Consequences of Love and War: Chapter 42
When Ziva David was eighteen and still going through training for the IDF, one of her fellow privates had come across a block of C4 and wanted to experiment with the plastic explosive. As an eighteen-year-old girl wanting to impress the eighteen-year-old boy, she expressed her enthusiasm, even though the part of her that had been raised around weapons and taught to respect them shouted at her to stop. As happens with all adolescents, the impulsive part of her brain won that argument.
The resulting explosion tore apart a training shed and almost set a field of dry desert brush on fire.
Her father, then a colonel in the reserve component of the IDF and a high-ranking member of Mossad—but not yet in the directorate—had been called in, and the dressing down she had received from him was at least a thousand times worse than anything the training sergeants could have dished out, and every time she had worked with C4 since, she could still hear his voice in the back of her head asking her why she had been so foolish.
She blinked away the memory of Eli David as she finished setting up the explosives, hoping that her calculations had been right and that it was enough to blast a hole in the reinforced concrete wall. She glanced over at Thal and nodded as she stepped away, listening as the younger control officer radioed over to the three men on the other side of base, asking them in Arabic if they were ready. A few seconds later, they received a reply asking them to stand-by for another few minutes, and Ziva smirked. Over-the-hill for this particular game or not, she was still better at it than the 'kids'.
As quietly as she could, she checked her weapons for the fifth or sixth time, confirming that the handguns were loaded and ready, the knife set firmly attached to her thigh where it wouldn't slip off as she ran. "It was not a mistake." She blinked and frowned at the softly spoken words, turning to Thal with her confusion clearly written on her face. Well, it would have been clear, had the face mask not obscured her features. "Sleeping with Ezra… that was not a mistake," the younger woman clarified. Ziva rolled her eyes and turned away. She didn't need to hear drama that was more suited to one of Tony's movies than an intelligence agency, not while she was getting ready to storm a United States military base.
"You were his control officer," she finally said, still not looking at Thal. "Your job was to keep him alive, not get him into your bed."
"That is not what it was about!" Ziva raised her eyebrows at the defensive tone, even though she knew Thal couldn't see her expression. The younger officer took a deep breath. "We tried to keep our distance, Ezra and I, because of our jobs, because we knew that it was not proper. And we struggled with that, because…because there was something else there, and we tried to deny it, but some things are…"
"Inevitable," Ziva filled in as Thal's voice trailed off, feeling herself smiling slightly at the word. Even years after the fact, she still couldn't hear the word without seeing Tony's intense stare, dulled only slightly by the alcohol he had stolen from Ducky's secret stash in Autopsy. She spent months trying to ignore that word, and when they realized just how inevitable some things were, months trying to avoid it, as if acknowledging that fact was the same as saying that nothing that happened between them was in their control. And then one day, Tony seemed to decide to pull a 180-degree-turn, working the word into every other sentence until she finally laughed, and since then, it was more of a joke than anything else.
"Yes," Thal replied. She hesitated. "Our work…we both know how dangerous it is, how close we are every day to losing everything." She hesitated again, as if weighing just what she could and could not say to the senior officer. "I suppose that is why your partner is at home sleeping while you are here, so that you would not be worried about each other," she finally said, and despite herself, Ziva snorted sarcastically.
"Tony is not sleeping," she said. "He will not be sleeping until he receives a phone call from me telling him that the mission was successful and all are safe." She thought about the way they parted at the Air Force Base, the serious expression on his face and barely-contained panic in his voice, and realized just how accurate that statement was. Tony had a habit of getting too easily consumed with things he couldn't change. "But yes," she said softly. "He is very good at his job, but having him here would be more of a liability than an asset."
Thal looked ready to say something, but before she got the chance, they both heard Ezra Hardoon's voice in their ears telling them that they were ready. With one final glance at each other and deep breath, they got to work.
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The explosion did more than simply blow a hole through the concrete-and-rebar wall; it almost set a field of dry desert brush on fire, but unlike the last time that had happened, Ziva didn't have the time to stand there and gawk at it with panic in her eyes.
On point, she ran through the resulting hole with alarms blaring and dust flying, and had a flashback to her time in the TacSim—Tactical Simulator—during Mossad training, where the scenarios were fake and the bullets weren't. This time, there was nothing that wasn't real, including the pounding of her heart and the flashes of light she ran and dodged to avoid.
Avoiding detection became easier when she entered Concrete City, the fifteen-foot-tall T-walls casting long shadows she could easily blend into. Unfortunately, that was when the hard work began. She gestured silently to Thal, the sharp nod of the younger woman the only indication that she had been understood. The two Mossad officers split off, going in opposite directions to cover as much ground as possible.
