The Fox

His precautions were meticulous; he took no risks. But high in a garret window overlooking the latrines of the coffee shop, a young Mossad probationer had the boring chore of keeping the dead-letter drop under observation. He saw Motti make his drop and reported in. Hours later, he saw the swarthy collector slip past the latrines, turn the corner into the deserted alley and make the pick-up. He reported back again.

By nightfall, the swarthy man had crossed the Allenby Bridge back into Jordan, the matchbox was on its way to Tehran and into the possession of Hossein Taeb, head of intelligence for the Pasdaran. Outside Tel Aviv, Ben-Avi, indulging his taste for very old Scotch whisky, was sipping a Chivas Regal as he watched the last glimmer of a dying sun across the darkling Mediterranean.

He had done what he could. Now he could only wait. In espionage, there is an awful lot of waiting.

Chapter Fourteen

HOSSEIN TAEB, ALTHOUGH appointed Pasdaran head of intelligence, was neither a soldier nor an intelligence officer, nor had he ever been. He was a cleric, steeped in the theology of the Shia branch of Islam and utterly devoted to the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, and the revolution that had governed Iran since the fall of the Shah. The report from one of his only two sources inside the Israeli intelligence machine caused him to be consumed with rage.

He knew exactly what had been done to the great facility at Fordow and who had done it. He had been present at the extremely restricted briefing at which Iran’s top nuclear physicists had explained how many years it would take, and how many resources, even to approach the level of what had been lost at Fordow and the stored weapons-grade uranium that was no more.

He knew that years earlier, Israel, impressed by the skills and wealth creation of California’s Silicon Valley, had decided to create her own equivalent. His department had watched the creation of the cyber-city that transformed the once dusty desert township of Beer Sheva into an enclave of gleaming tower blocks. His experts had informed him of the steady recruitment of the finest young brains of his enemy, Israel, to live and work either above ground or below, in Unit 8200 – the best ultra-secret cyber-spy agency this side of Cheltenham or Fort Meade. And he knew Iran had nothing to match it.

But he also knew that it was not the teams of brilliant young Jews at Beer Sheva who were responsible for the destruction of Fordow. Yes, they had penetrated the master computer and primed it with those lethal instructions. But someone else had given them the access codes which they had tried for so long to discover – and had failed to do so. Now Moscow had kindly informed the Supreme Leader of the identity of the person who really had achieved the impossible – a youth from England who must surely rank as the most dangerous cyber-hacker on earth. And he had come to Israel to be rewarded with a free holiday by the waters of the Gulf of Eilat. The cleric summoned his head of operations.

Colonel Mohammed Khalq was not a cleric; he was a born and lifelong soldier and killer. As a youth he had joined the Basij, the Pasdaran reserve of eager volunteers who, in the Iran–Iraq war against Saddam Hussein had hurled themselves in suicidal droves on to the Iraqi minefields along the border to die for Allah and Iran.

His dedication and courage had attracted attention. He moved from the Basij into the Pasdaran regular forces, rising through the ranks in operation after operation, serving in South Lebanon with the Iranian-trained Hezbollah and more recently with Assad’s forces in Syria. He read the report from the Mossad renegade and his gaze met Hossein Taeb’s.

‘He must die,’ said the cleric.

‘Of course,’ said the soldier.

‘I wish you to take personal command,’ said Taeb. ‘I will secure all the necessary clearances. But do not delay. The English party will not be there for long.’

Colonel Khalq knew at once the kill operation would have to be mounted from the sea and that he had an enormous range of sea-going options. The Pasdaran is not only an army within an army, a cohort of secret police, a national enforcer, a purveyor of terror and a guarantor of national obedience. It also has its own air force and navy, its own widespread industrial and commercial empire and its own merchant fleet. Khalq left his superior and went to confer with the general commanding all Pasdaran ships, military and commercial.

The selected vessel was the SS Mercator, formerly bearing an Iranian name, now retitled and flagged out of Valletta, Malta. That tiny republic inside the European Union appreciates the fees it can charge for registering merchant vessels whose cargoes it never needs to examine.

The selection was aided by the fact the Mercator was only a 2,000-ton tramp steamer, scruffy and rust-streaked, unlikely to draw attention to herself as she chugged from port to port with her small cargoes. More, she was currently lying empty in Bandar Abbas, in the deep south of Iran.

The first task was to replace her skipper and entire crew with a team of combat-experienced fighting seamen drawn from the aggressive torpedo boats that regularly harass Western shipping in the Persian Gulf. This was achieved by Ali Fadavi, head of the Pasdaran Navy, within twenty-four hours. The Mercator was then loaded with a cargo of planks, poles and beams, with papers showing they had been ordered by a construction company in Aqaba, Jordan, a thriving port a few miles across the bay from Eilat in Israel.

