"I got her, I got her — pull me up!" he, screamed as his fingers and nails dug into her wrist, desperate not to let her slip away.
Tariq and Nazir braced themselves and yanked hard. Bennett now grabbed hold of McCoy's other wrist and squeezed.
"Again, pull up, pull up!"
The two men yanked again and again and with one final tug, pulled Bennett and McCoy to the point where she could get her feet back on the metal ladder. With Bennett's help — his hands still locked like a vise around her wrists — she scrambled out of the silo and into his arms. He pulled her to himself and rolled out of the way. She was safe, but there was no time to take comfort.
Bennett and Tariq turned back to help Hamid. He was struggling to hold on to the lowest rung. The look of terror and helplessness in his eyes was haunting, but there was nothing they could do. Bennett wanted to look away, but he couldn't. He began moving back into the silo, to help Hamid as he'd helped McCoy. But it was too late.
Just as Bennett and Tariq peered down into the silo, the firestorm reached Hamid. With their eyes locked on his, they saw him disintegrate in a wall of flame. His flesh and muscles literally melted away from his bones right as the flames shot up the silo, threatening to incinerate them all. Tariq pulled Bennett away. He pivoted fast, cleared the silo and slammed the metal hatch down, just in time.
A damp basement — glowing orange and red just seconds before — was now pitch-black. The floor was shaking uncontrollably. The demons below raced forward, hunting new victims. But Bennett and his team were safe. Trembling, terrified, but safe.
Four Gold Team commandos burst through the basement door, weapons at the ready, lasers and flashlights shining into the darkness.
"Gold Leader, this is Gold Six. I have the package. I say, again, I have the package. They are secure. Repeat, they are secure. Requesting immediate extraction. Have medical personnel standing by when we arrive."
"Roger that, Gold Six. Storm Five is inbound. Stani by for extraction."
Three minutes later, "the package" was gift wrapped,
Bennett and his team were onboard Storm Five, skimming over the treacherous waters of the Mediterranean, surrounded by a team of navy SEALs and four Super Cobras ready to blow away anyone who got in their path.
Sa'id and Galishnikov were lying down in the back of Storm Five. They were attended by a team of medics who hooked each man up to IVs and began treating them for shock. Tariq and Nazir were huddled in the back, each under a thick wool blanket, sipping hot coffee and keeping to themselves.
Bennett and McCoy were also wrapped in blankets. From their seats just over the shoulders of the pilots, they could see the horizontal rains pelting the front windshield as the wipers swooshed back and forth at high speed. They could feel the intense winds buffeting the chopper, and after a few minutes, the faint outline of the USS Ronald Reagen appeared a few miles ahead. The deck looked hardly bigger than a postage stamp, and the sharp, shooting pains in Bennett's abdomen grew worse.
Neither of them had ever landed on the deck of an aircraft carrier before. The last time Bennett had been extracted by a SEAL team — out of Dr. Mordechai's house in Jerusalem — he'd been taken to Ben Gurion International Airport, put on a navy medical transport plane, and flown to Germany, via Incirlik in Turkey. But he'd been unconscious the whole time. Now he could see the pitching, heaving carrier all too well, tossed about like a toy boat in a bathtub.
"Don't worry," said Captain Lance "Buzz" Howard, a nineteen-year navy veteran. "We'll be fine."
Bennett wasn't so sure. But he didn't have the strength to ask questions. These guys had just saved his life. He'd just have to trust they wouldn't let him crash into the Atlantic. The deck of the Reagan was coming in fast now, and the Seahawk began its slow, careful descent from just over fifteen hundred feet. A few seconds later, they could feel steel crunching steel. The Seahawk's motors shut down immediately, and all of them breathed a huge sigh of relief. Minutes later, a flash traffic message reached Washington.
0107L DEC 29 2010
«FLASH TRAFFIC«
FROM: USS RONALD REAGAN
TO: NMCC, PENTAGON //OPS//
WHITE HOUSE SITUATION ROOM //OPS//
NSC, WASHINGTON DC //DIR//
DCI, CIA-LANGLEY, WASHINGTON DC //DIR//
CLAS — EYES ONLY — PRIORITY ALPHA
SUBJECT: OPERATION BRIAR PATCH
Package arrived… principals safe.. one (1) KIA, Hamid Al-Shahib.
Transfer to "Mount of Olives" by 1800 local time tomorrow. Professor en route, requested…. Sunday arrival.
>>end<<
THIRTY-FIVE
An American noose tightened around the neck of the radicals.
The Defense Intelligence Agency issued an eyes-only report to the president and the Pentagon listing the most dangerous extremists in the Palestinian arsenal — names, photographs, dossiers. This was augmented by a top-secret report by the CIA listing all suspected Al-Nakbah insurgents, as well as hard new intel from the Palestinian Legislative Council. There were well over two hundred names on the combined most-wanted list. Each name had a bullet next to it, and it was open season.
One by one, U.S. Special Forces — led by Delta operators, SEALs, army Rangers and a handful of Green Berets — were hunting down the men who had long terrorized the civilian Palestinian population and were now eating their own. Hour by hour, air-to-ground missiles fired by U.S. Air Force and Navy jets slammed into police stations and municipal buildings in Gaza City, Ramallah, Hebron, Jericho, and points in between.
Most of the targets were headquarters or field offices of the twelve different Palestinian security organizations operating during the Age of Arafat. Some were freshly verified headquarters of the various Palestinian rogue forces controlled by Mohammed Dahlan, Jibril Rajoub, and Marwan Barghouti. Each was a command-and-control center for the prosecution of the bloodiest war in the history of the West Bank and Gaza, a Palestinian war against itself.
Top officials of the Palestinian Legislative Council — many of them barricaded inside the communications center underneath the PLC's bombed-out headquarters in downtown Gaza — were now in direct and hourly contact with Jack Mitchell and Danny Tracker at CIA, and General Mutschler, operating out of the NMCC at the Pentagon. Their cooperation and inside information was proving absolutely invaluable, as were tidbits coming in from Egyptian and Jordanian intelligence and, of course, critical though completely confidential Israeli intelligence assistance from Shin Bet and Mossad agents still on the ground inside the territories.
A number of Israeli intelligence operatives disguised as Arabs — some as older Arab women, covered in traditional robes and scarves — were assisting U.S. air and ground forces, weaving in and out of heavy population centers, helping mark targets and identify radical safe houses. Others eavesdropped on Palestinian military radio frequencies, intercepted cell and land-line telephone calls and e-mails and monitored all long-distance lines. They provided rapid translations, summaries, and even full transcripts when needed to their American counterparts — directly to Langley, at times, or to CENTCOM headquarters in Tampa, if the information was of imminent military value.
None of this was publicly acknowledged, of course. Nor would it ever be. The Israelis didn't want credit for ripping up the last vestiges of a mafia empire. Washington didn't want to give it.
Armed with such real-time, actionable intel and surprisingly solid though no doubt temporary international support for defending Palestine from the Israelis without and the extremists within, Washington held nothing back. The president's rationale wasn't complicated. The faster the operation could be completed, the better the chances for peace, and the better the chances of staving off universal condemnation by the Arab world and the United Nations as a whole if the operation bogged down and civilian casualties began mounting. And the only way to get done quickly was to strike with overwhelming force.