Lion of God- The Complete Trilogy Read online

  Lion of God: The Complete Trilogy

  Stephen England

  Copyright © 2018 by Stephen England

  Cover design by Ares Jun

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—without the prior written permission of the author.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. Views expressed by the characters in this novel are their own, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the author.

  Episode I

  Part One

  “Whoever thinks of stopping the Intifada before it achieves its goals, I will give him ten bullets in the chest.”—Yasser Arafat

  6:30 A.M. Israel Standard Time, October 12th, 2000

  An undisclosed location in the Negev

  Israel

  There. He saw a dim shape barely visible in the opening to the darkened corridor ahead—the outline of a Kalashnikov assault rifle carried at low ready.

  Target identified. The suppressed Jericho 941 semiautomatic pistol came up in his hands, never breaking stride as he advanced—its nightsights centering on the man’s head, the base of the skull where the spine connects to the brain stem.

  The trigger broke under the pressure of his finger, the pistol recoiling into his palm as a single 9mm round spat from the barrel, the suppressor reducing the sound to the faintest of coughs.

  Target down.

  He reached the corner and paused, flat against the wall, feeling the breath of his teammate on the back of his neck—soft footsteps against the floor as the rest of the four-man Mossad kill team stacked up behind him.

  Go right, he motioned silently, taking his right hand off the weapon—and gesturing with two fingers. He didn’t need to look back to know that the rear pair of officers were moving to take the opposite corner. They were every bit as well-trained as he was.

  Another quick gesture. Go, go, go.

  He sprung out from the wall, going wide—cutting the pie as he moved into the corridor, pistol at the ready. His partner following him out.

  Clear.

  There was the sound of another suppressed cough from behind him, along with the dull thud of a target hitting the floor. Clearly the rear pair of officers had encountered—and dealt with—opposition.

  He didn’t react, didn’t look behind him. If their intel was accurate, they were well-nigh on top of the room where the hostage was secured. And their time was running out.

  The outline of a door to the right appeared, maybe ten meters ahead. Just where it should have been, given the structural blueprints they had reviewed at the mission briefing. The layout of the building burned into his memory.

  They stacked up once more at the door—two on either side—ready to go in hard. At his signal.

  They could have mirrored the door, gotten a glimpse of what was on the other side, but that would have taken time. Time they didn’t have.

  Time to do this. He took a deep breath, calming himself as he nodded at the officer immediately opposite him, uttering the first words since they had entered the target structure four minutes earlier—his voice nothing more than a faint whisper. “Bang the room.”

  A nod of acknowledgement and the rear officer withdrew a long, cylindrical stun grenade from his vest as his partner took a step back from the door—preparing to kick it in.

  Disorientation. Chaos. That’s what this was all about—minimizing the time the assault team spent trapped in the fatal funnel. Getting to the hostage.

  His fellow Mossad officer’s combat-booted foot connected with the door, smashing it in on its hinges as the man behind him threw the grenade, the cylinder describing a slow arc in the darkness as it sailed into the room.

  Look away. He tucked his chin to his chest, turning instinctively to the side to shield his eyes. And just in time.

  The room exploded in a light bright as the sun, the noise of the detonation hammering his eardrums. Flash-bang.

  He was back up before the last echoes had finished reverberating through the building, his gun up as he entered the room, going right. His partner, left.

  Nothing.

  Feeling a cold fear grasp at his heart, he spun on heel—finding his partner just standing there, her weapon half-raised.

  The room was empty.

  6:36 A.M.

  The United States Embassy

  Tel Aviv

  Patience, David Lay thought, glancing down the hallway. That was the single most important character trait for anyone with aspirations of working in the Middle East. Immeasurable, ineffable patience.

  You couldn’t work long in the region without coming to terms with precisely why the Torah contained so many references to the longsuffering of God. A lesson he’d had to learn time and again in his three years as the CIA’s Chief of Station in Tel Aviv.

  “We’ll be out presently,” he announced, speaking into the small two-way radio in his hand. “Pass it along to the Marines.”

  The acknowledgement came back along with a burst of static just as the door opened behind him to reveal the Director of Central Intelligence, George Tenet.

  “You have everything ready?” Tenet asked, buttoning his suit jacket as he joined Lay in the hall. “Everything’s in order?”

  “It is,” Lay responded quietly. He’d been in Tel Aviv for the entirety of Tenet’s time as DCI, but this visit to Israel was the first time the two of them had even been in the same room, let alone met.

  And so far. . .well, it was too early to say.

  “I’ve arranged a police escort to the talks,” he continued, leading the way down the hall toward the elevator. “They’ll meet us at the Erez Crossing.”

  “Israeli police?”

  Lay glanced back in surprise. “Of course. In light of the last few days, I thought it was wise to take additional security precautions.”

