SANCTION: A Thriller Read Online Free PDF Page B

fired Sabo rounds had burned hot white through the air as their propellants guided them toward their targets. The asphalt roads were still pock marked by the teeth of Israeli tank tracks. There was no population to speak of; it was a forgotten war zone.
    Quneitra had been a small, quiet city with a meager gathering of residents but in 1974, it grabbed national headlines when then Egyptian President, Abdel Nasser, had convinced his Jordanian and Syrian counterparts to assemble a military coalition to invade the state of Israel.
    Before Nasser and his fellow conspirators could act however, Israel launched a devastating air campaign that immobilized all three countries Air Forces. After the first few days, it had become apparent that the Arab plan had failed.
    In Egypt, the Israeli engagement took the IDF almost as far east as the city of Cairo, the army stopping only fifty miles short of the capital. Jordan was dealt several lasting blows, from which they had yet to fully recover. Syria had had an entire civilian city rich in culture and history demolished and subsequently abandoned.
    The Syrian government refused to rebuild Quneitra, choosing instead to have a permanent international reminder of what they deemed “Israel’s brutality.”
    Saleem thought that bringing the hostages to Quneitra was brilliant. Any attack, counter-attack or show of force would instantly throw Israeli and American aggression into the spotlight; making it both disadvantageous and difficult to respond to Saleem’s plan.
    Saleem steered the vehicle to the left and headed south. A mile outside of town, he pulled the truck over to a dirt shoulder and got out. From a trunk in the bed, he produced two small slender tubes, each were notched on one end of the tube body. One of the tubes had a mirrored glass panel embedded in the notch while the other had a small lens. Gone were the low-tech days of a physical trip wire attached to a detonator. The Palestinian forced one of the tubes into the dry hardened soil with the palm of his hand. It would fire a laser to the other tube which would receive and send back the beam via its glass panel. If anything broke the beam it was set up to alert Saleem on his cell phone with a text message that would simply read BREACH. This would allow him to monitor the access point without putting a valuable man on guard duty. He didn’t intend on setting up any munitions here, though the device was capable of it.
    Even though Quneitra was one hundred percent Syrian, the United Nations had passed a resolution shortly after the war in ’74 to make the city a, “U.N. Disengagement Observer Force Zone”. Ever since then, a small group of Peace Keeping soldiers patrolled the perimeter of the town’s footprint. Saleem couldn’t be sure yet but he believed they had no clue that he and his men were there.
    “Doesn’t matter anyway,” he thought to himself as he contemplated the possibility of a confrontation with the platoon sized United Nations element. They were always passive. They wouldn’t do anything even if they became aware of Saleem and his men. Still he knew it was when, not if, the U.N. observers discovered their presence in Quneitra.

5
Washington D.C.
    B rad pushed in the clutch and slid the small, leather gear shifter into fourth. The six cylinder engine revved as the car poured into the adjacent lane. Traffic on the D.C. Beltway was horrendous in the morning but the Defense Intelligence agent navigated the highway well enough, his black Porsche accelerating through the broad swooping bends quickly.
    Brad Ward had been with the Defense Intelligence Agency for just over seven years. He had started as an analyst in a cramped room on the third floor of a building on Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling.
    Back then, Brad had spent his days laboring over an endless stream of reports that, in and of themselves, posed little meaning for the war on terror or the intelligence community but which taken as part of a greater