Firebreak (39 page)

“No way,” he protested, giving a sharp little buck. But she ignored him and scooted her buttocks farther up onto his chest and tightened her legs, riding him. She bent forward, arching over his legs and drew the razor along the inside of his thigh, inching it toward his crotch. Then she grabbed the waiting bottle and splashed champagne over the freshly shaved leg. Fraser gave a little twitch as she licked at his thigh. “Don’t,” he moaned. She tightened her legs, wiggled her buttocks higher on his chest, and drew the razor over his scrotum.

Fraser was gasping for air and his heart pounding as she flicked the razor back and forth over his scrotum and wiggled higher. Then he felt the cold champagne and her warm tongue, quickly followed by the razor, only this time it was moving up his erection. “Please stop,” he begged. A momentary pain shot across his chest as she poured champagne over him and her tongue went to work. Now he could feel the razor again, or was it her fingernails? her teeth? He gasped as the pain returned, coming down hard on his chest, clamping him in an unrelenting vise, crushing him. Just before he died, he knew what Tara wanted.

Tara felt her mount go limp and looked over her shoulder. Fraser’s bulging eyes, gaping mouth, and frozen face shocked her. She had never seen a dead person before and bolted out of the bathroom, running for her clothes. Then she stopped, panting for breath, and forced herself to be calm. She sank to the floor, not moving for almost ten minutes. Back in control, she moved through the room, straightening, arranging, deliberately leaving traces to show that Fraser had shared his bed, but that his companion had dressed and left long before he had his heart attack.

She steeled herself and went into the bathroom. She drained the bath while she scrubbed the body and hosed it down. When she was satisfied that all traces of champagne and shaved hair were down the drain, she refilled the tub with hot water, hoping that the water would confuse a medical examiner about the time of death. Then Tara straightened up the bathroom, taking care to leave no traces that two people had shared the bath.

Carefully, she went over the entire apartment again, making sure it was right. She scribbled a note—“Call me in the morning”—and left it on his dresser in plain sight. Then she dressed, checked the apartment one last time, and left.

Shoshana and Hanni were in the APC when the first cruise missile hit. The low-order explosion drove both women to the periscopes as they tried to see what was going on. “Levy was right,” Shoshana said, scanning the slope in front of them. “That wasn’t a conventional warhead. It’s got to be nerve gas.” Panic was eating at her and she strained at the periscope in the driver’s position. But the eyepiece on her gas mask kept getting in the way. Hanni was having better luck with hers.

“I count three, make that four, missiles hitting,” Hanni reported. “I don’t understand, they’re hitting the area at random. There’s five and six.”

“Nerve gas is a wide-area ordnance,” Shoshana explained, trying to beat down the panic that was threatening her sanity. Should she tell Hanni what she knew? She decided against it since there was nothing they could do if it was the new nerve gas the Iraqis had developed at Kirkuk. “They don’t know our exact location so they saturate the area.”

“What do we do now?” Hanni asked.

“Exactly what we had planned to do before, only we do it wearing our masks and NBC suits.”

The radio crackled with reports of more inbound missiles. But these turned out to be the reconnaissance drones Levy had been expecting. Another report came in identifying the nerve gas vapor drifting over the area as VR55, an old Soviet-developed nerve agent. “We’re going to be in these things for a while,” Shoshana said.

“You sound relieved,” Hanni said.

The harsh metallic rasp of the radio interrupted her with orders to pull back. “Moshe wants us to pull back until after the artillery barrage is over,” Shoshana said and started the engine.

“What’s he like?” Hanni asked.

“Not what you’d expect. He seems quiet and withdrawn, but when he talks to you … well … I can’t explain it. You just want to follow.”

“Is he married?”

“Oh Hanni, be serious.”.

“Not for you, child.”

Yair Ben David’s face was a rocklike mask when the first reports came in that the Iraqis were using nerve gas. Every face in the command room of the bunker was turned toward him, waiting for his reaction. “How much? Where? Type? Casualties?” he barked. “I want the answers.” He slammed his fists onto the table in front of him. The prime minister forced his anger back into the cage where he contained it. This is not the time to overreact, he cautioned himself.

