He attained cruising altitude and saw his wingman appear to his left. He said, “Here we go again. Probably chasing a damn balloon.”
His wingman laughed through the radio and said, “Yeah, if these guys keep this up, they’ll win by bankrupting us with a million alerts.”
They circled around, heading toward the Golan Heights, Avril saying, “Never chased a phantom out of the West Bank, though. What do you suppose that’s about?”
“No idea. Let’s just clean our sector and go home.”
They crossed into the West Bank, came within spitting distance of the border with Jordan, and banked away, not wanting to cause an international incident. Avril scanned the area and said, “I see nothing. You?”
His wingman didn’t respond. He called again, “Do you see anything?”
“Nine o’clock low. Nine o’clock low. Looks like an aircraft flying low and slow.”
Avril banked, focused on the area, and saw the target. It did look like an aircraft, but it had no canopy. He understood that distance was its own enemy—and that he could be thinking the plane was much farther away simply because of its size. He flew forward, the aircraft eating up the ground, got above it, and said, “That’s not an aircraft. It’s a UAV.”
He called back to his headquarters even as the UAV broke the border between the West Bank and Israel, now twenty miles away from Megiddo. He couldn’t be faulted for that. He had no clear idea why he was even up here, and didn’t want to be a laughing stock by blowing out of the sky an Israeli UAV surveying the West Bank.
“Got a bogey UAV headed north, just broke the border. Is that my target?”
The man on the other end of the radio was just as mystified as he was, the orders that had filtered through their respective commands simply telling them to search and report. He said, “Stand by. Stand by.”
Avril tracked the drone, seeing the distinctive white excavations of Megiddo against the green of the hills in the distance. It jerked to the right and lowered altitude, moving into what he recognized as an attack run. He called back, “UAV is lowering altitude. I say again UAV is lowering altitude. Headed to Megiddo hill. Right at Megiddo hill. Is it ours? Is it our UAV?”
The man on the other end said, “Waiting on an answer. Stand by,” and Avril thought, Why on earth would anyone strike an archeological site? That thing has to be Israeli.
But the UAV was lowering into a strike run. Avril called his wingman and said, “You seeing what I’m seeing?”
“I see it, I see it. What’s your call?”
Avril said nothing. The UAV was twenty seconds from Megiddo at an altitude of one hundred feet when he flicked the arming switch on his Sidewinder missiles. It reached ten seconds out, flying at more than a hundred miles an hour, and he achieved lock-on, pulling the trigger and whispering, “Please don’t be Israeli . . .”
Chapter 72
I rolled into the checkpoint, lowered my window, and the uniformed Israeli said something in Hebrew. I said, “English?”
He said, “How can I help you?”
I said, “This is going to sound crazy, but there’s a threat against this place right now. We need you to alert the Shin Bet and get everyone off that hill.”
He bristled, and I knew why, but the time was so close I couldn’t think of any way to soften the blow. Trying to get past the checkpoint with some social engineering wouldn’t stop the drone.
He said, “What do you mean? What threat?”
“There’s an unmanned aerial vehicle flying here right now from Syria. It’s got a warhead that’s going to kill everyone on that hill. You need to evacuate them immediately.”
His face went slack in shock. He put his hand on his pistol, like I was the drone, and said, “Sir, what are you talking about? Please step out of the car.”
Shoshana opened the passenger door, stood up, and began yelling in Hebrew across the top of the cab. He backed up, drew his weapon, and I said, “Shoshana, that’s not helping anything.”
She said, “It’ll get someone here besides this monkey in a uniform.”
I turned to him, and saw his eyes focused on the parking lot, his gun out, now pointed away from me.
I turned and saw an SUV racing straight toward us, like it was going to ram us head-on. I slammed our vehicle in reverse, hit the gas, and spun into the grass on the side of the road, Shoshana barely hanging on. The SUV kept coming. The guard jumped aside and it hammered the wooden drop bar, shattering it, and screamed away. I got a quick glimpse at the driver as he sped by and couldn’t believe it.
I looked at Shoshana, wanting to make sure I wasn’t projecting. I said, “Did you see the man behind the wheel?”
I had my answer in her expression before she even spoke. She said, “It’s the Ramsad’s killer.”
I put the car in drive and went back to the gate, finding the guard completely confused, shouting in the radio and waving his pistol at me. I saw a platoon of men rushing to us and said, “This isn’t going to end well.”
Shoshana said, “Let me handle this.”
I said, “Do you have some secret Israeli code word for badass to stop the beat-down we’re about to get? Because I’ve been trying to get one for the United States, and have failed to do so.”
She smiled, and the men coalesced around our vehicle, with her shouting in Hebrew. They shouted back, and she pointed to the direction the SUV had gone, screaming at them. At that moment, I knew we were done. They didn’t believe her, and had no inclination to stop the event on the top of the hill, thinking the threat had just left.
I slapped my hands on the wheel in front of me and the man outside my window waved his pistol about, which did nothing but aggravate the hell out of me.
I said, “Do you hear what she’s saying?” I had no idea what Shoshsana was shouting, but was pretty sure it was along the lines of, “Get everyone out, or they’re going to get killed.”
He brought his pistol up, pointing it at my head, and I raised my hands, saying, “We’re all about to be dead, you dumb fuck.”
At that moment, an enormous explosion split the sky to the south, at the edge of the mountain, loud enough to shake the vehicle. Everyone turned to the noise, seeing a fireball in the air, bits and parts of machinery falling to the ground, and an Israeli F-16 screaming straight up over the top of Mount Megiddo.
I looked at Shoshana and said, “Points given here. You aren’t that dysfunctional.”
She smiled and said, “Let’s go get Garrett. There’s still one more on the loose.”
I nodded, turned to the man with the weapon at my head, and said, “We no longer want to enter. Sorry for being pushy.”
I put the SUV in reverse, and he shouted something. I hit the gas, flying backward at a high rate of speed. I did a J-turn, the front of the vehicle whipping around, and was headed back down the road away from the checkpoint, seeing a lot of men waving their arms in the air behind me.
We reached the main highway and I said, “Which way? North or south?”
Garrett headed north on Highway 4, wanting to put distance between him and the predators, wondering how on earth they’d managed to track him and his team, not only here in Israel, but also in Syria. There had to be something connecting them together, and his eyes fell on the Thuraya phone next to him, the antennae still out and transmitting.