Spa, Belgium, Thursday, July 11th, 2002, 3:26 p.m. local time
The Ardennes are known for its thick forests, rugged terrain, and mineral-rich spas. One of its treasures is the Manoir de Lébioles, a luxury hotel a few kilometers outside Spa. When it was finished in 1910, some called Georges Neyt’s new villa the “small Versailles of the Ardennes.” Others thought the manicured grounds and stone buildings were the extravagant home of a wealthy nobleman. In 1999, new owners turned the complex into a luxury hotel.
Janis had stayed at the five-star hotel before when she and Karin came to watch the Belgian Grand Prix. She liked the food, the attentive staff, and its remote location.
As a vintage race car owner, driver, and fan, Janis couldn’t resist taking Aliyah to the historic Spa-Francorchamps track, where races had been run since the 1920s. As they drove around the portion of the track open to the public, Janis told Aliyah about Dan Gurney who won the 1967 Belgian Gran Prix in a car designed and built in the United States.
The Ardennes is also famous for the Battle of the Bulge, one of the biggest land battles of World War II. On day two, the couple visited the Malmedy Memorial near where Johannes Peiper – a German SS Officer – ordered his men to shoot American prisoners. Eighty-four GIs were machine-gunned to death.
A cryptic message left on June 10th at the Manoir de Lébioles front desk said their meeting was set for “noon on the eleventh.” Translation – their targets – Waadi Jalal and Abdul Chakroun – would arrive around noon.
The message prompted an evening trip to the Brussels train station. While Aliyah waited in the car, Janis went to the kiosk where people stored luggage. She showed her passport, and the man looked at a ledger before he gave her a key. She paid the storage fee and left a 10 Euro note as a tip.
On the way to the locker, Janis wiped the key with a pad soaked in alcohol. With the locker open, she stuck her hands inside so no one would see her pull on a pair of latex gloves unless they were paying close attention.
Out came a duffel bag, and as she reset the key, she wiped it again with the alcohol-soaked cloth. The bag went into the trunk of their rental car, and Janis ran a small scanner around the top and sides of the bag to ensure there were no tracking devices installed.
Driving toward Spa, Janis exited E40 at Rommerson and turned off so she could drive to a spot where she could stop on the side of the road. After opening the trunk, she unzipped the bag and made a cursory inspection of the weapons. Satisfied that they were what she requested, Janis returned to the driver’s seat and Aliyah handed her lover a bottle of water. “Paranoia?”
“Let’s put it this way. In this business, outside of you, I don’t trust anyone. That is why I don’t take missions planned by someone else – too much risk.”
The weapons were taken to their room and inspected again before being put back in the bag. They, along with Aliyah and Janis, spent the night in their hotel room.
After feasting on the breakfast buffet the next morning, the pair stopped in at a bakery and a small grocer in Malmedy where they bought bread and a small grocery store to buy salami, ham, cheese, and a six-pack of bottled water. It all went into their packs.
Janis drove through Spa to the Route de Berizenne. Just after the road made a 90-degree turn to the east, Janis found a place to pull safely off the road. A note in both French and English was left on the dash saying they would be back in the afternoon after hiking in the woods.
A kilometer hike brought them to where they could see a two-story brick house and a barn. Their intelligence said Hezbollah recruits from France and Belgium were brought here to wait while their travel arrangements and documents were prepared for their trip to the Al-Musawi training camp.
Staying well back in the trees but still able to see the building, Janis assembled the rifle, known in the U.S. Marine Corps as the M25 Sniper System. The rifle was a specially modified M-14 with a match-grade barrel, glass bedded stock, special gas piston, bipod, and a large suppressor. The M25 came with a Bausch & Lamb 10 power scope and a card showing how the rifle performed at 100-yard intervals up to 900 yards. Her 20-round magazines were loaded with Cartridge, Caliber 7.62mm 175 grain M316 Mod 0 ammunition specially made for sniping.
While Janis was getting ready, Aliyah focused a 40-power spotting scope on the house’s front door. Two hours passed, and they saw nothing – no people, no van, no Chakroun or Jalal.
Waiting was part of the job. Sometimes the target showed up right away; sometimes, it did not. Janis didn’t like leaving their car, even though it was parked legally and well off the road. The rental VW was, as a practical matter, their only way out other than walking. Janis felt exposed.
The photographs given to them showed the gravel driveway widened into a large parking area in front of the house. Janis estimated the distance from where their photos showed the van parked to the house’s front door was 30 yards. In the time needed to run from the car to the front door, Janis was confident she could fire four accurate shots with the semi-automatic M25. At just over 500 yards, the driveway was well within the range of her ammunition.
