Gideon's Spies полностью

The early morning sun caught the rust-stained hull of the 1,700-ton cargo ship as it slowly steamed into the busy Mediterranean port of Tartus in Syria on September 3, 2007. From its mast flew the flag of South Korea and the stern plate identified the al-Hamed as being registered in Inchon, one of the country’s major ports.

Watching the ship maneuvering into its berth from a distance was a man with the swarthy skin of a Kurd or one of the marsh Arabs of Iraq. He was fluent in both their languages as well as some of the dialects of Afghanistan. He was, in fact, a Turkish-born Jew who had eschewed the life of a carpet seller in the family business in Istanbul to go to Israel, serve in its army as a translator, and finally achieve his life’s ambition to work in Mossad. Fifteen years later, he was recognized as one of its most brilliant operatives. In that time, he had operated in a dozen countries under as many aliases, using his linguistic skills and chameleon-like characteristics to observe and be absorbed into whichever community he had been sent.

Now, for the moment, he was code-named “Kamal” with a perfectly faked Iranian passport in his pocket. Meir Dagan had stressed to him the importance of his mission: to confirm the role of al-Hamed in the dangerous relationship, which the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad had formed with North Korea.

Kamal had known before he left Tel Aviv the ship had sailed from Namp’o, a North Korean port in the high security area south of the capital, Pyongyang. An NSA satellite image had shown it steaming out into the Yellow Sea on a journey, which had taken it across the Indian Ocean, around the Cape of Good Hope, up the Atlantic and through the Strait of Gibraltar into the Mediterranean, and finally into Tartus harbor. At some stage of its voyage, it had re-flagged itself at sea and the crew had painted on the stern plate the port of registration as Inchon. The newness of their work was still apparent against the drab gray of the rest of the hull.

Through a contact in the Tartus harbormaster’s office, Kamal had managed to check the al-Hamed’s manifest and all day had watched trucks being loaded with the cement it listed. Then, as the sun began to set, military trucks arrived at the dockside and from the ship’s hold cranes lifted crates covered in heavy tarpaulin, which soldiers guided into the trucks. Using a high-resolution camera no bigger than the palm of his hand, Kamal photographed the transfer. When he finished, he pressed a button on the camera to transmit the images to a receiving station inside the Israeli border with Lebanon. In an hour, they were in Mossad headquarters.

Kamal knew then his trip had achieved all Meir Dagan had hoped. Though he could not see inside the crates, the spy intuitively knew the steel-cased containers were holding weapons-grade plutonium, the element which had fueled the American atomic attack that destroyed the Japanese city of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945. In his mission briefing, Kamal had been told by Professor Uzi Even, who had helped to create Israel’s own nuclear facility at Dimona, that the plutonium would, in its raw form, be easily transported as nuggets in lead protective drums and the shaping and casting of the material would be done in Syria.

On that warm September day almost fifty-two years after Nagasaki had been destroyed, sufficient plutonium had been delivered to Syria to devastate an entire country, its neighbor, Israel.

Shortly before noon on September 4, 2007, a number of cars drove past the concert hall of the Israeli Philharmonic Orchestra in Tel Aviv and entered the heavily guarded headquarters of Major General Eliezer Shkedy, the country’s air force commander. As a fighter pilot he had won a deserved reputation for daredevil tactics coupled with a cool analytical mind. His speciality had been flying dangerously close to the ground, maneuvering past peaks and rocky outcrops, then hurtling skyward to ten thousand feet, nearing the speed of sound, before diving on the target, his weapon system switched on, his eyes flitting between the coordinates projected on his hood screen to the bombsight and the target. Weapons released, he would turn radically, the screech from the strain on the airframe like a banshee wail, and he would once more hurtle skyward. From dive attack to his second climb, it would take him only seconds.

For the past week Shkedy had prepared for an unprecedented operation, which would require those tactics to be carried out by pilots he had hand-picked because their flying skills matched his own. But they would be flying not the F-16 fighter plane he had once commanded, but Israel’s latest jet, the F-151. Flying at almost twice the speed of sound and capable of delivering a five-hundred-pound bunker-busting bomb, it was the most formidable fighter plane in the Israeli Air Force.