PROLOGUE
Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, Africa
SHE
HAD BEEN STRIKINGLY beautiful once. At just over forty she still turned
heads, a trait she often worked to her advantage both personally and
professionally, but even as confident and, more importantly, competent
as she was, it was not lost on her that fewer heads were turning these
days. She was well aware that her looks had a limited shelf life. She
accepted it. She had enjoyed them in her youth but now she had other,
more valuable skills—skills she had put into practice hours earlier. As
she waited her turn in line at the check-in counter at the Air France
section of Thomas Sankara International Airport Ouagadougou in Burkina
Faso, no one would have guessed that earlier she had shot a man three
times in the head with a Makarov 9x18mm pistol.
The Makarov would
not have been her first choice but on assignments like this you used
what was available. It had worked. The man was dead. The message had
been sent.
Aliya Galin brushed her raven-black hair to the side
and glanced at her smartphone, not because she wanted to know the time
or scroll through a newsfeed or social media app, but because she did
not want to stand out to local security forces as what she was, an
assassin for the state of Israel. She needed to blend in with the
masses, which meant suppressing her natural predatory instincts. It was
time to act like a sheep, nonattentive and relatively relaxed. She
needed to look normal.
Had she been stopped and questioned, her
backstory as a sales representative for a French financial firm would
have checked out, as would her employment history, contacts, and
references developed by the technical office just off the Glilot Ma’arav
Interchange in Tel Aviv, home to the headquarters of the Mossad, the
Israeli spy agency tasked with safeguarding the Jewish state. The laptop
in her carry-on contained nothing that would betray her, no secret
backdoor files storing incriminating information, no Internet searches
for anything to do with Israel, terrorism, or her target. The computer
was clean.
It was getting more difficult to travel
internationally with the web of interconnected facial recognition
cameras that continued to proliferate around the globe. Had it not been
for the Mossad’s Technology Department she would have been arrested many
times over. The Israeli intelligence services had learned the lessons
of facial recognition and passport forgery in the age of information the
hard way on the international stage twelve years earlier, when
twenty-six of their agents had been identified and implicated in the
assassination of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in a Dubai hotel room. Al-Mabhouh
was the chief weapons procurement and logistics officer for the
al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of the Hamas terrorist
organization. The Mossad would not repeat the mistakes of Dubai.
Her
French passport identified her as Mélanie Cotillard and if someone were
to check her apartment in Batignolles-Monceau, they would find a flat
commensurate with the income of a midlevel banker in the financial
services industry. No disguises, weapons, or false walls would betray
her true profession.
The man she had come to kill was responsible
for the bombing of a Jewish day care center in Rabat, Morocco. Not all
in the Arab world were supportive of Morocco recognizing Israel and
establishing official diplomatic relations. If retribution was not
swift, it emboldened the enemy, an enemy that wanted to see Israel wiped
from the face of the earth. When Iranian-backed terrorists targeted
Israeli children, justice was handled not by the courts but by Caesarea,
an elite and secretive branch of the Mossad.
More and more,
drones were becoming a viable option for targeted assassinations. They
were getting smaller and easier to conceal. But, even with the options
that came with the increasingly lethal UAV technology, the Mossad still
preferred to keep some kills personal. Israel was a country built on the
foundation of a targeted killing program, one that had continued to
evolve, as did the threats to the nation. There was nothing that put as
much fear in the hearts and minds of her enemies as an Israeli assassin.
Though
Aliya maintained her dual U.S.-Israeli citizenship, she had not set
foot in the United States in almost fifteen years. Israel was now home.
Her parents had been born there and had been killed there, a suicide
bomber from Hamas taking them from her just as they began to enjoy their
retirement years. She had been in the Israel Defense Forces then, doing
her duty with no intention of devoting her life to her adopted
homeland. She would be back soon. She would quietly resign from her job
in Paris, which had been set up for her by a Sayan, and return to Israel. Sayanim
made up a global network of non-Israeli, though usually Jewish, assets
that provided material and logistical support for Mossad operations, not
for financial incentives but out of loyalty. Aliya planned to take time
off to see her children and her sister who cared for them. She also
planned to talk to the head of the special operations division about
moving into management. She was getting tired. Perhaps this would be her
final kill.
The assignment had been relatively straightforward.
She did in fact have a legitimate meeting with a bank in Ouagadougou,
Burkina Faso’s capital city. The instability inherent to the African
continent also provided opportunity for investment. Her cover for action
intact, she had three days to locate and case the residence of Kofi
Kouyaté. They called it a “close target reconnaissance” when she had
worked with the Americans in Iraq. She reflected on the operational pace
of those intense days often; the lessons learned, the relationships
fostered.
