The Heat of Ramadan by Steven Hartov

Author:Steven Hartov
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Argo-Navis

8: Cyprus

The Next Morning

FOR THE FIRST TIME IN A LONG TIME, Mike Dagan was a happy man.

In truth, Dagan was not one who surrendered quickly to melancholy, but it had taken him months to emerge from the psychological black hole of half a year in a German prison cell. Not that the stiff-spined BKA, BfV or BND agents had tortured him or, in fact, had treated him with anything less than professional respect. For despite his tight-lipped indifference, they certainly knew who his employers were. It was just that a man who is accustomed to racing around Europe in all sorts of high-powered machines does not take well to lengthy confinement—whether it be a five-star hotel room or a five-square-meter cell.

On the road to Munich Airport, ‘Peter Hauser’ had given the Bulgarian KGB stringers a good thrashing with his Audi. Fortunately for him, the men had survived their rather serious injuries. The Germans, unable to conclusively tie Peter to the Mohammed Najiz murder, had instead convicted him of reckless driving, resisting arrest and carrying an unlicensed firearm. He had been given a two-year sentence, yet it was quickly commuted to six months when a faceless Israeli police liaison suggested to his counterpart at the Bundeskriminalamt that a confirmed story about a West German engineering firm selling chemical weapons technology to Libya was chomping at the bit to go to press.

Dagan had been quietly repatriated to Israel, where the first order of the day was an obligatory ass-chewing by Itzik Ben-Zion, followed quickly by the Colonel’s firm, congratulatory handshake before Mike could tell him to go straight to hell. Ben-Zion then handed him a check for double the amount of his retroactive pay, which was customary whenever an operative was missing in action, a prisoner of war or had served time in a foreign detention center.

Immediately thereafter, Mike’s AMAN comrades threw him a rousing party, for he had honored the unit and shown exceptional bravery beyond the call. In any other nation’s service, there would have been a medal to be briefly caressed and then sealed in the Commanding Officer’s safe. But in the IDF there were only three awards for valor, and to get one you had to single-handedly destroy an enemy tank battalion while dragging your wounded comrades to safety.

It didn’t matter. Mike did not want a medal. He wanted to eat something other than Wurst and Sauerbraten, get laid without keeping an eye on the door and breathe fresh air.

In Larnaca, he had all the food, women and oxygen he could handle.

The assignment was gorgeous, the stuff of an agent’s fantasies, and if Mike had not transferred to Mossad he would never have come close to something like this. AMAN’s idea of a choice assignment was clerking the desk of a whorehouse in Port Said while counting the Russian sailors who made the headboards bang. However, the civilians at Mossad had more cosmopolitan imaginations. Mike had not quit AMAN in search of this luxury—he had done so because his old team was history and he did not want to work for Ben-Zion another long minute without them.

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