general consensus is that they are still a couple years out. I don’t believe that for a second but I don’t have anything to base that on other than my gut instinct – there’s just too many unanswered questions.”
“Well, you’re going to get that chance to prove your instincts right. I’ve booked you on a 9:45 British Airways flight to Tel Aviv. General Pardo just called and he’s expecting you later this afternoon,” referencing the head of Mossad. “Tamir mentioned that they have something really hot they are working on and wanted to know if we wanted in on it – he knew we would – I think he just wanted the chance to get me out of bed at two in the morning. I told him you’d be on the first flight out of London.”
“Any idea what this is all about?”
“He wouldn’t say over the phone – though we were on a secure line – which leads me to believe it’s extremely sensitive. I realize you’ve never worked with him but he’s a personal friend of mine and he was at K2 with us,” a reference to Karshi-Khanabad Air Base in Uzbekistan, “in the first few months after 9/11 while you were in Afghanistan with the Northern Alliance. He knows you’ve recently taken over as my lead on Iranian intelligence and nuclear proliferation and I’ve told him that you’re still active duty, a colonel with the Fifth Group” – that is, Fifth Group Special Forces, whose area of concentration is the Middle East – “so whatever they have for you, he knows you’re more than qualified.”
“Okay, I’m all packed and heading to check out of the hotel right now. Any idea as to who’s picking me up in Tel Aviv? Someone from the embassy or one of the general’s folks?”
“Her name is Danielle Yaniv and, yes, she works for Tamir, but that’s all I know. Go ahead and wear your patch and she’ll find you.”
“Okay, will do.”
“Colonel Jackson?” Danielle asked, leaning towards – and somewhat yelling through – the open passenger window, as she saw someone standing by the curb who she thought fit the description her boss, General Tamir Pardo, had given her: kind of tall, dish-water blonde, well chiseled features – and sporting an eye patch.
“Yes, Ma’am,” Jackson replied. “Call me Tom.”
“Hop in, Tom. I’m Danielle; call me Dani. The Prime Minister scheduled an urgent meeting with Tamir for five thirty so he told me to get you over to his office right away so he’d have the opportunity to meet you before he went in with Bibi,” an informal reference to the Prime Minister. “I’m not sure what his meeting’s all about but I’ll get you there so you’ll have a few minutes with Tamir before he has to leave. By the way, welcome to Israel; have you ever been here before?”
“No, I haven’t but I’m looking forward to the visit,” Jackson replied.
The tail end of Dani’s pony-tail whipped across her face as she snapped her head back towards Jackson, caught completely by surprise on hearing that he had never been to Israel before. This guy came highly recommended by Jim Carmichael, a close friend of Tamir’s from the CIA, yet he had never been to Israel? What was up with this, she wondered.
Jackson, seeing Dani’s expression, partially obstructed by her long hair, sensed this was the wrong answer, though he had no idea why.
* * *
“Stonewall, Jim speaks very highly of you. Nice to finally meet you. You’ve obviously met Arielle; I trust the drive over from the airport wasn’t too eventful,” General Pardo added, somewhat facetiously.
“Tamir! You made it sound pretty urgent that I get him here just as soon as I could, so I did,” Dani interrupted.
“Likewise, General, I’m glad to be here,” Stonewall replied, somewhat surprised by Dani’s interruption.
“Arielle, you won’t believe what this guy did in Afghanistan. In the first few months after 9/11, the US only had a couple teams in Afghanistan; Jackson, here, commanded one of them. His team had joined the Northern Alliance up in the Panjshir region of northern Afghanistan. Remember, the US role was just getting started so the Taliban thoroughly outnumbered Stonewall’s team and his allies. At one point, they came across a Taliban force of, I think, around nine thousand men bivouacked in a relatively narrow valley; Jackson’s twelve man team and the Northern Alliance force amounted to something like 1,500 men. Stonewall, here, then a relatively junior captain, comes up with this incredibly bold and brilliant idea – I mean, it’s Gideon out of the Old Testament all over again: Sometime in the middle of the night, something like two in the morning, he takes three hundred of his men and marches them up and down the canyon trail – with torches fully lit so everyone in the Taliban encampment can see them. The other 1,200 were set up in a blocking position at the other end of the valley. The really cool thing about this is that the three hundred men with torches – each one only marched about a couple hundred feet along this trail. Stonewall, go ahead and tell her about this.”
“You see the whole trick here is about being a force multiplier. I had the men on the trail spaced out about every few hundred feet or so. I had the man at the very top of the canyon light his torches or lanterns. Each man carried two of them; he’d walk to the next one down the trail, who would then hand the lanterns to him; this man would then walk another hundred feet or so and hand the lanterns off to him, and so on. Once each exchange was made each one returned to his place on the trail. As the lit lanterns reached the bottom, these were turned off and exchanged at every hand-off of those coming down the hill so that these would go back up the hill and repeat the process. In this manner, mind you, it’s about 2:00 a.m., the impression of the number of men coming down the trail would never seem to end. The idea was to panic them into thinking that a very large force was assembling and force them to run up the other end of the valley, right into our blocking force.”
“How’d it go?” Dani asked.
“We destroyed the entire Taliban force.”
“There’s a little more to the story, though,” General Pardo added. “You see, this young captain, here, was the last one on the trail, right on the valley floor and some of the Taliban decided to stand and fight.”
“That they did. I had one of my weapons sergeants and my senior comms sergeant with me, along with several of the Northern Alliance guys. We set up a few claymores in the brief time we had and the few of us had every heavy weapon we could carry; we needed to give the impression that we were a much larger force than we really were. If they figured it out, it would have been a disaster. As it was, it got pretty intense and chaotic there for a while.”
“I’m impressed,” Dani said.
“Jim invited me to participate in the after-action debrief,” Pardo added. “Jackson, and his two sergeants each received the Silver Star. It was an incredibly bold and brilliant – not to mention very risky – operation.”
“I was wondering how you knew all of this,” Jackson added. “I know Jim said you were over there but I never knew in what capacity.”
“Well, that’s our little secret. I’ll have to make this brief as I can’t keep Bibi waiting too much longer, but I’m curious as to the general sense in Washington regarding Iran. From over here, it seems that the current administration has lost any appetite for showing any type of leadership or involvement on the world stage. Look at the failures in Benghazi, Syria, Ukraine and the rise