  That was, in his opinion, a massive understatement. The unrest that had been building ever since the summer had finally spilled over its brim two weeks earlier—with Palestinian rioters clashing with police in the wake of Israeli opposition leader Ariel Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount, or the Haram al-Sharif as it was known to members of the Muslim faith.

  The visit of the former IDF paratrooper turned vocal critic of the peace process had not been. . .well-received, in spite of the care taken to coordinate the visit with the Waqf, the Islamic trust in charge of Jerusalem’s holy sites. And things were getting more hostile by the day.

  The DCI shook his head, stopping stock-still in the hallway behind him. “Look, David, perception is everything. I’m here to chair the talks, not take sides in them. We made progress at Camp David this past summer, and we continued that progress last week in Paris. I didn’t come here just to piss that all away.”

  “Would you have preferred I ask Mohammed Dahlan to offer his protection?” Lay asked, turning calmly to face him.

  Dahlan was the chief of the Palestinian Security Force in Gaza, responsible for keeping law and order—or at least the roughest Middle Eastern equivalent of it—in that sector of the Palestinian Authority.

  “We’ve spent the last four years training Dahlan’s people, so don’t give me that.” Tenet’s eyes flashed. “They’re solid. And a joint escort would have provided for the necessary security while providing an appropriate symbolism for the talks.”

  The politics of the intelligence business, Lay thought—meeting t
he director’s eyes. It was enough to make him wish for the bad old days of the Cold War, when all such things had been way above his pay grade. “That’s not an option. The Israeli police,” he continued, measuring his words carefully, “have suspended all joint patrols with the NSF since the Qalqiliyah incident.”

  An Israeli Border Police superintendent, shot dead by one of his Palestinian counterparts. It seemed a reasonable justification for such measures.

  The DCI started to reply, then seemed to think better of it—staring into Lay’s eyes for the space of a full minute before his face relaxed into a smile. “All right, then. Let’s go make peace.”

  6:37 A.M.

  The Negev

  The hostage wasn’t here. It took a brief moment for that realization to filter through, his ears still ringing from the blast of the stun grenade. Their intel had been wrong, that all-too-frequent reality out in the field.

  And then a siren began to wail. Now everyone knew they were there.

  The man swore fiercely under his breath, motioning for the rest of the team to form up on him as he led the way back out into the corridor of the now seemingly-abandoned structure—the encrypted radio clipped to his tactical vest suddenly coming alive with static. A woman’s voice.

  “Ariel, Hachilah-1, requesting sitrep.” Ariel. His Mossad codename. He had been born David Shafron, but it had been a long time since anyone had known him by that name. Years.

  Another man, from a different time.

  “The mission is blown, Hachilah-1,” he responded angrily, more furious with himself than anyone else. He should have known. “I say again, the mission is blown. Moving to extract.”

  “Negative, Ariel. There’s a truck near the rear entrance,” came the woman’s voice once more. “We’re picking up a large number of hostiles in the vicinity—your hostage may be with them.”

  May. That was the operative word of that particular sentence. But they had come this far. Ariel grimaced, motioning with his hand to his team members to spread out as they advanced down the corridor—their eyes perfectly adjusted to the darkness.

  Target. Target. A pair of silhouettes emerging from the darkness ahead, his pistol coming up to cover the threat in a motion born of years of practice, his finger closing around the trigger.

  Target down. He couldn’t hear the report of his partner’s weapon over the cacophony of the sirens, but he saw the second silhouette fall. Moving on.

  A corridor to the right led toward the back of the building, his steps hastening as they neared the exit. The sound of a truck’s engine running faintly audible amidst the sirens.

  “Ready?” he mouthed, exchanging a glance with the man opposite him.

  A nod. Ready. He took a step back from the door, bouncing momentarily on the balls of his feet before lashing out with a booted foot—the blow splintering the wood of the doorframe as it slammed outward, his partner first through, her weapon already up.

  He followed the third member of the stack into the fatal funnel and out into the open, careful not to allow the muzzle of his weapon to sweep any of his team members. Instant disqualification.

  Target. Target. Target. Target.

  He saw them fall one by one, cut down by the precision fire of his team members—his attention suddenly focusing itself toward the truck, taking in the sight of a middle-aged man in a suit forced to his knees at the rear of the vehicle. A terrorist, his face concealed by a black balaclava, standing over him. His weapon pointed at the man’s head.

  Ariel swung, the muzzle of his pistol coming to bear, the terrorist’s head appearing, perfectly aligned in the twin rear posts of the nightsights. There.

  The Jericho recoiled into his hand, the bullet smashing through paper and backing as the reactive target slammed into the ground.

  He lowered his weapon and slipped the safety on, holstering it once more on his belt as the “hostage” rose to his feet, dusting himself off—his face now clearly visible. Ariel’s breath catching in his throat as he recognized the general, or aluf, as they were known in the Israeli Defense Force.

  “General Shoham,” he began, unable to completely mask his own look of surprise, “They told me you were arriving today, but I was not informed you would be part of the live-fire exercise.”

