Crusader One (Tier One Thrillers Book 3) Page 23

  “And she won’t,” Elinor said. “I told you I called ahead. We have an arrangement.”

  “I’m operating on her,” Munn said.

  Elinor paused. “That . . . I can’t promise.”

  “Munn is the most qualified doc to operate on her,” Dempsey said without looking up from Grimes’s face. “He’s done more field surgery than any doc in the group. If he can save a mortally wounded SEAL in a dirty basement of a bombed-out school in Ethiopia, he can sure as hell take care of this.”

  “Okay,” Elinor said. “I’ll make it happen.”

  The SUV jerked to a halt, and the tailgate opened slowly—too slowly—under electric power. Munn rolled out of the growing gap and forced the tailgate up all the way with his hand. He grabbed Grimes under the shoulders while Dempsey jumped out and lifted her lower body. A gurney smashed into his hip, and the driver spun parallel to them.

  “Bravo-two-seven?” a stern, fit woman dressed in scrubs asked.

  Dempsey shrugged, clueless what the hell that meant, but Elinor was already beside him. “Yes,” she said. “Bravo-two-seven. Authenticate Alpha-one-one-eight.”

  “Okay, let’s go,” the female doc said.

  Dempsey wondered what it was like to live in a city where even access to trauma care required this level of security. Elinor read his mind.

  “This is a civilian hospital,” she said as they wheeled Grimes toward the glass doors of the emergency room entrance. “But we always have a secure suite with military surgeons who provide care for operators from Aman, as well as Mossad and Shin Bet. That’s where we’re taking her.”

  Dempsey nodded, clutching the handrail of the gurney with a grip like his own life depended on it. He wasn’t read in on Aman, but he assumed it was the Hebrew slang for the Directorate of Military Intelligence under which the Seventh Order loosely resided—sorta like Ember’s dotted-line connection to the rest of the US intelligence community.

  They made a sharp left turn as they passed through the second set of glass doors. The next hallway was short, dead-ending at an oversize elevator door just fifteen paces away. The stern-looking doctor—at least he assumed the woman was a doctor—entered a code on a panel beside the door, and the light turned from red to yellow.

  She then turned to Elinor and said something in Hebrew.

  “Excuse me,” Elinor said, squeezing past Dempsey.

  Elinor punched in a second code and the doors slid open. They rolled Grimes into the elevator, and then the Israeli doctor departed with nothing more than a curt nod. Dempsey looked down and his heart sank. Grimes’s head was lolled to the side, her eyes now lifeless and her pupils wide and dark.

  “Oh shit,” he said as the elevator stopped and the doors opened. “Dan . . .”

  Munn tore his hand from the gurney. “Let go, JD. I got this.”

  Dempsey’s voice cracked. “I think she’s dead.”

  Munn shoved the gurney into a large circular space containing four operating suites and eight recovery beds. He was sprinting now—pushing the gurney ahead of him and then crashing through double doors into the nearest OR, where a surgical team was waiting to receive Grimes. As the doors swung shut, he looked over his shoulder at Dempsey and growled, “She’s dead when I say she’s dead.”

  Dempsey stood at the large window, palms pressed on the cold glass, watching as they moved Grimes’s corpse onto the operating table in the center of the room and attendants repositioned rolling tables with instruments spread out on them.

  “Two more large IVs and get me a thoracotomy tray stat,” Munn commanded. The SEAL doc quickly sprayed brown liquid from a plastic bottle onto Grimes’s torso around the chest tube he’d already inserted. Munn snapped on sterile gloves but made no move to change his clothes, put on a gown, or even a mask. Dempsey had seen Munn operate in the back of a Ryder truck on his knees once, so Dempsey wasn’t surprised. The only thing that mattered now was speed.

  “Four units of trauma blood.”

  Munn draped her chest with blue towels, picture framing a square of sterilized flesh where he was going to operate.

  “Close those curtains,” Munn snapped.

  Dempsey expected his friend to look over, give him a nod—give him something. But it didn’t happen. The last thing Dempsey saw as the curtains pulled closed was a flash of metal under the surgical lights as Munn plunged a scalpel deep into Lizzie’s chest, just below her right breast, and sliced downward toward her back before thrusting his hand into her chest cavity up to his midforearm.

