Pandora's grave

There he was-she caught sight of him again, working his way diagonally toward the parked Jeep. Sarah quickened her pace and began to close the gap…

Something was happening. Tex knew that much. The bat leveyha had left abruptly, making her way to the entrance of the resort before he lost sight of her in the crowd. Harry’s attitude had changed, tension pervading his body language.

Tex was laying on his stomach on the thick carpet of the hotel room, about five feet back from the opened balcony door. With the bipod-mounted FN-FAL, he could easily cover the courtyard from there.

“Kill them wherever you find them,” the young man whispered, reciting the sura under his breath, “and drive them out from whence they drove you out.”

He opened his eyes, calmed by the sacred words, and began scanning the crowd once more. A mindless sea of licentious Western tourists, careless of their danger. Invaders in the house of Islam…

And then he saw him. A big man, dressed in shorts and a tank top, a photographer’s vest over the upper half of his body, pushing his way through the crowd. Moving with purpose.

His calm evaporated like the morning dew. “Ya, Allah,” he gasped. Oh, God. He reached in his pocket for the cellphone, his fingers shaking uncontrollably.

There was no time. The realization smote him with the cold certainty of death. The Jew would be next to the vehicle in a few moments.

His trembling hand moved forward, fingers closing around the detonator…

“Something’s wrong,” Yossi observed, his binoculars aimed at the young Arab in the Jeep.

“This is MARKSMAN ONE, requesting permission to terminate.”

There was a moment’s silence, then Gideon’s voice came over the headset. “Execute.”

Almost in the same instant, the Jeep vanished in a fireball, the explosion’s concussive force spreading across the lagoon.

She was thirty-five meters from the Jeep when it blew up, the explosion knocking her to the ground. “Nathan!” Sarah screamed, her eyes watering as she stared through a spreading cloud of thick, oily smoke, into the explosion’s epicenter. There was no way anyone had survived.

Harry threw himself flat against the concrete of the courtyard as the explosion went off, flames and smoke arising from the entrance of the resort. He looked over to see Gideon still standing there, as though frozen in place.

Then the shooting started. First a single shot, barely audible over the screams of agony and fear arising from the resort, then the chatter of assault rifles on full-automatic.

“Move!” Harry yelled, scrambling to his feet and drawing his.45 in a single smooth motion. His voice seemed to jar Gideon into action and the Israeli grabbed up a suitcase from beside the overturned pool chair, extracting a Uzi submachine gun from its depths.

“Go! Go! Go!”

The Israeli sniper team was caught off-guard when the shooting started, Chaim well-nigh blinded by the explosion, Yossi several feet from the gun.

Tex swiveled the FN-FAL on its bipod, identifying the source of the hostile fire. Two men, kneeling on the bow of a boat in the marina. The scope’s cross-hairs centered on the forehead of one of the shooters and he squeezed the trigger.

Target eliminated, Tex thought coldly. The man collapsed, the top of his head nearly blown away by the heavy bullet. Next target.

Before he could draw down on the second shooter, a rifle boomed from somewhere in the marina and the man toppled over the rail, his body falling into the lagoon.

When the shooting started again, it took him by surprise, coming, as it seemed, from right over his head. Shooters were in the hotel.

He hesitated for only a moment, then sprang to his feet, leaving the FN-FAL where it was. It was too bulky.

He left his hotel room and hurried down the corridor toward the stairs. Reaching the covert of the stairwell, he reached down and jerked the Smith and Wesson from his ankle holster. He had six shots. Time to go.

The ineptitude of the Eilat cell was truly unamusing. Farouk swore in frustration as he lowered the binoculars and turned away. He needed to leave-quickly, before the Zionists mopped up the rest of his fighters.

Come on, Tex, Harry thought, crouched behind the engine block of a Corvette near the edge of the resort. With the shooters firing from the dark interior of a hotel room eighty meters away, the pistol in his hands was largely useless. This wasn’t Hollywood.

Gideon was five meters to his left, behind the bullet-riddled hulk of a Hummer H2. The courtyard and street outside had all but emptied in the six minutes since the car bomb went off. Those not under cover were dead or dying, lying in their own blood in the street.

With a twinge of regret, Harry realized he hadn’t seen the bat leveyha since the explosion. Such a waste.

“You have an angle on the window?” he hissed across at Gideon.

The Israeli nodded, slapping a fresh mag into the butt of his Uzi. The question was clearly visible in his eyes.

Harry nodded. “Cover me.”