Tsunami Connection (19 page)

March 25, 2012

The water was tepid but flowing in
strong currents around the sandbars, forcing the dark, undetectable, amphibious
vehicles to adjust their trajectories continuously as they floated silently,
cloaking and uncloaking at regular intervals to save battery power. To the
unschooled eye, it was an odd flotilla of slightly larger-than-human-size sea
mammals.

Kefira knew better as she pulled her own transporter to a
stop on the seaward side of a large coral covered reef, not far off the Syrian
coast. The device had transported her to the shore where she now sat commanded,
via a submarine, by an unseen central military command deep underground in
Israel.

The vehicle uncloaked and was visible to the naked eye for
an instant as she stepped out of its shell. On her waist, she touched a small
hard box the size of her hand. She was now invisible. It took a signal from the
central command and then she became invisible to even land or aerial-based
radar systems. There was a weakness in the design of the cloaking software.
There was an instant of vulnerability as the vehicle and the occupant separated
from each other, likely due to a software problem. The vehicle now drifted on
its own power back into the water, itself once again cloaked in attack mode.

As if participating in the charade, Mother Nature displayed
a colorful natural tapestry around the transporter as it broke below the
surface and rested just under the water, waiting for Kefira to recall it. Sea
plankton surrounded its descent into the sea in the moonlight, giving the whole
scene an ethereal quality.

The commander looked toward the coast of Israel. She checked
her compass on her invisible wrist and it became visible, displaying a second
bug in the software. Her directional GPS, when activated, became visible. She
quickly shut it down, and with its low-frequency, digital signal off, it now
acquiesced to the field, becoming invisible again.

This was the most dangerous point of the mission, mainly
because it was necessary to break communication silence and step out of
cloaking to receive final mission approval. Over the water, she saw it. Her
ultra-light, night-vision glasses permitted her to see its glint as it skimmed
over the water, guided by the single burst made by her compass.

Here, so near the Syrian coast, any unusual signal was
dangerous as the Syrian military was vigilant and paranoid, constantly sweeping
the whole spectrum of possible electronic frequencies for out of the ordinary
possible communications.

Tonight, though, the Syrians had their hands full as the
Free Syria movement repelled attack after attack of government forces in every
major city and hamlet in the country. At least that is what Kefira hoped and
believed. She awaited her signal. The messenger approached her less than a
meter above the water. It was a predator probe, about one meter long and very
thin, possessing no radar detectable surfaces. It had the same weakness as
Kefira and her vehicle. It became visible for an instant as it used digital
signals. These signals were, however, ultra-fast bursts and the window of
vulnerability was very small, a danger that more than justified the risk. War
is, after all, just a balancing of unpredictable risks.

Her eyewear received the message burst as the small
communications-only drone vehicle hovered near her. The vehicle now became
invisible again. The video and audio message flashed over the left side of her
glasses in the top left corner, allowing her to receive orders even under
battlefield conditions.

Her communications with her group were always on the upper
right of all of their vision goggles. The phrase, 'we own the night', coined
years earlier by American Special Forces troops, especially Navy Seals, had now
gone one step further.

Cloaking devices made it possible for properly equipped
troops to 'own the day'. Kefira watched her orders unfold as she crunched a
high-energy food pellet based on coca leaves, which had been developed by a
small, relatively obscure Israeli company during the long battle to control the
Medellin cartel in Columbia. She could feel the energizing pulse of the drug
coursing through her body. She touched her cloaking device, became invisible,
and stepped into her recalled amphibious transporter. When she was inside, all
except her head, she tapped a button on her console.

A slightly altered video was stored in the goggles of all of
her team. Kefira's voice, a husky whisper, said: "Go" into the ears
of every member of her team. A small green triangle flashed in the upper right
corner of all of their eyewear or communication glasses. The signal for abort
would have been a hexagon flashing red. For a second, they were all visible as
the digital message transferred. All of them were floating on the seaside of
the small reef, protected from spying Syrian military radar, both by their
closeness to the water and the slight rise of the sandbar. This part of the sea
was in Syrian territorial water, distantly adjacent to the country that the
Syrians called the Great Satan's pawn, Israel.

