Free The Gamma Option by Jon Land

away from them, he had managed to lift and start to hurl the grenade when it detonated. The colonel’s men were saved, but his arm was reduced to sinews sprouting from the shoulder joint.
    The rehabilitation period had been long, and Ben-Neser resisted the use of prostheses and learned to live with a single arm. The best therapy was determination, and he focused all he had into becoming the best marksman in Israel. He learned how to steady the rifle with a single arm and could reload as quickly as any man with two. A decade’s assignments had culminated in a single mistake—a civilian lunging in front of a bullet meant for a much wanted terrorist—and he was reassigned to Mossad as a field control officer, an overseer of other people’s work. With each report, he found himself contemplating not how the operation had been done, but how he would have done it himself. The frustration mounted.
    It spilled over when the first hard reports on Evira began to cross his desk. He maneuvered to get himself appointed as head of the team gathering intelligence on her and then became obsessed with putting an end to her shadowy and elusive movements within Israel. In these past two years he had considered nothing else, and when at last a report linked her to a booth in the Jaffa Market, Ben-Neser elected to hold on to the memo and deal with it himself. The commandos with him knew no better. He was their control, after all, and they saw no reason to doubt this sudden change in plans.
    “Come in, Colonel,” a voice squawked over his walkie-talkie.
    “I read you, Ari.”
    “All men are in position. Ready to move on your signal.”
    Ben-Neser reviewed for himself the final deployments he had decided on once Evira’s position was confirmed. Besides himself and Ari, he had a detachment of six commandos at his disposal. Of these, two had been placed upon the flat roof of the long angular building that housed Ben-Neser’s location along with a dozen other sidewalk shops. One had been stationed around the corner from the target shop on the chance Evira might manage to flee in that direction. The remaining three were all planted among the locals: one seated before a blanket crammed with cheap watches, a second in apron selling food from a heated pushcart, and a third looking like an eager patron who had yet to purchase a thing.
    The phantom pain scratched at Ben-Neser again. Had he already passed the point of no return, or was there still time to abort? No matter the results here today, he knew the ramifications so far as his future was concerned. But he was approaching the end of his run anyway and desperately wanted to take something with him, something beyond the anonymity of the kills he had made over the decade he had served as a marksman.
    Ben-Neser turned his walkie-talkie to the channel that connected him with his commandos. “We move on my signal. Get ready. No shooting unless absolutely necessary. Clear? I want her taken alive. That’s the first priority.” He gazed across the street one last time. With the itch of a no-longer-existent arm driving him to shudders, Ben-Neser spoke again. “Thirty seconds, people. On my mark …”
    “You don’t have a choice and neither do I,” Evira was saying.
    McCracken glared at her from across the table. “Do you really expect to be able to reach Hassani? You’re talking about a man who is almost never seen and about whom virtually nothing is known.”
    “Some is known. Enough. The underground movement in Tehran is small but well focused. They will help me.”
    “Killing him will almost certainly mean your own death.”
    She returned his emotionless stare. “Would you not do the same thing if in my position?”
    “I’m still not quite clear on what that position is.”
    “I’m an Arab and so is Hassani. Is that it?”
    “Not at all.”
    “It is in enough ways, Blaine McCracken, and you know it. Yes, I am an Arab, and no one wants to see a Palestinian homeland more than me.