Proviso Five

Copyright © 2010 by Fred Cradler.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

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ISBN: 978-1-4502-4926-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4502-4928-7 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4502-4927-0 (e)

iUniverse rev. date: 03/28/2019

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Prologue Splashdown Minus 81 Days The Negev

Chapter One Splashdown Minus 1 Boston

Chapter Two Splashdown Aboard Air Force One

Chapter Three Splashdown Plus 1 48°38’N 127°11’W

Chapter Four Splashdown Plus 2 E1 A1 Flight Seventeen

Chapter Five Splashdown Plus 3 Point X-Ray

Chapter Six Splashdown Plus 4 Tel Aviv

Chapter Seven Splashdown Plus 5 Washington

Chapter Eight Splashdown Plus 6 Giants’ Graveyard

Chapter Nine Splashdown Plus 7 The Situation Room

Chapter Ten Splashdown Plus 8 The Beltway

Chapter Eleven Splashdown Plus 11 Room 401

For Sheilah, my Bodhisattva

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My deepest gratitude goes to:

Ethan Fredric for creating the front and back covers and for his technical support

To Julia and Elyce, who watched over the ms during my travels

To Steve and Caren, who showed me the rainbow path back there in Boston

And to the Transcendental Meditation Society.

PROLOGUE

SPLASHDOWN MINUS 81 DAYS

THE NEGEV

THERE IT IS.

The eyes of General Saul Ben-David, Deputy Director of Mossad, Israeli Intelligence, followed the captain’s gesture out through the helicopter windscreen. As the flight of ten helicopter gunships skimmed over the last dune, three quonset huts appeared a hundred meters below, a small, silent outpost in the Old Testament wilderness of the Negev Desert. Ben-David scrutinized the shapes in the wind-driven silence swirling around them, then turned back to the force commander.

You were right, he half yelled to the captain over the chopper’s roar. Whatever happened down there is over.

And whoever did it was lucky … or well informed, his captain said against the racket. They hit during the one-hour our satellite computer was down for servicing. Otherwise we’d have seen it all. By the time it was back on task, nothing was moving except snakes and scorpions. We waited until they missed their radio check, then went to Condition Aleph.

Ben-David thought of the red telephone ringing on his desk, then a Mach 2 fighter flight from Tel Aviv down to Uvda airbase. There he had been handed combat gear and driven out to the waiting helicopters.

One hundred miles overhead, the Jericho-10 killer satellite had been re-tasked into geosynchronous orbit over the camp since the alert. It busily projected back to Mossad’s computer enhancers, thermal photos alternating between small-scale landscapes reaching west to the Sinai and high-resolution close-ups that were even now projecting rank and insignia on the uniforms of this recon force. Meanwhile, the Jericho remained at battle stations, its laser ready to destroy any hostile satellite intruding on its one hundred miles of viewing space.

He listened in his headset as the force commander turned back to his flight and issued final instructions. The gunships fanned out into an assault formation descending in a curve around the huts, settling onto the desert floor as their props tossed whirls of sand into the air. Before the pilots had cut their engines, the squad of infantry in each plane was out, scrambling into skirmish lines facing the encampment two hundred meters away.

Ben-David waited until the Negev’s wind had blown away some of the propellers’ disturbance, then opened his door, dropped onto the sand and peered out at the forlorn assembly of corrugated metal housing shimmering in the distance. He turned to watch the commander form the assault patrol and signal the advance.

Open the scrambler to Tel Aviv, he said to the pilot, reaching into the plane for his AKM assault rifle. He waited for the man’s nod, then shifted to watch the first line of infantry moving cautiously toward the hutments. On their right and left, other squads duplicated the run, crouch, and cover of a town mop-up operation.

From behind them came the sound of breeches clanging shut on the reserve squad’s mobile-mounted HS 404 automatic cannons. All of this prowess and firepower, he thought, will mean very little if someone gets careless about tripwires and the whole place vaporizes into an oil-field fire.

An hour later Ben-David saw the all-clear signal from the last hut 400 meters away. He rose from his position, mindful of the absence of gunfire as the force commander ran up, his eyes bright with the adrenaline of the hunt … too bright, thought Ben-David – it must be bad.