To cover the last five miles from Aqaba to Eilat the colonel commandeered two of the fastest speedboats in the world, Bradstone Challengers, of which Iran had recently acquired a dozen for no explained purpose. Hammering at over fifty knots across flat water, they are normally the playthings of the rich and self-indulgent. Colonel Khalq had two driven south to be hoisted on to the Mercator with their crews. The racers were hidden beneath tarpaulins on the deck-covers.

Now, he needed his men. He chose twelve marine commandos; all experienced in shore-landings and skilled with small arms at close quarters. The entire party went south by helicopter to meet the Mercator, already at sea, twenty miles offshore, in the Strait of Hormuz. Led by Colonel Khalq, the attack party rappelled from the choppers on to the foredeck of the Mercator and were shown to their cramped quarters among the timbers of the cargo. It would be a five-day run with labouring engine to the Gulf of Aqaba.

Motti in his report had related that security around the villa was assigned to the Eilat police, which had allocated a rotating force of two officers in order not to cramp the holiday of their country’s guests. That was what Motti had been told as the Mossad team flew north. It was not quite true. Meyer Ben-Avi had in fact assigned twenty men from the very special Special Forces unit called the Sayeret Matkal.

The Matkal usually operate outside the borders of the republic and are skilled in penetrating unseen and unheard anywhere in the Middle East and remaining there until they go operational. Their speciality is invisibility, but when they choose to become visible they can be very lethal indeed.

The Mercator had passed the port of Aden and entered the narrows of the Bab-al-Mandab when she was finally identified. For the Israeli aircraft overhead it was a question of elimination. She was the right size, her Maltese flag fooled no one and her wake showed she was churning along as fast as she could. A quick check in the office of the harbourmaster of Aqaba revealed that this was her destination. There were canvas-shrouded humps on her deck and the Jordanian constructor which had supposedly ordered a cargo

of timber had gone into receivership several months earlier. Hossein Taeb’s intelligence unit was seemingly long on motive but a tad short on detail. After Jeddah, the SS Mercator was monitored all the way to Aqaba.

When the ship reached her destination she did not berth in the inner harbour but moored in the roads. Using the Mercator’s davits, the two speedboats were lowered into the water and tethered beside her. Fully fuelled, they could cross the five miles to the Gulf of Eilat in minutes, then race south to make rendezvous with the much larger and more heavily armed Pasdaran warship steaming north.

Before leaving Iran, Colonel Khalq had instructed the agent who had serviced Motti’s dead-letter box, now in Jordan and posing as a tourist, to cross the land border into Israel. Thence, still a harmless tourist, he would head south to Eilat and reconnoitre the villa described by Motti, south of the resort and close to the bar that had once been run by Rafi Nelson.

Watching through field glasses from the shore, the agent saw the Mercator arrive and, in a rented boat, went out to confer with his commander.

In the captain’s cabin he was able to describe the target villa minutely. He had seen the two Eilat policemen on guard at the gate. He had not seen the Sayeret Matkal hidden inside the villa or in the surrounding landscape.

He had noted the English party of six: three men, the mother and her two sons, one of whom, shy and nervous, had to be encouraged into the warm blue water. He had not produced a camera near the villa but was able to create accurate sketches, which he now passed to Colonel Khalq. The colonel planned his attack for the following night.

It was two in the morning, the hour of the night assassin, when the two speedboats slipped their moorings and eased out into the gulf. There was no need for speed – that blistering pace would be needed for the escape down the gulf to the Red Sea. Since darkness had fallen at nine the previous evening, the lights of the tourist magnet of Eilat city had blazed to the west and the music from a hundred bars, restaurants, clubs and parties could be heard across the silent sea. Behind them, the industrial port of Aqaba, once liberated from the Turks by Lawrence and the Hashemites, was quieter and, by 2 a.m., asleep. The powerful but muzzled engines of the two Challengers made little more than a burble and they drove the speedboats westwards at under ten knots.

The scattered lights of the out-of-town villas came into sight south of the town, set in their own grounds. Earlier, in daylight, crouching in the rigid inflatable that served as the Mercator’s lifeboat, should its crew ever have to abandon ship, the colonel had mingled with holidaymakers and cruised off the beach, noting the location of the target house. A lone beach bar acted as a marker. They would make landfall a dozen yards to one side of it, with a clear hundred-yard run to the target.