Sword of Allah (24 page)

‘What have you got – what sort of rounds?’ Wilkes asked.

Benyamin was well and truly on side now. The information coming in on his touch screen from the UAVs and helos presented a desperate picture. His eyes were now wide in their sockets, his mouth dry with the adrenalin rush. ‘Sir, we have APFSDS and HEAT multipurpose
rounds, plus assorted anti-personnel and HE rounds.’

The armour-piercing fin-stabilised discarding sabot round would have been perfect if they were up against tanks, APCs or hardened bunkers. But a high-explosive anti-tank round, basically a high-explosive shaped charge, would clear the building in one massive blow.

‘Given ’em HEAT?’

‘That’d be my choice, sir.

‘Well, get it loaded.’

Benyamin slowed the Merkava, swung it round the right-hander then gunned it. The tank’s 1500 horsepower General Dynamics GD833 diesel thrummed as it launched the tank’s thirty tonnes down the road. The going was tough. The gap between the buildings was too narrow to allow the tank to pass freely between them. The left side of the tank ploughed into several buildings, causing them to cave-in as it charged through. Benyamin worked the touch screen. ‘Two rounds in the hopper, sir. One to do the job, and one for luck.’

‘Got an ETA?’ asked Wilkes.

‘Thirty seconds give or take, sir.’

Wilkes increased the magnification on the forward view. The target loomed large. Benyamin switched to infrared. The hot lead and tracer exchanges between the two buildings could be seen clearly, as could the burning Humvees out front.

Machinery clanged beside Wilkes as the HEAT round was automatically pushed into the gun’s breech. An orange glowing diamond appeared on the building about to be reduced to landfill. Benyamin moved it around with the trackball. ‘I think the ground floor, sir. Give our people
across the road some protection. But I’d give them some warning.’The Israeli tried to lock the gun on target but the street was too narrow, so he widened the angle by smashing the tank through an adjacent building. Benyamin brought the gun to bear again, this time with better results. Its stabilising system took over, automatically making minute corrections in all axes, compensating for the tank’s movement, to ensure the round, once launched, hit the spot.

‘Roger that,’ said Wilkes. ‘Lieutenant Glukel, Tom Wilkes.’

‘I hear you,’ yelled the lieutenant, partially deaf from the ordnance exploding all around her.

‘Get some cover now,’ said Wilkes.

‘What?’

‘Gotcha, Tom,’ said Atticus. ‘Whatever you’re gonna do, buddy, do it fast. No ammo…wounded.’

‘You’ve got a five countdown.’ Wilkes counted back from seven until he reached five. He turned off the radio and finished the countdown in his head:
four…three…two…one.
Wilkes yelled, ‘FIRE!’

The Merkava leapt as the HEAT round erupted from the gun. An instant later, a massive percussion wave swept over the tank. Benyamin stood on the anchors and the Merkava skidded to a halt sideways, clipping a building and knocking out a large corner of it. Wilkes was almost thrown out of his seat and was grateful for the seatbelt. All went strangely quiet, and then a pitter-patter sound emanated from the hull like a light sun shower on a tin roof. Wilkes looked about, unsure of the noise.

‘It’s raining, sir,’ explained Benyamin. ‘Concrete.’

Wilkes checked the monitor. Sure enough, chunks of concrete, stone and bricks were striking the road all around the tank. A large ‘thunk’ gently rocked the Merkava, and Wilkes, with the help of the TSS, watched a three-metre corner section of a wall tumble off the tank’s turret and onto the road. The dust had a while to settle but the cameras, in light-augmented mode, revealed a hole where once a building stood.

‘Bloody hell,’ said Wilkes quietly.

Benyamin nodded. ‘Yeah. Cool, huh?’

Kadar viewed the surf suspiciously, but the joy that seemed to possess everyone who swam between the peaks was infectious. He dived in and struck out for the green water beyond the white, beyond the breakers where the waves lined up like soldiers, obedient to the orders of some invisible drill sergeant. Kadar rose as the first wave in a set lifted him up, its energy encouraging him to catch the next. As the wave passed, it set him down gently in its trough. But then the following wave approached, bigger than the first. It sucked him through the water as it neared, dragging him up its towering face. For a moment he was poised on its crest. He looked down and saw that there was no water on the reef below, just the points of the coral reef with one small fish flopping and twitching between its jagged fingers. The face of the wave became concave and Kadar saw the wave for its true self: a malignant force with a conscious and grim determination. He looked down on the reef below as if from the roof of a four-storey building and saw his death. The lip of the wave curled under,
taking him with it. It drove him into the reef and rolled him over those jagged peaks.