Today, Kefira's team would threaten a longstanding peace
between Israel and Syria, won by bloodshed in an earlier war on the Golan
Heights. Once again, Machiavellian logic prevailed, sending the spear into
Syria to clandestinely confirm the existence of weapons of mass destruction.

Heads sealed into their craft once again, they spaced out
and made their way around the natural reefs in the shallow water. As they
turned the northeast corner of the shoal, the stronger current buffeted them
all. It was 3:30 am Syrian time. Sharks lazily eyed the vehicles as they passed
close to the coral between dozens of marauders and the steepening underwater
cliff. Here, sharks had plenty to eat. None tested the silently propelled
man-carriers as they made their way to the shore, over the 200-meter-wide
gulley between the coral island and the water's edge.

A kilometer out to sea, Yochana sat at the command table of
an attack submarine. She was silently praying, a habit she had taken up again
after years of agnosticism. Her head rocked back and forth. The submarine
Captain, Claude Astruc, watched his instruments. Using GPS, the submarine was
monitoring a 6-person team Zak had led into the waters around Syria twenty
minutes previous to Kefira's 6-person team's insertion. The Captain tapped a
tune he loved on the navigation table between them. He spoke, breaking the
trance in the room.

"Three forty-nine. Landing accomplished."

The rarefied air of the command deck of the attack submarine
crackled a bit. Yochana and Sam looked at each other.

"The information that Zak extracted from MacAuley may
kill us all," said Sam.

"Or save us all," retorted Yochana.
"Remember," she added, "They were working together, our stars.
They concurred on the analysis. It's not just my word or yours or the word of
either one of them. It's all of our funerals if they are wrong."

"I know. I know. It just somehow seemed too easy when I
think back now," said Sam.

The captain shrugged unconsciously, mimicking his great
grandfather, a French Jew who did not survive Treblinka extermination camp. His
family somehow beat the odds and they became Holocaust survivors. Their family
line made it to Israel in 1946 to bear an infant in 1947. A child that would
sire the youngest Israeli submarine captain of the fleet, carrying on a proud
tradition to never let genocide happen again.

As Kefira's group approached the shore, their amphibious
vehicles surfaced. They exited their transporters and spread out in an
arrowhead-shaped formation on the beachhead about twenty-five feet apart,
crouched, weapons with external safeties set to off on their combination dart
and live ammunition magazines. They looked towards their unseen target in
unison, checked the GPS map guiding them via a blue directional arrow centered
on their eyewear, and awaited Kefira's signal on the eyewear. Behind them,
directly behind her, their vehicles submerged, seemingly having a life of their
own.

One by one, the personal amphibious carriers formed a
pattern on the bottom amongst the sharks to the leeward side of the underwater
dunes and coral reefs. Essentially, each of the vehicles became a large mammal,
and in doing so disappeared on the bottom in a kind of holding pattern,
conserving battery power, like so many jets stacked up above the airport of a
great city, awaiting the communication of the air traffic controller. The
vehicles would resurface to take the team home at Kefira's command upon their
return, mission accomplished or not. Their batteries could sustain them in this
holding pattern for up to 7 days.

Feeling the pull of destiny, looking from the center behind
the waiting arrowhead formation, Kefira prayed briefly, raised her arm as if to
throw a javelin in the Olympic Games, then whispered into her communication
device while touching it on her vocal chords: "The spear flies."

They left at once, over the salt-flats-like beach near
Latakia, Syria. The team moved in front of her, roughly keeping formation,
trying not to change the distances between them. She fell back slightly,
waited, thinking of all the years of training coming to a head today,
remembering that she had doubted her purpose rarely, but still not believing
the strength of the symbolism she represented. She was the spear.

