Dead Drop

Book 2: Handler Thriller, A

by M.P. Woodward

Genres: Action & Adventure; Spy Thrillers; Political Thrillers

Synopsis

International nuclear espionage turns allies into enemies in this electrifying thriller from the author of The Handler.

Nuclear negotiations between the United States and Iran have reached a crisis point. The new American administration is determined to move ahead, but there are several stumbling blocks, not the least of which is Lieutenant Colonel Kasem Khalidi, the former Iranian Quds Force intelligence officer the CIA has hidden away in one of its safe houses. 

As always, John and Meredith Dale are caught in the middle. Mossad—the Israeli intelligence agency—wants Meredith's help to find a suspected cache of Quds tactical nukes, while John is in a desperate race to keep Kasem one step ahead of an Iranian hit squad. 

They are pawns in an international chess game, and any player knows you cannot capture the king without sacrificing some pawns.

Release date: May 23, 2023

Publisher: Berkley

Print pages: 464

Sample

PROLOGUE

The captain had to rely on the oldest, most reliable naval sensor of them all—­his eyes. He pressed his brow to the viewfinder and squinted. Sidestepping, he rotated the large metal cylinder all the way around the bridge. He was under strict orders to avoid using the surface search radar, but after completing the periscope’s sweep, he’d concluded that on a night like this, his eyes would do just fine.

For once, conditions up top were just as the intelligence briefers had said they’d be. There were no visible marine navigation lights and only a few winking streetlights on the distant shore. Even better, a thin, silvery sheen from the half-­moon reflected on waves that were barely above a ripple. Only a heaving swell undulated the surface of the otherwise flat sea fifty feet above them.

The captain scanned again. This time he paused in the middle of the three-­sixty, aiming the reticle at the northern end of the lights on the land. There, he zoomed in to identify the old sandstone ruins, still lit for the tourists at ten o’clock on this summer Saturday eve. The crumbling sixteenth-­century Ottoman fort known as the Sidon Sea Castle was easily visible from this distance. With the reticle centered on it, the skipper pressed a button to take a laser navigation fix.

“Point X-ray. Two point four kilometers, bearing zero-­eight-­three,” said a young seaman, reading off the numbers, scribbling in the log.

That sounded about right to the captain. He cross-­referenced three more points in the same way and found that Tekumah, the Israeli navy diesel-­electric Dolphin class submarine he commanded, was right where she was supposed to be.

“Down scope,” Tekumah’s captain said, folding the handles. As the periscope retracted, he turned to a hard-­faced man standing next to him who stoically awaited the report. This man wore a wetsuit pulled down to the waist, exposing a tight black T-shirt.

The captain caught his eye. “Good news, Reu. You and your boys won’t have to panic in the tubes tonight.”

Reu shrugged, his mouth flat. “Don’t surface on our account. We don’t mind going out the torpedo tubes.”

The captain smiled. “Stow your SDVs and tanks. It’s a nice night for boating.”

As the frogman went below to break down the Swimmer Delivery Vehicles, Tekumah’s captain angled his head toward a petty officer manning the diving planes, then looked at the young lieutenant in charge of the shift. “Officer of the deck, make surface profile zero. Ten degrees up angle. Two knots, dead slow.”

Fifteen minutes later, Reu barely bounced as his rubber boat skimmed along the smooth, oily sea. Nice night for boating, he repeated inwardly to himself, grateful to have dodged the submerged egress and its claustrophobic hell in the torpedo tubes. Up here there was no wind, a flat sea, good visibility. The rubber boat was making a quiet twenty knots. Ideal conditions, really. The frogman cursed himself. No mission ever had ideal conditions.

He and his three men, commandos of the Israeli Navy SEAL team equivalent known as Flotilla 13, were squatting on the rubber dinghy’s sponsons as cool salt air rushed past them. Behind them, Tekumah had already submerged in a frenzy of bubbles. Clad in shining black wetsuits and neoprene balaclavas, Reu felt that they were alone on the sea now, invisible in the dark.

Two racing kilometers on, he sensed a warmer shift in the air temperature and signaled his coxswain to stop. Almost immediately, the dinghy’s way fell off and began to drift with the Mediterranean current. The man at the tiller killed the humming engine. All was quiet now, save for the sound of water lapping against the semirigid hull.

“NVGs,” the Flotilla 13 commander whispered to the chief petty officer next to him, his number two. A moment later, Reu adjusted the night-­vision goggles over his forehead, waiting for them to warm up before scanning the beach. It looked empty—­but looks could be deceiving. With an outstretched fist, he signaled his men to remain still, waiting, drifting.

