staked out the view in front of him, lying on his front with the handgun by his side. From here he could see right across the rooftops of the Old Town and, beyond, the lights of the rest of Jerusalem. His angle of view allowed him to see over the top of the perimeter wall and further to the entrance gates of the Western Wall plaza; and of course the golden cupola of the Dome of the Rock, glowing in the darkness.
To the left of the gate itself he could see the olive tree; to the right, the three palms and a souvenir stall that had closed down for the night. Even though it was late, there were still people walking in and out of the gate and the perimeter road was reasonably busy.
Also busy was the airspace. He counted four helicopters hovering over Jerusalem with searchlights angled down at the ground. Training his scope on one of them, he could make out the outline of a Minigun. If ever there was a city on high alert, this was it. He knew that if any of these choppers flew over his position and spotted him, he’d be fucked. But they didn’t come closer than about 200 metres.
It grew light just after 06.00 hrs. By 07.00 the traffic on the perimeter road was heavy — civilian vehicles, police cars, the occasional tourist bus — and there were more pedestrians. Luke trained his scope on individual faces, committing every minute detail of the scene below to memory. He clocked a military Jeep driving past the gate. Exactly eighteen minutes later it passed again. And eighteen minutes after that. It was clearly doing a circuit and Luke would have bet his bollocks it wasn’t the only one. With the troop mobilisation occurring in the north-western part of Israel and the eyes of the world on this troubled city, Luke didn’t doubt that every soldier and every policeman was on standby.
As was Luke. He didn’t take his eyes off the area between himself and the Old Town. And even though he didn’t know exactly what he was looking for, he knew he had to trust his judgement.
Trust his surveillance skills.
Trust that he’d made the right call, and that whatever was about to happen, he’d know it when he saw it.
08.59 hrs.
The queue to pass through security into the Western Wall plaza had been growing steadily since first light. Reuben Sharon, a nineteen-year-old IDF recruit, had been here since 06.00 hrs and if he looked pissed off, it was because he was. Not only was he working on Hanukkah, but he had the shittiest job imaginable: watching the crowds flock through security into the plaza for a full eight-hour shift. Like this was what he joined the army to do…
So far, most of the visitors had been old-timer Hassidim. Fucking weirdos as far as he was concerned, with their strange clothes and their constant worshipping and lamenting. Some of these guys turned up at the Western Wall twice a day to mutter at the stones. Reuben didn’t get it. Any free time he had was spent chasing tail in the bars of downtown Jerusalem. Then again, he wondered how much pussy worth having was one of these misugena likely to get, dressed like that?