Janis slowly scanned the area through her scope. First, she studied the tree line on the other side of the driveway, then the field in front of them, and last, the house. There was a window open on the second floor of the house in which she saw a white curtain flutter.
A glint at the base of a tree caught Janis’s eye. “Aliyah, we have company.” Janis described the location, and Aliyah slowly moved her 40-power scope, whose greater magnification came with a much smaller field of view.
“Shit. You’re right.”
“Do you think he’s spotted us?”
“I don’t know.” Janis tugged on the section of pantyhose that she duct-taped to the front of the rifle scope to prevent glint, and Aliyah had done the same to the spotting scope.
“Let’s go on the assumption he has. We’re going to crawl back 15 yards, move to the right about 30 yards and set up farther back in the woods. My gut tells me there may be a second shooter on the second floor set back from the window and hidden in the shadow.”
Janis kept her rifle pointed at the sniper in the trees while Aliyah crawled into a new position between two large trees. Janis followed, and several anxious minutes later, Janis re-found the sniper in the woods.
Aliyah whispered. “Janis, I am pretty sure there is another shooter set up well back from the window behind a dark cloth hanging from the ceiling. I saw the barrel of his rifle move, and I don’t think it is suppressed like the one in the woods.”
“We’ve spotted two snipers, and I wonder how many more there are?” Janis paused as she processed what they were facing. “This smells like a trap. Sweep the field and see if men are hiding in the grass. If Chakroun or Jalal show up, we have a decision to make.”
“What do you want to do?”
“Not sure yet. Let’s see if there are any more shooters. This tells me Hezbollah was tipped off.”
After searching the grass for 10 minutes, Aliyah whispered. I don’t see anyone in the grass.”
“O.K., here’s the plan. If the targets show up, I take out Jalal and Chakroun, then go after the snipers. We have the advantage in that our rifle is suppressed, and they won’t see the flash. As soon as I start shooting, you slide back, pack up the scope and get ready to cover our retreat. When I finish, we’ll leapfrog back to the car. Hopefully, we won’t need to see how good you are with the M16A3.”
The crunching sound of tires crunching on gravel caused both women to swing their glasses to where a car would emerge from the trees. A black Volkswagen Eurovan stopped where Janis suspected it might.
Based on the waving of the grass, Aliyah called out the wind, and Janis adjusted the scope and pointed her rifle to the front of the van where she would pick up the targets. “They’re getting out of the van.”
“It’s a trap. Neither are Jalal and Chakroun. Get ready to leave.”
Janis shifted her aim point to where the sniper in the woods was in time to see a puff of smoke rise from the barrel of his rifle. The bullet smacked into the tree near their original position. She exhaled and made sure her body was perfectly motionless as her right forefinger took up the slack on the trigger. The M25 shoved her shoulder back. Through the scope, she saw a rifle fly up as her target was knocked backward by the impact of the 173-grain bullet.
Neither needed a scope to see the muzzle flash from the house’s second story. The bullet smacked into the tree next to where they had been. Janis swung the M25 on the bipod so she could shoot at the house and saw another flash. The bullet thudded into the ground five feet from Aliyah as Janis squeezed the trigger.
A second later, she saw the barrel tilt upward. “Time to go.”
The two men from the van pointed in their direction, yelling to a dozen men carrying AK-47s that were spilling out of the van and the house. They split up, half ran down the road, and half went wide around the field.
Janis knelt behind a large pine tree. “I’m going to slow them up, then we’ll leapfrog. Get moving!”
She dropped one man in the field and then pivoted to fire at the two men closest to her on the road. Both went down. Trees partially blocked her view of the field, but when she saw a man with an AK-47, a single shot to the chest sent him sprawling.
As Janis ran crouched over and zigzagging through the trees, bullets smacked into the tree trunks and kicked up dirt where she’d been. After a few hundred yards, it was clear that they were not being pursued. At the edge of the woods, Janis put a hand on Aliyah’s shoulder and made a patting motion, as if to say, stop and get down.
Whispering, Janis said, “We just escaped from a well-planned ambush and we’re not out of the woods yet.” She pointed to their car and the grassy area between the woods and the road. “Look for anything out of the ordinary. They may have stationed a couple of shooters out in the field to pick us off if we escaped the trap back at the house.
Aliyah took the 10 X 50 binoculars from her pack and began searching. “What am I looking for?”
“Anything unusual or that doesn’t quite fit, such as a poorly prepared hide. Then I’ll look at it with the rifle scope.” Janis lowered herself to a prone position and rested the bipod on the soft earth. She popped out the magazine, which only had nine rounds left, and replaced it with a full one with 20.
