The nuclear-tipped bunker busters sat in their cradles on the gleaming concrete floor. The bombs were intimidating just to look at. Twenty-five feet in length, they bore four fins behind a sharp nose and four more on the tail. The B61-11 was slim as far as airborne munitions go. Its two-foot four-inch diameter corresponded exactly to the eight-inch artillery barrel of the deactivated M110 howitzer used in its manufacture. Equipped with a delayed-reaction fuse, it would strike the earth at a speed of two thousand feet per second and burrow through fifty feet of granite or reinforced concrete prior to detonation. Armed with a ten-kiloton warhead, the bomb and the seismic shock waves it would generate would destroy any structure up to two hundred fifty feet underground. It would also throw over sixty thousand tons of radioactive waste into the atmosphere.
“Just in time,” said General Danny Ganz as he walked alongside Zvi Hirsch inside the large hangar.
“A miracle,” Hirsch agreed.
Nearby, a team of airmen wheeled one of the bunker busters across the polished concrete floor. Positioning it beneath the plane’s bay, they jacked up the gurney and fastened the projectile to the internal bomb rack. Hirsch and Ganz watched as the team attached a second bomb, and then a third. Ganz sighed inwardly at the sight. He was tired of the fighting. Tired of the constant vigilance. He wondered if Israel would ever have the luxury of peace.
“The first wave will concentrate on the newly discovered enrichment facility at Chalus,” he said. “After that, we’ll go after their missile launchers and warhead fabrication plants. Some Sayeret men are going in tonight to paint the targets in advance of our birds. We’ll helo them in from our boats in the Gulf.”
“Tonight?” asked Zvi Hirsch, more than a little confused. “Isn’t that a bit rash? Remember what the president said: We can’t go off half-cocked. We need a reason.”
Ganz crossed his arms. “I received a phone call a few minutes ago from a friend in the Pentagon. A fellow pilot, actually.”
“Who?”
“Major General John Austen.”
“The evangelist?”
“I prefer to think of him as a friend of Israel.” Ganz leaned closer to make sure that no one overheard their conversation. “He has intelligence pointing to an attack against our interests within the next twelve hours.”
“Where?”
“Somewhere in Europe,” said Ganz. He stared into Hirsch’s bulging eyes. “I don’t think we have long to wait.”
80
“How will we find him?” Jonathan asked.
“Look in the backseat and get my laptop,” said Emma.
Jonathan found the computer and turned it on. “Same password?”
“Same one. You know that you scared the hell out of everyone by cracking that code. They’re going to have to redesign the entire Intelink system because of you.”
“I don’t know whether that’s good or bad.”
They were driving beside the Lake of Zurich. It was six o’clock. Lights sparkled along the hillside like a fairy-tale landscape. During the ride down the mountain, she’d finally opened up and began to talk. If she wouldn’t tell him about everything she’d done in the past, she was more forthcoming about how she’d found him and about John Austen’s plan to shoot down the plane. It was a first step in repairing the split between them.
Emma instructed him how to open the software program. The laptop’s screen filled with a detailed map of Switzerland. She told him to enter the letters “VD.”
A flashing red dot appeared near the outskirts of Zurich. The map zoomed in until it reached street level.
“What is it?” he asked.
“LoJack on steroids,” said Emma. “I put a tracker on von Daniken’s car three days ago. I needed to keep tabs on him. The signal from his car is sent to a satellite and bounced right back down to us.”
“You’ve been busy.”
Emma smiled cryptically. “Where is he?”
“Close.”
“Glattbrugg?”
Jonathan studied the map. “How did you know?”
“Shit.” Emma punched the accelerator.
81
“Zurich Air Traffic, this is El Al 8851 heavy commencing initial approach.”
“Roger El Al 8851. You are cleared for approach. Proceed to vector one-seven-zero and descend to altitude ten thousand four hundred. You are number six in the grid.”
“Copy.”
The Pilot listened to the communications between Zurich air control and El Al Flight 8851 with anticipation.
Shutting his eyes, he whispered a last prayer. He asked for His guidance and a steady hand. He prayed for the courage to see the job done. He was not an evil man. Faced with taking more than six hundred lives, he trembled. He knew that Christ had felt the same as he bore the cross upon his shoulders. Their deaths would be as painful to him as the Crucifixion.
“It’s time,” said John Austen.
He walked into the garage. His men had removed the coffins from their storage lockers and rolled the steel containers to the center of the floor. With the precision of a pit crew, the team assembled the drone. The wheel struts came first, set down and locked onto the fuselage. The long, flexible wing sections were bolted to one another, then attached to the fuselage. Austen rolled the cradle holding the nacelle and its contents of twenty kilos of Semtex plastic explosive beneath the aircraft and fixed it to the UAV’s belly.
“Fly well,” he said, brushing his fingers against the drone’s steel flesh.
He returned to the living room with its view of the airport. One wall of the living room was given over to his instruments. Monitors for the radar and nose camera. Flat-panel arrays broadcasting speed, altitude, position over ground. In the center of the array was a keyboard with a joystick positioned to either side. He climbed into the seat and spent a moment getting comfortable.
“Engines on,” he called as he flipped on the ignition. A red light blinked five times, before burning steadily. Though he was not inside the drone, he could feel it shudder as it came to life. A thread of excitement ran along his spine. He’d waited twenty-eight years for this moment. The date was inscribed in his mind, no different than a plaque at a historic site. April 24, 1980.
Operation Eagle Claw.
He, John Austen, then a major in the United States Air Force, had been chosen to fly the lead Hercules C-130 into the Iranian desert on the first leg of a desperate, overly ambitious plan to rescue fifty-three hostages from the United States embassy in Teheran. Aboard were seventy-four members of the newly created Special Operations detachment trained by Colonel Charlie Beckwith and led by Lieutenant Colonel William “Jerry” Boykin.
The flight into the desert had gone according to plan, the only incident being a period of seven minutes when the plane had passed through a haboob, a blinding dust storm in the Dasht-e-Kariv, the Great Salt Desert, that spanned four hundred miles in the southwestern corner of the country. The plane negotiated the dust storm well enough, the turboprop engines holding up despite the onslaught of grit and sand. He landed without problem at a preordained spot christened Desert One. Eight Sea Stallion helicopters followed, inbound from the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz in the Arabian Sea. The choppers were to ferry the elite soldiers into Teheran, where they would free the diplomats and bring them back to Austen’s aircraft for the return flight across the Persian Gulf to Saudi Arabia.
Disaster soon struck.
One of the helicopters landed disabled, its hydraulics severely damaged by the same dust storm that Austen had himself flown through. Another had turned back in mid-flight, lost and fearing a systems failure. With only six functioning helicopters instead of the eight planned, there would not be enough space to carry all of the rescued hostages out of Teheran. The mission was called off.