  The expression on the older man’s broad, stolid face might have been a smile, but it was impossible to judge.

  And unsafe to guess. “Nor should you have been,” he replied after a long, tense moment. “Have your team secure their weapons and regroup for the debrief.”

  9:35 A.M.

  Ramallah, The West Bank

  The human cost of war. That was what he had spent a career documenting, Simon Collins thought, the straps of the British man’s backpack digging into his shoulders as he made his way down the dusty street, ahead of the crowds now leaving from the burial of a young man taken far too soon. The high-pitched, keening wail of the women piercing the air. An other-worldly sound.

  Twenty-five years, across three continents, as a freelance journalist. Reporting on human sorrow. Tragedy. Africa, Eastern Europe—now the Middle East. Men with power and guns, leaving broken lives in their wake.

  And this place was no different, for all its claim of being a “promised land.” A claim rendered farcical by the history of the place, a history soaked in the blood of those viewed by one side or another as “God’s enemies.”

  A pretext for the murder of the innocent—like the boy whose funeral procession he now found himself following. His notepad and pen in hand, trying to capture the enormity of it all. The loss.

  Halil Zahran had been seventeen years old when he had been shot dead by Israeli soldiers two days earlier.

  He hadn’t been the first, and he wouldn’t be the last—the anger palpable in the crowd of thousands who had attended his funeral, the angry chants against the Zionist state. The banners waving over their heads as they returned from his burial, the colors of Palestine—recalling to mind the words of the 13th-century Arab poet Safi a-Din al-Hili:

  “White are our deeds, black are our battles, green are our fields. . .red are our swords.”

  Peace had seemed so bright only months before, with Ehud Barak and Yasser Arafat reaching out to shake each other’s hand at Camp David.

  His contacts in the Palestinian delegation had gotten him in, his piece on the summit making the front page of The Guardian.

  Now it seemed farther away than ever.

  Collins stopped short, his young Arab guide nearly tripping into him—his pulse quickening as he glanced down the street, taking in the sight of a red sedan parked in front of the local police station.

  A red sedan. . .with yellow plates. Israeli plates.

  Something was wrong.

  9:47 A.M.

  HaKirya

  Tel Aviv

  “Have you been able to confirm their identities?” Shaul Mofaz asked, not turning from the window, looking from the seventeen-story height of the Matkal Tower out over the military complex toward the Marganit Tower to the west and the glistening blue expanse of the Mediterranean beyond.

  Born in Tehran, he had made his aliyah—his return to Zion—at the age of nine along with the rest of his family. Long before the darkness had descended over that country.

  Since then, the majority of his fifty-one years had been spent in the service of the Jewish state, first as a young paratrooper—then as an infantry brigade commander as Israel pushed into Lebanon in the early ‘80s.

  He had been the IDF’s Chief of General Staff, the Ramatkal, for the last two years—as the “peace process” continued along at a snail’s pace and the clouds of war gathered all around them.

  Clouds he feared had just broken over the West Bank.

  “No, we have not,” his adjutant replied. “The word on the street is that they’re Mossad.”

  Of course, Mofaz thought—the fluorescent light glistening off his balding head as he turned to face the young man. To the Palestinians, every Jew was Mossad. A “Zionist
spy.”

  He’d heard it all a thousand times before. “And. . .are they?”

  “We’ve reached out to the Mossad, but have heard nothing from Efraim yet.”

  And that wasn’t likely to be forthcoming. At least not on the short-term. “So, barring that, what we have is a pair of IDF soldiers in Palestinian custody at the police station in Ramallah?”

  “According to the best intelligence we have available at this time, yes.”

  Shaul Mofaz shook his head. “Get the Prime Minister on the phone. Whoever they work for, they’re our people. We’re going to need to go in and get them out.”

  9:59 A.M.

  The police station

  Ramallah, The West Bank

  You didn’t spend over a quarter-century in war zones around the world without being able to sense barely-repressed violence. To feel it in the air around you.

  And that’s what he was feeling, all around him—this was no longer a funeral procession. This was a mob. Chanting young men, their clenched fists raised to the sky. Full-throated shouts of anger. He didn’t understand more than a few words of the Arabic, but the intent was coming through loud and clear.

  “What are they saying?” Collins demanded, placing a rough hand on his guide’s shoulder and pulling the young man around to face him. He’d never asked Nur his age, but he couldn’t have been much older than a university student, if that.

  The same age as most of the men in the crowd now surrounding them.

  “They—they’ve captured a pair of Jewish assassins,” the young man responded breathlessly, his face dark with anger. “Trying to sneak in past the checkpoint—to murder the old man.”

  The old man. Arafat. Collins nodded his understanding, glancing over his shoulder and back toward the Mukataa, just visible in the distance—it was a common Palestinian way of referring to their leader. But Nur wasn’t done.

  “They have to pay for their crimes—for all that they have done to us. They have to be made to pay.”