Her days of seducing men in hotel bars were in the
past, at least in this part of the world. Enough of them had ended up
shot, stabbed, poisoned, or blown up after thinking with the small head
between their legs that others became wary when a beautiful
olive-skinned angel offered to buy them a drink.
The Mossad could
have used a hit team of locals on this assignment, but her masters in
Tel Aviv still preferred to send a message—hurt Israeli citizens and we
will find you, no matter where you hide. Aliya’s generation of Kidon,
assassins, had proven worthy inheritors of the legacy of Operation
Wrath of God, which targeted those responsible for the 1972 massacre of
Israeli athletes in Munich.
She had worked this job alone. No
accomplice to turn her in or identify her to the infamous Burkina Faso
internal state security service. If you were rolled up in this part of
the world, you could look forward to an interrogation and torture worse
than what you would experience in the West Bank. Out here, you would be
questioned, beaten, burned, and mutilated before being gang raped until
you were dead.
Though security was lax by internationally
accepted standards, she still had to empty her purse and small suitcase
onto a table beyond a metal detector that she had a strong suspicion was
not plugged in. As the two security guards went through her bag, they
paid a bit too much attention to her bras and underwear. Finding nothing
suspicious that gave them an excuse to bring her into a back room for a
secondary search, they let her proceed to her gate. Perhaps if she were
younger they would have crafted an excuse. Aging in this business did
have its benefits.
She was looking forward to leaving the African
heat behind and settling into her business-class seat on the
air-conditioned Air France flight with service to Paris. She was ready
for a drink. Air France still took pride in the French part of their
lineage and served tolerable white wine even this early in the morning.
Waiting
to board, she allowed her mind to wander to the past six months in
France, the children she had left in the care of her younger sister in
Israel, and a possible return to, no, not normalcy, as life had never
been normal for Aliya, but possibly an evolution, yes, that was it, an
evolution in her life. Maybe she would visit the United States, travel
with her children, and introduce them to the country where she had lived
with her parents until they returned to the Holy Land, when Aliya was
ten. She smiled, imagining her son and daughter playing on the white
sand beaches in the Florida sun. Normal. They were still young
enough that she could be a mother to them. What would she do at
headquarters? Work as an analyst in collections or as an advisor to the
chief or deputy director? More appealing was a transfer out of
operations and into training. Her hard-earned skills and experience
would be put to good use at the Midrasha, the elite Mossad training
academy. Would she be able to adjust after all these years in the field?
Killing was all she knew.
As she boarded the flight, distracted by thoughts of the future, she failed to notice the man watching her from across the gate.
When she crossed the tarmac and disappeared into the plane, he placed a call.
Nizar Kattan studied the two men from neighboring Mali as they removed the Strela-2 missiles from the back of the Jeep.
A
Soviet-era, shoulder-fired surface-to-air missile, the 9K32 Strela-2
was almost as common in sub-Saharan Africa as RPGs and AK variants.
Nizar knew the Strela had been used to successfully shoot down multiple
airliners over the years. It was a reliable missile system that had
proven its worth, but it was getting old. During the 2002 Mombasa
attacks in Kenya that targeted an Israeli-owned hotel, the al-Qaeda
inspired terrorists had fired two Strelas at an Israeli-chartered Boeing
747. Both missiles had missed the target. Having worked with enough
indigenous talent over the years, Nizar chalked it up to operator error.
Still, he wasn’t going to take chances, which is why four of one of the
Cold War’s most prolific weapons would be used on this mission.
Nizar
and his French accomplice had recruited the two patsies from the ranks
of Nusrat al-Islam, or Jama’at Nasr al-Islam wal Muslimin to the
initiated. The group formed when al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, Ansar
al-Dine, and al-Mourabitoun merged in 2017. With a mandate that called
for killing civilians from Western nations, they would be perfect. Still
reverberating with the echoes of French colonial rule, insurgent groups
in West Africa were ripe for exploitation. Financial incentives
cemented the deal. In this case, Nusrat al-Islam thought they were
striking a blow against their European oppressors in an operation
organized by Nizar, who they believed to be an al-Qaeda facilitator.
Their tasks were simple: They were to transport the four surface-to-air
missiles from Mali into Burkina Faso, where they would link up with
Nizar and the Frenchman and be given their target. Unbeknownst to them,
their other task required them to die.
French special forces
soldiers had proven extremely proficient in decimating the ranks of
Nusrat al-Islam in Africa. Say what you will of the French, their
operators were some of the best in the world. The officials meeting
weekly in the Élysée Palace turned a blind eye to French military and
intelligence actions in Africa. With few war correspondents covering
what was essentially a forgotten conflict, French soldiers targeted and
killed with impunity. Most of the developed world cared little for what
transpired on the Dark Continent. The French government was smart enough
to allow their citizens the freedom to travel, train, and join terror
groups abroad. What they were loath to do within their own borders even
in the wake of the attacks in Nice and Paris, they were more than happy
to do in their former colonies and protectorates, perhaps as a
psychological fuck-you to those who had thrown them out in the wars of
liberation that swept the continent in the mid to late twentieth
century. In Europe, France was a liberal bastion of democratic
socialism. Overseas they hunted their enemies with ruthless efficiency.
