Operation: Red Crescent – Lessons
Okay, here we go with chapter four of Operation: Red Crescent!
Sorry I've stagnated on this fiction, but I've been pretty busy, and I haven't been feeling the muse for this story. Today, however, I've decided pretty much how it will work out, so this is becoming a much clearer and easier process since I'm not hacking it out in the wilds of lost plot bunny land, which I often have to do. So I now have a good idea where this is going, and I have some excellent surprises in store. Keep reading, and enjoy!
As per usual, I own nothing, this is just for my own entertainment. Well, and yours, too, XD
...
Alex stepped out of the Cairo International Airport. It was two in the morning, and he was bleary-eyed and exhausted from the six-hour flight. Agent Shalom had explained that they would be staying at a motel for the evening, and meeting up with her contacts in the morning.
He glanced around the near empty cab stand, looking for Fox. The agent was nowhere to be seen, though Alex knew that he was somewhere nearby, disguised, keeping an eye on him and Yedit.
Agent Shalom walked over and spoke in rapid Arabic with one of the cab drivers, and got in the back with her pack. Alex followed her lead and slid in next to her.
The motel they stayed in was small, discreet and clean. Agent Shalom swept the room for bugs before unwinding the scarf she had used to cover her head since they had left MI6 headquarters. Alex remembered that she had called it a hijab.
"That is the one thing I like about western fashion," she said. "Its not so hot. Try wearing a burqa in Pakistan in the summer. Not fun."
She pulled open one of the drawers and removed a pistol.
"Do those come standard in motel rooms in Egypt?" Alex asked, seeing the weapon and raising his eyebrow.
"Only when you know who to ask," Agent Shalom said. She weighed it in her hand and set it on the bed. She pulled up one end of the mattress on the other bed, and removed an AK-47.
"When did you set this up?" Alex demanded. "Does MI6 know about this?"
"When I was in the ladies room," Agent Shalom answered. "And this is what having contacts in a hostile region means, Alex. It means I don't worry about not having guns when I know there are three or four hotels within reach that always reserve one special room for people they know."
Alex frowned. Somehow, he didn't like the idea of someone knowing who they were already.
"Relax, newbie," Agent Shalom teased. "They told me you weren't going to... ah, freak out on me."
"I'm not," Alex answered, offended.
"Good," Agent Shalom answered. "Can you shoot one of these?" she asked, holding one of the AK's out for him. Alex shook his head. Agent Shalom regarded him critically for a second, and put it down next to her pistol.
"You better be worth it," was all she said. She started pulling apart the pistol, examining every bit. "Just a tip," she said when she caught Alex staring. "Never assume that your contacts won't pass on a jammed or broken gun. Everyone has a price Alex, remember that."
"I thought we were here proving that you don't have a price," Alex said flatly.
"No, we're proving the Iranians couldn't afford to buy me off," Agent Shalom replied, amused.
Alex lay back on the bed (the mattress now restored to its original position). He didn't remember falling asleep, but the next thing he knew, Agent Shalom, already fully dressed, was shaking him awake.
"What time is it?" Alex asked.
"Six-thirty," Agent Shalom answered. Alex let an exasperated sigh escape his lips before pulling himself out of bed. They had only slept for four and a half hours.
Alex gathered a change of clothes from his bag, and went to the bathroom to change and brush his teeth.
His new reflection started back at him while he completed these tasks. His hair and skin were several shades darker than he was used to, and it was a little disconcerting.
"I spoke with my contact in Cairo this morning," Agent Shalom said when he came out of the bathroom. "He heard about this business with the Iranians through a client, and he thinks he may know where I can find some answers."
"This is starting to sound like a wild goose chase," Alex said.
"Not so," Agent Shalom said. "My contact informed me that the information was stolen off a high security computer in Mossad; my handler's computer. That tells me that whoever stole the information was looking for something very specific. Something my handler knew about."
"So was there anything your handler was involved in that was worth all the effort of stealing it?" Alex asked.
"Aside from huge databases on Mossad operative and generally classified intelligence, I wouldn't know," Agent Shalom answered, slightly put out. "But my handler was specifically targeted. That means that there was something."
"Or maybe someone just wanted to screw Mossad's agents over, and you got especially unlucky?" Alex suggested. Shalom shook her head.
