Free Days of Rage by Brad Taylor

the West Bank occupied territories, and thus had no use for the Gaza unit, but they hesitated to throw away something that had been very difficult to create.
    The Mossad had stepped in.
    In 1979, the Wrath of God operations had ended with the killing of Ali Salameh, the archetype of terror. After that hit, the Kidon—or bayonet—teams had been reassigned back to general Mossad operations. In 1987, Hamas had formed, and the blood began to flow on Israeli soil. By 1994, some in Mossad were beginning to think disbanding the Wrath of God teams had been a mistake, and were looking to rekindle the Kidon mission, but convincing the command was another story. Too much training. Too much overhead. Too much everything for too little gain. Then Samson fell into its lap. Almost a Kidon element in its own right. All it needed was a little sharpening of a few global edges.
    The Mossad went to work, and the results began immediately, with the 1995 killing in Malta of Fathi Shaqaqi, the creator of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. There were a few missteps after that first success, the worst being two operatives captured in Jordan in 1997. They’d injected the Hamas political bureau chairman, Khaled Mashaal, with poison, but were swiftly captured by Jordanian police, leading to enormous political repercussions. The mission ended with Israel flying in an antidote to the poison, forced to admit its hand in the operation.
    The teams learned quickly from those mistakes, and had some notable successes, including the 2008 killing of Imad Mughniyah—a master Hezbollah terrorist—in Damascus, Syria, and the 2010 killing of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh—the founder of Hamas’s militant wing—in Dubai, UAE.
    Even with these successes, without a burning desire to keep the mission—without a Munich—people in the upper echelon of Mossad still questioned the expense and waste of teams dedicated to targeted killing. After all, they did nothing for years at a time. Couldn’t Mossad simply put a team together when necessary? Did Israel really need dedicated assets for the mission?
    With the target on his computer, it appeared Samson had finally turned the corner, and their worth was being proved.
    Aaron reflected on the profile for a moment, running through various options in his mind. Of course, the target himself had a vote, and would dictate to a certain extent what was possible, but sending a message required a specific signature. Mossad wanted Syria to know it was
them
who had taken the life, but needed to ensure the prime minister of Israel could say
No comment
with a straight face. In other words, everyone would know with a wink and a nod, but nobody could prove anything.
    He pulled up the location of the meeting on Google Earth, and thought about the atmospherics.
Yes. It would work.
    The initial Shabeeha meeting with other unknown personnel was just outside the Istanbul Grand Bazaar, in a rat warren of small streets and side alleys too small for a car. But not too small for a moped, which is what zipped around that area like little demons. A perfect mode of assault. Wearing helmets, a Samson element could blast up on a small motorcycle and assault the meeting site, surgically killing the Syrian without harming anyone else in attendance.
Exactly like the scientists.
    Over the past several years, five Iranian nuclear scientists and the commander of Iran’s cyber warfare unit had been assassinated, all by attackers on motorcycles. Some were killed when a limpet-shaped charge was magnetically attached to their car door, others were simply gunned down in a drive-by, but all were the work of the Mossad, and the world knew it. True, the missions were executed by surrogates and not an actual Samson team, but everyone understood who the puppet master was. Using the same signature here would ensure the Syrian regime instantly recognized this hit for what it was.
    Aaron smiled to himself. It looked like conducting “ordinary” Mossad case officer work in