Jean-Pierre
Le Drian was capable and resourceful. His former teammates would have
described him as merciless. A former French Foreign Legion maréchal des logis-chef,
he now found employment as a soldier of fortune, a mercenary with an
axe to grind. Rather than face charges for an atrocity in Africa that
was too much for even those fighting an expeditionary counterinsurgency,
the former staff sergeant was on the run. And he was valuable. He knew
just where to look to find black-market weapons and regional guns for
hire in this forgotten corner of Africa.
Le Drian fancied himself
a successor to the Waffen SS commandos who escaped Nazi Germany
following World War II and found refuge in the Legion, fighting in
Indochina in the Devil’s Brigade. Were those stories fact or fiction? It
didn’t matter. Le Drian was guided by the myth. He was his own Devil’s
Brigade of the new century. He knew that he had done what was necessary.
These savages deserved no respect. What was coming next would be easy
for him.
Nizar could not care less about the plight of the
locals. Africa was just as shitty as the places he had left behind in
the Middle East. His assignments in Syria and Ukraine had not been out
of allegiance to Allah but out of a desire to leave that world behind.
He had feigned support and devotion to the cause time and time
again, always wondering how those around him could be so naive. Allah
didn’t care for Nizar. The prophet and the cult that followed him were
no different than adherents to any religion the world over, con artists
in a protection racket just like he had witnessed in his time with the
Bratva, the Russian mafia. Nizar was clear on where real power lay: in
the dollar, the euro, the yuan, gold, diamonds, silver, and now bitcoin.
Enough of those and you could be a living, breathing god in the flesh.
What
Nizar wanted, Allah could not deliver. Praying five times a day in
accordance with the Five Pillars only wasted time. His skill with a
rifle had been his ticket out of Syria and then to Russia and
Montenegro. When his mentor had outlived his usefulness, Nizar had put
him down with a shot from a suppressed Stechkin pistol, just as he’d
been instructed by his then handler, General Qusim Yedid, a Syrian
general who had been found shot in the knee and then poisoned with a
highly toxic substance. Nizar had put enough of the story together to
conclude that the general’s death was the work of James Reece, the man
he currently had in his sights. Nizar had escaped to Moscow and into the
waiting hands of the Russian mafia before he struck out on his own,
finding a home in Montenegro, a way station of illicit trade over
millennia. He enjoyed the protection he received there but sensed it was
time to move on. Trust your instincts. His next kill would allow
him to relocate: Thailand, the Philippines, Argentina. He had not
decided yet. This last payday, James Reece’s death, would make it
possible. It would also be his greatest challenge to date, as his prey
might at this very moment be hunting him.
Fortunately for Nizar,
James Reece was a man with enemies; enemies at senior levels of
governments hostile to the United States, governments with intelligence
services that had close ties to proxy terrorist groups. Nizar briefly
wondered if the information that had led him to Burkina Faso had
originated in Russia or Iran. No matter. It was time to move a pawn on
the board. It was time to draw Reece out of the mountains of North
America and onto the battlefield.
Nizar closed his eyes and took in the dry morning air. He was ready.
The
men were dressed in the uniforms of the Burkina Faso security forces.
They had parked off a red dirt road flanked by the long grasses of the
savanna. Their position gave them a clear line of sight to aircraft
departing Thomas Sankara International Airport.
The retainer
money from Eric Sawyer that had been laundered through a construction
company in Montenegro was not insignificant, but it was not quite
enough. The former Army Ranger and private military company CEO had used
Nizar to eliminate problems. He had died under suspicious circumstances
on his island property in the West Indies, but not before he had set up
a contract to eliminate James Reece. Was the CIA involved in Sawyer’s
death? Nizar could not be sure, but he had his suspicions. Had the
retainer been a few more million, Nizar would have considered taking the
money and not fulfilling the contract. With Sawyer dead, there would
have been no repercussions. Perhaps if he were not on Reece’s radar,
Nizar would have walked. But he was. Nizar suspected that Reece had
killed two of Nizar’s past handlers. The former SEAL was a threat, one
that needed to be dealt with. Putting him in the ground solved two
problems: It eliminated an exceptionally competent professional
targeting him and it unlocked the other half of Sawyer’s money, allowing
Nizar to disappear and to not have to go for his gun every time he
caught movement in the shadows. If he was going to vanish and leave this
life behind, he needed to kill James Reece.