After another minute, the Flotilla 13 commander saw what he’d been looking for. Just beyond the surf line, a van slowed by the side of the road. The tall Mercedes Sprinter then did a three-­pointer and turned itself toward the sea. About ten seconds after that, it blinked its headlights—­once, then a second time a beat later. Reu’s pulse quickened. One blink would have meant mission-­scrub. Two meant the op was a go.

Retrieving an angled waterproof flashlight from his combat harness, Reu blinked twice in reply to the van. He then tapped the chief on a knee and stowed his NVGs. The engine coughed back to life and the dinghy surged forward.

Much of the coast in this part of Lebanon was jagged rock, smashed by pounding surf. But they’d planned for landfall on the ladies’ beach at the extreme edge of the Damour Beach Resort, just north of Sidon. With a strict night curfew on the female-­only enclave, the Damour made for a good exfil point—­provided they got back to it before sunup.

Gunning the boat’s engine into the back of a breaking swell, the coxswain finally cut power and pulled the engine up. With oars in hand, the men paddled the dinghy to catch the momentum of a roaring wave, then swiveled their legs over the sponsons. They raced in on white water until the keel skidded on sand.

With well-­oiled practice, the frogmen pulled the heavy boat ashore, lifting it by its handles, pausing now and then to rest. Once to the dunes, they kneeled beside it to extract their IWI assault rifles, spare magazines, and body armor from their rubber bladders. Finally, with weapons at their sides, they ran low and fast toward the Sprinter van.

The driver, a woman in heels and skirt, helped stow the weapons in the Mercedes’s overhead cargo area. The interior stayed dark since the dome lights had been disabled. Catching a glimpse of the woman in the spare moonlight, Reu thought the pretty brunette looked to be all of twenty years old. But then, he admitted to himself, the older he got the younger they looked. He unzipped his wetsuit.

Showing some modesty, the female intelligence officer slid behind the Sprinter’s wheel as the men changed into the dry clothes that had been waiting for them. Once dressed in jeans and a polo, Reu got into the front passenger’s seat next to her.

“How long?” he asked.

The woman, a Mossad intelligence collection operative called a katsa, was busy typing a message on her phone. “Twenty minutes,” she said without looking up. “And we’re late.”

Forty kilometers to the north, the phone lying just to the right of Maya Shaheen’s sweating club soda began to buzz. The senior special operative, known in Mossad parlance as a kidon, glanced at the glowing screen: Rendez-­vous au Blanc 20.

Without missing a beat, Maya swiped the message clear and continued the slight nod of her head in time with the throbbing bass, thinking about the op. The team had made landfall. They were a little late—­but then so was the man she was to meet here at the club. Maya sipped her soda, mentally choreographing the next set of moves, deciding that the op was still a go.

Despite Lebanon’s deepening economic crisis, the nightclub, Beirut White, was packed on this Saturday night. A striking brunette who stood nearly six feet tall, Maya was pressed on all sides by young people ordering drinks, yelling to be heard over the throbbing music. Ignoring the clubgoers, she carefully composed a text to the man she was waiting for.

Mo, où es tu? Je me sens seul.

That should do it, she thought, putting the phone down again. Men tended to hurry whenever Maya said she was lonely. She took another sip of her soda and tapped her foot in time with the beat.

Maya had met Mo at a hotel in Paris about a month back. A Persian who resided in Damascus, Mohammed Baramzedeh preferred the Prophet’s first syllable as his sobriquet. Mid-­forties, slim, bespectacled, bookish, the Iranian liked to drink when away from his dry homeland. Maya had stalked him to the hotel lobby bar where Mo had been having his quiet dinner, reading his phone while sipping a Chardonnay—­ behavior spot-­on with her pre-­op brief.

She’d taken the corner barstool, just off Mo’s elbow. Dressed in a snug suit, she’d crossed her long legs slowly to give a full body view before asking him how the food was. Even at thirty-­nine, the one-­time youth model could still pull it off.

Acknowledging that they were both single business travelers in a foreign city, Maya had talked Mo into sharing a bottle of her favorite Bordeaux, conveniently unavailable by the glass. Mo was soon shocked to learn just how much he had in common with this rare beauty. She lived in Beirut. But since she spoke no Arabic, she admitted to feeling sometimes lost in the polyglot city. Mo confessed that as a native Farsi speaker, his Arabic was also poor. In French, he proceeded to tell Maya how much he loved Beirut, how he visited often, how he favored a particular boutique hotel by the sea called Mer Azul. Twirling a finger through one of the J-shaped curls of her shining dark hair, Maya had smiled widely.