  “I need a large vascular clamp,” he heard Munn bark from behind the closed curtain.

  Dempsey felt a hand on his back but didn’t turn to see who it was. He knew without looking. He closed his eyes, pressed his forehead against the cool glass, and did something he hadn’t done in a very, very long time . . .

  He prayed.

  CHAPTER 24

  Secret Seventh Order Jerusalem Annex

  Sub-basement, Bronfman Archaeology Wing

  Israel Museum Jerusalem

  11 Ruppin Boulevard, Hakyria, Jerusalem

  May 11

  1930 Local Time

  Dempsey stared at his hands, certain he could still see traces of Elizabeth’s blood, despite having scrubbed them raw. He ignored the quiet, hushed conversations happening around the conference table in this TOC annex used by the Seventh Order for operations in Jerusalem. Access and security had been more discreet here, and the TOC was smaller than in the Tel Aviv facility. All the monitors were dark except for two news feeds, i24 News and CNN International, which were both muted at present.

  A hand patted his back. He looked up and saw Smith. The Ember Ops O looked tired, or older, or something. It was the eyes.

  “You hanging in there, JD?” Smith asked, though the tightness in his voice told him Smith was far from okay himself.

  Dempsey nodded. “Yeah . . . easy day.”

  Smith pulled out the chair beside Dempsey and collapsed into it. He sighed and rubbed his face. “You should have seen her, dude,” he said, throwing his head back in the oversized chair and staring at the ceiling. “She was a real fucking operator out there today. I’m talking badass. She saved a lot of people and sent lots of those sleeper-cell jihadi motherfuckers straight to hell.”

  “Stop it,” Dempsey said, slamming a fist down on the table.

  Smith looked at him, his face clouded and confused. “Stop what?”

  “Stop talking about her like she’s dead,” he said, his voice cracking.

  Smith nodded, his lips tight. “You’re right,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  “She’s in good hands,” Adamo said, the first indication he had been listening and the first thing he’d said since they’d relocated here nearly an hour and a half ago.

  “I know,” Dempsey mumbled. “I know.”

  They all sat in silence, even Wang the motormouth, each man staring blankly into empty space. Time passed, until the door opened and Jarvis stepped in. All eyes turned to the Ember Director.

  “I don’t know anything,” he said. “Munn was still operating last I heard. He had the best chest surgeon in Jerusalem helping him—a former Sayeret Matkal guy, I’m told. Everything that can be done to save her is being done.”

  Elinor appeared behind Jarvis, and she met Dempsey’s gaze, her mouth tight but her eyes kind. Jarvis nodded at her, a wordless handoff of the floor.

  “You’ve all seen the news, and you know the attack we suffered was massive,” she said simply. “The retaliation for our strike on Iran was exactly what you would expect. Whereas the IDF targeted Iranian military and nuclear sites, our enemies targeted civilians exclusively, including . . .”—she looked down at her note card—“ . . . the brutal and savage murder of one hundred and eighty women and children, many of whom were neither Israeli nor Jewish. But conflict reveals the true nature of us all, does it not?”

  Dempsey nodded solemnly; he was beginning to feel sick to his stomach.

  “We expected sleeper-cel
l terrorists would play a role, but we never imagined anything on the scale we witnessed here today. Reports from Tel Aviv and Haifa tell similar stories—sapper bombers, knife attacks, vehicular manslaughter, and opportunistic snipers wreaking havoc in markets and city centers. But where we were, at the Midrachov, was the worst.”

  “Typical,” Dempsey grumbled to himself. The suck follows me wherever I go . . .

  “Similarly, the rocket barrage we experienced was on a scale not previously seen and involved every munition in our enemies’ arsenals. The attack by Iran’s proxies was highly coordinated, requiring a level of command and control that IDF thought would not be possible after our air strikes crippled critical components of the Persian military communication network. Which means that all elements of the proxy attack were preplanned and designed to be executed without Persian real-time oversight. IDF is launching a counteroffensive as we speak, targeting Gaza and the West Bank.”

  Elinor paused and rubbed her temples. She sighed heavily and continued.