The Frenchman had
come to him courtesy of his new handler, the man in the wheelchair. They
had met in person only once, in Dubrovnik. The coastal Croatian city
was close enough to Montenegro that Nizar could make the trip with
relatively few complications. His potential handler, on the other hand,
had to travel by train and ferry from Turin, in northern Italy, to the
Balkan state on the Adriatic. Nizar had watched him over the course of
four days, looking for signs of surveillance. The man in the wheelchair
was a veteran of the game; he knew Nizar was observing and vetting him.
He was a professional and would have expected nothing less. Nizar found
himself grudgingly gaining respect for the small man who pushed himself
through the streets and hauled himself in and out of taxis and into
restaurants and cafés without asking for help or letting a moment’s
worth of self-pity cross his face. The man wore a different tailored
suit every day, a bold silk ascot around his neck. Like Nizar, he stayed
off cell phones and computers. He was a student of the old school. How
he ended up in the wheelchair was a source of mystery and conjecture to
those who lived and worked in the darker side of the clandestine
economy. It was rumored he had been put there by a sniper.
Having
established that the man was not bait, Nizar sat down with him over
coffee, and they worked out their arrangement. Without Sawyer he needed
someone else who could navigate the underworld, acquire weapons, and
find additional talent. Additional talent would be necessary on this
job. His one and only in-person meeting with his new handler had felt
like a job interview, the small man confined to the chair studying him
with those hawklike eyes, judging, assessing.
Nizar needed a
partner on this mission, one with language abilities and a high level of
martial prowess; the man in the wheelchair had delivered. If James
Reece was as good as his track record would suggest, a second set of
eyes and another scoped rifle in the fight would pay dividends.
Le
Drian glanced at his watch and barked at the two “soldiers.” When
operating in this part of the world it helped to have a French citizen
on your side who also spoke Arabic and Mòoré. That he boasted a
background in the French Foreign Legion, operating almost exclusively in
Africa, made him worth the investment. That he had a beef with the
French government only helped solidify his allegiance.
“Just a few more minutes,” the Frenchman said in flawless Arabic.
“Unless they are delayed,” Nizar responded.
“Yes, always a probability in this part of the world. This is Africa, after all.”
“Are they ready?” Nizar asked.
“Yes. They think they are making a statement, killing the colonial invaders, which, as you know, appeals to me.”
Le
Drian could never set foot in France again, banned to the outer reaches
of what had once been an empire. Even the French Foreign Legion had
standards. Hunting and killing were one thing, torture was another; the
memory of Algeria had yet to fade.
“Get ready,” Nizar said. “Confirm the tail number and—”
The phone in the Frenchman’s pocket chirped. He spoke in Mòoré and hit the End button.
“She’s on board. Plane is taxiing.”
“Good. It is time.”
Aliya leaned back in her seat and took a sip of wine. It was just after 9:00 a.m.
The
plane gained speed and lifted off, clearing the buildings at the east
end of the runway and making a slow turn over the capital city.
The mission was never
over. Not now. Not when she landed in France. Not when she returned to
Israel. Not ever. This was a war and she was a combatant, something that
was driven home in Iraq when the Mossad had detailed her to the Central
Intelligence Agency. Her dual U.S.-Israeli citizenship allowed her to
liaise between the Mossad and CIA on matters pertaining to the state of
Israel. She missed those days. She missed that mission. It was straightforward. She missed the people she had worked with. She missed one in particular.
As
the aircraft banked northward and gained altitude, she looked through
her window. The buildings turned to huts; the semi-paved road of the
capital morphed to red dirt and then to the grasses of the African
plains. She wondered how long it would take them to find the man she had
killed.
Had she not been a trained intelligence officer she
might not have taken note of the green Jeep and faded purple van that
stood out in contrast to the light brown grasses that surrounded them.
At this low altitude she could still discern the outline of four men
looking up at the gigantic plane headed for Europe. Had she not been on
the receiving end of RPGs and Katyusha rockets, she might have mistaken
the four flashes for the glint off a windshield or perhaps a deformity
in the thick plastic window at her shoulder. But she was a trained intelligence officer and she had been on the receiving end of enemy rockets and missiles.
She thought of her two children. She thought of her husband, who had preceded her in death. She closed her eyes.
Though I walk through a valley of deepest darkness, I fear no harm, for You are with me; Your rod and Your staff—they comfort…
For
the briefest of moments, she wondered if she was the intended target
and just before the first missile impacted the fuselage, she determined
that was the only logical conclusion. She was responsible for the
innocent lives on the plane: mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters,
children, and grandparents, who would never take another breath. She
wondered who had betrayed her and she went to her death with the weight
of one hundred and twenty-eight additional souls on her already troubled
conscience.
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