Halfway through the second bottle, she’d suggested that with summer ripening, perhaps Mo would be in Beirut again soon. Mo eagerly assured her that he would. She’d made approving noises and glanced at her watch. It had been just long enough. She’d made excuses to leave. But not before scrawling her number on a cocktail napkin.

Now in Beirut, sitting at the bar in Beirut White, Maya saw the predictable response from Mo. En retard mais j’accélère! Je te verai en dix!

She acknowledged the message with a winking emoji and a heart.

She then composed another text, meant for a different man.

Ten minutes, she wrote.



Maya’s text landed in a bunker two hundred kilometers to the south in Tel Aviv. There, Werner Davidai, head of the Mossad operations directorate called Caesarea, retrieved his buzzing phone from his pocket. The bald sixty-­seven-­year-­old nudged the deputy next to him. “Maya says ten minutes,” he said.

The deputy nodded before quietly passing the word to the uniformed men at the scopes.

Werner was sitting along a wall in the darkened Joint War Room, JWR. It was a hardened warren under the Matcal Tower, the general staff headquarters of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). Before Maya’s text had come in, the Caesarea chief had been listening to the uniformed soldiers of IDF’s Unit 8200 swap jargon over their boom mics. Much like the American National Security Agency, Unit 8200 was the Israeli group that processed Signals Intelligence, SIGINT, which included intercepting voice and electronic communications.

Werner put his phone back in the breast pocket of his thick, army-­style shirt. Over the soldiers’ heads, he watched a grainy infrared video feed from the four Heron drones circling Beirut. The unmanned aerial combat vehicles, UACVs, still had more than two hours’ time on station. “Tighten up on Beirut White,” he said to one of the operators.

As the view changed, the Caesarea boss watched the telemetry data flashing at the bottom of the screen, indicating flight attitude and weapons status. The flickering numbers reminded him of the heads-­up display of the F-15 he’d flown for the Israeli Air Force (IAF) way back when. And then, as often happened to Werner, an involuntary memory fired. He was suddenly glimpsing the sun reflecting off a canopy, a smudge of brown desert beyond the sea. He was watching the red-­and-­black roundel on the Syrian MiG’s wing angling down, away.

A young 8200 soldier brought him back to the present. “Sir—­fix on the HVT’s phone.” It was a reference to Mohammed Baramzedeh, Mo, the Iranian High Value Target they were pursuing, the one on his way to see Maya at Beirut White.

“Can we get him on video?” asked Werner.

“Triangulation on two . . . now three cell towers. Wait one,” came the reply. The drone video swung back and forth, retargeting. With the assistance of electronic gimbals, the image improved. Zooming in tight, the men in the JWR identified the car as a silver Honda Accord. And zooming tighter still, they saw the HVT himself—­Mo, on his way to meet Maya at the club. Hurrying.

Gotcha, Werner thought.

Reu got out of the van first. Standing still, the Flotilla 13 frogman paused, ensuring that all was as it should be in the parking lot at Beirut White. The nightclub’s bass-­heavy music shook the Sprinter’s windows. But things were otherwise still. Poking his head around the van, Reu surveyed the egress routes and decided they were good, just as they’d been depicted in the satellite photos. Satisfied, he rapped the vehicle’s sliding door. Fully dry and clothed as civilians now, his men got out, snugging down the pistols each carried in an ankle holster. They headed toward the club.

At the corner of the building, near clusters of straggling partiers who’d either just left the club or were about to go in, three attractive women approached. These additional Mossad katsas put on an ostentatious show of greeting, kissing Reu and his Flotilla 13 men like boyfriends. Now, strutting proudly, holding hands, the girls led their dates past the line of young men waiting at the door. The bouncer winked at the lead brunette and unclipped a velvet rope, letting them all pass. The pretty young katsa blew him a kiss on her way through.

“Oh, to be a frogman,” said one of the IDF drone operators back in the Tel Aviv JWR bunker, watching on monitor one. The sergeant zoomed in on the front door to Beirut White, confirming that the team had entered as planned. He relayed it to the officer over his shoulder.

With the team inside, Werner turned back to the video of Mo’s Honda, mentally urging the Iranian to hurry the hell up to Beirut White. But just as the Caesarea boss willed the silver Accord to make a pivotal turn toward the club, the sedan slowed to a stop on the shoulder.