Everything’s secured, General, the force leader gasped in a breathless staccato. No hostiles. Professor Herschmann is in the last hut… alive … looks like exposure more than anything else. The students are dead. We’re going through the roster now … you should see them, General … whoever did this was an animal! I never –

– the worst you’ve ever seen, Captain? Ben-David regarded the man steadily.

The force leader’s rasping breath slowed. His shoulders lowered as he returned Ben-David’s stare. If the general will follow me, he said, measured now but still working at it.

Ben-David gave him a gentle nod, then turned to the pilot. Give Tel Aviv an ‘all clear.’ Tell them I’ll report within the hour. Now, Captain, he said, slinging his weapon, shall we try to discover what happened here?

They moved to the first hut, the captain pushing the door aside as Ben-David entered and slipped on a pool of blood not quite dry and caught himself on the edge of an overturned desk. The Mossad radioman lay curled on his side in a fetal position. His shoulder and the side of his head were riddled with bullet holes. Beneath a layer of sand the radio lay smashed on the floor. File cabinets, ransacked, then tossed over, formed a misshapen battlement Ben-David stepped over as he approached the body and knelt, his eyes running from the head and torso, down to the dead man’s legs.

Look at those kneecaps, he said to the captain, waiting.

Yes. Shot away. His face, too. The captain stared grimly back at what was left of the lines of writhing agony fixed in the expression. He must have held out, the man said. All that shooting into the face. They were infuriated at his courage."

Where’s his weapon? Ben-David surveyed the wrecked room.

Missing, came the reply. "So was his issue of magazines and silencer.

This is not the work of a strike team, not even a patrol, Ben-David said, glaring out. Something else happened here.

And now they have a sub-machinegun with silencer and two hundred rounds of ammo. The captain’s glance went out of the window.

Ben-David shook his head slowly, musing as he rose and followed the officer to the next set of buildings, a barracks. What were they looking for, and why in the commo shack? The transmission codes?

These were off duty, said the captain as they approached the barracks door, guarded by Mossad troopers. Talk among them stopped as the two officers went through the door.

Three male corpses in various stages of dress sprawled over bunks. Two had been putting on their desert boots. One boy, tall and scrawny, with the beginning of a proud moustache, lay tossed back over his bunk, his hands still dragging at his pants. Each body contained lines of bullet holes crisscrossing each other along beds, bodies, the walls.. Ben-David idly tapped the breech of his weapon, his eyes sweeping the room, lips working in puzzlement.

And you found no sign of others? He watched the captain’s nod. This begins to look like an abortive terrorist operation. One of them drugged up, of course, and wanting a massacre. But where were the rest? And why would they want the transmission codes?

The two men left the detail placing the mangled corpses into body bags and approached the motor pool. As they were about to enter, a soldier ran up to the captain and handed him a sheet of paper. He read it, his face hardening in apparent disbelief, then gave the message to Ben-David, shaking his head.

Well, that explains the radio hut, Ben-David said, reading once more, then folding the paper and putting it in his vest pocket.

It probably also explains what’s next, said the captain as they approached the garage-like hut of the motor pool. Brace yourself, he said to Ben-David as they entered.

Bodies hung from, lay on, grasped at, and sprawled over equipment and a single Land Rider desert truck, its dashboard shot full of holes. Six of them, young men and women, their bodies stitched by dozens of holes, were frozen in the positions the machinegun had found them as they had heard the gun’s muted chugging and tumbled from their sleeping bags and grabbed for weapons.

The canvas tent floor was stiff and slippery with the drying blood that had streamed toward seams and into the sand beneath. Brass ammo casings littered the area. The feet of flies that had already feasted on blood left lines of tracks across dead faces.

Now she has all of guns and ammo she wants, said the captain, watching Ben-David. His general’s face was unreadable.

There were two Land Riders on the inventory, Ben-David said. One is missing. Waving his beret at insects, Saul Ben-David knelt to one corpse, a boy barely twenty, who eyes stared wide in final horror, mouth gaping to take more of the sand that half filled it. I wonder how she managed to spray the room like this and not hit the second truck," he said.

