Each Challenger had a crew of two. In each speedboat, with them were six armed commandos. There was room for more, but Colonel Khalq wanted no colliding as they leapt into the knee-deep water and raced up the beach. The firepower of twelve experienced shooters would be more than enough to eliminate the targets.
He did not know that other eyes, aided by powerful night-vision lenses, had noted the speedboats emerging from the blackness of the sea and heading for the beach. Quiet orders were issued inland, not in Farsi but in Hebrew.
The colonel’s men made perfect landfall and were almost in line abreast as they began their race across the sand. They could have been dropped by the snipers much earlier, but the Matkal also had their orders. There was no one in the villa but the dummies, curled up, seemingly asleep, in their beds. The Pasdaran reached the villa, with its open doors and windows, raced inside and ran upstairs. Then the firing started, shattering the quiet of the night, causing others a hundred yards away to jerk from their slumber with yells of alarm.
The other tourists, waking in their villas up and down the beach, dived for cover. The last two drinkers at the beach bar swore and went for the floor, joining the barman.
Inside the target villa there was no resistance. Every bedroom was invaded, the sleeping figures sprayed with bullets. The youngest commando ran into a bedroom as Colonel Khalq rushed out. By the watery-green half-light of his night-vision goggles, he clearly saw the form of a blond youth in white cotton pyjamas, soaked in blood from chin to waist, sprawled across the dripping sheets. He turned and followed his colonel. Job done. Mission accomplished.
The dozen assassins ran back out of the villa the way they had come – through the front doors and windows. The silenced rifles of the snipers made no sound. The panicking tourists heard nothing. Colonel Khalq wondered just before he died why the two Eilati policemen had not been where he had seen them during the afternoon cruise offshore. His query was never answered.
Like the Special Forces men at Chandler’s Court, the Matkal were using hollow-point ordnance. Each round penetrated the running body and then expanded to leave an exit hole the size of a saucer. All but two died. The orders had been quite clear. One, maybe two, had to make the shoreline and scramble aboard the boats. The other ten made no more than fifty of the needed hundred yards.
The young one who had been with the colonel in the boy’s bedroom was a survivor. He realized his comrades were dropping around him but thought for a few seconds they were merely stumbling and wondered why. Then he was knee-deep in seawater, reaching for the hands stretching towards him. The two Challengers, engines roaring, swerved away from the beach and raced for the darkness. No bullets pursued them.
From a bunker above and behind the target villa Avi Hirsch watched the cream smudges of the two wakes fade into the darkness. He had been allowed to leave his number two in command of the station in London so that he could fly home and control the Eilat operation. After all, he had reasoned to Meyer Ben-Avi, the idea had resulted from a talk in a bug-proof room off Palace Walk between himself and a wily old knight who had spent his career with MI6 with which Mossad had done joint operations before.
It took the two Challengers an hour, racing flat out down the Gulf of Aqaba, to rendezvous with the Pasdaran warship. The speedboats, short on fuel, were craned aboard for the cruise home; out of the Red Sea, along the coast of Oman and back to the Strait of Hormuz. But radio waves are faster.
What the debriefed commandos had to report, eavesdropped by the young listeners of Unit 8200 under Beer Sheva, reached Hossein Taeb within an hour. He in turn reported to the Supreme Leader in his frugal apartment on Pasteur Street. There had been heavy loss of life among the commandos when the infidel Jews woke up and fired back. But they had been too late. The English boy was dead – there had been eyes-on identification by one of the Pasdaran survivors.
This fiction was maintained in Israel. Jubilation would have leaked sooner or later. For the media based in Eilat, it was a big story – a clash between two rival criminal gangs on a beach outside the town in the middle of the night. Tourists were reassured. The gangsters had all been caught by the police, who had been tipped off and were waiting for them. Like most media stories, it lived and then it died. Tourists have the delightful habit of going home when their holiday is over. No one had even seen a body – they had all vanished before dawn.
The warmest congratulations were offered to the six actors from the Israeli Film School, especially the lookalike youngster with his blond-dyed locks who had mastered his role as Luke Jennings. And also to the technical department of Spiro Films, who had created the six dummies which, when shot full of bullets, exploded into buckets of very real-looking blood.
The former were also praised for maintaining their fluent English on the flight from Brize Norton to Ovda airport and to the villa. Even Motti had been convinced.
There were celebrations in Tehran, which remained convinced that the destroyer of the Fordow centrifuges was at last rotting in the hell of infidels.