"This wasn't random," she objected. "I am sure there were agents much easier to set up than me, and yet I am the one who was picked. I want to know why that was, but then, thats just one more question added to the list of things I need to beat out of whoever was responsible for this."
"So where do we go from here?" Alex asked, deciding to ignore the other agent's obvious pleasure at the idea of being able to torture whoever had framed her.
"Honestly, I was surprised my contact knew as much as he did," Agent Shalom admitted. "The goal here is to find out which cell organized this theft. No one who knows anything is likely to share with an outsider, which means getting our hands dirty to get into the inner circle of a cell."
"Again, getting chummy with a bunch of terrorists sounds like a brilliant idea," Alex objected dryly.
"Alex, I was placed on an international terrorist watch list for being implicated even a little in this mess!" Agent Shalom said sharply. "Whatever went missing, it's worse than top secret. This is like someone stealing the launch codes for America's nuclear missiles. It could destabilize the entire Middle East. The rest of the world would line up against one another to back up their allies. It would be world war three."
Alex had a sudden mental image of Damian Cray, pushing a button on Air Force One, starting the countdown that would fire the most dangerous weapons ever created. He shivered in the warm morning air of Cairo.
"Point taken," he said. "So what did your contact tell you?"
"Blunt mentioned that my contacts in Fatah had connections to Hammas," Shalom began.
"There's a promising Hammas cell in Gaza that's recruiting," she said, smiling as if this was actually good news. "They're being very secretive about their organizational structure, but all their work has the signature of an old… acquaintance of mine." Alex gulped. All he knew about Gaza was that it had been forcibly evacuated a few years ago – videos of settlers in the region being dragged from their homes by IDF soldiers had been all over the news for a whole summer. It wasn't number one on his vacation list.
"How will we know where to find this cell?" he asked, in response. Agent Shalom smiled slightly. There was a predatory gleam in her eyes. Alex briefly wondered if all agents had that expression – hungry, almost wolflike – when they were on the tail of a new lead.
"My contact gave me the details," Agent Shalom said. "But like I said, the guy in charge is a real piece of work. He's also incredibly paranoid, so we would have to work our way into the good graces of the cell before we even caught a glimpse of his back."
"How do we do that?" Alex asked.
Agent Shalom held up a brown paper bag that Alex hadn't noticed beside her bed.
"Well, lucky enough for us, we may not have to do anything at all, per say," she told him. "Thanks to Blunt being an interfering little twat, our identities may have done the work for us."
"What do you mean?" Alex frowned. He was all for any plan that did not involve having to partake in terrorist activity to maintain a cover, but he really didn't like the idea of walking around with the identity of someone who had committed crimes like that himself.
"In the terrorist community, nothing says 'pick me' quite like a prison record before the age of eighteen," she said with a grin. "That passport you're carrying? Its real owner served two years in an Israeli prison when he was twelve and thirteen, for wrestling a gun from an Israeli soldier at the point of a Swiss army knife, and shooting the soldier. He came into contact with a militant Fatah cell while in prison, and when he got out, started building explosives for a cell in the West Bank. He was arrested again when he was sixteen for blowing up a bus in Te Aviv, the only one of several scores of explosives that the Israeli government could pin on him. He was traded back to Hammas for the dead body of an Israeli soldier, and was assassinated by a Mossad operative before he turned eighteen."
Alex had taken out the passport while Agent Shalom was talking, but tossed it away from himself when the Mossad agent finished.
"Was MI6 even going to warn me about the extra baggage on this?"
"Alex, we're here to infiltrate a terrorist organization," Agent Shalom said patiently. "They figured it could only help. If it makes you feel better, Zahrah Khalid has an even worse track record, and she was only in prison once."
Alex's eyes were fixed on the passport. How many people had this guy killed? There was only a three-year difference in their ages, but the boy whose passport he carried had killed enough people to bathe in blood if he wanted to. He felt slightly sick.
"So we won't have to kill anyone to prove who we are, at least," Alex grumbled.
"I said we may not have to," Shalom corrected, and the silence that stretched on between them was unbearable.
"You in there?" Agent Shalom asked, waving a hand in front of his face.
"What's in the bag?" Alex asked in answer, trying to distract himself.
"Some basic supplies I picked up while I was talking to my contact," Agent Shalom said. "I'm going to give you a crash course in explosives, so that you can do enough to make the cell think you are who we're saying you are."