So lucky, muttered the captain. To pick that one hour that the satellite was down, then go crazy enough to do … this without disabling her own escape vehicle….

Where was their security during all of this, Ben-David said tightly now, lowering the head and rising. "We left them weapons and a Mossad radio team,showed them how to set up a perimeter and run a guard mount. Silenced weapons or not, the sentries should have heard some-thing. Where the fuck were the sentries!"

They posted guards … I think, said the captain, his face a mix of apology and disbelief. To Ben-David’s frown he gestured outside. You’d better see for yourself.

He led Ben-David out behind the hut to a pup tent erected in the lee of the wall, a shelter against the wind. It was crisscrossed with bullet holes.

Tear it off, Ben-David growled at one of the two men assigned to the site. The soldier leaped to comply to the anger finally edging into his leader’s voice.

The young woman lay on top, her naked back arched away from her partner as if in a spasm of ecstasy, her pelvis joined to the man by their organs and at least twenty holes puckered with dried blood spattering out to the limbs they had seemed to thrust out in a final ejaculation of life.

They probably didn’t hear the silencer working, the captain said, his eyes moving among the sentries, daring them even a wrinkled eyebrow of gallows humor.

Ben-David looked at the machine guns that had been tossed aside in the blankets. Captain, he said, staring off at the desert.

Yessir.

It will be in the highest tradition of Mossad and a great personal favor to the sovereign state of Israel if the public never hears … how these two young people died. Will your unit accept that trust?

The captain returned the look of somber regard, then turned around to his soldiers. Macabre novelty had worn off now, and their blank faces stared in the numb introspection of final understanding - it could just as well have been one of them.

Their sacred trust, Saul Ben-David, said their captain. He motioned for the burial sacks, turned to follow the general, heading for the last building.

The last section served as a mess hall and dayroom, he said, catching up.

Tables and chairs, a field stove and food stores were arranged in shelves along the walls. On the end of one table lay a CD player and a pile of discs. Ben-David picked up one, its small, garish cover proclaiming a digitally-resurrected performance by some group called The Grateful Dead. He tossed it back to the table and looked up at the officer. What about the teacher?

Professor Herschmann must have been studying his data, said the commander as he reached for the door. Heard the commotion, maybe even saw the shooting. He probably tried to find a weapon somewhere. We found him in the motor pool. He must have collapsed there when he found ….

How is he, said Ben-David as they brushed past two soldiers, into a walled-off area of draped plastic sheets holding a cot and its occupant.

Critical but stable, the captain replied, dismissing the two medical attendants, who checked saline/ dextrose bags above a wizened body, then left. He’s dehydrated and in shock, he added as they look down on the patient.

The old one seemed as though reclaimed from the desert, an artifact left behind by some dying civilization. Tufts of white hair sprayed out from a scalp covered with liver spots. Lines furrowed the forehead in permanent concern. Even the blanket could not conceal a body pared down to bone and sinew. The eyelids fluttered open as Ben-David sat on the edge of the cot, took a frail hand in his.

So. Now you’re here, the ancient voice rasped, the eyes glaring out their indictment.

How do you feel, Professor, Ben-David said gently.

Bereft, the answer came like a desert whisper. Yes … ‘bereft’ would do. The voice suddenly blurted out a gasping wail – How could you, General! How could you!

Ben-David motioned for the captain to leave, bent to the old man anxiously as the plastic curtains parted, then fell back into place. You knew the dangers the moment your core drilling turned up crude petroleum instead of rock lessons, he tried to say gently, but his jaws tightened. "My god, man, you radioed for assistance in the clear. You even said, ‘Oil!’ It is a miracle that OPEC monitors didn’t pick it up.

"If we had brought in the Israeli army to protect a massive oil find instead of what looked like our supply chopper, how long would it have been before an OPEC satellite would have been directing a SCUD attack down on your heads! We were even afraid to increase the number of people in camp by those three radiomen in the event the thing was counting heads!"

But eight weeks! the man gasped. His head turned away, eyes staring blindly at the sand-brown camouflage curtains.