It was as if he had no strength to resist, for the wave’s power was beyond resistance. It drove him down and tumbled him around, over and over. It pummelled him senseless, rolling him so that he had no sense of up or down, and all the while the air in his lungs soured, his desire to inhale growing by the moment so that his chest burned and his head pounded with an irresistible craving to breathe, breathe, breathe. Yet, round and round he was driven, the surf careless of his life, which must surely slip from his grasp at any moment. It was as if a great hand had forced him to the bottom and held him there, grinding his limbs and his face on the coral, slicing, piercing, the water reddening with his ebbing life force.

And then suddenly he burst to the surface at the last moment of desperation to inhale the sweet clear air. Only this time, there was nothing but sand to breathe; mouthfuls of rasping sand that filled his lungs with a dry burning. Kadar Al-Jahani regained consciousness as he coughed and hacked to free his lungs of the concrete dust. There was silence in his head, the silence of the deaf. He began to crawl slowly. His shoulder was torn and loose, the ball rolling freely in soft muscle made him want to cry out, but he bit down on it, channelled it, harnessed it to his will to survive and escape. His hands were secured behind his back, so Kadar fell on his face several times as the rubble shifted under his bloody knees. And still the dust choked. He crawled for days and weeks like this, stumbling, falling, searching for air, air that was sweet, a clean breath above the roiling dust.

‘Son of a bitch,’ Wilkes heard Monroe say.

‘Let’s roll,’ said Wilkes with a nod of his head to Benyamin.

The Israeli gunned the diesel and the Merkava bucked forward, rearing over the scattered debris like a frightened horse. The soldiers waiting in the building choked as the billowing waves of grit coated their lungs.

‘Where’s Kadar?’ asked Monroe.

‘He’s with you,’ said Glukel.

‘Shit,’ said Monroe.

Some long seconds of silence followed. ‘Okay,’ said Monroe. ‘I do not have the prisoner. REPEAT! THE PRISONER HAS ESCAPED!’

‘Kaaakaaaat!’ yelled Glukel.

Shit!
Wilkes resisted the temptation to say it into the mic. Without Kadar Al-Jahani, the mission would be worse than a complete disaster.
So many pointless deaths…
Wilkes checked the monitor in front of him and cycled through the various levels of information. Major Samuels and all his men were dead, according to their flat-lines. And if they weren’t dead before his arrival with the Merkava, only a miracle would have saved them during the explosion of the HEAT ordnance. He again counted the signatures of Samuels and his people and the lines were as before – all flat. But there was something unusual. Lieutenant Glukel was in the process of conducting a search of the demolished building to find Kadar, ordering teams of two to perform a systematic search of the various rooms. The Saudi could well have just been hiding somewhere amongst the rubble.

‘Lieutenant Glukel?’ Wilkes said.

‘I’m busy.’

‘Lieutenant. How many in your troop?’

‘Twelve. No, thirteen, including your friend Monroe.’

‘Atticus,’ said Wilkes. ‘You wearing a wristband?’

‘No,’ said Monroe.

‘Okay, well I’ve got thirteen signatures here on screen. So why is that?’

‘Christ! I forgot. I put my band on Kadar after we cuffed him,’ said Monroe.

‘I’m with you,’ Baruch said, interrupting. ‘Give me a minute.’

Wilkes heard him talking heatedly with the technician. Wilkes wondered whether the American had pulled up his daks now that the stress levels were elevated. A refreshed view of the building flashed onto the screen in front of Wilkes and on it floated twelve bright red dots, each representing a soldier’s homing beacon. But there was one missing. Unlucky number thirteen.

‘Tom, we’re going to have to send Dragon Warrior on a bit of a fly-around. The target couldn’t have gone far,’ said Baruch.

The view of the building changed as the UAV swept around it slowly, stopping every dozen metres or so in a hover to scan the surrounding buildings. And then, suddenly, there it was, or rather, there
he
was, Kadar Al-Jahani. There was a brightly coloured red sphere inching down the street behind the target building.

‘You got that?’ said Baruch.

‘We’re on it,’ said Wilkes. ‘Benyamin?’

The tank moved forward, swung right, then advanced
slowly. It was a tight fit in the side street. It took out the front wall of a two-storey dwelling that promptly collapsed around the tank. The Merkava stopped in the T-intersection at the rear of the building, Benyamin rotating the turret so that it fitted between the buildings. There was not enough room to turn the tank through ninety degrees without destroying more buildings. The tank’s TSS cameras revealed a small dust-coloured mound moving slowly down the middle of the street. Benyamin targeted the main gun on the lump and loaded the spare HEAT round into the breech.