In Moscow the Iranian ambassador asked for a personal reception with the Vozhd. He intimated that he had significant information to impart and that it should be directly to the ears of the master of the Kremlin. When they met it was th
e Russian who was initially sceptical. His mood turned to congratulations and pleasure when the Iranian diplomat disclosed that, during a putative holiday visit to Israel, the cyber-genius Luke Jennings had been assassinated by a group of Iranian commandos.
When the ambassador had left, after politely declining a toast in vodka, the Russian put in a personal call to his spy chief at Yasenevo. Yevgeni Krilov accepted the congratulations with pleasure. But when the call ended he demanded some files from the archive. It is a simple fact that espionage centres the world over keep tabs on their known friends but far more detailed files on their enemies. The archives at Yasenevo contained copious information on known staffers with the CIA, the FBI and other American agencies. It was matched by the information on those in Britain’s MI5 and, even more so, in MI6. And they went back many years.
Sir Adrian Weston had come to attention when he was promoted to head the Eastern Europe department during the Cold War. That might have ended, officially at least, but interest in him had not. His elevation to deputy chief of MI6 was also very much on file. This was the file Yevgeni Krilov called for. When it arrived, he studied it for an hour.
It reported that the then Mr Weston had been quietly but spectacularly successful against the USSR and later against the Russian Federation. It was known that he had recruited two major Soviet and Russian traitors, and the recruitment of others was suspected. It seemed his speciality was deception: misleading, diverting attention, trickery. There was even a reference to a possibility that, after retirement, he had been quietly recalled as adviser to the new British Prime Minister.
Was he back in harness? Everything that had recently gone wrong for Russia and her allies bore the hallmark of the man whose file in front of Krilov was an inch thick. And there was a photo, another shot snatched through a buttonhole camera at a diplomatic reception years earlier. His suspicion hardened into near-certainty. It had been Adrian Weston who had visited Fritsch at the Vaduz Bank – he had been photographed crossing the lobby, and the photo in the file was obviously of the same man. But he had clearly not swallowed the bait. Disaster had followed disaster. Krilov stared at the photo and began to have doubts about the Gulf of Eilat massacre.
Sue Jennings had enjoyed the stay of the six visitors from Israel. She did not know why it was necessary that they be there, but she trusted Sir Adrian enough to believe him when he told her he had in mind a plan to safeguard her and her children.
She noted the resemblance between herself and the blonde woman and between her sons and the young curly-headed boys. She was not foolish enough to believe that there was no point to this. There had to be some form of impersonation in the offing, but she did not know why. Nor did she need to know. That is how it is in the world of smoke and mirrors.
But she had enjoyed their stay. It made a change from the monotonous routine. They had stayed only a couple of days, observing her and her sons closely throughout that time, then they were gone.
That apart, in the embrace of the SAS captain Harry Williams she was enjoying love-making she had never experienced nor even imagined in her previous life. Her second son, Marcus, was perfectly content at his new school. He had been named captain of the Colts XI cricket team, and that had brought him the attentions of his first girlfriend.
What Sue did not know was exactly what was happening in the computer wing, where her elder son, Luke, as self-contained at a screen as ever, spent hours tapping away, in a world where it seemed no one, not even Dr Hendricks, could follow him.
It was that same Dr Hendricks who, on a supremely hot day at the beginning of August, withdrew to his own private office and dialled the phone number of Sir Adrian.
‘He’s done it,’ he blurted when the connection was made. ‘He’s bloody well done it. He’s gone through the lot … firewalls, air gap, the bloody lot. It has defeated everyone for years, but we have them. And Tehran has not even noticed the penetration.’
Sir Adrian could have told Avi Hirsch, now back in post, but he was a modest man and gave the present to Mrs Marjory Graham. The Prime Minister secured a very private line to the Israeli ambassador instead and alerted him, in the knowledge that Israel’s Prime Minister would not be displeased. Then she ordered that the access codes to the main computerized database of FEDAT be passed to Jerusalem and to Washington.
The harvest that these codes permitted to emerge from the Iranian nuclear research department in Tehran proved that both leaders, Israeli and American, had been right. Iran had consistently been lying to the International Atomic Energy Agency and thus the world. Nuclear research had never ceased, not even slowed. In the light of the FEDAT harvest, the yield from the archive raid on Shorabad paled to a fraction of what had been concealed. It caused uproar.