“What’s he doing? Where’d he go?” Werner asked no one in particular.

Caught unawares, the drone’s tracking video momentarily lost the vehicle. It then swerved and circled before reacquiring the target. But the Honda was no longer alone. A white Mitsubishi Montero SUV had arrived. It was slowing to a stop behind Mo’s now-­parked Honda. Alarmed, Werner watched as the Mitsubishi’s front seat passenger and driver got out and walked toward Mo’s window.

“Who the fuck is this?” the Caesarea chief said to the lead 8200 Network Intelligence Officer, NIO, charged with the SIGINT plan. “Has our HVT gotten any calls? How do we not know about this?”

The NIO struggled to respond. “HVT’s phone has been active on WhatsApp,” a subordinate rescued him. “He’s using a VPN. Can’t read the contents.”

Werner clenched his mouth and stared. The Caesarea boss watched two men approaching Baramzedeh’s Honda in the drone video. Both were fit and bearded. One of them cautiously opened the front passenger door of the Accord and slid in next to the HVT. The other stood looking at the street, watching, his right arm at his side. It was poised as though ready to reach for the sidearm that was surely inside his jacket.

The fucking bastards, Werner thought.

Inside Beirut White, Maya watched the Flotilla 13 team and their katsa dates as they came through the front door. She’d been one of those young katsas before entering the elite kidon special activities program more than a decade ago. Approvingly, the now senior Mossad operative watched the four pretty women thread the crowd toward the teeming dance floor. But while the younger Flotilla 13 men were able to blend in, the oldest one looked uncomfortable.

Paying little attention to his assigned date, the Flotilla 13 leader’s eyes were resting on the door, watching. Military men, Maya thought. The best of them, the ones you really wanted when the shit hit the fan, simply couldn’t pull off an alias like this. Then again, she thought, if the snatch went sideways, that flinty bastard with the thousand-­yard stare would be just the man for the job.

Her phone buzzed. Mo texting again. Excuse moi-­je peux pas venir après tout-­c’est mon boulot.

Maya kept her face neutral. It wasn’t easy because Mo’s message was a disaster, a showstopper. He was abandoning her for work, standing her up. She responded with several coquettish replies. None worked. Mo was adamant.

On pourrai faire rendez vous à la plage à Azul, demain? the Iranian finally offered.

Maya bit the inside of her cheek. Demain. Tomorrow.

That was it, then. The op was off, scrubbed. They’d all be heading out now, using their pre-­planned egress routes to get back to Israel. There was no sense in pressing further. Werner would lose his mind as soon as he found out, she knew.

But projecting a breezy calm, the beautiful kidon composed a final message for Mo. À demain, chéri!

Then she texted Werner.

“Chara!” Werner cursed in the JWR bunker, reading his buzzing phone. “Maya says the HVT’s not going to the club.”

Up on monitor three, Werner watched in disgust as the Montero and Honda made a U-turn together. The two vehicles were headed back to the southwest, toward the southern Beirut Shia neighborhoods collectively called the dahiyeh, Arabic for “suburb.”

“Has to be an IRGC security detail,” Werner’s deputy said, watching the cars on monitor three. IRGC was the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the elite backbone of Iranian military ops. They were all over Lebanon, especially the dahiyeh.

Not just IRGC, Werner was thinking in response, jaw muscles moving. “They’re Quds.”

The specialty of IRGC’s elite Quds Force was to gin up Shia proxy armies around the Middle East. Armies of freedom as the Iranians called them. In Lebanon, that Shia army was called Hezbollah, Hizb’ Allah, the Party of God.

Someone burned us, Werner thought, crossing his arms.

The vehicles were conducting a surveillance-­detection route, an SDR, turning randomly. Regular IRGC officers wouldn’t conduct fieldcraft like that. But Quds officers would.

“They seem to be headed southwest. Probably going back to Mer Azul, the HVT’s beach hotel,” Werner’s deputy said, crossing his arms in imitation of the chief.

More like the dahiyeh, thought Werner. Once there, they’d disappear for good into some Hezbollah-­run safe house. So much for the planned snatch at Beirut White with the easy transit back to the sub Tekumah.

As a grandson of German Holocaust survivors, the old Yiddish saying fired from somewhere in Werner’s mind: Mann tracht, un Gott lacht.

Well, Werner thought. God’s most certainly laughing now.

But he still had a play, he thought. He texted Maya.