Silence on the line. Then, “Scott’s resting. That’s all.”
Nick touched his earpiece and switched to an isolated line. “Don’t lie to me, Molly.”
More silence.
“Molly…”
“He’s paralyzed, Nick.” After holding it in so long, she just blurted out the revelation. “Doc Heldner says he’ll never walk again.”
Nick could not respond. He had suspected something like this, but now that he knew it to be true, he could not speak. Quinn was down, Rami was dead and CJ close to it, and now Scott’s life was changed forever, not to mention the dozens who died at Paternoster Square and the thousands who would die in America and Israel if he did not find Kattan. All this collateral damage from a single five-hundred-pound bomb that he called down on a tiny mud house nine years ago. How much more could he take? How much more could the world take? He gazed over at his teammate for several seconds.
Drake looked up from his inventory. “What?”
Chief Morales knocked on the wall next to the open portal. “Gentlemen, the L-T wants you up front. We’re approaching the coast.”
From three miles out, little could be seen of the shoreline besides the lights of Tel Aviv, blazing on the northern edge of the infrared display. The two blue boxes Drake identified when they left Cyprus had multiplied into several, marking a variety of civilian ships near the coast. By two miles, the small stretch of beach that was Nick’s target materialized in dull gray, dark and empty. On either side of it, green diamonds and red octagons appeared one by one, and kept appearing until there was a long line of them fixed to the shore, rising and falling with the motion of the Dagger. Each shape had a small stack of data next to it, identifying it as a piece of the extensive Israeli shore defense network — radars and optical trackers and the like. Stealth boat or not, this was not going to be easy.
Several minutes later, just inside one mile from the shore, Lighthart slowed the Dagger to a drift. Morales abruptly stood and offered his hand to his two guests. “Good luck, gentlemen, whatever your mission may be.” The chief’s phrasing sounded oddly final.
Drake stared at the distant shoreline as he cautiously shook the chief’s hand. “Am I missing something?”
“Didn’t you see the dry suits and rebreathers hanging in the locker?”
“SEAL boat,” said Drake, gesturing all around. “We figured they were just part of the decor.”
Lighthart glanced over his shoulder. “Do you see this display?” Then he turned back to the screen and pointed to the shapes on either side of the target beach, reading off each label in turn. “Surface radar, surface radar, passive sonar. This one is an infrared motion detector designed to break out anything that isn’t a fish or a wave. The Dagger is invisible to radar but not to infrared.” Even as he spoke, a new red box entered the display from the right. The SEAL lieutenant captured the box with his crosshairs and expanded it, zooming in on a long patrol boat cutting across the waves. “And then we have these guys.”
“And they are?” asked Nick, leaning in to get a closer look at the Israeli boat. He could see turret-mounted weapons fore and aft.
“You’re looking at a Super Dvora Mark Three interceptor,” said Morales, as if reciting it from a manual. “There are several guarding the Israeli coast, and every boat is packing an optically guided twenty-five-millimeter cannon and the naval variant of Hellfire missiles.”
Lighthart looked back at Nick and raised his eyebrows. “I don’t care who called in this favor. I’m not taking my boat any closer to that briar patch than I have to.” Then his eyes returned to his control panel. “Nice working with you. Now suit up. You’re going for a swim.”
“That was rude.” Drake’s voice sounded muted and tinny through the comm link in their full-face dive masks. “Don’t you think that was rude?”
The two of them kicked toward the shore at a steady pace, dragging their waterproof bags and pushing the big submersible crate ahead of them. Thanks to the infrared motion detectors and the patrol boats, Nick had to set the crate’s buoyancy for five meters below the surface, making it all the harder to push through the water. The SEALs had warned them not to break the surface outside a hundred meters from the beach.
“Lighthart did what he had to. Now pipe down. We don’t know how good their passive sonar is.”
Halfway to the beach, Nick heard an undulating hum in his ear. At first he thought it was the comm link, then he realized that it was engine noise. He checked to his right and left, but he didn’t see the lights or the disturbance of a Dvora on the surface.
“You hear that?” asked Drake.
They brought the crate to a stop and hovered in the water, listening as the hum grew louder until it became a throbbing metallic pound. Suddenly a twenty-foot-tall leviathan materialized out of the murk to their left. “Move!” Nick yelled into his mask.
Nick and Drake pushed together, kicking with everything they had to get the crate out of the submarine’s way. It passed so close behind them that Drake’s fin smacked the dive plane. Even then, they didn’t slow down. Neither of them had any desire to get tumbled by the black beast’s monstrous prop wash.
Despite the slap from Drake’s fin, the sub continued south on its patrol. As far as Nick could tell, the two swimmers and their rubber crate had been dismissed as a biological by its sonar filters.
They surfaced fifty meters out from the beach and removed their dive masks. Dawn was still more than an hour away, but a quick scan with a night-vision monocle told Nick the three-mile stretch of sand wasn’t as empty as he hoped. “Two-man foot patrol,” he whispered. “Eleven o’clock.”
Drake nodded, silently lifting his FN-303 out of the water. He paused to dip the fat barrel and let the seawater spill out, and then raised the holographic sight to his eye and fired a single NEP grenade with a resounding foomp. The two Israelis stopped and looked out across the water, searching for the source of the sound. They never saw it.
Activated by a proximity sensor, the grenade opened a few meters from the foot patrol and released a net of ten barbs, all connected to its power source by micro-thin wires.
Nick heard two surprised yelps from the beach and watched the Israelis drop like stones. The high-voltage pulse instantly knocked them out. Conventional Tasers were painful, exposing targets to long duration shock and only immobilizing them for a few seconds. The NEP grenade pulses lasted a billionth of a second, but they carried much higher voltage. The effect was significantly less damage and significantly higher downtime.
“How long will it last?” whispered Drake.
Nick stared at his teammate for a moment and then turned to look at the Israelis lying on the beach. “I have no idea.”
The final stretch took them less than a minute; they were kicking hard and pushing the crate along the surface through the waves. Nick kept raising his head to make sure the patrol was still down. When they reached the shore, he ran over to the unconscious Israelis and carefully dosed each one with a sedative.
“We should take their uniforms,” grunted Drake, dragging the crate onto the beach. “They might come in handy down the road.”
Nick surveyed his victims. “That’ll work for me, but I don’t think you can squeeze into the other one’s pants.”
“Is he short?”
“He’s a she. And I doubt she weighs more than a buck fifteen with her boots on.”
Nick found the Israeli’s pickup parked on an overgrown asphalt pad a short distance away. He and Drake loaded up the equipment and the unconscious patrol and followed a gravel road inland until they found a long low concrete bunker half-buried in the weeds. They laid the patrol inside and bound them hand and foot. Nick took the male’s uniform, but they left the girl dressed, taking only her boots and socks to limit her mobility.