"And if we had let you come back, Professor, Ben-David said, hesitated as he wiped sweat from his brow, how long before one of those kids would have let something slip? Then we could have chosen between watching OPEC ignite our new oil fields or holy war!"

The head turned slowly to him. But that’s no longer a problem, hmm, Mister Mossad?

Ben-David’s head slumped to his chest for a moment. He rubbed his forehead. We did a thorough background on every one of those students, Ben-David said urgently. Their credentials – but the other was looking blankly overhead.

He could have destroyed the radio, the old man said, still staring upward. Disabled the other truck, and just left. Not… this!

She was new, Ben-David replied softly"

"She! Oy Vey!"

"The only person missing from the roster, and a twenty-mile satellite thermal scan has turned up nothing alive or … cooling. So it was probably the missing student, some breathless trainee out on a routine operative’s field test – and she walks into the greatest secret since the Manhattan Project.

"She is trapped, quarantined here with you, and the waiting begins. Week after week. She thinks to radio out her extraction and recovery signal, perhaps an innocent message to the university that actually alerts her monitoring control that she must come in. But now the three Mossad men have a twenty-four-seven watch on your signal equipment.

"Even without such stringent security, she knows that any transmission from here without the initial authentication code letters will be considered by Mossad as either an SOS from you or a hostile transmission.

"Disable one of the two trucks then, and escape with the other – but armed students now guard the motor pool. And so she must wait.

"The end of the second month approaches, and finally this trainee can stand it no more. She grabs her rifle and bayonet, waits until early morning as she has been trained, then enters the communications room. Perhaps she tries first some subterfuge to get the authentication code letters from the guard, then sex. But he is Mossad and only laughs at this foolish college kid.

"Suddenly she brandishes her weapon, fright filling her eyes, and the soldier realizes he has made a terrible mistake. He surrenders his machinegun and silencer to her demand, waiting for an opening as he complies with her order to lie on the floor.

"She tells him to give her the transmission codes. He refuses, and, as she has been taught, manages to aim the silenced Uzi well enough to shoot off one of his kneecaps. This is when the sentries should have been alarmed, for no one incurs that wound without screaming. She makes her demand again, but he only writhes on the floor, still crying out in agony.

"She takes off the other kneecap. The man’s pain pulls him over on his side in a tight ball, but still he gives her no code. Panicked now and probably enraged with frustration and fear, the woman points the weapon toward his screaming face and holds down the trigger, probably until the gun falls silent and empty.

She reloads and heads for the barracks and her next three kills. By the time this youngster reaches the motor pool and those kids sleeping with the trucks, Ben-David said quietly, she is probably sobbing hysterically and through her tears shooting at anything that moves.

Herschmann’s eyes looked blank for several moments, surveying some inner landscape of surrender. Then he blazed out at Ben-David. The dead and I, we have earned the right to know, he said huskily. How much longer must you need for this master plan of yours to begin! How many more children must be sacrificed!

The general sighed, his head bowed. Then he took the old man’s hand in his, an expression of hope piercing the mask of too much responsibility held too long. I tell you this … because you have earned it. But you must be silent. This new American president –

He won, then, the professor whispered. This Lattimore?

He …it depends on him now. Your secret…he will use it well, and soon.

The professor managed a wry mouth. A return to Eden, no doubt.

Perhaps not that much, Ben-David said gently, but a permanent stabilization of the Mid-East.

The old eyes were closed now, Herschmann’s breathing growing shallow and regular. Will there be a place in it to bury my students, he whispered, then fell asleep.

The general watched him with tightened lips for a moment, placed the veined and wrinkled hand gently on the blanket, stood and left the room. He strode out past the medics and made the long walk to his helicopter. Ben-David motioned for the pilot to leave his station and picked up the radio receiver. Give me the Prime Minister, please, he said into it.

There was a crackle of static, then a voice clear, deep and full of gentle authority. Well, Saul, what do you have for us, it said.

Mister Prime Minister, he replied with clipped formality. All dead but the professor. He’s in shock, but he’ll be all right. He gave the man a moment, staring out on the killing ground, then continued. One missing – a mole. They must have planted her –

Her?