"Don't take this the wrong way," Alex said as Agent Shalom pulled a bucket of fertilizer out of the bag, "but I can kind of see why Mossad could be easily convinced you were in on terrorist activity."
"Attend," Agent Shalom said, not addressing his comment, but smiling in response. "Fertilizer bombs are easy to make, and easy enough to get materials for, since most people in Israel use fertilizer. The key is knowing what amounts you need, in combination with other materials to make the right kind of bomb."
Alex watched as she carefully measured out fertilizer into a gallon plastic bag. The next few hours were spent with him watching attentively while Agent Shalom demonstrated the basic kinds of bombs he would be expected to make.
Several times, Alex wondered if MI6 knew what they had signed him up for, but he suppressed it, knowing that their cover might rest or fall depending on how well he remembered and was able to execute the older agent's lessons.
"Muntasir was especially good with remote detonated C4 explosives, however," Agent Shalom said, halfway through the afternoon. She explained the various ways to wire a detonator for a block of C4, or several. Alex watched her hands twist the wires in front of him deftly. He was glad she hadn't actually picked up any C4, though he wouldn't put it past her to have some hidden in some secret compartment in her bag.
"You try," she said, connecting all the wires and passing the detonator over to Alex. He looked down at the device nervously.
"Hammas won't give you any breathing room," Agent Shalom warned him.
Alex picked up the wires, and after a few minutes of fumbling and wrong turns, managed to get the wires connected in all the right places. Agent Shalom examined his handiwork.
"Sloppy, at best," she muttered. "We will work on this. Muntasir might fumble with the correct units for a fertilizer bomb, but he was an expert with electronics."
"You talk about him like you know him," Alex commented, stalling for time. His head was swimming.
"I was the agent that took Muntasir Khalid out a year ago," Agent Shalom said. The thoughtful expression had bled out of her features, leaving her face as stony as Alan Blunt's. Obviously, this was a sore spot for her, but Alex wasn't going to be kept in the dark. Not by his own partner.
"So who was Zahrah Khalid?" he asked.
"They often went as brother and sister, though they were married," she replied.
"What happened to her?" he asked.
"Mossad captured her, at first because they thought she would be a good bargaining chip against Muntasir," Agent Shalom said. "They tortured her to find out where Muntasir was. They found out that she had some strong connections in the world of terrorism while they were interrogating her, and that decided things for them."
"What happened?" Alex asked, even though he already knew.
"They killed her."
She could have been commenting on the color of a jacket she was contemplating buying, Alex thought, unnerved. It was almost scary, how detached she was. How little she cared the agency she was working so hard to get back into had tortured and killed someone they had pulled off the streets for having the wrong boyfriend. The fact that Zarah was still a criminal didn't change the fact that it left a bitter taste in Alex's mouth.
"Practice the wiring for a while," Agent Shalom said, breaking a very uncomfortable silence with a small, but encouraging smile. "If you can manage this without a hitch, I can help you through anything else they might intend for you to do. They will not become suspicious that we would work closely, given our cover," she added dryly.
Alex pulled the detonator towards him, torn. Learning how to wire a detonator might save him and Agent Shalom, and in the long run allow them to discover what information had been compromised, and who had organized the theft.
On the other, he couldn't ignore the fact that mastering this lesson might mean that people would die. Yedit couldn't be sure that they wouldn't have to kill someone to prove that they were who they said they were, and Alex didn't know if he could do it, if he could become a murderer of innocent people who were just taking the bus, or walking down a street, or buying pizza.
"I'm going to go talk to Daniels, meanwhile," Agent Shalom said, breaking through Alex's mental paralysis. "I want to appraise him of the situation and our next plan of attack, since your agency clearly has little trust for me, and would probably assume that I was leading you to your death if I ran this operation as I normally would work in deep cover."
Alex had to smile at that. Blunt would almost certainly recall this mission if he knew what Alex was being taught to do.
On the other hand, he was the one who chose the cover ID's, Alex thought as Shalom closed the door behind her, and he returned his attention to the wires. And he clearly knows something about Agent Shalom's past that she doesn't like to share. She was really upset when she saw the cover ID's, and the way she was talking about them just now…
Alex forced himself to concentrate on the detonator. He wasn't going to be the reason this mission went sour.
If, his mind insisted. If it goes sour.