“Janis, there’s what looks like a stump of a tree about five hundred yards from us at 11 o’clock and about ten yards from the tree line. An off-color green mound doesn’t match the grass, but I can’t make out much detail.”
It took a few seconds for Janis to find the tree stump, and she adjusted the scope before slowly moving the rifle to find the off-color mound. “It’s a hide of some sort. I see a suppressor on a rifle barrel. I will wake them up with a shot into the tree stump.”
Unless you were within 50 feet and listening carefully, the average passerby would not hear the soft crack from the suppressed M25. Both women, Aliyah through the binoculars and Janis through the rifle scope saw the wood fly from the impact of the 173-grain MK 316 MOD 0 bullet.
Whoever was in the hide was surprised by the bullet impact. Janis saw a man toss off the netting as he changed positions to reorient his rifle. It was a fatal mistake. Before he could point his rifle in Janis’ direction, the second round was on the way. It hit a little off her point of aim. Instead of entering the man’s head at the bridge of his nose, it entered his mouth and blew off the back of his head.
A second man tried to grab the rifle but exposed himself, and he, too paid for his life with two rounds into his chest.
Janis waited a few seconds to ensure there wasn’t a third man in the hide before saying to Aliyah. “Go to the car, but from about a hundred yards away, unlock it. If it doesn’t explode, then walk around it to see if any of the tell-tales we left were missing. Do not touch the car until I get there.”
Janis jogged over to the hide where she found a position stocked with food and ammunition for a Dragunov SVD-63 sniper rifle. Both men were dead. She covered them with the netting and walked toward the car.
At the Jetta, Aliyah pointed to the two small slips of paper on the ground. She could see a mark where someone slipped in a shaft to unlock the door. “Aliyah, back off about a hundred feet. I am going to slowly open the driver’s door. If the car doesn’t blow up, I will pop the hood. My guess is the bomb is either under the driver’s seat or in the engine compartment. If it is not there, then it is under the car.”
Aliyah nodded grimly and watched as Janis opened the car door and then slowly felt around for a bomb. Finding none, she pulled the latch to open the engine compartment. The clunk was the loudest sound on the empty road.
Janis felt for a wire around the hood. Finding none, she slowly lifted it and nestled in a space near the battery was a brick of SEMTEX. Taped to it was a cell phone. Two wires were clipped using alligator clips to the battery to provide power.
“Aliyah, go up to the hide and see if you can find a cell phone. If you can, bring it here.”
While she was gone, Janis took her multi-tool from her backpack and disassembled the rifles, which went back into the trunk of the Jetta. The time it took for Aliyah to jog to the hide, find the phone, and then return gave her time to study the bomb. She wondered if she turned off the phone, would it explode?
Backing away from the car, Janis asked Aliyah to turn off the cell phone she found. No explosion.
The next step – turn off the phone connected to the bomb. Again, no bang, and both women breathed a sigh of relief. Janis used the multi-tool to cut one and the other wire to the car’s battery. Her rationale was that she didn’t want to risk making a spark by removing the alligator clips.
With a few more deep breaths to calm herself, Janis carefully slid the detonator out of the plastic explosive. Once it was out, she lifted the bomb out of the engine compartment and handed it to Aliyah. “You can’t take this back with you on an airplane, so I think you need to take this to the Israeli embassy and give it to the local Mossad agents. I am sure there is something they can glean from this.”
Laughing, Aliyah said, “Sure, I’ll walk into the embassy and show my passport and Mossad ID. What do I say? Hi, I’m Aliyah Skylar from Mossad headquarters here in Belgium on a secret mission I can’t discuss with you. Hezbollah planted this bomb in my rental car, and you should examine it!”
“Get in the car. You have half an hour before we get back to the hotel to figure out what to do. We’re checking out, and you’re getting on the next plane to Israel, and I’m going back to the states.”
Once they were on the road, Janis didn’t take her eyes off the road as she drove as fast as it was safe. “Aliyah, they knew about when we were coming, which is not cool. This means they had inside intel on the operation. So, who within the Mossad knew the details of the op?”
“Reznik, me, and three members of my team. Halevy knew only that we were authorized to make the hit. We had intel from other parts of the Israeli intelligence community and from the CIA. Hence, the agency knew we were interested in Jalal and Chakroun, but nothing more.”
“Are you sure there was no one else?”
“No. But I know where to start.”
“Good. You’re going back to Israel to find the traitor. I’m going to London and back to the U.S. for a week or so to give you time to sort things out in Tel Aviv. Then, I’ll rattle Walt Bishop’s cage. If there is a leak, Mossad must find the bastard before we take on another assignment.”