Then the answers filtered in. It was a limited attack in a tactical situation. Only six short-range cruise missiles had been used, the chemical weapons had been used in Lebanon, not inside Israel, and the IDF had been ready. More reports confirmed that it was the old type of nerve gas that the Israelis had an antidote for. “So,” Ben David said to the general sitting beside him, “the Iraqis are testing the water, gauging our reaction. But why did they use cruise missiles? I’d always expected them to use artillery or aircraft when they employed nerve gas.”

“Deception,” the general answered. “They wanted us to mistake them for reconnaissance drones and be caught unmasked. It didn’t work. Levy’s Luck again.”

“That man is charmed,” Ben David agreed.

“Are you going to retaliate?” the general asked.

“What are our casualties?” Ben David replied.

“So far, none.”

“Then we wait.” His carefully masked anger raged in its cage.

The APC was moving again, this time forward, back into their original position. Shoshana was having a hard time seeing where she was going; the combination of gas mask and periscope didn’t work well for her. Hanni seemed to be doing better so they switched places and Hanni drove while Shoshana rode in the crew compartment. Then they were back under the camouflage netting where they had started as the dark on the eastern horizon broke with the first light of dawn.

Shoshana could see movement in the valley below, moving toward them. The radio was silent.

Tara sat in her aunt’s library next to the fireplace, feeling the warmth of the fire. B. J. Allison refilled her teacup and touched her arm. “There, there, dear,” she cooed. “These things do happen. You did exactly what I would have.” There were few higher compliments from the old woman. “But we must think about the future.” She sat down in the wing-backed chair opposite Tara and sipped at her tea, deep in thought. Allison’s strength was her ability to quickly reevaluate a situation and find new opportunities. Her thoughts did not follow a concrete, nicely ordered path from A to B to C, but rather she hovered over a problem and moved around it, darting in and out, looking at it from every viewpoint and finding a niche she could exploit.

At die same time, on another mental level, she was evaluating Tara. If she sensed the young woman had become a liability, she would dispose of her, taking whatever action was necessary. And she was very fond of Tara. Age had not diminished Allison’s thought processes but sharpened them, making her a formidable power.

“Dear, when all this breaks in the papers, I think you’re going to have to make a confidential phone call to a certain police lieutenant I know. Tell him you were the “mystery woman’ but that when you had left, Fraser was sleeping in bed. He’ll be expecting your call. Don’t be afraid to tell him your name but make him coax it out of you.” Allison gave Tara a tight little smile. By the time Tara made her phone call, the lieutenant would already have “discovered” a witness who would swear that he saw Tara leave well before Fraser could have died.

Allison set the cup down and folded her hands primly in her lap. “We must change directions,” she said. “I sank my money in a dry hole. Remember I had mentioned another person I thought you would like to meet? His name is Sheik Mohammed al-Khatub. Perhaps you know of him?”
Tara
‘s reaction indicated she did. “I will arrange for you to meet him tomorrow evening. Dear, it is very important that he take you into his confidence very quickly. I must know the timing of OPEC’s next oil embargo.”

Allison also knew how to many money out of that eventuality if she had a little warning. She gave an inward sigh. Exploiting an oil embargo was such a simple thing to do but she was only reacting to world events, not controlling them. She made a mental promise that she would settle matters with Pontowski at another time, another place.

The radio came alive as the first Israeli artillery salvo walked through the tanks advancing toward Shoshana’s position. She could hear the distinctive sound of Levy’s voice respond to the eager requests of his company commanders to open fire. In every case, he ordered them to hold. He knew how long the artillery batteries could continue to shell the tanks before they had to stop shooting and start moving to avoid Iraqi counterbattery fire. Almost on cue, the artillery barrage stopped and Shoshana could hear the rumble of jets as they rolled in on the tanks.

Three sharp knocks on the rear ramp tore her attention away from the battle going on in front of her and she spun the periscope around to the rear. A fully NBC-suited soldier was hosing down the APC with a hose leading to a small tank trailer while two others were scrubbing it down with long brushes. It was a decontamination team at work in the midst of the fighting.

When they were finished, the team leader gave her the hand sign to drop the ramp. The team checked them and the interior of the APC for contamination. The leader put her mask next to Shoshana’s and spoke in a normal voice. “You’re clean,” she said. “Keep wearing your suits, but you should be able to take your masks off in thirty minutes. Keep buttoned up until then. This stuff doesn’t last as long as we thought.” The team moved on to the next APC ambulance.

