International nuclear negotiations turns allies into enemies in this electrifying thriller from the author of The Handler.
Intrigued? Well read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from M.P. Woodward’s Dead Drop, which is out now.
Nuclear negotiations between the United States and Iran have reached a crisis point. The new American administration is determined to move ahead, but there are several stumbling blocks, not the least of which is Lieutenant Colonel Kasem Khalidi, the Iranian intelligence officer the CIA has hidden away in one of its safe houses.
As always, John and Meredith Dale are caught in the middle. Mossad–the Israeli intelligence agency–wants Meredith’s help to find the lead Iranian rocket scientist; while John is in a desperate race to keep Kasem one step ahead of an Iranian hit squad.
They are pawns in an international chess game, and any player knows you cannot capture the king without sacrificing some pawns.
The captain had to rely on the oldest, most reliable naval sensor of them all—his eyes. He pressed his brow to the viewfinder and squinted. Sidestepping, he rotated the large metal cylinder all the way around the bridge. He was under strict orders to avoid using the surface search radar, but after completing the periscope’s sweep, he’d concluded that on a night like this, his eyes would do just fine.
For once, conditions up top were just as the intelligence briefers had said they’d be. There were no visible marine navigation lights and only a few winking streetlights on the distant shore. Even better, a thin, silvery sheen from the half-moon reflected on waves that were barely above a ripple. Only a heaving swell undulated the surface of the other- wise flat sea fifty feet above them.
The captain scanned again. This time he paused in the middle of the three-sixty, aiming the reticle at the northern end of the lights on the land. There, he zoomed in to identify the old sandstone ruins, still lit for the tourists at ten o’clock on this summer Saturday eve. The crumbling sixteenth-century Ottoman fort known as the Sidon Sea Castle was easily visible from this distance. With the reticle centered on it, the skipper pressed a button to take a laser navigation fix.
“Point X-ray. Two point four kilometers, bearing zero-eight-three,” said a young seaman, reading off the numbers, scribbling in the log.
That sounded about right to the captain. He cross-referenced three more points in the same way and found that Tekumah, the Israeli navy diesel-electric Dolphin class submarine he commanded, was right where she was supposed to be.
“Down scope,” Tekumah’s captain said, folding the handles. As the periscope retracted, he turned to a hard-faced man standing next to him who stoically awaited the report. This man wore a wetsuit pulled down to the waist, exposing a tight black T-shirt.
The captain caught his eye. “Good news, Reu. You and your boys won’t have to panic in the tubes tonight.”
Reu shrugged, his mouth flat. “Don’t surface on our account. We don’t mind going out the torpedo tubes.”
The captain smiled. “Stow your SDVs and tanks. It’s a nice night for boating.”
As the frogman went below to break down the Swimmer Delivery Vehicles, Tekumah’s captain angled his head toward a petty officer man- ning the diving planes, then looked at the young lieutenant in charge of the shift. “Officer of the deck, make surface profile zero. Ten degrees up angle. Two knots, dead slow.”
Fifteen minutes later, Reu barely bounced as his rubber boat skimmed along the smooth, oily sea. Nice night for boating, he repeated inwardly to himself, grateful to have dodged the submerged egress and its claustrophobic hell in the torpedo tubes. Up here there was no wind, a flat sea, good visibility. The rubber boat was making a quiet twenty knots. Ideal conditions, really. The frogman cursed himself. No mission ever had ideal conditions.
He and his three men, commandos of the Israeli Navy SEAL team equivalent known as Flotilla 13, were squatting on the rubber dinghy’s sponsons as cool salt air rushed past them. Behind them, Tekumah had already submerged in a frenzy of bubbles. Clad in shining black wet- suits and neoprene balaclavas, Reu felt that they were alone on the sea now, invisible in the dark.
Two racing kilometers on, he sensed a warmer shift in the air temperature and signaled his coxswain to stop. Almost immediately, the dinghy’s way fell off and began to drift with the Mediterranean current.
The man at the tiller killed the humming engine. All was quiet now, save for the sound of water lapping against the semirigid hull.
“NVGs,” the Flotilla 13 commander whispered to the chief petty officer next to him, his number two. A moment later, Reu adjusted the night-vision goggles over his forehead, waiting for them to warm up before scanning the beach. It looked empty—but looks could be deceiving. With an outstretched fist, he signaled his men to remain still, waiting, drifting. After another minute, the Flotilla 13 commander saw what he’d been looking for. Just beyond the surf line, a van slowed by the side of the road. The tall Mercedes Sprinter then did a three-pointer and turned itself toward the sea. About ten seconds after that, it blinked its headlights—once, then a second time a beat later. Reu’s pulse quickened. One blink would have meant mission-scrub. Two meant the op was a go.
Retrieving an angled waterproof flashlight from his combat harness, Reu blinked twice in reply to the van. He then tapped the chief on a knee and stowed his NVGs. The engine coughed back to life and the dinghy surged forward.
Much of the coast in this part of Lebanon was jagged rock, smashed by pounding surf. But they’d planned for landfall on the ladies’ beach at the extreme edge of the Damour Beach Resort, just north of Sidon. With a strict night curfew on the female-only enclave, the Damour made for a good exfil point—provided they got back to it before sunup.
Gunning the boat’s engine into the back of a breaking swell, the coxswain finally cut power and pulled the engine up. With oars in hand, the men paddled the dinghy to catch the momentum of a roaring wave, then swiveled their legs over the sponsons. They raced in on white water until the keel skidded on sand.
With well-oiled practice, the frogmen pulled the heavy boat ashore, lifting it by its handles, pausing now and then to rest. Once to the dunes, they kneeled beside it to extract their IWI assault rifles, spare magazines, and body armor from their rubber bladders. Finally, with weapons at their sides, they ran low and fast toward the Sprinter van.
The driver, a woman in heels and skirt, helped stow the weapons in the Mercedes’s overhead cargo area. The interior stayed dark since the dome lights had been disabled. Catching a glimpse of the woman in the spare moonlight, Reu thought the pretty brunette looked to be all of twenty years old. But then, he admitted to himself, the older he got the younger they looked. He unzipped his wetsuit.
Showing some modesty, the female intelligence officer slid behind the Sprinter’s wheel as the men changed into the dry clothes that had been waiting for them. Once dressed in jeans and a polo, Reu got into the front passenger’s seat next to her.
“How long?” he asked.
The woman, a Mossad intelligence collection operative called a katsa, was busy typing a message on her phone. “Twenty minutes,” she said without looking up. “And we’re late.”
Excerpted from DEAD DROP by M.P. Woodward, published by Berkley, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2023 by Michael Woodward.
