the window at the country neither of them had seen before. It did not look as clean as it did from the air. The land was dry and dusty. In the distance was a hint of green but no evidence of the soil that produced the lush fruits and vegetables for which Israel was famous.
Raz considered asking them about the Russian to get the ball rolling and start searching for any cracks in their supposed mission but decided against it and turned back to face the front. He was not in the mood for subtle conversation at that moment, and, anyway, he got the impression from the thuggishlooking Englishman he would learn more from watching than discussion.
Stratton stared at the back of Raz’s head and wondered what kind of man he was and would he pose any problems for them. His thoughts drifted to the meeting in Ramallah and what light it might throw on the mission, if any. Zhilev was somewhere here in the Middle East with his atom bomb, of that he was certain. The question was, where did he want to detonate it. A more detailed profile on Zhilev could have been useful and might shed some clue as to what his goal was. From what little Stratton knew, and thinking as a Special Forces soldier himself, he had boiled it down to two options. Zhilev either wanted to destroy an Islamic symbol and as many Muslims as possible along with it, or start a fight between the East and the West. For the latter, initiating the bomb in Europe would have been better, but only if he could somehow blame it on Islam, which would not be easy. For the former option, the two most important Muslim sites were Mecca and Medina. After that came Jerusalem, but inside what was perhaps technically or symbolically the West, i.e. Israel. That certainly made it interesting, but the big disadvantage was the degree of difficulty. It would be much harder to get a bomb into an Israeli city than into an Arab one. But then, from what little Stratton knew about Zhilev, he was certainly ambitious and did not lack tenacity or planning abilities. The truth was Zhilev had been faultless so far and was only being hunted thanks to a psychic remote viewer.
Stratton suddenly felt eyes on him and looked up to the rear-view mirror. Like most civilianised police-type vehicles, there was a second rear-view mirror for the passenger to use and Raz was looking directly at him.
Chapter 12
Zhilev pulled off the tarmac road scarred by countless tank tracks and eased on to a sandy, stony verge, stopped the car and killed the engine. He looked ahead through the dirty windscreen up the road that climbed steeply to a permanent Israeli army checkpoint a hundred yards away. A large sign close by announced the entrance to the city of Jerusalem. Jericho, the lowest dry point on earth, was some twenty miles behind and to the east on the northern tip of the Dead Sea and over two hundred miles north of Elat. He had spent the night outside a petrol station, south of the Dead Sea, waiting for it to open, and the drive to Jerusalem had been eventless with no other checkpoints after the one outside Elat.
The traffic heading into the city at this checkpoint was light; however the lethargic soldiers who ran it were slow and managed to maintain a constant line of half a dozen or so waiting cars. Beyond the checkpoint, lining the high ground a mile away like medieval battlements, were new Israeli housing estates, their stone-clad buildings and red-clay tiled roofs standing defiantly, proudly occupying their captured ground. The land in front of the city on all sides was barren, rocky desert with sprinklings of hardy shrubbery growing out of the arid soil.
Zhilev had considered bypassing the Israeli outpost on foot but after studying the land decided against it. There was hardly a stick of cover for a daylight move and at night the likely approach routes to the city were undoubtedly monitored by a variety of night vision, trembler and movement detection devices. Attempting to pass through the checkpoint with the stolen car was obviously out of the question. He had to assume the owners had been discovered by now and the car reported missing.
He watched a handful of Palestinians approach the checkpoint on foot where they were questioned, asked to show identification and searched before being allowed through into Jerusalem.