Agent Shalom was back maybe twenty minutes later. Alex had taken the detonator apart and put it back together five times while she was out. His hands quickly picked up the movements, and Alex began to see their pattern for himself, instead of just memorizing by rote. It was a relatively simple pattern. Agent Shalom nodded approvingly when she saw his progress. She had come back in carrying a bag with two boxes of take-out Indian food.
"Sorry I forgot to ask what you wanted," she said. "I remembered on the way back from talking with Daniels that we haven't yet eaten lunch, and it's already one-thirty."
Alex shrugged and opened the box Agent Shalom passed him. It was some kind of chicken curry, along with a garlic naan, which tasted very good, for its part. As they ate, Agent Shalom asked Alex to demonstrate how quickly he could take the detonator apart and put it back together, and examined his handiwork, giving him a chance to eat.
"This is good, for now," she said. "You will have time to work on different wiring patterns while we wait to move into Gaza, and then while we wait to make contact with the cell we are looking for."
"When do we leave for Gaza?" Alex asked.
"A week, possibly more," Agent Shalom said. "I have arranged for us to be snuck over the border illegally. Anyone watching us will believe that we really are Muntasir and Zahrah Khalid, returned from the dead, as it were."
"And in the meantime?" Alex asked.
"You work on eating, breathing, dreaming, and living electronic explosives," Agent Shalom said.
"I actually don't think remote detonators taste that good," Alex muttered. Agent shalom placed a small booklet in Alex's hands as a response.
"Master the diagrams labeled one, two, three, six, eight, and thirteen," she said. "They will give you a template for anything else you might have to do in a hurry. The other diagrams can be extrapolated if you remember what each is for, and what the wirings are for the main kinds of bombs. Pay special attention to thirteen. When you aren't working on committing these to memory, I want you to learn as much Arabic as you can. You won't ever learn enough to speak it, not before our mission commences, but it will give you a fuzzy outline of what someone is saying."
Alex stared at the dictionary Shalom handed him. The foldout booklet of diagrams had at least twenty intricate designs for detonators, which would take him forever and a half to memorize. Learning another language on top of that?
"I didn't think I would be going back to school so soon," was what he said.
"Cheer up Alex, think of it as a learning experience," Agent Shalom said brightly. "When else are you ever going to learn Arabic, or how to make improvised explosives?"
"At least for the latter, in the case of most people, the answer is never, and for most people, they're bloody well happy to keep it like that," Alex snapped.
"Yet you and I are not like most people, are we Alex?" Agent Shalom asked, an impish gleam in her eye, even though her tone was deadly serious. Alex looked down, unable to meet her eyes.
No, no we aren't, Alex thought. But that thought also reminded him of how vastly different he and the mossad agent were. She was hardened; she was good at her job, and she enjoyed it. The fact that she could speak so matter-of-factly about explosives, torture, and death told him that even though he and Shalom were indeed very different from the majority of people in the world, they were by no means similar to one another.
"And what are you going to do?" he asked, more to forestall the moment when he had to knuckle down to work more than anything.
"I intend to make it clear to a few of the local cells that Zahrah Khalid is very far from dead, and I want to test your ability to work on the detonators in different circumstances that you may be exposed to in the cell. I also intend to see how well you can translate some basic Arabic."
Alex mentally groaned as he looked over at the dictionary again. He hated homework. He turned his attention to the diagrams first, looking over the diagrams Shalom had specified.
"I'm going to shake the tree a bit in some of the local cells, see what I can stir up, by letting some old contacts of Zahrah's know that she's alive," Shalom said, putting her hijab back on, and tucking a pistol into a pocket in her jacket. Alex didn't see any of the other weapons she had uncovered last night, but he had no doubt the mossad agent was better than well armed. She had probably picked up a couple of hand grenades and a rocket launcher while getting lunch, Alex thought, and took an amused moment to guess where she was hiding it all on her slight frame as she exited the motel room.
He chuckled as he began the grueling work of setting up a new detonator for the next diagram he was going to be working on, willing every aspect of the process to remain in his memory.
His fingers were bleeding from minor cuts on the detonator, and his head was throbbing but Alex had managed to get the hang of another diagram, and had memorized a few Arabic verbs, by the time Shalom returned, looking satisfied.
When he slept, Alex dreamed of moving wires around and across a circuit board.
...
Edit: Updated as of June 8. Fixed some minor transitions, generally cleaned up the chapter to make it easier to read.