Her body melded into the movement of progressing across the
rough, arid terrain in Syria and the mission became a kind of tantric
meditation. It was ironic that the team moved for her, but that she was the
only weak link. If she were not in such perfect shape, her age may have slowed
the group down. They moved in this contour because they were on patrol, each
protecting the other from a calculated distance. In case of capture, they
didn't know their actual goal. They just knew that WMD's that could destroy
Israel were stored at the target. It was their job to get video proof of these
stockpiles so that an airstrike could be ordered with impunity and neutralize
the weapons. Their GPS systems contained only streaming information that could
not compromise them if captured.

Only Kefira knew the target. Her breath faltered, but they
had accomplished the first leg of the journey. The soft sand of the beach area
gave way under her feet to the hard pack and scrub that makes up the landscape
in this part of the world. Behind them, the flats of the beachhead gave way to
the rising, hilly topography that would comprise the rest of their journey. The
terrain was the same here as at the objective. It was only at this early stage
of the penetration that she was a weak link.

A signal from the point person meant she had risen to the
task. She had succeeded. The point of the arrowhead stopped and dug vigorously
in the sandy soil beneath his feet. He touched something hard. He reached down
into the cascading side of the last dune before the hard pack started. He
touched his throat and whispered the Arab word for camel into his communicator.
He used a local intonation pattern in case someone was somehow listening to
them on their special frequency.

Training left nothing to chance. Yochana and Sam were the
best of the best in this business. Thirty-some years of work came to a climax
today in the dark in Syria. Kefira breathed hard as six bicycles materialized
out of the sand. Another insertion team had planted them one day before. The
30-geared mountain bicycles were made of a ceramic-based, nano-enhanced fiber
knit from carbon, like the wings of a fighter jet. The bikes' wheels were
virtually indestructible. Clandestine pre 'Desert Storm' troops in the first
Iraq war had used these bikes extensively.

Again forming in an arrowhead shape, the group spaced and
waited for Kefira to signal. The cool night air filled her lungs, now relaxed
after the brief pause to dig out their wheeled transport. She sipped sparingly
a bittersweet mixture of coconut water and ginger root from the tube beside her
mouth under her armor, to counter the effects of dehydration. Her armor was
cooled by a layer of this liquid, ensuring both her body temperature and her
water content. Her silenced Heckler and Koch submachine gun was secured to her
chest by carbon Velcro and easily accessible. The automatic weapon had been
specially modified to permit tranquilizing darts as a choice of projectile.

All of them could ride their vehicles with no hands,
shooting as they moved. Kefira would rely on her team to do the shooting,
though. She was the mind and had to stay focused on planning and execution.

"I'm following," signaled Kefira, using coded
eyewear symbols.

They all started, as much as the topography permitted, to
form the arrowhead once again. However, the hilly terrain made this figure more
and more difficult. It was still dark, but the sun was starting to make itself
felt. The carbon bicycles and riders advanced through the growing dawn over the
hard packed surface. The team was not visible. The frames of the bicycles and
the layered body armor contained life-giving liquid for drinking. A tube set in
the handlebars accessed the liquid.

Their target was a building complex recently abandoned by
the Syrian military and not yet occupied by the militias of the freedom forces,
the mujahedeen. It was imperative that Israel take possession of the stockpiles
in this complex because no one could predict the behavior of the freedom
fighters. They were ousting President Assad, a dangerous menace to Israel, but
the mujahedeen represented another threat, possibly more dangerous in the long
run.

Satellite imagery affirmed that the target buildings were
abandoned. Knowing, but not caring that Israel was interested in this data, the
CIA had unwittingly forwarded the IMINT and GEOINT, or geospatial intelligence
made up of information collected by satellite, and the analysis of this
information by trained specialists to Mossad. Zak got the data via his mole,
Lieutenant Colonel Tallingsworth. In turn, he had notified Sam and shared with
Kefira. In addition, unknown to the CIA, was the fact that MacAuley had
pinpointed the location for Kefira and Zak while they were in Argentina.