‘I think you’ve got him covered, Ben,’said Wilkes. ‘Crack the doors and leave the motor running.’ Wilkes released his safety harness, picked up the Glock and disappeared through the rear. The tank’s floodlights snapped on. Wilkes gagged on the thick dust boiling around the tank. It stung his eyes and made them water. The atmosphere in the tank had been cool and clean, purified by the air-con. Wilkes pulled himself up on the tank, picked his way over it and then jumped back down into the rear lane. He walked up to the lump, a man with his hands snap-locked behind his back, crawling along on his knees, his skinned face and broken shoulder pushing into the dirt as he tried in vain to escape.

Glukel’s people materialised from the target building, dragging their feet slowly, exhausted, crunching the rubble and grit collected on the road. Seven faces, seven pairs of white eyes blinking from black faces. They carried their people who were too badly wounded to walk. One of the men carried a dead comrade over his shoulder.

‘I hope he’s fucking worth it,’ said Glukel too loudly, her
ears clogged with the thunder of battle. She didn’t wait for a reaction, but pushed past Wilkes towards the tank.

‘What kept you, Mr Cojones?’ said Monroe, the smile for once wiped from his face.

Lieutenant Colonel Baruch stood in silence as he watched the monitor, the green clouds of dust settling. He knew this would be his last op. He would be retired, probably with yet another medal. In the words of the American technician beside him, it had been ‘a cluster fuck’. A nice term. He couldn’t have put it better himself. All the technology in the world and still, at the battle front, flesh and blood had stopped the bullets. That crazy Australian bastard. If not for him, more body bags would have been required. But how the hell was he going to keep the warrant officer’s involvement from leaking? If it was important enough, someone else higher up could worry about that.

Besides, Baruch no longer cared and his knees trembled with the realisation. He felt a great despair within. More letters to mothers and fathers explaining the hero’s death earned by their sons. Baruch headed from the rooftop to the stairwell, and checked the magazine in his sidearm as he walked. It was full. No doubt someone would find a use for the nine rounds that remained.

It had never happened before. Annabelle Gilbert was late getting to the station. She leapt from the taxi and flew through reception, running onto the set trailing a make-up artist who fussed with a tube of mascara. This was not good enough, she told herself, and there was no excuse. Okay, so Saunders had taken her to lunch, told her she had the world at her feet, and the two bottles of vintage merlot had worked their magic, dissolving her guard and melting time. Suddenly, it was five thirty-seven in the evening and the red light on the camera facing her would wink on in exactly twenty-three minutes. No, correction, twenty-two and a half minutes, she realised, glancing at her TAG Heuer.

‘Shit,’ she’d said, jumping up from the table, teetering on heels that clattered across the restaurant floor as she headed for the front door. Fortunately, as she’d run down the steps, a taxi arrived dropping off a couple of businessmen. One of them held the door open for her as she jumped in. Annabelle hoped the alcohol wouldn’t be noticed when she read the news – it was a sackable offence to be drunk on camera, and quite righly, too. The realisation that she had broken a number of her own professional and personal rules made her furious, white circles on her usually rosy cheeks the only indication of the anger welling inside. No time to prepare. No time to get her thoughts in order. Only time to wing it.

‘…and five and four and…’ The assistant producer held up three fingers silently, then two, then one, finishing the countdown pointing at her.

‘Good evening. This is Annabelle Gilbert with the six o’clock news. Tonight, anger at the pumps as petrol prices surge to as much as a dollar fifty-five a litre, huge seas
batter the New South Wales coastline, and an IVF chimp gives birth to triplets.’

Gilbert turned to face another camera as its top light flicked on, and assumed her most serious face. A brief pause in the rolling script on the autocue glass in front of the lens allowed her an extra second to suitably compose herself. ‘The Israeli army today claimed a major victory in the war against terrorism, swooping on members of the radical groups Hamas and Hezbollah in Ramallah on the West Bank. The daring raid, utilising infantry, helicopters and tanks, cornered the terrorists as they met in a deserted apartment block…’

As Gilbert read the lines, footage of the attack played across the monitor facing her. Israeli soldiers dropped onto a rooftop from a helicopter. Then suddenly it was night and the black sky glowed orange with a massive explosion. The picture cut to show weary Israeli soldiers stepping out the back of a tank. Gilbert froze. One of those soldiers was Tom. Annabelle’s mouth went dry and her skin crawled with a cold sweat. The footage continued and showed Tom assisting a wounded soldier.

‘More than a dozen Israelis were killed in the assault on the terrorist stronghold,’ she read, not realising she was doing so. ‘Israeli officials claim that one of the terrorists killed in the raid was Kadar Al-Jahani, the man US intelligence experts believe masterminded the recent bombing of the US Embassy in Jakarta, causing the deaths of at least one hundred and thirty-seven people…’

Through sheer professionalism, Annabelle Gilbert had somehow managed to keep it all together during the half-hour bulletin. But when the floor producer drew his finger
across his throat and gave the thumbs up signalling the end of the broadcast, Annabelle rushed from the set violently sick.