The Caliphate by André Gallo (books to read for 13 year olds .TXT) 📕

a blanket. Other men talked quietly as they loaded into other vehicles. Steve could hear the occasional metallic sound of weapons hitting against each other, of magazines being loaded, and of breeches chambering the first shell. They were moving for about forty minutes. Then they stopped, apparently waiting for something.

     As they were waiting, Abdul, the driver of their car, stepped out and called his wife. Kella could hear enough of Abdul’s side of the conversation to make out that the driver seemed to be saying goodbye.

     “Tell my father that today I will serve Allah’s cause well, that he will be proud of me. Tell our son when he grows up; they will be talking about me. I will be known in our history as one of Allah’s warriors.”

     The trunk opened and Steve felt his blindfold being moved to his forehead. The driver leaned over him and showed him the ravaging effects of forty-five years without dental care. Steve recognized his cell phone in the driver’s hand. It had been taken from him shortly after his capture. The driver talked to him in a low voice and held the phone open for Steve to see the text message that he had found. The text read:

31 degrees, 43 minutes N – 34 degrees, 49 minutes E; 31-55-59N – 34-42-26E. 06:30 hours tomorrow.

Steve felt confident Karim’s message meant nothing to the driver. The driver’s gestures and body language indicated he thought he was doing Steve a favor. Steve assumed that his Good Samaritan was putting some credits in the bank. If the operation failed, he would need a friend on the other side. It also occurred to Steve he might have shown the text message to al Khalil first.

     The blindfold was replaced and the trunk closed. They began to move again.

06:40

At 5:34 a.m., Lieutenant Schlomo Gazit had scanned his screen. He had been on duty in the Palmachim Air Base SIGINT center building near the beach for nine hours. He knew from the clock on the wall that he had one hour to go. His mind drifted to Sarah, his young bride, who was at home waiting for him. He would be with her in an hour and a half.

     Gazit noted that the call originated from outside Israel to a number not registered in Israel. The key word that triggered the message to surface must have been the coordinates, he reasoned. He had hundreds of other messages to screen and not enough time to research the location. The antennae field and the giant satellite dishes located on the base collected millions of messages, most of which were irrelevant to Israel’s security.

     Gazit looked at the clock again, then at Sarah’s photo on his desk. He went back to the message, and the word “tomorrow” gave him a reason to put it in the queue rather than to forward it for action.

     An hour later, as he was going off duty, Gazit’s eye caught the text of an Arabic language call from a number originating in Israel but from a phone not registered in Israel. The call was to a Gaza number. Leaving it for his relief to take appropriate action, Gazit walked out to his car and hurried home.

***

At the controls of his first UAV, Rashid looked at the smooth waters of the Mediterranean on his screen. He lowered the Ranger’s altitude slightly to better evade detection by Israel’s coastal radars. As his drone flew over the beach of the Palmachim Air Base from the sea, he could see the space center to his left. He let it go. Rashid’s targets were of a tactical nature, Israel’s helicopter fleet, its 200th UAV Squadron, and any aircraft that could be called on to counter al Khalil’s ground attack.

     He headed straight for the two-thousand-meter runway. As he got closer, he could see hangars on its far side and several AH-64 helicopters parked close together. He knew that, even if the rest of his mission failed, and his UAVs were shot down or crashed, the cost of these three battlefield helicopters meant he was more than even. He fired then circled back and dropped a bomb on another group of the aircraft.

     Rashid handed the controls of the first Ranger to someone else to bring back to base and he took command of the second Ranger closing in on the beach. He aimed at HH-65 Short-Range Recovery helicopters parked near a hangar. All five machines were evidently ready to go, because their full fuel tanks exploded and became wicks for thirty-foot-high flames with a rising wall of black smoke.

     He then focused on anti-aircraft positions and devoted his last UAV against what looked like the base’s headquarters building. He ran out of UAVs before he ran out of targets.

***

A few miles south, Karim brought his Ranger over the beach and, within seconds, he was looking at the experimental farm on his screen. He brought the UAV up a hundred feet for a quick look at the overall target, anxious not to hit the wrong building. He identified the access road and looked for the vans he expected to see there. He didn’t see them and assumed they were hidden by vegetation near the road. But he only spent a couple of seconds looking for al Khalil and his fighters. He could see the extent of the fields and quickly located his target.

     With Mahmoud’s sketch next to him, he identified the large parking lot to the side of the main building. He lowered the Ranger’s altitude, swung it around to approach the building from the front, lined up the computer-game-like aiming device on the front entrance, and fired his first Hellfire missile. He saw it strike before he raised the nose of the UAV to fly over and to the right of the building.

     He circled until he