"One Zelda Metzenbaum, would you believe? Who names his daughter Zelda? I imagine you’ll be speaking to Immigration about this.

They plant her as a freshman. Three years later, she finds herself on some damn geology exercise that turns into a historic oil find. I think the quarantine panicked her. She went berserk with a machinegun.

Who did this, Saul?

Ben-David shrugged. She was Semitic – had to be for the DNA screening. But you can’t bio-test for politics. Perhaps entrapment, a lover. Or she could have sold out to the Russians, the French – maybe the Americans!

Saul.

All right, all right. But tell our foreign ministry people, when Mossad catches up with that little bitch … she won’t be available for trade-offs!

The radio stared back at him silently, then spoke with the stiff civility of a bank manager. You’ll use drug interrogation first, I presume.

In the distance Mossad troopers carried jerry cans of fuel toward the buildings, which would shortly become the burned ruins of a bandit attack hiding the precious oil cap. Ben-David wiped sweat onto his pants leg and cleared his throat.

I told the professor a little about Lattimore.

I wonder if that was necessary, Saul.

Ben-David watched the body bag detail bringing their burdens to the helicopters. It seemed so at the time, he said.

Well, the plan will be in effect before he recovers, said the voice. Where do you think she headed?

Our satellite covers a sixty-kilometer radius from the site. Since we’ve detected no vehicle, seen no explosions, we can assume that she didn’t hit a mine and no border unit put a missile into her, Ben-David said, spitting sand.

If the woman knows no one can make it over the mountains to the south and west without maps and provisions, he continued, she’ll have to try for El Arish, on the Med. If she makes it through those sand seas to the north, she’s probably headed home via Cairo."

Then within the next day or two, the radio said, either the site will take a missile hit, perhaps nuclear – or the state of Israel will receive some monstrous blackmail demand.

Blackmail is my guess, Ben-David said. Only a fool would bury all of this oil in a thousand years of radioactivity. And I wouldn’t count on a quick gambit – they’ll want to play this piece for all it’s worth, and that might mean a wait.

D-Day will have to be moved up, said the radio, more to itself. Then the voice hesitated, softened. Saul, you can’t leave those children to the desert.

I know, Uri.

But the public can’t kn –

We have a large … cold storage facility at headquarters. A sigh of wind whirled a dust devil about the legs of Saul Ben-David. It broke and drifted away, fell back to earth and disappeared among all the other grains of sand.

Yes, came the PM’s voice. Then a state burial.

On D-Day. said Ben-David. At least we can give them that.

CHAPTER ONE

SPLASHDOWN MINUS 1

BOSTON

AS SOON AS THE DOORS opened on the empty pressroom, with the few of them down there at the other end in front of the big TV, she knew it was bad. Stepping out of the elevator, down the aisle between desks emptied by the new journalism, and past work stations of the surviving top writers, she tried to tally up the screen’s dead by the depth of their silence. She edged through them to the front and asked the nearest shoulder what had happened.

Hey, Hemingway, the shoulder said down to her, eyes on the screen. London. Some kind of explosive fires, napalm … phosphorus … something. On the West End subway… timed it just right – everyone going home from work. Nine hundred confirmed dead, but dozens of trains are trapped between fires … so hot nobody can get to them.

She stiffened and swallowed hard as faces and places of her favorite town rose in the mind, wavered in the screen’s fiery images of flames shooting up and out through subway vents onto streets above. But the nausea and anger would have to wait until she and the managing editor of the Boston Globe finished their upcoming shouting match and she headed out for a seat closest to the TV of the nearest bar to see if three Bloody Mary’s would dull the pain of bearing witness yet again to the moods of Dame Fortune.

CNN began the headlines recycle, and the shoulder turned to join the movement back to work, leaving Tracy and the other latecomers to stare and listen, then turn to each other, too blank and dry-mouthed to do more than shake their heads and walk away.

