The Caliphate André Gallo (list of ebook readers TXT) 📖

     Abdul, their driver and now their guard, who Steve could see wanted to get them out of the way where he could watch them easily, found this room and decided it was the electronic equivalent of a broom and mop closet.

08:30

At 5:30 a.m., Lieutenant Colonel Moshe Avidan and his fifty Shaldag troops had begun their day. They had just completed ten days of joint training with the British Special Air Service, the senior special-operations unit in the world. Avidan was pleased that the SAS had chosen to hone its desert fighting capabilities against his Shaldag troops. Each unit had learned from the other.

     Avidan had begun the week with a briefing to the SAS in Building 12, the compound from which the Shaldag worked and trained.

     “This base was named for the Palmach, the first Israeli Special Operations unit. In 1974 Palestinian terrorists took over a school in Northern Israel. During the rescue, twenty-one children and four adults died. As a result, the Israel Defense Forces reorganized the special units that had grown as a result of the many terrorist attacks.

     “As a part of the reorganization,” he continued, “Sayeret Shaldag, also called Unit 5101 or Shaldag, was created and based at Palmachim under the air force and as part of the Southern Command headquartered at Beersheba. We are now the country’s primary counterterrorist and hostage-rescue unit, and the only one with its own small helicopter fleet. Our workhorse helicopter is the AH-64, which also fires the Hellfire missile.”

     Avidan kept to himself that his command was also responsible for long-range patrols outside of Israel, and for marking targets for fighter-bomber-launched, laser-guided bombs. He also did not reveal that his troops had fought the Hezbollah in Southern Lebanon.

     Moshe Avidan wanted to pattern his career after former Prime Minister Ehud Barak, Israel’s most highly decorated soldier, who famously had led the Sayeret Matkal, Israel’s primary special-operations unit during the 1970s.

     That morning, Lieutenant Colonel Avidan was leading his men on their daily run. They reached the beach. He always led them where the sand was softer, which required more effort. Today they were running without their equipment because they had been on maneuvers with the SAS until the middle of the preceding night.

     Avidan loved this part of the day. He had learned from his girlfriend while at Stanford that the runner’s high was not produced by an increased level of endorphins, a seventies idea, but because the body naturally produced a chemical similar to THC, the psychoactive property of marijuana. Whatever the cause, he always looked forward to prolonged physical exercise and imagined bliss-inducing chemicals flowing to his brain.

     He and the Shaldag unit were several miles away from Building 12 when a UAV flew over their heads. Seconds later, they heard explosions. Avidan made an immediate U-turn on the beach and they started running back, as fast as they could. At 0700 hours, Avidan called the operations center on his radio but there was no connection.

     He sent his second in command with his men back to Building 12 to get ready for action and he headed toward the Ops Center. He first saw the smoke before coming around a block of living quarters and he realized that the building had been a target of the attack.

     A firefighting unit had just reached the building and was deploying its hoses. Other unit commanders were arriving at the same time but no one had concrete information. The stories they exchanged ran the gamut from a full attack on Israel by the surrounding Arab states, to one single coordinated attack against the primary air bases, to the assassination of the Israeli Prime Minister, to UAV attacks against the country’s nuclear center at Dimona.

    At 7:40, Avidan and the other officers who had met outside the destroyed Ops Center learned that the base commander had died in the attack. They all made their way to a crisis center half a mile away. There, the ranking officer took charge. Through the communications at the center, they learned that Palmachim was the only base to have been attacked and that there was no general invasion. However, someone at the Soreq Nuclear Center near Yavne had received a phone call saying that a Rafael center had also been attacked.

     Avidan was pulled aside by the acting commander, together with the base’s air police chief and Avidan’s friend, head of Unit 5707. The unit had been created in 1996 to obtain pre- and post-bombardment intelligence during the continuing war in southern Lebanon, a mission that Unit 5707 took from the Shaldag.

     Unit 5707 sometimes trained with the Shaldag, used similar armament, and could be used to supplement the Shaldag unit if necessary. The acting base commander, General Uri Shomron, said, “This attack seems to have come from Egypt. Our aircraft were able to shoot down two or three of the UAVs as they tried to get away but the rest crossed into Egyptian air space. Our pilots asked for hot pursuit authorization but they didn’t get it from the national command authority, so far. They are authorized to follow them but not to conduct aggressive operations over the Egyptian border.”

     A colonel brought him a message, which he read. He then told his men, “Jerusalem is getting in touch with Cairo and with the United Nations. A retaliatory attack against Egypt is not out of the question. Our aircraft are already in the air over international waters waiting for a decision to attack. That’s the big picture. Now here’s your part.”

     He turned and looked at Avidan.

     “There is a hostage situation developing just south of here at the Agricultural Experimentation Center.”

     He walked over to a map and pointed to the location.

     Avidan, still in his running gear, had obtained a towel which was slung around his neck.