End of Days (Pike Logan #16)(110)

Shocked at her vehemence, I almost missed the exit to the Megiddo national monument. I swerved at the last minute, taking the road and looking at her. She listened for a little more and said, “Sir, I apologize. Just find the UAV. It’s small, but a lot bigger than what we usually see. It’ll probably be coming from the West Bank.” The other end said something, and she said, “We’re there now. I’ll get the Shin Bet to evacuate.”

She hung up, then looked at me, saying, “I don’t think I’m going to get hired by them again.”

I said, “What happened?”

“They don’t believe me, but they believe enough to not be the ones holding the bag if they’re wrong. They’re launching alert fighters from multiple bases. They’ll find the drone, but I don’t know if they’ll kill it.”

“Why?”

“Too many layers. Too many people in the chain of command. I mean, if the CIA called an air base in the United States to find a threat, you’d get a response, but you wouldn’t get cooperation. You’d have a bunch of people launching fighters in the air to protect their asses on the ground. The pilots wouldn’t know why they were in the air, but the men on the ground would be protected because they issued the order.”

“Great. You are as dysfunctional as we are.”

She smiled and said, “We aren’t dysfunctional. You and me. It’s why we’re here, right now.”

And I realized she was right. The dysfunction she was talking about was the reason the Taskforce was created. It was the reason Knuckles and Brett had eliminated the threat in Syria, and the result of that mission was why she’d made the call.

“So what now?”

“We get to tell the Shin Bet to call off the speech.” She grimaced, hating her role. She wanted to be the killer, not the diplomat, and I understood that. She said, “This should be great fun.”

I turned to the road leading to the Megiddo monument and looked at the time, saying, “If it was a straight line, we’re too late. It’s going to hit in seconds.”

We entered the small road to the parking area, and I saw a security checkpoint. I said, “What do we do with that?”

“Just go forward.”



Avril Sharon buckled the oxygen mask to his helmet, closed the canopy to his F-16 Fighting Falcon, gave a thumbs-up to the ground crew, and taxied to the runway. He received clearance for takeoff and thundered into the sky, believing it was just one more chase against phantom ghosts stalking Israel.

He attained cruising altitude and saw his wingman appear to his left. He said, “Here we go again. Probably chasing a damn balloon.”

His wingman laughed through the radio and said, “Yeah, if these guys keep this up, they’ll win by bankrupting us with a million alerts.”

They circled around, heading toward the Golan Heights, Avril saying, “Never chased a phantom out of the West Bank, though. What do you suppose that’s about?”

“No idea. Let’s just clean our sector and go home.”

They crossed into the West Bank, came within spitting distance of the border with Jordan, and banked away, not wanting to cause an international incident. Avril scanned the area and said, “I see nothing. You?”

His wingman didn’t respond. He called again, “Do you see anything?”

“Nine o’clock low. Nine o’clock low. Looks like an aircraft flying low and slow.”

Avril banked, focused on the area, and saw the target. It did look like an aircraft, but it had no canopy. He understood that distance was its own enemy—and that he could be thinking the plane was much farther away simply because of its size. He flew forward, the aircraft eating up the ground, got above it, and said, “That’s not an aircraft. It’s a UAV.”

He called back to his headquarters even as the UAV broke the border between the West Bank and Israel, now twenty miles away from Megiddo. He couldn’t be faulted for that. He had no clear idea why he was even up here, and didn’t want to be a laughing stock by blowing out of the sky an Israeli UAV surveying the West Bank.

“Got a bogey UAV headed north, just broke the border. Is that my target?”

The man on the other end of the radio was just as mystified as he was, the orders that had filtered through their respective commands simply telling them to search and report. He said, “Stand by. Stand by.”

Avril tracked the drone, seeing the distinctive white excavations of Megiddo against the green of the hills in the distance. It jerked to the right and lowered altitude, moving into what he recognized as an attack run. He called back, “UAV is lowering altitude. I say again UAV is lowering altitude. Headed to Megiddo hill. Right at Megiddo hill. Is it ours? Is it our UAV?”

The man on the other end said, “Waiting on an answer. Stand by,” and Avril thought, Why on earth would anyone strike an archeological site? That thing has to be Israeli.

But the UAV was lowering into a strike run. Avril called his wingman and said, “You seeing what I’m seeing?”

“I see it, I see it. What’s your call?”

Avril said nothing. The UAV was twenty seconds from Megiddo at an altitude of one hundred feet when he flicked the arming switch on his Sidewinder missiles. It reached ten seconds out, flying at more than a hundred miles an hour, and he achieved lock-on, pulling the trigger and whispering, “Please don’t be Israeli . . .”