The hutmets were cheap, quickly constructed buildings with concrete floors, front and back doors, an air-conditioner on one end and a heater on the other, with barely more insulation than the simple plywood walls. They were also constructed to allow the occupants to exit as quickly as possible in the case of an emergency, which meant that the metal doors, for some reason locked in their disuse, opened out, instead of in like a typical house door. Which meant that kicking them in wasn't an option. Fortunately, Ziva was also fairly confident that it wouldn't be necessary. In an abandoned section of the base, far away from normal traffic, locking the hutmet as the kidnappers took turns watching over Dr. Aachen was more trouble than it was worth; she was pretty sure that the one occupied by the missing physician would be unlocked. And if she was lucky, the kidnappers left the light on for her.
She ran quickly—as quickly as the conditions would allow—between buildings, her Jericho held ready near her chest in her left hand, her right hand free to test doorknobs as she scanned for any sign of people coming and going. The first row of hutmets revealed nothing, prompting Ziva to duck around a T-wall to the next row. As she did so, she caught a glimpse of Thal, on the other side of the straight row, a few hutmets ahead of Ziva, obviously having come to the same conclusion about the unlocked door. She was about to call for a SitRep from the younger control officer and the operatives on the other side of base, but stopped herself in time. If something was amiss, they would let her know. If not, they didn't need to be distracted.
She had checked three hutmets in the second row, trying to focus on any sounds that would indicate that either the MPs or the kidnappers were near above the sound of the alarms, when she saw the unmistakable sign of footsteps and disturbed dirt in front of a hutmet two away from her current position. She crouched lower, in case someone was watching from a darkened window, as she pulled a flash-bang grenade from her ammo belt and made her way quickly to that simple wood building. She paused a beat outside the door, trying to listen for any sounds from inside, before reaching for the doorknob.
It was unlocked.
She pulled the pin from the grenade and counted to three before throwing the door open with her shoulder, her Jericho ready out in front of her and the flash-bang in her right hand, and without hesitation, rolled the grenade into the hutmet before ducking back behind the metal door, crouching down and covering her ears as best she could.
The explosion, echoing in the small space, was still loud enough to leave her ears ringing, which she supposed was the point.
Before giving whoever—if anyone—was on the other side of the door a chance to recover, she spun on her foot, using her momentum to rotate around the door and into the simple space, and knew that she had the right place.
Curled up on a cot on the opposite side of the hut, hands over her ears and body made as small as possible in the fetal position, was a dark-haired and scrub-clad figure, but Ziva didn't let her eyes stop there, her whole body turning with her head as she scanned the smoke-filled space for others, seeing only a man in a Marine camouflage uniform, writhing in pain on the floor right next to where the grenade stopped, hands clasped over his ears and probably moaning loudly, although Ziva couldn't hear anything over the noise outside and the ringing in her ears. Knowing—unfortunately, from experience—that he would be incapacitated for longer than it would take the MPs to find him, she didn't bother tying him up, satisfied with just removing the weapon from his belt holster, dropping the clip, clearing the handgun, and then dropping it on the other side of the corpsman. Then she kicked him for good measure.
Dr. Aachen was still in the same position on the cot, curled up and facing the wall with a pained expression on her face. "Found Dr. Aachen," Ziva said into her radio, speaking in Arabic with an accent even she couldn't place. "She is unharmed. Leave the base." She didn't receive a reply, but hadn't been expecting one, knowing that each of the other four would follow the order without question.
Assuming they were all still in a position to do so.
"Dr. Aachen," she said loudly, again speaking English, but now with an American accent Tony had no idea she was capable of. "I am from NCIS. Can you hear me?" The physician nodded her head, then winced again at the motion. "The corpsman can not hurt you now."
"HM2 Stemplinski," Dr. Aachen informed her, her voice sounding slightly hollow, probably from temporary hearing loss from the grenade. "The other is Specialist Jenkins."
"Yes," Ziva replied, not having the time to discuss everything with Dr. Aachen. "The MPs will be coming soon. Your husband is waiting for you at the hospital. I need you to lay flat under the cot, and when they come, identify yourself loudly. I do not want you hit by mistake."
The physician again nodded and moved to roll off the cot, assisted by the Mossad officer. She didn't question why Kirkan was in Afghanistan, nor did she ask Ziva wasn't just taking her from the hutmet herself, probably because she had too many other things to worry about.
Ziva waited until Alyse Aachen was securely under the cot before she ran from the hutmet, leaving the door wide open for the MPs to see before heading for the hole that she and Thal had made only a few minutes before. She didn't see the other Mossad officer, but didn't waste any time worrying about that. She would meet up with Thal again at the vehicle, parked almost a kilometer away, or she wouldn't.
Either way, she knew that Dr. Aachen would soon be in safe hands, and even if the rest of the mission failed miserably, that was enough for her.