Moving across to the glass-walled office, she could see his face, flat and grim before a desk TV. Part of the stormy emotions behind that furrowed and bushy brow were reserved for her, of course. But Tracy had stopped being afraid after that night in Miami, with the acid inches from her face. Holding her scarred and beat up old attache’ case tightly to her side, she knocked and entered at his wave and sat down. Mister Presnell, she said.

The editor’s welcome smile ended well before the corners of his mouth, his eyes still on the set. It went to commercials and he turned to stare through her, the smile gone. "Smoke should get a thousand more before they put out those fires.

Al-Qaida only had to kill a couple hundred to get the Spanish out of Iraq, he said to something behind her. This oughtta’ do it for the Brits. That’ll leave us and a tribe a’ Zulus in the Grand Coalition. He recovered from his thoughts, focused on her, remembering. His faced softened in genuine concern. The Times doesn’t use the usual workday hours, does it?

Nossir. At least not the year I worked there. They were probably all in the middle of their shift, she replied, waiting.

Well …that’s good then.… His voice drifted off into silence. The NASA assignment working out okay, he asked as if making small talk before they got around to her request for the meeting.

His premier investigative reporter and nationally syndicated columnist gave up on the hope that a perfect figure, raven hair falling seductively at her shoulders and a shampoo ad face would soften up this candidate for Mt. Rushmore. She sighed. Yeah. I’ve just about completed it, except for –

– and what does it conclude, he said deadpanned.

All investigative agencies have drawn a blank, she said. An inside job is only a remote possibility. NASA can’t even identify a sector responsible for the loss, or so they say.

C.Y.A, Presnell muttered, more to himself, then fixed those dead eyes on her again. In other words, he said archly, "nothing more than we knew going into this assignment. Those tapes have been missing for years.

They are very important tapes, an electronic archive of the entire shuttle program, he said. Now if the CIA, the NSA, and the FBI can do nothing but cover their asses, I should think that a veteran correspondent of the Mid-East and the jungles of Miami’s underworld….

For a man who usually talked in grunts and facial semaphores, it was a speech that drifted off into contemplation of the end game. Fuck it, she thought, and joined the fray. While I was down there, she said, I came upon some extremely important –

– more important than the job I gave you to do? Presnell was breathing harder, the smile replaced by tight lips. I called Greenbelt, Maryland ‘bout three weeks ago, he said. "Ya’ know, where they store all those tapes that were stolen? ‘Asked them how my reporter was getting on down there.

Know what they told me? He slumped back in his chair, righteous anger creeping into his face. ‘Oh, she finished up here a month ago,’ they said. Hadn’t seen you since. No return visits to double check some point in your article or get the spelling of a name right. Nothing. Where were you, I wondered."

Mister Presnell –

So I got worried ‘cuz I liked … like you, he growled. "I started leaving calls on your cell phone, on your pager. I get paid about a thousand dollars an hour to run this place yet I’m making my own calls because I don’t want some clerk trying to play Missing Persons Bureau. But you’re not in Green Belt or NASA headquarters in Washington or even in goddamn Cape Canaveral, watchin’ the goddamn crocodiles scare the goddam tourists and vice goddamn versa!"

They’re alligators, not crocodiles, Ballard said and watched at least another ten points diastole rush into a face that couldn’t have gotten much redder. Mister Presnell, I’m asking you for six minutes before you fire –

– six?

I timed it. It’s about President-elect Lattimore, Sir, she said, proffering an attache case as she watched Presnell’s eyes carefully ignore her breasts touching the edge of his desk.

The election is over, Miss Ballard, he said, behind formality. Lattimore will celebrate his inauguration tonight because he won an election we’re covering with five reporters.

None of whom know about a certain wastebasket in Key West and a secret meetings that I photographed Lattimore at.

Presnell sighed, scanned the case. You don’t deserve six minutes on a day like this. His eyes drifted off. Besides that, he nodded over at the set, "one of our wire service boys got himself detained by Israeli intelligence for asking too many questions about three truckloads of body bags entering Mossad headquarters.

"Then we’re trying to find out why the Chinese and the Russians were shooting at each other for ten hours last night up at some border town south of Vladivostok. And maybe you can tell me why the People’s Republic of China has arrested several of its own internal security officers, according to South Korean intelligence. And, of