The radio crackled with urgent requests for support as the teams holding the northernmost sides of the valley came under heavy attack. Again, Levy did not respond. Now the closest tanks were less than two thousand meters away as the last F-4 pulled off. Two tanks exploded as the F-4s’ Maverick antitank missiles found their targets.

Now Levy ordered his blocking force to commence fire and the hillside exploded as his tanks opened up. Shoshana’s world narrowed as she watched, transfixed by three Iraqi tanks moving in a V formation coming straight toward her position. Levy’s tank surged out of its deep rut and slammed to a halt when its turret was clear. It fired two quick rounds and reversed back into its hole. Two of the tanks exploded but the third pulled around its burning leader and came up the hill,directly toward their position, its main gun swinging onto her.

“Hanni!” Shoshana yelled. “Reverse out of here!”

She watched in horror as the tank, which she could clearly identify as a T-72, fired. “Hanni! Go!” she shouted. The APC jerked and then stopped, stalled. The shell impacted thirty meters in front of them as the tube of the T-72 raised for die automatic loader to eject the spent shell casing out of the breach. Hanni ground the starter and Shoshana knew she was going to die. She had heard tankers talk about how the tube on the main gun of a T-72 would first raise to eject the casing and then point downward with a fresh shell to slam into the breach. Then the gun’s barrel would raise, retrain, and fire.

Levy’s tank roared out of its hide as the T-72's tube was depressing to reload. With maddening slowness the turret of the M60 traversed toward the T-72. “Fire! Damn you, fire!” Shoshana shouted as the M60's 105-millimeter gun cracked. The muzzle of the T-72's gun had raised and was pointed directly at her when it disappeared in a flash. The APC’s V-6 diesel came to life and now they were moving backward to safety.

The radio crackled. “Band-Aid, did you take a hit?” It was Levy.

Shoshana held the mike against her gas mask. “No damage,” she reported. She could hear the trembling in her voice.

“Hold,” Levy replied. “We’re going to be needing you.” Hanni slammed the APC to a halt. Levy did have that effect.

“Band-Aid,” the radio spat, “a TOW team four hundred meters to your left and one hundred meters downslope needs a medic. Go.” Hanni rolled the APC forward, past their last position and toward their first pickup. When they crested the ridge, Shoshana got her first clear look at the valley. Burning tanks and BMPs were sending up clouds of black smoke obscuring her view. Off to her right, she could see the Iraqis regrouping for another thrust up the slope. She swung the periscope to the rear to fix their escape route. A sickening feeling swept over her when she realized they had been well dug in and hidden in their old position. She had been looking at the battle through a raised periscope and had assumed that if
she
could
see
the tank, the
tank could see
her.
Only Levy’s
sharp command at the right time had saved them from running away from where they were needed.

A sharp clanging deafened the two women as machine-gun fire raked their right side. The Toga armor the Israelis had covered the APC with had done its job and they were okay. The lightweight carbon sheets could stop a 14.5-millimeter shell before it hit the main hull. “Where’s it coming from?” Hanni shouted, concentrating on driving and working her way across and down the slope toward the TOW team. Shoshana spun her periscope around until she found the machine gun. An Iraqi BMP on their right was racing them to the TOW team. The BMP had taken a hit on its turret disabling the 73- millimeter smooth-bore gun, but one of the troops inside was firing out of a gunport on the side, trying to take out the APC. Now Hanni could see the BMP.

“Don’t they see our red cross?” Hanni shouted. A heavier burst of machine-gun fire beat against the Toga armor, across the freshly painted red cross.

The two vehicles were on a collision course and would collide at the spot where the wounded Israelis were dug in. Another gunport on the BMP swung open and Shoshana saw the snout of an RPG aim at them. Their Toga armor and 30- millimeter thick aluminum hull could not stop the Soviet-made rocket-propelled grenade. “Hard right!” Shoshana yelled. Hanni slued the APC to the right, directly toward the BMP just as the RPG fired. The rocket-propelled projectile flashed past behind them. “Ram the son of a bitch!” Shoshana screamed.