  “I think it is safe to assume that despite the massive amount of ordnance fired at us, our enemies’ arsenals are not empty. We should expect and plan for follow-on attacks—”

  The door opened and Munn came in, escorted by Rouvin and Daniel. He was in new clothes—cargo pants and a black T-shirt, but with his own now-bloodstained boots. He looked exhausted.

  “Sorry to interrupt,” he mumbled, standing by the door, his hands folded in front of him.

  “No, please,” Elinor said. “We are all desperate to know about Elizabeth.”

  Dempsey’s stomach tightened and he tasted bile.

  Oh God . . . She’s dead. He couldn’t save her.

  Munn took a deep breath and then said, “She’s alive but in critical condition. The bullet tore her pulmonary artery—the artery from the heart that delivers deoxygenated blood back to the lungs for renewal. I was able to repair it with the help of an amazing Israeli surgeon.” He turned to Elinor. “Thank you so much for securing Dr. Epstein to assist. I could not have done it without him.”

  Elinor nodded.

  “She lost her total body blood volume like two times over,” Munn said, shaking his head with a tired smile, “but the team just kept filling her up and somehow managed to keep her stable throughout the operation. We were able to save her lung, and the artery is repaired. The bullet tore through the dome of her diaphragm also, but that was an easy repair. It ended up lodged in her back just beside her spine. I know it sounds trite, but an inch to the left . . .”

  “Did you get it out?” Wang asked.

  “We don’t hunt for bullets. That’s just in the movies. Unless they pose an immediate danger, we fix the damage left in the wake and leave them be. In my experience, you do more damage cutting and rooting around than just leaving well enough alone.”

  Wang nodded.

  “How is she?” Smith asked. “Is she awake?”

  Munn shook his head. “She’s stable for now. It’ll be a tough few days. Whenever you replace that much blood, patients experience coagulopathy—you know, their clotting mechanisms don’t work—so they tend to ooze and bleed. A lot. She still might need another transfusion. The other complication is that changing out someone’s entire blood volume weakens their immune system, putting her at higher risk for infection. On top of that, her right lung is hamburger meat, so it could be a few days before we get her off the ventilator and she’s able to breathe on her own. She’ll have to keep the chest tube in for a day or two at least to keep the lung inflated, and the tube and ventilator both increase the probability of getting pneumonia.”

  “Christ, Dan, you make it sound like she’s fucked,” Dempsey said.

  Munn shook his head and smiled at him.

  “No, not at all. She’s young and strong as hell, which is the only reason we were able to bring her back. She’ll get through this, but it will be a tough slog.”

  “Full recovery?” Jarvis asked, his voice more clinical than concerned.

  Munn hesitated. “Yeah, I would expect so. Physically, anyway.”

  Jarvis nodded and said, “Thanks for the update, Dan. Great work.”

  Wang was already handing Munn a cup of coffee from the station at the back of the room. Munn clapped the cyber whiz on the back and followed him to a seat at the table across from Dempsey.

  Dempsey held Munn’s eyes—Thank you.

  “We were just briefing on the attack,” Elinor said, taking the floor back. She turned to the flat screen behind her and clicked on a map of Israel, which began to populate with the color-coordinated dots signifying, according to the legend at the bottom, the sites of various sleeper-cell attacks broken out by type. “This is the slide we are using to brief the PM and the Knesset, our parliament. We are still updating it as intel comes in, so the number of dots will continue to multiply . . .” She paused, closed her eyes for a beat, and took a deep breath before continuing. “It’s unfortunate that we weren’t able to conduct our operation before this attack, and I know that most of you are undoubtedly thinking that we’ve lost the window of opportunity to act, but Captain Jarvis and I are of a different opinion. We believe there is still value to taking Amir Modiri. This man is more than a nuisance; he is a clear and present danger to both our nations’ clandestine operations, citizenry, and way of life.”

  She advanced the slide, and a map of the Iranian and Iraqi border appeared on the screen.

  On that cue, Jarvis said, “If it isn’t obvious by now, what Ms. Jordan is telling you is that our operation is a go. She and Dempsey will execute the mission we’ve been prepping these last several days. The rest of you will support their INFIL and border crossing. A US Navy SEAL contingent is standing by in Iraq to support us. The Seventh Order will coordinate with Mossad to leverage embedded assets for cover and transport on the other side. The plan is to execute a night crossing in Iraqi Kurdistan from the village of Tawella, which is about twenty clicks east of Halabja. From there, it’s a three-mile hump to Route 15, depicted here, running north to south on the map. We’ll have a vehicle staged and ready to drive to a safe house in Sanandaj. If everything looks good, they’ll shelter until morning, make a vehicle change, and travel to a second safe house in Tehran.”

