Black Mountain by Greig Beck Read Free Book Online Page A

was best to take no chances considering how close they were to their goal.
    Finished, he stood back and waved her impatiently towards the kitchen, resisting the strong urge to kick her large behind as she hobbled past him.
    *
    The woman shuffled slowly towards the five men sitting around the table in the darkened room. All had stopped talking at her arrival, and now sat smoking their thick, pungent shisha tobacco and sipping syrupy-sweet coffee. Though her limbs were slow, her eyes darted from one man to another. She recognised Hezar-Jihadi faces and also some senior Iranian Revolutionary Guards. Unfurled on the table, the corners held in place by a bottle of whisky and several ashtrays, were the schematics for the new Iranian missile, the Shihab-2, the Meteor.
    She stopped at the table and turned to the black-eyed young man who had let her in. ‘May I use the washroom, edame ?’
    The young man looked to one of the older men at the table, who shook his head without even looking up. ‘No,’ the young man said. ‘Leave the bag and go, halla, halla .’
    She nodded her understanding and turned towards the kitchen. On the way, she pulled off her gloves and pushed them into a fold of her robe. If the men had been watching, they would have been surprised to see such strong and youthful hands on one so bent and infirm. She lifted the string bag onto the kitchen bench and in the same motion drew up the front of her long abaya. Strapped high between her smooth, muscular thighs was a squat black pistol. She pulled it free of the tape and secreted it in one of her long, loose sleeves. She whispered one word: ‘Installed.’
    From one arm of her glasses, came the reply: ‘Proceed.’
    She drew in a deep breath and turned to hobble back out to the men.
    The young man who’d let her in was looking at her with ill-concealed disgust and contempt. He felt in his pocket, pulled out some crumpled Lebanese pounds, rolled them into a small ball and dropped it at his feet. The woman slowly bent to retrieve it; however, when she came back up it was not the wrinkled money she had in her hand but an unwavering black Barak pistol. There were no words needed – the gun barked once in the young man’s face, and before his body had even begun to fall she turned and fired at the men at the table.
    Two went down with precision headshots; the third was taken high in the sternum, throwing a plume of blood and shattered spinal column over the wall behind him. Of the remaining two, one took up a vantage point behind some furniture and the other launched himself at her across the table. Perhaps his mind was fooling him into believing it was an old woman under the dark robes and she would easily buckle under his 200-pound frame. Maybe he realised his error when he was in the air, but by then it was too late.
    The woman took up a combat stance and, with perfect balance, launched a flat-soled kick to his face. Even though the man easily outweighed her by over fifty pounds, the muscles in her thighs uncoiled with enough force to smash his nasal septum up into his brain. He was dead before his large body had hit the ground. She dropped and rolled to the left, slamming her back to the wall. She needed to reacquire the final target.
    A voice sounded in the quiet from amongst the toppled furniture. ‘Bat-Tzion, you have stopped nothing. There are hundreds like us, and we will eventually bulldoze your bodies into the sea.’
    The woman remained silent at the threat. Seconds passed as she quickly looked around the room, now heavy with the smell of cordite and coppery blood.
    ‘Bat-Tzion, if you let me leave, I will give you Nazranasha. I know you have been searching for him. He is here, you know, right now, in Beirut.’
    Nazranasha was the leader of Hezar-Jihadi and the mastermind behind every assassination, bombing and cross-border raid for a decade. He was the first prize for every Israeli soldier and agent.
    Tempting, but not for today , the woman thought.