  “Crossing at Tawella is quite a haul from a crossing at the usual areas east of Irbil,” Adamo said, tapping his index finger on the table as he spoke.

  “Yes, it is,” Jarvis agreed. “But, based on the latest intelligence and satellite imagery confirming the deployment of Persian military forces, we believe this is the safest location.”

  “Have you considered a covert entry through Turkey? I have an extensive network of well-developed assets that could smuggle them into Tabriz,” Adamo pressed.

  “Let me ask you a question,” Elinor said, her face contorting as if she’d just sucked on a lemon. “Would you trust these Turkish assets of yours to babysit your children?”

  Adamo smiled wryly at this but held his tongue.

  “That’s what I thought,” she said.

  “At this stage in the game,” Jarvis said, jumping in, “we’re going to stick with the plan we’ve developed. We have the SEALs ready to support, and Seventh Order has already begun moving the chess pieces inside Iran to support.”

  “If memory serves, isn’t there a border crossing east of Penjwen a few clicks to the north, boss?” Smith chimed in. “I would imagine that crossing probably has an IRGC contingent now. How the hell is this supposed to work, crossing right under their noses?”

  “That’s the reason we cross there. The plan is to initiate an engagement with Persian forces massing at Outpost Bashmaq. We’ll begin with an artillery exchange and then escalate, which will serve as a diversion while our people slip across to the south. We cross in the heat of battle.”

  “So we’re inviting the bad guys to gather and engage us right where we cross? How the hell does that work?” Dempsey asked.

  “The Bashmaq outpost is thirty miles north of Tawella. And in case you�
��ve forgotten, we’re not talking thirty miles on Interstate I-70. This is rough, desolate mountain terrain. Without air assets, there’s no easy way to prosecute. And don’t forget, the Artesh is in disarray right now due to the crippling blow to their comms in the wake of the cyber and air attacks from the IDF. Which leads me to the other reason we’ve selected this location. The city of Marivan—which is just south of the Bashmaq crossing—is in chaos. The IDF hit the Iranian nuclear facility there, and the city’s largely Sunni Kurd population, which has always been at odds with their Shi’ite masters in Tehran, has seized upon this opportunity to take control of the city. To steal an expression from social media, this particular little corner of Iran is a hot mess. We’ve got aid workers rushing into Marivan while citizens are fleeing, giving Elinor and JD an opportunity to get lost in the traffic between Marivan and Sanandaj.”

  “I’m on board with the plan,” Dempsey said, feeling that old familiar pre-op anticipation building in his gut. “What’s next, Skipper?”

  “The only thing left, I suppose, is to name this op,” Jarvis said, meeting his gaze. “I thought we’d give you the honors . . .”

  “Crusader,” Dempsey said without hesitation, clenching his right fist. “Operation Crusader.”

  “Beautifully politically incorrect, which I love of course,” Rouvin said, “but it fails to represent the Jewish contribution to the team, don’t you think?”

  “It’s not about politics,” Dempsey said, his jaw set and his thoughts on all the men—friends, teammates, SEALs—who died one year ago because of Amir Modiri’s diabolical handiwork. “It’s about payback.”

  “Crusader it is,” Jarvis said with a tight approving grin, “which, I believe, makes you . . . Crusader One.”

  CHAPTER 25

  Sa’dabad Palace

  Shemiran, Greater Tehran, Iran

  May 14

  1130 Local Time

  “The President will see you now,” Esfahani’s aide said and gestured to the door.

  Modiri stood and wordlessly accepted the invitation. His summons to Sa’dabad, the Persian equivalent of the American White House, while not entirely unexpected, was not a meeting he was looking forward to. That Esfahani had called him here instead of traveling to the Ministry’s offices, as would be customary, was noteworthy. It was also telling that Modiri’s boss had not been summoned. As he entered Esfahani’s office alone and for the very first time, Modiri wondered if it would also be his last.